Sex with the Queen (60 page)

It is ironic that if the British royal family had picked any other woman in the world as Charles’s bride, no matter what her tem-perament or sexual history, chances are she would not have shaken the foundations of the monarchy as Diana did. Certainly a few newspaper articles about the raucous sexual adventures of the youthful Camilla, now a discreet and supportive matron of the royal family, would not have done nearly as much damage as the virgin bride Diana.

The Princess of Wales transformed herself from a shy pudgy 2 7 6

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teenager into a sleek, mean, and angry woman, wielding newspa-pers as a deadly weapon. The avenging Fury ripped moldering skeletons out of stuffy royal closets and gleefully exposed their grisly decay for all the world to see. Indeed, Queen Mother Eliz-abeth viewed Diana as the greatest danger to the British monar-chy since the adulterous Wallis Warfield Simpson stole King Edward VIII in 1936.

As soon as her engagement was announced, Diana, worried about her fiancé’s lackluster courtship, slipped into bulimia, binge eating to satisfy a hunger that could not be quelled with food, and then, repelled at her gorging, forcing herself to throw it all up. Bulimia, she said, “is like having a pair of arms around you, but it’s temporary. Then you’re disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and then you bring it all up again.”4

Despite her illness, Diana’s sexual needs were demanding.

James Hewitt said, “She couldn’t get enough. She always wanted more.”5 Perhaps sex was something like bulimia, only having a real pair of arms around her. Of Charles she said, “Dead below the waist.”6 Given the revelations of his eternal passion for Camilla, perhaps we should say that Charles was dead below the waist for Diana. In 1992, while being videotaped by her speech instructor Peter Settelen as an exercise, Diana reported that even when they were first married, Charles only made love to her once every three weeks. Though a virgin, she realized his lack of ardor was odd. After about four years, she said on the tape, the royal sex fizzled out altogether. For his part, Charles reportedly told friends that the aroma of vomit wafting under layers of mouth-wash and perfume disgusted him, rendering him unable to per-form.

Threatened by her husband’s continued friendship with his mistress and his lackluster performance in bed with his wife, Di-ana threw shrill temper tantrums whenever he wanted to hunt, garden, meet with friends, or attend to state duties. A single mo-ment spent away from her seemed a painful rejection, a cruel abandonment, crystal clear proof that he didn’t love her. She broke vases, slammed doors, and called him the vilest names, and when five months pregnant, she threw herself down a flight of d i a n a , p r i n c e s s o f m a n y l o v e r s 2 7 7

stairs during a fiery temper tantrum. Whatever feelings he had for his bride quickly dissipated as he ran from her furious accu-sations into the safe and comforting arms of Camilla.

Diana told her voice coach that when she confronted her hus-band about Camilla, Charles replied that he refused to be the only Prince of Wales without a mistress. Undeterred, the princess took her problem directly to the queen, who said she didn’t know what advice to give Diana, because Charles was hopeless.

Sex between the royal couple ceased forever soon after the birth of their second child, Prince Harry, in October 1984. Ac-cording to James Hewitt, Diana told him that her former body-guard Sergeant Barry Mannakee became her lover in 1985.

Married with two children, Mannakee was an unlikely lover for a princess, a bit plump, with thinning dark hair and a blue-collar background.

The kindhearted Mannakee was deeply troubled by Diana’s bouts of sobbing depression; the affair started when he began to comfort her, putting his arms around her. Before Diana and her bodyguard attended public events, Diana often pranced around her room trying on outfits for him, waiting for his compliments.

“He’d tell me I looked good. Something my husband no longer did,” Diana said.7

Mannakee quickly began to rue his involvement with the princess. Diana demanded that he remain at her beck and call twenty-four hours a day, no matter what his obligations to his wife and children. “Once it began, [Mannakee] was very dis-traught about being caught up with her,” a friend of Charles said. “She was so intense, and he found it very difficult to han-dle.”8

She often dismissed her servants and spent time alone with Mannakee at her apartment in Kensington Palace or went out with him for drives that lasted hours. Like so many princesses before her, Diana dreamed of fleeing her gilded cage hand in hand with her lover. “I was quite happy to give all this up,” she told Settelen on the videotape. “. . . Just to go off and live with him.”9

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Charles, aware of her affair, was at first relieved. Diana might find some happiness with her bodyguard, and with Camilla warming his bed at night he was in no position to cast blame. “I don’t want to spy on [Diana] or interfere with her life in any way,” he told a friend.10 Yet someone at the palace minded. Sud-denly the detective was transferred far away from the princess.

Diana was furious at the interference in her private life. When Mannakee died shortly after his transfer in a freak motorcycle accident, Diana was certain the palace had arranged his murder.

But Diana did not mourn her bodyguard for long. In 1986 at a party celebrating Sarah Ferguson’s forthcoming wedding to Prince Andrew, the princess wrapped herself around a hand-some financier, Charlie Carter. Shortly after midnight, accord-ing to author Lady Colin Campbell, a friend of hers went outside for a cigarette and made a shocking discovery. “I heard sounds coming from the bushes,” he reportedly told Lady Campbell. “I nearly choked with astonishment when I looked over and saw Charlie Carter with the Princess of Wales. I moved away, finished my cigarette quietly, and went back inside. They didn’t return for ages.”11

Diana’s most notorious love affair—the only one she admitted publicly—was with the charming Captain James Hewitt who met her at a London party in August 1986. When she heard he was a staff captain in the household division and helped run the royal stables, she confided her fear of horses after a childhood riding accident, and her wish to get back in the saddle. Hewitt gallantly offered to give her riding lessons.

During her first riding lessons Diana had her detectives in tow riding alongside her. She then began to make them ride be-hind her and Hewitt, and finally told them not to come along at all. Her lessons were invariably followed by coffee with her in-structor. Through tears she told him of her painful marriage, her husband’s neglect of her and his love for another woman. “I am surrounded by people but so alone,” she cried, that ancient lament of royalty.12 “You are not alone. You have me,” he gulped, that ancient reply of a valiant knight to a damsel in dis-tress.13

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Diana began to phone Hewitt several times a day. Awed by her beauty and position, and unfettered by a wife and children of his own, he was flattered. She invited him to a private dinner at Kensington Palace, where she served Hewitt from the buffet with her own slender hands. Afterward, according to Hewitt, she se-duced him and, lying in his arms, cried for joy and sorrow.

Diana often visited Hewitt’s family in the county of Devon, accompanied by two palace detectives and watched by police in four counties as they traveled. Palace officials and members of the royal family—including Charles and the queen—must have been well aware of the love affair.

But still Diana could not find happiness. Her insecurities ran deep; when Hewitt didn’t respond exactly the way she wanted, she would throw a royal tantrum, flinging bitter accusations.

These emotional outbursts frightened and repelled him. “She needed constant attention and reassurance,” he said. “Ten min-utes after I’d left, having spent most of the time making love to her, she’d be on the phone needing to be told how much I loved her. She’d phone five, six, ten times a day, always needing to hear the same thing.”14

Oddly, for all the tantric sex and breathless promises of eter-nal devotion, neither Hewitt nor Diana was sexually faithful. For much of the five-year love affair with Diana, Hewitt was involved with Emma Stewardson, whom he lamely claimed in his book was a decoy from his affair with the princess, a very convincing decoy indeed. For her part, Diana, still as needy as ever, had a series of love affairs unbeknownst to Hewitt.

Shortly after her love affair began with Hewitt, she took up with the wealthy banker Philip Dunne. Tall, virile, and witty, Dunne was darkly handsome with polished manners. The princess and the banker were seen in trendy restaurants flirting and laughing. One society lady reported having seen them play-ing footsie under the table. Charles, grateful for any man who could distract Diana, seemed to stamp the seal of approval on their relationship by inviting Dunne to join the royal skiing party at Klosters, Switzerland.

But the princess made a huge faux pas in June 1987 at a soci-2 8 0

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ety wedding reception. Dancing with Dunne, Diana ran her hand through his hair and pushed her tongue down his ear. She danced wildly with him, bold sexual undulations, pressing her body against his, as an awestruck crowd looked on with mouths agape. Charles quietly left the party without her at two a.m., and Diana and Dunne danced until dawn.