Prince Bids Cheerio to an Awed but Puzzled L.A.

All week long, he was a prince of contradictions.

Among the aides almost constantly at Prince Charles’ side was a serious-minded woman with a sheaf of papers who runs his business and community partnership organization. There was also a military man in a gold-braided uniform who scoops up the gifts bestowed upon the prince.

Throughout Los Angeles, he was protected by the State Department and the Los Angeles Police Department and escorted by the California Highway Patrol, yet he’s not a politician. He rules nothing.

And on Friday, the last day of his Los Angeles tour, in the rotunda of the Downtown Central Library, he engaged in a round of handshaking with dark-suited Fortune 500 company chiefs. Then he caught sight of a local activist, Ted Hayes, in trademark dreadlocks and beret (how could the prince miss him?), and strode over to chat about Hayes’ geodesic domed village for the homeless.

As the prince flew (by commercial airline) to Hong Kong on Friday, he left a cascade of images in his wake.

The Prince of Wales supped in black tie Thursday night at the estate of producer Aaron Spelling--but had spent most of Tuesday talking to youngsters in the Crenshaw district and South-Central L.A. who will probably get no closer to Aaron Spelling than watching “Melrose Place.” People expect that dichotomy in American presidential candidates. But they don’t know what to make of it in a British prince.

Even as some people in celebrity-inured Los Angeles waited to see him, they had questions. “I appreciate he’s coming to a lot of places in the African American community,” said a puzzled Charlene Nunnery, 39, as she waited outside the Vons supermarket in Inglewood on Wednesday morning for the prince to appear. “But why didn’t he take in Brentwood and Beverly Hills? Did he pick these places?”

His aides picked them--with his blessing. Although Charles may have a country house and titled friends to fill it with for dinner; although he’s married to (and separated from) one of the most photogenic women in the world; although he skis in Switzerland and plays the rich man’s sport of polo, he spends a third of his time (according to aides) working to get businesses involved in disadvantaged communities.

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So Charles got to end his last day in Los Angeles doing one of the things he likes to do best: waxing philosophical about urban problems.

It was his first and only chance to leave some public impressions of his trip, and he did so in a speech he gave before a group of people gathered at the invitation of his own Business Leaders Forum, one of several organizations he runs from London that fund struggling young entrepreneurs and coax business leaders into community work and philanthropy.

“What I have seen myself this week in Los Angeles demonstrates the strength and vitality which can be unleased in the midst of some of the worst urban areas if community leaders work side by side with business and city authorities,” Charles told the group.

He seemed struck by the African saying now appropriated and made popular in American black communities: “At Food From the ‘Hood at Crenshaw High School,” Charles said, “students pointed out that ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Putting the welcome mat out for parent volunteers and business mentors will help to raise achievement.”

Hayes, who has become something of a favorite with the British royal family (Prince Edward, Charles’ younger brother, visited the domed village last year), hoped the prince’s interest in his cause would bring his project some badly needed money.

“It’s like you’re not wanted locally until someone outside wants you,” said Hayes, fresh from his encounter with the prince.

As much as the prince tried to say at least something to everyone, he ignored the press that trailed him like a 500-pound gorilla. Never mind that Charles and Diana are daily grist for the tabloid mills. He doesn’t do the interview thing.

“He’s not a politician,” one aide said simply.

As a result, American writers strained over ropes and past burly guards to catch just a scintilla of Charles’ conversations. The British reporters, on the other hand, were brilliant at picking up whole sentences 10 feet away.

Nevertheless, coverage is problematic: “I think you’re always going to be up against the fact that he’s a middle-aged man in a suit,” said Robert Jobson, Daily Express royal correspondent. “I hate being called a royal observer. Makes me sound like a pervert.”

If you’re a prince, this royal tour moved fast. If you’re the artist-on-tour, it moved at the speed of light. Much too fast to get anything more than a few quick sketches of faces and torsos. Still, Tom Hallifax, a Belfast artist with a bald pate and a black hat, doffed his jacket and pulled up a cinder block in the Crenshaw High garden Tuesday to dash off a few quick pencil renderings. Much of the trip he would sketch later. “I took Polaroids,” he said Friday.