The royals - Kitty Kelley [267]
This particular phase in my life is most dangerous. My husband is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious injury, to make the path clear for him to marry.
The mass hysteria that gripped the globe in the wake of Diana’s death melded countries into communities of grief for days on end, uniting disparate people to something mystical and magic that suddenly had been snatched from them. Perhaps it was the hope for a “happily ever after” ending that had been dashed, leaving them feeling bereft in a hopeless world. Years later, psychiatrists and sociologists would continue to try to explain the cataclysm of sorrow that shook the world on that hot August night in Paris, and would compare the global convulsion of mourning to that following the assassination of President Kennedy, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Diana’s death unleashed a ravenous hunger to know every detail about her short life that was soon filled with a spate of tawdry books the palace rushed to squash. After promising “never to cash in our relationship,” former army major James Hewitt published Love and War, which contained passages from the sixty-four love letters he had received from Diana during his Iraq war service. British newspapers immediately branded “pea brain James” as “a sick cad” and “Major Rat.” During her Panorama interview Diana had admitted her five-year affair with Hewitt. “Yes, I adored him,” she said. “Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” In that, she proved to be prescient.
After Hewitt cashed in, Trevor Rees-Jones, the only survivor of the car crash, wrote The Bodyguard’s Story. He had been accused of “incompetence and unprofessional protection” by the Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al-Fayed, who also tried to suppress the book, which said that Diana “could do miles better than this guy [al-Fayed’s son], for Christ’s sake.”
Six months later, in September 2000, Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson published Shadows of a Princess, which the palace had tried for two years to block. But the former royal retainer, who had signed a confidentiality agreement as a term of his employment, maintained that Diana’s death released him from legal obligations of silence.
Jephson, whose ancestors had served the monarchy for four hundred years, had worked for Diana for seven during the breakdown of her marriage, and he recalled her as willful, manipulative, and mentally unstable. He wrote that she had taken a string of lovers, smuggled one into Kensington Palace in the trunk of her car, and always traveled with a vibrator for sexual pleasure. He also alluded to her growing paranoia, saying, “She saw plots everywhere.”
Upon publication of Jephson’s book, Diana’s brother appeared on CNN to denounce the former private secretary as a traitor to the Princess. “He’s not thinking of anything except his bank balance,” said the fuming Earl Spencer, who later enhanced his own bank balance by selling $45 million worth of his family’s treasures to pay for running his estate and for alimony to his ex-wives.
By this point, Charles Spencer had fallen off his pedestal and was no longer upheld as the standard of loyalty. After his impassioned eulogy, he had moved his wife and four children from England to South Africa to follow his mistress, whom he later dumped for another woman. That woman was soon replaced several times, leading to a messy public divorce, more affairs, another marriage, two more children, further divorce and finally plans for a third marriage. With his tawdry love affairs spread over the British tabloids, the Earl Spencer was dismissed as an “Aristo-Cad.”
In later years he criticized the Queen and Prince Charles for never visiting Diana’s grave at Althorp, the Spencer estate in Northamptonshire, where he had buried Diana on an island and charged tourists twenty dollars apiece to view her from afar. He complained to the press that he had been frozen out of the lives of William and