The royals - Kitty Kelley [230]
He smiled sheepishly. “I think you are wonderful, ma’am. I would never do anything to harm you.”
Diana’s father, the late Earl Spencer, once called her “pure steel inside,” and Arthur Edwards occasionally felt her jabs. Commenting on a new hairstyle, he said if her hair got any shorter, she would look like Sinead O’Connor, the Irish pop star who shaves her head.
“At least I’ve got some hair,” said Diana, looking at the photographer’s bald head.
When she felt offended, reporters felt her sting. One young woman was pointedly ignored by the Princess when she wrote that Diana had worn comfortable but dowdy clothes on a royal tour. On the return flight home, Diana eyed the writer’s ankle-length skirt and said, “She won’t last long.” Hearing the Princess discuss plans for making other overseas visits, the young reporter inquired, “Oh, more trips?” Without smiling, Diana said, “More trips and more dowdy clothes.”
Usually Diana courted the media, especially after her separation, when she and her husband competed for coverage and used the press to take a poke at each other. Both had recruited national newspapers to carry his and her versions of their marital rifts. She received more sympathetic coverage because she befriended reporters: she gave cocktail parties for those who covered her royal tours, sent them notes when she was especially pleased by their stories, and remembered their birthdays. She regularly briefed the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent Richard Kay, who was photographed whispering with her in a car. She invited media baron Rupert Murdoch to lunch at Kensington Palace and sent similar invitations to television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. They all accepted. She ingratiated herself with Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company, by visiting her in Martha’s Vineyard and Washington, D.C. Diana also attended parties sponsored by People magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. She posed for Vogue. She was so accommodating to the photographers who accompanied her on ski vacations with her children that supporters of Prince Charles accused her of using the boys to look motherly at his expense. He countered with more exotic vacations for the children in Italy and on the Greek islands. She topped him by taking the boys to Disney World in Florida. Charles was determined not to be outdone. When he went with his sons to Balmoral for Easter, he gave them a set of soccer goalposts, a garden badminton set, two mountain bikes, a trampoline, guns for shooting rabbits and crows, and two minimotorbikes that cost $3,000 apiece. But even his staged photo opportunities with his sons could not overcome the popularity gap.
“The big trouble with some of the royals is that they treat the press like telegraph poles,” said Arthur Edwards. “They just walk round them and totally ignore them. That has been one of the reasons for the bad publicity they get…. Diana has gone more than halfway to stop that.”
She became the most photographed woman in the world, and photographers made thousands of dollars taking her picture. She was reminded what a valuable commodity she had become after receiving a call from Lady Elizabeth Johnston, a friend of the royal family, who lived near Great Windsor Park. She had heard from her hairdresser that Diana was being secretly photographed during her weekly workouts at the gym. Lady Johnston warned the Princess that the owner of the gym was the Peeping Tom.
“Oh, God,” said Diana. “Am I decent?”
“As far as I know, you are.”
“That’s a relief. My mother-in-law would die.”
The next day Diana asked her detective, Ken Wharfe, to check out the story. He talked to the owner of L.A. Fitness, Bryce Taylor, who denied taking pictures of the Princess.
“For chrissakes,” said Taylor. “She’s been coming here almost three years now. You’re always with her. Have you ever seen a security problem?”
The detective satisfied himself by walking