by Dylan Howard
One of those doyennes of Park Lane, where fruity posh girls fell over themselves to catch the eye of a Prince, was Lady Sarah Spencer, the eldest daughter of an old friend of the Royal Family, the eighth Earl Spencer. Although barely in her twenties, Sarah was already plagued with severe anxiety and eating disorders as well as a discreet alcohol problem. She and Charles dated for around three years until 1977, when one night, during a particularly fragile period, she met two newspaper reporters in a London restaurant and gleefully spilled the beans on their clandestine love affair. Dismissing the idea that she would one day marry the heir to the throne (“I wouldn’t marry him if he was a dustbin man,” she reportedly scoffed), the escapade firmly terminated any prospect of her becoming queen in waiting. Charles, notoriously sensitive to publicity and even more to criticism, swiftly ended the relationship.
But the Prince’s roving eye, never missing a trick, remembered Sarah’s youngest sister, a gangly collection of gawky limbs, huge blue eyes, and shaggy blonde hair, which more often than not tended to obscure her pretty, blushing features. This was eighteen-year-old Diana, a nursery school assistant and the polar opposite of Charles’s typical companions. Shy and unsure of herself, she had been working for her sister Sarah as her cleaner, earning a lowly $1.60 an hour to do the dusting, dishes, vacuuming, and laundry.
To Charles, she had made a fleeting impression, and he began to notice her out and about during the late 1970s. But it wasn’t until they were formally reintroduced at a BBQ party in 1979 that Charles began to seriously contemplate Diana as a wife capable of surviving in the House of Windsor. Pressure was mounting on him to find a suitable girl, befitting the heir to the throne, and that meant an innocent yet pliable girl without a past. In fact, months before his untimely death at the hands of the IRA in 1979, Lord Mountbatten had recently told his adoring great-nephew Charles in no uncertain terms to get cracking and find a “sweet-charactered [sic] girl.”
The trouble was, Charles didn’t know any such girls, his lady friends tending toward the more outgoing and confident. And so, when Diana meekly tiptoed from the wings onto the confused carnival stage of Charles’s life, a gigantic spotlight suddenly flashed between those famous ears.
She was young—very young—and painfully shy. She adored children, was sufficiently sporty, agreeably sensitive, happy with informality, and, crucially for the Royals, entirely at home in the countryside. But on the flip side, the twelve-year age gap was stuffed with problems—they had no intellectual connection, barely any close mutual friends, and precious few interests in common. Charles, the thinker who would become a controversial public figure in the 1980s with strongly held opinions on everything from contemporary architecture to medicine, religion to literature, found himself with a disapproval of Diana’s love of cheesy pop music, fashion, and soap operas, hobnobbing with her fellow “Sloane Ranger” (a British reference to young women from rich upper-class backgrounds) society pals and behaving more or less like a typical, rather giggly, upper-class nineteen-year-old girl.
Nevertheless, by the time Charles attended a Sussex house party weekend in July 1980, thrown by one of Diana’s friends, he and Diana tentatively bonded at a postmatch barbecue, after she had watched him playing polo at the nearby Cowdray Park. It was reportedly during this conversation that Diana pointed out how sad she thought he had looked at the recent funeral of Lord Mountbatten. Charles melted. Meanwhile, hovering suspiciously nearby was one of Charles’s exes, the strident Sabrina Guinness, who observed the couple’s first real conversation. “She was giggling,” recalled Sabrina. “She was looking up at him … furiously trying to make an impression.”
Whether by coincidence or design, shortly after this meeting, Diana went to stay at a small cottage at the Queen’s Balmoral estate in rural Scotland, to help her sister Jane, who had just given birth. Charles, vacationing—as was traditional at the main house with his family—began to hang around the cottage and started making a point of spending time with Diana. Thus began, according to a close relative of Diana’s who was visiting at the time, the romance that kick-started the chain of events that would lead to one of the most dramatic, tragic episodes in royal history.
The next month, Charles invited Diana to join him on the royal yacht, the Britannia, during the annual Cowes regatta. His valet, Stephen Barry, watched as Diana “went after the prince with single-minded determination.” “She wanted him and she got him,” he recalled. During the regatta, Charles confessed to one of his surprised closest friends that he wanted to get married—to Diana.
The final and most important affirmation of the romance took place when the Queen invited Diana to Balmoral in early September during the weekend of the traditional Braemar Gathering, an ancient Highlands celebration of medieval games, from tug-of-war to caber tossing, bagpiping and burly kilted men dancing jigs and reels. The Royals were known for their patronage of these games, attending in full Scottish garb, and despite the sight of the men of the family in their kilts and tartans, Diana acquitted herself wonderfully—no mean feat when it was plain the event was an audition for the family, in all but name. Adding to the pressure was the watchful presence of the Parker Bowleses and another close family, the Palmer-Tomkinsons, who were quietly assessing the potential bride.
Once mummy had given her royal thumbs-up, Charles moved like a hesitant man in a hurry. Meanwhile, the tabloid frenzy about the Prince’s bashful girlfriend bubbled and boiled, creating severe problems for Diana as she now attempted to go about her London life, trailed by dozens of shouting paparazzi. Seeing the degree to which the press was hounding her, surprisingly, it was Prince Philip, not widely known for his tact and diplomacy, who urged his dithering son to put a ring on her finger or end the relationship before Diana went mad. Charles, no stranger to his father’s imperious ways, grumbled and moaned to friends about the old man’s interference (he took to carrying the Duke’s letter around with him, reportedly showing it, plaintively, to friends and complaining bitterly), but clearly it was time for action.
On February 3, 1981, at a private dinner at Buckingham Palace, Charles proposed in what must have been an epic speech. The pair, who had only been on a handful of dates together since Balmoral, would see each other barely a dozen or so times before the date they had set to wed—Wednesday July 29, 1981. So, it was Prince Philip who had fired the starting pistol of a new, extraordinary era in the Royal Family’s lives that would climax horribly in August 1997—and change the monarchy forever.
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The wedding date had been fixed. Charles was resigned to marriage, while Diana had started to wonder what she had gotten herself into. She would lose six inches from her waistline in the following three months, from stress. Once the wedding was formalized, the bride-to-be moved into the palace awaiting instruction and guidance on her future role as consort to the first in line to the throne and primarily, from the Royal’s point of view, the vessel for the second and maybe third in line.
The media was salivating like a pack of hungry dogs, confronted with a particularly juicy bone when finally summoned to the Palace for Charles and Di to explain themselves and their wedding plans on February 24, 1981. To look at, the couple was bashful, blushful, and tense. “Are you in love?” shouted the assembled media throng. “Of course” answered nineteen-year-old Diana, flashing her thirty-thousand-pound engagement ring and looking bashful. “Whatever love means,” mumbled Charles, looking like a man silently trying to pass a kidney stone. “Put your own interpretation on it.”
Clearly, this was a marriage borne amidst convenience, opportunity, and necessity. Had Charles been less in thrall to the memory of his beloved Uncle Dickie, or had the pressures of life in the Firm been less pressing, the engagement might never have happened. But as worldwide excitement reached fever pitch and Royal wedding mania swept the country, Charles was said to have become increasingly aware of the fact that not only did he profess not to know what love was—but he was, in no way, in love with his fragile, naive brid
e-to-be. He was still secretly seeing the strapping country girl who had captured his heart back in 1971, then deemed unsuitable by Palace officials for matrimony and now unhappily married herself—Camilla Parker Bowles. The night before the wedding, he wept with anguish, telling a friend later in a letter that going ahead with the marriage was “the right thing for this Country and for my family.”
Hoping for the best, looking at preceding Royal marriages of convenience that had “worked out”—all was futile. In the depths of his tormented, confused heart, Charles knew he was about to commit the biggest mistake of his life.
For her part, Diana admitted she knew even before her wedding that Charles was still seeing Camilla. But she was young and naive enough back then to believe her love was strong enough to change things.
“We always had discussions about Camilla. I once heard him on the telephone in his bath on his hand-held set saying, ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’ I told him afterward that I had listened at the door and we had a filthy row.”
To add to Diana’s angst, she found a bracelet Charles bought for Camilla engraved with the initials “GF” for the nicknames they had for each other, Gladys and Fred. “I was devastated. This was about two weeks before we got married.” The Monday before her Wednesday wedding, the immensity of the hole she dug herself into overwhelmed Diana, who recalled “sobbing my eyes out.”
WASTING AWAY
January 8, 1981, was just another day for fashion designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel, a young couple who had recently graduated from the Royal College of Fashion and had set up a small atelier in London’s high-class Mayfair district, painstakingly creating gorgeous outfits for young preppies, Bianca Jagger, and the Duchess of Kent alike.
On that day, Elizabeth was doing a fitting with a customer, hands full, on her knees, when the phone rang. Shouting to an assistant through a mouthful of pins to get the phone, she was quickly told it was a new customer asking Elizabeth if she would make her a dress for a friend’s upcoming twenty-first birthday party. If that would be possible, a “Debra” would come over at 2:30 p.m. that afternoon? It was.
At the appointed hour, Elizabeth answered the door to Debra and did a double take. Although the engagement had yet to be announced, she immediately recognized the shy young girl from the blanket coverage the royal romance had been getting in the newspapers. “I recognized her immediately,” Elizabeth told the Daily Mail. “She’d been in the papers since she and Charles had started dating the previous year—but photographs didn’t do her justice. I was immediately struck by her height, her beautiful blue eyes, and that flawless complexion.”
The result was a gorgeous taffeta gown, which thrilled Diana so much, she returned to the Emanuels on a number of occasions to commission new designs, each gaining more and more attention as her public profile skyrocketed after the engagement. In March 1981, when every British designer was holding their breath to find out who would win the coveted commission to design Diana’s wedding dress, the Emanuels were stunned to discover they’d landed the gig.
“From the minute she asked us, we knew nothing was going to be the same,” said Elizabeth. Diana, making her first steps in the world of haute couture, had given the duo no direction or specific requests, other than stressing a deadly need for secrecy.
“I tracked down every book I could find on royal weddings from history,” she recalled. “Queen Victoria, her daughter, Princess Beatrice, Queen Mary. And I watched all my favorite old films—The Leopard, Gone With The Wind, Barry Lyndon. Inspiration came to me from everywhere.”
The pair had to bring in military-grade security while the dress was being made, given the virtual round-the-clock surveillance by the media. A heavy safe was installed to store designs in, thick window blinds were acquired and kept pulled down, and Diana herself was referred to by everyone as “Debra” or “Dorothy Cornwall.”
Having secured their premises, outsourced the shoes and bouquet, and commissioned silk weavers and lace manufacturers—all British family-run companies, naturally—the Emanuels were left to concentrate on fittings with Diana.
Once Diana and her mother, Frances, had selected a design from the dozens of ideas the Emanuels came up with, a mock-up was created in calico. Unfortunately, the measurements for the dress were shrinking practically each week. Diana, a healthy teenage girl, had decided to starve herself, despite having witnessed her elder sister Sarah’s battle with bulimia to the point of being hospitalized. According to Diana, her own eating disorders were triggered by her fiancé’s insensitive comments after the engagement.
“The bulimia started the week after we got engaged,” she confided to biographer Andrew Morton in 1992. “My husband put his hand on my waistline and said, ‘Oh, bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me.” Yet, according to another biographer, Lady Colin Campbell, Charles said nothing of the sort. Diana was simply fishing for sympathy. Campbell, a former close friend of the princess, defended Charles to the hilt. She claimed that far from being the cold-hearted emotional abuser Diana depicted him to be in her traumatic interviews of the early 1990s, he was a sensitive and mature adult who had been pushed into marriage by his own belief in duty, his eager family, and—with admirable guile and cunning—Diana herself.
“I’ve discovered a marvelous new diet,” Diana confided to a shocked Palace flunky shortly after her unofficial move into Kensington Palace. “I eat all I want and then—[mimes sticking a finger down her throat]—blllleeeuuuggghhhhhhhh.”
At her first fitting in January 1981, Diana’s waist measured twenty-nine inches. By the big day, it was down to 23.5 inches. “Every time she turned up for a fitting, she had lost more weight,” Elizabeth said. “We put it down to nerves. But it did make it incredibly difficult for us to get on with making the dress. We had to keep taking the bodice in and changing the pattern. The last thing we wanted was to make it up in silk, then have to play around with that. Silk soon looks worn if you work it too much.” Finally, fifteen fittings later, the final tryout took place two weeks before the wedding, with Elizabeth Emanuel making the final adjustments. “She was incredibly tiny by the end,” recalled Emanuel. “It was suddenly very real. She was just so excited—you could see it in her eyes.”
The Emanuels’ team of seven seamstresses spent weeks on the dress, working flat out to have it ready by July. The silk came from Stephen Walters & Sons, a family firm of Suffolk weavers dating back to the 1700s. Having been instructed to keep it as British as possible, they used up all the raw silk they could get from busy silkworms at Lullingstone silk farm in Kent. Still, there wasn’t enough. Some eleven thousand strands of raw silk were used, so they had to make up the difference with imported silk. The silkworms briefly became global celebrities during the wedding celebrations when it was revealed that they had been gifted to the royal couple in an ornate box. Unfortunately, utterly worn out from their exertions, they all died within hours of the marriage.
The dress’s bodice and skirt were made of gleaming ivory silk taffeta, and the trim on the bodice, sleeves, and edges was lace. The creation was festooned with ten thousand pearls and tiny mother-of-pearl sequins. Underneath, a petticoat, made of 295 feet of tulle, was fluffed into shape. And, in accordance with one of the very few directions from the future Princess, the train was designed to be longer than any previous royal wedding dress. The colossal, twenty-six-foot trailing confection was fashioned from antique lace and ivory taffeta, just like the dress, and would need six young bridesmaids to carry it.
Finally, just in time, after numerous fittings, panics, last-minute dashes, and frantic preparations, all was ready. For Elizabeth and David Emanuel, a life-changing day was just around the corner.
The whole country was ablaze with excitement that week. Crowds began converging on St Paul’s Cathedral in London, camping on the streets and creating a party atmosphere in the usually staid narrow streets around the historic monument in the heart of London’s financial district. As ex
citement reached fever pitch the night before the wedding, the BBC evening news sent reporter Angela Rippon to interview the couple. Speaking years later to London’s Daily Express newspaper, Ms. Rippon recalled the interview as being an excruciatingly awkward affair, claiming Diana’s body language clearly boded ill: “At the end of the interview, he looks at her and she just looks away, down at the floor. Goodness, maybe we should have read so much more into that. Those five seconds at the end of the interview might have told us so much more about what was to come.”
After filming the BBC interview, the couple went their separate ways, with Diana heading home to Clarence House for her last night as a single woman. That night, beset with nerves, she began stuffing herself with food, before inducing severe vomiting. “I had a very bad fit of bulimia the night before [the wedding],” she confessed years later. “I was sick as a parrot that night. It was such an indication of what was going on.”
THE FURIOUS BRIDE
If I’d had the courage I would have hitched up my dress and bolted out the church.
—DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
At dawn on the morning of July 29, 1981, Elizabeth and David Emanuel drove carefully past the guards, past the already substantial crowds, police on horseback, paparazzi, and barricades into the grounds of Clarence House, in central London. Inside sat the world’s most famous woman, in a t-shirt and sneakers, giggling with her girlfriends and makeup artists. She was watching herself on television, eating cookies, and drinking orange juice.