Diana's Nightmare - The Family (49 page)

The sexual conundrum had been brought out into the open in April 1990 when a gossip columnist hinted that Edward had a 'touching' friendship with Michael Ball, the leading man in
Aspects of Love.
Edward flew to New York for the show's Broadway premiere and, when a foreign correspondent approached him at the first night party, he decided it was time to speak in his own defence.

'It's just outrageous to suggest that sort of thing,' the Prince said with controlled fury as other partygoers tried to eavesdrop without spilling their champagne, it's so unfair to me and my family. How would you feel if someone said you were gay? The rumours are preposterous. I am not gay but what can I do about it? The Press has to be a lot more responsible. I just wish I could be left to enjoy what I do.'

Wisely side-stepping a career in the Royal Marines, Edward had become the first royal to find a job outside the armed forces when he joined Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group as a production assistant in January 1988. The theatre was Edward's real love and he fought a valiant battle to take his place in the wings. After two years learning the craft, he felt he was ready for bigger things.

When Bridget 'Biddy' Hayward, Lloyd Webber's executive director, broke away to form a new theatre production group with a coterie of other defectors, Edward threw himself into the enterprise. Part of his job was to recruit 'angels' who were willing to risk their money in the commercially treacherous quicksands of the West End. His name undoubtedly had something to do with his success in raising capital, although there was never any suggestion that the Royal Family would underwrite the venture.

As its first show, the company, Theatre Division, planned to stage a 1950 comedy called
The Rehearsal
by the French dramatist Jean Anouilh. One of the first people Edward recruited was Michael Winner, the
Death Wish
film-maker who was also sympathetic towards the living theatre. 'Prince Edward wrote to me and asked me to invest in a new play,' remembered Winner. 'He said, "All this is going to be wonderful. We'll make a fortune." Edward, I said, you are going to lose everything. No company can keep offices and all the staff to put plays on in the West End because it's a very rough business.'

Edward, however, had a stubborn streak and he persisted with the hard sell. Starring Nicola Pagett,
The Rehearsal
opened to mixed reviews at the Garrick Theatre in November 1990 and closed without covering its costs. 'Bless him, I was slightly wrong,' said Winner. 'I think we lost eighty per cent of our money.'

Taking
The Rehearsal's
title at face value, Edward the impresario pressed ahead with the fledgling company's next show, a play called
Same Old Moon
by Dublin-born playwright Geraldine Aron, which he had recommended himself. 'We lost the rest of the money and, after that, the company ran out of funds and vanished,' explained Winner. 'Edward is a very nice person, a decent kid, and he took it philosophically.' Theatre Division went down with debts of £600,000 and Edward devoted his extra time to royal duties, particularly promoting and fund raising for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme.

When Charles and Andrew's marriages failed in 1992, Edward was cast in the role of troubleshooter if not exactly peacemaker. Shrewder than most people credited, he was the only royal who could talk to the estranged couples as individuals. Moreover, his natural inclination to be non-judgemental and non-malicious made it easier for him to avoid taking sides. He found it difficult, however, to trust Diana.

Although his views remained strictly private, a friend of the Prince said: 'Her behaviour is quite conspicuous of what she's about. She is everything you have probably realised: calculating, self-preserving and absolutely the best actress in the world. The best way to illustrate this was her performance at a funeral I attended. In front of the church where the cameras were on her she was tearful and sad and moving-all those things. The moment she was out of the camera's range she was bubbling and cheerful and full of life. I was watching her very closely and when she went back to the family house, she was so up and full of beans that it had to be seen to be believed. I just noticed a spectacular difference in her performance in front of the camera and then off it. Okay, sure - funerals aren't supposed to be particularly morbid, but at the same time I think she went over the top.'

Edward had been present at Balmoral at the end of the royal honeymoon in 1981. His new sister-in-law's behaviour towards Charles had deeply upset him. He had heard the rows coming from their bedroom and seen the furniture which had been broken during one showdown. It was, he told a friend, a rotten advertisement for marriage.

Although he readily became a favourite uncle to William and Harry and often visited Kensington Palace, Edward was saddened by Charles's unhappiness. He noted that the elder brother he admired so much cheered up whenever Camilla or Kanga were on the scene, either at Balmoral or Sandringham. He knew what was going on in Diana's marriage and he didn't try to interfere.

As the youngest, Edward hadn't been spoiled like Andrew, who was four years older, while Charles, fifteen years his senior, was dealing with more grown-up matters at Gordonstoun before he could even crawl. The Queen was thirty-seven when he was born, and had the opportunity to spend more time with the new baby. She had ensured that he enjoyed relative anonymity until he followed his brothers to Gordonstoun. But Edward felt the sibling rivalry all the more keenly because of the targets the others had set for him. Unsure of his position, he was intrigued by brotherly relations in other families.

He never forgot a visit he made to Longleat, the Marquess of Bath's stately home in Wiltshire. 'He came down with the Queen and Prince Philip for the 400th anniversary, but the date was far from precise because my father had missed it and had to invent one,' said Alexander, Viscount Weymouth, who succeeded his father's title in 1992. 'As we took them on a guided tour, Prince Philip looked up at one of the ceilings and asked, "Is that part of the original Elizabethan house?" I said, "Oh no, that's much more recent." Whereupon my younger brother Christopher said in excited tones that it was, in fact, the original. This blazing row flared up between us. Seven years later, Edward came down on a visit and he remembered the occasion vividly. He called it "that awful row you and your brother had in front of my parents". He obviously identified with it in his own family.'

In fact, Edward outshone both Charles and Andrew academically. He passed nine O levels and gained A levels in English, history, and economics and politics. He played Rugby and squash, sailed well and took part in the school's dramatic productions. In his last term, he was made Guardian, or head boy. He earned his glider wings after his first solo flight in 1980 and two years later qualified for a private pilot's licence in a Bulldog two-seater piston-engined trainer.

As he travelled the world in his father's name, he showed that he was dependable and wise beyond his years. The Duke of Edinburgh gave him more responsibility and noted proudly that the 'afterthought' in his family had turned out well. His new nickname was Rock Steady Eddie. When Romy Adlington sold the story of their romance to the
Sunday Mirror
, he was able to shrug it off as nothing more serious than an occupational hazard of being a prince.

IF Edward needed any further confirmation of the perils involved in bringing an outsider into the Family, it came soon after the Palace announced that Viscount Linley had finally chosen a bride from among his many girlfriends. Fifth in line to the throne when he was born, David Linley had wooed a number of leggy blondes before he proposed to Serena Stanhope, daughter of Charles, Viscount Petersham, heir to William the eleventh Earl of Harrington, an extremely wealthy London property owner.

When she first came to public attention as a Linley interest, Serena was described by a one-time escort, the photographer 'Prince' Hannibal, as 'a bubbly girl who loves to laugh and never sulks'. He also expressed surprise about a revealing dress she had worn on a night out with Linley: 'She must have chosen that dress to please him. She was always very conservatively dressed when we went out.'

Unlike many of Linley's previous loves whose pedigrees lay chiefly in their fathers' business acumen, Serena came from a family which could trace its ancestry back to Charles II and, in the sixteenth century, to the Earls of Bedford, Huntingdon and Worcester as well as Ferdinand I, the Holy Roman Emperor. A noble ancestry, however, did not protect her from the slings and arrows of former suitors and one crawled out of the woodwork on Independence Day in 1993 to offer a lurid description of their affair across two pages of the
People.
Selling what the newspaper described as her 'secret sexy past' was one Alexander Slack, who had been introduced to the heiress by her elder brother William in 1989 when she was just nineteen.

Readers of the Sunday newspaper were treated to a detailed account of how the girl who was to marry the Queen's nephew had made love with Slack in a number of public spaces, including the great squares of Kensington and Chelsea. 'Serena obviously felt like making love and we didn't need an excuse. It was a case of just passion and realising that if we went home we could not get any privacy,' claimed the former commodity broker. Serena was spared nothing. Slack said that they had even made love at her home in the bed her father normally shared with her stepmother, Anita Fugeslang, the former wife of the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire whom Viscount Petersham had married aboard a yacht off the coast of Fiji.

Slack maintained that in an effort to portray Serena as 'a lily-white princess', he had been wiped out of her past as if he had never existed and that he was hurt. In fact, his own life was in a certain amount of disarray. Six months earlier he had married Diana's cousin, the banking heiress Katie Baring, and the marriage had already foundered when he became a kiss-and-telltale. Published four days after she and her fiancé joined Diana at a high society party in Mayfair, the story certainly hurt Serena, but perhaps even more damaging was the photograph of her which covered the
People's
front page. She was pictured lying asleep on a floor in a black mini-dress that exposed gaping holes in her tights. One of the newspaper's executives said that Hannibal had taken the photograph, something he denied. 'No, that is nothing to do with me,' he said. 'The picture was taken in my flat but I didn't give it to anyone. I don't know why it got into the hands of whoever.' In any event, the paper demanded £5,000 from anyone wishing to reprint the photograph elsewhere.

Linley's love for Serena had blossomed the previous summer on an excursion to the home in Monte Carlo of her mother, the former showjumper Virginia Freeman-Jackson. Unsure at that stage of his intentions, he had telephoned another old flame, Stephanie Struthers, an account executive at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, to ask her out two days before his departure. 'Stephanie said he sounded hurt when she declined his invitation,' said a chum of Ms Struthers. 'He asked her, "Have you got anyone else on the go?" When she answered, "No, have you?" he replied, "Oh, I've got about four on the go at the moment." '

Coming from a broken home, Serena was well placed to handle such crises of confidence in Princess Margaret's son. When the time came to deal with the likes of Alexander Slack, David Linley was as supportive as a royal groom could be. Besides, he had not flinched when another ex, the stunning Susannah Constantine, had teased him with tales of her flings during their repeatedly on-off affair.

What Serena didn't know about the royals from her family she picked up from one of her friends, Santa Palmer-Tomkinson, daughter of Prince Charles's close pals, Charles and Patty.

Anyone less versed in royal mores might have been shocked by what happened the night she accompanied her fiancé to Tiffany's.

'This woman is just trying to create an image at the expense of her husband — it's wicked'

FREE of the husband one royal had dubbed The Thinker, Diana allowed herself a wry smile as she passed the gilded, near-naked body of a male model posing as a living reproduction of the Rodin sculpture. The eve of her thirty-second birthday, a hot midsummer's night, found the People's Princess at Tiffany's in Bond Street, Mayfair.

The London branch of the New York emporium was packed with rich and titled customers, carefully vetted so that Diana's secret visit might exclude the idly curious. Her appearance, though, still created excitement among the exquisitely dressed women taking supper at Tiffany's from dainty packets of fish and chips. Caught completely off guard, those in her path dropped into unrehearsed curtsies as Diana swept past. Others jostled forward for a better view. To catch the Princess of Wales, the most famous woman in the world, in person at the height of the Season was better than attending Oscar night in Hollywood.

Seemingly oblivious to the chaos her unexpected arrival had caused, Diana ignored the sound of breaking champagne flutes and the well meant greetings of complete strangers. As though anticipating her reception, she was dressed to kill, her make-up applied so heavily it looked like war paint.

When she passed The Thinker on a staircase on her way to inspect Jean Schlumberger's newest designs on the upper sales floor, it was impossible to tell whether she blushed. She probably didn't. The misty Gainsborough bride of 1981 was just a photographic memory on someone's mantelpiece. Similarly, Shy Di, the 'Gosh, Golly, Help, Panic!' Princess of a decade earlier, had been totally banished from her life - and so had the embarrassing Squidgy. On show in this jewelled temple was a woman of Substance who outwardly sparkled like the magnificent sapphire, encircled with diamonds, which shone from her seven-strand pearl choker. To best display the massive gem, she had selected a figure-hugging short-sleeved dress of midnight blue with a scooped neckline. If Charles was The Thinker, Diana in this phase of her metamorphosis was The Presence, an unmissable figure who glowed with an aura that was electrifying.