The royals - Kitty Kelley [139]
Diana did not realize the complexities facing her. She did know that Camilla was a constant presence whenever she turned around, and she wondered how the older woman always knew so much about her relationship with Charles. But she didn’t feel secure enough yet to question the Prince about his former lover. She confided her discomfort to her roommates and her sisters but said nothing to Charles. She felt slightly reassured by his anger over the royal train incident; he lashed out at the press and called them “bloody vultures.” When the editor refused to apologize and retract the story, Charles insisted the Palace issue a second denial.
He left for India days later on a trip that had been planned for months, and Diana accompanied him to the airport to say good-bye. As he nonchalantly skipped up the steps of the royal plane without looking back, she burst into tears.
Reporters followed Charles on his visit to the Taj Mahal and asked what he thought about the great monument to passion built by a Moghul emperor in memory of his wife. “A marvelous idea,” said Charles, “to build something so wonderful to someone one loved so very much.” An Indian reporter asked about the Prince’s own prospects for a wife, and Charles left him breathless with his odd response. “I’m encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim,” he said, “I could have lots of wives.”
The British reporters glanced at one another uncomfortably, wondering if the Prince was joking. None quoted him verbatim. Even with the arrival of Australian Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid papers, Britain’s reporters remained deferential to royalty. They softened their stories on the Queen and her heir by withholding newsworthy details and, in this case, ignoring the revealing quotation. Instead they wrote as Her Majesty’s obedient servants. They reported that Charles said: “I can understand that love could make a man build the Taj Mahal for his wife. One day I would like to bring my own back here.”
In England, reverberations from the royal train story were still rattling Diana, who became hysterical when she read the Sunday Times report of the “tawdry” incident. “Whatever the public expects of her,” wrote the newspaper on November 30, 1980, “the monarchy demands that her copybook be unblotted. Part of Lady Diana’s suitability is held to be the fact that she is, in the Fleet Street euphemism, ‘a girl with no past’—that is, with no previous lovers.”
Up to this point, Diana had carried her own pedestal wherever she went. Every word written about her had been laudatory. Now she was scared and called her mother in tears. Frustrated and angry, Frances Shand Kydd fired off a letter to the Times, deploring the “malicious lies” and “invented stories” printed about her daughter. She demanded that reporters stop harassing Diana, and her letter prompted sixty members of Parliament to draft a motion “deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is being treated by the media.” An editorial entitled “Nineteen and Under Siege” followed in the Guardian, stating that no teenager deserved to be put through such an ordeal.
Fearing that her mother might have overreacted, Diana quickly called James Whitaker at the Daily Star to disavow the letter. She said she did not want to alienate the press but needed to proclaim her innocence.
“Diana wanted nothing more than to become Charles’s wife,” recalled Whitaker. “Everyone wanted it, the Queen included. Diana called me to deny that she had been involved in the royal train incident. ‘Please believe me,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been on that train. I have never even seen it.’ I ran the story and quoted her as saying she’d been at home all evening, watching television with her flatmates.”
Most people, with the possible exception of her stepmother, assumed that Diana was as pure as Portia. She never proclaimed her virginity—directly—but years later her biographer Andrew Morton did it for her. He claimed