Prince Harry Handled the Heat For That ‘Spare’ Frostbite Anecdote, Author Says: ‘He Got It’
Prince Harry wasn’t “hurt” when a Spare passage about his “nether regions” became “fodder” for everyone from late-night talk show hosts to Saturday Night Live and people on social media. According to an author and royal correspondent, the Duke of Sussex took the ridicule in stride and likely relished having “made it.”
Harry ‘got it’ when ‘Spare’ frostbite passage became ‘great stand-up fodder’
Between bombshells in Spare — an alleged physical altercation with Prince William, royals leaking stories about each other — were some lighter things from Harry.
Enter the time the now-39-year-old got frostbite “down there.” Harry revealed in his memoir that after trekking to the North Pole, he came home with an unwelcome surprise below the waist: frostbite.
The anecdote went viral on social media. It inspired memes, a Saturday Night Live skit, and a hefty roasting from late-night talk show hosts. Harry handled it well, according to author and royal correspondent Omid Scobie.
“I mean, there are obviously things in the book that were great stand-up fodder,” he told Newsweek prior to Endgame‘s release. “From what I understand, he [Harry] gets it, he got it. You know, I don’t think there was [sic] any kind of hurt feelings about that.”
“And quite honestly,” Scobie continued, “if you’re a public figure, a celebrity, you want to be included in those late-night monologues. You want to be an SNL skit. These are the things that show that you’ve made it.”
“And I don’t think it comes from a negative [place]” like many British tabloid pieces, he added. “It’s very different.”
Harry likely got a reminder about ‘warts and all’ element of memoirs with ‘Spare’ passage
Scobie continued, telling the outlet he hadn’t “heard anything about regretting anything” related to the frostbite Spare passage. “But I think it had been, by the time it had come out.”
Harry’s book, he noted, had been “read so many times among the people around him and himself. But they must have been extremely confident about everything that they were pressing out.”
“I also think that whether he liked it or not, he would have had editors love him that would have reminded him that to tell one story, you have to kind of go warts and all.”
Additional “warts and all” type anecdotes in Spare included Harry’s first time having sex and inadvertently bringing Meghan Markle to tears, among others.
What Harry said about his ‘traumatized’ body following North Pole trip
It happened shortly before Prince William and Kate Middleton’s April 2011 royal wedding. Harry traveled to the North Pole. Upon returning home to England, was “horrified to discover” that his “nether regions” were frostbitten.
“My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized,” he wrote. Harry applied Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream, the same product used by his late mother, Princess Diana, on a friend’s recommendation.
The smell of the cream made him feel as if Diana were “right there in the room.” However, it didn’t fix Harry’s problem. Ultimately, he sought advice from a doctor, who told him the frostbite would heal with time.
(Actor Elizabeth Debicki didn’t have the cream on the set of The Crown as part of her Diana look. A make-up artist for the Netflix series revealed it wasn’t among the products used.)
