The royals - Kitty Kelley [234]
Her admirers bemoaned her withdrawal from public life as a tragedy for the country; her detractors disparaged her as a cunning actress who had milked the public’s sympathy. Her royal retreat created reams of editorial commentary. Even the Irish Times sounded wistful. In the United States, writer Calvin Trillin begged her to reconsider in an amusing bit of doggerel:
“Oh, Di,” repentant tabloids cry,
“Don’t leave the role you occupy.
For we can quickly rectify
The misbehavior you decry.
We need you, Di. We’ll tell you why:
The Prince is not the sort of guy
Who causes lots of folks to buy
Our papers. So we all must try
To get along together, Di.
So come now, be a sweetie-pie,
We promise we’ll no longer pry,
Nor pay some sleazeball on the sly
To photograph your upper thigh.
So promise us it’s not goodbye.
Di?”
TWENTY-ONE
Members of the British royal family were starting to look like impostors: they wore jewels, dressed up in gold braid, and rode in carriages. But they did not behave like royalty.
They tried to appear brave and true, but they were not even good-hearted. They did not understand royalty’s obligation to behave with probity, to bestow kindness, to set a good example. The traditions of royalty passed on by literature and by art seemed to have bypassed them. They had forgotten the legends of King Arthur and his shining Knights of the Round Table.
Many of their loyal subjects, once enthralled by royalty, became disenchanted. Some became indifferent, some turned faintly negative, some were decidedly hostile. The public’s respect, even reverence, for the Crown had eroded severely. Obeisance was no longer automatic. Only the Queen Mother, bobbing along in her feathers and veils, seemed capable of inspiring genuine affection.
The Queen, who had reluctantly agreed to pay taxes, trim the Civil List, open Buckingham Palace, and give up the Britannia, was barely accorded customary courtesies. In a breach of civility, she was not consulted when Britain’s National Blood Service removed the crown from its insignia. Her representative was mooned in New Zealand by a Maori protester, who bared his tattooed buttocks and spat on the ground. And in South Africa she was asked by the government to return the Cullinan diamonds, which had been presented to her great-grandfather Edward VII.
The royal family was sinking in its own muck, and their problems were as unpleasant as rotting possums under the country’s front porch. The press began fuming. London’s Sunday Times summed it up for antiroyalists: “Gone With the Windsors.” The New York Times was equally pun-ridden: “Windsors and Losers.”
Monarchists looking for a morality play to guide them had been shoved into a lurid soap opera, complete with illicit sex, phone sex, foot sex, and, according to Charles’s valet, garden sex. The valet, who sold his secrets to a tabloid, asserted that he had found the grass-stained pajamas the Prince had worn during a romp in the Highgrove gardens with his mistress.
The media, once monarchy’s obedient servant, had become the master. So many rumors were circulating that the Palace broke its usual stance of “No comment” and began responding to the most salacious gossip. When scuttlebutt persisted about the health of Prince Andrew, courtiers denied that he was HIV-positive.
“Our stand on the rumors has been constant,” a Palace official told the Sun’s royal correspondent. “Any suggestion that the Duke of York has AIDS is utter rubbish…. He is in command of servicemen, and there is no way he would be allowed to continue his duties if there was any question about his health and fitness.”
The rumors arose after Andrew’s wife, Sarah Ferguson, had been tested for AIDS three times. Her previous drug use and her continued promiscuity with drug users raised concern about what she might have transmitted to her husband. His closest friends worried but said nothing to him. “We wouldn’t dare,” said a woman friend. “And we certainly would say