The royals - Kitty Kelley [135]
Raine was the daughter of the flamboyant Barbara Cartland. More subdued than her mother, Raine, forty-seven, was known as Lady Dartmouth after her marriage. She was a Tory disciple in the lacquered mode of Margaret Thatcher. She had met Johnny Spencer at a local political meeting and invited him to dinner at her London apartment when her husband was away. Spencer, so lonely since his divorce, fed on her attention. Drawn to her strength, he turned to her for advice, especially about running Althorp. She advised him to renovate his estate and to pay for the work by selling off some of his family heirlooms, including three Van Dyck paintings. She suggested pitching an immense tent on the grounds, filling it with huge bouquets of plastic flowers, and serving tea in paper cups to paying customers. She recommended converting the stables into a gift shop and selling souvenirs. She even drew up a list of items to appeal to tourists, including rape whistles and her mother’s romantic novels.
The Spencer children were aghast. “We didn’t like her one bit,” said Charles. “As a child, you instinctively feel things, and with her I very much instinctively felt things.”
Diana was less direct than her brother but equally hostile. Behind her back she made fun of Raine’s elaborate ball gowns, which she said were borrowed from film studios. She called her “Countess Come Dancing,” after a British television show about Ballroom dancing. Diana’s sister Jane treated Raine like dust on the closet shelf, but Sarah was more outspoken.
“Since my grandfather died and we moved to Althorp,” Sarah told a friend, “Lady Dartmouth has been an all-too-frequent visitor.” When a reporter called asking to speak to the new Earl Spencer, Sarah said, “My father is in bed with Lady Dartmouth,* and I wouldn’t dream of disturbing them.”
Diana ran up and down the corridors of Althorp with her brother, chanting the nursery rhyme “Rain, Rain, Go Away.” They called their father’s lover “Acid Raine” and sulked in her presence. Charles refused to talk to her, and Diana bedeviled her with anonymous poison-pen letters and hang-up phone calls—a scare tactic she allegedly used on others years later. When Raine insisted on dressing formally for dinner, the children came to the table in jeans.
Like Frances Shand Kydd, Raine was still married when she began her love affair. She, too, was publicly humiliated by being cited for adultery in her husband’s divorce action, and she also lost custody of her children. “It was quite a traumatic time for all of us,” said one of her sons. “My father never forgave her.”
Raine’s husband, Gerald Legge—the Earl of Dartmouth—was so embittered that he commissioned an artist to paint her out of a family portrait; he replaced her with a tree.
By then Raine had moved into Althorp with her Vuitton trunks. The Spencer children pleaded with their father to send her away, but he was bewitched. In 1976 they married and she became the Countess Spencer.* None of their children attended the civil ceremony.
“We weren’t invited,” Sarah told a reporter. “Not grand enough.”
“The inference is unwarranted,” snapped Barbara Cartland. “After all, my daughter gave up a sixteenth Earl for an eighth Earl. Hardly social climbing.”
Raine relished the Spencer title, the fortune, and the estate. In fact, she loved everything about her new marriage, except the children. “I’m absolutely sick of the ‘wicked stepmother’ lark,” she said years later. “You’re never going to make me sound like a human being because people like to think I’m Dracula’s mother, but I did have a rotten time at the start…. Sarah resented me, even my place at the head of the table, and gave orders to the servants over my head. Jane didn’t speak to me for two years, even if we bumped in a passageway. Diana was sweet, always did her own thing… and Charles, well, he was simply hateful.”
Raine was more rancorous in the early months of her marriage. “Sarah is impossible, and Jane’s all right as long as she keeps producing children. That’s about all she is good for. As for