by Kitty Kelley
The men who worked for Prince Charles also tried to be reassuring and help Diana ease into her future responsibilities. They showed her the daily and monthly events calendar and explained the tour schedule, which was planned six months in advance. Her only concern was the Prince’s relationships with other women. His staff did not know how to deal with her persistent and personal questions. “I asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles,” Diana said to Francis Cornish, “and he didn’t give me a clear answer. What am I to do?” His assistant personal secretary lowered his eyes and changed the subject.
A few days later Michael Colborne, who was Charles’s personal assistant, faced more uncomfortable queries. On his desk Diana had found a bracelet Colborne had ordered for Charles as a farewell present for his mistress. The gold bracelet with a lapis lazuli stone was engraved with the initials G.F. [Girl Friday]. Diana pressed Colborne about the gift and asked to know whom it was for. “I know it’s for Camilla,” she said. “So why won’t you admit it? What does it mean? Why is Charles doing this?” Reluctantly Colborne acknowledged that he had ordered the present, but he refused to answer any more questions. He, too, lost his job shortly after the wedding.
Diana confronted Charles, who admitted that the bracelet from Asprey’s was for Camilla Parker Bowles. He said he intended to give her the present in person to say good-bye. He maintained that the farewell gift would put a full stop to their affair. Diana didn’t believe him. They quarreled, and she ran out of his office in tears. She later confided to her sisters that she didn’t want to marry a man who was still in love with his mistress. “It’s bad luck, Duch,” said her sister Sarah, using the family nickname for Diana. “Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out now.” For weeks feminists had been wearing buttons that warned, “Don’t Do It, Di!”
The next day Diana retaliated by striking Camilla’s name from the guest list for the wedding breakfast. She also crossed off the name of Lady Dale “Kanga” Tryon. She could not keep them from the wedding, but she insisted they be barred from the breakfast. Charles, who had grown up watching his father shuffle mistresses like a deck of cards, decided not to press the issue with his edgy fiancée. He told his private secretary that he didn’t understand Diana’s sudden moods and sulks, and her crying jags unnerved him. He also said he was alarmed by what one of his equerries had told him about her sitting hunched in a chair for hours with her head on her knees, absolutely inconsolable. Charles said he found such behavior to be irrational and unsettling. His private secretary dismissed Diana’s behavior as wedding nerves.
Charles, never a decisive man, now reevaluated his decision to marry Diana. He visited his sister at Gatcombe Park and confided his doubts. Princess Anne, who was a month from giving birth to her second child, was in no mood for her brother’s soul-searching whines. Airily she dismissed him as gumless. “Charles,” she said, “you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.” She repeated Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter on how to survive the act of love: “Just close your eyes and think of England.”
Still pondering his decision, the Prince visited a former lover, Zoe Sallis, in London. Her Ebury Street apartment was a few yards from the police station, where patrolmen watched Charles arrive and depart. He tried to disguise himself by wearing a gray fedora hat, which he pulled over his forehead. Several policemen, watching from a window, laughed at the royal camouflage. One said, “He looks like a bloke with big ears in a bonnet.”
“Zoe told me later that Prince Charles had confided in her his misery and fear of marrying Diana,” said Time’s Roland Flamini, “but he felt he had a duty to go through with it.”
Resigned to prudence over passion, Charles visited Broadlands, where he planned to spend the first part of his honeymoon. “Five days before the royal wedding,” said John Barratt, shaking his head, “Charles told myself and Lord Romsey [Mountbatten’s grandson] that Camilla was the only woman he had ever loved. He told us, ‘I could never feel the same way about Diana as I do about Camilla.’ Lord Romsey simply assured him that his feelings would, most likely, change.”
Although the bride was bulimic and the bridegroom a bounder, they looked like an ideal couple. The public had been entranced by their romance: the Prince had finally found his Princess, and after their wedding on July 29, 1981, they would live happily ever after. Abracadabra, and bippitty boppetty boo. Most Britons needed to believe in this fairy tale to distract themselves from the awful reality of inner-city riots, IRA bombings, and widespread unemployment.
The Queen understood the spell a royal wedding could cast on an impoverished country. Despite more than three million people unemployed, Her Majesty did not hesitate to spend taxpayers’ money. She felt any expense for ceremony (engraved invitations alone cost $10,000) was a hedge against hopelessness. Much as she disliked the whiff of show business, and the comparisons between royalty and celebrity, she staged an extravaganza worthy of Hollywood, complete with drums, trumpets, and coaches. Her production combined the romance of High Society with the magic of Fantasia. She had better costumes and more horses than Ben-Hur. The royal wedding she produced in 1981 gave the British monarchy its biggest ratings to date and British tourism its greatest revenues. The Queen knew that her crown and country depended on such moments of pageantry. “This is what we do best,” said her Lord Chamberlain.
The site was St. Paul’s Cathedral because it could accommodate more people than Westminster Abbey. “I’m glad it’s there,” said Diana. “It would be too painful for me to marry Charles where my parents were joined for life.” The wedding hymn she chose emphasized “the love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price, and lays upon the altar the final sacrifice.”
The Queen sent 2,500 invitations* to friends, family, and heads of state, plus the crowned heads of Europe. King Juan Carlos of Spain declined his invitation when he learned the newlyweds would board the royal yacht at Gibraltar during their honeymoon. Spain had long disputed British occupancy of the little colony on the tip of the Iberian peninsula, and the King said Britain’s decision to have Charles and Diana join the Britannia there was a diplomatic blunder. Face-to-face, Prince Philip told Juan Carlos he was an idiot. “We’re fed up with the story of Gibraltar,” Philip said, “and it is very expensive at that.”
The President of the United States also declined the Queen’s invitation, but only because his White House staff insisted. They told Ronald Reagan that his first foreign trip as President should not be to a glittering spectacle with British royalty. People might get the wrong impression. So his wife went without him. “I’m just crazy about Prince Charles,” said Nancy Reagan, who arrived with twenty-six suitcases, eleven hatboxes, seventeen Secret Service men, and one borrowed pair of diamond earrings worth $880,000.
The U.S. networks also invaded London, bidding up the price of window space along the parade route. The Palace press office issued regular bulletins about the ceremony to be telecast to 750 million people. Journalists, untutored in titles, learned that Lady Diana Spencer soon would outrank all other women in the realm, except the Queen and the Queen Mother. As an earl’s daughter, she was below thirty-eight categories of British women who had titles superior to her own. But upon her marriage, she soared to the top of the social heap. The ancient title of Princess of Wales entitled her to deep curtsies from all other female royals, including her sister-in-law, the Princess Anne, and her husband’s aunt, the Princess Margaret.
“Most definitely, that’s the protocol,” explained Princess Margaret’s butler, “but not the reality. Never in your life would you see Princess Margaret drop a curtsy to anyone but Her Majesty or her mother. After all, Margaret was born royal; Diana was only marrying royalty. There’s a big difference. And as for Princess Anne, well, as her father once said, ‘If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, she isn’t interested.’ ”
The Palace press office announced the formal style for Lady Diana Spencer. “Following the wedding, she will be kno
wn as Diana, the Princess of Wales,” said an aide. “She’s not Princess Diana because she was not born a princess, and she’s not the Princess Diana because only children of the sovereign are entitled to ‘the’ before their title.” Americans, who did not understand titles or their subtleties, called her Princess Di.
In Time, British literary critic Malcolm Muggeridge sounded skeptical about the century’s grandest nuptials: “Only fortunetellers, Marxists and Jehovah’s Witnesses will venture to prognosticate whether Prince Charles and Lady Diana will actually one day mount the throne as King and Queen of England. In the course of fifty years of knockabout journalism, I have seen too many upheavals of one sort and another to feel any certainty about anything or anyone…. Popularity, however seemingly strong and widespread, can evaporate in an afternoon, and institutions that have lasted for centuries disappear overnight. So I can but conclude by simply saying, ‘God bless the Prince and Princess of Wales.’ ” Within fifteen years the critic looked like a visionary.
The night before the wedding, the royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the largest display of fireworks since World War II’s Blitz. British police estimated 175,000 people camped on the sidewalks around St. Paul’s Cathedral to watch the procession of horse-drawn coaches. Crowds started forming the day before as aristocrats arrived at the Palace for the Queen’s ball.
“That evening had a Waterloo feeling to it,” said one titled British woman. “You could almost smell the formaldehyde from the mothballs. That was the last time I put on my tiara. It was gloriously dotty. We walked down the Mall with our diamonds and our gowns swirling and headed for an enormously grand occasion that everyone wished to be attending, except for those of us who had to go.”
After the ball, Diana spent the night in Clarence House. Charles spent the night in the arms of his mistress. Camilla Parker Bowles later confided to her brother-in-law that she had slept with the Prince in his suite at the Palace. “She was cozy in the knowledge she had his heart when he married Diana,” said Richard Parker Bowles.
The next day, as she recited her vows, the nervous bride transposed the order of her bridegroom’s first two names: Charles Philip Arthur George became Philip Charles Arthur George. But even in error, she charmed. “Well,” she said later, “with four names it’s quite something to get organized.” When the bridegroom pledged to share all his worldly goods, he, too, was nervous. He forgot to include the word “worldly.” A prophetic omission, considering what he parted with fifteen years later.
The Princess of Wales was not resigned to giving up her husband to his mistress. Diana was determined to cement her marriage by getting pregnant. She packed accordingly for her honeymoon, taking a green bikini bathing suit that Charles liked, six satin lace teddys, and several sheer nightgowns. He took his fishing tackle. He also packed one book by Arthur Koestler on parapsychology and five scholarly books by Laurens Van der Post, which he said he wanted to share with his bride. She took two paperbacks by Danielle Steel, although she knew Charles disapproved. “He doesn’t like me reading trash novels,” she said. “But I love them.”
Years later she read a psychological profile about the Unabomber, whose crimes were attributed to his being a loner. A mathematical genius at the age of ten, he took a book on vacation entitled Romping through Mathematics from Addition to Calculus. Diana said, “Sounds like Charles on his honeymoon.”
Aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, the Princess charmed the crew of 256 navy men, especially the galley staff, whom she pestered for extra desserts. Near the royal stateroom, attendants wore rubber-soled slippers so as not to make any noise that might disturb the royal couple. “We were told to fade into the background,” said seaman Philip Benjamin. “We were to act like air. Unless spoken to, we said nothing, just looked straight ahead. Bit difficult at times to look straight ahead with the Princess of Wales dashing about in her nightgowns.
“I remember her coming out of the royal suite one afternoon in a filmy white negligee with a pink satin bow at the bosom, which was untied and open. She was trying to lure the Prince away from his books.
“ ‘Chulls,’ she said in a sexy singsong, ‘come here and do your duty.’ He was reading in a deck chair and she wanted him to go inside and produce an heir. I was standing guard a few feet away and looked straight ahead. She giggled when she realized I had heard her, but she was unembarrassed. She just kept teasing Charles to go to bed with her. She teased him a lot. I never saw the awful moods that His Royal Highness complained about later.”
Prince Charles told his authorized biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he learned on the honeymoon his young wife was suffering from bulimia. Charles said it triggered sudden mood shifts, leaving Diana cheerful one minute and morose the next. After two weeks aboard the yacht, the couple joined the royal family at Balmoral. At times Diana felt overwhelmed by the heavy presence of her in-laws and excused herself from meals to throw up. Charles became so concerned about her eating disorder that he contacted Laurens Van der Post and implored him to help. The older man, whom Diana trusted, talked gently with her at each session, but he quickly realized that she needed more professional help than he could provide. He gave Charles the name of a psychiatrist, who made discreet visits to counsel the couple. The therapist met them in their suite at Balmoral at eleven A.M. for an hour every day. He spent thirty minutes with them together and then thirty minutes alone with Diana, trying to address her anxieties. Charles said he worried about her emotional state. “She’s so high-strung,” he said. He wondered whether or not his wife was suffering from manic-depression. “What else can explain the moods—vivacious charm in the morning and verbal assaults in the evening?” The therapist recommended tranquilizers. After the honeymoon, Diana continued psychotherapy in London but resisted taking sedatives. For eleven more years her bulimia haunted her.
“It’s an insidious disease from which to recover,” she said years later. “You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don’t think you’re worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up four or five times a day and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It’s like having a pair of arms around you, but it’s temporary. Then you’re disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and you bring it all up again…. It’s a repetitive pattern and very destructive.”
Outside Balmoral, the international press had gathered, staking out the entrances and clamoring for photographs. Charles was incensed, saying they had enough photos from following the Britannia for two weeks with their snoopy long lenses. He was even annoyed at Patrick Lichfield, the Queen’s cousin, for having taken a candid shot of the royal wedding party that he sold around the world. “He never even submitted the pictures to the Queen,” Charles grumbled. Lichfield’s unstaged photo showed the Prince and Princess of Wales and their bridal attendants sitting on the steps of the Throne Room after the wedding, collapsed in laughter. Charles thought the photo taken in a relaxed moment made them look undignified. Having given Lichfield exclusive access to photograph the wedding, Charles felt used. He had not expected him to sell the photos without approval. “I can’t believe Lord Lichfield could have let us down so badly,” Charles said. Lichfield later made copies of the famous photograph and distributed them instead of business cards.
“He gave me one,” said the Pulitzer Prize– winning photographer David Hume Kennerly. “He’s an arrogant guy, but the picture of Charles and Diana is a great moment.”
Charles was in no mood to placate the press, but by the fourth day of the Balmoral segment of the honeymoon, he had no choice. The royal family felt besieged, so the Queen dispatched her press secretary to negotiate a settlement: an interview with the newlyweds, plus photographs, in exchange for privacy. The deal was cut, and Charles, who groused, was required to cooperate.
The Prince of Wales was Colonel in Chief of the Gordons in Scotland, so for the interview he dressed in full tartan garb—knee-high socks, plaid kilt, and leather sporran (a pouch worn in front o
f the kilt). He appeared at the appointed hour to meet the newspeople, holding his wife’s hand.
“Where do you want us to perform?” he asked.
“Right here is fine, Your Royal Highness,” said a reporter.
Charles recognized him. “I hope you had a nice time going round the Mediterranean.”
“Bit expensive,” said the reporter.
“Good,” said Charles with a tight grin.
The cameras whirred and clicked as the churlish Prince and his charming Princess chatted with the press.
“How was the honeymoon?”
“Fabulous,” said Diana.
“And married life?”
“I highly recommend it,” she said, beaming.
“Have you cooked breakfast for your husband yet?”
“I don’t eat breakfasts.”
Charles looked bemused. “This must be very exciting television,” he said sarcastically. Diana lowered her eyes and smiled. Seconds later he kissed her hand, she laughed gaily, and the photographers grabbed their picture.
As the couple prepared to leave, one of the cameramen presented the Princess with a bouquet of flowers.
“Thank you. I suppose one of you puts them on his expense account,” she joked.
Two months later, on November 5, 1981, the Palace announced the Princess was pregnant. She tried to continue her royal engagements, but frequent bouts of morning sickness forced her to cancel. Her husband explained to reporters.
“You’ve all got wives, you know the problems…. It’s better not to do too many things…. After about three months, things are inclined to get better.” Then, sounding officious, he added, “I am prepared to take full responsibility.”
A few days later the Princess resumed her duties, but as she walked through crowds and accepted bouquets, she was hit by waves of nausea. She did not try to hide her discomfort. “This is terrible,” she said. “Nobody told me I would feel like this.” Seeing a pregnant woman in Derbyshire, she grabbed her hands in sympathy. “Oh, that morning sickness, isn’t it dreadful!”