The royals - Kitty Kelley [177]
Diana struck back by accusing him of being selfish and stingy, and he yelled at her for being extravagant. “The meaner he got, the more she would spend,” said interior designer Nicholas Haslam, a close friend of the royal family. “That meanness of his drove her crazy… but the royals love to play at being poor. Camilla is the same way; she can’t abide spending money, and Charles adores that quality in her. They turn each other on with their stinginess. When Camilla comes in bristling about how much the cleaner costs, Charles becomes aroused and leaps in to exclaim about how much he had to pay for the same thing. Back and forth they go, banging on about the cost of having their clothes commercially cleaned. The two of them nearly expire with exasperation about having to spend their money on such a necessity….”
The Princess carped that his penny-pinching deprived her of a tennis court at Highgrove.
“You know it’s the only thing I have ever wanted here,” she told him.
Charles said he could not afford the $20,000 to build a tennis court.
“You cannot be serious,” Diana shouted. “What about the thousands you pour into your precious bloody garden and anything else which takes your fancy? I don’t think you realize quite the efforts I make to go along with what you want to do all the time. What about my wants?”
He shrugged and walked out of the room. Diana yelled at him through the closed door. That evening she did not show up for dinner. While he sat in the dining room waiting for her, she ate alone in the nursery, where she said she did not have to beg for love.
During their most heated arguments, they flung curses and objects. After one blistering row, Charles stormed out the door, jumped into his car, and roared out of Highgrove. Diana opened an upstairs window and screamed at the top of her lungs, “You’re a shit, Charles, an absolute shit!” During another quarrel, she threw a teapot at him, stomped out of the room, and slammed the door, nearly knocking over a footman. She yelled over her shoulder, “You’re a fucking animal, Charles, and I hate you!”
Soon Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail gossip columnist, who said he socialized with royalty, denounced Diana in print. He called her a spoiled, fiendish monster who was making the Prince of Wales “desperately unhappy.”
Her growing distrust of Charles and her jealousy over Camilla Parker Bowles marked Diana—in her husband’s eyes—as irrational. Charles expected to do as he pleased—without objection from his wife. Her tearful outbursts about his long absences only convinced him of her instability. Worse, he was bored with her. He dismissed her interests—clothes, dancing, rock and roll—as trivial. He said her hospital visits were self-serving, and her humor, which he once found so delightful, grated on him.
A university graduate with intellectual pretensions, Charles was embarrassed to be married to a high school dropout who he said did not know the difference between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. During the taping of a television interview at Highgrove in 1986, she poked fun at herself for failing the college entrance exams. “Brain the size of a pea I’ve got,” she chirped. Charles insisted her comment be edited out. Diana said he should have edited out his own comment about talking to the plants in his garden at Highgrove. “It’s very important to talk to them,” he had told viewers. She had told him, “People will think you’re barking [mad].” That was the last television interview the couple did together.
But Diana was right. Charles’s remark made him look slightly eccentric, if not ridiculous. “He’s really not the nut-chomping loony you read about in the papers,” insisted his brother Andrew.
“Charles sometimes complained to friends about what he considered Diana’s coarse, even vulgar, sense