Kate
by Sean Smith
(Simon & Schuster UK, R120)
Best-selling celebrity author Sean Smith was surprised when a commissioning editor asked him to write a book about Kate Middleton, who became the newest royal when she married Prince William earlier this year.
The leading celebrity biographer is more used to writing about world-famous pop stars like Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue, but he was convinced that Kate was the biggest celebrity around and a perfect subject. He has risen to the occasion, adding a very readable unauthorised account of the future queen of England to the deluge of books about her.
It is almost a year since Prince William popped the question and put his late mother’s fabulous sapphire and diamond ring on Kate’s finger during a holiday in Kenya, but the world had to wait until November before the news made headlines around the globe.
A nationwide UK store had a copy of the engagement ring on sale for just R60, making it their fastest-selling piece of jewellery.
Smith duly delved into the background of Kate and William’s upbringing… as well as how they met and fell in love, broke up and then got back together again. He discloses that the famous split in 2007 lasted only a week and was more a lover’s tiff than anything serious.
But the couple managed to keep it quiet for months, thus keeping the paparazzi away.
Although Kate comes from a well-off family and had the benefit of a very expensive education, her ancestors were a colourful lot.
They included a road sweeper, a cloth merchant, a pilot and at least two convicts, one of whom was arrested in 1840 for stealing sheep.
He was banished to the penal colony of Tasmania… and one of his descendants went on to become an MP, demonstrating “another example of how fortunes can change between generations”.
Thanks to a series of trust funds set up more than 100 years ago by her great-great-grandfather – a rich mill-owner – Kate was able to get the best of education at the famous Marlborough College, having been taken out of a former school when she became a victim of bullying.
At Marlborough, she joked about a poster of William on the wall with her dorm mate, predicting: “I’ll be his wife one day”.
Kate also transformed from a plain and gangly girl into the beauty that she is today.
Contrary to popular opinion, William did not first clap eyes on Kate when she sashayed down the ramp in a see-through outfit during a fashion show at St Andrew’s University (that R300 dress was to later sell for R800 000, by the way).
Their first meeting was on the touchline of a rugby match four months before the fashion show.
By August 2007, they had reached an understanding about their future together… and slowly Kate became Catherine, the name that her parents always preferred to call her.
She accepted the advice of palace officials that Queen Kate might not sound regal enough. And Princess Kate sounded like a Disney character.
Naturally, the historic wedding day is covered in the book, along with the kisses on Buckingham Palace’s balcony… and it even includes a chapter on what the stars foretell, predicting that Kate has backbone, that people will know where they stand with her and, luckily, that the couple are in for the long haul. – Barbara Cole