The royals - Kitty Kelley [165]
“But you’re over six feet tall,” she said to the craggy-faced actor.
“I’d ask you to dance,” Eastwood said, deadpan, “but you’re too old for me.”
“I’m only twenty-four,” Diana said flirtatiously.
“Oh, all right,” said the fifty-five-year-old movie star. “I’ll make an exception.”
Eastwood described his dance with Diana by paraphrasing a line he had made famous in his Dirty Harry movies: “She made my day.”*
As dazzled as the celebrities were to meet Diana, she in turn was just as excited to meet them, including explorer Jacques Cousteau, skater Dorothy Hamill, artist David Hockney, Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, and actress Brooke Shields. She told Baryshnikov that she had gotten his autograph years before when he’d appeared at Covent Garden.
“I was one of those girls who was waiting for you for hours and hours after your performance,” she said.
She asked Dorothy Hamill if there were gossip magazines and society magazines in America as there were in England. “They can be so nice,” Diana said. “They ask you three lovely questions, and then they throw in a zinger question.” She also inquired about television talk shows and wanted to know about Johnny Carson and the Tonight show.
“Of course, Joan Rivers’s name came up,” recalled Dorothy Hamill, who sat at Diana’s table, “and Baryshnikov chimed in, ‘No, don’t do that! Don’t go on Joan Rivers’s show.’ ”
At a luncheon the next day in Upperville, Virginia, at philanthropist Paul Mellon’s estate, the British royal couple were introduced to Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. A few days later in Palm Beach at a charity ball, the Prince and Princess met Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, and Joan Collins, who had recently married a man sixteen years younger than she. Diana was fascinated by the fifty-three-year-old television star of Dynasty and cornered a reporter from the Daily Mail to pump him about Collins’s latest wedding. “She’s amazing,” said Diana. “At her age. Husband number four.”
In Washington and Palm Beach large crowds had lined the streets to welcome the royal couple. Young girls jumped up and down and screamed with excitement when they saw Diana. The Princess of Wales had become an international icon, who inspired the same kind of ear-splitting ruckus as a rock star. When she accompanied her husband to religious services in Washington’s National Cathedral, more than twelve thousand people turned out. “I think it’s her flying saucer hat,” said Prince Charles. He gestured to the large discus on top of his wife’s head.
In a lighthearted farewell toast in Washington, D.C., he said: “A gentleman of the press asked me, rather tactlessly, I thought, why there was a bigger crowd outside the cathedral than when I was last here on my own. The answer, of course, is that they all turned out to see my new clothes.”
The audience responded appreciatively and laughed again when he referred to his wedding as a production of sanctified show business. “My wife and myself have been completely overwhelmed by the extraordinary, enthusiastic, and friendly welcome that we’ve received here,” Charles said. “Perhaps it’s the fact that we got married four years ago in a rather well-known ecclesiastical bull ring in London and it wasn’t actually filmed in Hollywood.”
Although most of the attention was focused on Diana with her youth and beauty, Charles, not surprisingly, charmed several older women. “I must admit I found him the more interesting of the two,” wrote U.S. Chief of Protocol Selwa Roosevelt in her memoirs. “He was well read, spoke beautifully, had his father’s charm and a great sense of humor.” But President Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, was more candid. “We all loved Charles,” she said, “but Diana was stupid. Someone should tell her that it doesn’t play well—that dopey looking-up-through-the-eyelashes bit of hers.”
By the time she returned to London, the Princess of Wales had become a walking monument. British opinion polls said she was the country’s greatest tourist