by Kitty Kelley
Limited by his $50,000-a-year salary, the cavalry officer could not afford to reciprocate in the same grandiose style. “Instead I gave her the clothes off my back,” he said lightly. She asked him for his
T-shirt to wear to bed and his cricket sweater to wear under her ski parka. She also asked for one of his down-filled jackets, which she wore frequently on walks. His most luxurious gift was a pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings, which he sent her as a reward for not biting her fingernails.
Following their first dinner at Kensington Palace, Diana served him coffee on the sitting room couch. She turned off the lamp on the side table and then slipped into his lap, putting her arms around his neck. Moments later, he told his biographer, she stood up and, without saying a word, led him into her bedroom.
For the next eighteen months their affair was vigorous and passionate and not conducted with utmost discretion. They visited Althorp, and according to Hewitt, they made love in the poolhouse. They stayed with Hewitt’s mother in Devon and made love in her garden. They spent nights together at Kensington Palace with Diana’s children and weekends at Highgrove when Charles was traveling. The young Princes became so accustomed to Hewitt’s presence that they called him “Uncle James.” He spent hours teaching them how to ride. He took them to his army barracks, where they were enthralled by the men in uniform. He taught the little boys how to march, salute, and hold a gun.
In turn, Diana invited Hewitt’s father and his two sisters to London for a private dinner. James had confided in them about his relationship with Diana. She also accompanied him to Devon and spent many days with his mother, who ran a riding school. “She would always help carry the things out after lunch,” recalled Shirley Hewitt. “She would wash up the dishes and, on one occasion, helped clear out a cupboard. She said, ‘What is all this? It’s disgusting!’ and cleared the whole lot out and gave the cupboard a good wash.” On those trips Diana endeared herself to Mrs. Hewitt with her girlish questions about James’s childhood. Together they teased him as they paged through the family scrapbooks, looking at his baby pictures.
Hewitt said he had not intended to fall in love with the Princess, whom he described as emotionally vulnerable and distressed. “But,” he admitted sheepishly, “it happened…. We spoke a great deal about what the future may hold for us both. I think it was perhaps fun to fantasize and to believe in a situation which quite clearly might not be possible… the dreams of being able to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Joking nervously about the Treason Act of 1351, he wondered aloud if he could be sent to the Tower and beheaded for sleeping with Diana. The archaic law forbids adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne to ensure that all heirs are legitimate. When the Princess’s affair with her riding instructor was disclosed by Hewitt and confirmed by Diana, some royal biographers noticed a startling resemblance between the copper-haired Hewitt and rusty-haired Prince Harry. But Hewitt denied he was the father and staunchly maintained he did not meet Diana until two years after the birth of her second son. “In fact,” stated Private Eye, “Hewitt first met Diana five years earlier—at a polo match in 1981, before her marriage.”
The Princess did not exercise prudence in her relationship with the cavalry officer. Careful to disguise her voice when she called him on the pay phone at his barracks, she took few other precautions. In a sense, she felt immune from scandal because people were accustomed to seeing her at public events with escorts like Major David Waterhouse and the banker Philip Dunne. So the image of her in the presence of other men had already been established. She relied on the reservoir of goodwill she enjoyed as the Princess of Wales, knowing that most people would never suspect her of committing adultery, especially with the man in charge of the army’s stables.
“It was simply too inconceivable,” said one of her closest friends. “Even after she admitted on television that it was true—that she had been unfaithful with that cad, who cashed her in by writing a book—I still couldn’t believe it.”
Nor could her brother, Charles Spencer, who, despite contrary evidence, defended her against insinuations of promiscuity. “Hand to heart,” he said, “my sister Diana has only slept with one man in her life and he is her husband.”
Some of the men in Hewitt’s regiment suspected the relationship from the beginning and nudged each other with burlesque winks about the Princess and her riding instructor, whom they had nicknamed the Red Setter. But none dared publicly to suggest anything improper. “Even when I saw them kissing and cuddling in the middle of the riding school, I was so shocked that I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my wife, for a year and a half, until after I left the army,” said the former groom.
He described what he saw: “It was in the middle of November 1988 and Hewitt had been transferred to Combermere Barracks, not far from Windsor. I got the Princess’s horse ready for her three-thirty P.M. lesson… and took it to the riding school because the weather outside was awful…. The two of them met inside, and I stood on a mounting block to watch them. I saw his hands going up the back of her blouse. Her blouse was outside her jodhpurs. She was all over him. He was all over her.”
As the affair progressed, Diana drew her former roommate, Carolyn Bartholomew, into her confidence as well as her friend Mara Berni, who owned the San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, where Diana and Hewitt sometimes lunched together. She also relied on her detective, Ken Wharfe, who accompanied her with Hewitt, making their trips look like casual excursions rather than romantic outings.
Diana included her lover on the Queen’s invitation list for a formal white-tie ball in November 1988 to celebrate Prince Charles’s fortieth birthday. She knew without looking at the list of five hundred guests that Charles would invite his mistress. So she added the name of her riding instructor next to her favorite dress designer, Bruce Oldfield. Everyone in the royal family attended the ball at Buckingham Palace, except Prince Andrew, who was aboard the HMS Edinburgh in Australian waters. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia flew in from Spain to join the king of Norway, the grand duke of Luxembourg, the prince of Liechtenstein and Sophia’s brother, Constantine, the deposed king of Greece. The Dukes of Northumberland and Westminster danced and drank champagne until three in the morning with rock stars, disk jockeys, and industrialists.
Charles had started his day by visiting the inner cities of Birmingham northwest of London, where the charity he founded in 1976, the Prince’s Trust, employed disadvantaged young people. He arrived in the morning wearing a “Life Begins at 40” button, a gift from his children, and was cheered by crowds, who burst into a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
“When will you be King?” shouted a mechanic.
“Dunno,” said Charles. “I might fall under a bus before I get there.”
The inner-city celebration did not impress the chairman of the Labor Party. “It’s just a way in which the benevolent hierarchy operates,” said Dennis Skinner. “They have to push a few crumbs off the table for the poor and underprivileged… to ease their conscience and create an image of benevolence.”
That evening’s Palace party aroused even further indignation. “They’ll spend as much on this celebration as many poor families would be able to spend in a lifetime,” said Skinner. “Those on Easy Street, including the royal family, should take great care not to treat poor people with contempt. This party is like kicking sand in the faces of those people at the bottom of the ladder.”
Charles said he would not be deterred by criticism, especially from cranks. “Now that I’m forty,” he said, “I feel much, much more determined about what I’m doing.” He considered his work for the underprivileged of Britain worthy of royalty but said his wife’s patronage of AIDS patients was “inappropriate” and that the press coverage she received by visiting them was at times “sentimental” and “exploitative.” He said her trip to visit AIDS babies in New York City’s Harlem Hospital a few months later was totally unnecessary. When he refused to accompany her to Harlem, the capit
al of black America, she went by herself. He then dismissed the newspaper photographs of her hugging a dying black AIDS baby as “predictable.”
Diana responded with calculation. On the return flight to London, she talked to a Daily Mirror photographer about her whirlwind tour, saying how tense she felt being whisked from one engagement to another. “I feel so sad when I think about how I held that little boy in my arms,” she said. “It was so moving. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman traveling alone. It never feels so bad when my husband is with me.”
The Palace interpreted her comments as a veiled attack upon her husband and scrambled to issue a statement, which implied that she was overwrought: “Visiting Harlem Hospital was a very emotional experience for her. She has been working non-stop for two days and the full impact is only just catching up with her.” That was the first shot fired in the media war between the wily courtiers and the willful Princess.
“Diana played the game of one-upmanship like a maestro,” said London columnist Ross Benson. “When she and Charles visited a music college, he was prevailed upon to play a note or two on the cello. It was too good an opportunity for her to miss. While he was playing, she strode across the stage, sat down at the piano, lifted the lid, and struck up the opening theme of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Every camera swung around to follow her, leaving Charles beached and abandoned in his humiliation.”
Diana had insisted on accompanying her husband, over his objection, to a birthday party for Annabel Elliot, the sister of Camilla Parker Bowles. The forty guests were part of what she dismissed as her husband’s stuffy Highgrove set, so no one had expected her to attend. But she was determined to confront her husband’s mistress.
“I remember meeting her at that party shortly after her Harlem hugging trip,” recalled a London attorney, “and thinking she was either dumb or else jet-lagged because she couldn’t carry on a conversation. She kept looking at Charles, who had left her and gone off in a corner all night with Camilla. I didn’t get what was happening until later, when my wife explained it all.”
Toward the end of the party, Diana approached Camilla and said she wanted a word with her in private. Diana waited until the last guests had left the room. Then, looking her rival in the eye, she spoke bluntly: “Why don’t you leave my husband alone?” Taken aback, Camilla started to protest, but Diana cut her off, saying she knew all about their affair. She cited the telephone calls, the love letters, the foxhunts, the Sunday night visits. She said she knew that Camilla played hostess at Highgrove in her absence, and Diana resented Camilla’s being in Diana’s home. Diana blamed Camilla for turning Charles away from his children and ruining his marriage. That said, Diana walked out of the room and told Charles she wanted to go home.
The next morning she called Carolyn Bartholomew and told her what she had done. She also phoned James Hewitt and related every detail of the confrontation, relishing her bold performance. She said she finally felt free of Camilla’s clutches. “Why, oh, why,” she asked him, “didn’t I say all of that to her sooner? What a difference it would have made.”
Hewitt said she deserved a medal for bravery and inquired about Charles’s reaction.
“Stone cold fury,” Diana said proudly, “and ‘how could I possibly.’ ”
Diana’s father invited the royal couple to a sixtieth birthday party in honor of Diana’s stepmother in May 1989. But Charles had planned a trip to Turkey and wouldn’t cancel it. “I’ll be traveling,” he announced by memo, which was how he communicated with his wife to avoid bickering. He had quietly moved out of Kensington Palace and lived entirely at Highgrove, where his children visited him on weekends. He did not tell his wife that he would be going to Turkey with Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband, Andrew, but Diana found out.
When she told Hewitt about the trip, she said she no longer cared about Charles and Camilla and “Andrew Park-Your-Balls,” the nickname she had picked up from Private Eye* for Brigadier General Bowles. Hewitt suspected that she still cared very much and, despite her disavowals, wanted to revive her marriage. But he said nothing and jumped at the invitation to escort her to her father’s ball. “With five hundred guests, we’ll be safe,” Diana assured him.
Soon after, Hewitt received transfer orders to Germany to command a tank squadron. Excited by his promotion, he worried about telling Diana he would be gone from her life for two years. He later said she had berated him for leaving her and putting his career ahead of their relationship. For several months she did not take his calls, and he left for Germany without seeing her.
Within weeks Diana sought out the man she had been infatuated with when she was seventeen. This time James Gilbey was much more receptive. Over lunches and quiet dinners he listened worshipfully as she unfolded the saga of her miserable marriage. And he became her cushion. They had started seeing each other again after a private dinner party at the home of their friend David Frost, the television interviewer, and his wife, Carina. As Diana and Gilbey were leaving that evening, they were photographed in front of Frost’s house, kissing good-bye. The kiss was so intense that the photographer decided to stake out Gilbey’s apartment in London’s Lennox Gardens, near Harrods department store. Days later the photographer was rewarded with a shot of the Princess leaving Gilbey’s apartment at 1:15 A.M. Gilbey said they were playing bridge but added: “I suppose it wasn’t that wise for Diana and I [sic] to meet in those circumstances.”
From then on, Diana acted with much more caution. Instead of visiting Gilbey’s apartment, she arranged to meet him secretly at Mara Berni’s home, around the corner from the San Lorenzo restaurant. She also bought a shredder for her office at Kensington Palace. She used post office boxes for personal correspondence and talked on the phone in code. She preferred mobile phones because she thought they were more secure. But when she found out they were less secure, she stopped using them. When using the phones in Kensington Palace, she often closed the doors of her suite and turned up the television so servants couldn’t eavesdrop.
Despite her efforts to avoid detection, her telephone conversation with James Gilbey on December 31, 1989, was intercepted by a stranger’s scanning device and tape-recorded. When the British tabloids published the transcript three years later, they withheld an explicit ten-minute segment in which the Princess and her lover discussed masturbation. They also talked about Diana’s fear of getting pregnant. “Darling, that’s not going to happen,” Gilbey said reassuringly. “You won’t get pregnant.” Diana said she was worried after watching a soap opera earlier in which one of the main characters had had a baby. “They thought it was by her husband,” said the Princess. “It was by another man.” She and Gilbey laughed.
“Squidgy [his nickname for Diana], kiss me…. Oh, God. It’s so wonderful, isn’t it, this sort of feeling? Don’t you like it?”
Diana replied, “I love it, I love it.”
By the time the tape-recorded conversation known as Squidgygate became public, the Princess’s pedestal had toppled into the ditch, and she was struggling to keep her head above the muck.
SEVENTEEN
The Duchess was teetering. She had veered from the path marked “Duty and Decorum” a few weeks before her wedding. And she was blamed for leading the Princess of Wales astray. The two women had been photographed at Ascot, poking a man’s bottom with the tips of their umbrellas. Days later they dressed up as policewomen to raid Prince Andrew’s stag party. With badges and billyclubs they barged into Annabel’s nightclub and sat at the bar, drinking. The British press reported the incident in terms of class that Americans could understand: bush league vs. Junior League. Sarah was pilloried as the biker babe from hell. Diana, the sweetheart next door, emerged unscathed. They were like the fairy tale of the two Princesses: One opened her mouth and out came rubies and diamonds. The other one spoke and out came toads.
“The Princess of Wales escapes such censure because she is prettier,” wrote Sunday Times columnist Craig Brown, “and less, well, obvious than the
Duchess of York. It is the peculiar capacity of the duchess to mirror modern Britain, its gaudiness, its bounciness, its rumbustious lack of mystery.”
Within the first year of her marriage, the Duchess of York became the Duchess of Yuck. She took 120 days of vacation, yet she complained about overwork. She carried out 55 royal duties during the year, compared with 429 for Princess Anne. That earned Sarah Ferguson the title the Duchess of Do Little. When she gained fifty pounds during her first pregnancy, she was dubbed the Duchess of Pork. When she accepted free first-class plane tickets, free hotel suites, and free limousines, she became “Freeloading Fergie.” She also accepted free watches from Cartier and free luggage from Louis Vuitton. As the Duchess of Dough, she expected payment for interviews and asked designers to give her expensive clothing. French couturier Yves St. Laurent agreed to, but British designer Zandra Rhodes turned her down flat, saying, “I don’t need the publicity.”
Sarah careened into controversy like a drunk with vertigo. She was seen in public playfully tossing bread rolls at her husband. On another occasion she emptied a salt shaker in his hair and squirted him with Champagne. As the auctioneer for a charity benefit, she exhorted bidders to pledge more money. “Come on, George,” she hollered at one startled man, “your wife wants it b-i-g.” At a private party for a Middle Eastern emir, she dropped to the floor in front of forty guests and screamed at a female stripper, “Take it off! Take it off!”
“Fergie thinks by throwing food around, she can identify with the lower orders, which only revile her vulgarity,” said columnist Taki Theodoracoupolos. “If you want to clear a room in London and get rid of stragglers who’ve stayed on too late, just say: ‘Oh, Fergie. At last. How are you?’ People will start running. Whenever Philip wants to make the Queen laugh, he picks up the phone and says, ‘What? You say that Fergie has been hit by a truck and run over?’ ”