The royals - Kitty Kelley [140]
Raine had watched disapprovingly as Diana continued to pick up Gilbey’s dirty laundry each week, lovingly wash and iron his shirts, and deliver them on hangers to his apartment. During an earlier infatuation, she had done the same thing for Rory Scott, a lieutenant in the Scots Guards.
Concern over Diana’s tarnished image in the press was shared by Raine’s mother, Barbara Cartland, who had made millions because she understood the importance of the soft lie over the hard truth: one fuels a fantasy while the other breaks your heart. She accepted the unspoken agreement between royals and commoners: they pretend to be superior and we accept the pretense. So the eighty-year-old novelist wrapped herself in pink marabou feathers and summoned a reporter to her house to declare Diana’s innocence. She conducted the interview from her bed surrounded by five poodles in rhinestone collars.
“Prince Charles has got to have a pure young gel,” she said, “I don’t think Diana has ever had a boyfriend. She’s as pure as one of my heroines. This is marvelous. Quite perfect.”
Raine knew she needed more than her mother’s breathless proclamation. She consulted a lawyer because she also was concerned about rumors that nude photos of Diana might surface in the press. “She particularly feared Private Eye,” recalled one lawyer. Raine had remembered Diana’s giggling on the phone with girlfriends about pictures* that had been taken of her at a pool in Switzerland, where she had taken off her bikini. The lawyer reassured Raine that an injunction might be obtained before such photos could be published. He then advised her to turn to someone within the aristocracy to publicly proclaim Diana’s good name. So Raine contacted Lord Fermoy, who was Diana’s uncle, and asked him to uphold the family honor. The nobleman, a manic-depressive who would commit suicide four years later, readily agreed to talk to the press.
“Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover,” he told a reporter. “Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible royal bride for Prince Charles at the moment. And after one or two of his most recent girlfriends, I am not surprised. To my knowledge, Diana has never been involved in this way with anybody. This is good.”
“The consensus,” declared Newsweek, “virtue is intact.” The press coverage of the royal romance heated up as zealous reporters followed the Prince of Wales everywhere, pestering him about his intentions. By January of 1981 the royal family felt as if they were under house arrest at Sandringham, where reporters and photographers gathered outside.
“It’s like a goddamned death watch,” Prince Philip said to his aide as he looked out the window.
The Queen complained that she couldn’t go riding without being pursued by “a ragtag band of reporters.”
“Her Majesty, if you’ll excuse me, behaved like a fishwife one morning and told me to ‘eff off,’ ” said James Whitaker, who recalled the incident at Sandringham more vividly than he reported it. “I simply quoted the Queen as saying, ‘Go away. Can’t you leave us alone?’ But she was more explicit than that.
“I was camped out with two photographers when she came out of her stables on the royal steed. She drove there to avoid the press and then rode out of the stables on her horse, but we were close enough to get to her. There were three of us: Les Wilson and Jimmy Gray, both photographers, and myself.