Diana's Nightmare - The Family (9 page)

AS a bachelor conducting an affair with a married woman, Charles would turn to Lady Tryon for advice. The Australian blonde, born Dale Elizabeth Harper, hailed from Melbourne, not far from where the Prince had spent six months at Timbertop, the character-building, up-country adjunct of Geelong Grammar School. He preferred her nickname, Kanga.

Of all the women Charles ever met, she was the most immediately endearing. 'They hit it off from the start,' said a friend. 'Dale was very attractive, but it was her personality that appealed to him. She is completely natural and unaffected. She was a school friend of Barry Humphries, but she didn't turn out remotely like Dame Edna.' She was also extremely brave. Dale had been born with spina bifida and the crippling illness was undetected at birth. Her father, Barry Harper, a wealthy magazine publisher, noticed the problem when he saw his daughter, aged seven, walk crookedly across a beach. As a result, she spent years of her childhood in a hospital for crippled children. 'She has never let her illness slow her down,' said the friend. 'She's a terribly energetic workaholic and Charles adores her.' 'My life is work, work, work,' said Kanga, who turned her hand to fashion designing. 'I work for the money - and because that's the way my father brought me up.'

They became friends after Dale arrived in London and started going out with one of his chums, Lord Anthony Tryon, the six-foot-four son of the Queen's Treasurer. Dale was working in public relations for Qantas, the Australian airline. The day she was due to return home, Lord Tryon, who coined the nickname Kanga, invited her to a farewell lunch in the City, where he worked as a merchant banker. Before the bill arrived, he had proposed to her and she had accepted. Kanga and 'Ant' as she called her fiancé were married in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace.

Lady Tryon soon became one of the more delightful additions to the higher echelons of the London social scene. Charles was a frequent visitor at her home in Walton Street, Knightsbridge, and the family's manor, Ogbury House, set in 700 acres of prime shooting and fishing country in a Wiltshire valley. The trio started a yearly ritual: an expedition to the Tryons' unpretentious lodge on the Hoffsa River in the ruggedly beautiful north-east of Iceland, where the salmon fishing is the best in Europe.

Kanga already knew about Camilla and Charles and, as they were now rural neighbours, the two women talked about him constantly. Both realised that Charles's years in the Navy had changed him from the cavalier young beau who had first flirted with them into a more mature man. When he talked about marriage, he said more or less the same thing he said in public: if I'm deciding on whom I want to live with for the next fifty years - well, that's the last decision in which I want my head to be ruled entirely by my heart.' Much as it troubled him, he knew that his heart was already taken.

Charles was due to leave the Navy after taking his first command in the coastal minehunter, HMS
Bronington.
His need to find a challenging role outside the services was uppermost in his mind. To that end, he set up the Prince's Trust to help young go-getters make a start in life and became its hands-on president. He displayed a gift for organisation by raising £16 million for the Queen's Silver Jubilee Appeal in 1977. But none of this was enough without approval. Like Edward the previous Prince of Wales, Charles wanted his father to acknowledge his accomplishments. 'Camilla understood this need and gave her unstinting, unselfish praise,' said a friend. The insider revealed that the relationship resumed in earnest after the birth of Camilla's second child, a daughter named Laura Rose, in 1978.

'It seemed like a workable arrangement at the time,' said the friend. 'Andrew Parker Bowles spent most of his time in London, where he had other interests of his own, and Camilla lived close to mutual friends. Her marriage provided the perfect cover for their meetings.' Like the two Edwards before him, Charles saw nothing wrong in having an affair with someone else's wife. Some things didn't change.

Andrew Parker Bowles had connections of his own. He was related to the Duke of Marlborough and the Earls of Derby and Cadogan. He rose to brigadier of the Royal Horse Guards and First Dragoons and later became director of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. In 1987, he was appointed Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen, a largely ceremonial post which, in previous times, required the holder to lay down his life for the sovereign in the event of an assassination attempt. He lived in a four-story pied-a-terre in South Kensington. 'There was a fair amount of sexual activity of the heterosexual variety,' said one privy to the household's comings and goings.

When the Queen pressed Charles about marrying, he consulted Camilla and Kanga. The Twin-set Twins would, they promised, scout around for a suitable prospect. They had, in fact, already started looking because Camilla had a personal interest in Charles's choice. Thus the Camilla Conspiracy was hatched to find a bride for Charles.

Wallis Simpson, her predecessor as lover of a Prince of Wales, had no real desire to marry Edward VIII. Her intention had been to see him settle down with a homely, complaisant spouse who dared not challenge her position as the King's mistress. She wanted power, not duty. It was only after Edward sacrificed his throne for her, and the option disappeared, that she finally agreed to marry him. 'She is a nice woman and a sensible woman - but she is hard as nails and she doesn't love him,' said the Cabinet Minister Sir Alfred Duff Cooper. Camilla's dilemma was different. She loved Charles but knew that, even if she divorced her husband, marriage to him was out of the question. They had to find another way.

WHEN Charles flew off for a well deserved holiday in April 1979 to do some serious thinking, he knew he was living on borrowed time. His destination was the Bahamas, where, ironically, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been banished during the war years. 'The St Helena of 1940,' the Duchess called it. The big difference was that, unlike Napoleon, the Windsors got out alive. Edward was forty-one when Wallis eventually married him on 3 June, 1937 at the Chateau de Cande at Tour in France, but Charles had already been 'rash enough' to declare that thirty was a reasonable age for a man to wed. As he was now in his thirty-first year, his days as the world's most eligible bachelor were numbered.

His birthday party six months earlier had been a roisterous affair at Buckingham Palace, the dynamic black singers, the Three Degrees, starring his friend Sheila Ferguson, providing the up-tempo glitz which had become associated with his bachelor style. His date that evening was the fresh-faced blonde actress Susan George, star of the explicit movies
Straw Dogs
and
Matidingo
. Her profession disqualified her as a future queen. Previously dated by tennis star Jimmy Connors, Ms George had also been a girlfriend of the sentimental singer Jack Jones who, Charles was later to confide mischievously, spent more time crying on her shoulder than cooing in her ear. As always, Camilla and Kanga were present to monitor the royal progress; to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.

Watching Charles dance to the thumping disco beat was Lady Diana Spencer, who had been surprised to receive an invitation. The Queen Mother and her grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, had taken a hand in that although they didn't seriously consider Diana as a possible bride at this stage. Most of what Diana knew about Charles and his tangled love life came from Sarah, her feisty, red-headed sister who had been his previous girlfriend. Like any other teenage girl in the country, Diana seized every morsel Sarah cared to drop about her famous escort.

Diana was changing. While staying at her mother's home in Chelsea, she had started visiting Headlines, the salon of a young hairdresser called Kevin Shanley in South Kensington. He saw distinct possibilities in this lanky, hunched country girl. 'She was a natural blonde right into her mid-teens, but then her hair got darker until it was light brown,' he said. He persuaded her to put blonde highlights through her fine, mousy tresses. The effect was electrifying. She sparkled as a blonde. Looking in the mirror, Diana straightened her shoulders and marched out of the salon a new woman. The Spencer family speculated that she might marry Prince Andrew, who knew her as the girl next door at Sandringham. She had kissed him under the mistletoe one New Year's Eve. 'I'm saving myself for Prince Andrew,' she told friends. His big brother was, after all, far too old. Her family's nickname for her was The Duchess, 'Duch' for short.

The first time Prince Charles had actually set eyes on her was when he called at Park House and baby Diana was playing happily in her nursery. She was, her father proudly told the world, 'a superb physical specimen'. Sarah formally introduced Diana, not at all glamorous in country rig of jeans, jumper and wellies, to Charles during a pheasant shooting weekend at Althorp while she was on leave from West Heath school. This famous encounter in a ploughed field near evocative Nobottle Wood in the winter of 1977 had left Charles with the impression of 'a very jolly and amusing and attractive sixteen-year-old - I mean, great fun, bouncy and full of life'. Diana was less articulate about this milestone in her life. 'Just amazing,' was all she could say about Charles.

Lady Sarah, who suffered from the unpredictable effects of
anorexia nervosa
, the compulsive starving illness, made a fatal mistake after Charles invited her to accompany him on a skiing trip to Klosters. 'Our relationship is totally platonic - I think of him as the big brother I never had,' she said. 'I wouldn't marry anyone I didn't love whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me, I'd turn him down.' After that astonishing gaffe, Charles swiftly transferred his attentions elsewhere, although some believed that Sarah dumped him after rejecting his proposal. Diana observed the break-up and learned an important lesson in the ways of the Prince.

By this time she too had begun to suffer from the effects of an eating disorder, which later developed into bulimia. At West Heath she regularly binged on four bowls of All-Bran at breakfast. 'We used to throw up together,' said a titled young lady who knew Diana in her teens.

Her problems originated at home. She had been brokenhearted when her father divorced her mother Frances in April 1969 over her admitted adultery. Frances had married her lover, Peter Shand Kydd, but that marriage also ended in the divorce courts. To his children's deepest distress, Johnnie Spencer fell in love with Raine, Countess of Dartmouth and married her despite their open hostility. The children called her 'Acid Raine' and prayed for her to go away but when Earl Spencer suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, he survived largely because of his new wife's constant presence at his bedside. 'Raine did a lot more than will him to live,' said a friend. 'She simply refused to let him die.'

After this trauma, Sarah and Diana were relieved to be invited to join a shooting party at Sandringham in January 1979. Jane, the quieter, more homely, middle sister, had married Robert Fellowes, the Queen's Assistant Private Secretary, and she had put their names forward. Charles noticed Diana again. She made him laugh and, soon after she returned to London, he started to invite her to join his circle of friends on occasional nights out.

Diana already knew that the one thing Charles would not tolerate in a prospective bride was loose talk about his intentions. It ran counter to everything he believed about his right to make up his own mind. He simply would not be pressured into a match because the Press wanted him to wed. 'Charles was secretive — no, furtive — about his girlfriends,' said the Palace insider. 'He was furious if word leaked out, even about quite innocent stuff.' Charles expressed it thus: 'I trust my friends implicitly and they know that. The more discreet they are the better.'

Sometimes the parents of his lovers conspired in the secrecy, as the former beau of a society beauty discovered to his astonishment. When he turned up at the family mansion to pay his respects, he was met at the front door by the young lady's mother. 'She's up there with Him,' she whispered, pointing skywards. 'I thought for a moment she was indicating that the Almighty had taken her daughter to heaven,' said the jilted suitor, the son of a baronet. 'Then I realised she was speaking in code. She was telling me that her daughter was upstairs with Prince Charles. Quite amusing, really.'

NO ONE knew Charles better than his great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma. In this reworking of the Arthurian Legend, he played Merlin. 'I'll make this prophecy,' said Uncle Dickie, who was due to meet Charles on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. 'When Charles finds someone he wants to marry, he will not ever be seen with her in public. Very privately he will try hard to win her round like any other suitor.' Uncle Dickie, as usual, was right. Even Prince Philip did not know his son as well as the Prince's HGF (Honorary Grandfather).

Marriage was high on the agenda for the sessions Charles looked forward to with Mountbatten in the peace and quiet of Windermere Island, Eleuthera, where the Earl's two sons-in-law kept holiday homes. Charles was to stay in the villa of Lord Brabourne while Mountbatten was ensconced in the palatial residence of the interior designer David Hicks across the road. Brabourne, who was married to Lady Patricia Mountbatten, was a noted film producer, his works up to that time including
Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Sink the Bismarck, Murder on the Orient Express
and
Death on the Nile.
He moved easily around the celebrity circuit, sometimes accompanied by his daughter, Lady Amanda Knatchbull. Uncle Dickie had big plans for Amanda. He hoped she might link the Windsor and Mountbatten names in the most propitious way. The matchmaking Merlin had, he thought, conjured up a Guinevere.

As the prime mover in the Queen's marriage to Prince Philip, Mountbatten had often discussed the succession with Her Majesty over tea at Buckingham Palace and during her visits to his Broadlands estate in Hampshire. The mother of Charles's heir was a matter of abiding concern to them both. While a Windsor-Mountbatten union would have thrilled Uncle Dickie to the core, neither the Queen nor her son was quite so convinced. Mountbatten's ruthless ambition seriously worried Her Majesty.