by Kitty Kelley
His parents were greatly upset. “They had no idea what he was going to say,” recalled a friend who had spent a weekend with the Queen and Prince Philip earlier in the summer. “I will not go into details because they did not go into details—they never do…. A mention was made in passing about concern over a book—that’s all. A book. We assumed it was James Hewitt’s dreadful kiss-and-tell….” The Queen’s friend waves a hand dismissively to indicate the book Princess in Love, which detailed Hewitt’s five-year love affair with the Princess of Wales. “But the Queen didn’t seem to care about Major Hewitt’s tittle-tattle. Her concern was over what Charles intended to say….”
The Prince proved that his disclosures were every bit as sensational as those sold by his servants. Violating royal precedents of restraint, he astonished even those who were accustomed to gaudy sensationalism. “A Foolish and Sorry Authorised Version,” was the Guardian’s opinion. The left-wing newspaper soon declared itself republican (opposed to a monarchy and committed to a republic), as did the Independent on Sunday. The temperate Economist called the monarchy “an idea whose time has passed.” Even the conservative Daily Telegraph chided the Prince for placing the book in the public domain. Columnist John Junor excoriated him as “wicked” and said he should feel “suicidal.” The Washington Post called him “the Prince of Wails” for forgetting the cardinal rule of the monarchy: “The son never frets on the British Empire.”
The Duke of Edinburgh also registered disdain—publicly. “I’ve never discussed private matters, and I don’t think the Queen has either,” he told reporters who asked for his reaction to his son’s book. “I’ve never made any comments about any member of the family in forty years, and I’m not going to start now.”
Charles’s brothers and his sister criticized him for using the book to bash their parents. But the self-pitying Prince didn’t see it that way. He rationalized that at his age he was entitled to a little happiness. He said he wanted to make a clean breast of it. “You’ll see,” he predicted. “At the end of the day, it will be for the best.” This wasn’t the first time he had been wrong footed.
His mistress’s long-suffering husband was fed up. For years Andrew Parker Bowles had stoically endured gossip in his circle about the Prince’s passion for his wife. “Actually, some people felt he rather enjoyed it,” said Jocelyn Gray, a close friend of Prince Andrew. “Having your wife bonked by the future King of England lends cachet… in some circles.” Barely suppressing a grin, British writer Anthony Holden explained on American television that some old-fashioned English men consider it an honor to share their wives with their monarch. “Comes from the French droit du seigneur and refers to the master of the house sleeping with his servants….”
When Andrew Parker Bowles saw himself derided in the press as “the man who laid down his wife for his country,” he was angry. He had held back on getting a divorce two years before only because Charles had asked him to wait. The Prince had said that after his own separation he didn’t think the monarchy could take another marriage scandal. “I’m afraid I’ve cocked up things a bit,” Charles said apologetically. So his mistress’s husband, who was also his friend and former aide, agreed not to start legal proceedings that might embarrass the royal family.
As Lieutenant Colonel Commanding the Household Cavalry, Andrew Parker Bowles held the honorary position of Silverstick-in-Waiting, which entailed accompanying the Queen on ceremonial occasions. When she opened Parliament, he preceded her walking backwards and carrying a silver stick. Even after his love affair with Princess Anne in 1970, he had remained close to the royal family, particularly the Queen Mother. But after Charles made him nationally known as a cuckold, he felt he had no choice. “I can’t keep on living someone else’s life,” he said. Although a devout Roman Catholic, he resolved to seek a divorce.
The year before, Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles had celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a big party at their country estate. Some of those invited had extended discreet hospitality over the years whenever one or the other wanted to entertain a lover. These same friends, part of Prince Charles’s hunting and shooting circle, now professed surprise when the Parker Bowleses announced their plans to divorce. “We have grown apart to such an extent that… there is little of common interest between us,” read the couple’s statement. Their divorce was granted in January 1995, and less than a year later Andrew Parker Bowles remarried. Camilla sold their house and bought one closer to Charles.
Diana appeared unfazed by the divorce of her husband’s mistress. She smiled at photographers as she made her early morning visit to her new gym. But away from the cameras, she seethed. She confided in the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent, Richard Kay, that she considered the Parker Bowleses’ divorce part of a “grand scheme” to force her out of the public life she had gradually resumed. She worried about Camilla’s influence on her children. She fretted about “enemies” out to get her. “They” wanted to harm her. She feared her phones were tapped at Kensington Palace, so she had her lines swept electronically. She talked of a “whispering campaign” against her conducted by friends of Charles such as Nicholas Soames and members of the Prince’s staff at St. James’s Palace.
Diana had summoned the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent for a three-hour audience. She wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled over her eyes as she drove to meet him in London’s West End, where he climbed into her car to talk. Whenever they met, she spoke freely and he quoted her as “a friend of the Princess.” He published so many exclusives about her that he became known as her unofficial spokesman. Colleagues teased him about being “ma’am’s mouthpiece.” The tabloid reporter James Whitaker, who had helped engineer Diana’s courtship, lamented his being “traded up.” Realistically and without rancor, he explained why he had been replaced as her favorite reporter: “The Daily Mail is her crowd. That’s what they read. It’s more upmarket than my downmarket paper.”
In fact, any story on the Princess of Wales appearing under Richard Kay’s byline was assumed to come directly from her. He had reported her strong denials of an affair with James Hewitt. “We were never lovers,” she swore to the reporter, although later she admitted on television that she had committed adultery with Hewitt. She denied to Richard Kay that she had had an affair with James Gilbey, although their taped phone conversation revealed her fears of getting pregnant. She also denied having an affair with England’s rugby captain Will Carling, despite Julia Carling’s public threat to name Diana in a divorce suit for adultery.
“I saw the Princess sneaking men into the back way of Kensington Palace,” said a butler in the royal household, “because she brought them round by my apartment…. I couldn’t help but see because she had to pass by my window.”
The gamy insinuations swirling around the Princess inspired raucous jokes from late night comedians. In the States, The Dana Carvey Show lost two sponsors after the comic, performing as a prissy church lady, clucked disapprovingly about Diana’s being a “slut.” On the Tonight show, Jay Leno joked: “Princess Diana was in an accident today, but she’s recovering. Soon, she’ll be out of the hospital and flat on her back again.”
In most of Richard Kay’s exclusives, the Princess appeared as a paragon. When she told him how her phone call had saved a drowning man, Kay wrote dramatically: “She rushed to the water’s edge and helped pull the unconscious tramp to the bank, where he was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” When she told him she had taken her children on a secret visit to a homeless shelter so they could see how others less privileged live, Kay’s “exclusive” dominated the entire front page: “Princes and the Paupers.”
Diana reveled in her role as a mother and felt threatened when Charles hired Alexandra Legge-Bourke to plan activities for the boys when they were with him. The former nursery school teacher, known as Tiggy, joined the Prince’s staff a few months after his separation from Diana. Tiggy forged a close bond with the children, who enjoyed her rollicking enthusiasm.
The Princess admitted feeling a “gut kick” the first time she saw Tiggy racing to embrace the children, whom she called “my babies.” And Diana felt upstaged as “Mummy” after seeing pictures of the twenty-nine-year-old assistant skiing with the children at Klosters in Switzerland, grouse hunting with them at Sandringham, and deer stalking at Balmoral. Tiggy was quoted as saying: “I give the boys what they need at this stage—fresh air, a rifle, and a horse.”
The Princess fumed. “She’s undermining my boys,” she said. She complained about Tiggy’s cigarette habit and said she didn’t want the young woman smoking in front of the boys. “What is it about Charles, who professes to hate smoking, and women who’re addicted to cigarettes?” she asked, alluding to Camilla Parker Bowles, also a pack-a-day smoker. And when Diana read about Tiggy in the press as “warm and cheerful” and “a wonderful surrogate mother,” she hit the roof.
Diana acidly pointed out to Richard Kay that if she employed a “surrogate father” to be with the Princes when they were at home with her, she would be criticized as a bad mother. Unlike her husband, who took Tiggy with him to events at the boys’ schools and on all vacations with the children, Diana said she did not feel compelled to take a man with her when she visited her sons or took them on holiday. After seeing pictures of Charles embracing Tiggy on three occasions and greeting her with a kiss on the lips, the Princess speculated that the Prince was “probably having an affair with the little servant girl.”
The kissing drew questions from reporters, but Commander Aylard dismissed the Prince’s public displays of affection for his assistant. “Tiggy is a member of the household,” said Aylard, “and an old family friend.” He added that her mother was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne, her aunt was an extra lady-in-waiting, and her brother had been a page-of-honor to the Queen. When the Prince and Princess later started divorce negotiations, Tiggy called herself “Tiggy in the middle.”
By then Diana felt displaced as a mother, so she fired off directives to her husband regarding Tiggy’s role in the children’s lives. The Princess banned the younger woman from the boys’ bedrooms and bathrooms. She said Tiggy should stay in the background on any occasion when the boys were seen in public. “She is neither to accompany them in the same car nor be photographed close to them.” She insisted that when the boys called her from Sandringham at Christmastime, they were to be taken to another lodge on the estate, where they could speak to her privately. “No one else, no staff or servants, is to be present during our conversations.”
Diana publicly reinforced her image as the mother of a future King by talking to Richard Kay about her firstborn son. She bragged that at thirteen he was “taller than his father… and so very different.” She belittled Charles by building up William: the son is “decisive”; the son has “sense and sensibility”; the son takes “people for what they are, not who they are.” The son is handsome, “not burdened” with stick-out ears. “Tell him he’s good-looking,” wrote Richard Kay after visiting with Diana, “and Wills says he can’t be because that would make him vain.” In contrast with his father, the gentle son protected his mother. When he saw a tabloid story about her having a crush on Tom Hanks and bombarding the movie star with phone calls, she said she was prepared to laugh it off, but Wills had insisted she issue a denial. “As he crossly told a school friend later, ‘It made my mother look like a prostitute.’ ”
When the Princess phoned the reporter on Saturday, August 20, 1994, she was distraught. “Someone somewhere is going to make out I am mad,” she sobbed. She had just found out the next day’s newspapers were reporting that for eighteen months she had been peppering the art dealer Oliver Hoare with anonymous telephone calls. She was suspected of making the crank calls to Hoare’s home and hanging up when his wife answered. Sometimes the caller stayed on the phone without saying a word. Diane Hoare complained to her husband about the “silence” calls, which she found “unnerving.” After a mysterious woman caller screamed torrents of abuse at her, Diane Hoare insisted her husband call the police. At first the art dealer, an expert in Islamic art, feared a terrorist threat against his family. So he insisted on answering the phone himself. But when the sinister silent calls continued, he realized that whoever was calling just wanted to hear his voice.
“I would be polite and say, ‘Hello, who’s calling? Who’s there?’ ” he said. “But there was just silence at the other end. It was eerie.”
After tapping the Hoares’ telephone line, police traced the calls to Diana’s and Charles’s private lines at Kensington Palace, to Diana’s mobile phone, and to Diana’s sister’s phone on the days Diana was visiting. An investigator from the Nuisance Calls Division speculated that the Princess was using different lines to avoid detection.
“Mr. Hoare went white as a sheet when he saw our report,” said the investigator. “He never imagined in his wildest dreams that Princess Diana could be making the calls.”
The Hoares, who were close friends of Prince Charles and had known Diana since their marriage, showed him the police report that logged the time of every call. A confidential extract from January 13, 1994, shows:
8:45 A.M. Phone rings. Silence. Hoare punches in the police code. The number that flashes up is a private office at Kensington Palace.
8:49 A.M. Phone rings. Hoare: “Who’s there?” Code reveals Diana’s private line.
8:54 A.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s office phone at Kensington Palace. [Charles no longer living or working at Kensington Palace.]
2:12 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s office at Kensington Palace.
7:55 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s line from Kensington Palace.
8:19 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s line from Kensington Palace.
The Prince shook his head sadly and expressed concern for his children. “They are the ones who will suffer from all this and will get it all played back when they return to school,” he said. The Hoares declined to press charges, but someone in Scotland Yard leaked the story to the press, and the Princess looked pitiful. People began questioning her sanity. “Is the Princess of Wales going mad?” asked an editorial. “She’s an hysterical woman,” wrote a columnist, “clearly teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”
Her therapists explained her alleged pathological behavior as typical for a bulimic experiencing loneliness and isolation. “For a woman who has difficulty confronting people, and is struggling for control,” said one specialist who treated Diana, “phone harassment gives a feeling of empowerment. It’s a safe way to retaliate.”
Then came a few tasty tidbits. The art dealer, a dashing married man and father of two children, apparently had extended friendship to the troubled Princess, and she had turned into an obsessive pest. But that was not entirely accurate, said Oliver Hoare’s chauffeur, Barry Hodge. He spoke up after Hoare had fired him for unrelated reasons. The chauffeur asserted that Diana and the art dealer had been having an affair. He said the couple had set up a “love nest” in Pimlico, where they had been meeting three or four times a week for almost four years. The chauffeur said Hoare, who did not want to leave his wealthy, aristocratic wife, was very much taken with the Princess. And he said they dined secretly at the homes of friends such as Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of a Brazilian diplomat. The chauffeur said the Princess “could phone [the limo] more than twenty times a day.”
When Hodge’s story was published, Diana contacted Richard Kay, who wrote that the chauffeur’s “claims are said to have reduced the Princess of Wales to peals of laughter.”
Oliver Hoare admitted that he had met with Diana on several occasions, but only to advise her and console her about her marriage. Still, his wife insisted on a separation, so he moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Pimlico. A few months later the Hoares reconciled and he moved back into their home.
“All we know is that Mr. Hoare did not want to prosecute the Princess of Wales,” said an investigator from London�
��s Metropolitan Police Department. “He agreed to withdraw his complaint and said he would talk to the lady privately.”
Diana denied making the harassing calls. “There is absolutely no truth in it,” Richard Kay quoted her as saying. She showed him extracts from her calendar, saying she was at lunch with friends or at the movies when some of the calls were made. “They are trying to make out I was having an affair with this man,” she said, “or that I had some sort of fatal attraction…. It is simply untrue and so unfair…. What have I done to deserve this? I feel I am being destroyed.”
He listened sympathetically. When she acknowledged that she and Hoare were “friends” and had spoken on the phone “occasionally,” he asked if she had placed any of those occasional calls to him from pay phones.
“You can’t be serious,” she said indignantly. “I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”
Her response made James Hewitt smile ruefully. He remembered many calls from Diana, who always disguised her voice when she called him at his army barracks. She told him she was dialing from a pay phone so the call would not appear on the phone bills that Charles examined. “I feel sorry for her,” Hewitt said. “Very sorry.”
Less sympathetic were the cartoonists, who lampooned her without mercy. One drew the Princess on the phone, saying: “Can you hold on a second? There’s someone at the door….” Through a window, two men in white coats were approaching with nets and manacles. In another cartoon an old woman answers the phone. Hearing nothing but heavy breathing, she turns to her husband. “I think it’s Princess Di for you.”
Charles took advantage of the crack in his wife’s stature. Having portrayed her as intellectually vacant and television addicted, he now said her only goal in life was to empty Chanel’s boutiques and stock her closets at his expense. He complained loudly during a London dinner party about her expenses for travel and clothing and said she cost him $13,900 a month for “grooming.” When Diana heard the comment she snapped, “I don’t cost half as much to groom as his goddamned polo ponies.” Days later people could decide for themselves when her yearly “grooming” expenses were itemized in the papers: