Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  In 1980, Prince Charles was on the rebound from his affair with Anna “Whiplash” Wallace. Wallace was a dangerous version of Lady Diana—tall, blond, but a reckless horsewoman. Prince Charles was sexually obsessed by her and would probably have married her if the press hadn’t revealed her past. Shortly afterward she unceremoniously dumped him.

  It was following the Wallace debacle that Prince Charles began to see that he must snap up the shy little sister of his friend Sarah Spencer because the chances of another eligible virgin coming his way were slim. She was not very bright, but she had a sweet nature. At school her chief academic accolades were the Leggatt Cup for Helpfulness and the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner (for being kind to her guinea pig, Peanuts). If he passed her up he would find himself like a royal Roman Polanski dating thirteen-year-old girls when he was forty. The press, led by Nigel Dempster, had corralled poor Lady Diana and were howling for a happy ending. His family wanted it. The public wanted it. Like the last Prince of Wales, he liked to confide in married women, and his two favorites, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker-Bowles, wanted it. They had met the blushing little Spencer girl and deduced she was not going to give them any trouble. Better her than another fiery number like Anna Wallace. Prince Charles was exhausted. He proposed.

  But Diana’s famed shyness was one of her most misleading character traits. It is not the bashfulness of youth, but the statement of her whole style of operating. The generation gap between the royal couple is far more profound than a matter of age. It is the yawning sensibility gap between the Me generation and the yuppie generation. The Princess of Wales is mentally and emotionally light-years away from the career girls, the rebels, the bolters, the experimenters Prince Charles associated with in his dancing years. She is one of the new school of born-again old-fashioned girls who play it safe and breed early. Postfeminist, post-verbal, her femininity is modeled on a fifties concept of passive power. The style is all summed up by her voice, which is flat, almost gruff, with half-swallowed vowels—“Pritz Chuls” for Prince Charles, “yaw” for yes, “hice” for house. When, at a dance at Broadlands, an overenthusiastic American millionaire told her, “Your Royal Highness, I’d love a signed photograph of you,” she barked, “Tough luck.” With the voice goes a total absence of intellectual curiosity. Another hallmark of the type is a streak of quiet tenacity, developed, no doubt, from the age of six, when her homelife was shattered by her mother’s departure with a wallpaper tycoon. She is a female type we don’t often meet in the modern novel, but the Victorians knew her well. In Middlemarch she appears as Rosamond Vincy, the exquisite blonde with the swan’s neck whose decorous extravagance in the face of her husband’s pleas to desist finally breaks his spirit.

  Diana’s passive power chimes very well with the needs of modern royalty. What is required is an image, a symbol, a charismatic focus for Britain’s inchoate feelings of nationhood in a gloomy period of history. Like the Queen Mother, another iron mouse, Diana’s uninterpretative mind did not pause to analyze the mechanism of her own appeal, but she knew how to use it instinctively. That’s why she began her extraordinary physical transformation from mouse to movie star. When Charles and Diana announced their engagement in 1981, they had scarcely had time to get to know each other. He had done his duty and hoped it would work out. But his feelings changed subsequently in Australia, when he saw the image of the girl he’d left behind flowering on the front page of every newspaper. Royal biographer Anthony Holden tells me that on that tour he watched Prince Charles fall in love with her before his very eyes.

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  Shortly after their marriage I met the Prince and Princess of Wales at a black-tie dinner at the American Embassy in London. It was Diana’s most beguiling moment, when the star quality was emerging but the schoolgirl was still there. We were asked to form up in groups of four to be introduced. The playwright Tom Stoppard was in my group. It was the first time I’d ever seen him lost for words. She came first, pure and fresh and charmingly angular in her choker and senior-prom manner. She was wearing a pale-blue dress that seemed to have been spun out of moonbeams, and her skin had the pink sheen of a cultured pearl. She was startlingly more self-possessed than when I’d met her a year before, leading the small talk with a slightly pointed chin, gallantly keeping it afloat. I told her I had come back from a wonderful trip to Venice on the Orient-Express. “I can never sleep on trains, can you?” she replied. When Charles joined her, his accomplished manner was much less effective. “I’ve thought of a good idea for a play,” he told Tom Stoppard. “It’s about a hotel which caters entirely for people with phobias. It was a small item in the Times.” “We’ll go halves on the take, sir,” said Stoppard kindly. “Actually, I thought it was so amusing,” Prince Charles persisted, “I telephoned Spike Milligan [the British comedian] and told him. It’s a most frightfully funny idea, don’t you think?” His words conjured up a poignant picture: Prince Charles asking his secretary to put through a call to Milligan, who, after conquering his astonishment, had to listen politely and humor the royal desire to throw out a spark that might ignite somewhere.

  They moved on to the next group. The easy chat halted as they approached. I was struck by the exhausting oddness of always approaching silent people who stood there waiting to be addressed. But even at this early stage Diana had evolved a perfect way to deal with it. Her small talk was fine, but she didn’t really have to speak at all. She had perfected the art of detaching herself and being a presence. Every pair of eyes followed her hungrily as she bid the ambassador a slim, luminous good-night.

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  Since then the astonishing power of her fame has stamped out the schoolgirl. She is much more self-conscious about her image, much more professional. She created a fashion style in England by heightening and glamorizing the basic wardrobe requirements of the Sloane Ranger—old-fashioned pearl choker, low pumps, piecrust frills, and good earrings at all times. Now, with her shoulder pads and frosted bearskin hairdo, it’s all gone Hollywood. On her Italian tour she disregarded her private advisers at British Vogue and belly flopped in the fashion press when she emerged in a repertoire of heinous hats. The instinctive style that carried her through is turning into a new obsession with her image. She spends hours studying her press clippings—almost as if she’s trying to figure out for herself the secret of her mystique. She was furious when it was reported she spent £100,000 on her wardrobe for Italy. Like Jackie O before her, she shops compulsively to relieve the tension and is probably unaware, in the rush it gives her, of what it all costs. “Where did you get your figures?” she challenged one royal hack.

  She is in that adversary mood toward the press that is the first stage in the removal from life that fame inflicts. The second stage is “Graceland,” when the real world melts away altogether. There is a danger that this has started to happen to Diana. Apart from the children’s tea parties at Highgrove and Kensington Palace, her social life is nonexistent. One of her closest postmarriage friends is the young Duchess of Westminster, whose children are often summoned to partake of the quivering mounds of royal Jell-O. Lately, “Tally” Westminster complains, the princess never returns her calls. Likewise, Diana’s twenty-one-year-old brother, Lord Althorp, an Oxford undergraduate, is concerned with how remote she’s become. With “Wills” and “Harry” looked after by three nannies, Diana spends hours cut off in her Sony Walkman, dancing on her own to Dire Straits and Wham! It’s difficult for Charles to recall her from her isolation, because he’s even more cut off than she is.

  He doesn’t seem to mind anyway. The realization that the spotlight is off him has enabled Prince Charles to relax his own arduous self-projection for the first time in his life. He has understood about Diana what Queen Elizabeth has always known about the Queen Mother—that she’s a natural star. (“If it were Mummy, they would all be cheering,” the Queen is said to have commented sadly at a subdued rally.) The pressure has falle
n from Charles, leaving him free to be irresponsible at last. It’s a release that has finally allowed him the postadolescent rebellion against the Teutonic boorishness of Prince Philip. Relations between father and son these days are so strained that when Prince Charles walks into a room Prince Philip walks out of it. He expressed his displeasure by not visiting Prince Harry until six weeks after the birth.

  This suits Prince Charles, who is indulging in the luxury of being himself. It was not Diana who turned him into a fish-and-fowl freak. What he eats is not of much interest to her, since she’s permanently on a diet.

  It was his own brooding on biofeedback that led him up this path and also to insist that the Duchy of Cornwall farms be run on the latest organic lines. A posse of unlikely gurus have entered his life—Laurens van der Post, with his talk of mystical and religious experiences in Africa; Patrick Pietroni, a leading exponent of holistic medicine; Dr. Miriam Rothschild, an authority on fleas, who invented a seed mix of weeds and wild flowers known as “farmer’s nightmare,” which Charles has sown around his Highgrove acres; and a medium named Dr. Winifred Rushworth, whose books encouraged him to make contact on a Ouija board with the shade of his beloved “Uncle Dickie” Mountbatten. Again, it was not the princess who discouraged him from shooting. Perhaps he found it made a nonsense of his new conservation stance. Nor, most important, was it Diana who drove out the trusted Edward Adeane, along with Oliver Everett, Diana’s private secretary, and Francis Cornish, the prince’s assistant private secretary, who recently hopped it to some white man’s grave in Borneo.

  Adeane left because he was utterly dismayed by the motley crew of mystics, spiritualists, and self-sufficiency freaks acting as the prince’s unofficial advisers. He simply could not stand working for a man whose private office had become redundant. He wanted Prince Charles to confront the need to create a serious role in British national life. He urged Charles to make Queen Elizabeth give him something real to do. With his opera interests he could, say, become chairman of the Royal Opera House. With his gardening interests he could be secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society. Dammit, there were respectable public outfits for Charles’s new solitary passions. But Charles frustrated Adeane by refusing to push himself forward. Instead he took the chance to dismantle his office. It meant there would be no one to nag him anymore about duty. His tally of official engagements dropped off noticeably. He seemed to become obsessed with his children. Like John Lennon, who spent the last years of his life as a recluse playing with his son in the Dakota, Prince Charles has turned into a house husband.

  No one is more dismayed by all this than his wife. When Diana fell in love with Charles, he was a James Bond smoothy with a glamorous sheen of metropolitan amours. Now he wants to be a farmer. It is hard to overestimate the boredom of the royal schedule she has to endure. All the royal houses are like second-rate hotels to live in, with the inmates complaining rustily that dinner was “bloody awful!” Sandringham, situated near the freezing Norfolk Broads, is the worst, but Balmoral, where Charles spends most of the summer up to his ankles in the river fishing, is also the scene of hellishly convivial family picnics and Princess Margaret playing the piano until two in the morning. It’s not surprising that when she fled one autumn, Diana had only two words to say in explanation—“Boring. Raining.”

  Charles, for his part, was happy for his bride to evolve into the Super Sloane Ranger, but less wild about the excesses of the new princessly development. His estates bring him an income of over £1 million a year, but he is frugal to the point of meanness. One of his less endearing traits is to check the refrigerator at Highgrove for any sign the servants are overeating at his expense. Diana, appalled at the house’s discomfort when she first saw it, immediately went into overdrive with the interior designer Dudley Poplak to create a comfortable, if predictably chintzy, country home.

  Her lack of intellect discourages Charles. Recently he made a weekend trip to a friend’s house, without Diana, to study its magnificent garden. His European hostess spoke perfect English, and he complimented her. “My father believed in educating girls,” she laughed. “I wish,” said Prince Charles, “that had been the philosophy in my wife’s family.”

  If Princess Diana is a very young twenty-four, he is a very old thirty-six. Only Prince Charles could have picked a navy-blue suit to wear to the Live Aid concert. He allowed Diana to stay for only an hour before dragging her away to watch polo. (“My wife made me go to some pop jamboree,” he grumbled to a friend.)

  Unsurprisingly, they have few mutual cronies. There’s a worthy country-bumpkin couple called the Palmer-Tomkinsons who share their skiing interests, and Lord Vestey’s second wife, Celia, a senior Sloane Ranger who enjoys a certain lukewarm favor, but the old faithfuls like banker Lord Tryon and Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles and their frisky wives, who did so much to divert the bachelor Charles, have been banished since the marriage (a satisfyingly comic dénouement from Diana’s point of view). Bonds have weakened with other inseparables like Tory M.P. Nicholas “Fatty” Soames, Winston Churchill’s grandson, who offer a more sophisticated line in conversation. (“Pass the port, he’s not my sort” is one of his catchphrases.) Soames recently called his son “Harry” to curry favor with Prince Charles, but Diana is unswayed and is said to find him “heavy furniture.” And since Prince Charles cannot abide the Diana clones who are her old buddies, or the neo-Neanderthal Hooray Henrys who escort them, the Waleses can find very few weekend guests for house parties. For the anniversary of Handel’s birth, in July, Prince Charles invited four hundred “friends” to a musical evening with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Buckingham Palace. It was a private evening, but none of their peer group was present. The guests were all ambassadors, dignitaries, and assorted oldsters. The princess followed Prince Charles around looking glum.

  Sometimes, through the looking glass, she sees glimpses of another life.

  Earlier this year, while Prince Charles stayed at home worrying about the beet crop, Diana attended a charity fund-raiser escorted by her favorite English fashion designer, Bruce Oldfield. It was a chic, young evening. Oldfield is amusing company. The princess was supposed to leave at midnight, like Cinderella, but she stayed on and on. When Charlotte Rampling’s husband, the charming French musician Jean-Michel Jarre, asked her to dance, the princess positively lit up. One guest told me, “Everyone within twenty yards got the fallout from Diana’s mood that night. She was suddenly aware of everything she was missing.”

  It is somehow typical of Prince Charles that he was a yuppie when everyone else was a yippie, and now that everyone else has gone straight he’s discovered the flower child’s concern with brown rice and spiritualism. He’s in just the kind of mood to fall in love with a nursery-school teacher in flat shoes who’s kind to guinea pigs and babies.

  If he looks hard enough, she’s still there.

  (The Waleses divorced in 1996 after a long separation. The following year, in Paris, Diana and her companion Dodi Fayed died, along with their chauffeur, Henri Paul, when their Mercedes S280 crashed while attempting to elude a band of paparazzi. Another passenger, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, though injured, survived. Paul was later discovered to have been inebriated at the time of the accident.

  Charles would marry Camilla Parker Bowles [Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall] in 2005.)

  THE STARS

  GRACE KELLY

  GRACE KELLY’S FOREVER LOOK

  By Laura Jacobs | May 2010

  It may be the softest kiss in film history. The sun is setting over West Side rooftops, the sky persimmon. A man, his leg in a cast, sleeps near an open window, undisturbed by a neighbor singing scales. Just after the highest note is reached, a shadow climbs over the man’s chest, shoulder, and chin. We see a face: blue eyes, red lips, skin like poured cream, pearls. Then he sees it. The kiss happens in profile, a slow-motion hallucinatory blur somewhere between myth and dream, a limbic level of consciousness. The
director, Alfred Hitchcock, liked to say he got the effect by shaking the camera. In truth, this otherworldly kiss comes to us by way of a double printing. Has any muse in cinema been graced with such a perfect cameo portrait of her power?

  “How’s your leg?” she murmurs. “It hurts a little,” Jimmy Stewart answers. Another soft kiss, more teasing questions. “Anything else bothering you?” she asks. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Who are you?”

  Who, indeed! In 1954, when Rear Window premiered, Grace Kelly had been in only four films. She was hardly known to the public, and then she was suddenly known—a star. In her first film, Fourteen Hours, she played an innocent bystander, on-screen for two minutes and 14 seconds. In her second, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, she co-starred as the pacifist bride of embattled sheriff Gary Cooper. In her third movie, John Ford’s Mogambo, she was the prim wife of an anthropologist (Donald Sinden) and Jane to big-game hunter Clark Gable’s Tarzan. It was a steep and impressive learning curve, straight to the top. By the time Hitchcock got his hands on her, figuratively speaking, casting himself as Pygmalion to her Galatea, Grace Kelly was ready for her close-up. Hitchcock gave her one after another, in three films that placed her on a pedestal—Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief—enshrining her as an archetype newly minted. “A snow-covered volcano” was how he put it. She was ladylike yet elemental, suggestive of icy Olympian heights and untouched autonomy yet, beneath it all, unblushing heat and fire. By 1956, two years, six films, and one Academy Award after Rear Window—while the country was still wondering, Who are you, Miss Kelly?—she was gone, off to Europe to marry a prince, whence she would become Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco.