The royals - Kitty Kelley [241]
Diana reveled in her role as a mother and felt threatened when Charles hired Alexandra Legge-Bourke to plan activities for the boys when they were with him. The former nursery school teacher, known as Tiggy, joined the Prince’s staff a few months after his separation from Diana. Tiggy forged a close bond with the children, who enjoyed her rollicking enthusiasm. The Princess admitted feeling a “gut kick” the first time she saw Tiggy racing to embrace the children, whom she called “my babies.” And Diana felt upstaged as “Mummy” after seeing pictures of the twenty-nine-year-old assistant skiing with the children at Klosters in Switzerland, grouse hunting with them at Sandringham, and deer stalking at Balmoral. Tiggy was quoted as saying: “I give the boys what they need at this stage—fresh air, a rifle, and a horse.”
The Princess fumed. “She’s undermining my boys,” she said. She complained about Tiggy’s cigarette habit and said she didn’t want the young woman smoking in front of the boys. “What is it about Charles, who professes to hate smoking, and women who’re addicted to cigarettes?” she asked, alluding to Camilla Parker Bowles, also a pack-a-day smoker. And when Diana read about Tiggy in the press as “warm and cheerful” and “a wonderful surrogate mother,” she hit the roof.
Diana acidly pointed out to Richard Kay that if she employed a “surrogate father” to be with the Princes when they were at home with her, she would be criticized as a bad mother. Unlike her husband, who took Tiggy with him to events at the boys’ schools and on all vacations with the children, Diana said she did not feel compelled to take a man with her when she visited her sons or took them on holiday. After seeing pictures of Charles embracing Tiggy on three occasions and greeting her with a kiss on the lips, the Princess speculated that the Prince was “probably having an affair with the little servant girl.”
The kissing drew questions from reporters, but Commander Aylard dismissed the Prince’s public displays of affection for his assistant. “Tiggy is a member of the household,” said Aylard, “and an old family friend.” He added that her mother was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne, her aunt was an extra lady-in-waiting, and her brother had been a page-of-honor to the Queen. When the Prince and Princess later started divorce negotiations, Tiggy called herself “Tiggy in the middle.”
By then Diana felt displaced as a mother, so she fired off directives to her husband regarding Tiggy’s role in the children’s lives. The Princess banned the younger woman from the boys’ bedrooms and bathrooms. She said Tiggy should stay in the background on any occasion when the boys were seen in public. “She is neither to accompany them in the same car nor be photographed close to them.” She insisted that when the boys called her from Sandringham at Christmastime, they were to be taken to another lodge on the estate, where they could speak to her privately. “No one else, no staff or servants, is to be present during our conversations.”
Diana publicly reinforced her image as the mother of a future King by talking to Richard Kay about her firstborn son. She bragged that at thirteen he was “taller than his father… and so very different.” She belittled Charles by building up William: the son is “decisive”; the son has “sense and sensibility”; the son takes “people for what they are, not who they are.” The son is handsome, “not burdened” with stick-out ears. “Tell him he’s good-looking,” wrote Richard Kay after visiting with Diana, “and Wills says he can’t be because that would make him vain.” In contrast with his father, the gentle son protected his mother. When he saw a tabloid story about her having a crush on Tom Hanks and bombarding the movie star with phone calls, she said she was prepared to laugh it off, but Wills had insisted she issue a denial. “As he crossly told a school friend later, ‘It made my mother look like a prostitute.’ ”
When the Princess phoned the reporter on Saturday, August 20, 1994, she was distraught. “Someone somewhere is going