The royals - Kitty Kelley [159]
Certainly few suspected that the Princess was bulimic or that she was suffering from postnatal depression. The Palace assumption was that she was merely acting spoiled and temperamental. She later confided to Chapman that she was bored with performing her royal duties and intended to get pregnant again as soon as she could. “I’d rather eat and have babies* than collect bouquets,” she said.
“I quite agree, ma’am,” he said, “but please let’s not share that information with Francis [Cornish] just yet.” Chapman achieved such a warm rapport with Diana that the Queen sent him on the royal tour of Australia in 1983.
“That’s where he revolutionized Diana,” said a woman also on the trip. “Vic showed her how to be a princess. He coached her: ‘It would be lovely if you did a dance for the cameras with your husband,’ he said before the night of the charity dance at the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne. Diana pulled a face, but he encouraged her. ‘Have fun with it. Show them your style.’ He flattered her, said that Diana was the best dancer he’d ever seen.
“ ‘The best?’ she asked.
“Vic laughed. ‘The best—after Dame Margot Fonteyn. And that’s only because she’s got Nureyev.’ Diana said she was stuck with Charles, who had admitted to all of us how much he dreaded having to get up at formal dinners and start the dancing. ‘I assure you,’ he had said, ‘it makes my heart sink to have to make an awful exhibition of ourselves.’
“Vic was playful with Diana. He relaxed her. She mugged at him as her lady-in-waiting fussed with her jewelry that evening. Diana took the necklace and put it over her head rather than wait to have it clasped around her neck. She couldn’t get it over the bridge of her nose. ‘My honker’s too big,’ she said. Vic roared. ‘Leave it there,’ he said. ‘It’s young and fun, like you. Just be your wonderful self. They want nothing more than a beautiful princess. They’ll love you.’ ”
And they did. The photograph of Charles and Diana dancing relieved Britons, who had begun to worry about their less-than-perfect Princess. With Queen Mary’s emeralds wrapped around her head, Disco Di was a triumph.
When the tour was over, Diana gave her lady-in-waiting Anne Beckwith-Smith an expensive pair of earrings. The card read: “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
The problem of the Princess had been solved, but the solution upset the Prince. “We’ve got trouble,” Chapman told his friend Carolyn Townshend when he returned to England. “She’s too popular, and he doesn’t like it a bit.”
The Prince did not understand his wife’s appeal. He expected his intelligence to be prized over her beauty and resented the adulation she stirred in crowds, who wanted to see her and not him. He smarted when people crossed the street to be on her side, not his. Because Diana looked like an angel and carried the aura of a royal princess, she fulfilled people’s dreams in a way that he never could. And he was envious. She tapped into emotions that were deeply rooted in fantasy and nourished by fairy tales as an image of perfection, worthy of adoration. The title of Her Royal Highness, conferred by marriage, elevated her in people’s eyes. Like a saint, she was automatically revered and considered deserving of worship. She packaged herself exquisitely, and her beauty, combined with natural warmth, made her magnetic. Charles, for all his worthy causes, looked dull, whereas Diana dazzled.
“One of