The royals - Kitty Kelley [238]
Through his approved biographer, Charles showed the Queen as a cold and uncaring mother. He said he had grown up “emotionally estranged” and craving affection that she was “unable or unwilling to offer.” He depicted his father as an acid-tongued martinet and his Gordonstoun teachers as bullies. He described his estranged wife as a self-absorbed neurotic who was mentally unhinged. He said she was twisted with jealousy and temperamentally “volatile,” “hysterical,” “obsessive.” In addition, she was prone to “violent mood swings,” “black phases,” and “bouts of gloom.” He said the only reason he had married her was that his father had pressured him. The middle-aged Prince sounded like the hapless young man in the Danish ballet “The Young Man Must Marry,” who was forced into marriage by his family and ended up betrothed to a girl with three heads. Through Dimbleby, Charles made it clear that Diana was nothing more than a hired womb.
His level of contempt disappointed people who expected their future King to be high-minded and big-hearted. Through Dimbleby, Charles tried to put his case forward and set right the real and imagined wrongs he felt had been done to him. But he came across as petty and small, and he offended his wife, his parents, his sister, his brothers, his children. He even managed to slight his favorite movie star, Barbra Streisand, whom he had once described as “my only pinup… devastatingly attractive and with a great deal of sex appeal.”
Months before, the star had serenaded him in front of twelve thousand fans in London’s Wembley Arena, her first public engagement in twenty-eight years. She sang “Some Day My Prince Will Come” and told her British audience that she was particularly fond of songs about imaginary princes. “What makes it extra special is that there’s a real one in the audience tonight,” she said, looking flirtatiously at the royal box, where Prince Charles was sitting. He beamed. She recalled their first meeting, saying she had not been very gracious. “Who knows, if I had been nice, I might have been the first real Jewish Princess—Princess Babs!”
She imagined the newspaper headlines that might have accompanied their romance: “Blintzes Princess Plays the Palace” and “Barbra Digs Nails into Prince of Wales.” Charles laughed with everyone else and looked pleased when she sang “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” The audience went wild and gave her a two-minute standing ovation. She raised more than $250,000 for The Prince’s Trust. Yet in the Dimbleby book, Charles said her “attractiveness has waned a little.”
He made it up to the diva several months later by inviting her to Highgrove for an overnight visit. But he almost withdrew the invitation after her secretary called to make advance arrangements. She told the Prince of Wales that the star wanted only white flowers in her bedroom and for breakfast an omelette of egg whites. Charles complained to his friend Geoffrey Kent. “She sounds daft,” he said. But he sat up all night with Streisand, who, he said, arrived with eight suitcases. “We discussed philosophy,” he reported to friends.
In the Dimbleby book, Charles described his nanny and his mistress with the same words—”loving,” “warm,” “sympathetic,” “gentle,” and “caring”—words a child might use to describe his mother. He also admitted to three love affairs with Camilla: one before she married in 1973, the second