The royals - Kitty Kelley [186]
Diana responded with calculation. On the return flight to London, she talked to a Daily Mirror photographer about her whirlwind tour, saying how tense she felt being whisked from one engagement to another. “I feel so sad when I think about how I held that little boy in my arms,” she said. “It was so moving. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman traveling alone. It never feels so bad when my husband is with me.”
The Palace interpreted her comments as a veiled attack upon her husband and scrambled to issue a statement, which implied that she was overwrought: “Visiting Harlem Hospital was a very emotional experience for her. She has been working non-stop for two days and the full impact is only just catching up with her.” That was the first shot fired in the media war between the wily courtiers and the willful Princess.
“Diana played the game of one-upmanship like a maestro,” said London columnist Ross Benson. “When she and Charles visited a music college, he was prevailed upon to play a note or two on the cello. It was too good an opportunity for her to miss. While he was playing, she strode across the stage, sat down at the piano, lifted the lid, and struck up the opening theme of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Every camera swung around to follow her, leaving Charles beached and abandoned in his humiliation.”
Diana had insisted on accompanying her husband, over his objection, to a birthday party for Annabel Elliot, the sister of Camilla Parker Bowles. The forty guests were part of what she dismissed as her husband’s stuffy Highgrove set, so no one had expected her to attend. But she was determined to confront her husband’s mistress.
“I remember meeting her at that party shortly after her Harlem hugging trip,” recalled a London attorney, “and thinking she was either dumb or else jet-lagged because she couldn’t carry on a conversation. She kept looking at Charles, who had left her and gone off in a corner all night with Camilla. I didn’t get what was happening until later, when my wife explained it all.”
Toward the end of the party, Diana approached Camilla and said she wanted a word with her in private. Diana waited until the last guests had left the room. Then, looking her rival in the eye, she spoke bluntly: “Why don’t you leave my husband alone?” Taken aback, Camilla started to protest, but Diana cut her off, saying she knew all about their affair. She cited the telephone calls, the love letters, the foxhunts, the Sunday night visits. She said she knew that Camilla played hostess at Highgrove in her absence, and Diana resented Camilla’s being in Diana’s home. Diana blamed Camilla for turning Charles away from his children and ruining his marriage. That said, Diana walked out of the room and told Charles she wanted to go home.
The next morning she called Carolyn Bartholomew and told her what she had done. She also phoned James Hewitt and related every detail of the confrontation, relishing her bold performance. She said she finally felt free of Camilla’s clutches. “Why, oh, why,” she asked him, “didn’t I say all of that to her sooner? What a difference it would have made.”
Hewitt said she deserved a medal for bravery and inquired about Charles’s reaction.
“Stone cold fury,” Diana said proudly, “and ‘how could I possibly.’ ”
Diana’s father invited the royal couple to a sixtieth birthday party in honor of Diana’s stepmother in May 1989. But Charles had planned a trip to Turkey and wouldn’t cancel it. “I’ll be traveling,” he announced by memo, which was how he communicated with his wife to avoid bickering. He had quietly moved out of Kensington Palace and lived entirely at Highgrove, where his children visited him on weekends. He did not tell his wife that he would be going to Turkey with Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband, Andrew, but Diana found out.
When she told Hewitt about the trip, she said she no longer cared about Charles and Camilla and “Andrew Park-Your-Balls,