The royals - Kitty Kelley [160]
So, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Grace of Monaco before her, the Princess of Wales became a decorative focus for the masses. Treated as a natural phenomenon, she became an object of mass hysteria. People lined up for hours to see her pass by. They reached out to touch her and felt blessed if she smiled in their direction. Unlike her earnest husband, she excited people. She possessed the incandescence of a movie star, and he couldn’t stand it.
“Vic had seen the conflict developing in Australia,” recalled Townshend, “so he tried to set things right for Charles. Vic suggested some jocular comments for the Prince to make at the farewell banquet in Auckland à la President Kennedy’s wonderful line about being the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and enjoying every minute. But Charles was not John F. Kennedy.”
Whenever the Prince tried to be self-deprecating, he sounded strained and unnatural. Seeing someone wave a bouquet in Diana’s direction, he offered to give it to her. “I’m just a collector of flowers these days,” he said. His delivery suggested a sinner who sees redemption in self-inflicted humor but can’t make the leap of faith. Although distinctly uncomfortable poking fun at himself, he made an effort. “I have come to the conclusion that it really would have been easier to have had two wives,” he said. “Then they could cover both sides of the street and I could walk down the middle, directing operations.”
Because he was the Prince of Wales, everyone laughed. But Chapman knew how hard it was for Charles to step aside and let his wife be the star.
“Vic stayed with us in the country,” said Townshend, “and the calls came in late at night from the Prince of Wales, who was worried about some negative article that had appeared. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it,’ Vic would say. The rest of the people around Charles would shuffle and shamble: ‘Oh, yes, Your Royal Highness, you are absolutely right, sir. Such rubbish. It’s an outrage. Indeed. Yes, sir. Yes sir. Three bags full, sir.’ But not Vic. He shot straight and told Charles exactly like it was.
“Diana bit her fingernails to the quick because she worried about the tabloid stories displeasing the Palace. She once appeared in a new hairstyle that, unfortunately, upstaged the Queen, who was opening Parliament. Princess Margaret was furious and said something to Charles, who gave Diana unshirted hell. Poor thing, she quaked in those days. Her nails were the giveaway: if they were short and chewed, there was trouble.”
The British press reported that for the first three years of her marriage, Diana said only five hundred words in public. She was too intimidated to make a speech or appear without her husband. Her first solo appearance was in France, not England, when she attended the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco. On the strength of their one meeting, Diana had considered the Princess to be a close friend. “We were psychically connected,” she told Grace’s daughter Caroline. Diana, who believed in astrology and numerology, felt that she and the Princess of Monaco were born under the same star and shared mystical characteristics. In fact, both came from dysfunctional families. Both were third children. Both had married royal princes. Both became more famous than their husbands. Both paid a heavy price.
This was confirmed for Diana several years later, when Robert Lacey published a biography entitled Grace, which disclosed her excessive drinking, her fraying marriage, and her extramarital love affairs. Diana said the book substantiated her psychic intuitions. When Grace died in 1982, Diana had to fight to attend her funeral. The Palace did not want her to go, although no one else in the British royal family had volunteered. Diana said the glowing press coverage she received for going