Low Key The Key In Royal Wedding

Prince Charles' first wedding drew royalty and heads of state to St. Paul's Cathedral, a million well-wishers in the streets of London and a global television audience of 700 million.

Not even his mother will show up for his second.

The modest civil union of the 56-year-old heir to the throne and Camilla Parker Bowles next Friday makes a poignant contrast to the fairy-tale trappings of his 1981 wedding to Princess Diana.

Correspondent Mark Phillips updates viewers of CBS News Sunday Morning.

Then, the prince and his 20-year-old bride arrived by horse-drawn carriage, cheered by throngs on the street. He wore the uniform of a naval commander; she a dress of ivory silk taffeta with a 25-foot train. Guests included presidents, royalty from across Europe and first lady Nancy Reagan. The couple kissed on a balcony at Buckingham Palace before an adoring crowd.

Soon reality set in to spoil the fairy tale. Fifteen years later, the marriage ended in divorce after admitted infidelity on both sides.

On April 8, Charles and Parker Bowles — the longtime love whom Diana blamed for the breakup of her marriage — will be driven from Windsor Castle to the decidedly more plebeian local town hall, where they will be married by a registrar before about 30 guests.

The bridegroom will likely wear a suit, the 57-year-old bride a dress by Robinson Valentine, a small London-based company she is known to favor. The guests will include Charles' sons William and Harry, Camilla's children Laura and Tom — but not Charles' mother Queen Elizabeth II, who said she was staying away to keep the event low-key.

But some took it as a snub.

There have been other controversies surrounding the nuptials in the weeks since the plans were announced.

The town hall setting wasn't the couple's initial intention. Some royals watchers questioned the wedding's very legality. Charles was caught muttering some unkind words about the press when asked about his pending walk down the aisle. Even Camilla's new title was the subject of debate.

Television cameras will not record the wedding vows, although TV will broadcast the blessing that follows in Windsor Castle's St. George's Chapel. Led by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, it will include prayers, selections from Bach and Handel and three of the couple's favorite hymns.

Buckingham Palace has said the Queen would attend that blessing.

The newlyweds will appear for the media on the castle steps before a reception for family and friends, reportedly including a finger-food buffet. But the crowds gathered to greet them are likely to be far smaller than on that summer's day in London 24 years ago.

In opting for a low-key ceremony, Charles and Parker Bowles are following in the footsteps of many other second-time newlyweds.

"First marriages are all about the princess-style white dress, the horse-drawn carriage and throwing the biggest party of your life," said Victoria Black, associate editor of Cosmopolitan Bride magazine.

"When a couple marry for a second time, they're usually a little older and more interested in sharing their special day with their close friends in a more understated way."

It's certainly cheaper. The 1981 royal wedding cost an estimated $2 million. Local authorities in Windsor charge $533 for a civil wedding on a Friday, and $295 an hour to hire the town hall. The final cost of the nuptials, however, could be hundreds of thousands of pounds.

A few things will remain the same.

Charles and Diana spent part of their honeymoon in Scotland, where the prince loves to fish and stroll. Charles and his new wife also will have a Scottish honeymoon, at Birkhall hunting lodge on the Balmoral estate in the Highlands. Parker Bowles, an avid fan of country pursuits, may be more at home there than the metropolitan Diana.

Perhaps the biggest change in the past two decades has been in public attitudes. Charles and Diana's wedding day, July 29, 1981, was declared a public holiday and celebrated with a fireworks display in Hyde Park the night before.

Since then, Britons have endured two decades of scandal and sensation — from Diana's affairs to Prince Harry's Nazi party costume — that has cut the royal family down to size.

The Friday of the wedding is a normal working day. In a survey last month by pollster ICM, 67 percent of respondents said they were either unlikely or very unlikely to watch the service on television.

If the brisk trade at Windsor's souvenir shops is anything to go by, however, hearts may be thawing toward Charles and his soon-to-be Duchess of Cornwall.

Dhillons, a gift shop just down the street from the wedding site, has sold 1,200 tea towels and hundreds of Charles and Camilla mugs, refrigerator magnets and commemorative plates since the wedding was announced in February.

"Even the expensive items are selling," said co-owner Kashmir Dhillon. "We never thought it would be so popular.

"They should have married a long time ago — good luck to them," she added. "It's true love. He deserves to be happy now."

The media's attitude to the royal family has been transformed over the past generation from quiet deference to scandal-hungry irreverence.

Charles and Diana's extramarital affairs, her tragic death in a car crash in 1997, the collapsed marriages of Prince Andrew and Princess Anne, the underage drinking, pot-smoking, and swastika-wearing escapades of Harry — all have been played out in detail on TV screens and front pages around the world.

Charles probably hopes the intense scrutiny will abate after his wedding. He may be disappointed.

"It's going to get worse, not better," said Max Clifford, Britain's best-known celebrity publicist.