by Kitty Kelley
Johnny Spencer started drinking too much and abusing his wife. He sent her back to London’s Harley Street specialists to find out what was “wrong” with her. Three years later, when she was twenty-eight, she produced a son. “Finally,” she said, “I’ve done my duty.” The Queen was named godmother.
The heir, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, was known as the Honourable Charles Spencer, while his grandfather, the Earl Spencer, was alive. Upon the Earl’s death in 1975, Johnny Spencer inherited his father’s title and his son, Charles, then nine years old, became Viscount Althorp.
“Waiting for dead man’s shoes,” is how Frances bitterly described her husband’s life before he inherited his father’s title. By then she had fallen in love with a dynamic married man, who she said gave her life passion and purpose. Although Peter Shand Kydd, forty-two, did not have a title, he was wealthy and glamorous and had a wild sense of humor. Unlike Johnny Spencer, a courtier who approached royalty with reverence, Kydd was unimpressed. After dinner with the Queen, he told his children that Her Majesty “was as boring as ever” and “Buckingham Palace was a bit of a fucking Trust House Forte [hotel].”
Kydd was heir to a wallpaper fortune and a former naval officer who owned land in England, Scotland, and Australia. He was the father of three young children.
“That didn’t stop Frances,” said one of Peter Shand Kydd’s sons. “She’s tough—a predator. When she moved on my father, my mother didn’t stand a chance.”
Diana was six years old in 1967 when her mother left her father and moved into a rented apartment in the Chelsea section of London to be closer to her lover. Frances told her husband that she wanted a divorce and expected to receive custody of their children. Johnnie drunkenly raged at her as “a bolter” and beat her. When he sobered up, he sobbed and begged her to return home. She tried a reconciliation but said it was torture, so she moved out of Park House and returned to London.
Shortly after that, Mrs. Peter Shand Kydd sued for divorce and named Frances as corespondent. Johnny Spencer was so humiliated by his wife’s adultery that he sued for custody. He was supported in court by Frances’s mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Lady Fermoy testified under oath that the Spencer children appeared to be happier with their father than their mother. She also swore that she had never seen Spencer lose his temper.
“Ruth was an old royalist—humbly born in Scotland but incredibly snobbish—and she’s been in royal circles all her life,” said a Spencer family member. “I adored her and she was wonderful to me, but I must admit that she was rotten to her children, especially Frances. In the custody fight, Ruth sided with Johnny because, as she told me, and testified in court, she’d never seen him actually strike Frances. Ruth hadn’t been around for the drunken thrashings, so she could swear without compunction that she’d never witnessed Johnny’s physical violence. And Frances would never have told her mother about the abuse; she and Ruth weren’t that close to begin with, and the subject wasn’t one you discussed freely in those days.
“Ruth would never be party to anyone—let alone her own daughter—embarrassing one of the Queen’s courtiers. But the real reason she turned on her daughter was to protect her grandchildren. She didn’t want them living with a commoner when they could be living with an aristocrat. Frances never forgave her mother. They didn’t speak for nine years and then just barely.”
The writer Penny Junor concurred. “Lady Fermoy really could not believe that her daughter would leave a belted earl for a man in trade.”
The court ruled in favor of Viscount Althorp, so Diana and her brother, who had moved to London with their mother, moved back to Park House to live with their father. Their two older sisters, Sarah and Jane, remained at boarding school. That year, 1969, Frances married Peter Shand Kydd, who was so torn about abandoning his children that he almost backed out of the marriage. “He never got over the guilt,” said one of his closest friends, “and that, coupled with drink later on, probably led to the divorce from Frances in 1990.”
A child of a broken marriage, Diana had trouble learning to read. Her brother teased her about being slow and dull-witted because she barely made passing grades. The only award she received in school was in the fourth grade when she won the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner for being nice to her guinea pig. She loved to dance and spent hours in front of the mirror practicing toe, tap, and ballet exercises, but she was not scholastic. So she dropped out of school at the age of sixteen, and her father, who worried about her lack of education, enrolled her in a Swiss finishing school (Institut Alpin Videmanette in Gstaad). She went reluctantly and studied cooking and French halfheartedly. She spent most of her time skiing. After three months she said she was too homesick to complete the term. She badgered her father to let her come home, which, upon her grandfather’s death, had become the grand Jacobean mansion of Althorp.
Her father continued to worry about her future, but Diana was unconcerned. After reading an article in the Daily Telegraph about academic failures who later became roaring successes in life, she clipped the story and slipped it under his door. Then she pestered him about moving to London. She wanted to get an apartment like her older sisters.
“I couldn’t bear Althorp anymore,” she said. “A hard Raine was falling.”
Raine was the daughter of the flamboyant Barbara Cartland. More subdued than her mother, Raine, forty-seven, was known as Lady Dartmouth after her marriage. She was a Tory disciple in the lacquered mode of Margaret Thatcher. She had met Johnny Spencer at a local political meeting and invited him to dinner at her London apartment when her husband was away. Spencer, so lonely since his divorce, fed on her attention. Drawn to her strength, he turned to her for advice, especially about running Althorp. She advised him to renovate his estate and to pay for the work by selling off some of his family heirlooms, including three Van Dyck paintings. She suggested pitching an immense tent on the grounds, filling it with huge bouquets of plastic flowers, and serving tea in paper cups to paying customers. She recommended converting the stables into a gift shop and selling souvenirs. She even drew up a list of items to appeal to tourists, including rape whistles and her mother’s romantic novels.
The Spencer children were aghast. “We didn’t like her one bit,” said Charles. “As a child, you instinctively feel things, and with her I very much instinctively felt things.”
Diana was less direct than her brother but equally hostile. Behind her back she made fun of Raine’s elaborate ball gowns, which she said were borrowed from film studios. She called her “Countess Come Dancing,” after a British television show about Ballroom dancing. Diana’s sister Jane treated Raine like dust on the closet shelf, but Sarah was more outspoken.
“Since my grandfather died and we moved to Althorp,” Sarah told a friend, “Lady Dartmouth has been an all-too-frequent visitor.” When a reporter called asking to speak to the new Earl Spencer, Sarah said, “My father is in bed with Lady Dartmouth,* and I wouldn’t dream of disturbing them.”
Diana ran up and down the corridors of Althorp with her brother, chanting the nursery rhyme “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” They called their father’s lover “Acid Raine” and sulked in her presence. Charles refused to talk to her, and Diana bedeviled her with anonymous poison-pen letters and hang-up phone calls—a scare tactic she allegedly used on others years later. When Raine insisted on dressing formally for dinner, the children came to the table in jeans.
Like Frances Shand Kydd, Raine was still married when she began her love affair. She, too, was publicly humiliated by being cited for adultery in her husband’s divorce action, and she also lost custody of her children. “It was quite a traumatic time for all of us,” said one of her sons. “My father never forgave her.”
Raine’s husband, Gerald Legge—the Earl of Dartmouth—was so embittered that he commissioned an artist to paint her out of a family portrait; he replaced her with a tree.
By then Raine had moved into Althorp with her Vuitton trunks. Th
e Spencer children pleaded with their father to send her away, but he was bewitched. In 1976 they married and she became the Countess Spencer.* None of their children attended the civil ceremony.
“We weren’t invited,” Sarah told a reporter. “Not grand enough.”
“The inference is unwarranted,” snapped Barbara Cartland. “After all, my daughter gave up a sixteenth Earl for an eighth Earl. Hardly social climbing.”
Raine relished the Spencer title, the fortune, and the estate. In fact, she loved everything about her new marriage, except the children. “I’m absolutely sick of the ‘wicked stepmother’ lark,” she said years later. “You’re never going to make me sound like a human being because people like to think I’m Dracula’s mother, but I did have a rotten time at the start…. Sarah resented me, even my place at the head of the table, and gave orders to the servants over my head. Jane didn’t speak to me for two years, even if we bumped in a passageway. Diana was sweet, always did her own thing… and Charles, well, he was simply hateful.”
Raine was more rancorous in the early months of her marriage. “Sarah is impossible, and Jane’s all right as long as she keeps producing children. That’s about all she is good for. As for Diana, how can you have intelligent conversation with someone who doesn’t have a single 0-level? If you said ‘Afghanistan’ to her, she’d think it was a cheese.”
The animosity between stepmother and stepchildren became even more vitriolic in September 1978, when Johnny Spencer suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage. He lapsed into a coma for two months and lay in the hospital two more months. Raine visited him every day and sat by his bed, playing opera records and willing him to recover. She fought his children over his medical treatment and barred them from seeing him in a coma. She said she did not want them absorbing the life energy she felt he needed to recover. His doctors braced her for death, but she would not accept their diagnosis. She insisted her husband would live, if only he could be treated with a powerful new German drug (Aslocillin) that was not yet licensed in England. Citing legal restrictions, the doctors said they could not give him the drug, even if they could get it. So Raine moved her husband to another hospital and exerted her influence to get the drug imported for experimentation. She succeeded, and as she predicted, the Earl Spencer rallied and recovered, but not completely. He remained partially brain-damaged, which affected his speech and mobility.
“I could have saved my husband’s life ten times over and spent all my money doing this,” she told a writer, “but it wouldn’t have changed anything in his children’s attitude toward me.
“But I’m a survivor, and people forget that at their peril. There’s pure steel up my backbone. Nobody destroys me, and nobody was going to destroy Johnny so long as I could sit by his bed… and will my life force into him.”
Raine appreciated the opportunity for social advancement and welcomed Diana’s new royal relationship. And her father felt flattered about his favorite daughter’s catching the eye of the Prince of Wales. But her mother was troubled. Frances Shand Kydd had seen the royal brush swipe her oldest daughter, and she remembered the embarrassment Sarah had suffered when she was dropped from the royal guest list. Sarah, who was fighting anorexia while she was dating Charles, had treasured his invitations and hired a clipping service to send her all the stories written about them. She proudly started a scrapbook that chronicled her rise as one of the chosen few. After her “dustman” interview, there were no more articles and no more invitations. Now her younger sister was receiving them.
Prince Charles had been intrigued enough by his conversation with Diana during the weekend house party in July to invite her to the opera. He extended the invitation through his secretary and at the last minute. But Diana didn’t care; she was thrilled. She accepted and pretended to share his appreciation of Verdi. Charles later invited her to watch him play polo at Cowdray, to watch him shoot at Sandringham, to watch him race at Ludlow. Diana accepted—and watched adoringly. “Mostly,” she told her mother, “I just enjoy being with him.”
Diana joined Charles aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, to watch the races at Cowes, and a week later she accepted his invitation to join his small party for dinner at Buckingham Palace. She admitted feeling intimidated by such friends of his as Nicholas “Fatty” Soames, who were so much older, but she managed to ingratiate herself with them and fit in. They especially appreciated her youthful adoration of the Prince. “She was clearly determined and enthusiastic about him,” recalled Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, the wife of one of Charles’s closest friends, “and she very much wanted him.” Years later Diana’s biographer, Andrew Morton, would state it more bluntly. “During their bizarre courtship,” he wrote, “she was his willing puppy who came to heel when he whistled.”
Diana was not discovered by the press until the autumn of 1980, when she was sitting beside Charles on the bank of the river Dee, watching him fish. The high-powered binoculars of newspaper reporter James Whitaker and his photographer, Arthur Edwards, spotted her through the trees. When she saw them watching her, she slipped away discreetly. They tracked her down in London, and days later, “the wicked Mr. Whitaker,” as she teasingly referred to the leader of the royal tabloid pack, introduced his readers to “Lady Di.”
“She was pretty, but not staggeringly so,” he recalled. “She had charm, but no magic. Yet, before my eyes, she performed a miracle and transformed herself into the most glamorous woman in the world, worshipped by the media and the masses.”
The portly reporter, who wore silk handkerchiefs in the breast pocket of gold-buttoned blazers, became to Diana what the fairy godmother had been to Cinderella. Whitaker waved his magic wand of publicity and, in story after story, presented her as “the most suitable choice for our future Queen.” He praised her “innocence,” her “delightful charm,” her “blessed modesty.” He rhapsodized about her “abundant freshness” and her “regal carriage.” His colleagues followed his lead in varying degrees.
Within two months the Earl’s sweet daughter had captivated the kingdom that wanted nothing more for its bachelor Prince than a beautiful blond princess. Diana was perfect. More British than Charles, who was her sixteenth cousin through King James I, she was an aristocrat with five lines of descent from Charles II. “She’s also related to practically every single person in the French aristocracy,” said Harold Brooks-Baker, editor of Debrett’s, the bible of bloodlines. “She’s even related to Napoleon’s brother and eight American presidents, including George Washington.”
Most important, Lady Diana Spencer was a Protestant without a past. Her virginity validated her as the most worthy candidate to become Queen and beget an heir. Even Prince Philip approved. “She can breed height into the line,” he said as if she were a brood mare.
The British press was as beguiled as the public and couldn’t get enough of the young woman they glorified as “Shy Di.” They put her picture on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, with her head tilted coyly to one side or her eyes demurely cast down. “She’s 19 and a perfect English rose,” gushed the Sun. In her frilly blouses, she was the epitome of schoolgirl innocence. “DIvine” raved the Mirror. Reporters dogged her on foot, chased her small red car through traffic, and climbed over rooftops to photograph her. They pursued her every day down the street, on the phone, to her job.
“Darling, how do you put up with the bloody creatures?” Charles asked.
“I love working with children, and I have learned to be very patient with them,” said Diana. “I simply treat the press as though they were children.”
She gently reprimanded photographers who became too familiar. “Hey, Di,” hollered one. “Cheat [turn] to the left.”
She smiled sweetly. “My name is Diana,” she said evenly. She never stopped smiling.
Unshakably poised at first, she gave way to tears when a posse of press cars almost drove her off the road. On another occasion, contrite reporters left a note on the windshield of her car: “We didn’t mean this to happ
en. Our full apologies.” She agreed to pose only after a photographer frightened the children at her nursery school by crawling through the lavatory window with his clattering gear.
“You’ve got two minutes,” she told him sternly. He fired off four flashes, startling two nursery school tots, who clung to her for protection. The photographs became the world’s first glimpse and most lasting impression of the winsome beauty. Balancing one child on her hip and holding the hand of another, she did not realize the sun was shining through her gauzy skirt and revealing what Prince Charles appreciatively described as “a great pair of legs.” The caption was “Lady Diana’s Slip.” British newspapers called on Charles to make the guileless girl England’s future queen.
The Sunday Times said she was perfect: “serious but not boring; sweet but not too sweet; funny, not silly; sporty, not horsey; and sexy without being brassy.”
“I’m told she’s ideal,” said the Daily Mail’s Nigel Dempster. “She has been pronounced physically sound to produce children.” (Years later, Diana denied that she had to submit to a premarital physical exam by palace-dictated doctors.)
One headline advised, “Charles: Don’t DIther.” Another screamed, “To Di For.”
The press expected the Prince to propose on his thirty-second birthday in November 1980, when Diana spent the weekend with him and the rest of the royal family at Sandringham. So reporters camped out at the estate, waiting for an announcement. They watched Diana arrive on Friday and leave on Sunday. After her departure, Charles strolled by them as he walked his dog.
“Why don’t you all go home to your wives?” he said. “I know you were expecting some news Friday, and I know you were disappointed. But you will all be told soon enough.”