by Tim Clayton
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‘Royal marriage on the rocks’ stories had become commonplace. The Palace press office had, for some time, been planning a damage limitation exercise via television. The Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, approached ITN’s Editor, Sir David Nicholas, with the offer of an exclusive interview with the royal couple in exchange for £1 million for the Prince’s Trust. In the Sunday Mirror on 20 October, ITN executive Bill Hodgson promised that ‘the public will be surprised by their Royal Highnesses’ remarkable honesty’.
Coached by Sir Richard Attenborough, Diana turned in a polished performance under what turned out to be some unctuously gentle questioning from Sir Alastair Burnet. She denied that she argued with her husband and made light of her petulance on the ski slopes. She also denied that she had tried to change the Prince or that she was a domineering wife. She was not a shopaholic or a perfectionist, and there had been no rift with Princess Anne over Prince Harry’s christening, as rumoured in the press. Altogether, she complained, there was too much about her in the newspapers. Charles agreed. For his own part he defended his views on architecture robustly and emphatically denied stories that he had been using a ouija board to contact his great-uncle Mountbatten.
The interview was associated with a documentary and a book that followed the royal couple through the best part of a year. The programme-makers saw Diana and Charles barnstorm Australia again, and once more the Princess pulled in vast crowds. The fly on the royal wall came from a particularly respectful species. The ITN crew were soon aware of the tension between the couple they were filming, but nothing of that ever made the screen. In theory, the Royal Family had given access to a group of independent journalists; in practice they retained a good measure of editorial control, and even today restrict access to what was filmed.
Only with the help of the rewind button does the viewer, in a single two-second gesture, get a sense of how brittle this relationship had become. It’s the twice-yearly planning meeting. Charles and Diana have different ideas for a particular date. Charles tries to make a joke out of it, poking his wife softly and playfully in the ribs. She reacts as if stabbed, arching and twisting her back away from his touch, a look of anger clouding her face. Anne Beckwith-Smith stares, for a second palpably worried about what might happen next. Then the director cuts away.
Elsewhere in the documentary the couple are seen to touch only once with anything approaching warmth. A meeting on the royal plane after a week apart produces a pair of weak smiles and a quick peck on the cheek.
* * *
From Australia, Diana and Charles flew to Washington to open the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition, a celebration of British country-house culture. For J. Carter Brown, director of Washington’s National Gallery, who organised the show, the Waleses were the perfect couple to open this British cultural promotion: ‘It was romance. It was fairytale. They were both wonderful looking, and represented everything that everybody wanted to be.’ The opening would be attended by a substantial proportion of the British aristocracy in their capacity as lenders to the exhibition.
Carter Brown had not anticipated how great a draw the couple would prove. Time magazine put Charles and Diana on the front cover with the headline ‘Here They Come’. Inside, ten pages were devoted to the world’s most glamorous couple. Washington socialites were so desperate to be invited to the opening ceremony that they were offering money.
The tour began with a visit to the White House, a glitzy White House ball. At dinner Diana was seated between the President and the dancer Mikhail Barishnikov, who was in awe of the Princess and nervous when it came to passing the menu to her for her signature, as custom required. ‘Why? What’s wrong? I’ve got your autograph,’ she teased, and then explained that as a teenager she had stood outside the Covent Garden stage door in the rain to collect his signature. Carter Brown thought that she was as excited to meet the movie stars as they were to meet her. That night she danced with John Travolta and President Reagan. Another dance partner, Clint Eastwood, pronounced to waiting news crews that ‘she made my day’. Carter Brown cheerfully admits that he had ‘a mad crush on her’ himself. He was dying for a dance with the Princess, ‘since I did feel it was I who’d gotten her over here, but I couldn’t compete with John Travolta, and her dinner partner was Barishnikov, who presumably knows how to dance, and so I was about to see if I could finagle a dance when Cinderella’s coach appeared and she was whisked away. I was steaming.’
The next day jet-lag took its toll. As they boarded a helicopter borrowed from the President to go to lunch with multimillionaire art collector Paul Mellon, Diana kicked her shoes off and wilted. She was tired and nervous and had little to say. ‘My role is about eighty per cent slog, twenty per cent fantastic,’ she told Carter Brown. She was visibly bored by the hours of discussion of fine horses and fine art that followed. She was equally bored, or jet-lagged, or both, during Charles’s speech to open the exhibition.
Well, we had a press conference which was the opportunity for the Prince to sing for his supper. This trip was on behalf of a national cause, and he was being very serious and good and promoting the British country houses as a tourist destination. So, here is the Prince trying to do his job and put the right spin on this show and all these good things, and then the very first question from the press had to do with how the Princess enjoyed dancing with John Travolta. And so when they asked the Prince, he just threw it over to her and said, ‘I’m not a glove puppet.’
‘Disco Queen Diana Upstages John Travolta,’ the Daily Mirror duly reported on Monday, II November, above pictures of Diana with various stars. The London Evening Standard did mention treasure houses: it reported Charles’s joke that the exhibition proved that much art remained in Britain despite ‘endless raiding parties from the USA’. But it concentrated on another aspect of his speech:
A gentleman of the press asked me rather tactlessly why the crowds in Washington were bigger than when I came a few years ago as a bachelor. I can tell you why the crowds are bigger. They have all turned out to see my new clothes. All those suits and shoes and ties and everything which have been chosen for me.
If the Princess detected a note of tetchiness directed at her in Charles’s wry humour, she did not show it. Instead she looked on impassively from her seat next to Vice-President George Bush, wearing, as the press reported next day, a ‘cream coloured evening dress by Murray Arbeid with lace bodice and taffeta skirt cut low in the back’.
To the American press all was sweetness and light, and the British press was just as full of Diana’s star quality. But not every journalist ran with the herd. The republican Christopher Hitchens, who had earlier regretted the conservatism of Charles wedding a blue-blooded aristocrat, was invited to a reception at the British embassy:
I attended with my earlier misgivings intact. Well, if I hadn’t had those earlier misgivings then, I assure you, I would have developed them on the spot, because down the steps came this couple who looked as if they had just finished having a really nasty, bitter, pointless row. He looked bored and sickened, as if the whole routine was a trial to him. And she – this is what struck me much more – looked just plain ill, terribly thin, pale, pasty, no tone to her at all, no aura of any kind, plain and sick. And I take my oath, I went home and said to my wife, ‘I think she’s got terrible anorexia or frightful anaemia or something.’ I said, ‘She’s sick, she’s ill and miserable with it.’
Well, I had to read as well as write some of the coverage the next day, and I knew the people who were writing it and I knew they’d been in the room and seen what I’d seen. And the next day there was the word ‘radiant’ just where it always was in the first phrase of the first sentence of every story. I think the word must have been mandatory in those days. Or, if not, it was lurking in the keyboard, so if you just brushed it with your finger, the word would leap on to the page.
The principle of celebrity coverage is that your actions are judged by your reputation, not your reput
ation by your actions. In other words, if you are a radiant princess then that’s what they’ll say you are no matter what you look like or what you do or say.
Neither the royal machine nor the press, nor indeed the public, wanted to admit that the fairytale might not be all it had promised. They all wanted it to continue, and wanted to see radiance where, to the more critical eye, the light had already dimmed.
Diana the fledgling celebrity insisted on a meeting with Mary Robertson:
I couldn’t believe that in five short years my shy, quiet, plump little nanny had turned into this icon. Apparently her schedule was absolutely jammed full already, but we learned later that she had put her foot down and said that she absolutely insisted on having a lengthy visit with Patrick and his mother.
Diana was just herself, she rushed across the floor, didn’t give us a chance to curtsy or bow, and again that wonderful big hug, ‘How are you?’, ‘How wonderful to come all this way.’ Just Diana, again, no formality. I sat across from them, and they looked very happy to me, they even joked, I’d had my daughter by then, they were even joking with each other that next time they would have a girl. It was very convincing, I had no idea there was anything wrong.
The last leg of the tour was a visit to Palm Beach where Prince Charles would play polo and the millionaire chairman of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, would chair a dinner and ball for the benefit of one of Charles’s causes. Carter Brown tagged along. He still had not had his dance.
Armand flew us down in his huge plane and we sat with the Princess watching the polo game and Gregory Peck was right near, but was rather shy about talking with her. At the dance afterwards I went through the line, I wasn’t gonna be left out this time. So I said to her, ‘Well, what does it take to get to dance with you?’ She said, ‘Oh, no problem, that would be great.’ And so the equerry came up at a certain moment and said, ‘All right, Mr Carter Brown, it’s time for you to cut in.’ So I went over, and who was she dancing with but Gregory Peck? The two of them looked daggers. Neither one of them wanted to be interrupted. So, huh, what else is new?
The tour was declared a complete triumph, but even Carter Brown was struck by the way that it was received by the press. He remembered one particular incident:
When she came out of the exhibition she’d been wearing a hat, which I think was designed to shade her eyes so that the cameras wouldn’t see the circles under them. But, at any rate, out she came and it was a blustery, autumn day, and this wind took the hat which was the shape of a flying saucer and therefore developed aerodynamic lift, and it became a flying saucer and it went soaring up into the sky. And luckily my wife, who used to play basketball, made this heroic leap and caught it, and there were so many photographers that that shot was on the front page of newspapers all around the world. I thought, Boy, you work seven years on an art exhibition and what do people remember? It’s the Princess’s hat.
Mary Robertson was struck by something more personal. Six days after her trip to Washington she was still glowing from her royal encounter when she received a slightly disturbing letter from Kensington Place. Diana, with the world at her feet, was once again being strangely grateful for the kindness of a friend.
I hadn’t even written a thank-you note to her yet, but Diana wrote immediately to me, which in itself is strange, and she said it was wonderful seeing Patrick and me, because it reminded her of such a happy time in her life and it was wonderful to get back in touch with people she had known when her life was simpler, and happier, and she said to us that the meeting with us had been the high point of her trip.
8
Julia from Low Wood
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Sarah Ferguson and Diana had lunch once a week, an arrangement dating from before Diana’s marriage. In June 1985 Sarah was invited to Windsor for Royal Ascot. There she made a great impression on Prince Andrew, who asked her to come to Balmoral as his guest that summer. In December, when Andrew’s ship visited the Port of London, Diana persuaded Sarah to go with her to visit him. Inevitably the two girls drew the attention of the press. ‘Just keep smiling,’ Diana advised her friend. She did. Her continual smiles and cheerful high spirits endeared her to the press and to the rest of Prince Andrew’s family. At Sandringham on 1 January 1986 Andrew told Sarah that he loved her. In February Sarah went skiing with Charles and Diana to Klosters. After one of their now habitual frosty exchanges, Charles asked Diana: ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie?’
Diana had been trying to please him. That winter she had spent weeks secretly preparing a routine with the ballet dancer Wayne Sleep. It was meant to be a surprise present for her husband, who was due to attend a Royal Gala performance at Covent Garden. Two numbers before the end of the show, Diana left Charles’s side in the royal box and slipped on stage with Sleep to perform a dance to Billy Joel’s pop song ‘Uptown Girl’. Diana was lithe, sexy and confident, and the audience loved it, demanding eight curtain calls. In public Charles said that he was ‘absolutely amazed’. In private he was embarrassed by the undignified show and told her so. A pattern was setting in. Whenever one made a conciliatory gesture the other rebuffed it.
* * *
The same pattern was visible to staff at Highgrove. According to housekeeper Wendy Berry, the couple spent happy days together with their children, both active, warm and enthusiastic parents. And she recalls seeing Diana, when the boys were asleep, putting her arms around her husband, only to have her affection shrugged off, as if its recipient was too embarrassed to accept it.
Diana, whose voice could be piercingly loud, was frequently heard berating Charles for some supposedly selfish act, for refusing to cancel this or that arrangement, for staying too late at polo or a hunt meeting without calling home, for not thinking enough about his wife and family. But by 1986 the Prince was growing indifferent to her complaints. His heavily sarcastic ‘What is it now, Diana? What have I done to make you cry?’ – as if delivered to a moody child – was a common rejoinder. According to Berry, several members of the Highgrove staff believed that Charles was habitually aloof and uncaring towards Diana, although one, his groom Paddy Whiteland, took the Prince’s side in the below-stairs discussions, blaming Diana for finding fault with everything Charles tried to do for her.
Arguments could break out at any time. Afterwards Charles carried on in front of the staff as if nothing had happened, while Diana would run to her room, demand dinner on a tray and turn to the telephone for company until the next morning. Charles now rarely made the effort to tempt her back downstairs. Instead, his face betraying not the slightest hint of anxiety, he would announce to his guests that his wife had a headache and regretted that she could not join them that evening.
One day Berry came across Diana crying on the staircase. ‘Everything is such a mess and so complicated. I just don’t know what to do,’ she said.
* * *
Sarah’s continuing romance with Prince Andrew pushed Diana off the front pages. Andrew proposed in late February.
Once again the Palace got into gear for a royal celebration. One day, as Diana slipped into a side entrance to the Palace, she bumped into James Hewitt, a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Life Guards. It was the first time he had encountered her since a casual introduction when he had played polo against Prince Charles before her wedding. It was a hot day and he was wearing dismounted review order – quilted red jacket, boots and spurs.
I’d just come out of a meeting with one of the equerries, Tim Lawrence, to discuss arrangements for the wedding of Sarah and Andrew and get the details sorted out. I came out of that meeting and encountered Diana on the steps near one of the side entrances. I was wearing uniform – she said something like, ‘Where are you going, dressed up like a dog’s dinner?’ It was quite sweet, but it threw one off a bit.
Red-faced, he explained what he was doing and strode off, spurs jingling.
Diana saw Sarah as a potential ally in the family and a friend to have some fun with. Fergie’s idea of fun wa
s rather boisterous. Together they dressed up as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash Prince Andrew’s stag night. They were arrested for causing a scene outside Buckingham Palace, and bundled into a police van before they were recognised. Allowed out at Annabel’s nightclub, they drank champagne before returning to Buckingham Palace, where they ambushed Prince Andrew’s car.
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During the 1980s magazines, newspapers and television zoomed in on the lives of the rich and famous. The top soap operas were Dallas, playing to 300 million viewers in fifty-five countries, and Dynasty, both about fabulously wealthy people, power, greed, glamour and lust. New magazines celebrated the lifestyles of the real-life rich. In America the Jazz Age style magazine Vanity Fair was revived in 1982.
Top sportsmen and women were pursued by cameras, their private lives analysed to a new degree. Pop stars lived like aristocracy. Models became supermodels. Fashion designers got personalities and became stars in their own right too, mixing with the musicians, the models and the actresses. The ‘Charles and Di’ story became a staple of this booming TV and magazine culture, she presented as vital and warm, he as distant and disenchanted. All this was parodied in the British satirical puppet show Spitting Image, where the dithering wimp Charles talked to plants and fought with his diamond-hard, high-fashion Princess. Graydon Carter is the editor of Vanity Fair.
Diana was an icon, an international symbol the likes of which you get maybe three or four times a century. She lived her life in such a public way. And she sold. Like Madonna sells. These women are unique in their own ways, through circumstance and talent and drive, and people either love them or hate them, but either way they’re fascinated by them.