The royals - Kitty Kelley [240]
The year before, Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles had celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a big party at their country estate. Some of those invited had extended discreet hospitality over the years whenever one or the other wanted to entertain a lover. These same friends, part of Prince Charles’s hunting and shooting circle, now professed surprise when the Parker Bowleses announced their plans to divorce. “We have grown apart to such an extent that… there is little of common interest between us,” read the couple’s statement. Their divorce was granted in January 1995, and less than a year later Andrew Parker Bowles remarried. Camilla sold their house and bought one closer to Charles.
Diana appeared unfazed by the divorce of her husband’s mistress. She smiled at photographers as she made her early morning visit to her new gym. But away from the cameras, she seethed. She confided in the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent, Richard Kay, that she considered the Parker Bowleses’ divorce part of a “grand scheme” to force her out of the public life she had gradually resumed. She worried about Camilla’s influence on her children. She fretted about “enemies” out to get her. “They” wanted to harm her. She feared her phones were tapped at Kensington Palace, so she had her lines swept electronically. She talked of a “whispering campaign” against her conducted by friends of Charles such as Nicholas Soames and members of the Prince’s staff at St. James’s Palace.
Diana had summoned the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent for a three-hour audience. She wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled over her eyes as she drove to meet him in London’s West End, where he climbed into her car to talk. Whenever they met, she spoke freely and he quoted her as “a friend of the Princess.” He published so many exclusives about her that he became known as her unofficial spokesman. Colleagues teased him about being “ma’am’s mouthpiece.” The tabloid reporter James Whitaker, who had helped engineer Diana’s courtship, lamented his being “traded up.” Realistically and without rancor, he explained why he had been replaced as her favorite reporter: “The Daily Mail is her crowd. That’s what they read. It’s more upmarket than my downmarket paper.”
In fact, any story on the Princess of Wales appearing under Richard Kay’s byline was assumed to come directly from her. He had reported her strong denials of an affair with James Hewitt. “We were never lovers,” she swore to the reporter, although later she admitted on television that she had committed adultery with Hewitt. She denied to Richard Kay that she had had an affair with James Gilbey, although their taped phone conversation revealed her fears of getting pregnant. She also denied having an affair with England’s rugby captain Will Carling, despite Julia Carling’s public threat to name Diana in a divorce suit for adultery.
“I saw the Princess sneaking men into the back way of Kensington Palace,” said a butler in the royal household, “because she brought them round by my apartment…. I couldn’t help but see because she had to pass by my window.”
The gamy insinuations swirling around the Princess inspired raucous jokes from late night comedians. In the States, The Dana Carvey Show lost two sponsors after the comic, performing as a prissy church lady, clucked disapprovingly about Diana’s being a “slut.” On the Tonight show, Jay Leno joked: “Princess Diana was in an accident today, but she’s recovering. Soon, she’ll be out of the hospital and flat on her back again.”
In most of Richard Kay’s exclusives, the Princess appeared as a paragon. When she told him how her phone call had saved a drowning man, Kay wrote dramatically: “She rushed to the water’s edge and helped pull the unconscious tramp to the bank, where he was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” When she told him she had taken her children on a secret visit to a homeless shelter so they could see how others less privileged live, Kay’s “exclusive” dominated the entire front page: “Princes