The royals - Kitty Kelley [141]
“ ‘Ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’m just about to do exactly that. To get away.’ I scampered off and yelled over my shoulder for the two photographers to carry on. One froze, and the other reared back. ‘If you think I’m going to knock the fucking Queen off her own fucking road to take her fucking picture,’ he said, ‘you’re fucking crazy.’ He ran off, too. None of us was brave enough to pursue the story.”
When reporters approached Prince Philip later in the day to say “Happy New Year,” he was just as vulgar. “Bollocks,” he snarled. Putting his head down, he barreled through the swarm of reporters and photographers, swearing at them as he passed.
A reporter for the Sun said a hunting party that included Philip and Prince Charles peppered her car with shotgun pellets. And a Daily Mirror photographer was warned away from a public road near the family estate by sixteen-year-old Prince Edward. “I wouldn’t stand there,” the Prince said. “You could get shot.”
Charles was incensed at being hounded, and when he encountered reporters, he struggled to be cordial. “May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year,” he said through clenched teeth, “and your editors a particularly nasty one.”
Diana arrived a few days later, prompting a commotion among photographers, who blocked the entrances to Sandringham, trying to get pictures. Exasperated, the Queen admonished her son, “The idea of this romance going on for another year is intolerable for all concerned.” Prince Philip was more explicit. He told his indecisive son that he had to make up his mind one way or the other before he ruined Diana’s reputation.
Always the more involved parent, Philip monitored the women Charles dated. He disapproved of his son’s attraction to black women, and he ignored Charles’s fling with a Penthouse centerfold. He knew about the affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and warned Charles that such an illicit relationship could endanger the monarchy. Pushing him toward marriage, Philip was concerned about the woman Charles would marry because that woman, whoever she might be, represented the future of the Firm. Philip had invested his life in the monarchy and intended to protect his investment. After Charles turned thirty,* his father became especially vigilant and did not hesitate to say who was suitable, who was not. When Charles was dating Sabrina Guinness, from the banking side of the brewery family, he invited her to a house party in the country with friends of the royal family. The invitation was leaked to the press, and it triggered another spate of speculative stories about the new woman in Charles’s life. “Is He in Love Again?” asked one headline. It so infuriated Philip that he called the hosts and instructed them to disinvite the young woman. To ensure that they did, he mentioned that he would be arriving at five P.M. that weekend. Mortified, the friends did as they were ordered and told Miss Guinness that she was “welcome to leave” by a certain time “to avoid confusion” with Prince Philip’s visit.
Philip arrived early and met the young woman as she was leaving. He told her to join him in the drawing room. There were no break-the-ice pleasantries when she walked in and not so much as a perfunctory hello. As exacting as a guillotine, Philip told her to get out of his son’s life. He said he never wanted to see her name linked with Prince Charles again. Philip tidied up the landscape by telling her to get out of the house. She fled in tears.
Philip spoke to his son in the same gruff manner about marrying Diana Spencer. He didn’t tell Charles to marry her, simply to make up his mind. “Get on with it, Charles,” he said.
“The difference between father and son,” explained one of the Queen’s secretaries, “is that Charles dithers, and Philip decapitates.”
Charles spent the next four weeks agonizing over whether to marry Diana. He recorded his “confused and anxious state of mind” in his diary, and he consulted