by Kitty Kelley
Charles celebrated his thirtieth birthday on November 15, 1978, with a grand ball at Buckingham Palace attended by more than four hundred people. The invitations from the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh specified “no tiaras” the way other rich parents might specify “no gifts.” The Prince took the tall, blond actress Susan George as his date, but he danced most of the evening with his friends’ wives, Dale “Kanga” Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles. As godfather to both their eldest children, Charles admitted he felt more relaxed with them than the eligible beauties pursuing him. “Married women are safe,” he later explained to his fiancée. “Because of their husbands, they understand discretion.”
As Prince of Wales, Charles was accustomed to adulation. He expected it and received it in full measure, especially from the wives of two of his friends. These married women gave freely and expected nothing in return, unlike single women, who required the time and attention of courtship. For Charles’s married lovers, sharing his bed was like owning a wine château or a Gulfstream jet: it added to their prestige. They enjoyed being whispered about as his “confidantes,” and their husbands felt honored to share their wives with the future King. The arrangement enhanced their stature within the aristocracy.
“Poor Charles even feels more comfortable with bossy old women like me than he does with young single women his own age,” said the sixty-five-year-old Viscountess he invited to Windsor for lunch a few days later. “I’m one of the old aristos who grew up with Her Majesty and Princess Margaret at a time in this tiny country when we all knew one another and understood our place. I’m part of a world no longer visible: the bloated upper classes where the echo of deference still lingers and allows for amiability toward our royal family, which is unfortunately German, and part of the vaulting arrogance of the middle class. We recognize them [the royal family] for what they are—they are undereducated and ill-informed Germans, and they need our help. We feel protective toward them, particularly the heir apparent, which is the reason Charles seeks me out.
“He was never more endearing than on that day after his thirtieth birthday,” she said. “I arrived for lunch, and he said, ‘Oh, God, I hope you are not very hungry. When Mummy’s not here, nothing much happens. So my valet is making us a little omelet.’ He eyed my dog. ‘Thank God Mummy isn’t here. Her corgis would’ve made a sandwich out of your Labrador. They’re perfectly dreadful.’
“Charles is very sweet, but not too bright. He has a slender understanding of the world. Humbly nice and well mannered, but there’s a dimension missing. He said he’d become so set in his bachelor ways and habits that he didn’t think he’d ever find a wife who’d fit in and want to share his life. ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What woman would ever put up with all this? With me?’
“After lunch he showed me his horse, Mantilla, and then I left, feeling more protective than ever toward the future King of England, who seemed to have everything but actually had nothing. At least, nothing that mattered much.”
TWELVE
Charles was in Iceland to fish when he received a call on August 27, 1979, from the British Ambassador. “Your Royal Highness,” said the Ambassador, “I’m afraid I have some tragic news…. Lord Louis has been… Sir, I’m so sorry…. Earl Mountbatten of Burma is dead.”
Charles was too stunned to cry. Stammering in disbelief, he asked for details, but the Ambassador said he knew only what he had heard on the BBC news flash. So Charles called his mother at Windsor Castle. She told him that “Uncle Dickie,” on holiday in Ireland, had been blown up by an IRA bomb.
Mountbatten, seventy-nine, had been aboard his boat with his daughter, Patricia; her husband, John Brabourne; their fourteen-year-old twin sons, Nicholas and Timothy; and Lord Brabourne’s elderly mother. They were going lobstering in Mullaghmore harbor when the bomb was detonated. The explosion instantly killed Mountbatten; his grandson, Nicholas; and an Irish boat boy hired as crew. Lord Brabourne was severely wounded, and his wife almost died. She spent days on a life-support system and underwent several operations to save her eyesight, then weeks in intensive care. Their son Timothy was knocked unconscious but recovered; Lord Brabourne’s eighty-three-year-old mother died the next day.
Prince Charles was heartbroken. He wired Mountbatten’s private secretary: “This is the worst day of my life. I can’t imagine going on without him.” That night he poured his grief into his journal: “I have lost someone infinitely special in my life. Life will never be the same now that he has gone….”
Days later Charles met his mother and father for lunch at Broadlands to discuss Mountbatten’s funeral arrangements. Still distraught, he said he didn’t think he could get through the service without breaking down.
“He’s gone now, Charles,” said his father. “You’ve got to get on with it.”
The Prince of Wales started crying and left the room. The Queen, who did not respond, just continued eating. She dropped bits of chicken from her salad on the floor to feed her corgis. Prince Philip threw down his napkin.
“I hope that has ensured that Charles will shed no tears when he goes out in public,” he said. The Queen sipped her water and said nothing.
“Sounds cruel,” recalled John Barratt, “but the Duke of Edinburgh was determined to put some steel in his son’s spine. Her Majesty couldn’t have given a tinker’s cuss. Poor Charles was destroyed. He was so dependent on Lord Mountbatten. They spoke every day and wrote weekly. He was everything to Charles—his grandfather figure, his father, his tutor, his best friend.”
Although Philip sometimes chafed at this closeness, he mourned his uncle’s death and never forgave the Irish Republican Army. Two years later, during a tour of Australia with the Queen, he passed a group of IRA demonstrators. The Queen ignored them and stared straight ahead; Philip raised his hand to wave and gave them the finger.
On the day of Mountbatten’s funeral, Charles stepped sadly onto the podium at Westminster Abbey to read the prayer that his great-uncle had selected years before when he planned his state funeral. The Prince of Wales had pinned to his own naval uniform all his ribbons and medals because, as he told his valet, that’s what Mountbatten would have preferred. Tapping his chest, he said, “If the IRA want to get me through the heart, they’ll have a hard job.”
In a quavering voice, Charles recited Psalm 107 in memory of the Admiral of the Fleet: “They that go down to the sea in ships… These men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep….” He struggled to keep his composure, but as the buglers sounded the last post, he broke and brushed away a tear.
His emotion contrasted starkly with that of his mother, who sat a few feet away, as impassive as stone. On the day of the bombing, ten days before the funeral, the Palace had issued a statement that Her Majesty was “deeply shocked and saddened,” but she did not write a letter of condolence to Mountbatten’s children, who were her cousins and her closest friends from childhood. Nor did she interrupt her vacation at Balmoral, where she was joined the next day by her daughter, Princess Anne, for a picnic. The Queen was seen walking in her garden with her corgis and playing with her two-year-old grandson, Peter.
Such ordinary activity in the face of tragedy jolted one royal reporter, who watched the scene through high-power binoculars. He said he was stunned to see the Queen skipping and laughing as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “This was the day after Mountbatten had been blown to bits,” he recalled, “and I’ve never seen Her Majesty so relaxed and happy* in all her life.” Ever the loyal subject, the reporter filed a story for his newspaper, saying that the grief-stricken sovereign walked through the gardens of Balmoral in solitary sorrow.
Charles mourned his great-uncle’s death for months and turned for guidance to Laurens Van der Post, a writer who had served as an aide to Mountbatten in India. Charles was in awe of the older man, who now replaced Mountbatten as his guru, spiritual mentor, and political adviser. Van der Post, a friend and biographer of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, talked to Charles about the
concept of the collective unconscious, which is expressed through myths and dreams. He encouraged Charles to believe in the supernatural and to be open to the world of spirits. He accompanied the Prince to the Kalahari Desert in Southwest Africa to commune with the ghosts of bushmen. Charles was fascinated by the elderly mystic and soon sought the consolation of seers, mediums, and psychics. He dabbled in the paranormal, took part in séances, and consulted clairvoyants to communicate with the departed Mountbatten.
“Charles tried to summon the shade of Lord Louis on a Ouija board,” said John Barratt, “but when the press found out, the Palace made him deny it because he looked barmy.”
During this time, Charles became intensely involved with a beautiful Indian-born actress who had been the mistress of Hollywood director John Huston. Zoe Sallis, who gave birth to Huston’s son in 1962, was a Buddhist and devoted to swamis. Her influence on Prince Charles disturbed the Palace. She espoused transcendentalism and the doctrine of many divinities, which is inconsistent with the Anglican belief in one omnipotent God.
Charles was enraptured by his new lover, who was ten years his senior, and he began practicing what she was preaching. She had given him a book entitled The Path of the Masters and said that her mission was to convert him to belief in reincarnation. To the dismay of his staff, she succeeded. He began talking about the transmigration of souls and speculated about the form that Lord Mountbatten might assume when he returned to earth.
The Prince’s private secretary, Edward Adeane, became alarmed by what he saw as incoherent ramblings. The tough-minded barrister, whose father, Sir Michael Adeane, had been private secretary to the Queen, expected more of the future King of England than Charles was demonstrating. Adeane was dismayed by the hairshirt mentality, the do-good speeches, and the forays into alternative medicine. Mostly he was concerned about Charles’s attitude toward religion. Adeane tried to redirect him back to the conventional teachings of the Church of England. He stressed the responsibility of the heir apparent to his future subjects, but Charles was not receptive. He was too enthralled by the message of nirvana. Under the influence of his new lover, he became a vegetarian and resolved (temporarily) to stop killing animals. “I want to purify myself,” he declared, “and pursue a oneness with all faiths.”
“It’s got to be stopped,” said Adeane to other members of the staff. Asserting himself, the private secretary told the Prince his relationship with the beautiful Buddhist was potentially harmful to the monarchy. Adeane felt the older woman’s influence was warping Charles’s perspective. He said Charles was destined to become Defender of the Faith—not, as Adeane put it, defender of many faiths. He recommended that Charles end the relationship, but Charles refused—until Adeane threatened to go to the Queen. Then Charles relented. At the age of thirty-one he was still afraid of his mother.
Charles ricocheted from casual dates to one-night stands and, in between, pursued brief relationships with tall, beautiful blondes whose fathers were rich landowners. “I fall in love so easily,” he told reporters, trying to explain away the numerous women drifting into and out of his life. He proposed marriage twice—once to Davina Sheffield and again to Anna Wallace—but neither blonde accepted his proposal, and both fell out of favor once their pasts were revealed in the press.
“Oh, God,” Charles moaned to his valet, “will I never find a woman worthy enough?”
During the summer of 1980, he found her sitting on a bale of hay. The fresh and lovely nineteen-year-old Lady Diana Spencer seemed too young and too innocent to have a past. Charles, who was thirteen years older, noticed her during a weekend house party at the country home of his friends Philippa and Robert de Pass. The Prince had met Diana in 1977, when he briefly dated her oldest sister, Sarah, and spent a shooting weekend with the Spencers at Althorp, their family estate in Northamptonshire, about seventy-five miles northwest of London. So she was not a stranger when he saw her three years later. He noted how much she had grown up from the sixteen-year-old girl he remembered. “No more puppy fat,” he said.
Diana blushed, lowered her eyes, and looked down at her long legs. “I’m just taller now,” she joked. “I’ve stretched the puppy fat.”
Amused by her self-deprecating humor, Charles laughed and sat down to talk. They chatted about her sister, Sarah, who recently had married Neil McCorquodale, a former officer of the Coldstream Guards. Charles mused about how pleased he was to get away from his royal duties and be with friends. (The “never-ending bloody” burden of being Prince of Wales would become a constant refrain in the next few months, as Charles complained about his workload.) Diana listened sympathetically and told him how wonderfully he performed his duties. She mentioned how touched she had been watching him on television at Mountbatten’s funeral.
“You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at the funeral. It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched it. I thought: It’s wrong. You are lonely. You should be with somebody to look after you.”
She later recounted this conversation to her roommates and said that she had talked to the Prince as if he were one of her nursery school charges. She added that he drew close to her, just like the little children she looked after at the Young England kindergarten. Charles, leaving early, asked her to drive back to London with him, but she demurred, saying it might be impolite to her hosts.
“That was a good move on her part,” said one of her roommates. “She didn’t want to appear ill-bred, and she certainly couldn’t look too eager.”
For Diana, the courtship had begun. She was excited to be noticed by the Prince of Wales and told her roommates that if she had a chance with him, she would not treat him as dismissively as her sister, Sarah, had when she’d talked to the press. “I think of the Prince as the big brother I never had,” Sarah had told a reporter. “I really enjoy being with him, but I’m not in love with him. And I wouldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, whether it was a dustman or the King of England. If he asked me, I would turn him down.” Diana, who read the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, had fantasized about marrying a prince. She would never turn him down.
Diana confided her fantasies to her roommates, who started ransacking their closets to find the right clothes for her to wear on her royal dates. They never saw the future King of England because he never visited Diana’s apartment. Nor did he pick her up when they went out. “There weren’t many presents, either,” recalled one roommate. “A book at Christmas, a watercolor he had painted at Balmoral, one bouquet after they got engaged that was delivered by his valet but without a card, and a little green plastic frog, which Diana kept on the dashboard of her car. She had teased Charles about not having to kiss any more frogs because she’d finally found her prince. I guess he agreed.”
During their six-month courtship, Charles rarely telephoned Diana, and he relied on an equerry to issue his last-minute invitations. She was expected to provide her own transportation to wherever he might be. “We referred to him as ‘sir,’ ” said one roommate, “because that’s what Diana had to call him in the beginning…. We helped her plot her strategy. It was great fun, and a bit of a game.”
The young women, whom Charles referred to as Diana’s “silly flatmates,” shared an apartment at No. 60 Coleherne Court in London, near Harrods department store. Diana had bought the three-bedroom apartment with money she had inherited from her great-grandmother. “It was my coming-of-age present,” she said. Like her two older sisters, she had received the money ($75,000) on her eighteenth birthday. Her mother advised her to invest in London real estate, so Diana bought the apartment. To meet the mortgage, she collected rent from three friends and assigned them cleaning chores. “Truth to tell, Diana did most of the housework,” said one roommate. “She loved to clean. Pride of place and all that.”
Growing up, Diana had been the meticulous member of the family. She spent hours cleaning and scouring, rearranging her dresser drawers, and hanging her clothes. She lined up her shoes by colo
r and made her bed every day, tucking the corners precisely. She vacuumed constantly and learned to launder because she said she loved the smell of freshly ironed shirts. Like Cinderella, she worked cheerfully as a maid for her oldest sister, who paid her $2 an hour to clean her London apartment. Years later Diana told friends that her psychiatrist explained this compulsion to clean as an attempt to impose order on the chaos around her. Recognizing her obsessive nature, she avoided medications like tranquilizers, fearing that if she ever got started, she would become addicted.
Her family had been torn apart by divorce, alcoholism, and violence. For the first ten years of her parents’ marriage, her father had blamed her mother for not producing an heir. “It was a dreadful time for my parents and probably the root of their divorce,” said Diana’s brother, Charles, “because I don’t think they ever got over it.”
Diana’s father, Edward John Spencer, was known informally as Johnny Spencer. As Viscount Althorp, he was heir to a large fortune and a thirteen-thousand-acre estate, Althorp House, which his ancestors had acquired in the sixteenth century. A former equerry to two monarchs, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, he was destined to become the eighth Earl Spencer; when he inherited his title, he needed a son to pass it on. In 1954 he married Frances Roche, the beautiful blond daughter of the fourth Lord Fermoy. They moved into Park House in Norfolk, on the Sandringham estate. Their first child, Sarah, was born the next year, and two years later, 1957, they had another girl, Jane. Johnnie Spencer wanted a boy and insisted his wife be examined by specialists to find out why she produced daughters. Willing to try again, Frances became pregnant in 1958 and gave birth to a boy in January 1959. The baby was named John in his father’s honor. “I never saw him. I never held him,” Frances said. “He was an eight-pound baby boy who had a lung malfunction, which meant he couldn’t survive.” Ten hours after he was born, he died. Frances tried again, and eighteen months later, on July 1, 1961, she gave birth to a third daughter, whom they named Diana Frances. “I was supposed to be the boy,” said Diana many years later.