by Kitty Kelley
When the Prince did not propose, he was chided by an editorial in the Guardian: “The Court Circular that issued from Buckingham Palace last night,” wrote the newspaper, “was profoundly disappointing for a nation which, beset by economic and political dissent, had briefly believed that the sound of distant tumbrels was to be drowned by the peal of royal wedding bells.”
The romance was almost derailed on November 16, 1980, when the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined “Royal Love Train.” The newspaper cited an unidentified police officer, who claimed that Lady Diana had spent two secret nights with Prince Charles aboard the royal train. The train, with its elaborate kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom suite, was used only by members of the royal family for travel on official business. The story alleged that Charles was spending the night aboard the train after engagements in the Duchy of Cornwall and had summoned Diana, who was secretly escorted through a police barricade in the middle of the night. The caption accompanying a photo of the secluded train in Wiltshire: “Love in The Sidings.”
“Absolutely scurrilous and totally false,” thundered the Queen’s press secretary. “Her Majesty takes grave exception.” The Palace demanded a retraction and an apology, but the editor, Robert Edwards, stood firm. He said he had a sworn statement from an eyewitness who saw a woman board the train on two nights, spend several hours with the Prince in his private bedroom compartment, and leave clandestinely. But the editor made one mistake: he identified the blond as Diana.
“It was Camilla Parker Bowles,” said John Barratt. “She had started up again with Charles after Mountbatten’s death, when she called to offer her condolences. I know because I was wrapping things up at Broadlands then and [was] in regular contact with the Prince. He did not hide the fact that Mrs. Parker Bowles was back in his life. He said she was helping him sort things out. They spent hours together—riding, hunting, shooting. She acted as his hostess at dinner parties, and arranged luncheons and country weekends, and, naturally, controlled the guest lists. Charles called her his Girl Friday.
“She was perfect for him—horsey and accommodating. Charles is like all the Windsor men, and I include Lord Louis and Prince Philip. They like women who look like men. Long legs in riding breeches. They want their tarts to look like their horses. Mountbatten’s women, Philip’s women, Charles’s women—all cut the same, beginning with Sasha [the Duchess of Abercorn], who is the Queen’s cousin. She was Mountbatten’s before he passed her on to Philip, which is what they do in that family. Lord Louis and Philip also shared that chinless wonder [Barratt names a woman married to one of Prince Philip’s close friends] whom Charles also inherited. Camilla was different. She didn’t come in under Mountbatten or Philip before she got to Charles. She was under him from the start.”
The Prince of Wales continued seeing Camilla during the time her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles, was posted to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)* to help the emerging British colony make its transition to independence. She did not accompany him on his overseas assignment.
“Charles said he couldn’t bear for her to leave, so she didn’t,” said a friend who boarded her horses with Camilla. “It was no hardship for her husband not having her with him because Andrew Parker Bowles was already involved with another woman.”
Diana did not realize the complexities facing her. She did know that Camilla was a constant presence whenever she turned around, and she wondered how the older woman always knew so much about her relationship with Charles. But she didn’t feel secure enough yet to question the Prince about his former lover. She confided her discomfort to her roommates and her sisters but said nothing to Charles. She felt slightly reassured by his anger over the royal train incident; he lashed out at the press and called them “bloody vultures.” When the editor refused to apologize and retract the story, Charles insisted the Palace issue a second denial.
He left for India days later on a trip that had been planned for months, and Diana accompanied him to the airport to say good-bye. As he nonchalantly skipped up the steps of the royal plane without looking back, she burst into tears.
Reporters followed Charles on his visit to the Taj Mahal and asked what he thought about the great monument to passion built by a Moghul emperor in memory of his wife. “A marvelous idea,” said Charles, “to build something so wonderful to someone one loved so very much.” An Indian reporter asked about the Prince’s own prospects for a wife, and Charles left him breathless with his odd response. “I’m encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim,” he said, “I could have lots of wives.”
The British reporters glanced at one another uncomfortably, wondering if the Prince was joking. None quoted him verbatim. Even with the arrival of Australian Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid papers, Britain’s reporters remained deferential to royalty. They softened their stories on the Queen and her heir by withholding newsworthy details and, in this case, ignoring the revealing quotation. Instead they wrote as Her Majesty’s obedient servants. They reported that Charles said: “I can understand that love could make a man build the Taj Mahal for his wife. One day I would like to bring my own back here.”
In England, reverberations from the royal train story were still rattling Diana, who became hysterical when she read the Sunday Times report of the “tawdry” incident. “Whatever the public expects of her,” wrote the newspaper on November 30, 1980, “the monarchy demands that her copybook be unblotted. Part of Lady Diana’s suitability is held to be the fact that she is, in the Fleet Street euphemism, ‘a girl with no past’—that is, with no previous lovers.”
Up to this point, Diana had carried her own pedestal wherever she went. Every word written about her had been laudatory. Now she was scared and called her mother in tears. Frustrated and angry, Frances Shand Kydd fired off a letter to the Times, deploring the “malicious lies” and “invented stories” printed about her daughter. She demanded that reporters stop harassing Diana, and her letter prompted sixty members of Parliament to draft a motion “deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is being treated by the media.” An editorial entitled “Nineteen and Under Siege” followed in the Guardian, stating that no teenager deserved to be put through such an ordeal.
Fearing that her mother might have overreacted, Diana quickly called James Whitaker at the Daily Star to disavow the letter. She said she did not want to alienate the press but needed to proclaim her innocence.
“Diana wanted nothing more than to become Charles’s wife,” recalled Whitaker. “Everyone wanted it, the Queen included. Diana called me to deny that she had been involved in the royal train incident. ‘Please believe me,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been on that train. I have never even seen it.’ I ran the story and quoted her as saying she’d been at home all evening, watching television with her flatmates.”
Most people, with the possible exception of her stepmother, assumed that Diana was as pure as Portia. She never proclaimed her virginity—directly—but years later her biographer Andrew Morton did it for her. He claimed that even as a young girl she had a sense of destiny about her future marriage. “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead,” she supposedly said. Her stepmother thought she knew differently. Raine suspected that Diana’s virginity had vanished in 1978 when she was dating James Gilbey, a member of the wealthy Gilbey’s gin family. Lady Spencer had overheard conversations between her seventeen-year-old stepdaughter and the playful London bachelor, who occasionally stood her up to take someone else out. Diana got back at him by making a secret midnight run to his apartment building. His car was parked in front, and she and her roommate doused it with flour and eggs.
Raine had watched disapprovingly as Diana continued to pick up Gilbey’s dirty laundry each week, lovingly wash and iron his shirts, and deliver them on hangers to his apartment. During an earlier infatuation, she had done the same thing for Rory Scott, a lieutenant in the Scots Guards.
Concern over Diana’s tarnished image in the press was shared by Raine�
�s mother, Barbara Cartland, who had made millions because she understood the importance of the soft lie over the hard truth: one fuels a fantasy while the other breaks your heart. She accepted the unspoken agreement between royals and commoners: they pretend to be superior and we accept the pretense. So the eighty-year-old novelist wrapped herself in pink marabou feathers and summoned a reporter to her house to declare Diana’s innocence. She conducted the interview from her bed surrounded by five poodles in rhinestone collars.
“Prince Charles has got to have a pure young gel,” she said, “I don’t think Diana has ever had a boyfriend. She’s as pure as one of my heroines. This is marvelous. Quite perfect.”
Raine knew she needed more than her mother’s breathless proclamation. She consulted a lawyer because she also was concerned about rumors that nude photos of Diana might surface in the press. “She particularly feared Private Eye,” recalled one lawyer. Raine had remembered Diana’s giggling on the phone with girlfriends about pictures* that had been taken of her at a pool in Switzerland, where she had taken off her bikini. The lawyer reassured Raine that an injunction might be obtained before such photos could be published. He then advised her to turn to someone within the aristocracy to publicly proclaim Diana’s good name. So Raine contacted Lord Fermoy, who was Diana’s uncle, and asked him to uphold the family honor. The nobleman, a manic-depressive who would commit suicide four years later, readily agreed to talk to the press.
“Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover,” he told a reporter. “Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible royal bride for Prince Charles at the moment. And after one or two of his most recent girlfriends, I am not surprised. To my knowledge, Diana has never been involved in this way with anybody. This is good.”
“The consensus,” declared Newsweek, “virtue is intact.” The press coverage of the royal romance heated up as zealous reporters followed the Prince of Wales everywhere, pestering him about his intentions. By January of 1981 the royal family felt as if they were under house arrest at Sandringham, where reporters and photographers gathered outside.
“It’s like a goddamned death watch,” Prince Philip said to his aide as he looked out the window.
The Queen complained that she couldn’t go riding without being pursued by “a ragtag band of reporters.”
“Her Majesty, if you’ll excuse me, behaved like a fishwife one morning and told me to ‘eff off,’ ” said James Whitaker, who recalled the incident at Sandringham more vividly than he reported it. “I simply quoted the Queen as saying, ‘Go away. Can’t you leave us alone?’ But she was more explicit than that.
“I was camped out with two photographers when she came out of her stables on the royal steed. She drove there to avoid the press and then rode out of the stables on her horse, but we were close enough to get to her. There were three of us: Les Wilson and Jimmy Gray, both photographers, and myself. The Queen galloped toward us, looked directly at me, and hissed. ‘Get away, you fu——.’ I started moving before she could finish the sentence.
“ ‘Ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’m just about to do exactly that. To get away.’ I scampered off and yelled over my shoulder for the two photographers to carry on. One froze, and the other reared back. ‘If you think I’m going to knock the fucking Queen off her own fucking road to take her fucking picture,’ he said, ‘you’re fucking crazy.’ He ran off, too. None of us was brave enough to pursue the story.”
When reporters approached Prince Philip later in the day to say “Happy New Year,” he was just as vulgar. “Bollocks,” he snarled. Putting his head down, he barreled through the swarm of reporters and photographers, swearing at them as he passed.
A reporter for the Sun said a hunting party that included Philip and Prince Charles peppered her car with shotgun pellets. And a Daily Mirror photographer was warned away from a public road near the family estate by sixteen-year-old Prince Edward. “I wouldn’t stand there,” the Prince said. “You could get shot.”
Charles was incensed at being hounded, and when he encountered reporters, he struggled to be cordial. “May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year,” he said through clenched teeth, “and your editors a particularly nasty one.”
Diana arrived a few days later, prompting a commotion among photographers, who blocked the entrances to Sandringham, trying to get pictures. Exasperated, the Queen admonished her son, “The idea of this romance going on for another year is intolerable for all concerned.” Prince Philip was more explicit. He told his indecisive son that he had to make up his mind one way or the other before he ruined Diana’s reputation.
Always the more involved parent, Philip monitored the women Charles dated. He disapproved of his son’s attraction to black women, and he ignored Charles’s fling with a Penthouse centerfold. He knew about the affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and warned Charles that such an illicit relationship could endanger the monarchy. Pushing him toward marriage, Philip was concerned about the woman Charles would marry because that woman, whoever she might be, represented the future of the Firm. Philip had invested his life in the monarchy and intended to protect his investment. After Charles turned thirty,* his father became especially vigilant and did not hesitate to say who was suitable, who was not. When Charles was dating Sabrina Guinness, from the banking side of the brewery family, he invited her to a house party in the country with friends of the royal family. The invitation was leaked to the press, and it triggered another spate of speculative stories about the new woman in Charles’s life. “Is He in Love Again?” asked one headline. It so infuriated Philip that he called the hosts and instructed them to disinvite the young woman. To ensure that they did, he mentioned that he would be arriving at five P.M. that weekend. Mortified, the friends did as they were ordered and told Miss Guinness that she was “welcome to leave” by a certain time “to avoid confusion” with Prince Philip’s visit.
Philip arrived early and met the young woman as she was leaving. He told her to join him in the drawing room. There were no break-the-ice pleasantries when she walked in and not so much as a perfunctory hello. As exacting as a guillotine, Philip told her to get out of his son’s life. He said he never wanted to see her name linked with Prince Charles again. Philip tidied up the landscape by telling her to get out of the house. She fled in tears.
Philip spoke to his son in the same gruff manner about marrying Diana Spencer. He didn’t tell Charles to marry her, simply to make up his mind. “Get on with it, Charles,” he said.
“The difference between father and son,” explained one of the Queen’s secretaries, “is that Charles dithers, and Philip decapitates.”
Charles spent the next four weeks agonizing over whether to marry Diana. He recorded his “confused and anxious state of mind” in his diary, and he consulted his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. She said she approved and described Diana to friends as “a mouse.” In a letter to a friend, Charles wrote: “It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me, but I expect it will be the right thing in the end…. It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this Country and for my family—but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.” Years later he blamed his father for forcing him into a marriage that he was reluctant to embrace.
Yet despite his doubts, he proposed on February 6, 1981, in his third-floor quarters at Buckingham Palace over dinner for two. Diana accepted eagerly, and he apologized for not having a ring to give her. A few days later he contacted Garrard’s, the Crown jewelers, who arrived with several black velvet trays filled with rings. Diana chose a six-carat sapphire surrounded by eighteen diamonds. Price: $50,000. “The Queen’s eyes popped when I picked out the largest one,” she said, giggling, “but I love it.”
The engagement of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer was officially announced on February 24, 1981. “I couldn’t have married anyone t
he British people wouldn’t have liked,” said Charles. Most of the country joined the royal family in rejoicing. But Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was afraid for her daughter.
“I cried for six weeks after that,” she admitted to a relative. “I had a terrible feeling about what was going to happen to Diana when she married into that family.”
THIRTEEN
The prize for best performance in a supporting role should go to Lady Diana Spencer’s gown—bold, black, and strapless.
When Diana wore it—barely—to London’s Goldsmith Hall in 1981, she—and the gown—drew gasps. It was her first public appearance with Prince Charles since they’d become engaged, and the press pounced on them like condors on carrion. Flashbulbs popped and hydra-headed microphones closed in.
As the couple swept into the Royal Opera benefit, the BBC commentator stuttered as he tried to describe the eye-popping dress. He stumbled on the word “décolletage” and struggled not to look at Diana’s cleavage. Spilling out of her low-cut gown, she smiled shyly. Off-camera, the BBC man whispered, “Now there’s a bosom built to burp a nation.” An American reporter whistled softly and quoted Raymond Chandler in Farewell, My Lovely: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
Diana had carefully selected her dress for the evening. The black taffeta confection, which sold for $1,000, was given to her by the designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who were making her wedding dress. She told them she needed to look “drop dead gorgeous” because she was meeting her movie star idol, Grace Kelly, at the benefit and dining with her later at Buckingham Palace. Diana did not realize that Her Serene Highness had probably been invited to the Palace only because she was performing for charity.
The Queen of England still considered the Princess of Monaco a bit of Hollywood fluff, who had married a poseur from a tiny principality. Her Majesty was not moved by the enthusiasm of her husband, Prince Philip, for the beautiful blond American, who also had been a favorite of Lord Mountbatten’s. When Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier in 1956, the Queen declined to attend their wedding. “Too many film stars,” she had said. As far as she was concerned, the Rainiers did not count as royalty, although Prince Rainier had reigned longer* than any crowned head in Europe.