I need the collected correspondence of Alex and Henry. Here's how I imagine a review of volume 1 would sound.
This is for eggheads who read book coverage in places like the Timeses (New York, Financial, or of London) or Slate or Jezebel (which is na...
New book of collected correspondence covers the run-up of Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry's famous love affair.
by Dana Fusil-Brody
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Prince Henry circa 2020.
In my line of work, involuntarily thinking of phrases from a book is either a very good sign or a very bad one.
In the case of Before the Dream: The Prologue of the Alex and Henry Story, it's mostly good. The author, academic-turned-journalist-turned-ghostwriter-turned popular historian Robert Pessoa, assembles correspondence from Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry into something that amuses, delights, and titillates, even as it holds back. Because again—if the title doesn't already give you fair warning—this book is about what came before their courtship began and produced a still-running partnership. (The couple has never confirmed or denied that they've gotten married.)
So, where does the titillation come from if not yet from the two famously handsome men at the center of the tale? I say yet because this book is clearly meant to be the first entry in a series of first-person contes about Claremont-Diaz and Henry, shepherded by June Claremont-Diaz herself, now serving as the executive editor of the Claremont imprint. Call it nepotism or call it something else, but the Claremont-Diaz clan knows an opportunity for synergy when they see it. Consider Alex's role in his mother's reelection campaign, all the way back in 2020. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pessoa is a distant Claremont cousin. And in a piece about a book that's almost purely world-building and context-setting material, you'll forgive the copious asides.
The titillation comes from their correspondence with other people—about each other. Pessoa knows what his audience came for. He wisely eschews any and all content that isn't plot. Yes, plot. We are, after all, talking about an actual fairy tale in which a prince falls irrecoverably for a commoner, albeit a commoner whose mother was also the leader of the neoliberal Western world when they first fell in love.
After their first meeting at the Rio Olympics in the summer of 2016, Henry mentions Alex briefly and tersely to his close friend, the philanthropist Percy Okonjo.
"I was accosted by a loud American," he writes in an email. "A politician's son, I think. Bieber hair. That country has a sickness, and it's expressed in their hair."
Alex also complains about Henry after that meeting, but in the more belligerent terms befitting an American.
"I can't believe people put me in the same category as [Henry]," he wrote in a group text to Nora Holleran, a granddaughter of the late Vice President Michael Holleran, and his sister June.
"Young icons of our nations, my ass. Speaking of asses, mine has GOT to be better than his. Our country has the Kardashians. He's English. Case closed."
The emails and texts in this collection reveal that both men had a penchant for threatening to set things on fire: Themselves, each other, Kensington Palace, where Henry lived at the time. In light of what came later, the allusions to combustion come off as howlingly, endearingly queer. The soft-eyed among us might also find them straightforwardly romantic. What's passionate hate-turned-to-love if not the experience of combustion for another?
And it is precisely that later combustion—rather, the reader's awareness of it—that handicaps the book. Because we already know what happens to Alex and Henry, everything in the book has an air of inevitability, even while it's giving the reader emotional blue balls.
That doesn't mean it's not fun to read. In fact, we could read the book through the prism of armchair matchmaking. Two media darlings and famously good-looking people in parts of public life in which most people look mercifully, if not blissfully, regular—with apologies to the branches of the royal family that don't carry genetic material from an actual James Bond—hate each other. But we know they later fall in love and manage to hold on to each other after weathering some seriously public tsuris.
Or we could read through the prism of a romantic comedy: Boy meets boy, boy hates boy for years, boy likes boy, boy loves boy. Boys are outed without their consent by an evil sorcerer played by erstwhile senator Jeffrey Richards and current Florida resident and hawker of NFTs of the founding fathers. (I don't know either.) The publics of both their countries are briefly stunned, then amused, then titillated, because again, good-looking media darlings. The fans come out to smash the boys together like they're two favored Ken dolls. The boys live happily to this day.
But for all his yeoman's work of sifting through archived digital files, Pessoa misses an opportunity to contextualize the support Alex and Henry receive from their countries. Why them, and why then? After all, Rafael Luna, a key ally of President Claremont during her administration, was also young and beautiful-for-politics and—crucially—had a politically and socially salient role during the era. But though Luna was open about his sexual orientation throughout his political career, he wasn't partnered. The public was aware only of his sexual orientation in theory, not in reality. (Luna has since announced his surprise marriage, three years ago, to the journalist Brendan Lawh.)
It's hard to imagine now, but the path toward respectful acceptance for queer public figures used to be borderline nonexistent, no matter how telegenic the faces involved. That helps explain how often public figures were only ever unwillingly outed. The nineties come to mind as a particularly brutal time: Neil Patrick Harris, making out with a fling in a hot tub in photos that would be PG by any standard today. George Michael, cruising for at least PG-13 action in a park and getting busted instead by an undercover cop. Without further analysis of the history and meaning of this particular couple and what they meant at that particular time, the book works best as a gift to Alex and Henry's fans. Omg they're so cute.
Because the thing is, they are. They really are. Even in a book that only presents their (curated) words, not their images they're charming. As a determined non-follower of the Alex-Henry saga, I wanted to conclude that both of them were simply tedious hunks. Instead, I found myself awake in the wee hours, going down rabbit holes about them and their love story, and not just for journalistic reasons.
What was I looking for? The outlines of the story were already well known to anyone who read headlines or even casually tended to their social media accounts. One recent day, while I ate lunch over a 2020 Lainey Gossip item that included excerpts of their hacked emails, it hit me. I wanted more of the hacked emails. The emails from the time of Alex and Henry's initial undercover courtship—which was more of a mad affair—have a lush emotionality and bracing intelligence, even when presented in the context of contemporaneous gossip coverage. To be sure, I didn't want to be the kind of person who wanted to read those emails. See above about demurely reading excerpts on Lainey Gossip instead of taking ten seconds to find the entire haul on Russian blogs with incomprehensible names. (Pessoa has said that for ethical reasons, he will exclude those emails in any future work and will keep allusions to them at a minimum.)
What I'm saying is, I've caught myself suspended somewhere between a swoon and a cringe. Multiple times. And not just for Alex and Henry or their story. Maybe I'm too much of an adult, but the swoons came hard and fast for Shaan Srivastava, Henry's right-hand man. How is someone as educated and competent as he clearly was—is— running a prince's life instead of say, turning around a struggling NHS hospital or a nonprofit? The roads not taken.
Between Alex and Henry, the latter's correspondence is more satisfying to read. Henry's correspondence to his intimates has a searching, diaristic quality. We get the sense that he's a young man—a gay one, sure, but also one who's going through the undergraduate years—who's clarifying his values and intellectual leanings. He writes with emotion about connecting with the work of John Rawls and James Baldwin. And of course, there are glimpses of his early crush on Alex.
Oh, Alex. His correspondence reads like a series of particularly engaging Reddit threads, but written by someone who's determined to adhere a bro-ey airhead persona. Thank god we know he's eventually awakened by the true love of a prince.
And just as he does in fairy tales, the prince saves the day, not by planting a kiss on his beloved—the collection ends in the run-up to Prince Phillip's 2016 wedding to Duchess Martha—but by being pure of heart. The Henry of this collection has to wait for Alex a bit longer. I'm sure Pessoa has more material up his sleeve.
