The royals - Kitty Kelley [136]
The animosity between stepmother and stepchildren became even more vitriolic in September 1978, when Johnny Spencer suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage. He lapsed into a coma for two months and lay in the hospital two more months. Raine visited him every day and sat by his bed, playing opera records and willing him to recover. She fought his children over his medical treatment and barred them from seeing him in a coma. She said she did not want them absorbing the life energy she felt he needed to recover. His doctors braced her for death, but she would not accept their diagnosis. She insisted her husband would live, if only he could be treated with a powerful new German drug (Aslocillin) that was not yet licensed in England. Citing legal restrictions, the doctors said they could not give him the drug, even if they could get it. So Raine moved her husband to another hospital and exerted her influence to get the drug imported for experimentation. She succeeded, and as she predicted, the Earl Spencer rallied and recovered, but not completely. He remained partially brain-damaged, which affected his speech and mobility.
“I could have saved my husband’s life ten times over and spent all my money doing this,” she told a writer, “but it wouldn’t have changed anything in his children’s attitude toward me.
“But I’m a survivor, and people forget that at their peril. There’s pure steel up my backbone. Nobody destroys me, and nobody was going to destroy Johnny so long as I could sit by his bed… and will my life force into him.”
Raine appreciated the opportunity for social advancement and welcomed Diana’s new royal relationship. And her father felt flattered about his favorite daughter’s catching the eye of the Prince of Wales. But her mother was troubled. Frances Shand Kydd had seen the royal brush swipe her oldest daughter, and she remembered the embarrassment Sarah had suffered when she was dropped from the royal guest list. Sarah, who was fighting anorexia while she was dating Charles, had treasured his invitations and hired a clipping service to send her all the stories written about them. She proudly started a scrapbook that chronicled her rise as one of the chosen few. After her “dustman” interview, there were no more articles and no more invitations. Now her younger sister was receiving them.
Prince Charles had been intrigued enough by his conversation with Diana during the weekend house party in July to invite her to the opera. He extended the invitation through his secretary and at the last minute. But Diana didn’t care; she was thrilled. She accepted and pretended to share his appreciation of Verdi. Charles later invited her to watch him play polo at Cowdray, to watch him shoot at Sandringham, to watch him race at Ludlow. Diana accepted—and watched adoringly. “Mostly,” she told her mother, “I just enjoy being with him.”
Diana joined Charles aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, to watch the races at Cowes, and a week later she accepted his invitation to join his small party for dinner at Buckingham Palace. She admitted feeling intimidated by such friends of his as Nicholas “Fatty” Soames, who were so much older, but she managed to ingratiate herself with them and fit in. They especially appreciated her youthful adoration of the Prince. “She was clearly determined and enthusiastic about him,” recalled Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, the wife of one of Charles’s closest friends, “and she very much wanted him.” Years later Diana’s biographer, Andrew Morton, would state it more bluntly. “During their bizarre courtship,” he wrote, “she was his willing puppy who came to heel when he whistled.”
Diana was not discovered by the press until the autumn of 1980, when she was sitting beside Charles on the bank of the river Dee, watching him fish. The high-powered binoculars of newspaper reporter James Whitaker and his photographer, Arthur Edwards, spotted her through the trees. When