The royals - Kitty Kelley [162]
Charles understood his power, but he did not understand criticism. He was accustomed to excessive praise, but for months now magazines and newspapers had ridiculed him, his wife, and his marriage. Vanity Fair said he was “pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” His mistress had described his wife as a mouse, but others considered her a royal rat. She had purged his staff of over forty people who had either resigned or been fired. She retired most of “the pink mafia,” as she called the homosexuals on Charles’s staff, because she did not want them around her young sons. She even banished her husband’s old Labrador because the dog was incontinent.
Diana was just as miffed as Charles by the tabloid stories of her “compulsive shopping” and the “exorbitant amounts of money” she was “squandering” on “high-style fashions.” One newspaper estimated that after British Vogue started advising her, she spent $1.4 million in one year—for 373 outfits, complete with hats, belts, shoes, and purses. “It’s not true, it’s not true,” she wailed. “In the beginning, I had to buy endless new things, of course, because on a tour you change three or four times a day. I had to buy new things. I couldn’t go around in a leopardskin.”
Since then her closets had expanded to six suites in Kensington Palace. One room was reserved solely for shoes: “Three hundred and twenty pairs,” she gleefully told her friend Sarah Ferguson, “and that’s not counting my trainers.” Diana soon learned to send her bills to the British Foreign Office for the designer clothes she wore on royal tours. For a sixteen-day trip of Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, her clothing bill was $122,000.
She was distressed by the stories of how she had changed from a dewy-eyed virgin into a self-obsessed harridan. She felt inaccurately blamed for turning her husband into a muzzy mystic, whom she no longer allowed to hunt and shoot.
Charles fretted continually about his media coverage. He did not read the tabloids, which he called “the cheap and impertinent gutter press.” But he complained that the quality papers he did read were not adequately reporting his worthy endeavors. Over a private lunch he grumbled to Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, “I sometimes wonder why I don’t pack it in and spend my time playing polo.”
Like politicians, who live and die by polls, Charles and Diana scrambled to find spin doctors. They asked everyone around them for advice, calling upon Tory Members of Parliament, discreet editors, and worshipful courtiers. They sought counsel from lawyers and media consultants, inviting them all to Kensington Palace to pick their brains.
“It was in November 1984 that I lunched with them,” John Junor, former editor of the Sunday Express, wrote in his memoirs. “The Prince remarked that he hoped Princess Diana would begin to give interviews. But he added, ‘Perhaps not just yet. It might be wise to wait until she has more experience.’ ”
The Princess agreed. “I just hate the sound of my own voice,” she said. “I can’t bear it. When I launched that new liner last week, I just couldn’t believe it when I heard myself afterward. It just didn’t sound like me.”
The Prince laughed. “I felt exactly the same way. I just couldn’t believe that yakkety-yak voice was mine. So upper-class.”
Charles asked Junor for advice on how to handle public relations and combat “the idiotic stories” that appeared in the press. The Prince spoke at length about his concerns—the disadvantaged youth of the country, the inadequacy of the Church of England—and the editor listened. So did Diana, until Junor turned to include her in the conversation.
“Darling, I’m so sorry,” said Charles. “I’ve done all the talking. Did you have something you wanted to say?”
The Princess nodded. Then she poured out to Junor her resentment about the way in which she had been attacked for influencing her husband and turning him against shooting and hunting.
The Prince broke in. “I’m angry about that, too. Because my wife is doing nothing of the kind. My wife actually likes hunting and shooting. It is