Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  A loner by nature, Charles became even more so at Gordonstoun. “I’m not a gregarious person,” Charles later said. “I have always preferred my own company or just a one-to-one.” Yet Charles did well academically, passing five O levels. Thanks to several gifted teachers, he gained confidence as an artist by learning pottery, and as an actor by playing the lead in Macbeth. He also learned the cello, prompting his grandmother’s best friend Ruth Fermoy to pronounce him a “sensitive musician”—a judgment she declined to bestow on her granddaughter Diana’s piano-playing. Nevertheless, Charles remained afflicted by low self-esteem, which was only intensified by his hazing at Gordonstoun and his parents’ inability to applaud his achievements.

  Prince Philip posed one more character-building challenge after Charles turned seventeen: a sabbatical in the Australian outback at a school called Timbertop. Charles was reluctant at first. When he left, he told his grandmother that he would wear two watches. “I have one set to Australian time and the other to English time,” he said, “so I can think about what you are doing at all times.” As at Gordonstoun, the emphasis at Timbertop was on fostering initiative and self-reliance, and this time the lessons stuck. Charles thrived on learning to prepare meals, cutting down trees for fuel, and hiking in the wilderness.

  He also made some friends and found what Dimbleby called a “surrogate elder brother” in his father’s equerry, David Checketts, who served as an aide to the young prince. Charles spent weekends with Checketts, his wife, and three children. It was the Prince’s first exposure to real family life, and he could relax in the informality of the Checketts household. In Australia, Charles was able “to find himself—free of Gordonstoun, away from his parents, away from the British press, away from the suffocating certainties of royal life,” wrote Dimbleby.

  The experience made Charles’s last year at Gordonstoun more bearable. He was also appointed head boy, which offered new responsibilities such as serving as the intermediary between students and staff, as well as privileges. Rather than living in a communal dormitory, Charles had his own bedroom, which adjoined the apartment of his art teacher, Robert Waddell, who stimulated his intellectual curiosity during long conversations about music, art, history, and archaeology. In such encounters, Charles’s boarding school years differed significantly from Diana’s. He may have endured his classmates’ tyrannies, but because he was male, and the heir to the throne at that, teachers took a keen interest in making the most of him intellectually. At eighteen, Charles passed his A levels and secured admission to Trinity College, Cambridge.

  At Cambridge, Charles fell in with the sort of young men he would have known at Eton: aristocrats who spent their free time hunting, shooting, fishing, and playing polo. He joined the drama group, in which he appeared in a revue, spent a term at University College of Wales to learn Welsh, and submitted to his first radio and television interviews as part of his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969. Charles was a diligent but less than dazzling student; however, when he earned a “lower second-class degree” in history in 1970, he became the first future king to graduate from college. At the suggestion of his father and his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, Charles entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in the autumn of 1971 for a career in the service—once again following his father’s path.

  Unable to talk to his parents about intimate subjects, Charles turned to Mountbatten for advice on his late-blooming interest in romance. Mountbatten encouraged him to “sow his wild oats,” and offered the use of his home, Broadlands, as a safe haven for trysts, away from the nosy press.

  Shortly after Charles turned twenty-three in November 1971, a friend from Cambridge named Lucia Santa Cruz, the daughter of the Chilean ambassador, introduced him to someone she considered “just the girl” for him. Her name was Camilla Shand, and she was a year older than Charles. The daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a wine merchant and avid huntsman, Camilla was related to Lord Ashcombe of the Cubitt family that built much of fashionable Belgravia in London. She was also the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, the longtime lover of King Edward VII. Gossip columnist Nigel Dempster wrote that the connection prompted Camilla to greet Charles on their first meeting “with a searching look,” and say, “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-grandfather.” (According to Dempster, when he printed this anecdote in July 1981, Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, told him it was “dashed [emphatically] accurate.”)

  Camilla was known to be quick-witted, and she was full of the confidence that Diana lacked. She had been through a similarly unchallenging education, topped off by school in Switzerland and a turn as a popular London debutante. She was also attractive to men: “She has laughing eyes,” said a friend of the Shands. “She is an intensely warm, maternal, laughing creature, with enormous sex appeal.” For a young girl, Camilla had an engaging directness, and an earthy streak that came through in what another friend described as a “slightly sexy, ginny voice” deepened by cigarette smoking. “She is about dogs and gum boots, and a cozy life,” continued the friend. She shared Charles’s self-deprecatory humor and fondness for the absurd, as well as his love of the country and its range of sporting pursuits. Most of all, Camilla made him feel secure, not least because she was so comfortable in her own skin. “He always liked older women,” said a friend of the Queen’s who knew Charles from childhood. “He is able to relax with them.” “With all the intensity of first love,” wrote Dimbleby, Charles “lost his heart to [Camilla] almost at once.”

  Years later, with the release of the infamous “Camillagate” tape in 1992—a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla, surreptitiously recorded in 1989—it would become clear that Camilla knew how to please the Prince, and perhaps to manipulate him as well. Although much attention would focus on the silly sexual banter (especially Charles’s desire to be reincarnated as Camilla’s Tampax to “live inside [her] trousers”), the more revealing aspect of the tape was Camilla’s solicitude toward him: her eagerness to read one of his speeches, to mop his brow, soothe his doubting ego, and encourage him at every turn (“I think, as usual, you’re underestimating yourself.… You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”).

  At the time of her first encounter with Charles, Camilla had been dating Andrew Parker Bowles, a handsome officer in the Household Cavalry whose father, Derek, was a close friend and distant relative of the Queen Mother’s. Nearly a decade older than Charles, Parker Bowles had become friendly with the Prince through polo and hunting. Parker Bowles was a ladies’ man, and his relationship with Camilla had been through its ups and downs.

  By mid-1972 Charles and Camilla had struck up a relationship, and began spending time together in London and at the Mountbatten estate. In Camilla’s company, Charles became “more confident,” according to Dimbleby; nevertheless, he had no intention of marrying for a while, and he faced a long tour at sea starting the following January. Charles and Camilla spent their last weekend together that December at Broadlands, but he didn’t ask her to wait for him. Writing to his great-uncle, Charles noted that it was “the last time I shall see her for eight months.”

  When Charles was at sea, he wrote about Camilla in his journal from time to time, but the couple didn’t correspond. She took up again with Andrew Parker Bowles, and in April 1973, Charles learned that Camilla would marry the cavalry officer that July. Charles wrote to a friend that it seemed unfair, after “such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship,” that he and Camilla had been able to enjoy only six months together. He lamented that he had “no one” to return to in England, adding, “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.”

  Charles heard the news about Camilla while he was on vacation at the home of Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia Brabourne on Eleuthera in the Caribbean, yet by then he had already found a diversion in the Brabournes’ daughter Amanda Knatchbull. “I must say, Amanda really has grown into a very good-looking girl—most disturbing,�
�� Charles wrote to Mountbatten two days before he confided his gloomy thoughts about losing Camilla.

  Prodded by his great-uncle, Charles started to correspond with Amanda, and Mountbatten began to steer the couple toward the possibility of marrying. “Perhaps being away and being able to think about life and about the future (and her) has brought ideas of marriage into a more serious aspect,” Charles wrote to Mountbatten in 1974. He noted that Amanda was “incredibly affectionate and loyal, with a glorious sense of fun and humor—and she’s a country girl as well, which is even more important.”

  Other women shuttled in and out of Charles’s life during these years, usually unknown to the press. But when he left the Royal Navy in December 1976, he moved into the tabloid sights. Except for King Edward VIII’s abdication to marry Wallis Simpson in 1936, reporters had taken only a superficial interest in the royals; but the Prince of Wales had caught their attention, and once he passed his thirtieth birthday, the tabloid hacks became obsessed with the ultimate scoop. As Harry Arnold, a veteran tabloid reporter, described it, “Our editor said … ‘We want to be the first to tell the British public who Prince Charles is going to marry.’ ”

  By 1978, Charles had given no indication who that might be. But behind his mercurial approach to romance, he had been establishing a set of guiding principles for his ideal bride, which he had set out in a series of informal manifestos that went all the way back to 1969, when he granted a TV interview for his investiture. Part romance, part pragmatism, his statements revealed an earnest yearning for a soulmate who would share his interests and his devotion to duty, and who would show him the deference he had come to expect from everyone around him. His words also revealed a sense of foreboding about the responsibilities that his wife would inevitably assume.

  Looking distinctly nervous as he broached such private thoughts, Charles told the TV interviewer in 1969, “You’ve got to remember … in my position you’re going to marry somebody who perhaps one day is going to become Queen, and you’ve got to choose somebody very carefully, I think, who can fulfill this particular role because people like you [the interviewer], perhaps, would expect quite a lot from somebody like that, and it’s got to be somebody pretty special.” Although much would later be made of the need for Charles to marry a virgin, that was not a specific requirement per se. Rather, as royal historian Hugo Vickers wrote, “His bride needed to have a character of such irrefutable dignity that such questions were irrelevant.”

  Mountbatten subsequently urged Charles (with his own granddaughter in mind, no doubt) to “choose a suitable and sweet-charactered girl before she meets anyone else she might fall for.” In 1974, the same year as Mountbatten’s exhortation, Charles emphasized the need for a wife to adapt to her husband’s world: “A woman not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life into which she’s got a contribution to make,” he told Kenneth Harris of The Observer. “She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, or she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. And if she didn’t have a clue, it would be risky for her, wouldn’t it?” Marriage, he said, was “the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.”

  The following year, Charles discussed the premium he also placed on compatibility and shared interests. “My marriage has to be forever,” he said, adding, “A lot of people get the wrong idea of what love is all about. It is rather more than just falling madly in love with somebody and having a love affair for the rest of your married life.… It’s basically a very strong friendship. As often as not you have shared interests and ideas in common and also have a great deal of affection. And I think where you are very lucky is when you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense. To me marriage … seems to be one of the biggest and most responsible steps to be taken in one’s life.… Marriage is something you ought to work at. I may easily be proved wrong but I intend to work at it when I get married.”

  In his Woman’s Own interview with Douglas Keay in February 1975, Charles pursued yet another crucial theme: He wanted “a secure family unit in which to bring up children, to give them a happy, secure upbringing—that is what marriage is all about. Essentially one must be good friends, and love I’m sure will grow out of friendship and become deeper and deeper.” Yet Charles was beginning to doubt the intentions of various women he had met. “You must get married at once,” TV broadcaster Alistair Cooke told Charles over lunch in 1976. “Yes, well, it’s not that easy,” Charles replied. “You see, every time a girl tells me that she loves me, I have to ask myself whether she really loves me or just wants to be Queen. And whoever I choose is going to have a jolly hard job, always in my shadow, having to walk a few steps behind me, all that sort of thing.”

  The year Charles turned thirty, an increasingly impatient Mountbatten gave him a jolt by warning that he was “beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your uncle David’s [Edward VIII] life and led to his disgraceful abdication and his futile life ever after.” Charles was starting to feel the pressure, telling a friend in April 1979, “I must say I am becoming rather worried by all this talk about being self-centered.… I’m told that marriage is the only cure for me—and maybe it is!… The media will simply not take me seriously until I do get married and apparently become responsible. At the moment I’m convinced that they see me as ‘marriage’ or ‘bird’ fodder.”

  Throughout the seventies, Amanda Knatchbull remained in the picture for Charles. Clearly he admired and respected her, and he recognized that she instinctively understood the demands of the “job.” Not long after Mountbatten’s rebuke about selfishness, Charles raised the topic of marriage with Amanda, who gently and swiftly turned him down. She grasped all too well the sacrifices that she would have to make as his wife: giving up her independence, losing her identity in the royal family, and exposing herself to relentless scrutiny by the press.

  “She was fond of the Prince,” noted a man who knew her well, “but she knew the life would be unbearable.” Ironically, the very qualities that drove her to rebuff Charles argued for her suitability as his consort: She was secure in her identity, she had no illusions about the monarchy, and she had a realistic view of what she wanted from life. “She is a very attractive and warm woman, very sensible, feet on the ground,” her friend continued. “She was much more aware of the duties than Diana was, because the Mountbattens were closer to the throne than the Spencers.”

  Amanda Knatchbull did not appear to know, however, that Charles had recently renewed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, by then married for six years and the mother of two children, the second of whom was born in 1979. Because of the friendship between the Parker Bowles family and the Queen Mother, Andrew and Camilla had often been invited to the various royal residences, where they spent time with Prince Charles. In many ways, the Parker Bowleses had a typically male-dominated, upper-class marriage. They lived essentially separate lives, he in London with a succession of mistresses, and she in the country, where he would return for hunting and shooting on the weekend. Camilla was no fool; she was aware of her husband’s peccadilloes. “It was an open marriage,” said a friend of the couple. “He wandered a lot.”

  By 1979, Charles was having long telephone conversations with Camilla; he had come to regard her as the best friend to whom he could confide his hopes, happiness, anxieties, and secrets. He was drawn, according to Dimbleby, to her “warmth, her lack of ambition or guile, her good humour and her gentleness.” They fell in love, and when Andrew left that year for a six-month posting in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), Charles and Camilla’s relationship again became intimate. Close friends and some family members “began to suppose that they were having a clandestine affair … to a point where [Charles] was warned that an illicit liaison would be damaging to his own standing,” according to Dimbleby. Yet the Queen, in her customary hands-off fashion, declined to intervene to end the relationship.

  Diana Spencer faced another family trauma in September 1978, when
her father collapsed at fifty-four from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He lay in a coma for several months as Raine supervised his care in a London hospital. “The surgeons didn’t want to operate because they were sure I was going to die,” Johnnie said a decade later. “She told them to ‘Bloody well get on with it!’ She saved me.” When Johnnie contracted pneumonia, Raine used her connections to secure an untested medication from Germany that cured him. “I was the first person after the rats that it was tried on,” Johnnie said.

  Diana, then seventeen, and her siblings resented Raine’s controlling behavior. They felt that Raine kept them from visiting their father in the hospital—with the exception of Sarah, who asserted herself and went anyway. Afterward, Diana believed that her father had become a different person: “estranged but adoring.”

  The only bright spot evident in that otherwise gloomy autumn was Diana’s invitation to attend a dance at Buckingham Palace for Prince Charles’s thirtieth birthday on November 14, 1978. Sarah Spencer was naturally invited because of her friendship with Charles, but Diana’s inclusion came as a surprise. As she had been when she met Charles a year earlier at Althorp, Diana was intrigued by Sarah’s apparent jealousy.

  Detecting signals that Diana “hadn’t twigged on to,” Sarah wondered why her younger sister was included. Diana later said she had not been “intimidated” by Buckingham Palace, although she confessed thinking it was an “amazing place.”