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Bernhard works hard, plays hard. Winters, he takes skiing vacations in Lech, Austria. In the summer the royal family heads for the Happy Elephant, its seaside villa in Porto Ercole, Italy. The tall, trim pipe-smoking Prince Bernhard dresses impeccably, and all year round sports the sun-goggled, slightly tanned look that is associated with Europe's jet set. His trademark is a fresh white carnation in his lapel. At 64, he looks like an aging but still dashing airplane pilot.
The prince's tireless traveling has given rise to countless rumors of romantic adventurism, but his 39-year marriage to Queen Juliana has remained relatively unruffled. Their only publicized conflict was over Faith Healer Greet Hofmans, who was brought to Stoestdijk Palace in the late 1940s in the hope that she might be able to cure the youngest of their four daughters, the near-blind Princess Maria Christina. Healer Hofmans failed to help Christina, but she almost succeeded in converting the Queen to a queer brand of mystical pacifism that seemed equal parts Scientology, Moral Re-Armament and nuclear disarmament. In 1956, at the strong urging of both the prince and the Dutch Parliament, Hofmans was banished from the palace.
Bernhard has occasionally crossed the grain of his ardently democratic adopted countrymen. In 1971 former Dutch Prime Minister Barend Biesheuvel publicly told him to button his royal lip after the prince suggested that the Cabinet should be freed periodically from parliamentary interference so that the "government could really get down to business without having to spend half its time answering questions."
Nonetheless, the prince has consistently topped lists of the most admired men in The Netherlands and routinely won 90% approval rating in public-opinion polls. Perhaps the greatest index of his popularity was that virtually no one in The Netherlands really wanted to believe the allegations about the prince that surfaced last week.