Spain: The Student Prince

Ever since he was old enough to lift a pair of water skis, Spain’s Prince Juan Carlos, 23, has been one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors. Tall (6 ft. 2 in.), blue-eyed and athletic, he has one added, increasingly rare attraction: a slightly better than outside chance that he will some day sit on a throne. His father is the Spanish Pretender, Don Juan de Borbón, who, Franco has more or less promised, may in due course be allowed to become King of Spain, and young Prince Juan Carlos might presumably some day succeed him. In the meantime, Franco has looked after Juan Carlos’ education at Spain’s army, navy and air force academies, where the conscientious prince learned, among other things, to pilot a jet. During a naval training cruise three years ago, he visited the U.S., charmed press and politicos. Last year Franco even allowed him to establish an informal, unofficial court, complete with rotating gentlemen in waiting.

Last week the student prince was still a bachelor, but no longer eligible. Followed by rumors that he would marry Italy’s tall, fair-haired Princess Maria Gabriella (whose passion for bullfighters and fast cars shocked Madrid society), Juan Carlos skipped his usual summer of water skiing on Lake Lausanne. Instead, he appeared as the guest of King Paul of Greece for a month of boating off the Greek Isle of Corfu. His shipmate: King Paul’s eldest daughter, Sophie, a 22-year-old blonde known in Europe’s tabloids as “The Princess of the Sad Eyes.”

Rumors began to fly that Sophie was no longer melancholy. Last week in Athens, a 101-gun salute boomed out from Mount Lycabettus, and the Greek court made it official: Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, Prince of Asturias and Infante of Spain, would marry Princess Sophie of

Greece at an undetermined date in the future. In Madrid there were audible sighs of relief that it was not Maria Gabriella, and even a faint wave of optimism among Spain’s Royalists that the marriage might precipitate the long-dangled return of the monarchy.