Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  The truth is she got swamped. Yes, she listened, but it was so overwhelming. I remember being in a car with her coming over Vauxhall Bridge and there was this huge hoarding with ‘Di – the real story’ and she broke down in tears and said, ‘I can’t take this any more.’

  There had been days when she had phoned Mrs Robertson to excuse herself from work, saying she just couldn’t face the attention. But now that job was over. The Robertsons had returned to America and she had waved Patrick off from Heathrow. Christmas was coming, bringing a different excitement and the prospect of escape to the privacy of Althorp. Ken Lennox was still on duty outside Diana’s flat.

  She knew my family were still in Scotland at that stage, and she said, ‘Mr Lennox, are you going home for Christmas to be with your family?’ She knew enough about it, our families, and she would quiz us when she was sitting around with us. And I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ And she said, ‘Whyever not?’ I said, ‘Because we all reckon you’re going to marry Prince Charles, and my task is to find some very good close-ups of you to use for a whole front page when the announcement’s made.’ And she said, ‘But there’s nothing like that happening yet.’ I said, ‘Well, we think there is.’ And she said, ‘Are you serious? You’re staying down here to get that photograph?’ I said, ‘I am.’ She said, ‘But you must have lots?’ I said, ‘Yes, but they’re all head down – they’re not very good. I want a full-face, big, smiling picture for us, that we can drop over the whole front page of the paper.’ And she said, ‘I’ll look out of the window tomorrow morning at six-thirty, and if you’re the only one here, I will come down and get into my car. I’ll put the window down, and let you have some close-ups, with a big smile. And that’ll allow you to get home for Christmas.’ I said, ‘Right, I’ll be here.’ And she did it.

  * * *

  Robert Spencer joined the family for Christmas. He says that the relationship was not much discussed, but Raine Spencer told a friend that Diana was walking alone around the grounds of Althorp in tears.

  The Royal Family went to Sandringham for New Year, where Diana joined them, spirited by back roads through a horde of reporters and photographers. They pressed so close that even the Queen lost her temper, snapping, ‘Why don’t you go away?’ Prince Charles wished reporters ‘a happy New Year and your editors a particularly nasty one’. At the beginning of January press secretary Michael Shea let it be known that the Queen was ‘very distressed’ at the way her family had been harassed during their winter holiday. The Queen urged Charles to take action soon but did not recommend one course or another.

  Diana planned a trip to Australia with her mother to escape from the pressure and persuade the Prince with her absence.

  * * *

  Charles put a great deal of faith in the Queen Mother. She and her lady-in-waiting, Lady Fermoy, seemed firmly behind the match. Many years later Lady Fermoy admitted to Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that she had privately worried that Diana might not be up to the job. At the time she had tried to hint to Diana that she might be making a mistake: ‘Darling you must understand that their sense of humour and their lifestyle are different, and I don’t think it will suit you,’ but, to her lasting regret, she had warned no one else. Robert Spencer told us that any reservations were overwhelmingly outweighed by delight at the apparent suitability of the match.

  Well, I don’t remember any reservations at that time at all. I remember just celebrating, because it did appear then how eminently suitable Diana was. She’d never had any serious affairs, she was nineteen and a half, extremely beautiful and most popular, and she seemed to share interests with the Prince of Wales. She gave the impression of loving the country life, in particular staying at Balmoral. She seemed to be madly in love with him and, after all, she did come from stock of a family who had worked with and supported the Royal Family for many generations.

  And it seemed even more suitable because the Prince seemed like somebody who would want a younger girl to be his wife. She was young enough to be trained, and young enough to be helped, and young enough to be moulded.

  Of Charles’s friends, only two spoke out against Diana. Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson and a heavyweight in every sense, thought the couple too unlike each other to get on and felt that, above all, she did not share his serious social and political interests. Penny Romsey, wife of Mountbatten’s grandson, also realised how little Charles and Diana had in common. She worried that Diana was courting press photographers and posing for them to put herself in the best possible light. She thought that the nineteen-year-old had fallen in love not with the Prince but with the idea of being Queen. After she had tried to hint as much to Charles, to no effect, her husband, Norton, stated her views more bluntly during a horse ride at Broadlands. Charles lost his temper.

  His mother and father were urging him to act and seemed to be in favour of the match. Charles made clear in a letter that he wanted to make the right decision for himself and for the country, but he was being given no time to think and no opportunity to get to know the girl. An aide told us:

  Charles was an insecure person. He bounced around from one thing to another. He was captivated by this nice young thing, but he was never one for reaching a decision. The Queen told him, ‘You can’t keep on delaying coming to a decision. It’s not fair on the girl, when the world’s press is looking on the whole time. Come to a decision.’

  Other royal officials remain convinced that Charles felt under pressure:

  He was a bachelor, loved the single life, travelling around the world. He didn’t want to get married. But then his father issued an ultimatum, and told him to marry her, and so he did what he was told. He was forced into it.

  And another courtier told us:

  He got bounced into this, make no bones about it. The combination of press and public pressure, he conned himself into thinking he was in love with her. Alarm bells should have been ringing all over the place. We are as guilty as everybody else.

  * * *

  While she awaited developments, Diana revisited West Heath. Penny Walker says that:

  She burst into our sitting room, and just beamed, and of course we said, ‘What are these rumours? Are they true about you and Prince Charles?’ And the beam got bigger and bigger, and she just said, ‘I can’t possibly say.’ And she continued to beam for the rest of the afternoon. So we actually weren’t quite sure what was happening, but she was obviously very, very happy.

  Some of the press followed Charles to Switzerland. Harry Arnold was at Klosters, and he too was feeling the strain:

  I was under tremendous pressure to find out if there was going to be an engagement. I remember telephoning her from a hotel in Switzerland. All the calls in those days went through the switchboard. So I got through to the flat and one of the other girls answered, so I simply said, ‘I have a call from Klosters.’ Lots of girlish squealing in the background and on came Diana. I said, ‘Oh, hello, Diana, it’s Harry Arnold here.’ There was this gasp and I said, ‘Who did you think it would be?’

  * * *

  In the clear mountain air Charles was making his final deliberations. He had been close to Diana for only six months but his parents had told him that he could not keep her waiting much longer. It was his duty to let her go if he was not sure. And in many ways she seemed so perfect.

  While skiing in Klosters he talked his problem through again with his hosts, Patti and Charles Palmer-Tomkinson. Both had been early supporters of Diana, and it’s likely that they encouraged the match at this critical moment. Had Charles gone skiing with Nicholas Soames or the Romseys, it is conceivable that the story may have ended differently.

  On his return to London, on 6 February, Charles invited Diana to Windsor Castle and asked her to marry him. He told her to take some time to think it over. She accepted immediately. Charles explained how horrendous some of the pressures would be and said that it would not be an easy life. She barely listened and rushed back to Colherne Court to tell the girls. Una
ble to celebrate in public, and yet needing an outlet for their excitement, the four of them went for a late-night drive around Buckingham Palace in Diana’s Mini Metro.

  As they sped up and down Birdcage Walk and round and round the Victoria Memorial, they talked about the great occasions that were to come. Diana standing on the balcony and waving at the crowds pouring down the Mall, Diana showing her young princes to their people, Diana, their Diana, riding in an open carriage. She was going to be the Queen of England.

  As Diana and her friends sped dreamily past the gates of her future home, Charles was inside Windsor Castle making a series of telephone calls. According to Penny Junor, one was to Camilla Parker Bowles, who was aware that he was planning to propose to Diana that evening and was keen to know the result.

  * * *

  In New York, Mary Robertson had been scanning the English newspapers anxiously. Then she got a call from a friend in London:

  ‘Mary, your girl made it.’ I just shrieked for joy. I couldn’t have been prouder of her than if she’d been my own daughter. And I was happy for her, because this was truly what she wanted.

  Arthur Edwards was on holiday in Ireland that February, but he had left a number with Harry Arnold. He’d only just arrived at his cottage when the phone rang.

  It was Harry and he said, ‘Listen to the one o’clock news. I think they’re going to get engaged.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m at the Foreign Office and he’s cancelled the engagement here and there was a piece in The Times this morning suggesting it was going to be today.’ And I said to my wife, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to go back to London.’ I went straight to the flat, Colherne Court, and got a really nice picture of her leaving for the last time. She gave a smile, I promise you it just lit up the whole street. She was such a happy girl.

  4

  New Billing

  * * *

  I thought that it was a match made in heaven and I think most of us did. I thought that the Prince of Wales would take Princess Diana under his wing and teach her the ways of the Royal Family and the direction that she should follow, and I couldn’t think of a better tutor.

  Lord Palumbo

  Within a week of Prince Charles’s proposal on 6 February, Lady Diana was in session with Vogue fashion editor Anna Harvey choosing clothes. Harvey had rung round various leading designers asking for samples for an anonymous celebrity. Elizabeth Emanuel, five years out of the Royal College of Art but already a favourite at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, sent in a pink blouse and skirt. Diana loved them. A few days later she went to Elizabeth and David Emanuel’s Brook Street studio and asked for an evening dress for her first public appearance. At the time all they had was a strapless, backless, black taffeta silk gown with a plunging front. She loved this too and said that she thought black was the smartest colour a girl could wear.

  She consulted Kevin Shanley about her hair. Twenty-five-year-old Shanley ran a stylish Kensington studio called Head Line. He had been doing Diana’s hair since 1978, and her current short look was his creation. Now she was worried that it wouldn’t go with the Spencer tiara for her wedding. She could only grow her hair two inches before July: he assured her it would be fine.

  * * *

  With the announcement of the engagement on 24 February 1981, large crowds converged on Buckingham Palace. The band of the Coldstream Guards played ‘Congratulations’ and Diana’s father and stepmother beamed their delight to reporters at the Palace gates. At Westminster, Margaret Thatcher interrupted Prime Minister’s Question Time to congratulate the couple.

  They were interviewed for television that day. The Prince declared himself ‘positively delighted and frankly amazed that Diana is prepared to take me on’. The BBC interviewer pressed them, ‘And in love?’ Diana’s ‘Of course’, delivered with rolled eyes and a self-conscious giggle, was immediately qualified by Charles’s ‘Whatever “in love” means’. Much has been made of Charles’s odd remark. Ronald Allison, who was Buckingham Palace press secretary through the seventies, told us the Prince was merely being clumsily flippant. But Diana noticed the comment. She later claimed that it echoed what her new fiancé had said to her seconds after she had accepted his proposal of marriage: ‘I said, “I love you so much, I love you so much.” He said: “Whatever love means.” He said it then.’

  PENNY JUNOR: But I think that he . . . he could have handled the situation better, he could have explained more to Diana, he failed to realise that she was a . . . a jealous . . . I mean the jealousy is perfectly understandable and perfectly normal in a nineteen-year-old girl and I think that he failed to see that and when asked whether he was in love he said . . . he answered – absolutely typically – ‘Yes, in love, whatever love means.’ This man is not like the rest of us, he can’t tell a little white lie, he can’t just say, ‘Yes, of course we’re madly in love,’ he thinks too hard about everything and feels compelled to articulate what he’s thinking. He’s . . . And if something is difficult or deep or complicated he will spell it out, whereas the rest of us will just be two-dimensional about things.

  AUTHOR: Would you have bought it if you’d been Diana? And how would you have felt if you’d been standing next to him – international television, you adore him, he’s been the object of your teenage crush, you’re about to marry him and he says that, what would you have said?

  JUNOR: I would have been devastated. I mean, I think it was a terrifically insensitive thing to have done, but in some areas he’s a . . . I think he was . . . He was insensitive.

  * * *

  Whatever Diana thought in retrospect, Charles’s lack of emotional enthusiasm was probably not her most unsettling experience that spring. Or rather, perhaps, his reserve mirrored the coldly orchestrated formality of court life as it was suddenly revealed to her. She found herself under constant pressure to perform in circumstances dictated by protocol and the rigidly old-fashioned officials responsible for determining it.

  The night before her engagement was announced, Diana had been moved to the Queen Mother’s home, Clarence House, and three days later to her own apartment in Buckingham Palace, where she stayed until the wedding on 29 July. A courtier told us that the move was made:

  partly because of the press but partly as a result of her determination to come to terms with the huge challenge. She was trying terribly hard to get it right. She cut herself off from her Sloaney friends, which was part of her attempt to try and get it right. That was the streetwise Diana. She would have realised all her old chums and kindergarten friends would have stuck out like sore thumbs in the Palace. Once she was in there, what does she do? Who does she talk to?

  But the pace was so fast that the problems did not emerge immediately. There was very little time for preparation before Diana’s first public engagement on 3 March 1981, a musical recital at Goldsmiths Hall in aid of the Royal Opera House Development Appeal. The one highlight of this evening was meeting Princess Grace of Monaco, who sympathised with Diana’s predicament. Next week came Diana’s first state occasion, a banquet given by the Queen for the President of Nigeria. The weekend was spent at Balmoral and was followed by a photo call with the Queen after ratification of the marriage by the Privy Council.

  Diana wanted to please Charles, have him take pleasure in her progress, give her an encouraging pat or a kiss, as courtiers who first worked with her recall vividly. But in mid-March, he went off on a long-planned official visit that took him to Australia for three weeks, New Zealand for two weeks, and then on to Venezuela, Washington and Williamsburg. The tour had been arranged months before and could not now be cancelled. Nor, apparently, could Diana be worked into the tight schedule, although she longed to travel with him. Perhaps everyone felt that she needed to be in London to arrange the wedding. But it was an unfortunate time for her to be deprived of Charles’s support.

  Diana accompanied Charles to Heathrow and telephoto pictures of her as she left revealed a head bowed in tears.

  * * *

  ‘Never underest
imate the Palace establishment,’ we were told. ‘When I first arrived there the footmen had their rooms tidied by the maids. They are deeply conservative.’

  With over six hundred rooms and two hundred staff, Buckingham Palace is more like a large office building with an attached hotel than anything resembling a family home. Members of the Royal Family each have their own apartment, and Diana too was assigned a suite with a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom and small kitchen. The rooms had the impersonal feel of an Oxbridge college with ugly furniture, pictures drawn from the less celebrated corners of the royal collection, and old-fashioned electric-bar heaters fixed to the walls. The sense of temporary incumbency was emphasised by the typed names inside brass holders attached to the door frames. With the flat came a maid and a footman.

  The Palace is a very gossipy place and Diana was soon made aware that staff provided information to the newspapers. It was difficult to know who to trust, and it did not come naturally to Diana to remain distant and buttoned up. They had rescued her from the press, but she soon found herself bewildered and lonely inside an alien institution with its own arcane rules.

  To demonstrate that she was taking her new life seriously and was determined to rise to the challenge, Diana saw little of her friends from Colherne Court. Instead she strengthened friendships within the royal circle, notably with Sarah Ferguson (whose father managed Charles’s polo team), with whom she had lunch once a week, Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, and Princes Andrew and Edward. But none of them provided Diana with a soul mate to make the atmosphere less oppressive.

  When Sarah Ferguson eventually married Prince Andrew in 1986, she also found life in Buckingham Palace intimidating: