The royals - Kitty Kelley [250]
“So sorry to hear about the baby,” Diana said with a sneer.
The young woman was taken aback. Then she realized the taunt was based on gossip that she had become pregnant and had had an abortion. Crushed by Diana’s accusation, Tiggy fled to a private room, where she was comforted by Prince Charles’s valet. She returned to the party but confided her distress to Commander Aylard, who told the Prince of Wales. Charles counseled her to contact Peter Carter-Ruck, one of England’s most widely known libel lawyers.
Two days after putting the Princess on notice, the lawyer sent letters to newspapers warning that the allegations were false. “Reports have reached her [Tiggy] and her family that a series of malicious lies are circulating in the press which are a gross reflection on our client’s moral character. These allegations are utterly without the very slightest foundation.”
With the full support of Prince Charles, Tiggy was prepared to sue Diana over her remark. But the Prince’s friends cautioned him that the Princess would dig in her heels, even relishing the spectacle of the royal family in a courtroom fight. Charles agreed, and after lengthy talks with her lawyers, Tiggy decided not to sue.
Diana’s oblique attack on Tiggy came within hours of being named Humanitarian of the Year. She attended the staff Christmas party upon her return from New York City, where she had received the prestigious United Cerebral Palsy award from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The seventy-two-year-old statesman seemed transfixed by the Princess in her low-cut gown and stared at her bosom like a high school boy. In his gushy introduction, he said Diana was a symbol to humanity of caring and compassion.
“She is here as a member of the royal family with which the USA has a long history of cooperation, friendship, and standing as allies,” he said. “But we are honoring the Princess in her own right tonight, having aligned herself with the ill, the suffering, and the downtrodden.”
Seven hundred people paid $1,000 each to attend the dinner and applauded Diana as she walked to the microphone, sparkling in diamonds. She spoke movingly of how her thoughts were with parents who were holding vigil at the bedsides of their desperately sick children, who might not live until the morning.
Then a woman called out from the audience: “Where are your children, Diana?”
“They’re in school,” replied the Princess, barely looking up. Then she resumed her speech. When she finished, the crowd stood up and cheered as if to drown out the rude interruption.
Afterward a reporter approached the middle-aged heckler and asked why she had yelled at the Princess of Wales, expressing surprise that someone would dare to yell at royalty. Without apology the woman replied: “I don’t like being lectured on humanity.”
TWENTY-TWO
A battle royal was brewing. For two months the Queen had been waiting for the Princess to respond to her letter. Her Majesty’s private secretary had phoned Diana three times to nudge a response, but Diana kept stalling. Then Prince Charles wrote her. Finally she deigned to respond.
She called her husband and proposed a meeting with him: February 28, 1996, 4:30 P.M., in his office at St. James’s Palace. She insisted they meet privately—no lawyers, no equerries, no secretaries. At the appointed hour, Charles and Diana were on the scene. His courtiers objected to the restrictions because they wanted to take notes, but Charles waved them off. As the last of his staff backed out the door, Diana sniped, “They’ll probably bug the room anyway.”
She later told Richard Kay of the Daily Mail that she had told Charles, “I loved you and I will always love you because you are the father of my children.” But when Charles saw that statement in print he became angry. He told one of his aides that she had never uttered those words. What he clearly recalled