The royals - Kitty Kelley [212]
The Palace tried to counteract the discordant images of the Waleses and their marriage, but new disclosures kept popping up like frogs from a swamp. When police constable Andrew Jacques, a guard at Highgrove, disclosed that the Prince and Princess led separate lives, the Palace dismissed his story as tabloid fiction. The constable, who worked at Highgrove for four years, stood firm. “The only time they meet up is at mealtimes,” he said, “and very often that ends in a blazing row for all to hear.” He revealed that Prince Charles slept alone in one bedroom (with his childhood teddy bear in bed with him), while the Princess slept by herself in the master bedroom. “They never smile, laugh, or do anything together…. In four years, I only ever saw him kiss her good-bye once, and that was a peck on the cheek.”
Predictably, the establishment press called upon peerage expert Harold Brooks-Baker to respond to the constable’s assertions, and, as always, the American-born royalist complied. “You can’t break down a marriage that’s been put up the way the press has put this one up,” the peerage expert told The New York Times. “The press made a lot out of the fact that they were apart on her thirtieth birthday last month, but very little out of the fact that on the following weekend she and her husband were together; there was a birthday cake, and he gave her a lovely bracelet.”
The former housekeeper of Highgrove disclosed that the gift from Charles was paste. In a diary she kept while working for the Prince and Princess of Wales, she noted that when Diana found out, she burst into tears. The Princess, accustomed to being consoled with expensive gifts, was distraught that her husband bestowed a diamond necklace on his mistress but gave her only costume jewelry. The housekeeper quoted Diana as saying: “I don’t want his bloody fake jewels. I thought cheating husbands took great care to keep their wives sweet with the real things, saving the tawdry stuff for their tarts.”
For her thirtieth birthday Charles offered to throw a party. But Diana didn’t want to celebrate with him. So she said no and celebrated privately with her lover, James Hewitt, who had recently returned from the Gulf War. Charles was stung by press accusations that he had neglected the occasion of his wife’s birthday, so he dispatched a friend to call Nigel Dempster to set the record straight. The gossip columnist obliged with a front-page story in the Daily Mail about the Prince’s loving gesture. Diana responded the next day through a friend, who told the Sun that the Princess did not want a grand ball filled with her husband’s “stuffy friends.”
Princess Anne, disgusted by the newspaper sparring, confronted Diana about turning her marriage into a media free-for-all. “Before you joined, there were hardly any leaks,” said the Princess Royal. “Now the ship is so full of holes, it’s no wonder that it’s sinking.”
Diana stared hard at her sister-in-law without saying a word. But Anne didn’t flinch.
“I wouldn’t go telling too many tall tales if I were you,” she warned. “They might just come back to haunt you one day.”
After Anne’s rebuke, Diana became convinced that the entire royal family was against her. She decided then to cooperate with Andrew Morton by giving her friends permission to talk to him about her dismal marriage. “Do what you think is best,” she told her friends when they called her about the book. She made sure that nothing was said to the author about her love affair with James Hewitt.
Upon publication she could hardly disavow the book, so when Robert Fellowes called and read her the statement he had drafted for release, she withheld her approval. He insisted that she publicly disapprove the book, but she said, “I cannot be held responsible for what my friends say.”
Waiting for the Princess to respond, the editor of the Sunday Times was getting jumpy. “We thought