The royals - Kitty Kelley [209]
The maid arrived and packed two Louis Vuitton cases monogrammed with the Spencer “S.” Diana stopped her from leaving. “What have you got in there?” she demanded. “Those are my father’s cases. They don’t belong to you.”
The maid explained that Raine had bought the luggage for a trip to Japan to match suitcases with the initials “R.S.”
Diana ordered the maid to empty the Vuitton suitcases into black plastic garbage bags. The maid complied, and Diana snatched the suitcases. Her brother kicked the garbage bags down the stairs.
Days later, when Raine returned with a roll of red stickers to identify the pieces of furniture she wanted to move, she was confronted there by her stepson’s lawyer. He told her she could not remove one single stick from Althorp until she supplied proof of purchase.
“She had to telephone the new Earl for details of the memorial service [held six weeks later in Westminster Abbey],” said her assistant, “and he told his solicitor to send her a fax.” When her husband’s ashes were placed in the Spencer vault, Raine was not invited to the family ceremony.
The last merchandising contract that the Earl Spencer had signed before he died was with the publisher of Diana: Her True Story. Having been assured that the book would portray his family positively, especially his daughter, he sold the rights to eighty personal photographs from the Spencer family albums. This time Diana did not object.
She wanted the photographs to illustrate a book, which she hoped would set her free from her marriage. Months before, she had given permission to a few friends to talk with the author, Andrew Morton. Through the eyes of her brother, her best friend, her lover, and her masseuse, she presented a shattered fairy tale: she had kissed a prince who had turned into a toad. His love for another woman had driven her into bulimia and five attempts at suicide. She had been abandoned by his family, which did not appreciate her efforts to breathe life into their dreary dynasty.
An excerpt from the book ran in the Sunday Times. Its placement on the front page of the once respected newspaper had elevated its credibility above tabloid tittle-tattle. And its apparent endorsement by the Princess of Wales made it even more tantalizing. But it rattled the establishment. The Prime Minister, Members of Parliament, and the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission* denounced it as sensational and sordid. The Archbishop of Canterbury said it exceeded the limits of a society claiming to respect human values. Harrods refused to sell it. “Our customers would not expect us to stock such a scurrilous book,” said the store’s spokesman. The Spectator called it “a farrago of rubbish.”
The book became an instant best-seller, but its author was dismissed by the British press as a former tabloid reporter whose father was a picture framer. From the snobbish commentary, it appeared that the author had compounded the misfortune of being born working-class: he was a republican in a country that revered royalty. “I asked Andrew Morton if he wasn’t in danger of killing the golden goose which lays his eggs,” said Michael Cole, the BBC’s former royal correspondent. “He replied, ‘Well, I can quite happily live on the ashes of the House of Windsor for the next twenty years.’ ”
Only two of Britain’s eleven national newspapers ignored the published excerpt. The editor of the Financial Times said, “Not our subject matter.” The Daily Telegraph editor said the subject matter was distasteful. “It’s odious,” he wrote in the Spectator, explaining why he would not permit coverage. The Telegraph, sometimes called the Torygraph, is the royal family’s favorite newspaper, and its editor, Max Hastings, is a close friend of Prince Andrew. “The tabloid reporting of the Wales marriage,” Hastings wrote, “makes