by Kitty Kelley
The sixty years that separated the Queen Mother from the Duchess of York defined their differences. The older woman was traditional; the younger woman was modern. The former accepted the high price of membership in the royal family; the latter refused to pay the dues. Consequently the Dowager Queen was revered as a royal who retained the common touch; the young Duchess was reviled as merely common.
After the butler had read the Cannes story to the Queen Mother, he handed her the newspaper. But she waved it away in disgust. “Not even Wallis at her worst was this blatant,” she said, referring to her implacable enemy, the Duchess of Windsor. She ordered another gin and tonic and picked up the telephone to call her daughter the Queen.
“That was the kiss of death for Fergie,” said a Clarence House servant. “You can chart her downfall from that evening.”
Most of Sarah’s perquisites had already been stripped from her—the royal guards, the royal train, the royal duties, the royal invitations. Deprived of postal privileges, she was no longer allowed to send her letters free. She had been barred from accompanying her husband and their children to Windsor Castle over Easter, but the Queen felt bad about having to exclude her. As Sarah told her father, “I’m not going. Andrew’s going. Apparently the Queen wants me, but the rest of the family don’t.”
Sarah had lost her seat in the royal box at Wimbledon, and her life-size wax figure had been yanked from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Denied entry to the royal enclosure at Ascot, she looked pathetic as she stood on the side of the road, clutching the hands of her children and waving to the Queen as she passed in her royal carriage. Without Her Majesty’s continuing tolerance, the Duchess would lose what little remained of her standing in British society. And she didn’t stand a chance of retaining the Queen’s affection without the goodwill of the Queen Mother.
Shunned by the Palace, the Duchess soon despaired. She sought help from a psychiatrist. But with no royal protection officers she no longer had privacy, and her psychiatric visits became public. A newspaper photographer followed her to the mental health clinic and snapped pictures of her arriving and leaving.
“It’s been terrible,” said Fergie. “All I can do is pray to the Lord for help.”
At the age of ninety-four, the Queen Mother knew better than to waste time on the Duchess. At this point she was worth only a telephone call. After the Queen Mother had a word with Her Majesty, she felt confident that the family would finally be rid of the troublesome young woman, who later embarrassed them even more by announcing that she had been tested three times for AIDS.
The Queen Mother knew there was still the pesky matter of a divorce settlement, but that was only money. Once it was paid, the Duchess of York would be nothing more than a red-haired footnote to history. The elderly Queen knew better than to get distracted by a sideshow. As the center pole holding up the big tent, she stayed focused on the main event and conserved her dwindling energy for what was happening inside the three-ring circus.
NINETEEN
The sixty-eight-year-old Earl Spencer was ill with pneumonia in a London hospital, and Diana visited him the day before she left to go skiing in Austria. She hadn’t spoken to her father for several months, and when she visited him, she took her children for their softening presence.
Unfortunately, none of the Earl Spencer’s other children had been speaking to him at the time of his death. “It is a matter of great regret,” said his son, Charles, “that no one was with him when he died.” The children had been feuding over the renovations of Althorp and had publicly criticized their father and stepmother for their plans to pay for the $3.5 million restoration. The children had accused the Earl and his wife of flogging the family name and selling off heirlooms, including eleven Van Dyck paintings, to “tart up” the dilapidated estate, as Diana described the redecoration of Althorp. She was particularly incensed when she learned that her father had sold merchandising rights to the Japanese to make copies of her wedding dress. She told friends that she was thoroughly disgusted. And she said she was embarrassed by her stepmother’s “tacky” decor and her father’s “crass” commercialism. Then the family began slugging it out—on the front pages.
The Earl, who was devoted to his second wife, railed against his children for denigrating their stepmother’s efforts to make Althorp profitable. He bitterly singled out Diana.
“I have given Diana a hell of a lot of money—between $750,000 and $1.5 million—to invest for Harry,” he said, and disclosed Diana’s concern about her second son’s future. Her firstborn, William, destined to become Prince of Wales and eventually King, was guaranteed immense wealth. But not Harry.
“Diana doesn’t understand about money,” said her father. “She has no experience. She is too young.” He accused all his children of “financial immaturity,” said they were spoiled and “ungrateful,” and said they did not realize what was involved in running a grand estate.* Soon the children stopped visiting Althorp and stopped speaking to their father.
Minutes after Diana learned of his death on Sunday, March 29, 1992, her lady-in-waiting dashed to the luggage room of the Swiss ski resort and removed the black dress, black shoes, and black hat that were customarily packed for royalty in case of death. Diana wanted to return home alone, but her husband insisted on accompanying her. She dug in. “It’s too late for you to start pretending now,” she snapped. He knew how unacceptable it would be for her to return by herself. But she was adamant that he remain with the children, skiing. She resented his using her father’s death to look like a loving husband.
The Prince’s private secretary recognized the couple’s impasse and called the Queen’s private secretary. Only when Her Majesty interceded and called Diana did the Princess agree to return with her husband. The next day she got off the plane, looking red-eyed and stricken with grief.
“There was such dissension surrounding that funeral,” said a relative, who ruefully recalled the misleading headline in the Times: “Earl Spencer Goes to Rest at Peace with His Family.” In truth the family’s antipathies had followed the late Earl to his grave. Johnny Spencer’s bitter relationship with his father had forced Johnny to move off the family estate. He did not return until his father died. Johnny then repeated the acrimonious behavior in his relationship with his son, Charles, who was estranged from him at the time of his death.
The Spencer children accepted such acrimony as part of their life. They had grown up watching their father reject his father and their mother reject her mother. The children had seen nasty fights between their parents, which did not end with the divorce. Although both parents remarried, they continued to compete for the children’s attention and affection by showering them with expensive gifts. “It makes you very materialistic,” their son admitted later.
In his eulogy for the Earl Spencer, Lord St. John of Fawsley tried to make light of the family’s discord. “Birds twitter and peck in their nests,” he said, “even when they are gilded ones.” He assured the congregation in a little country church in the county of Northamptonshire that the Earl Spencer had loved all his family, especially the Princess of Wales.
Diana’s floral wreath to her father was prominently displayed in front of his oak coffin with a card she had inscribed personally: “I miss you dreadfully, Darling Daddy, but will love you forever… Diana.” Behind the coffin and barely noticeable was a tribute of flowers from the Prince of Wales, “In most affectionate memory.”
In front of the press, the four Spencer children appeared cordial to their stepmother, with Diana reaching sympathetically for her arm at one point. “The sight [of that gesture]… made me feel quite sick,” said Sue Ingram, who had worked for Raine Spencer for seventeen years. The assistant, who was fired by the new young Earl the day after the funeral, recalled what happened behind the scenes. When Raine, who had moved out of Althorp within forty-eight hours of her husband’s death to make room for the new heir, sent her maid to collect her clothes, Diana and her brother were waiting.
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nbsp; The maid arrived and packed two Louis Vuitton cases monogrammed with the Spencer “S.” Diana stopped her from leaving. “What have you got in there?” she demanded. “Those are my father’s cases. They don’t belong to you.”
The maid explained that Raine had bought the luggage for a trip to Japan to match suitcases with the initials “R.S.”
Diana ordered the maid to empty the Vuitton suitcases into black plastic garbage bags. The maid complied, and Diana snatched the suitcases. Her brother kicked the garbage bags down the stairs.
Days later, when Raine returned with a roll of red stickers to identify the pieces of furniture she wanted to move, she was confronted there by her stepson’s lawyer. He told her she could not remove one single stick from Althorp until she supplied proof of purchase.
“She had to telephone the new Earl for details of the memorial service [held six weeks later in Westminster Abbey],” said her assistant, “and he told his solicitor to send her a fax.” When her husband’s ashes were placed in the Spencer vault, Raine was not invited to the family ceremony.
The last merchandising contract that the Earl Spencer had signed before he died was with the publisher of Diana: Her True Story. Having been assured that the book would portray his family positively, especially his daughter, he sold the rights to eighty personal photographs from the Spencer family albums. This time Diana did not object.
She wanted the photographs to illustrate a book, which she hoped would set her free from her marriage. Months before, she had given permission to a few friends to talk with the author, Andrew Morton. Through the eyes of her brother, her best friend, her lover, and her masseuse, she presented a shattered fairy tale: she had kissed a prince who had turned into a toad. His love for another woman had driven her into bulimia and five attempts at suicide. She had been abandoned by his family, which did not appreciate her efforts to breathe life into their dreary dynasty.
An excerpt from the book ran in the Sunday Times. Its placement on the front page of the once respected newspaper had elevated its credibility above tabloid tittle-tattle. And its apparent endorsement by the Princess of Wales made it even more tantalizing. But it rattled the establishment. The Prime Minister, Members of Parliament, and the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission* denounced it as sensational and sordid. The Archbishop of Canterbury said it exceeded the limits of a society claiming to respect human values. Harrods refused to sell it. “Our customers would not expect us to stock such a scurrilous book,” said the store’s spokesman. The Spectator called it “a farrago of rubbish.”
The book became an instant best-seller, but its author was dismissed by the British press as a former tabloid reporter whose father was a picture framer. From the snobbish commentary, it appeared that the author had compounded the misfortune of being born working-class: he was a republican in a country that revered royalty. “I asked Andrew Morton if he wasn’t in danger of killing the golden goose which lays his eggs,” said Michael Cole, the BBC’s former royal correspondent. “He replied, ‘Well, I can quite happily live on the ashes of the House of Windsor for the next twenty years.’ ”
Only two of Britain’s eleven national newspapers ignored the published excerpt. The editor of the Financial Times said, “Not our subject matter.” The Daily Telegraph editor said the subject matter was distasteful. “It’s odious,” he wrote in the Spectator, explaining why he would not permit coverage. The Telegraph, sometimes called the Torygraph, is the royal family’s favorite newspaper, and its editor, Max Hastings, is a close friend of Prince Andrew. “The tabloid reporting of the Wales marriage,” Hastings wrote, “makes lager louts look like gentlemen.”
The morning the excerpt appeared, the Prince of Wales was reeling. “I’d say he was close to a panic,” recalled his Highgrove housekeeper. Over breakfast Charles had read the serialization that his press secretary had faxed from London. Charles had known that a Diana-inspired book was going to be published, but he’d assumed that it would be nothing more than a self-serving account of her good works, plus pretty pictures. He was not prepared for her assault on him as a man, a father, and a husband.
When he finished reading, he left the table and went to Diana’s room with the excerpts in hand. Like Richard III, he had one question for his wife: “Why dost thou spit at me?” Diana later compared their confrontation to the scene in The Godfather where Al Pacino berates Diane Keaton for humiliating him by trying to break free of their marriage. This was not the first time Diana compared the monarchy to the Mafia. “The only difference,” she told her cousin, “is these muggers wear crowns.” Minutes after Charles stormed out of her room, she left Highgrove in tears. Although she had denied having a hand in the book, he knew better.
“I can just hear her saying those things,” he told his private secretary, Richard Aylard. “Those are her words, exactly.”
Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy visited Highgrove a few days later to console Charles. He embraced the frail eighty-three-year-old woman and asked her to walk with him in the garden. “Ruth never forgave Diana for causing the separation,” said Lady Fermoy’s godchild. “She felt that Diana had brought shame to her family by not remaining within her marriage. She didn’t speak to Diana until the last few days of her life, and even then, Ruth told me, she could not forgive her for betraying the monarchy.”
Charles was stunned that his wife had had the nerve to break the royal code of silence by revealing his mistress. Diana went further by calling Camilla “the Rottweiler” and describing her as a killer dog that had sunk her teeth into the Waleses’ marriage and wouldn’t let go. Television star Joan Collins said she wanted to star in a TV special of the royal soap opera: “I could play Camilla Parker Bowles,” she said. “I could ugly up for that.” The press unkindly described Camilla as “plain-faced” and “looking like her horse.” The Scottish Herald sniffed, “She smokes, she jokes, and is capable of dressing for dinner after a day in the saddle without pausing to have a bath.” The revelation that the Prince of Wales had long been in love with her so upset the public that when she went to the grocery, angry shoppers pelted her with bread rolls.
Charles had dismissed his wife’s rantings about his mistress as adolescent jealousy. He didn’t understand Diana’s despair or her need to strike back. He had expected her to accept her loveless marriage in exchange for the privilege of being the Princess of Wales. He was taken aback when she balked and he felt mauled by the book that made him look like a beast. Quickly the Palace went to his defense.
Sir Robert Fellowes phoned Diana before she left Highgrove. “I need to know the extent of your participation,” he said sternly. His marriage to Diana’s sister Jane had strained family relations on occasion. Diana replied tearfully that she had never met the author or granted him an interview. Her trembling voice convinced her brother-in-law that she was telling the truth. He didn’t realize that she was simply panicked by the uproar that she had caused.
But she was rattled only momentarily. She later told one of her astrologers that she had no regrets about her decision to cooperate because her husband did not deserve to be protected by silence—least of all, she argued, because he was the Prince of Wales. “He’s supposed to be a paragon to people,” she said. “He’s going to be the goddamned Defender of the Faith.” After eleven years of marriage she had decided his infidelity deserved to be exposed. By entering into marriage, Robert Louis Stevenson had warned, “you have willfully introduced a witness into your life… and can no longer close the mind’s eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions.” If Charles wouldn’t, Diana would. But even she was startled by what she had wrought.
She was appalled by the degree of detail in the book, and she felt betrayed by her brother, who had described her as a liar. He said she was someone who “had difficulty telling the truth purely because she liked to embellish things.” He recalled, “On the school run one day, the vicar’s wife stopped the car and said: ‘Diana Spencer, if yo
u tell one more lie like that, I am going to make you walk home.’ ” He related that one of her school reports asserted, “Diana Spencer is the most scheming little girl I have ever met.”
She was also taken aback by James Gilbey’s remarks in the book, which she thought made her look like a suicidal maniac. She knew that Gilbey had spoken only with her approval and her best interests at heart, but she was dismayed by the pitiful picture of her that he painted. After publication, she closed the book on him.
Diana’s assurances that she had had nothing to do with the book prompted the Queen’s private secretary to fire off several protests to the Press Complaints Commission. He also drafted a public statement for her, disavowing the “preposterous” claims of her participation. He told her that anything short of an official denunciation would not be convincing. The public was prepared to believe the worst based on what they had read and seen in the past year.
Months before, Prince William was accidentally hit on the head with a golf club, which fractured his skull, necessitating emergency surgery. Diana, who was at San Lorenzo restaurant when she received the news, hurried to her son’s side and spent two nights in the hospital with him until he could come home. Charles visited him for a few minutes after his surgery but did not otherwise interrupt his schedule. He said he had to attend a performance of Tosca. The press was appalled. “What Kind of a Dad Are You?” shrieked a Sun headline. Jean Rook in the Daily Express asked: “What sort of father of an eight-year-old boy, nearly brained by a golf club, leaves the hospital before knowing the outcome for a night at the opera?”