Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (66 page)

Where, indeed? Kate herself seemed kind and pleasant. But the “men in gray,” as Princess Diana had called the palace courtiers, were concerned that the Middletons were not aristocratic enough to be Windsor in-laws, or that some crazy relative would emerge who would embarrass everyone. According to an unnamed courtier, “The Queen was sick of all the scandal and the drama. She wanted a nice, obedient girl from a lovely, hopefully rather boring, family.” In time, Kate’s uncle Gary Goldsmith, who calls his Ibiza residence the “Maison de Bang Bang,” would boast—to Prince William—of his own drug and prostitution connections.

After graduation William and Kate enjoyed a romantic holiday in Kenya. Then the prince began preparing for the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where he would follow in his brother’s footsteps. Because Harry hadn’t gone to university first, he was already ahead of William. Kate moved to London and submitted her résumé to art galleries. On January 8, 2006, William began his military training. Four days earlier, he and Kate had shared their first public kiss, dispelling rumors that their romance was on the rocks. The media took note as well when Kate and her parents attended William’s graduation from Sandhurst that November. ITN hired a lip-reader to discern what Kate was saying to her mother as she watched William march past. The verdict: “I love the uniform. It’s so sexy!”

Two weeks earlier, Catherine had been invited to spend a weekend with the royal family at Sandringham in Norfolk. The Windsors seemed very comfortable with her, and the feeling was mutual. After the disastrous marriages of three of her four children (Anne, Charles, and Andrew), the queen had become a fan of long courtships, and now favored a relationship of at least five years before she approved of the resounding clang of wedding bells. How much had changed in a generation! Charles already considered Kate one of the family, but it took Camilla some time to come around. At first, she found Kate “pretty, but rather dim” and went out of her way to say something
snide about her, even as Charles complimented her. Ironically, as she had the least patrician birthright in the room, Camilla felt that the Middletons weren’t blue-blooded enough and that William should marry a girl from an old aristocratic house, meddling in the heir’s affairs the same way she had in Charles’s marriage to Diana.

Mindful of Diana’s trial by fire during her engagement and of the chilly reception the royal family had given her, William was already taking pains to ease Catherine into The Firm. He had even requested that she be advised by family members and palace staffers on how to cope with the barrage of paparazzi and the media scrutiny, as well as how to handle the loneliness and isolation that his mother had endured. But unless Kate was in William’s company, or until they got engaged, she would not be entitled to a protection officer of her own.

And yet she was a princess-in-training with no assurance that William would propose. Purportedly, she was instructed to study footage of Princess Diana for lessons in everything from how to handle the press and work a crowd to gracefully getting in and out of a car without flashing any thigh. A target for every camera, Kate was always perfectly groomed and impeccably dressed when she stepped outside. Well coached, she never spoke to the press, nor posed, but smiled and kept going about her business.

According to
Tatler
’s Geordie Greig, Kate was “perfect princess material. She is the epitome of an effortlessly stylish English rose. She has qualities you can’t create or manufacture. Her unaffectedness makes her particularly attractive.”

While William had begun to learn the royal ropes, taking brief internships at Chatsworth, HSBC, and the Bank of England, and then embarking on a military career, Catherine had become a dabbler. Although she showed talent as a photographer, instead she enjoyed a brief stint as an accessories buyer, built a Web site for her parents’ business, and curated an art show, as she placed her royal relationship above all else.

Woolworth’s started manufacturing china tchotchkes with the couple’s images and initials on them in 2006. Kate was amused; William not so much. The press had expected he might pop the question on her twenty-fifth birthday, January 9, 2007, mobbing her when she left her London flat. She had hoped he would get down on bended
knee on Valentine’s Day, 2007, but William gave her a diamond-encrusted antique compact instead of a ring. A former St. Andrews classmate described Kate as “crushed” by the disappointment.

During those early months of 2007, Catherine and William found themselves at a crossroads. The Middleton mantra was “Grin and bear it,” and Kate had to do a lot of both, because William was visibly pulling away. The relationship began to crumble when William was down in Dorset for a ten-week tank commander’s course at the Royal Army’s training camp in Bovington. The couple was separated by a distance of 130 miles, and William preferred to spend weekends with his fellow officers instead of going up to London to be with Kate. On March 22, 2007, at a nightclub in Bournemouth, he was caught in the flashbulbs with his arm around a pretty eighteen-year-old Brazilian student, Ana Ferreira, who was quite certain that William groped her breast, and she cheerfully told the press about it. Later in the evening the prince steamed up the dance floor with nineteen-year-old Lisa Agar, and then invited her back to his barracks to hang out with him and his friends. When the story hit the tabloids, Kate predictably became infuriated.

William defended himself, insisting, at least to his friends, “I’m not 36 and I’m not married. I’m 24 and just want to have some fun.”

Kate had reached the point where she wanted a commitment but dared not ask for one. In fact, the more she yearned for William to get closer, the farther he pulled away. But instead of facing his insecurity or immaturity, the prince neatly deflected attention onto the perennial adversary, the media, blaming them for the problems in their relationship. “The press will make your life unbearable as long as we’re together,” he told Kate. “I don’t want you suffering the way my mother did.” But in trying to protect Kate, William was wounding her deeply. She reminded him how much they had invested in the relationship and how much they had already shared. According to one of Kate’s friends from Bucklebury, “She told him that he made her happy and that she believed she made him happy, and that was all that mattered in the end.”

But William demurred, insisting that for a man in his position, things weren’t that simple. Now twenty-five, he was under too much pressure to propose. He felt uncomfortable echoes of his mother’s
marriage jitters as well as the pressure his father was given by
his
father to marry Diana because Charles had reached a certain age. William was also determined not to let Fleet Street turn him into a fiancé just because it sold newspapers. Kate assured him that she was in no hurry to settle down, but the truth was, she wanted security.

Citing claustrophobia, over several agonizing phone calls in which he insisted, “I can’t…. It just isn’t going to work. It isn’t fair to you,” he ended their romance on April 11, 2007. News of the royal breakup leaked out three days later.

As soon as Catherine was no longer a royal girlfriend, she and her family seemed fair game for the press. Stories surfaced about some of William’s class-bound friends who would mock Kate’s roots by mimicking a flight attendant’s doors-to-manual command. Then the footage was broadcast of Carole Middleton chewing gum during William’s graduation from Sandhurst (it turned out to be nicotine gum to help her kick a thirty-year smoking habit). It suddenly became news that in the presence of the queen she used the words “toilet” (instead of “lavatory”) and “pardon?” (rather than “what?”)—perhaps “pardon” is what the royal family does to traitors. The stories turned out to be spurious inventions; Mrs. Middleton and HRM had never been introduced. But the media wondered whether the ambitious, enterprising, social-climbing Carole was too common to be William’s mother-in-law and had damaged her daughter’s chances of becoming a princess.

Not wishing to lose the goodwill of her middle-class subjects, the queen was quick to ensure that Kate didn’t think the criticism came from her. “What rubbish. I have absolutely nothing against gum.
I
chew gum!” she exclaimed when she read the headlines. And William phoned Kate to assure her that none of his family or friends had spoken to the press about the Middletons.

William and Kate spent the next ten weeks partying separately, if frantically, as if to show the other that they could get on well enough alone. A few nights after their breakup, William racked up a bar tab of more than $17,000 with his friends at Mahiki, one of his favorite watering holes. While the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blasted through the speakers, he raised his arms high above his head and shouted, “I’m
freeee
!”

Meanwhile, Kate stepped out in a miniskirt, as if to remind William what he was missing. She flirted up a storm on the same dance floors they had frequented together, and William’s once-snooty friends rallied around her.

But by July 1, and the concert to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his mother’s death, the couple was covertly reunited, having made tentative steps to rekindle their romance since the end of May. They sat separately at the concert, but at the after party, as they danced to the Bodyrockers’ “I Like the Way (You Move)” (which they’d always called “their” song), guests noted that the couple was practically making out on the dance floor.

“I’m glad to hear it. She’s a nice girl,” the queen told her grandson when William informed her that he and Kate had reconciled. Nevertheless, an engagement announcement remained forthcoming.

But that August, during a romantic holiday in the Seychelles, William made Kate a promise. As one of their friends later divulged, “They didn’t agree to get married there and then; what they made was a pact. William told Kate she was the one, but he was not ready to get married. He promised her his commitment and said he would not let her down, and she in turn agreed to wait for him.”

The prince needed to be certain Catherine fully understood that his royal duty would always come first, and what it would mean to marry him—what came with the job on her end as well as his. First of all, he would be committing the next few years to training with the RAF, and if Kate thought that being a royal girlfriend was difficult, being the sweetheart of a serviceman was even harder.

On January 7, 2008, William arrived at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire, the oldest air force college in the world. This time he made a concerted effort to return to London on weekends. Kate would be waiting for him at Clarence House, having been cheerfully waved in like a member of the family, according to journalist and royal biographer Katie Nicholl. Kate would have a hot bath and a home-cooked meal waiting for her weary pilot-in-training. “She was almost motherly to him,” a mutual friend recalled. The couple enjoyed puttering about the kitchen, just like the old days at St. Andrews. Friends observed their natural, easy intimacy and their cozy domesticity. William could (and did) finish Kate’s sentences; she could read his body
language and the look in his eyes, a keen judge of when he wanted to continue the party or kick the guests out.

On April 11, he qualified as a pilot. Kate attended his RAF graduation in a much-photographed white military-style coat and tall black boots. By that time, however, she had quit her job as a junior accessories buyer and been dubbed “Waity Katie” by the press. It seemed that all she was doing was waiting for her boyfriend to propose while he was busy with his military commitments, having embarked on a stint with the Royal Navy. His heavy schedule only spotlighted her own career of little consequence.

Catherine finally met the queen at the May 2008 wedding of another of Her Majesty’s grandsons, Peter Phillips, son of Anne, the Princess Royal. “It was in amongst a lot of other guests,” Kate later recalled, adding that the queen was “very friendly and welcoming.” Phillips’s marriage to Canadian Autumn Kelly marked a milestone in William and Kate’s relationship, because Kate attended the event without him. William had a competing wedding to attend in Kenya—that of Jecca Craig’s brother, Batian. Kate’s solo presence—without an engagement ring on her finger—was also a mark of acceptance into the royal family.

Her Majesty was concerned, however, that Catherine was not doing anything useful with her time. According to news reports, William had the same thoughts. It was admirable for her to be at his beck and call, but while he was occupied with his military training, it did not look well for a princess-in-waiting to do little but shop, take posh vacations, and go nightclubbing, even if she did most of those things on William’s arm. The queen is fond of career women. Kate had been working for Party Pieces, and she upped her presence at her parents’ company by including her photo on the Web site, but the move backfired, seen as self-serving for the Middletons. After the queen suggested that Catherine do some charity work, in September 2008 she became involved with the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which helps seriously ill children.

And yet Kate was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. Ungainly photos of her in a fun but tarty little costume, taken the moment after she landed flat on her back during the foundation’s Day-Glo Midnight Roller Disco fund-raiser, made it into the papers,
and the palace expressed displeasure. A courtier told Richard Kay of the
Daily Mail
, “The Queen already thinks that Kate is something of a show-off” [which seems to contradict HRM’s other quoted opinions of her], and they were “appalled at what they saw as a most unladylike display,” a comment that was extremely unfair to the ordinarily elegant, athletic, and discreet Kate, who’d been snapped the moment she’d lost her balance. Splattering the crotch shot of the potential future queen all over the tabloids had surely been deliberate. In any case, the roller disco event, undoubtedly aided by Kate’s presence, raised more than $200,000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, and Kate increased her involvement with the charity.