by Kitty Kelley
Beset by her eating disorder and her husband’s infidelity, Diana was volcanic and erupted frequently. After another of their incessant fights, Charles found her in tears in her bedroom, pouring out her heart to her detective about Charles’s late night telephone calls to Camilla Parker Bowles and his unexplained absences. Charles was appalled by her lack of discretion.
Within days the detective, who had guarded the Princess for a year, was suddenly transferred into the Diplomatic Unit. A member of the Prince’s staff told a reporter that the abrupt change was due to the sergeant’s “overfamiliarity” with the Princess.
“He’s just punishing me,” Diana told friends bitterly.
“I was transferred for domestic reasons,” Mannakee admitted to the press, “but I have no intentions of discussing those reasons.”
The Prince, who was polite but aloof with his servants, did not approve of his wife’s familiarity with the help. He maintained a certain distance from the staff and expected her to do the same. But she treated her dresser, her detective, and her butler like extended family.
“Do not misinterpret the Prince’s demeanor,” said one of his equerries. “There’s a seemly remove about him that comes from being reared as royalty.”
Diana, who did not possess that royal remove, embraced servants like friends. She thought nothing of eating in the staff kitchen, where her first question upon arrival at Sandringham, Balmoral, or Buckingham Palace was usually, “What’s for dinner?” She attended staff parties, brought records, and asked the servants to dance with her. Her husband rarely attended these employee get-togethers because he knew his presence would impose undue formality. Still, he regarded his wife’s behavior as highly improper.
Her indiscriminate displays of affection also irked him. He said that she kissed everyone she met, even strangers. She did not discriminate between highway workers and heads of state. At polo games she kissed Major Ron Ferguson to say hello. After the royal wedding she kissed the Lord High Chamberlain to say thank you. On the honeymoon she kissed the President of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat, to say good-bye. In New Zealand she rubbed noses with a Maori tribeswoman. When she returned home she kissed her servants.
When the royal family attended a grand ball at Buckingham Palace for the household staff, Diana circled the room in her tiara to greet everyone. She understood how much her title meant and how special people felt being in her presence. “I could see Charles watching her out of the corner of his eye,” recalled Wendy Berry, who worked at Highgrove. “He looked on as she took the mother of one servant in her arms and kissed her expansively on the cheeks. Charles’s expression was one of horror mixed with fascination that any wife of his could behave so normally with ordinary people.”
Eight months after Barry Mannakee was transferred from the Royal Protection Unit, a car smashed into his motorcycle and he was killed. Charles was given the news immediately, but he waited twenty-four hours before telling Diana. When they were on their way to the airport to fly to France for the Cannes Film Festival, he turned to her moments before she was to get out of the limousine in front of photographers.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “I got word from the Protection Unit yesterday that poor Barry Mannakee was killed. Some sort of motorcycle accident. Terrible shame, isn’t it?”
Diana burst into tears as the limousine pulled up to the royal flight. Charles pushed her out.
“Let’s go, darling,” he said sarcastically. “Your press awaits you.”
Diana did not believe Mannakee’s death was an accident. She was convinced that her former protection officer had been assassinated by MI5 [Britain’s intelligence agency] at the instigation of her jealous husband. She blamed herself for Mannakee’s death and tried to summon his spirit through several séances. When a writer published a book suggesting a nefarious plot by MI5, Mannakee’s father insisted his son’s death was an accident. Diana eventually accepted that, but she never forgave her husband for the cruel way he broke the news to her. She told the story to friends to demonstrate his heartlessness and to show the diabolical pleasure he took in tormenting her.
Privately the fairy tale was over, but the public did not yet see the cracks behind the facade. The first glimpse came after a polo match when Charles kissed his wife in front of hundreds of people when his team lost; she turned her head quickly as if she had just been licked by a slobbering dog. Then she wiped his kiss off her cheek.
“I suppose I should’ve seen something askew in 1985 when I interviewed Prince Charles for my biography of the late poet laureate John Betjeman,” said writer Bevis Hillier. “But I wasn’t looking for a shadow on the romance. I’m in my fifties and grew up singing ‘God Save the King.’ I now sing ‘God Save Our Gracious Queen.’ The monarchy is like religion to me, and absurd as it might sound, I want it to survive….
“The Prince and I talked in his office at Kensington Palace, where a clock chimed every fifteen minutes. He was very messy—heaps of papers on the floor and red leather boxes with gold-embossed Prince of Wales feathers all over the place. But he was sweet and could not have been more pleasant.
“My last question to him was: Which was your favorite Betjeman poem? He flipped through the book of poetry and fell upon one dealing with the aging sex drive. He read the last stanza:
Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust.
“He smiled ruefully and said, ‘I’d like to choose “Late Flowering Lust,” but I guess I better not.’ Instead he chose ‘Indoor Games Near Newbury.’ ” The Prince had carefully selected a poem about little children holding hands in a cupboard.
“I knew something was amiss in the fall of 1986, after an off-the-record interview with Prince Charles at Highgrove,” recalled the London bureau chief of Time. “As a condition of the interview, I was not allowed to ask questions about his family. We talked in his study, where there were at least forty sterling silver– framed pictures—the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh, King Juan Carlos, Mountbatten, Wills and Harry, the royal horse, the royal dogs. But not one picture of the royal wife. Although Diana was the most photographed woman in the world, her picture was nowhere to be found in her husband’s study.”
The royal watchers on the tabloids noticed the strain between the Prince and Princess and reported that the couple had spent thirty-seven consecutive nights in Britain without once sharing the same bedroom. They noted that Charles returned early and alone from family vacations and that even when he and Diana were going to the same place, they arrived separately. She attended fashion shows and rock concerts with other people in London while he worked alone in his gardens at Highgrove, 113 miles west of the city. When he went fishing by himself at Balmoral, she remained at Kensington Palace with their children.
A Norwegian manufacturer capitalized on the discord and made the Prince and Princess of Wales role models for people too busy to cook. Billboards in Oslo featured the mournful faces of Charles and Diana looking at single-serving cans of pasta and beef stew marked Middag for en— Dinner for one. Yet Britain’s establishment press did not take the rift rumors seriously. They dismissed the tabloid stories as “downmarket tittle-tattle” and called on establishment figures like Harold Brooks-Baker of Debrett’s Peerage to dispel the rumors.
The reverent monarchist complied eagerly. “Outrageous, simply outrageous,” said Brooks-Baker. “These rumors of marital discord tarnish the royal family’s image and diminish the monarchy. They must stop. There will never be a separation between the Prince and Princess of Wales, and there certainly will never be a divorce.”
His denial did not dent the tabloids’ credibility among royal servants. “Too much of the information was accurate and true,” said one of Princess Margaret’s butlers with dismay. “We knew that it had to be coming from someone on the inside. One of us. The royal family knew it, too. But there’s nothing they can do about
servants who sell their stories, unless, of course, they catch them outright. Then we can be fired, fined, even imprisoned.
“The only people who knew that the Prince and Princess of Wales were no longer sharing the same bed were their personal maids. You don’t think Her Majesty knew that. Or even wanted to know it. Princess Margaret used to say that she had to read the papers simply to find out what was happening in her own family. The floor-shaking fights between them [Charles and Diana] were known to their staffs, and the word traveled fast through the royal houses.”
The butler offered an explanation for the disparity between the upmarket press, which proclaimed the marriage as solid, and the tabloids, which depicted the marriage as shaky. He said a footman at Highgrove had seen the Princess throw a teapot at the Prince and rush from the room in tears. Hours later the royal couple had composed themselves and appeared together in public at a benefit. Their smiling photographs in the Daily Telegraph made the teapot story in the Mirror look fabricated. “Actually, both stories were accurate,” said the butler, “but the tabs ran the juicier bits.”
Diana resented the press speculation about her marriage but did not know what to do. “Just because I go out without my husband,” she protested, “doesn’t mean my marriage is on the rocks.” She had taken on more public engagements—299 in 1985, 70 percent more than her 177 in 1984—and more than half of those in Britain were without her husband. Heartened by her increasing commitment to performing royal duties, Prince Philip told her to ignore the rumors, and she tried.
“When we first got married,” she said, “we were everybody’s idea of the world’s most perfect couple. Now they say we are leading separate lives. The next thing is I’ll start reading that I’ve got a black Catholic lover.”
The unrelenting pressure of having to appear in public and be gracious to a press corps that acted like a firing squad wore her down. During a visit to a children’s nursery school, she was asked by the supervisor whether she wanted to accommodate the photographers clamoring outside.
“I don’t see why I should do anything for them,” she replied. “They never do anything for me.”
The next day the Sun fired back with an editorial: “Princess Diana asks: ‘What have the newspapers ever done for me?’ The Sun can answer Her Loveliness in one word—everything! The newspapers have made her one of the most famous women in the world. They have given her an aura of glamour and romance. Without them, the entire Windsor family would soon become as dull as the rulers of Denmark and Sweden.”
The burden of maintaining a sunny public image sapped the Princess’s strength. “I got no help from anyone carrying this load,” she complained to her lady-in-waiting. Like Diana’s husband, the Palace expected her to do her duties without comment: show up and shut up. But Diana needed reassurance. Without Barry Mannakee beside her, she had no one to buoy her, to provide advice and offer affection. Her husband had come to regard her as a whiner. “Oh, God, what is it now,” he’d say when she approached him. She felt increasingly isolated within the royal family and uneasy about confiding in her sisters, especially Jane, who was married to Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s assistant private secretary.
Diana was also wary of Sarah Ferguson, who, she said, acted too eager to please Charles. Diana didn’t want to disappoint her friends by admitting her fairy-tale marriage was a sham, so she said nothing. When her former roommate, Carolyn Pride Bartholomew, noticed her startling weight loss, Diana finally admitted her eating disorder and said she was throwing up four to five times a day because she was so unhappy. The Princess said her Prince was no longer charming.
When Mrs. Bartholomew was badgered by reporters in Australia about the state of the Waleses’ marriage, she declined to comment. Pressed about the royal couple’s separate quarters and separate vacations, she said nothing. One reporter pointed out the twelve-year age difference and suggested the twenty-six-year-old Princess was bored by her thirty-nine-year-old husband.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Bartholomew.
“Well, what do they possibly have in common?”
“Well… uhmmm… uhmmm… they… uhmmm… have their children.”
Diana was at her most vulnerable in 1986 when she met Captain James Hewitt at a cocktail party. She had been lonely, neglected, and despondent. The twenty-seven-year-old bachelor knew how to flirt with a princess without overstepping the line. He was introduced as a skilled horseman with the Life Guards’ Household Division. Diana told him that she had been afraid of horses since falling off her pony as a child. She said her fear of riding was a disappointment to her husband and his equestrian family, and she wanted to do something about it. The handsome cavalry officer smiled and offered to help her. Two days later she phoned him for riding lessons.
After graduating from Millfield, a private academy, James Hewitt received his military training at Sandhurst, joined the Life Guards, and made the army his life. He considered himself honored to be among the sovereign’s elite personal guard. Out of uniform, the officer dressed like a gentleman in double-breasted blazers, Gucci loafers, and gold cuff links. He wore silk cravats, played polo, and cultivated good manners. And he listened to the wartime recordings of Winston Churchill to improve his enunciation. With wavy russet hair, full lips, and sleepy blue eyes, he was beguiling to women. “All I know,” he said, “is horses and sex.” Years later he boasted that he had shared both with the Princess of Wales.
Their love affair started in the stables of Knightsbridge barracks. For the first two months Diana arrived every week for her riding lesson, accompanied by her detective and her lady-in-waiting. Soon the lady-in-waiting was left waiting. And the detective remained discreetly in the barracks while the Princess and her riding instructor rode alone on the trails, laughing and talking. “Their horses,” recalled the groom Malcolm Leete, “were hardly ever ridden.” The groom later sold his recollections to a newspaper.
In James Hewitt, Diana had found a man her own age who thoroughly relished women and treated them with the same respect he accorded high-strung horses. He calmed and comforted them.
The Princess of Wales crossed class lines to find Hewitt, the son of a marine captain and a dentist’s daughter. Diana described Hewitt to a friend as “my soul” and said that despite their backgrounds, they were very much alike. Both were graceful athletes, who reveled in their bodies and were extraordinarily vain about their appearance. They loved to dress up and spent hours getting ready to appear in public. Both were seducers who knew how to exploit their charms.
On a deeper level they bonded through the trauma of their parents’ divorces. Diana said she was determined that her children would not suffer the same kind of childhood she had. Yet despite her best efforts, she was subjecting them to the same violent quarrels and tearful recriminations she had seen between her parents. Hewitt had avoided making those mistakes by not getting married. As the only son, he was spoiled by his mother and indulged by his two sisters, with whom he remained close.
Unlike Charles, Hewitt lapped up Diana’s conversations. He listened attentively to her discuss her charity work and how much she enjoyed her royal duties when “they” (the Palace courtiers) left her alone. She felt as if she had a divine ability to minister to the sick and dying; she said this healing touch came from “spirits” that guided her. This enabled her to go beyond the ceremonial role of a royal princess visiting hospitals. She saw herself as Mother Teresa in a crown. She said she identified with victims and felt their pain. Although Hewitt did not understand her mysticism, he listened raptly and did not question her judgment—unlike the Bishop of Norwich, who was startled by Diana’s claims. When she told the cleric that she was a reincarnated spirit who had lived before, he looked puzzled. When she said she was protected by a spirit world of people she had known who had died, she said the Bishop looked horrified. But Hewitt was a simple man with no orthodox religion, and his silence encouraged her to keep talking.
She told him about her children, whom she called “my little
knights in shining armor,” saying they were the most important people in her life. Over several weeks she guided Hewitt through the swamp of her marriage, and as she revealed the dismal secrets—the bulimia, the suicide attempts, the separate bedrooms, and the mistress—he saw a woman reeling with rejection. Like most men who met Diana, he felt protective.
Wisely, he let her make the first move, which she did by inviting him to dinner at Kensington Palace when Charles was at Highgrove. She dismissed most of her staff that evening and greeted Hewitt excitedly at the front door. She led him to her private sitting room and handed him a magnum of Champagne. She said she rarely drank, but this was a special occasion. He popped the cork and filled the flutes as she sat on the apricot-and-white-striped sofa. Looking around the room, he chuckled when he saw the embroidered maxim on one of her scattered pillows:
If You Think Money Can’t Buy Love
You Don’t Know Where to Shop.
He appreciated her shopping expertise at London’s finest stores because he’d been the lucky beneficiary of several extravagant sprees. He told her that members of his regiment had been impressed by the presents that had been arriving at his barracks. She lowered her eyes and giggled.
“Whether it’s friends, lovers, or relatives, Diana is very generous,” said interior designer Nicholas Haslam. “She’s incapable of not giving presents. She always arrives at my flat with some kind of lovely gift—a tie, a plant, a book. Unlike the rest of the royals, she knows how to spend money on other people.”
Among the presents Hewitt received from the Princess were a rust cashmere sweater from Harrods, four silk Hermès ties, and a pair of $1,500 hand-tooled leather riding boots from Lobb’s, London’s finest shoemaker. He also received a tweed hacking jacket with suede patches and leather buttons, three custom-made suits, ten Turnbull & Asser shirts with matching ties, two blazers, one dozen pairs of cashmere socks, two dozen silk boxer shorts, gold cuff links, a diamond-studded tie pin, and an eighteen-carat gold clock from Asprey, the royal jeweler.