The royals - Kitty Kelley [210]
The morning the excerpt appeared, the Prince of Wales was reeling. “I’d say he was close to a panic,” recalled his Highgrove housekeeper. Over breakfast Charles had read the serialization that his press secretary had faxed from London. Charles had known that a Diana-inspired book was going to be published, but he’d assumed that it would be nothing more than a self-serving account of her good works, plus pretty pictures. He was not prepared for her assault on him as a man, a father, and a husband.
When he finished reading, he left the table and went to Diana’s room with the excerpts in hand. Like Richard III, he had one question for his wife: “Why dost thou spit at me?” Diana later compared their confrontation to the scene in The Godfather where Al Pacino berates Diane Keaton for humiliating him by trying to break free of their marriage. This was not the first time Diana compared the monarchy to the Mafia. “The only difference,” she told her cousin, “is these muggers wear crowns.” Minutes after Charles stormed out of her room, she left Highgrove in tears. Although she had denied having a hand in the book, he knew better.
“I can just hear her saying those things,” he told his private secretary, Richard Aylard. “Those are her words, exactly.”
Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy visited Highgrove a few days later to console Charles. He embraced the frail eighty-three-year-old woman and asked her to walk with him in the garden. “Ruth never forgave Diana for causing the separation,” said Lady Fermoy’s godchild. “She felt that Diana had brought shame to her family by not remaining within her marriage. She didn’t speak to Diana until the last few days of her life, and even then, Ruth told me, she could not forgive her for betraying the monarchy.”
Charles was stunned that his wife had had the nerve to break the royal code of silence by revealing his mistress. Diana went further by calling Camilla “the Rottweiler” and describing her as a killer dog that had sunk her teeth into the Waleses’ marriage and wouldn’t let go. Television star Joan Collins said she wanted to star in a TV special of the royal soap opera: “I could play Camilla Parker Bowles,” she said. “I could ugly up for that.” The press unkindly described Camilla as “plain-faced” and “looking like her horse.” The Scottish Herald sniffed, “She smokes, she jokes, and is capable of dressing for dinner after a day in the saddle without pausing to have a bath.” The revelation that the Prince of Wales had long been in love with her so upset the public that when she went to the grocery, angry shoppers pelted her with bread rolls.
Charles had dismissed his wife’s rantings about his mistress as adolescent jealousy. He didn’t understand Diana’s despair or her need to strike back. He had expected her to accept her loveless marriage in exchange for the privilege of being the Princess of Wales. He was taken aback when she balked and he felt mauled by the book that made him look like a beast. Quickly the Palace went to his defense.
Sir Robert Fellowes phoned Diana before she left Highgrove. “I need to know the extent of your participation,” he said sternly. His marriage to Diana’s sister Jane had strained family relations on occasion. Diana replied tearfully that she had never met the author or granted him an interview. Her trembling voice convinced her brother-in-law that she was telling the truth. He didn’t realize that she was simply panicked by the uproar that she had caused.
But she was rattled only momentarily. She later told one of her astrologers that she had no regrets about her decision to cooperate because her husband did not deserve to be protected by silence—least of all, she argued, because he was the Prince of Wales. “He’s supposed to be a paragon to people,” she said. “He’s going to be the goddamned Defender of the Faith.” After eleven years of marriage she had decided his infidelity deserved to be exposed. By entering into marriage, Robert Louis Stevenson had warned, “you have willfully introduced a witness into your life… and