Diana's Nightmare - The Family (13 page)

One of the most treasured heirlooms at Broadlands was a fragment of the wedding dress of Mountbatten's twenty-first great-grandmother, Saint (no less) Elizabeth. Just weeks before his murder, Lord Louis told the legend behind it to Chris Hutchins.

'The ruler whom Elizabeth married was a very hard man on his subjects, and it was in defiance of his strictest instructions that she carried bread to the poor in her apron when he went out hunting,' said Mountbatten. 'He suspected she was doing this and returned one day to catch her out. "What have you got in your apron?" he asked, and she replied, "Roses, sire". "Roses in winter? A likely story. Show me." "Oh God, let it be roses," she prayed, and as she opened her apron, roses fell out. She was canonised by the Pope.'

At Broadlands, Diana learned that her own struggle was just beginning. When she later declared: 'My husband has taught me everything I know,' the compliment was like a double-edged sword aimed straight at his heart.

'It was as if he was married to them, not me, and they were so patronising it drove me mad'

Diana, Princess of Wales

BEFORE the House of Wales was irrevocably split by divided royalties, Charles and Diana proved that they could be a world-beating team. When they placed their differences on hold, the myth of 'the perfect couple' became momentarily real and the effect was dazzling. They were able to achieve far more than anyone else on the royal payroll, and that included the Queen and Prince Philip.

Diana's charisma and her husband's title had great pulling power among members of the Big Hitters' League, the unofficial name for the rich benefactors who funded many royal charities. 'She was seen as a cross between Cleopatra and Cinderella, and he was the luckiest man alive,' said one big player. 'Everyone wanted to meet them, and they were prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege.' There was no more graphic example of this than the occasion Charles and Diana raised £1.2 million for charity in a single night. For a short period, Wales Inc. was a going concern and it prospered.

At the time of their marriage, Charles had promised, at Diana's insistence, that he would cool his relationships with Camilla Parker Bowles and Lady Tryon. He refused to freeze them out completely, but he agreed with Diana that she must rate as the most important woman in his life. In return, she promised to fit in with royal life as best she could. The pact seemed to work for the first three years, during which Prince William and Prince Harry were born. But Charles, according to his wife's friends, never really honoured his side of the bargain. His heart wasn't in it once the arguments started. When Diana found out that he was still secretly in touch with the Twin-set Twins, particularly Camilla, she exploded. She felt betrayed and she lost her temper.

Even as early as their extended honeymoon, a bedroom was wrecked and there were highly disagreeable arguments at Balmoral. 'They came down to breakfast one morning as though everything was all right,' said a guest. 'But both side tables to the bed in their room had been knocked over and both lamps were smashed. When this was discovered, they said they had had a pillow fight. But I think it was a proper fight.' 'Diana started to give voice to the screams that had been mounting inside her for months,' said a friend. 'She more or less forced a deal out of Charles.'

In the face of this domestic disharmony, the Prince reacted in character. He put some distance between himself and the problem. He moved out of the marital bedroom, first into a dressing room at Balmoral, and then into a spare room in Kensington Palace. He made excuses to spend more time at Highgrove, which the Duchy of Cornwall had bought for him to use just before his engagement.

The Gloucestershire estate became his Shangri-La, a haven where he could retrace the lost horizons of his bachelor days. 'I have put my heart and soul into Highgrove,' he declared. His landscaping, gardening and farming activities there were 'the physical expression of a personal philosophy'. It was also a place where he could express himself physically and personally with Camilla. She would later act as hostess at his dinner parties.

'Mrs Parker Bowles behaved just as though she and the Prince were married,' said one familiar with the household. 'She chose the menu, supervised the cooking and helped select the dinner guests. When they arrived, they treated her with all the respect you would expect them to give the Princess of Wales. They did everything but curtsy to her. Many of the staff felt disloyal simply by being there when Mrs Parker Bowles was granding it over everyone. There was very strong feeling about the way the Prince was behaving in humiliating his wife.'

Charles's friends claimed that it was Diana's bulimic behaviour and her irrational tantrums that drove him back into Camilla's arms. The truth was somewhere in the middle, in every marriage break-up, there are three stories: His, Hers and the Truth,' said one friend.

Yet at the mid-point of their married life the Waleses had come to identify the influences that were driving them apart. If they couldn't resolve their differences, they could at least 'keep it between themselves' for the sake of the children. Diana consulted several doctors and psychiatrists about her bulimia and the post-natal depression which had followed each birth. The result was a shaky stalemate which signalled a let-up in hostilities if not exactly the outbreak of unconditional peace. After a very unpromising start, things began to get a little better.

It was during this brief reprieve that Wales Inc. went into action to spectacular effect. Harry Goodman, the East End-born holiday tycoon, was serving a term as Chief Barker of the Variety Club of Great Britain in 1986 when he received an unexpected call. 'My secretary told me Prince Charles was on the line and I said, "You're kidding!" I'd met him socially at film premieres and that sort of thing, but you still don't expect to get that kind of phone call. It came right out of the blue. Charles said he'd been introduced to the Rev Ted Noffs, an Australian clergyman who was visiting England after being voted Australia's Man of the Year. He ran this church in Kings Cross, Sydney, right in the middle of the city's drug culture. He had launched a programme called Life Educational to teach children about the dangers of drug abuse. Special caravans drove around giving animated shows to children and the results had been so successful he wanted to introduce the same sort of thing in Britain. Charles asked me to meet him to see if we could raise the money to get it off the ground. I saw Ted Noffs at my office, he was a terrific guy, and we had a series of meetings with the Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the Variety Club.

'One evening, Ted and I turned up at Kensington Palace for a meeting and found Diana playing with the kids in the garden. I'd never been there before and it was incredible to see how normal it was. Diana was wearing a pair of jeans and, as we sat down inside, she said, "Would you like some tea?" She actually poured the tea. It was a small thing, but I was absolutely gobsmacked because I thought there would be liveried flunkeys to do it. She was still in her jeans and there was a lovely atmosphere; it was terrific, just fabulous. I sat there thinking, "The Princess of Wales poured me a cup of tea" and I realised that's how you fall in love with the woman. That's the charm.

'The mobile units cost £60,000 each to put on the road and we discussed the best way to sponsor them. I told the Prince that we would need his backing and he and the Princess agreed to do a dinner. It was up to us what sort of dinner we did. We could either do the traditional thing and get a thousand people at £50 a head or try something quite different. Myself and one or two other people decided the best way would be to do a very select dinner for twenty Big Hitters who would each pay £60,000 for the privilege. Charles and Diana said it couldn't be done, no one would pay that kind of money, but they agreed to take part. We booked it at the Dorchester Hotel: twenty couples at sixty grand a couple. It wasn't easy, but it took no more than a month to set up and we raised £1,200,000 in one night.

'We took adjoining suites, one with a balcony for a cocktail reception, and next to it a huge dining room with five tables laid out. Ted Noffs was there and it was a tremendous success - a warm, caring evening. I won't name the guest list, but they were either very rich individuals or people sponsored by major companies. Everyone made a thing about it being very anonymous, but they paid £60,000 to go.

'Charles and Diana both looked terrific - they
were
terrific - and they seemed very happy. If there were any problems in their relationship, it didn't show. It's said the marriage was bad from the beginning but I don't believe it. She's a lot of fun, obviously, and his sense of humour is a lot drier, but they were a lovely couple. They chatted to everyone and Charles made an anti-drug speech. Diana was the star but she wasn't the confident lady she is today. She was quite nervous and I did think, "It can't be easy to marry someone with his background. How do you marry into the Firm?"'

The Firm, of course, was one of the key symptoms of Diana's real problem. When she inadvisedly called the other royals 'this
f***ing
family' a few years later, she was speaking from bitter experience. She had found out that, in her own words, 'being a princess is not all it's cracked up to be'.

DIANA had to put her natural home-making flair to one side while she perfected her new role as the Princess of Wales. The 'double apartment' she and Charles were to occupy at Kensington Palace presented great possibilities for imaginative design. Really a three-storey house with twenty-five rooms, Apartments Eight and Nine had been derelict since they were firebombed during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Restoration work had been completed inside and out just before the engagement. The grace-and-favour residence Prince Charles called 'the perfect present-day home in London' still needed to be decorated. He was happy to leave it to Diana, who eagerly responded to the challenge. But she found that her consultations with Dudley Poplak, the interior designer, had to be fitted in between other, more pressing, engagements.

Diana was now a working royal and she had promised Charles that this would be her main priority. From the moment she stepped outside their temporary home in his bachelor quarters at Buckingham Palace, she was on show until the wrought-iron gates closed behind her late at night. When she collapsed into their four-poster bed, she was aware that she was sleeping under her mother- in-law's roof. Even more off-putting for a newly-wed, she suspected Charles had shared the same bed with Camilla and other girlfriends. There was the added discomfort of having to live in the presence of courtiers and staff committed to running the Sovereign's household. She felt that even the lowest footman was smirking behind a gloved hand. They had been there before her; they knew Charles's secrets. Diana was made painfully aware like others before her that, even inside the Palace, she was regarded as an outsider.

The same applied whenever the royal roadshow moved to Windsor, Balmoral or Sandringham with as many as two hundred retainers in tow. The Windsors could never be called a close family, although they were close-knit in the most tribal way. Diana found the atmosphere in the Queen's circle stifling to the point of suffocation. When she complained to Charles, he told her bluntly that she would have to adapt. To escape the tedium of Balmoral, she once flew to London to go shopping for a few hours and was roundly criticised. Nothing so far remotely resembled the intimate married lifestyle she had longed for as a child searching for true love. She had been warned about the pressures of royal life, but the reality was much more demanding. An unending cycle of packing, unpacking, hairdressing, clothes-changing and briefings to meet rigid Palace schedules began to exact a high price on her health.

She was fortunate that, instead of Fergie, her chief lady-in-waiting was Anne Beckwith-Smith, a cheerful woman and a very capable organiser. Fergie, however, continued to call and her advice rarely varied: 'Stand up for yourself.' Diana was always on the go and her weight kept falling. 'I'm exhausted, but I can't let people down,' she told a friend.

Her initiation as a fully-fledged royal had been a three-day tour of Wales a few weeks after they returned from the three-month honeymoon, which had included a Mediterranean cruise in
Britannia
and a trip to Egypt. Diana had just become pregnant with William and morning sickness, coupled with outbreaks of bulimia, left her drained and frightened. Even Charles, who had been carrying out royal duties for most of his life, found it difficult to accept his altered status. For a start, he had to think in the plural, the 'royal we' now meaning precisely that. Yet the understandable, though selfish, habit of thinking mainly of himself was so deeply ingrained that he began to have regrets. Unless he was travelling with his parents, Charles had always been the centre of attention, the unchallenged Number One. Proud as he was of his new wife, he was more than a little jealous of her instant fame. He was, he found, now definitely Number Two.

Diana's star quality had been evident on their wedding day and if Charles had any doubts that he had been relegated to second place, they were soon removed. In wet and windy Wales, the crowds made it patently clear that they had turned out to see Diana. Her appeal was overpowering. People who had seen the film now wanted to meet the star. Among ordinary folk, she rated higher than Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand or any of the Hollywood icons she watched so avidly in
Dallas
or
Dynasty.
Sick as she was, she gave great value. 'Poor you! I feel cold myself,' she told one shivering woman. 'My hands are freezing - and you must be much worse. Thank you for waiting for us.' The common touch was genuine and heart-warming.

If people admired Charles, they adored Diana. She developed an instantaneous street cred that crossed the barriers of sex, age, race and class. No one ever got close enough to Madonna to ask for a kiss, let alone get one. From early on, Diana kissed children, their grandparents and everyone else in between. People reached out to touch her. She embraced them by the thousand and laid her healing hands on the crippled and the sick. Through the media, she became the most recognisable image in world popular culture. She brought joy to complete strangers, but she was suffering inside. Since her engagement, she had lost twenty-eight pounds in weight.