The royals - Kitty Kelley [134]
Diana was six years old in 1967 when her mother left her father and moved into a rented apartment in the Chelsea section of London to be closer to her lover. Frances told her husband that she wanted a divorce and expected to receive custody of their children. Johnnie drunkenly raged at her as “a bolter” and beat her. When he sobered up, he sobbed and begged her to return home. She tried a reconciliation but said it was torture, so she moved out of Park House and returned to London.
Shortly after that, Mrs. Peter Shand Kydd sued for divorce and named Frances as corespondent. Johnny Spencer was so humiliated by his wife’s adultery that he sued for custody. He was supported in court by Frances’s mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Lady Fermoy testified under oath that the Spencer children appeared to be happier with their father than their mother. She also swore that she had never seen Spencer lose his temper.
“Ruth was an old royalist—humbly born in Scotland but incredibly snobbish—and she’s been in royal circles all her life,” said a Spencer family member. “I adored her and she was wonderful to me, but I must admit that she was rotten to her children, especially Frances. In the custody fight, Ruth sided with Johnny because, as she told me, and testified in court, she’d never seen him actually strike Frances. Ruth hadn’t been around for the drunken thrashings, so she could swear without compunction that she’d never witnessed Johnny’s physical violence. And Frances would never have told her mother about the abuse; she and Ruth weren’t that close to begin with, and the subject wasn’t one you discussed freely in those days.
“Ruth would never be party to anyone—let alone her own daughter—embarrassing one of the Queen’s courtiers. But the real reason she turned on her daughter was to protect her grandchildren. She didn’t want them living with a commoner when they could be living with an aristocrat. Frances never forgave her mother. They didn’t speak for nine years and then just barely.”
The writer Penny Junor concurred. “Lady Fermoy really could not believe that her daughter would leave a belted earl for a man in trade.”
The court ruled in favor of Viscount Althorp, so Diana and her brother, who had moved to London with their mother, moved back to Park House to live with their father. Their two older sisters, Sarah and Jane, remained at boarding school. That year, 1969, Frances married Peter Shand Kydd, who was so torn about abandoning his children that he almost backed out of the marriage. “He never got over the guilt,” said one of his closest friends, “and that, coupled with drink later on, probably led to the divorce from Frances in 1990.”
A child of a broken marriage, Diana had trouble learning to read. Her brother teased her about being slow and dull-witted because she barely made passing grades. The only award she received in school was in the fourth grade when she won the Palmer Cup for Pets’ Corner for being nice to her guinea pig. She loved to dance and spent hours in front of the mirror practicing toe, tap, and ballet exercises, but she was not scholastic. So she dropped out of school at the age of sixteen, and her father, who worried about her lack of education, enrolled her in a Swiss finishing school (Institut Alpin Videmanette in Gstaad). She went reluctantly and studied cooking and French halfheartedly. She spent most of her time skiing. After three months she said she was too homesick to complete the term. She badgered her father to let her come home, which, upon her grandfather’s death, had become the grand Jacobean mansion of Althorp.
Her father continued to worry about her future, but Diana was unconcerned. After reading an article in the Daily Telegraph about academic failures who later became roaring successes in life, she clipped the story and slipped it under his door. Then she pestered him about moving to London. She wanted to get an apartment like her older sisters.
“I couldn’t bear Althorp anymore,” she said.