The royals - Kitty Kelley [211]
She was appalled by the degree of detail in the book, and she felt betrayed by her brother, who had described her as a liar. He said she was someone who “had difficulty telling the truth purely because she liked to embellish things.” He recalled, “On the school run one day, the vicar’s wife stopped the car and said: ‘Diana Spencer, if you tell one more lie like that, I am going to make you walk home.’ ” He related that one of her school reports asserted, “Diana Spencer is the most scheming little girl I have ever met.”
She was also taken aback by James Gilbey’s remarks in the book, which she thought made her look like a suicidal maniac. She knew that Gilbey had spoken only with her approval and her best interests at heart, but she was dismayed by the pitiful picture of her that he painted. After publication, she closed the book on him.
Diana’s assurances that she had had nothing to do with the book prompted the Queen’s private secretary to fire off several protests to the Press Complaints Commission. He also drafted a public statement for her, disavowing the “preposterous” claims of her participation. He told her that anything short of an official denunciation would not be convincing. The public was prepared to believe the worst based on what they had read and seen in the past year.
Months before, Prince William was accidentally hit on the head with a golf club, which fractured his skull, necessitating emergency surgery. Diana, who was at San Lorenzo restaurant when she received the news, hurried to her son’s side and spent two nights in the hospital with him until he could come home. Charles visited him for a few minutes after his surgery but did not otherwise interrupt his schedule. He said he had to attend a performance of Tosca. The press was appalled. “What Kind of a Dad Are You?” shrieked a Sun headline. Jean Rook in the Daily Express asked: “What sort of father of an eight-year-old boy, nearly brained by a golf club, leaves the hospital before knowing the outcome for a night at the opera?”
Charles blamed Diana for making him look like a callous parent. Feeling slightly chastened, he made a point a few weeks later of being photographed riding a bicycle with his sons, but Diana told the press that Charles left the boys twenty-four hours later to go to a polo match. Jean Rook accused Charles of treating his sons like “well-fed pets who know their place in the world of their utterly self-involved parent. Certainly, it must hurt William and Harry to see their father more often on TV than in the flesh.”
Photos appeared of Charles going to church with his sons at Sandringham, but when someone in the crowd asked him where the Princess was, he replied with a strained smile, “She’s not here today, so you can get your money back.”
Other photographs had also indicated friction between the couple. On a royal tour of India, Diana was shown sitting by herself in front of the Taj Mahal. That sad picture (which some reporters said was staged by the Princess) recalled Prince Charles’s visit to India before his wedding. He had promised to bring his bride back to the seventeenth-century temple, a world-renowned monument to eternal love. But when he brought Diana in 1992 for a four-day tour, they were not speaking. They had arrived in India on separate planes; he flew from Oman, and she flew from London. They followed separate schedules. They stayed in separate suites on different floors of the hotel in New Delhi and communicated through their staffs. They smiled only in front of the cameras.
Then came a picture of Diana in front of the Pyramids—alone again. She had let it be known that while she was traveling on an official tour of Egypt, her husband was vacationing in Turkey with his mistress. More pictures followed of Charles playing polo while Diana visited leper colonies; Charles shooting birds at Sandringham while Diana