The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  America’s First Lady, Nancy Reagan, had been preceded into Westminster Abbey by twenty-two U.S. Secret Service agents. Cosmetics tycoon Estee Lauder walked in behind movie star Michael Caine. Pop singer Elton John, in purple glasses and a ponytail, waved to the crowds, as did Prince Albert of Monaco. Minutes later Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arrived, but she was booed for having sent in mounted police to settle a miners’ strike.

  The crowds erupted and cheered loudly when they saw the titian-haired bride, looking slim and lovely in her Victorian ivory gown. Royal trumpeters heralded her arrival as she stepped out of the glass coach. Trailed by 17½ feet of flowing satin beaded with anchors and the initial A, she proceeded up the steps of the Abbey. She halted at the top, unable to move. She turned around and yanked at her gown.

  “Who the hell is standing on my train?” she yelled. The wedding dress designer dropped to her knees and quickly rearranged the folds of the gown. The bride then moved forward and grabbed her father’s arm.

  “C’mon, Dads,” she said, “let’s show ’em how it’s done.”

  Major Ferguson nervously began the long walk down the aisle of the eleventh-century Abbey with his daughter, who smiled nonstop. She made faces at one guest, gave a thumbs-up to another, and cracked jokes about the outlandish outfits she spotted among the 1,800 guests.

  Major Ferguson was unnerved. “When we reached the archway leading to the chancel with the Queen and Prince Andrew gazing down expectantly,” he recalled, “I had to say, ‘Come on. You’ve got to be serious now.’ ”

  Fergie tried to rein herself in, but the effort showed. At the altar, Prince Andrew stepped forward with his Falklands medals pinned to the breast of his naval lieutenant’s uniform. “You look wonderful,” he said.

  “Thank you, darling,” she said, smiling. “I forgot to pack my toothbrush.”

  “Never mind,” said the beaming duke.

  The Queen, who occasionally took deep breaths to control her emotions during the service, could not take her eyes off her son.

  Princess Michael of Kent, who was married to the Queen’s cousin, could not stop looking at the bride. “All that ghastly winking as she came down the aisle,” she said. “So common.”

  The Princess of Wales seemed not to notice. Sitting with the royal family on pink-and-gold chairs, apart from the rest of the congregation, she looked sad and distracted, staring into space. She brightened up only when she saw her son, William, one of the four little pages. Dressed in a sailor suit, the four-year-old Prince tugged on his cap, wound the string around his nose, chewed it like taffy, and then pulled out his ceremonial dagger to bedevil the six-year-old bridesmaid next to him.

  Having brought Sarah and Andrew together, Diana had looked forward to having a friend as a sister-in-law and to sharing what she called “the royal load.” But she was unprepared for sharing the spotlight. The sudden media attention directed at Fergie jolted Diana, who was accustomed to being the focus of press interest. She slipped into second place temporarily. She tried to make light of her reduced status by joking to reporters. “You won’t need me now,” she teased. “You’ve got Fergie.”

  Sarah and Andrew’s royal wedding was characterized most amusingly by an Italian newspaper, Milan’s Il Giorno: “And so to conclude, if it is true, as Flaubert asserted, that to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent, to be a little bit arrogant, and above all, to have good health, then there is no doubt that the future of Andrew and Sarah will be among the best.” And it was. Sublime. For a time.

  SIXTEEN

  The Prince of Wales was convinced that his wife was having an affair with her bodyguard. Barry Mannakee, a gregarious police sergeant, had been assigned to protect the Princess in 1985 when the Waleses’ marriage started falling apart. He accompanied her wherever she went, and as Charles spent more time away from his wife, she turned to her personal detective for company.

  “He was like all the protection officers for royalty,”* said the former head of Scotland Yard, who received a title when he retired. “They are selected for sensitivity and diplomacy. They’re highly skilled at security and armed at all times, but they must also blend into any circumstance. This requires a range of social skills—skiing, sailing, horseback riding, hunting, even carriage riding. The royalty protection boys have expensive haircuts and wear Turnbull and Asser shirts. They’re handsome, charming, and seductive.”

  The thirty-nine-year-old protection officer for the Princess of Wales was a married man with two children, so he got along well with three-year-old Prince William. “Barry was such a colorful and easygoing character,” recalled the Highgrove housekeeper. “He was fun and everyone adored him. He was an ideal personal security officer for the Princess…. She hung on to his every word, flirted with him outrageously, and pulled his leg in a way that suggested the two of them were very close. There have been many rumors about them having an affair, but I am sure that is completely untrue. For Diana, Barry was simply a friend, someone she could rely on and trust.”

  The Princess’s detective escorted her on her endless rounds of shopping and took her for long drives through the hills of Balmoral when her husband went fishing alone and she wanted to get away from the rest of the royal family. She turned to Mannakee when she was upset, which was often in those days, and he offered consolation and a strong shoulder to cry on. He comforted her when she became unstrung before public engagements.

  “On one occasion, she kept saying she couldn’t go ahead with it, and just collapsed into my arms,” said Mannakee. “I hugged her and stopped her crying. What else would you have done?”

  The policeman became the repository of Diana’s secrets, including her suspicions about her husband and Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana told Mannakee she was convinced that despite Charles’s promises to her before they married, he had gone back to his mistress. Diana said she confirmed her suspicions one weekend when she arrived at Highgrove and Charles was not there. His aide said he had left minutes before she arrived, roaring off by himself in his sports car. He did not say where he was going and didn’t leave a number where he could be reached in case of emergency.

  Diana went into his study and pushed the recall button on his mobile phone, which rang the Parker Bowles estate. When the butler answered, she hung up. She checked Charles’s private calendar and saw a “C” marked on that date. She searched his desk drawers and told her bodyguard that she had found a cache of letters from Camilla. Some were chatty and some extremely intimate, addressed to “My Beloved.”

  After that, Mannakee felt even more protective toward the Princess, who tearfully asked him why her husband had turned away from her. “He’s a fool,” said Mannakee, shaking his head. “A bloody fool.” Diana was touched by her detective’s loyalty, and his working-class London accent made her smile. He became her close friend, her confidant, even her fashion consultant. She turned to him the way a wife turns to a husband, looking for approval. Servants recall many occasions when the Princess dressed for a public engagement and came out of her room to ask her bodyguard for his opinion.

  “Barry, how do I look? Do you think these are the right earrings?”

  “Perfect,” he said. She twirled in front of him, smoothed down her evening dress, and applied more lip gloss.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, looking in the mirror. “Do I look all right?”

  “Sensational, as you know you do,” he said with a laugh. “I could quite fancy you myself.”

  “But you do already, don’t you?” she said flirtatiously.

  Their easy banter disturbed Charles, who lived by a double standard: he confided in his gardener at Highgrove about the woeful state of his marriage, but he could not stand Diana confiding in her bodyguard. Charles accused her of lacking decorum and said her behavior with the staff was deplorable.

  He was embarrassed that their marital fights, which had gone on behind closed doors, were now being waged in front of the servants. He blamed Diana for the open warfare because
she had started to talk back. In the beginning of their marriage, she had been too insecure to speak up. But she gradually overcame her shrinking deference, and as her confidence grew with her popularity, she was no longer willing to defer.

  Usually restrained in public, the Princess let loose in private. She railed about her husband’s “toadying” friends, his preoccupation with polo, his dinner parties with “boring old men who smell of cigars,” and his solitary trips to fish and paint and ski. She said his excursions were simply excuses to get away from her.

  The Prince responded that he needed the trips to restore his peace of mind after enduring her neurotic behavior. He taunted her about her eating disorder, which caused fainting spells in public. “You’re always sick,” Charles said with disgust. “Why can’t you be more like Fergie?” During meals, he chided her. “Is that going to reappear later? What a waste.”

  Diana struck back by accusing him of being selfish and stingy, and he yelled at her for being extravagant. “The meaner he got, the more she would spend,” said interior designer Nicholas Haslam, a close friend of the royal family. “That meanness of his drove her crazy… but the royals love to play at being poor. Camilla is the same way; she can’t abide spending money, and Charles adores that quality in her. They turn each other on with their stinginess. When Camilla comes in bristling about how much the cleaner costs, Charles becomes aroused and leaps in to exclaim about how much he had to pay for the same thing. Back and forth they go, banging on about the cost of having their clothes commercially cleaned. The two of them nearly expire with exasperation about having to spend their money on such a necessity….”

  The Princess carped that his penny-pinching deprived her of a tennis court at Highgrove.

  “You know it’s the only thing I have ever wanted here,” she told him.

  Charles said he could not afford the $20,000 to build a tennis court.

  “You cannot be serious,” Diana shouted. “What about the thousands you pour into your precious bloody garden and anything else which takes your fancy? I don’t think you realize quite the efforts I make to go along with what you want to do all the time. What about my wants?”

  He shrugged and walked out of the room. Diana yelled at him through the closed door. That evening she did not show up for dinner. While he sat in the dining room waiting for her, she ate alone in the nursery, where she said she did not have to beg for love.

  During their most heated arguments, they flung curses and objects. After one blistering row, Charles stormed out the door, jumped into his car, and roared out of Highgrove. Diana opened an upstairs window and screamed at the top of her lungs, “You’re a shit, Charles, an absolute shit!” During another quarrel, she threw a teapot at him, stomped out of the room, and slammed the door, nearly knocking over a footman. She yelled over her shoulder, “You’re a fucking animal, Charles, and I hate you!”

  Soon Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail gossip columnist, who said he socialized with royalty, denounced Diana in print. He called her a spoiled, fiendish monster who was making the Prince of Wales “desperately unhappy.”

  Her growing distrust of Charles and her jealousy over Camilla Parker Bowles marked Diana—in her husband’s eyes—as irrational. Charles expected to do as he pleased—without objection from his wife. Her tearful outbursts about his long absences only convinced him of her instability. Worse, he was bored with her. He dismissed her interests—clothes, dancing, rock and roll—as trivial. He said her hospital visits were self-serving, and her humor, which he once found so delightful, grated on him.

  A university graduate with intellectual pretensions, Charles was embarrassed to be married to a high school dropout who he said did not know the difference between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. During the taping of a television interview at Highgrove in 1986, she poked fun at herself for failing the college entrance exams. “Brain the size of a pea I’ve got,” she chirped. Charles insisted her comment be edited out. Diana said he should have edited out his own comment about talking to the plants in his garden at Highgrove. “It’s very important to talk to them,” he had told viewers. She had told him, “People will think you’re barking [mad].” That was the last television interview the couple did together.

  But Diana was right. Charles’s remark made him look slightly eccentric, if not ridiculous. “He’s really not the nut-chomping loony you read about in the papers,” insisted his brother Andrew.

  “Charles sometimes complained to friends about what he considered Diana’s coarse, even vulgar, sense of humor,” reported journalist Nicholas Davies. “Once the couple were lunching with Charles’s old friend, the South African philosopher Sir Laurens Van der Post. The two men were enjoying a weighty conversation about the problem of blacks and whites living together in South Africa when Diana suddenly put in, ‘What’s the definition of mass confusion?’ ”

  The two men looked perplexed.

  “Father’s Day in Brixton [a predominantly black area of London],” Diana told them merrily.

  “I can’t believe you just said that,” said Charles.

  “Oh, well, if you two are having a sense-of-humor failure, I’ll leave you to it,” said Diana as she left the table.

  Miserable, Charles wrote to a friend on March 11, 1986, that his marriage “is like being trapped in a rather desperate cul-de-sac with no apparent means of exit.” He dipped into the poetry of Richard Lovelace (1618– 1658) to describe his despair: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage….” Diana’s demands for attention exasperated him, and he was not willing to pump her up for every public appearance. In the past he had quoted Shakespeare’s Henry V and told her (to) “Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood….” Now he ignored her or else snapped with irritation, “Just plunge in and get on with it.” He complained to his biographer about her self-absorption and extraordinary vanity, saying that she spent hours every day poring over newspapers and magazines, examining her press coverage.

  Acknowledging Diana’s preoccupation with herself, her friend Carolyn Bartholomew defended her to author Andrew Morton. “How can you not be self-obsessed,” she asked, “when half the world is watching everything you do?”

  Charles, previously controlled and gracious in public, started losing his temper. He clashed with Diana at a polo game when she posed for photographers while sitting on the hood of his 1970 Aston Martin convertible. The rare automobile, then worth $125,000, had been a twenty-first birthday present from his mother.

  “Off, off! What are you doing to my wonderful car?” he shouted. “You can’t sit there! Get off! You’ll dent the bodywork.”

  Diana was mortified by his outburst. She quickly slid off the fender and slyly stuck out her leg to kick him. Startled, he grabbed her arm and pushed her against the car, but she slipped away and leaped inside. He started to cuff the back of her neck but realized that people were gathering around, so he pulled back. He smiled thinly and pretended the incident was a joke.

  During another screaming argument, Charles threw a wooden bootjack at Diana. “How dare you speak to me like that?” he yelled. “Do you know who I am?”

  At first he had responded to her outbursts with grim silence. Now he struggled to restrain his temper but was not always successful. Once he stalked out of the room, strode into his bathroom, and, in front of his valet, Ken Stronach, ripped the porcelain washbasin from the wall and smashed it on the floor. “I have to do it,” his valet recalled him saying. “You do understand, don’t you? Don’t you?” The wide-eyed valet nodded.

  Despite his violent outbursts, Charles denied ever striking his wife. In fact, he blamed her for throwing lamps and breaking windows. During one of their visits to Althorp, her family estate, they stayed in a newly decorated suite that Diana’s father admitted Charles and Diana left “somewhat damaged.” An antique mirror was smashed, a window cracked, and a priceless chair shattered. “It was an almighty row,” said the Earl Spencer, who added quickly that every married couple had fights. “It’s noth
ing,” he said. “Diana is still very much in love with Charles.”

  Diana stopped going to Althorp because of her father’s wife. So the Earl Spencer had to go to London to see his daughter and grandchildren. After her brother’s wedding, Diana said she could no longer bear the presence of “that woman [her stepmother].” The sight of Raine presiding over the Spencer ancestral home during a prenuptial party for her brother had incensed Diana. She felt that her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had been slighted. Frances had recently been abandoned after nineteen years of marriage when her husband left her for another woman. Although she had left Johnny Spencer before he inherited Althorp, Diana and her siblings felt, perhaps without justification, that Raine had usurped their mother’s rightful place. Even as adults they continued to revile their stepmother.

  During a prewedding party for her brother at Althorp, Diana watched Raine go into the nursery and graciously pour tea for her husband’s grandchildren. When Raine left the room and headed for the grand staircase, Diana followed her. As Raine started down the first flight of stairs, Diana lunged forward and knocked her over with her shoulder. The fifty-eight-year-old woman fell to her knees and tumbled down the steps, coming to a stop on the first landing. Diana walked around her and, without a word, proceeded into the party.

  The assault alarmed the Countess’s personal assistant, Sue Ingram. “I wanted to run upstairs and ask Her Ladyship if she was all right, but I was too embarrassed, not only for myself, but for her,” she said. “The servants and I pretended that nothing had happened—we just looked away.”

  Later Raine mentioned the outburst to her assistant. “What has happened to Diana?” she asked. “Why such an occurrence? I just don’t understand that girl.”