The royals - Kitty Kelley [133]
Growing up, Diana had been the meticulous member of the family. She spent hours cleaning and scouring, rearranging her dresser drawers, and hanging her clothes. She lined up her shoes by color and made her bed every day, tucking the corners precisely. She vacuumed constantly and learned to launder because she said she loved the smell of freshly ironed shirts. Like Cinderella, she worked cheerfully as a maid for her oldest sister, who paid her $2 an hour to clean her London apartment. Years later Diana told friends that her psychiatrist explained this compulsion to clean as an attempt to impose order on the chaos around her. Recognizing her obsessive nature, she avoided medications like tranquilizers, fearing that if she ever got started, she would become addicted.
Her family had been torn apart by divorce, alcoholism, and violence. For the first ten years of her parents’ marriage, her father had blamed her mother for not producing an heir. “It was a dreadful time for my parents and probably the root of their divorce,” said Diana’s brother, Charles, “because I don’t think they ever got over it.”
Diana’s father, Edward John Spencer, was known informally as Johnny Spencer. As Viscount Althorp, he was heir to a large fortune and a thirteen-thousand-acre estate, Althorp House, which his ancestors had acquired in the sixteenth century. A former equerry to two monarchs, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, he was destined to become the eighth Earl Spencer; when he inherited his title, he needed a son to pass it on. In 1954 he married Frances Roche, the beautiful blond daughter of the fourth Lord Fermoy. They moved into Park House in Norfolk, on the Sandringham estate. Their first child, Sarah, was born the next year, and two years later, 1957, they had another girl, Jane. Johnnie Spencer wanted a boy and insisted his wife be examined by specialists to find out why she produced daughters. Willing to try again, Frances became pregnant in 1958 and gave birth to a boy in January 1959. The baby was named John in his father’s honor. “I never saw him. I never held him,” Frances said. “He was an eight-pound baby boy who had a lung malfunction, which meant he couldn’t survive.” Ten hours after he was born, he died. Frances tried again, and eighteen months later, on July 1, 1961, she gave birth to a third daughter, whom they named Diana Frances. “I was supposed to be the boy,” said Diana many years later.
Johnny Spencer started drinking too much and abusing his wife. He sent her back to London’s Harley Street specialists to find out what was “wrong” with her. Three years later, when she was twenty-eight, she produced a son. “Finally,” she said, “I’ve done my duty.” The Queen was named godmother.
The heir, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, was known as the Honourable Charles Spencer, while his grandfather, the Earl Spencer, was alive. Upon the Earl’s death in 1975, Johnny Spencer inherited his father’s title and his son, Charles, then nine years old, became Viscount Althorp.
“Waiting for dead man’s shoes,” is how Frances bitterly described her husband’s life before he inherited his father’s title. By then she had fallen in love with a dynamic married man, who she said gave her life passion and purpose. Although Peter Shand Kydd, forty-two, did not have a title, he was wealthy and glamorous and had a wild sense of humor. Unlike Johnny Spencer, a courtier who approached royalty with reverence, Kydd was unimpressed. After dinner with the Queen, he told his children that Her Majesty “was as boring as ever” and “Buckingham Palace was a bit of a fucking Trust House Forte [hotel].”
Kydd was heir to a wallpaper fortune and a former naval officer who owned land in England, Scotland, and Australia. He was the father of three young children.
“That didn’t stop Frances,” said one of Peter Shand Kydd’s sons. “She’s tough—a predator. When she