Diana in Search of Herself (16 page)

Like many men of his generation and class, Charles had not been raised to nurture a wife—a deficiency compounded by the essential selfishness bred into him as heir to the throne. He could not envision an equal partnership; he expected to be listened to, respected, and even obeyed. He wanted a soulmate, a country girl of intelligence and wit, willing to share his hobbies, embrace his passions, and honor his values; a wife who was loyal, committed to duty, and who, as he said to Alistair Cooke, was willing to mold herself to him and walk two steps behind. That was the royal way, and above all, he needed the support of a woman who would be consistent and dependable.

Charles also believed in the notion that an “arranged” marriage could work, as it had for his grandparents the Queen Mother and George VI, who grew to love each other deeply. “
He often used to say that he wanted to have the same kind of long and happy marriage which his grandmother had,” said his friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson. “To a detached or untutored non-establishment observer, his approach seems bizarre in that he wouldn’t think in terms of passion,” said a man close to Charles. “This is a romantic age where passion is important. He was aware of the fact that he was inviting someone to do a job, and … over and above the normal tests of marriage, he always felt, ‘Who would ever want to do this job?’ That explains his diffidence.”

If Diana had read any of Charles’s various statements on marriage, his expectations and attitudes about a helpmeet would have been clear. But she had no interest in doing that sort of homework. Finding a husband was much on her nineteen-year-old mind after her sister Jane had her first child and her sister Sarah had been married the previous May. Diana’s rivalry with Sarah remained a backdrop to her interest in Charles. Years later, Diana told her friend Elsa Bowker that Sarah “
resented it terribly because I accepted to go out with Prince Charles.” At the time, Diana confided to her employer Mary Robertson that she was unnerved by Sarah’s constant inquiries about the relationship. “
I don’t even dare to pick up the telephone at my flat for fear it might be Sarah,” said Diana.

Diana seemed to have scant reason for such wariness, but it was ingrained in her temperament. It didn’t matter that Sarah was now spoken for, having settled on Neil McCorquodale, a wealthy gentleman farmer and former Coldstream Guards officer, described by a friend as “solid, very steady, private, quiet, with a good sense of humor.” He was in many ways the opposite of Sarah, who was ebullient and enterprising, with an unpredictable streak and a fondness for the limelight.
Just weeks before her wedding
day, in February 1980, Sarah called it off only to reschedule it three months later. “Sarah was smart enough to know she needed a man like Neil,” said a friend of the couple. “He was the sort of man Diana should have married, but Diana went for ambition.”

Diana idealized marriage as a fantasy that contrasted sharply with Charles’s elaborately considered view. “
I had so many dreams as a young girl,” she recalled. “I wanted, and hoped … that my husband would look after me. He would be a father figure, and he’d support me, encourage me, say ‘Well done’ or say, ‘No, it wasn’t good enough.’ But I didn’t get any of that. I couldn’t believe it. I got none of that. It was role reversal.” Diana also believed that since Charles had to marry “forever,” she would be safe from the possibility of divorce, and she saw the royal household as a place where she would be protected. In contemplating marriage to Charles, Diana supposedly told friends that
she felt secure for the first time in her life.

While Charles envisioned a loving partnership in which he called the shots, Diana longed for a selfless man to fill her emptiness and offer continuous devotion. Her expectation was particularly unrealistic given Charles’s busy public life and time-consuming hobbies, as well as the nature and restraints of the royal family. Women had “
never dominated” Charles’s life, according to Stephen Barry. “The only thing that dominates Prince Charles is his work, and then his sporting activities. Girls come third.”

Diana’s detractors have accused her of manipulating Prince Charles during their courtship and fooling him into thinking she was something she was not. Diana proceeded “
with great cunning,” wrote Penny Junor in her 1998 book about Prince Charles. She “professed great interest in everything he said and did, and manifested great sympathy and understanding for the trials and tribulations of his life…. She talked about her love of the country and of shooting and of her interest in taking up horse-riding, and she liked his friends…. But it was all a sham. Diana didn’t like any of these things. She hated the countryside, had no interest in shooting, or horses, or dogs, and she didn’t even really like his friends. She found them old, boring and sycophantic.”

Like so much written about Charles and Diana, this judgment seems unduly harsh. Diana’s disillusionment with Charles’s friends—“
oiling up, basically, kissing his feet,” she said—was fairly predictable. She often started out enthusiastic, then readily found grounds for criticism and suspicion. Similarly, her embrace of Charles’s interests seemed to reflect her intense feelings, rather than calculated maneuvering. “
When you fall in love, you often suddenly say you like things when you may not really like them,” explained Charles’s former aide Michael Colborne.

Diana failed to comprehend—or even give much thought to—the range of duties she would have to take on. As she said years later, on her wedding day “
[she] realized [she] had taken on an enormous role but had no idea what [she] was going into—but
no
idea.” During the courtship, she seemed enchanted mainly by the idea of becoming a princess. “She had a romantic view of life,” said a childhood friend, “but Barbara Cartland books didn’t prepare you. They were cloud cuckooland, all very romantic escapism, and she was very impressionable.” Even Diana’s employer Mary Robertson worried that the infatuation was “
based on her romantic image of him, combined with his lofty position.” Diana struck one unsettling note early on, during her visit to Balmoral in July 1980. A friend recalled that Diana had been dazzled by the perfection of a royal picnic lunch complete with linen, silver, and a menu card. “
Oh! This is the life for me!” she exclaimed. “Where is the footman?” Diana’s reaction was endearingly refreshing, yet ominously childish.

For all the talking Charles had done about the nature of marriage, he seemed unable to apply his high-minded principles to Diana with a clear eye. If anything, he wasn’t calculating enough in choosing her. If he had been, he would have found that she passed muster in only half of his basic marital requirements: she was indeed “pretty special” in her appealing combination of noble birth, natural dignity, refreshing informality, and a virginal image; her love of children showed she could be a good mother in a “secure family unit”; and she had the sort of affectionate nature he wanted from a nurturing wife.

Yet in other crucial ways she fell short. Charles indulged in wishful thinking when he believed that the proximity of their families had prepared Diana for understanding his world or the role she would play in it. He seemed to have forgotten the concern he had voiced six years earlier about the “risky” consequences if a young woman “didn’t have a clue” about the royal role. Nor did he recognize that beyond Diana’s apparent enjoyment of rural life, her engaging sense of humor, and appreciation for classical music, they had few interests or ideas in common. He also seemed oblivious to Diana’s history of willfulness, which showed she might well be reluctant to live in his shadow. Had Charles given the relationship more time or probed into Diana’s past in a meaningful way, he would surely have found evidence of psychological fragility that might well have given him pause.

According to one Palace aide who knew him for a number of years, Charles’s emotional reaction clouded his judgment. Diana arrived at the right time, and as an older man, Charles found the adoration of a pretty and superficially eligible young woman irresistible. “He accepted her infatuation
and saw it as a charming part of her approach and character,” said the aide. “She had a sweet and affectionate and amusing side to her, so he let that carry him along and didn’t examine it.” In short, although Charles said he wouldn’t let his heart rule his head when it came to marriage, he did precisely that.

Chapter 7

H
E’S IN LOVE AGAIN! LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL FOR CHARLES
blared
The Sun
’s headline on September 8, 1980. The story, by Harry Arnold, described Lady Diana Spencer as “
a perfect English rose,” and asked “Is it the real thing for Charles at last?” The answer left no doubts, and Arnold offered one surprisingly shrewd hunch: “Some observers believe the Prince will follow a pattern set by several royals of marrying a friend he can learn to love.”

Arnold, it turns out, hadn’t even been at Balmoral for the all-important sighting. It was Arnold’s chief rival, James Whitaker, who spotted her with his binoculars. She was slipping behind a tree while Prince Charles fished in the River Dee, and Whitaker didn’t immediately identify Diana, but he could see that she was watching him in the mirror of her compact. “ ‘
What a cunning lady,’ I thought,” Whitaker later wrote. “This one was clearly going to give us a lot of trouble.… You had to be a real professional to think of using a mirror to watch us watching her.”

As a courtesy to Arnold, who was 200 miles away, Whitaker picked up the telephone and gave him a briefing once he had discovered Diana’s identity. Whitaker’s own paper at the time, the
Daily Star
, buried his story inside, but
The Sun
went all out on page one. “
They exaggerated it,” grumbled Whitaker. “ ‘He’s in love’ was based on nothing except there was this woman.” Indeed, Stephen Barry, Prince Charles’s longtime valet, would later write that “
there was certainly no obvious romance” during that Balmoral visit. “The Prince and Diana seemed to like each other, but there were no clues to a budding love affair.”

The Sun
claimed the scoop the tabloids had been hungering for since 1976. Its bold words typified Fleet Street’s increasingly aggressive approach
toward the royal family. What had once been a cozy relationship shifted largely because of the influence of Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, owner of two of the most popular tabloids,
The Sun
and
News of the World
, as well as
The Times
and
The Sunday Times
. The
News of the World
, published on Sundays, was the lowest of the downmarket papers, specializing in tawdry stories of sex and violence.
The Sun
’s trademark was a picture of a bare-breasted woman on its third page.

Murdoch was an admitted antimonarchist, and his recipe for tabloid journalism included generous servings of royal gossip. After a decade in English journalism, Murdoch turned his attention in the late seventies to America, where he was buying up newspapers and magazines. “
Because we had a foreign proprietor with Murdoch’s attitudes, it allowed us freedom,” said Andrew Neil, who edited
The Sunday Times
in the eighties and early nineties.

The most important beneficiary of Murdoch’s latitude was Kelvin MacKenzie (variously nicknamed MacFrenzy and MacNasty), who moved up to editor of
The Sun
in June 1981. “
Kelvin is a natural troublemaker,” said Neil. “Under Kelvin,
The Sun
started giving the royal family a degree of scrutiny and irreverence that permeated all newspapers.” Roy Greenslade, who worked for MacKenzie at
The Sun
and later competed against him as editor of the
Daily Mirror
, recalled, “
Kelvin would adopt at a conference in the morning a mock-and-shock look and say, ‘I’m afraid we’ve upset the Palace. How can we do it today?’ ”

Terrifying adversaries, the tabloids routinely turned tiny incidents into sensational page-one stories that were picked up around the world. The tabloids happily ignored prevailing standards of accuracy, in large part because the royal family declined to acknowledge—much less comment on—the manner in which they were covered. Most important, in those years the royal family did not sue, although they would later on.

Having watched the press destroy her sister Sarah’s chances with Charles, Diana was attracted and repelled by the hacks. The Fleet Street pack pursued Diana relentlessly in the fall of 1980. Although she had little sense of her own worth, she did have the confidence of her upper-class background, combined with the down-to-earth openness she inherited from her father. Unlike the royal family, Diana paid attention to the reporters. When they camped out on the doorstep of her London apartment building, she was invariably polite, addressing her stalkers by name and taking their phone calls in the middle of the night, even when she had nothing to say. “She made a decision that they were going to be around, so she had to tolerate them,” said one of her relatives. “She took a pragmatic view.” When tabloid photographers embarrassed her by snapping pictures
with sunlight silhouetting her legs beneath a sheer skirt, she wept privately but assured them, “
I understand all your problems, and there are no hard feelings.”