The royals - Kitty Kelley [180]
Eight months after Barry Mannakee was transferred from the Royal Protection Unit, a car smashed into his motorcycle and he was killed. Charles was given the news immediately, but he waited twenty-four hours before telling Diana. When they were on their way to the airport to fly to France for the Cannes Film Festival, he turned to her moments before she was to get out of the limousine in front of photographers.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “I got word from the Protection Unit yesterday that poor Barry Mannakee was killed. Some sort of motorcycle accident. Terrible shame, isn’t it?”
Diana burst into tears as the limousine pulled up to the royal flight. Charles pushed her out.
“Let’s go, darling,” he said sarcastically. “Your press awaits you.”
Diana did not believe Mannakee’s death was an accident. She was convinced that her former protection officer had been assassinated by MI5 [Britain’s intelligence agency] at the instigation of her jealous husband. She blamed herself for Mannakee’s death and tried to summon his spirit through several séances. When a writer published a book suggesting a nefarious plot by MI5, Mannakee’s father insisted his son’s death was an accident. Diana eventually accepted that, but she never forgave her husband for the cruel way he broke the news to her. She told the story to friends to demonstrate his heartlessness and to show the diabolical pleasure he took in tormenting her.
Privately the fairy tale was over, but the public did not yet see the cracks behind the facade. The first glimpse came after a polo match when Charles kissed his wife in front of hundreds of people when his team lost; she turned her head quickly as if she had just been licked by a slobbering dog. Then she wiped his kiss off her cheek.
“I suppose I should’ve seen something askew in 1985 when I interviewed Prince Charles for my biography of the late poet laureate John Betjeman,” said writer Bevis Hillier. “But I wasn’t looking for a shadow on the romance. I’m in my fifties and grew up singing ‘God Save the King.’ I now sing ‘God Save Our Gracious Queen.’ The monarchy is like religion to me, and absurd as it might sound, I want it to survive….
“The Prince and I talked in his office at Kensington Palace, where a clock chimed every fifteen minutes. He was very messy—heaps of papers on the floor and red leather boxes with gold-embossed Prince of Wales feathers all over the place. But he was sweet and could not have been more pleasant.
“My last question to him was: Which was your favorite Betjeman poem? He flipped through the book of poetry and fell upon one dealing with the aging sex drive. He read the last stanza:
Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust.
“He smiled ruefully and said, ‘I’d like to choose “Late Flowering Lust,” but I guess I better not.’ Instead he chose ‘Indoor Games Near Newbury.’ ” The Prince had carefully selected a poem about little children holding hands in a cupboard.
“I knew something was amiss in the fall of 1986, after an off-the-record interview with Prince Charles at Highgrove,” recalled the London bureau chief of Time. “As a condition of the interview, I was not allowed to ask questions about his family. We talked in his study, where there were at least forty sterling silver– framed pictures—the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh, King Juan Carlos, Mountbatten, Wills and Harry, the royal horse, the royal dogs. But not one picture of the royal wife. Although Diana was the most photographed woman in the world, her picture was nowhere to be found in her husband’s study.”
The royal watchers on the tabloids noticed the strain between the Prince and Princess and reported that the couple had spent thirty-seven consecutive nights in Britain without once sharing the same bedroom. They noted that Charles returned early and alone from family vacations and that even when he and Diana were going to the same place, they arrived separately.