by Kitty Kelley
“Her Majesty can be stuffy about that sort of thing,” admitted one of her ladies-in-waiting. “Too many jewels, fur coats, and fast cars. Jet-setters, you know. Prince Philip, on the other hand, does not feel that way, particularly if the wife is pretty.”
Diana, too, was fascinated by the former film star and sat spellbound through her poetry reading at the benefit. After the hour-long recital, Diana walked into the press reception rubbing her side. Someone asked if she had hurt her back.
“No, not at all,” she said brightly. “It’s just that I’ve pins and needles in my bottom from sitting still so long.”
Her spontaneity charmed everyone. “She was enchanting then,” said British journalist Victoria Mather. “So fresh and beguiling. At that reception, she spilled a little red wine on her gloves, held up the stain for us to see, and laughed. ‘Oops,’ she said, ‘Guess I’ll have to nip round to Sketchley’s [a London cleaner].’ ”
Seconds later Diana showed off her engagement ring and offered to let an admirer try it on. “I’ll have to have it back, though,” she quipped. “Otherwise they won’t know who I am.”
The woman gazed at the ring on her finger. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen such a large stone.”
“I know,” said Diana. “The other day I even scratched my nose with it. It’s so big—the ring, that is.”
Someone asked what it was like now that she had moved from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace. “Not bad,” she chirped. “But too many formal dinners. Yuck.”
A young man stepped forward. “May I kiss the hand of my future Queen?” he asked.
Diana smiled coyly and tilted her head. “Yes, you may,” she said, extending her hand.
The young man kissed her wrist lightly and everyone clapped. He blushed with pleasure.
“You’ll never live this down,” Diana said, teasing him.
Delighted reporters crowded around her, and the cameramen bore in, jostling guests and pushing them to the edge of the room. Prince Charles headed off to greet someone, expecting the media to follow him, but they were taken with Diana. Feeling self-conscious about the disturbance she was causing, she excused herself and escaped to the powder room with Grace Kelly. The Princess-to-be confided her distress over the unrelenting press coverage and asked Her Serene Highness how she coped with it. The movie star who became a princess comforted the teenager, who would become royalty’s movie star. Princess Grace, accustomed to unwelcome media attention, told Diana to treat it like the weather. “It’ll get worse,” she said with a warm smile.
And it did—the very next day. The tabloids were full of breathless reviews of Diana and her gown, accompanied by revealing photographs and suggestive headlines. “Lady Di Takes the Plunge,” blared the front page of the Daily Mirror. “Di the Daring,” exclaimed the Sun. “Shy Di Shocks,” the Daily Express reported. Even establishment newspapers noted the dress that seemed so startling for the modest kindergarten teacher. “Shy Di R.I.P.,” read the photo caption in the Times.
Diana was puzzled. “I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss,” she said to Prince Charles’s valet. “It’s the sort of dress I would have worn anyway.”
The valet lowered his eyes. “Well, it certainly caught everyone’s attention,” he said disapprovingly. He was fired a month after the wedding.
The Daily Express reporter praised Diana’s decision to go strapless. “Her Gone-With-the-Wind dress… takes courage, and a lot more, to uphold it,” wrote Jean Rook. “All Di must learn to watch, which the TV cameras noticed, is the ounce or two of puppy fat which boned bodices tuck under a girl’s arms.”
Diana cringed as she read the reviews of her “bounteous figure” and “blooming physique.” She shrieked when she saw the television coverage.
“I look hideously fat,” she wailed. “Fat as a cow. I can’t stand it.”
Charles, who never forgot the embarrassment of being called “Fatty” by his classmates, kidded her. Fanatic about staying slim, he exercised like a fiend and ate like a monk. On tours he carried snack bags filled with wheat germ, linseed, and prunes. His dinners at home consisted of two strips of dried fish or a yolk-free mushroom omelet. That was followed by green salad and a drink of lemon squash and Epsom salts, which Diana pronounced “revolting.” Charles said he needed the concoction “to keep regular.” He twitted her about her passion for sweets and called her “Plumpkin.” As she agonized over her newspaper photographs, he teased her again. “No more puddings for you,” he said. He had tossed off the remark casually, not realizing that she would plunge into bulimia. But after seeing herself on television, Diana was so distraught that she soon began bingeing and purging.
The eating disorder was seeded in the wreckage of her parent’s marriage, which had thrown her oldest sister, Sarah, into anorexia. As a young woman, Jane had starved herself to the frightening weight of a child, until her family forced her to seek help. Diana, too, reacted to her insecurities by secretly starving herself. But then she caved in to her hunger cravings and ate several bowls of cereal with sugar and rich Guernsey cream. She devoured bags of soft jelly candies, followed by vanilla cookies lathered with white frosting, which she quickly threw up.
She had moved into Buckingham Palace a few months before the wedding so she could learn the royal routine, and when Charles was traveling, she ate alone. Most of her meals were served in her room. At first she left her trays untouched, which concerned the chef, who felt he was not pleasing her. After he began asking, she flushed the food down the toilet.
“She nicked so many boxes of Kellogg’s Frosties from the pantry,” said royal reporter Ross Benson, “that one of the footmen was accused of stealing and nearly lost his job. Diana stepped forward then and admitted she was to blame.”
At first no one believed her. The staff was not ready to accept the image of their future Queen as a glutton who regularly gorged and vomited. “The picture of Lady Diana wrapped around the porcelain chariot—no, no, no,” said a member of the royal household with a shudder. “That was inconceivable to us.” The staff refused to see any dark shadows beneath the sunny exterior. “You’ve no idea how sweet she seemed—on the surface,” said one of the Palace maids. “The few flashes of temper we saw we put to wedding jitters and worked harder to be of help.” The staff did not believe that Diana was the culprit consuming the missing food. Even when she admitted it, they thought she was protecting a footman previously suspected of petty theft. They did not accept what was happening until the upstairs maids, who cleaned Diana’s suite, reported evidence of her throwing up in the bathroom. Even then most of the staff did not accept it.
As Diana began losing weight, she increased the pernicious cycle of bingeing and purging until she was going through it five times a day. Within three months she’d lost twenty pounds. Charles was unaware of the problem because he was not with her all day every day.
For five weeks during the spring of 1981, he traveled on previously scheduled visits; he toured the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, where he explored the possibility of a real job. The Queen and Prince Philip had been concerned for some time about the way Charles flitted from one cause to the next without direction. “He never sticks to anything,” complained Philip, who once blamed his wife for being an inattentive mother. At a private dinner party attended by an American, Philip jerked his head toward the Queen and referred to Charles as “your son.” Both parents despaired whenever he made impassioned statements about the jobless, the homeless, or the penniless. The Duke of Edinburgh, especially, had no patience with his son’s concerns for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. “He wrings his hands like an old woman,” said Philip after one of Charles’s speeches. “Why can’t he leave the weltschmerzen to the vicars?” Philip warned Charles not to become embroiled in politics and not to comment on “sacred cows” like the Church of England and the National Health Service. He said the one institution that could be insulted was the press—”I’ve relished doing
it myself,” Philip said—but nothing else. Charles ignored his father’s advice. As Prince of Wales, he resented being cast as a pitchman for Britain. He wanted to be taken more seriously than a salesman who dressed up in gold braid and waved. “I’m not good at simply being a performing monkey,” he said. His father disagreed. He thought Charles was perfect in the part.
Having enjoyed Australia as an exchange student, Charles was open to his mother’s idea for a job there after his wedding. He and Diana would move to Canberra, the capital, and Charles would become governor-general. The position paid an annual salary larger than the premier’s, but it did not carry great powers, other than commander in chief of the armed forces. Under the Australian constitution, it would enable him to summon and dissolve Parliament and carry the kind of responsibility that the Queen felt her son needed. She had discussed the appointment with her Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who approached the Foreign Office in 1980; she reported back that Charles had permission to “informally explore the possibility” during his next Australian tour. But, on that trip, Charles decided if the position were to be offered, he would have to refuse because the Australian Prime Minister was too dour.
“The difficulty is that he does not have any humor,” Charles told Diana in a phone call from Australia that was secretly taped. “He is terribly serious. I made a terrific effort to be amusing, but he just stared at me all the time.”
That was just one of the five phone calls between Charles and his fiancée, and Charles and his mother, that had been recorded. The tapes, made by anti-British republicans within the Australian telephone company, were given to a freelance British reporter, who tried to sell them in England. Afraid of further straining relations with Australia, which had been threatening to break away from the Commonwealth, the Queen’s courtiers moved swiftly. They called the Queen’s lawyers, who claimed the transcripts were not authentic.* The Queen’s courts agreed and issued an injunction to prevent publication of the transcripts in England. The Queen’s lawyers then sought an injunction in West Germany, but they were too late: extracts had appeared in the magazine Die Aktuelle and were translated from German to English and published in the Irish Independent.
In one of the purported conversations, Diana mentioned her wedding preparations and complained about the behavior of her stepmother, Raine, who had appeared on British television. Standing alongside her beaming husband, Countess Spencer did all the talking. The Earl Spencer, who never completely recovered from his stroke, smiled benignly.
“She’s got Daddy autographing photos and selling them in the gift shop,” said Diana. “It’s so embarrassing.” She added that her stepmother was conducting paid tours. Priced at $2.50, the fee included tea with “the ghastly pink lady,” as Diana now referred to Barbara Cartland. “The wedding,” she said, “will be a catastrophe if Raine continues.”
“Don’t worry too much about that,” Charles told her. “Edward [Adeane] can organize it when we come back. You will see the Queen will be in a position to give the necessary instructions so that objections will not be possible.”
“Yes, I know,” said Diana. “But can I not have any say about my own wedding?”
“Naturally, but let your mother advise you.”
“I will, I promise,” said Diana. “I really don’t want to complain, Charles, really not. I’m going to talk through everything tomorrow with Mummy. She has a very good feeling for things like this. She’s very sensible.”
The Spectator had already put out the call for Diana’s mother to take over. Following Raine’s television interview, the conservative magazine pleaded: “Come home, Mrs. Shand Kydd, your country needs you.” In an editorial railing against the participation of Raine Spencer and Barbara Cartland in the royal wedding, Alexander Chancellor wrote: “If a special Act of Parliament is necessary, so be it. For it would be more than a little unfair on everybody if these two absurdly theatrical ladies were permitted to turn a moving national celebration into a pantomime.”
Diana could do nothing about keeping her stepmother away from the wedding, but she was adamant about her stepgrandmother. “She struck Barbara Cartland from the guest list,” said a former aide to Prince Charles, who tried to intercede. Six months later the aide was fired.
“It was so cruel to do that to Barbara,” he said. “She was distraught, really deeply hurt, but there was nothing we could do. Diana had insisted her stepgrandmother not be allowed near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Queen did not object. Barbara was so humiliated she wanted to go abroad for the wedding day, but her sons said that it would make it look as though she had been banished.”
To save face, Barbara Cartland gave a party for the volunteers of the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. Forgoing her usual costume of ostrich feathers, she wore the tailored brown uniform of the Order of St. John and appeared on international television in a feature about the organization. She asserted that the St. John volunteers were devoted to providing “a Christian answer to the problems of a troubled and materialistic world.”
By then even the spiritual participants were cashing in on the royal wedding. The Archbishop of Canterbury had divulged to the media details of a private conversation he had had with Charles and Diana.* And the three choirs of St. Paul’s Cathedral had collected $1,200 each for 250 singers. By comparison, Barbara Cartland seemed positively benign.
During one of her conversations with Charles in Australia, Diana said she felt overwhelmed by having to learn so much in such a short time. “I’m so excited that I can’t concentrate properly,” she said. “I miss you very much.”
“I miss you, too,” he said, adding that he was late for a party but his hosts would have to wait. “I’ve done my duty all day and now I’m talking to my fiancée, whom I love very much.” He told her about the Di look-alikes who had greeted him at the airport in Australia. “Not as good as the real thing,” he said. She giggled. He complained about the press.
“During the whole trip, this guy had nothing better to do than to try to take photographs of the bald patch on my head.”
Diana laughed. “I didn’t know you had a bald patch.”
“It’s too stupid. I’m doing all of these things and the only thing they want are these ridiculous details.”
“I think it’s very funny.”
“Yes. As children, we were all very amused at the way my father tried to hide his baldness.”
“Oh, I really hope that yours is not as big as his,” she said. “In any event, you seem to have much more fun than I do.”
This was as close as Diana came to complaining about her royal tutelage. She pretended to Charles that she adored the Queen Mother but told friends she was “virtually ignored” for the few days she stayed with her in Clarence House. After Diana was moved into Buckingham Palace, she was given a small office near Oliver Everett, Charles’s assistant private secretary. Everett was amused the first time she bounced into his office wearing headphones and workout tights. He soon learned that her weekly dance class took precedence over every other activity and that she loved rock and roll. “I actually wanted to be a dancer,” she said, “but I overshot the height by a long way.” She watched television day and night and was devoted to soap operas. The courtier began his classes in how to be a princess by giving Diana instructions on her royal engagements, which would average 170 a year and include Ascot, Trooping the Color, Badminton Horse Trials, Opening of Parliament, Chelsea Flower Show, Wimbledon, Garden Parties, Cowes Regatta, Hospital benefits, charities, and anything for the military.
The Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Susan Hussey, helped Everett guide the Princess-to-be through the maze of royal rules: wear hats in public and bright colors to stand out; wave from the elbow, not the wrist; never use a public lavatory. “The worst thing about being a princess,” said Diana years later, “is having to pee.”
Everett hit his first snag when he recommended a course of study and gave Diana several history books to read about her future role as Princess of Wales. In
the throes of bulimia, and lonely for Charles, she balked. When the equerry left the room, she told a friend that she threw the books on the floor. “If he thinks I’m reading these,” she said, “he’s got another think coming.”
Weak from losing weight, she frequently cracked under the strain of preparing for one of the biggest ceremonies in British history. “I think I am realizing now what it all means,” she told a reporter a few weeks before the wedding, “and it’s making me more and more scared.” She broke into tears in front of photographers at a polo match and had to be whisked away by her mother. “It was a bit much for her,” Prince Charles explained to the press. Privately he told friends he was worried. “I wonder if she is going to be able to cope with the pressures.”
An avid tennis player, Diana attended the finals at Wimbledon but left the royal box before U.S. tennis star John McEnroe won. He had objected to thirteen calls, shouted obscenities, and cursed the umpire. “I always get robbed because of the fucking umpires in this country,” he snarled.
“The wedding’s off now,” said one television commentator, watching the abrupt exit. “Lady Di’s ears are no longer virgin.”
In the tea room below, Diana met the Wimbledon women’s champion, Chris Evert, who asked why Prince Charles was not with her.
“He can never sit still,” said Diana. “He is like a great big baby. But one day I hope to calm him down enough to enjoy it.”
Diana admitted to the tennis star that she was nervous about getting married. “I assured her that marriage was great, and she had nothing to be concerned about,” said Evert, then married to the British tennis star John Lloyd, whom she later divorced. “I told her to relax and think about other things.”