TEN

The First Lady was sitting in her bedroom at the White House when her secretary entered with yet another dispatch from

the British Embassy. For weeks diplomatic cables had been rocketing between London and Washington regarding the Queen's dinner party on June 5,1961, in honor of the President and his First Lady. But she was exasperated.

"This is absurd," she said to her secretary. "It's not like I suggested inviting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor."

The First Lady had suggested inviting her sister, Lee Radziwill, and Lee's husband, the Polish Prince Stanislas Radziwill. But after the White House sent its proposed guest list to Buckingham Palace, the Radziwills were de-listed. By the Queen.

The Kennedys planned a stopover in London for a few days to attend the baptism of the President's godchild, Christina Radziwill, after the President's state visit to Paris. In London the Kennedys would stay with the Radziwills at their home on Buckingham Place, around the corner from the Palace. While there, President Kennedy wanted to meet informally with the British Prime Minister. Although Kennedy's visit was private and not official, the British government recommended that the Queen entertain the President and his wife. The Queen agreed. It was to be the first time an American president had dined with a British monarch in Buckingham Palace since Woodrow Wilson was a guest in 1918.

A dinner party for fifty people was planned in the state dining room of the Palace, and the White House was asked to submit the names of people the Kennedys would like to attend. The First Lady proposed her host and hostess, the Radziwills, as well as Princess Margaret, whom Mrs. Kennedy wanted to meet; the President asked for Princess Marina of Kent, whom he had met during his year at Oxford. The Queen did not approve any of them.

Annoyed by the royal rebuff, the First Lady telephoned the British Embassy in Washington to speak to Her Majesty's Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, who was also a close Kennedy family friend. He explained gently the Palace policy on divorce, saying that because this was an unofficial visit, the Radziwills, both of whom were divorced once for her, twice for him could not be invited to the Palace. If this were an official visit and the Radziwills were part of the official group accompanying the President, they would have to be invited.

"But she's my sister," Jackie told the British Ambassador, "and they are our hosts."

The Ambassador sympathized and suggested that she call the U.S. Chief of Protocol, Angier Biddle Duke, to appeal the ruling through the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, David Bruce.

"Oh, Angie," Jackie wailed, "you've got to help me."

The diplomat reassured the First Lady and promised to contact David Bruce. Jackie then called her husband in the Oval Office to tell him what she had done. The President was irked. He quickly called Ambassador Bruce in London to say he did not want to cause an international incident.

The Ambassador noted the President's conversation in his diary: "He wanted to make it clear that for his part he had no feeling about this incident, and any decision on the guest list must be the Queen s.

Her Majesty eventually relented and included the Radziwills; she even allowed them to be listed in the Court Circular for the

occasion as "Prince" and "Princess." That was a great concession because the Queen had never granted Radziwill royal license to use his Polish title* in Great Britain.

"She did not like him," said Evangeline Bruce, the Ambassa~ dor's wife. "It had nothing to do with divorce. My husband was divorced, and the Queen loved him. She just didn't like Stash Radziwill . . . didn't approve of him and always referred to him and his wife as Mr. and Mrs., which irritated them."

"Anyway, the Queen had her revenge," Jackie later told Gore Vidal, her stepbrother once removed. "No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture that they could find. The Queen was pretty heavy-going. I think she resented me. Philip was nice, but nervous. One felt absolutely no relationship between them."

The Queen's resentment was real. She had read the press coverage of the First Lady's spectacular visit to Paris, where she had been hailed by the French newspapers as "ravirsante, " "cAarmante," "6elle." Parisians had lined the streets, waving American flags and screaming, "Jacquiii! Jacquiii! Jacquiii!" The Mayor of Paris had given her a $4,000 watch and pronounced her visit the most exciting since Queen Elizabeth II had paraded through the city four years earlier.

"Queen Elizabeth, hell," presidential aide Dave Powers told the press. "They couldn't get this kind of turnout with the Second Coming."

Even the President was stunned by the excitement his wife had generated. Greeting reporters at a press conference in France, he introduced himself as "the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris."

By the time the Kennedys arrived in London, Jackie fever had gripped the British, who lined the streets awaiting her arrival the same way they did for the Queen. One newspaper even dubbed the First Lady "Queen of America." Another ran a cartoon showing

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*When the Nazis invaded Poland, Radziwill fled Warsaw for London, where he became a British subject. Legally he forfeited the right to use his hereditary title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been conferred on his family in the sixteenth century. His insistence on being addressed as prince Radziwill remained controversial in Britain.

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the Statue of Liberty with Mrs. Kennedy's face; one hand held the torch of freedom, the other clutched a copy of Vogue. The Evening Standard gushed, "Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on one thing they had always lacked

majesty."

"The young President with his lovely wife and the whole glamour which surrounds them both caused something of a sensation," recalled Prime Minister Macmillan in his memoirs. "Normally, the visits of foreign statesmen do not arouse much enthusiasm . . . but the Kennedys were news on every level, political and personal."

The Prime Minister did not record Her Majesty's displeasure at having to entertain them. The Queen, who was forever proclaiming her disdain of glamour, scorned Hollywood and all that the film colony represented. Unlike her mother, her sister, her husband, and her uncle Dickie, who felt cinema was the highest art form, the Queen was not receptive to Hollywood or its celebrities. In fact, she was so contemptuous of associating with motion picture stars that she declined to attend Grace Kelly's 1956 wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. "Too many movie stars," she said.

As Queen, she resisted all attempts to dress up her image. When a BBC producer timidly suggested she show more animation during her first televised Christmas address, she snapped, "I'm not an actress.

For the same reason, she refused to wear a fur coat. "Absolutely not," she told footman Ralphe White. "I look too much like a film star in mink."

She acknowledged her dour image, saying that unlike her mother, she was not a show stopper. At a subdued rally, she noted, "If it were Mummy, they would all be cheering."

Her husband shared her resolve that royalty must not descend to the level of movie stars. Like the Queen, he, too, would not sign autographs, and he resented efforts to make him perform. When he made a speech to the British Film Academy, he was heckled.

"Liven it up," shouted actor Tom Bell. "Go on, tell us a funny story."

The Duke of Edinburgh bristled. "If you want a funny story," he said, "I suggest you engage a professional comic."

Neither he nor the Queen recognized then that the British public wanted something more humane and spontaneous from their monarchy than an aloof wave from the royal coach.

"The Queen takes her Commonwealth responsibilities very seriously," explained Prime Minister Macmillan, "and rightly so, for the responsibilities of the U.K. monarchy have so shrunk that if you left it at that, you might as well have a film star. She is impatient of the attitude toward her to treat her as a woman, and a film star or mascot."

With the visit of the Kennedys, she was faced with entertaining the epitome of flashbulb glamour. The Queen had admitted to her sister that she felt more comfortable with President Eisenhower's matronly wife, Mamie, than the mesmerizing Jackie, who was inciting the Queen's normally sober subjects to act like crazed fans. They clogged the streets of London for hours, clamoring for a glimpse of the U.S. President and his First Lady.

In preparation for the Kennedy visit, the Lord Chamberlain, who usually exercises his powers of censorship only on an objectionable word or sentence, had banned a theatrical review that lampooned the President's wife. The show, set to open in a Newcastle theater, was to have had a male chorus singing:

Here she comes, sing do re mi

Oh, what a change from old Auntie Mamie.

Then an actress was to appear in a black wig and impersonate Mrs. Kennedy in a satirical skit. Her routine, a string of barbed wisecracks, included the refrain

While Jack fumbles with Russia, I use all my guile, So the press and the public won't guess for awhile,

He's just Ike dressed up Madison Avenue style.

I'm doing my best to be everyone's choice, playing Caroline's mother with Marilyn's voice.

The mention of Marilyn Monroe prompted the censor's scissors. "The review deals unsuitably with a head of state's private life," was the Lord Chamberlain's official explanation, which only added credibility to the rumors of the President's intimate relationship with the Hollywood star.

Despite their differences, the Queen and the First Lady shared a similarity in their husbands, who were charismatic men. Extraordinarily handsome and witty, both were attracted to pretty actresses like fish to shiny metal objects. Neither man was hamstrung by romanticism, and both understood the social necessity of marrying well.

The Queen had not been impressed by the Kennedys' ascent from the Irish bogs to the White House. She still remembered her parents' antipathy toward the President's father, Joseph P. Kennedy. As Ambassador to the Court of St. James's he had opposed U.S. intervention on the side of the British in World War II, so President Franklin Roosevelt recalled him. Understandably the Queen was not enthusiastic about Kennedy's son.

She came around eventually, but she was a late convert. During the 1960 presidential campaign, she privately supported Kennedy's opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Publicly she remained silent, but her husband, who could and did speak out, made it clear. During a trip to New York City to open a British exhibition, Prince Philip showed a canny understanding of presidential politics. He did not overtly endorse Nixon, but he evoked the "special relationship" between America and England by saying, "The Queen was particularly delighted that our dear friend President Eisenhower agreed to join her as a patron for this exhibition." Then he toured the exhibit with the Vice President and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and posed for pictures. When photographers begged the Prince for more photographs, he insisted on posing with the Vice President. "We can't take a picture without Mr. Nixon," he said.

When Kennedy won the election, the Queen was smart enough to realize the political importance of good relations with the United States. So she followed her Prime Minister's recommen

dations to entertain the President and his wife at Buckingharn Pal ace.

Jacqueline Kennedy later told Gore Vidal about the Queen's dinner party, where she sat between Prince Philip and Lord Mount batten. During the reception before dinner, she talked to the Queen, whom she found chilly and standoffish.

"The Queen was only human once, she recalled. "I was telling her about our state visit to Canada and the rigors of being on view at all hours. I told her I greeted Jack every day with a tear- stained face. The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, `One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.' Then she said, `You like pictures.' And she marched me down a long gallery, stopping at a Van Dyk to say, `That's a good horse.'"

The Queen and the First Lady shared more than their mutual love of horses. Both were to become mythic figures and the most celebrated women of their era. Both were monarchs-Elizabeth in fact, Jacqueline in fantasy. The crucial difference between them was politics. The First Lady disliked politics and was totally apolitical; not so the Queen.

"God knows she's supposed to be above politics," said her biographer Roland Flamini, "but everyone knows the Queen gets politically involved, especially if it concerns the Commonwealth, which is all she really cares about. Her political involvement is never talked about, of course, but everyone knows."

By March 1962 the Queen was embarked on a covert plan to influence the elections in Argentina. She did not realize then that doing her duty meant acquiescing to what her Prime Minister and Archbishop told her to do. Instead she wanted to affect policy. So she dispatched her husband to visit the British communities in eleven South American countries, ostensibly to promote British industry. In Argentina his real mission was to secure the presidency of a friend, Arturo Frondizi, who was in danger of being overthrown by supporters of exiled dictator Juan Per6n.

The Queen and Philip had entertained Frondizi at Buckingham Palace earlier in the year, when he confided his fears about allowing Per6n supporters to vote in the March elections. "Only my person," he said, "stands between order and chaos."

The Queen agreed and decided to do what she could to prevent a military overthrow that would lead to another dictatorship. Although Argentina was outside the Commonwealth, more Britons lived there than anywhere except the United States, and their imports and exports were important to British trade. At least, that was the Queen's rationale for her intervention. Her husband thought it was empire building, which, he said, was basic to the British: "They are always meddling in other people's business. . . . That's why they're so successful at British charity work overseas. I think it reflects a hangover from the years of responsibility for the direct management of other countries."

Philip's trip to Argentina was the first time in thirty years that a member of the royal family had visited that country, but the Queen felt that her imperial luster would rub off on Frondizi.

In Buenos Aires the Argentine President hosted a state dinner for Philip, who used the occasion to lecture General Rosendo Fraga, Argentina's war secretary.

"Have you been a minister for a long time?" Philip asked.

"For almost one year.

"Tell me something," said Philip. "Do you enjoy it?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

"Another thing. Have you been in a war?"

"No, we haven't had wars recently in Argentina."

"Well," said Philip, wagging his finger in the General's face, "don't go and start one now.

In a speech, Philip referred to the good relations between Argentina and Great Britain: "The really remarkable part is that we are still on such excellent terms after so many years of intimate association. Perhaps it's a case of getting over the seven-year itch and staying good friends forever." (Diplomatically, he did not mention the epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease that had spread to England in cans of Argentine corned beef.)

The next day young communists pelted Philip with eggs and tomatoes. The police arrested the young people, but Philip interceded. He was in Argentina to help lower political tensions, not stir them up. "Let them go," he said, "but tell them not to do it again. I haven't got an unlimited supply of suits."

This was the first (but not the last) time the Queen veered from her constitutional mandate to remain above politics. As monarch, she was forbidden to take part in the internal affairs of another country. So in Argentina she operated through her husband to influence the outcome of the elections. Unfortunately she miscalcu~ lated: Frondizi's opponents won, marched into Buenos Aires with machine guns, and seized control of the country.

Immediately Prince Philip was evacuated from Buenos Aires, and the Macmillan government moved to shield the Queen from responsibility and criticism. The government concealed her participation by sealing all documents pertaining to the trip. They refused to routinely release the 1962 cabinet papers under the thirty-year rule and stipulated secrecy until the year 2057. Most people assumed the secrecy was to cover up a sexual scandal involving Philip, who was forty at that time, and Senora Magdalena Nelson de Blaquier, the beautiful fifty-year-old widow who had been his hostess after the military takeover.

"Look into that story," advised Peter Evans, a prominent British journalist, "and you'll probably find a suspicious birth nine months after the Duke's departure."

"One of Philip's three illegitimate children is supposed to be the daughter of an Argentine polo player," said his biographer Tim Heald, "but I don't know the details."

It just so happens that the Duke of Edinburgh was blamed for a love affair he never had and a love child he never fathered.

"I didn't even know Philip until the Ambassador called and asked me to be his hostess," said Mrs. de Blaquier, whose vast estate, La Concepcion, is ninety miles from Buenos Aires. "I was called because my estancia is very secure and large enough to contain three polo fields. The government needed to get Philip out of Buenos Aires because there was so much danger. They couldn't take him any place within the city during that crisis, so he came to my estate in the country.

"He did not speak Spanish and I did not speak good English, so we conversed in French. He speaks the language fluently, like a Frenchman. I had been married thirty years when my husband died in 1960 in an airplane crash. We had nine children. Philip stayed

with me and the children at the farm, and the couple who care for us. He was very simpcitico very funny, nice, easy. He played cards with the children in the evening, and I organized four polo games for him at the level he could play. He's not a very good player, but he's passionate about the game. Passionate. He plays with a ten handicap, which is not very good, at least by Argentine standards, and I did not want him to feel slighted; so I found him players who would play his kind of polo, and he was very happy.

"During that time, he had three private meetings with Frondizi. Philip stayed with us six days and then was taken to the airport and flown to Britain. He did not allow any photographs during his visit, so I don't have pictures, but he did send me a very beautiful letter thanking me for his stay. I never more see him again for thirty-two years until I go to a polo game in Paris. I sent word to him that I was there with my sons and grandsons. He came over.

"`Are you the person who was my wonderful hostess?' he asked. I said yes, and he presented me to the Queen. He also introduced me to Prince Charles, who said, `What did you do to my father? Whenever South America is mentioned, the only place he loves is Argentina because of the wonderful treatment you gave him at La Concepcion.'

"The reason, you see, is because of my polo fields. Philip said you can visit castles in Europe, but you can't play polo there. For polo real polo you must go to Argentina. That's why he loves our country so much. And Mexico, too."

In his role as Britain's goodwill ambassador, Philip took every opportunity to return to Argentina to play polo. He also visited Mexico several times, and again people assumed the magnet was a mistress the beautiful Merle Oberon, who owned a sumptuous villa in Acapulco, a palace in Cuernavaca, and a huge estate in Mexico City. Married to the multimillionaire industrialist Bruno Pagliai, the former film star was celebrated in magazines as an international hostess who regularly entertained the ex-King of Italy, Greek shipowners, and Saudi Arabian princes. Her favorite royal guest was the Duke of Edinburgh.

"The Queen's husband was Merle's boy," said New York society columnist David Patrick Columbia. "He was her big social

ticket. I had dinner with her at her Malibu Beach house in Cali&r~ nia with Luis Estevez, her favorite couturier, and she had framed pictures of really famous people all around. The pride of place was reserved for the personally inscribed eight-by-ten photograph of Philip, which she had in a large silver frame. She was always talking about `when Philip visited us in Mexico,' and `when Philip introduced me to the Queen,' and `Philip this,' and `Philip that.' 1 don't know whether they had an affair or not; I doubt it, only because Luis never thought so, and he would have known. In fact, Luis, who's homosexual, wondered if Philip wasn't just a little bit gay underneath that terminal macho facade of his. Luis was in Mexico with Merle several times when Philip visited, and contrary to what has been implied by others, Luis said he never saw anything romantic going on between them."

Despite Philip's attractiveness to women, he was also appreciated by men, especially in his younger days. "I think he far prefers the company of men," said a man who knew him in the navy. "There was the all-male Thursday Club before and after his marriage. The four-month cruise with his male equerry in 1956.

Another man, an internationally acclaimed writer and self-described homosexual, smiled mischievously when Philip's name was mentioned. The writer told another writer over drinks in the Oak Room Bar of the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1994 that he remembered Philip well. "Ah, yes," he said wickedly, "I knew Philip when he was the girl."

With Merle Oberon, Philip appeared more beguiled by opulence than romance. Impressed by her extravagance, he enjoyed being cosseted in superlative comfort. She provided cashmere blankets, silk sheets, and a French chef who served superb cuisine with vintage wines. Although Philip was married to the world's richest woman, and accustomed to the highest level of royal service, he did not live sumptuously. His wife was frugal and accustomed to scratchy tweeds and sensible shoes. Her palaces were cold and drafty and required electric space heaters in every corner. Merle Oberon's estates had heated marble floors, heated towel racks, and gold-leafed beds swagged with silk tassels. Her house parties were rich, relaxed, and sunny, with sweet bougainvillea breezes.

Lord Mountbatten, who adored glamorous movie stars like Merle Oberon, had introduced his nephew to the legendary beauty when they'd visited Mexico fifteen years earlier. "I was on that trip," recalled John Barratt, who was Mountbatten's private secretary, "and I never saw anything to suggest an affair between the Duke of Edinburgh and Merle Oberon. Her husband was there, and he was our host."

The editor and writer Michael Korda disagrees. "Oh, c'mon," he said. "Everyone knows Philip had an affair with Merle. My uncle [film director Alexander Korda] was married to her from 1939 to 1945. . . . No, I wasn't around then, and no, I never saw them together, but that's what I've always been told. Besides, if they didn't have an affair, they should have!"

Jody Jacobs, formerly a reporter for Women `5 Wear Daily and society editor of the Los Angeles Times, attended one of Merle Oberon's dinner parties in honor of Prince Philip. "It was during the [1968] Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and Merle, who was a stickler for royal protocol, insisted that everyone arrive before the Duke of Edinburgh and that the women wear long dresses. She invited Princess Lalla Nezha of Morocco and jet-setters like Cristina Ford, who was married to Henry Ford at the time, although he was not with her that evening; one or two Hollywood stars; and a few Mexican socialites whom Merle considered rich or aristocratic enough to be included. After dinner, when most of the other guests had left, I was part of a little group standing with the Prince near some French doors leading to the terrace and pool. There were two other women, including Cristina Ford, who was tan and tawny. This was the same Cristina Ford whose mad dancing at a White House dinner for Princess Margaret had made international news: Cristina, who was doing the twist, twisted herself right out of her white strapless gown. The top of her dress literally fell down. Now she was flirting madly with Prince Philip. They had danced a few times that evening. Suddenly she looked up at him and said, `Why don't we go to the pool and go swimming? We (meaning the women) could leave our bras and little panties on.'

"Prince Philip blanched. `Uh, uh,' he said. `I think it's time for me to leave.' He smiled at Cristina and the rest of us. He was

quickly surrounded by his group, which appeared from nowhere; he said good-bye to Merle and took off. I think in that setting, with a reporter listening in, he was being very discreet. Or maybe he just wasn't attracted to Cristina."

The Duke of Edinburgh was far too discreet to indulge in any~ thing beyond harmless flirting in public. "Arrangements were made privately," said a Moroccan woman. "I was living in London in the late `60s and going to parties with a painter, Felix Topolsky, who had done a portrait of Prince Philip and become good friends with him. I told Felix I thought Philip was quite handsome and I'd like to meet him.

"A few weeks later, Felix said, `I made a date for you to meet Philip. The Queen will be busy with the regatta. He has a flat on top of the hill and you'll meet him there at 10:30 in the evening.'

`I'm not a one-night stand, Felix,' I told him. "`But you said you fancied him.'

`Oh, I do but not to sleep with. . . .` Felix was taken aback and the date with the Duke of Edinburgh was canceled. I'm sure I wasn't the only woman propositioned in this way."

Philip certainly was not going to court criticism that might embarrass the Crown. The Profumo affair had already subjected the country to enough embarrassment. At the height of the Cold War, Britain's War Minister, John Profumo, shared a prostitute, Christine Keeler, with Soviet naval attache' Eugene Ivanov, and the scandal nearly toppled the government. The War Minister was forced to resign after he lied in a personal statement to the House of Commons. Years later the Queen knighted him. At the time, the sex scandal made the British the butt of international jokes, and the disgrace lasted for years, tarnishing the country's prestige.

Even before the scandal, the country seemed to be stumbling under the burden passed down from two world wars. "Britain still has shameful slums, obsolete housing, derelict dockyards," wrote John Gunther in Look magazine. "The rank and file of citizens seem apathetic about the future, despondent or confused."

Some citizens were angry. "Damn you, England," wrote John Osborne, the young playwright who transformed British theater with his blistering social drama. "In sincere and utter hatred .

you're rotting now, and quite soon you'll disappear . . . untouchable, unteachable, impregnable."

Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson saw a country stripped of glory and floundering with no direction. "Great Britain has lost an empire," he said, "and has not yet found a role."

Even the weather aggravated the country's misery. The winters in England during the early sixties were so severe that power failed and people shivered. Then the impossible happened: the Queen was booed. She and her husband were attending a theatrical performance with King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece when a group of Greek protesters in London yelled and hissed at her for associating with fascists.

Queen Elizabeth appeared not to notice. Having never encountered such criticism, she did not comprehend that the screaming was directed at her. She was equally unconcerned by the death threats she received when the Palace announced her plans to tour Canada in 1964.

"The Queen must not come," warned the Toronto Telegram.

"An innocent life is at stake," said the Times of London.

The Daily Mirror raised the specter of "a second Dallas" if the Queen ventured into Canada, where the French minority in Quebec railed against the English majority in Ottawa.

But she refused to cancel her trip. Canada was part of her realm and the largest member of the Commonwealth. "I am not worried about the visit," the Queen said, "and we are quite relaxed."

She had spent weeks preparing for the tour, including days of wardrobe fittings with her favorite dressmaker, Hardy Amies. For this trip she had allowed her hatmaker, Fredrick Fox, to make a dress. "Freddie was thrilled," recalled a friend. "He spends months designing the gown, makes it, and goes to the Palace for a fitting. Blue sort of sheath with silver bugle beads on the long sleeves. The Queen loves it. He does the fitting; she looks great. Then she presses a button. An old crone comes crawling in, hauling a box the size of Madagascar. The Queen opens it and removes an amethyst brooch as big as a plate. She lugs out diamonds the size of soup bowls and plops them all on her bosom. The style and creation of the dress is lost under the gargantuan crown jewels. Freddie rips

everything off: the bows, the bugle beads, the whole lot. The Queen senses his distress. She says, `But that's what they want to see.' " Someone later asked her an abstract question: "What do you think of taste?" The Queen said, "I don't think it helps."

On that trip to Canada, Her Majesty traveled to Quebec with her husband and grudgingly accepted the protection of bulletproof limousines and riot-control policemen. Philip chafed at so much security and, as always, spoke out. The Foreign Office patiently explained the political tensions building among French Canadians and noted that violence had become a terrible reality since the Kennedy assassination a few months before.

"Kennedy wouldn't have been shot," snapped Philip, "if it hadn't been for all the bloody security surrounding him."

Throughout Canada the Queen was trailed by armed guards and squad cars. She attended functions that required invitations and made her two speeches from secure television studios. Sailing up the St. Lawrence River aboard her royal yacht, frogmen checked the hull for explosives at every stop.

"Fancy having to put up with this sort of thing," said her dresser, BoBo MacDonald.

"Don't worry about me," said the Queen. "Nobody's going to hurt me. I'm as safe as houses."

She spoke English in Ottawa and French in Quebec, urging fraternity on both feuding factions. She praised Canada as "one of the older and most stable nations of the world." Still, she was hissed and booed, but despite the insults and screams, she never flinched.

After she left, Canadian television presented an hour-long show about her visit. "The question remains," concluded the commentator, "was it worth it? For all that was accomplished the opening of a building here and making a speech there was it worth the strife, the harsh words, oppressive security measures? We believe it was not. Good night."

In the past, the magnificent voice of Winston Churchill would have trumpeted the virtues of the British monarchy and drowned out such criticism. But that voice was gone. The Queen's first and

favorite* Prime Minister had fallen into a coma in January 1965 and died nine days later. His death marked the end of an era for En- gland and left the monarchy without its staunchest defender.

"The grandeur of Great Britain died tonight," the BB$ reported on January 24, 1965. "The power and glory are gone.

The Queen wept privately. Then she composed herself and gave her revered mentor the first royal funeral ever accorded a commoner. Years before, Churchill had issued instructions for his burial: "I want lots of soldiers and bands." His sovereign gave him all of that and more.

Attuned to Churchill's sense of history and theater, she instructed the Earl Marshall, who is also the Duke of Norfolk and in charge of royal pageants, to spare no expense. England was saying good~bye to its savior, and the Queen knew that the world would be watching this historic farewell on television. She wanted the spectacle to be as magnificent as the man himself.

She ordered that his body lie in state for three days and iiights in Westminster Hall so that the million men, women, and children who had lined the streets to keep a vigil for him during his coma could pay their final respects. The floor of the great hall was lined in felt to muffle the sound of footsteps. Four guardsmen stood by the casket with four candles, providing the only light in the darkness. The Queen and her husband joined the long line of mourners filing past the catafalque, and for the first time in her reign, Her Majesty was not the center of attention. She was simply part of a tide of people. As Time magazine observed, "Before the casket of Winston Churchill, all mourners were equal."

On the cold gray day of the funeral, the Queen lent her carriage full of blankets and hot-water bottles to Lady Churchill and her two daughters. Her Majesty then paid special homage to her first Garter Knight by arriving in St. Paul's before his coffin and his official mourners, and not last, as is her due as Queen.

After the majestic five-hour funeral, the royal family joined the

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*The Queen admitted her preference for Churchill when asked, "Which of your Prime Ministers, ma' am, did you enjoy your audiences with most?" She said, "Winston, of course, hecause it was always such fun."

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dignitaries from 110 nations* on the steps of the cathedral as Sir Winston's coffin was returned to the gun carriage for the final ride to his burial place in the little country churchyard of Bladon in Oxford shire. The Queen's wreath was placed on the gravesite with a card: "From the nation and the Commonwealth in grateful remembrance-Elizabeth R." The great bells of St. Paul's pealed and the cannons reverberated as ninety salutes were fired-one for every year of Churchill's remarkable life. Dressed in his naval uniform, the Duke of Edinburgh, who had been a young lieutenant during World War II, stepped forward to give the old warrior a last salute."**

"There can be no leavetaking between Churchill and the people he served and saved," said Lady Asquith in the House of Lords. "Many of us today may be feeling that by his going the scale of things has dwindled, our stature is diminished, that glory has departed from us. . . Then I remember the words of his victory broadcast-when he urged us not to fall back into the rut of inertia, confusion, and `the craven fear of being great.' And I knew that the resolve to keep unbroken the pattern of greatness which he had impressed upon the spirit of the nation is the tribute he would ask from us today."

Despite her ringing words, Britain had lost her greatness. The country was struggling to keep her footing in a cold war with a former ally, Moscow, while forced to make friends with a former enemy, Bonn. Four months after burying Winston Churchill, who

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*The President of the United Stares was absent from the assemblage of five prime ministers, four kings, four presidents, three premiers, two chancellors, one queen, and one grand duke, who represented their countries at Winston Churchill's funeral. Lyndon Baines Johnson stayed in his bed at the White House and watched the funeral on television. "The President has a cold," asserted his press secretary, who added that Johnson's previous heart attack made his doctors especially vigilant. That Churchill was half American on his mother's side was a special source of pride to Americans, many of whom were embarrassed that their President did not attend the funeral of the country's most famous honorary citizen and did not send his Vice President to represent him. instead the President dispatched his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, who came down with a cold in London and could not attend. So the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren, represented America. Former President Eisenhower attended the funeral because he had commanded Allied Forces during World War II.

**Such an appropriate gesture contrasts with Philip's behavior the day after Churchill's death when he wanted to go on a shoot. Mounthatten said it was inappropriate during a period of national mourning, but Philip was unconvinced. "Well, I won't anyway," said Mounthatten, who refused to accompany him. Philip canceled the shoot.

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had railed against "the hideous onslaught of the Nazi war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers," the Queen visited West Germany. It was her first trip to the country that had battered England in two world wars. Her husband had gone there many times before to see his sisters and his brothers-in- law, but because of the bitter anti-German sentiments in England, his trips had not been publicized. The Queen had wanted to accompany him, but each time her request had been denied by the conservative Tory government, which knew that the public would never accept a royal visit so soon after the war. Now under a Labor Prime Minister, who wanted to end the old hostilities, the Queen was asked to make the trip in May 1965, the first time a British sovereign had visited Germany since 1913, when her grandfather, King George V, went to see his relatives.

At the time of Churchill's death, the German newspaper Frankfurter RundscAau recalled the Nazi invective against the British prime Minister. "Nothing remains of the Nazi tirades," said the newspaper. "Those who authorized them have not only disappeared, but they have been proved wrong."

The newspaper repeatedly warned Germans against screaming out "Sieg Heil" when the Queen inspected the soldiers of the Bundeswehr and the airmen of the Luftwaffe. Instead they were told to wave the paper Union Jacks that would be distributed and to call out her name.

Newspapers and magazines stressed the theme of reconciliation by publishing the Windsor family tree with its German roots, including the names of Elizabeth and Philip's four hundred royal relatives still living in Germany: the princely Hanovers, Hohenzollerns, Brunswicks, and Glucksburgs dusted off their old decorations in anticipation of the royal visit.

"If we can't have our own Bavarian monarch back," said a city official in Munich, "at least we can borrow someone else's for a short while."

"After all," said his aide, "they are almost German, aren't they?"

For Germans, the Queen's presence meant that England had finally forgiven them. Her words underscored her healing mission,

despite the grimace she made when she first saw the ugly barbed wire spikes on the Berlin Wall. "The tragic period is over," she said, her English being translated to German. "If we wish to preserve the best of our great heritage, we must make common cause.

In the last twenty years, the problems facing our two peoples have brought us closer together again. It is now our task to defend civilization in freedom and peace together."

The crowds shouted, "Eee-liz-a~bet, Eee-liz-a~bet!" but the Queen did not smile or wave. In fact, she recoiled from the enthusi~ astic response. "I think she thought this was a bit too much of a good thing," said British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, "too reminiscent of ritual Nazi shouting. That was the only time I saw her perhaps at all put out."

With more dignity than warmth, the Queen went to ten cities in eleven days and was widely praised. ``For the thirty~nine~year~ old British monarch, theoretically above politics," said US. News & World Beport, it was a highly political perfbrmance~"

Criticism toward the Crown had become increasingly strident. In 1957, after Lord Altrincham criticized the Queen as "priggish" and "a pain in the neck," he was slugged by a man on the street who considered his words blasphemous. A year later, when Malcolm Muggeridge, a leading British journalist, dismissed the Queen as "a nice, homely little woman" whose monarchy was "a transpar~ ent hoax," he was banned from appearing on the state-run BBC. Yet within ten years criticism of the Crown had become common~ place. Students in the sixties were apathetic toward the monarchy. To them the royal family seemed irrelevant, almost laughable. Movie houses had stopped playing the National Anthem because too many young people booed. The Oxford University Union debated the resolution: "The Monarchy should be sacked, Bucking~ ham Palace given to the homeless, and the corgis put to productive work."

The monarchy could still count on the establishment press

the Times and the Daily Telegraph to pay homage. Both newspapers published the Court Circular,* which lists the activities of the

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*The first Court Circular was issued in the eighteenth century by King George III, who became annoyed by newspaper inaccuracies about the royal family's activities. So the King appointed the Court Newsman to prepare a definitive document to be supplied to newspapers every day.

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royal family and is delivered to the papers by Palace messenger every day. One day in 1966, according to a Telegrapli editor, that delivery was jeopardized because of what the Palace perceived as a gross lack of deference.

"We cannot go on supplying you with the Court Circular," a Palace spokesman told the editor, "if you continue with your unjustifiable attacks on the Princess Margaret."

"What attacks?" asked the editor, who was embarrassed by his newspaper's subservience to the royal family.

"What attacks indeed?" said the Palace spokesman. "You know perfectly well that as a Princess of the Blood Royal, she is entitled to the word `the' in front of her name."

The omission was duly rectified.

During the same period, the Sunday Times commissioned a Cambridge don to write a small biography of the Queen for a feature entitled "The 1,000 Men and Women of the Century." The biography referred to the Queen as belonging to the "regnum of mass consumption . . . like most carefully designed products, the Queen comes flavourless, harmless, beautifully packaged but a bit expensive. . . . Cluttered with amiable feudal eccentricities . . . the monarchy survives to restore its earliest function, to celebrate the rite of fantasy."

The don's contribution was immediately rejected. A more respectful editor rewrote the piece and referred to Her Majesty as "charming, witty and wise . . . with beautiful eyes and a peaches and cream complexion."

Even the blinkered courtiers noticed a lack of deference among young people and tried to make the Queen appear more relevant.

They announced she would honor the Beatles with the Member of the Order of the British Empire.*

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*"It's the lowest honor you can have from Britain," Paul McCartney told Newsweek thirty years later, explaining the honor bestowed no title ("not so much as a sir") and little prestige. The milkman, who delivered to the Prime Minister's official residence, received the MBE. This was not lost on Britain's biggest pop star. "It's the lowest," said McCartney. "But you can't sit around saying, `God, I wish they'd make me a sir.

The Queen finally bestowed a knighthood on the Beatle in 1997, citing McCartney's "services to music" in her New Year's Honors List. Acknowledging the honor, Sir Paul said, "it's been a hard day's knighthood."

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"Wow," said John Lennon. "I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE."

Some people protested the award to the Beatles by returning their MBEs to the Palace, the first time such honors had ever been renounced. Lennon was furious. "Army officers received their medals for killing people," he said. "We got ours for entertaining. On balance, I'd say we deserve ours more."

Four years later he returned the medal to the Queen to protest British involvement in the Nigerian civil war and Britain's support of U.S. action in Vietnam. "Really should not have taken it," Len- non said of the honor. "Felt I had sold out. . . ." One man who had sent his medal back to the Palace in protest of the Beatles' award now asked to have it returned.

When the four working-class lads from Liverpool arrived at Buckingham Palace in 1965 to receive their medals, they had to be protected by police from their screeching fans. Newspapers reported that they huddled in a Palace lavatory before meeting the Queen and smoked marijuana.

"We've played Frisco's Cow Palace, but never one like this," said Paul McCartney after the visit. "It's a keen pad."

"And Her Majesty?" asked a reporter.

"She was like a mum to us.

He paid amused homage to the Queen by writing a lyric in her honor entitled "Her Majesty's a Pretty Nice Girl, But Doesn't Have a Lot to Say."

The next year the Queen broke with precedent to knight a Roman Catholic, a black, and a rabbi. She even gave her divorced cousin the Earl of Harewood permission to remarry* when she found out his mistress was pregnant. Still, she was criticized for being out of touch with the times. Philip thought the problem was

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*The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 requires that all relatives of the sovereign who might succeed to the throne--the Earl is seventeenth in line-- ask for permission to wed. Reluctantly the Queen gave her divorced cousin permission to remarry, but he paid dearly--for years. He was ostracized from the court. He was not invited to the funeral of his uncle the Duke of Windsor or to the wedding of the Queen's daughter, Princess Anne. He was forced to retire early as chancellor of York University and had to resign as artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival.

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dull domesticity, which he said the Queen represented when she had another child in 1964. "Nothing more ordinary than a middle- aged Queen with a middle-aged husband and four growing children," he told a group of journalists. "I would have thought that we're entering the least interesting period of our kind of glamorous existence. . . . There used to be much more interest. Now people take it all as a matter of course. Either they can't stand us, or they think we're all right."

In promoting the Firm, as Philip called the royal family, he traveled constantly to open British exhibits, push British products, support British trade. Always, the mystique of royalty had insured enthusiastic crowds for him and the Queen, especially in America. But by 1966 no one seemed to care. So when he agreed to tour the United States to raise money for Variety Clubs International, he summoned a Hollywood press agent.

"I was the lucky guy," said Henry Rogers of Rogers & Cowan, the Los Angeles-based public relations firm. "Although I've represented the biggest names in Hollywood, like Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth, I got a special thrill out of having a member of the royal family as a client. . . . Before I got the assignment, I had to go to Buckingham Palace to meet with Prince Philip. He was polite, a bit reserved, but very gracious. Best of all, he was receptive to my ideas."

Rogers's first suggestion was for the Prince to hold a press conference in every city. Prince Philip laughed.

"Oh, God, Henry," he said. "I've never done a press conference* before. We never do things like that in the royal household. It's just contrary to our policy. But if you think we should have a press conference, then we'll have a press conference. . . . But there have to be a few ground rules, and I would appreciate it if you would alert the press in advance to what they are."

The Duke of Edinburgh then explained his constrained role as Prince Consort. "First, make it clear to them that I am not in the British government. Press outside Great Britain are often confused

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*The Palace press secretary was shocked when reporters suggested that Her Majesty hold regular press conferences. "it would he in keeping with a film star," said Commander Colville, "but not with the Queen. The monarchy doesn't need that sort of publicity."

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about what role the Queen and I play in our country. Not being a part of the government, I cannot very well answer questions about the British economy, the Tory versus Labor Party, the Prime Minister, the union problems, and inflation. Second, I will not handle any personal questions about the Queen. Outside of that, you can declare open season and let them fire away."

The press agent told the Prince not to worry. "All the questions will be inane," he said. And most were. But Philip handled them with breezy humor.

"Tell us about the London Symphony," said a reporter in Miami.

"It plays good music," said Philip.

"Have you considered sending your children to a U.S. school?"

"An absolutely truthful answer is no, but now you're making me think about it. Hmmmm. The answer is still no."

"What do you think of the success of the Beatles?* As an export product, don't they bring more money into Britain?"

"It's a very small return for some of the things imposed on Britain."

"Is this your first visit to America?"

"No," said Philip. "My first visit was during the reign of Harry Truman."

"Why is the Queen's birthday

"Don't ask me to explain why it is that she has an official birthday in June when her proper birthday is in April. You'll just have to accept it, like cricket, pounds, shillings, and pence, and other quaint British customs."

Reporters were amused by the Prince, and in every city he received laudatory press coverage. He raised a million dollars for charity and returned home convinced that the Palace needed the

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*The Duke of Edinburgh was not a rock and roll fan. During a Royal Variety show, he scowled at the performance by Tom Jones and then asked the singer, "What do you gargle with--pebbles?"

The next day, in a speech to businessmen, the Prince mentioned the singer. "He's a young man of about twenty-five or something, probably worth about three million [$6 million]," said Philip. "it is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are most hideous songs."

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British version of a Hollywood press agent. The Queen rejected his idea as utterly preposterous, saying that she did not have to sell herself or her monarchy.

"My father never did," she said.

"He didn't need to," said her husband. "He had Winston Churchill and World War Two." This prompted a quarrel in front of the footman.

Philip again referred to the Firm in front of a group of journalists. "To survive, the monarchy has to change," he said. "No one wants to end up like a brontosaurus, who couldn't adapt himself, and ended up stuffed in a museum. It isn't exactly where I want to end up myself."

He continued to badger his wife about the problem, but she did not pay much attention until the morning he stormed into her bedroom suite, waving his copy of the Sunday Telegraph, the conservative right-wing royalist newspaper he once jokingly called "the family bugle."

"You might be interested in this," he said, slapping the front page down in front of her.

The Queen put on her spectacles and read the article about the "marked change in the public's attitude toward the Crown."

Philip paced up and down in front of the Queen's footman.

Without comment she continued to read:

Most people care much less than they did particularly the young, many of whom regard the Queen as the archsquare. They are not against in the sense of being frr a republic. They are quite simply indifferent. . . . The British monarchy will not be swept away in anger, but it could well be swallowed up in a great and growing yawn.

A few weeks later, when her press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, retired, an energetic Australian, William Heseltine, succeeded him. "When I took over, things were bound to change," he said. "The essence of the Queen's role is communication, and it needed improvement. . . . During the sixties, the family had dropped from the news pages to the gossip columns. I wanted to rectify that by getting them back from the gossip columns onto the

news pages where they belonged, and by making greater use of television."

Heseltine's first responsibility was to handle preparations for the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales.* Years before, the Queen had promised the people of Wales that she would present her eldest son to them at Caernavon Castle. She decided that Charles was ready to be crowned a few months before his twenty first birthday. She agreed to have the investiture televised because she felt the miniature coronation ceremony was part of the continuity of the monarchy.

The BBC television producer suggested making a biographical film of Prince Charles, but the Queen and Prince Philip said no; they thought their son was too inexperienced to handle unscripted questions. The producer then suggested a film showing what sort of life Prince Charles faced as the heir apparent. Again the Queen and Prince Philip said no, but, influenced by the enthusiasm of Heseltine for television, they agreed to consider a documentary about the royal family and the work they do. The new Palace press secretary wanted to show the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and their four children as something more than stiff cardboard cutouts. "No one knew them as people," he said. "We needed to make them more rounded and human for the general public." In this he was supported by Lord Mountbatten, who had recently filmed an eight- part series on his life for the BBC.

Still, the Queen resisted. She did not want the monarchy to have anything to do with show business, and she certainly did not want her family acting like television stars. "I'm not Jackie Kennedy and this isn't the White House," she said, referring to the First Lady's televised tour of the White House. The Queen disliked performing on television and could never relax in front of the camera. She dreaded having to televise her annual Christmas message, which was staged and carefully produced with makeup artists, technicians, and TelePrompTers. She could not conceive of having television cameras follow her around every day, recording her offhand remarks and actions.

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*The title Prince of Wales is reserved for the eldest son of the reigning sovereign, but it is not hereditary. The title is conferred only by the sovereign's personal grant.

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"The Queen also questioned if it would be sensible to allow television to intrude into the family's private life," recalled Heseltine. "In the end, however, she agreed."

It took three months of negotiation to get her approval. "You know the proverb `When elephants wrestle, it is the grass that suffers,' " said one man involved in the discussions. "There was prince Philip to contend with; he kept saying, `Most journalists just want the shot where you're seen picking your nose,' and Cawston [BBC documentary executive] kept saying, `I'm not a journalist.' Then there was Mountbatten, who, of course, knew all there was to know about broadcasting, and Mountbatten's son-in-law, Lord Brabourne, who as a film producer actually did know something. He was the one who brought on Richard Cawston, head of the BBC's documentary department."

The Queen finally gave her consent to the film when she was assured total editorial control, including the copyright,* plus half the profits from worldwide sales.** She then agreed to allow the BBC's camera crew inside her office at Buckingham Palace during her weekly audience with the Prime Minister, which previously had been so privileged that even her husband had been excluded. She also invited the television crew into her home at Balmoral for a family picnic. To sell to the lucrative American market, she suggested a segment with President Nixon on his visit to London and another segment showing Walter Annenberg present his credentials as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. "We need something special," said the Queen.

But not so special as to create controversy. Her Majesty knew better than to allow cameras to accompany her to St. George's Chapel at Windsor on the morning of March 31,1969, for the secret reinternment of her father. She knew the public might be jolted to learn that the King's body had lain unburied for seventeen years in

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*Within a few years the Queen knew she had made a mistake in cooperating with the BBC to make Royal Family. Viewing the film is almost impossible in the United Kingdom. Since the Queen retains the copyright, she requires a viewing fee of approximately $70, plus written permission from the Palace. That permission is rarely, if ever, given.

**The film was shown three times in the United Kingdom, twice in the United States, and once in 124 other countries. The Palace declined to divulge the amount of money earned, but industry estimates placed the amount at $2.5 million.

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an oak coffin locked in a small passageway under the castle. So she ordered the Windsor grounds closed to the public and summoned the royal family* to the chapel, where the Dean of Windsor, the Right Reverend Robin Woods, conducted the solemn burial service in private.

Throughout the filming, the BBC crew took direction from the Queen. At one point the producer suggested she exercise one of her corgis. Her Majesty insisted on exercising all of them. Her husband, who despised his wife's nipping dogs, exploded.

"They want one of the fucking animals, do you understand?" snapped the Duke of Edinburgh. "Not fourteen fucking dogs."

In the film, that scene showed the Queen without her husband but with all her corgis.

The BBC producer described the film as historic. "I'm sure people will find it fascinating because it will show the role of the monarchy, the day-to~day running carried on in private, and how the monarchy fits into the present day and age.

"It's terribly important people should understand it's not a film about ceremonies. What they really want to know about is what the Queen does, what goes on inside the Palace, what the job consists of. . . . It won't be a formal type, but more of a film about people than buildings and ceremonies. The object of any documentary is to show people as they really are." He reassessed his view after seeing the effect of his film on people: "Monarchy is PR.

Public relations-a focus for public interest-is what it is all about."

The anthropologist David Attenborough had told the producer that the documentary would kill the monarchy. "The whole institution depends on mystique and the tribal chief in his hut," he said. "If any member of the tribe ever sees inside the hut, then the whole system of the tribal chiefdom is damaged and the tribe eventually disintegrates."

The television cameras stayed in the Queen's hut for seventy~ five days and even accompanied her on a state visit to Chile. More than forty hours were filmed at a cost of $350,000. The 1O5-minute**

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*In deference to her mother, she did not invite the Duke of Windsor to his brother's burial.

**The outtakes-more than thirty-eight hours of film left on the cutting room floor--were shipped to the royal archives at Windsor Castle.

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documentary, entitled Royal Family (but nicknamed Corgi and Beth), was seen by forty million Britons in June 1969. It was shown again in December, which is why the Queen canceled her annual Christmas Day message that year. "Enough is enough," said the Palace, but twenty thousand Britons disagreed and wrote letters protesting her not delivering the yuletide address.

"The most exciting film ever made for television" was how the BBC commentator introduced the show to viewers. Then they watched their Queen and Prince Charles prepare a salad at a family barbecue while Prince Philip and Princess Anne grilled sausages and steaks.

The Queen tested the salad dressing by poking her little finger into the mixture and licking it. She grimaced. "Oh, too oily," she said. She added more vinegar, pronounced the dressing perfect, and walked over to her husband. "Well, the salad is finished," she said.

"Well done," said Prince Philip. "This, as you will observe, is not."

In another scene, the Queen, known to her subjects as the richest woman in the world, fingers a fabulous necklace of rubies. She says how much she likes it and that it came to Queen Victoria from the ruler of Persia. Then, in a puzzled voice, she turns to her lady- in-waiting and asks, "I have actually worn this, haven't I?"

Minutes later the monarch, who supposedly never handles money, goes into a shop with her four-year-old son, Prince Edward, to buy him a sweet. She pays, saying she has just enough cash on her to cover the bill.

In another scene, the Queen laughs as she asks her family: "How do you keep a regally straight face when a footman tells you: `Your Majesty, your next audience is with a gorilla'? It was an official visitor, but he looked just like a gorilla." The Queen said she could not hide her laughter.

"Pretend to blow your nose," advised Prince Charles, "and keep the handkerchief up to your face."

The Queen did not need to censor the film beforehand, although her husband worried that she might be concerned about the scene where Prince Charles shows his youngest brother how to tune a cello. In tightening the instrument, Charles breaks the A string, which grazes Edward's cheek, stinging him to tears. After screening the film, the Queen said, "It's the sort of thing that can happen to anyone." She pronounced the film fine just as it was.

Most of the critics agreed, including the Times, which editorialized about the importance of the documentary in showing the advantages of the British system of monarchy, especially when the sovereign is trained in the duties of royalty and is surrounded by a family with similar training and tradition of service.

"A romp with royalty," raved one critic. "Everyone deserves a bow for this show."

"The refurbishing of the royal image that has been going on for some time now has been managed with some skill," wrote William Hardcastle, a former newspaper editor, "and skill in this field involves judgment of when enough is enough. My guess is that `Royal Family' is at the completion of a process rather than a herald of further revelations to come."

Little did he know. The monarchy had used television to enhance its image because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Only years later would it look like a blunder.

ELEVEN

Prince Charles peered at the poster on the dormitory wall with

its photo of three young women sitting on an Edwardian sofa. The girls smiled invitingly under their slouch-brimmed hats. One long-haired beauty wore sandals; the other two were barefoot. The caption read "Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No." Proceeds from the sale of the poster supported the draft resistance.

"Appalling," said the Prince, shaking his head. "Bizarre and appalling."

The Prince of Wales was not a man of his times. While many Cambridge students were protesting the war in Vietnam, he was playing polo. He avoided political activists, whom he called "nutters." And he disliked hippies. He called flower children "freaks" and damned feminists as "idiotic man haters." He loved the Goons, a group of British comedians known for broad humor and brash antics. (Germans referred to the group as Die Doofrn, or "The Stupids.")

Charles celebrated himself as old-fashioned. "I am proud to be a square," he said. While other young men streamed into singles' bars and took part in the sexual revolution, the Prince of Wales sipped cherry brandy and held on to his virginity. He stood ramrod straight during the swinging sixties and praised the sanctity of marriage. He declared he would not wed before the age of thirty.

Diana did not realize that Her Serene Highness had probably been invited to the Palace only because she was performing for charity.

The Queen of England still considered the Princess of Monaco a bit of Hollywood fluff, who had married a poseur from a tiny principality. Her Majesty was not moved by the enthusiasm of her husband, Prince Philip, for the beautiful blond American, who also had been a favorite of Lord Mountbatten's. When Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier in 1956, the Queen declined to attend their wedding. "Too many film stars," she had said. As far as she was concerned, the Rainiers did not count as royalty, although Prince Rainier had reigned longer* than any crowned head in Europe.

"Her Majesty can be stuffy about that sort of thing," admitted one of her ladies-in-waiting. "Too many jewels, fur coats, and fast cars. Jet-setters, you know. Prince Philip, on the other hand, does not feel that way, particularly if the wife is pretty."

Diana, too, was fascinated by the former film star and sat spellbound through her poetry reading at the benefit. After the hour- long recital, Diana walked into the press reception rubbing her side. Someone asked if she had hurt her back.

"No, not at all," she said brightly. "It's just that I've pins and needles in my bottom from sitting still so long."

Her spontaneity charmed everyone. "She was enchanting then," said British journalist Victoria Mather. "So fresh and beguiling. At that reception, she spilled a little red wine on her gloves, held up the stain for us to see, and laughed. `Oops,' she said, `Guess I'll have to nip round to Sketchley's [a London cleaner].'

Seconds later Diana showed off her engagement ring and offered to let an admirer try it on. "I'll have to have it back, though," she quipped. "Otherwise they won't know who I am."

The woman gazed at the ring on her finger. "Oh," she exclaimed. "It's beautiful. I've never seen such a large stone."

"I know," said Diana. "The other day I even scratched my nose with it. It's so big the ring, that is."

Someone asked what it was like now that she had moved from

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*By 1996 only Prince Rainier of Monaco and King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand had reigned longer than Queen Elizabeth II.

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Clarence House to Buckingham Palace. "Not bad," she chirped. "But too many formal dinners. Yuck."

A young man stepped forward. "May I kiss the hand of my future Queen?" he asked.

Diana smiled coyly and tilted her head. "Yes, you may," she said, extending her hand.

The young man kissed her wrist lightly and everyone clapped. He blushed with pleasure.

"You'll never live this down," Diana said, teasing him.

Delighted reporters crowded around her, and the cameramen bore in, jostling guests and pushing them to the edge o$the room. Prince Charles headed off to greet someone, expecflng the media to follow him, but they were taken with Diana. I?eeling self- conscious about the disturbance she was causing, she excused herself and escaped to the powder room with Grace Kelly. The Princess-to-be confided her distress over the unrelenting press coverage and asked Her Serene Highness how sAe coped with it. The movie star who became a princess comforted the teenager, who would become royalty's movie star. Princess Grace, accustomed to unwelcome media attention, told Diana to treat it like the weather. "It'll get worse," she said with a warm smile.

And it did the very next day. The tabloids were full of breathless reviews of Diana and her gown, accompanied by revealing photographs and suggestive headlines. "Lady Di Takes the Plunge," blared the front page of the Daily Mirrnn "Di the Daring," exclaimed the Sun. "Shy Di Shocks," the Daily Ex~ress reported. Even establishment newspapers noted the dress that seemed so startling for the modest kindergarten teacher. "Shy Di R.I.P.," read the photo caption in the Times.

Diana was puzzled. "I don't know why everyone is making such a fuss," she said to Prince Charles's valet. "It's the sort of dress I would have worn anyway.

The valet lowered his eyes. "Well, it certainly caught everyone's attention," he said disapprovingly. He was fired a month after the wedding.

The Daily Express reporter praised Diana's decision to go strapless. "Her Gone-With-the-Wind dress . . . takes courage, and

a lot more, to uphold it," wrote Jean Rook. "All Di must learn to watch, which the TV cameras noticed, is the ounce or two of puppy fat which boned bodices tuck under a girl's arms."

Diana cringed as she read the reviews of her "bounteous figure" and "blooming physique." She shrieked when she saw the television coverage.

"I look hideously fat," she wailed. "Fat as a cow. I can't stand it.

Charles, who never forgot the embarrassment of being called "Fatty" by his classmates, kidded her. Fanatic about staying slim, he exercised like a fiend and ate like a monk. On tours he carried snack bags filled with wheat germ, linseed, and prunes. His dinners at home consisted of two strips of dried fish or a yolk-free mushroom omelet. That was followed by green salad and a drink of lemon squash and Epsom salts, which Diana pronounced "revolting." Charles said he needed the concoction "to keep regular." He twitted her about her passion for sweets and called her "Plumpkin." As she agonized over her newspaper photographs, he teased her again. "No more puddings for you," he said. He had tossed off the remark casually, not realizing that she would plunge into bulimia. But after seeing herself on television, Diana was so distraught that she soon began bingeing and purging.

The eating disorder was seeded in the wreckage of her parent's marriage, which had thrown her oldest sister, Jane, into anorexia. As a young woman, Jane had starved herself to the frightening weight of a child, until her family forced her to seek help. Diana, too, reacted to her insecurities by secretly starving herself. But then she caved in to her hunger cravings and ate several bowls of cereal with sugar and rich Guernsey cream. She devoured bags of soft jelly candies, followed by vanilla cookies lathered with white frosting, which she quickly threw up.

She had moved into Buckingham Palace a few months before the wedding so she could learn the royal routine, and when Charles was traveling, she ate alone. Most of her meals were served in her room. At first she left her trays untouched, which concerned the chef, who felt he was not pleasing her. After he began asking, she flushed the food down the toilet.

"She nicked so many boxes of Kellogg's Frosties from the pantry," said royal reporter Ross Benson, "that one of the footmen was accused of stealing and nearly lost his job. Diana stepped forward then and admitted she was to blame."

At first no one believed her. The staff was not ready to accept the image of their future Queen as a glutton who regularly gorged and vomited. "The picture of Lady Diana wrapped around the porcelain chariot no, no, no," said a member of the royal household with a shudder. "That was inconceivable to us." The staff refused to see any dark shadows beneath the sunny exterior. "You've no idea how sweet she seemed on the surface," said one of the Palace maids. "The few flashes of temper we saw we put to wedding jitters and worked harder to be of help." The staff did not believe that Diana was the culprit consuming the missing food. Even when she admitted it, they thought she was protecting a footman previously suspected of petty theft. They did not accept what was happening until the upstairs maids, who cleaned Diana's suite, reported evidence of her throwing up in the bathroom. Even then most of the staff did not accept it.

As Diana began losing weight, she increased the pernicious cycle of bingeing and purging until she was going through it five times a day. Within three months she'd lost twenty pounds. Charles was unaware of the problem because he was not with her all day every day.

For five weeks during the spring of 1981, he traveled on previously scheduled visits; he toured the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, where he explored the possibility of a real job. The Queen and Prince Philip had been concerned for some time about the way Charles flitted from one cause to the next without direction. "He never sticks to anything," complained Philip, who once blamed his wife for being an inattentive mother. At a private dinner party attended by an American, Philip jerked his head toward the Queen and referred to Charles as "your son." Both parents despaired whenever he made impassioned statements about the jobless, the homeless, or the penniless. The Duke of Edinburgh, especially, had no patience with his son's concerns for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. "He wrings his hands like an old

woman," said Philip after one of Charles's speeches. "Why can't he leave the weltschmerzen to the vicars?" Philip warned Charles not to become embroiled in politics and not to comment on "sacred cows" like the Church of England and the National Health Service. He said the one institution that could be insulted was the press

"I've relished doing it myself," Philip said~but nothing else. Charles ignored his father's advice. As Prince of Wales, he resented being cast as a pitchman for Britain. He wanted to be taken more seriously than a salesman who dressed up in gold braid and waved. "I'm not good at simply being a performing monkey," he said. His father disagreed. He thought Charles was perfect in the part.

Having enjoyed Australia as an exchange student, Charles was open to his mother's idea for a job there after his wedding. He and Diana would move to Canberra, the capital, and Charles would become ~Overnor~general The position paid an annual salary larger than the premier's, but it did not carry great powers, other than commander in chief of the armed forces. Under the Australian constitution, it would enable him to summon and dissolve Parliament and carry the kind of responsibility that the Queen felt her son needed. She had discussed the appointment with her Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who approached the Foreign Office in 1980; she reported back that Charles had permission to "informally explore the possibility" during his next Australian tour. But, on that trip, Charles decided if the position were to be offered, he would have to refuse because the Australian Prime Minister was too dour.

"The difficulty is that he does not have any humor," Charles told Diana in a phone call from Australia that was secretly taped. "He is terribly serious. I made a terrific effort to be amusing, but he just stared at me all the time."

That was just one of the five phone calls between Charles and his fiancee, and Charles and his mother, that had been recorded. The tapes, made by anti-British republicans within the Australian telephone company, were given to a freelance British reporter, who tried to sell them in England. Afraid of further straining relations with Australia, which had been threatening to break away from the Commonwealth, the Queen's courtiers moved swiftly. They called

the Queen's lawyers, who claimed the transcripts were not authentic.* The Queen's courts agreed and issued an injunction to prevent publication of the transcripts in England. The Queen's lawyers then sought an injunction in West Germany, but they were too late: extracts had appeared in the magazine Die Aktuelle and were translated from German to English and published in the Irish Independent.

In one of the purported conversations, Diana mentioned her wedding preparations and complained about the behavior of her stepmother, Raine, who had appeared on British television. Standing alongside her beaming husband, Countess Spencer did all the talking. The Earl Spencer, who never completely recovered from his stroke, smiled benignly.

"She's got Daddy autographing photos and selling them in the gift shop," said Diana. "It's so embarrassing." She added that her stepmother was conducting paid tours. Priced at $2.50, the fee included tea with "the ghastly pink lady," as Diana now referred to Barbara Cartland. "The wedding," she said, "will be a catastrophe if Raine continues."

"Don't worry too much about that," Charles told her. "Edward [Adeane] can organize it when we come back. You will see the Queen will be in a position to give the necessary instructions so that objections will not be possible."

"Yes, I know," said Diana. "But can I not have any say about my own wedding?"

"Naturally, but let your mother advise you."

"I will, I promise," said Diana. "I really don't want to complain, Charles, really not. I'm going to talk through everything tomorrow with Mummy. She has a very good feeling for things like this. She's very sensible."

The Spectator had already put out the call for Diana's mother to take over. Following Raine's television interview, the conservative magazine pleaded: "Come home, Mrs. Shand Kydd, your country needs you." In an editorial railing against the participation of Raine

*writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1993, Alastair Forbes challenged the royal denial and said the authenticity of the taped conversations had been "proved to me beyond doubt, despite the Palace's glib denial."

Spencer and Barbara Cartland in the royal wedding, Alexander Chancellor wrote: "If a special Act of Parliament is necessary, so be it. For it would be more than a little unfair on everybody if these two absurdly theatrical ladies were permitted to turn a moving national celebration into a pantomime."

Diana could do nothing about keeping her stepmother away from the wedding, but she was adamant about her stepgrandmother. "She struck Barbara Cartland from the guest list," said a former aide to Prince Charles, who tried to intercede. Six months later the aide was fired.

"It was so cruel to do that to Barbara," he said. "She was distraught, really deeply hurt, but there was nothing we could do. Diana had insisted her stepgrandmother not be allowed near St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Queen did not object. Barbara was so humiliated she wanted to go abroad for the wedding day, but her sons said that it would make it look as though she had been banished."

To save face, Barbara Cartland gave a party for the volunteers of the St. John's Ambulance Brigade. Forgoing her usual costume of ostrich feathers, she wore the tailored brown uniform of the Order of St. John and appeared on international television in a feature about the organization. She asserted that the St. John volunteers were devoted to providing "a Christian answer to the problems of a troubled and materialistic world."

By then even the spiritual participants were cashing in on the royal wedding. The Archbishop of Canterbury had divulged to the media details of a private conversation he had had with Charles and Diana.* And the three choirs of St. Paul's Cathedral had collected $1,200 each for 250 singers. By comparison, Barbara Cartland seemed positively benign.

During one of her conversations with Charles in Australia, Diana said she felt overwhelmed by having to learn so much in such a short time. "I'm so excited that I can't concentrate properly," she said. "I miss you very much."

*Years later, after his retirement, the former Archbishop confided to his biographer that the Prince of ~ales was severely depressed before his marriage because he was in love with another woman. He also described Diana as a "schemer."

"I miss you, too," he said, adding that he was late for a party but his hosts would have to wait. "I've done my duty all day and now I'm talking to my fiancee, whom I love very much." He told her about the Di look-alikes who had greeted him at the airport in Australia. "Not as good as the real thing," he said. She giggled. He complained about the press.

"During the whole trip, this guy had nothing better to do than to try to take photographs of the bald patch on my head."

Diana laughed. "I didn't know you had a bald patch."

"It's too stupid. I'm doing all of these things and the only thing they want are these ridiculous details."

"I think it's very funny."

"Yes. As children, we were all very amused at the way my father tried to hide his baldness."

"Oh, I really hope that yours is not as big as his," she said. "In any event, you seem to have much more fun than I do."

This was as close as Diana came to complaining about her royal tutelage. She pretended to Charles that she adored the Queen Mother but told friends she was "virtually ignored" for the few days she stayed with her in Clarence House. After Diana was moved into Buckingham Palace, she was given a small office near Oliver Everett, Charles's assistant private secretary. Everett was amused the first time she bounced into his office wearing headphones and workout tights. He soon learned that her weekly dance class took precedence over every other activity and that she loved rock and roll. "I actually wanted to be a dancer," she said, "but I overshot the height by a long way." She watched television day and night and was devoted to soap operas. The courtier began his classes in how to be a princess by giving Diana instructions on her royal engagements, which would average 170 a year and include Ascot, Trooping the Color, Badminton Horse Trials, Opening of Parliament, Chelsea Flower Show, Wimbledon, Garden Parties, Cowes Regatta, Hospital benefits, charities, and anything for the military.

The Queen's lady-in-waiting, Susan Hussey, helped Everett guide the Princess-to-be through the maze of royal rules: wear hats in public and bright colors to stand out; wave from the elbow, not

the wrist; never use a public lavatory. "The worst thing about being a princess," said Diana years later, "is having to pee.

Everett hit his first snag when he recommended a course of study and gave Diana several history books to read about her future role as Princess of Wales. In the throes of bulimia, and lonely for Charles, she balked. When the equerry left the room, she told a friend that she threw the books on the floor. "If he thinks I'm reading these," she said, "he's got another think coming."

Weak from losing weight, she frequently cracked under the strain of preparing for one of the biggest ceremonies in British history. "I think I am realizing now what it all means," she told a reporter a few weeks before the wedding, "and it's making me more and more scared." She broke into tears in front of photographers at a polo match and had to be whisked away by her mother. "It was a bit much for her," Prince Charles explained to the press. Privately he told friends he was worried. "I wonder if she is going to be able to cope with the pressures."

An avid tennis player, Diana attended the finals at Wimbledon but left the royal box before U.S. tennis star John McEnroe won. He had objected to thirteen calls, shouted obscenities, and cursed the umpire. "I always get robbed because of the fucking umpires in this country," he snarled.

"The wedding's off now," said one television commentator, watching the abrupt exit. "Lady Di's ears are no longer virgin."

In the tea room below, Diana met the Wimbledon women 5 champion, Chris Evert, who asked why Prince Charles was not with her.

"He can never sit still," said Diana. "He is like a great big baby. But one day I hope to calm him down enough to enjoy it."

Diana admitted to the tennis star that she was nervous about getting married. "I assured her that marriage was great, and she had nothing to be concerned about," said Evert, then married to the British tennis star John Lloyd, whom she later divorced. "I told her to relax and think about other things."

The men who worked for Prince Charles also tried to be reassuring and help Diana ease into her future responsibilities. They showed her the daily and monthly events calendar and explained

the tour schedule, which was planned six months in advance. Her only concern was the Prince's relationships with other women. His staff did not know how to deal with her persistent and personal questions. "I asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles," Diana said to Francis Cornish, "and he didn't give me a clear answer. What am I to do?" His assistant personal secretary lowered his eyes and changed the subject.

A few days later Michael Colborne, who was Charles's personal assistant, faced more uncomfortable queries. On his desk Diana had found a bracelet Colborne had ordered for Charles as a farewell present for his mistress. The gold bracelet with a lapis lazuli stone was engraved with the initials G.F. [Girl Friday]. Diana pressed Colborne about the gift and asked to know whom it was for. "I know it's for Camilla," she said. "So why won't you admit it? What does it mean? Why is Charles doing this?" Reluctantly Colborne acknowledged that he had ordered the present, but he refused to answer any more questions. He, too, lost his job shortly after the wedding.

Diana confronted Charles, who admitted that the bracelet from Asprey's was for Camilla Parker Bowles. He said he intended to give her the present in person to say good-bye. He maintained that the farewell gift would put a full stop to their affair. Diana didn't believe him. They quarreled, and she ran out of his office in tears. She later confided to her sisters that she didn't want to marry a man who was still in love with his mistress. "It's bad luck, Duch," said her sister Sarah, using the family nickname for Diana. "Your face is on the tea towels, so you're too late to chicken out now." For weeks feminists had been wearing buttons that warned, "Don't Do It, Di!"

The next day Diana retaliated by striking Camilla's name from the guest list for the wedding breakfast. She also crossed off the name of Lady Dale "Kanga" Tryon. She could not keep them from the wedding, but she insisted they be barred from the breakfast. Charles, who had grown up watching his father shuffle mistresses like a deck of cards, decided not to press the issue with his edgy fiancee. He told his private secretary that he didn't understand Diana's sudden moods and sulks, and her crying jags unnerved him.

He also said he was alarmed by what one of his equerries had told him about her sitting hunched in a chair for hours with her head on her knees, absolutely inconsolable. Charles said he found such behavior to be irrational and unsettling. His private secretary dismissed Diana's behavior as wedding nerves.

Charles, never a decisive man, now reevaluated his decision to marry Diana. He visited his sister at Gatcombe Park and confided his doubts. Princess Anne, who was a month from giving birth to her second child, was in no mood for her brother's soul-searching whines. Airily she dismissed him as gumless. "Charles," she said, "you've got to play the hand you're dealt." She repeated Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter on how to survive the act of love: "Just close your eyes and think of England."

Still pondering his decision, the Prince visited a former lover, Zoe Sallis, in London. Her Ebury Street apartment was a few yards from the police station, where patrolmen watched Charles arrive and depart. He tried to disguise himself by wearing a gray fedora hat, which he pulled over his forehead. Several policemen, watching from a window, laughed at the royal camouflage. One said, "He looks like a bloke with big ears in a bonnet."

"Zoe told me later that Prince Charles had confided in her his misery and fear of marrying Diana," said Time's Roland Flamini, "but he felt he had a duty to go through with it."

Resigned to prudence over passion, Charles visited Broadlands, where he planned to spend the first part of his honeymoon. "Five days before the royal wedding," said John Barratt, shaking his head, "Charles told myself and Lord Romsey [Mountbatten's grandson] that Camilla was the only woman he had ever loved. He told us, `I could never feel the same way about Diana as I do about Camilla.' Lord Romsey simply assured him that his feelings would, most likely, change."

Although the bride was bulimic and the bridegroom a bounder, they looked like an ideal couple. The public had been entranced by their romance: the Prince had finally found his Princess, and after their wedding on July 29, 1981, they would live happily ever after. Abracadabra, and bippitty boppetty boo. Most Britons needed to

believe in this fairy tale to distract themselves from the awful reality of inner-city riots, IRA bombings, and widespread unemployment.

The Queen understood the spell a royal wedding could cast on an impoverished country. Despite more than three million people unemployed, Her Majesty did not hesitate to spend taxpayers' money. She felt any expense for ceremony (engraved invitations alone cost $10,000) was a hedge against hopelessness. Much as she disliked the whiff of show business, and the comparisons between royalty and celebrity, she staged an extravaganza worthy of Hollywood, complete with drums, trumpets, and coaches. Her production combined the romance of High Society with the magic of Fantasia. She had better costumes and more horses than Ben-Hur. The royal wedding she produced in 1981 gave the British monarchy its biggest ratings to date and British tourism its greatest revenues. The Queen knew that her crown and country depended on such moments of pageantry. "This is what we do best," said her Lord Chamberlain.

The site was St. Paul's Cathedral because it could accommodate more people than Westminster Abbey. "I'm glad it's there," said Diana. "It would be too painful for me to marry Charles where my parents were joined for life." The wedding hymn she chose emphasized "the love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price, and lays upon the altar the final sacrifice."

The Queen sent 2,500 invitations* to friends, family, and heads of state, plus the crowned heads of Europe. King Juan Carlos of Spain declined his invitation when he learned the newlyweds would board the royal yacht at Gibraltar during their honeymoon. Spain had long disputed British occupancy of the little colony on the tip of the Iberian peninsula, and the King said Britain's decision to have Charles and Diana join the Britannia there was a diplomatic blunder. Face-to-face, Prince Philip told Juan Carlos he was an idiot. "We're fed up with the story of Gibraltar," Philip said, "and it is very expensive at that."

*The bride was allowed to invite one hundred people and her parents fifty. The bridegroom was allotted three hundred invitations, which he distributed to his beloved nanny, Mabel Anderson; former girlfriends like Sabrina Guinness and Susan George; and, of course, his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, and her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.

The President of the United States also declined the Queen's invitation, but only because his White House staff insisted. They told Ronald Reagan that his first foreign trip as President should not be to a glittering spectacle with British royalty. People might get the wrong impression. So his wife went without him. "I'm just crazy about Prince Charles," said Nancy Reagan, who arrived with twenty-six suitcases, eleven hatboxes, seventeen Secret Service men, and one borrowed pair of diamond earrings worth $880,000.

The U.S. networks also invaded London, bidding up the price of window space along the parade route. The Palace press office issued regular bulletins about the ceremony to be telecast to 750 million people. Journalists, untutored in titles, learned that Lady Diana Spencer soon would outrank all other women in the realm, except the Queen and the Queen Mother. As an earl's daughter, she was below thirty-eight categories of British women who had titles superior to her own. But upon her marriage, she soared to the top of the social heap. The ancient title of Princess of Wales entitled her to deep curtsies from all other female royals, including her sister-in-law, the Princess Anne, and her husband's aunt, the Princess Margaret.

"Most definitely, that's the protocol," explained Princess Margaret's butler, "but not the reality. Never in your life would you see Princess Margaret drop a curtsy to anyone but Her Majesty or her mother. After all, Margaret was born royal; Diana was only marrying royalty. There's a big difference. And as for Princess Anne, well, as her father once said, `If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested.'

The Palace press office announced the formal style for Lady Diana Spencer. "Following the wedding, she will be known as Diana, the Princess of Wales," said an aide. "She's not Princess Diana because she was not born a princess, and she's not the Princess Diana because only children of the sovereign are entitled to `the' before their title." Americans, who did not understand titles or their subtleties, called her Princess Di.

In Time, British literary critic Malcolm Muggeridge sounded skeptical about the century's grandest nuptials: "Only fortunetellers, Marxists and Jehovah's Witnesses will venture to prognosticate

whether Prince Charles and Lady Diana will actually one day mount the throne as King and Queen of England. In the course of fifty years of knockabout journalism, I have seen too many upheavals of one sort and another to feel any certainty about anything or anyone.... Popularity, however seemingly strong and widespread, can evaporate in an afternoon, and institutions that have lasted for centuries disappear overnight. So I can but conclude by simply saying, `God bless the Prince and Princess of Wales.' " Within fifteen years the critic looked like a visionary.

The night before the wedding, the royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the largest display of fireworks since World War II's Blitz. British police estimated 175,000 people camped on the sidewalks around St. Paul's Cathedral to watch the procession of horse-drawn coaches. Crowds started forming the day before as aristocrats arrived at the Palace for the Queen's ball.

"That evening had a Waterloo feeling to it," said one titled British woman. "You could almost smell the formaldehyde from the mothballs. That was the last time I put on my tiara. It was gloriously dotty. We walked down the Mall with our diamonds and our gowns swirling and headed for an enormously grand occasion that everyone wished to be attending, except for those of us who had to go."

After the ball, Diana spent the night in Clarence House. Charles spent the night in the arms of his mistress. Camilla Parker Bowles later confided to her brother-in-law that she had slept with the Prince in his suite at the Palace. "She was cozy in the knowledge she had his heart when he married Diana," said Richard Parker Bowles.

The next day, as she recited her vows, the nervous bride transposed the order of her bridegroom's first two names: Charles Philip Arthur George became Philip Charles Arthur George. But even in error, she charmed. "Well," she said later, "with four names it's quite something to get organized." When the bridegroom pledged to share all his worldly goods, he, too, was nervous. He forgot to include the word "worldly." A prophetic omission, considering what he parted with fifteen years later.

The Princess of Wales was not resigned to giving up her hus-

band to his mistress. Diana was determined to cement her marriage by getting pregnant. She packed accordingly for her honeymoon, taking a green bikini bathing suit that Charles liked, six satin lace teddys, and several sheer nightgowns. He took his fishing tackle. He also packed one book by Arthur Koestler on parapsychology and five scholarly books by Laurens Van der Post, which he said he wanted to share with his bride. She took two paperbacks by Danielle Steel, although she knew Charles disapproved. "He doesn't like me reading trash novels," she said. "But I love them."

Years later she read a psychological profile about the Unabomber, whose crimes were attributed to his being a loner. A mathematical genius at the age of ten, he took a book on vacation entitled Romping through Mathematics from Addition to Calculus. Diana said, "Sounds like Charles on his honeymoon."

Aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, the Princess charmed the crew of 256 navy men, especially the galley staff, whom she pestered for extra desserts. Near the royal stateroom, attendants wore rubber-soled slippers so as not to make any noise that might disturb the royal couple. "We were told to fade into the background," said seaman Philip Benjamin. "We were to act like air. Unless spoken to, we said nothing, just looked straight ahead. Bit difficult at times to look straight ahead with the Princess of Wales dashing about in her nightgowns.

"I remember her coming out of the royal suite one afternoon in a filmy white negligee with a pink satin bow at the bosom, which was untied and open. She was trying to lure the Prince away from his books.

"`Chulls,' she said in a sexy singsong, `come here and do your duty.' He was reading in a deck chair and she wanted him to go inside and produce an heir. I was standing guard a few feet away and looked straight ahead. She giggled when she realized I had heard her, but she was unembarrassed. She just kept teasing Charles to go to bed with her. She teased him a lot. I never saw the awful moods that His Royal Highness complained about later."

Prince Charles told his authorized biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he learned on the honeymoon his young wife was suffering from bulimia. Charles said it triggered sudden mood shifts,

leaving Diana cheerful one minute and morose the next. After two weeks aboard the yacht, the couple joined the royal family at Balmoral. At times Diana felt overwhelmed by the heavy presence of her in-laws and excused herself from meals to throw up. Charles became so concerned about her eating disorder that he contacted Laurens Van der Post and implored him to help. The older man, whom Diana trusted, talked gently with her at each session, but he quickly realized that she needed more professional help than he could provide. He gave Charles the name of a psychiatrist, who made discreet visits to counsel the couple. The therapist met them in their suite at Balmoral at eleven A.M. for an hour every day. He spent thirty minutes with them together and then thirty minutes alone with Diana, trying to address her anxieties. Charles said he worried about her emotional state. "She's so high-strung," he said. He wondered whether or not his wife was suffering from manic- depression. "What else can explain the moods vivacious charm in the morning and verbal assaults in the evening?" The therapist recommended tranquilizers. After the honeymoon, Diana continued psychotherapy in London but resisted taking sedatives. For eleven more years her bulimia haunted her.

"It's an insidious disease from which to recover," she said years later. "You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up four or five times a day and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It's like having a pair of arms around you, but it's temporary. Then you're disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and you bring it all up again. . . . It's a repetitive pattern and very destructive."

Outside Balmoral, the international press had gathered, staking out the entrances and clamoring for photographs. Charles was incensed, saying they had enough photos from following the Britannia for two weeks with their snoopy long lenses. He was even annoyed at Patrick Lichfield, the Queen's cousin, for having taken a candid shot of the royal wedding party that he sold around the world. "He never even submitted the pictures to the Queen," Charles grumbled. Lichfield's unstaged photo showed the Prince and Princess of Wales and their bridal attendants sitting on the

Palace steps after the wedding, collapsed in laughter. Charles thought the photo taken in a relaxed moment made them look undignified. Having given Lichfield exclusive access to photograph the wedding, Charles felt used. He had not expected him to sell the photos without approval. "I can't believe Lord Lichfield could have let us down so badly," Charles said. Lichfield later made copies of the famous photograph and distributed them instead of business cards.

"He gave me one," said the Pulitzer Prize-winning photogra~ pher David Hume Kennerly. "He's an arrogant guy, but the picture of Charles and Diana is a great moment."

Charles was in no mood to placate the press, but by the fourth day of the Balmoral segment of the honeymoon, he had no choice. The royal family felt besieged, so the Queen dispatched her press secretary to negotiate a settlement: an interview with the newlyweds, plus photographs, in exchange for privacy. The deal was cut, and Charles, who groused, was required to cooperate.

The Prince of Wales was Colonel in Chief of the Gordons in Scotland, so for the interview he dressed in full tartan garb knee- high socks, plaid kilt, and leather sporran (a pouch worn in front of the kilt). He appeared at the appointed hour to meet the news- people, holding his wife's hand.

"Where do you want us to perform?" he asked.

"Right here is fine, Your Royal Highness," said a reporter.

Charles recognized him. "I hope you had a nice time going round the Mediterranean."

"Bit expensive," said the reporter.

"Good," said Charles with a tight grin.

The cameras whirred and clicked as the churlish Prince and his charming Princess chatted with the press.

"How was the honeymoon?"

"Fabulous," said Diana.

"And married life?"

"I highly recommend it," she said, beaming.

"Have you cooked breakfast for your husband yet?"

"I don't eat breakfasts."

Charles looked bemused. "This must be very exciting televi-

sion," he said sarcastically. Diana lowered her eyes and smiled. Seconds later he kissed her hand, she laughed gaily, and the photographers grabbed their picture.

As the couple prepared to leave, one of the cameramen presented the Princess with a bouquet of flowers.

"Thank you. I suppose one of you puts them on his expense account," she joked.

Two months later, on November 5, 1981, the Palace announced the Princess was pregnant. She tried to continue her royal engagements, but frequent bouts of morning sickness forced her to cancel. Her husband explained to reporters.

"You've all got wives, you know the problems. . . . It's better not to do too many things. . . . After about three months, things are inclined to get better." Then, sounding officious, he added, "I am prepared to take full responsibility."

A few days later the Princess resumed her duties, but as she walked through crowds and accepted bouquets, she was hit by waves of nausea. She did not try to hide her discomfort. "This is terrible," she said. "Nobody told me I would feel like this." Seeing a pregnant woman in Derbyshire, she grabbed her hands in sympathy. "Oh, that morning sickness, isn't it dreadful!"

At every outing she was trailed by the press. She performed flawlessly in public, but each performance sapped her energy, leaving her emotionally exhausted. At home she flew off the handle. "It was tears and tantrums behind closed doors," recalled a Palace aide. Charles did not know how to cope with his wife's erratic emotions. He called his mistress for advice, and he played more polo. "I've got to get out," he'd tell his bodyguard. "Too many hormones."

The more elusive Charles was, the more upset Diana became. She accused him of sneaking away to visit Camilla, and he became so exasperated by her jealousy that he stalked out, which only infuriated her more. Angry over his absences, curious about his whereabouts, and frustrated by the prying lenses of photographers, Diana complained bitterly to the Queen, who was unnerved by her daughter-in-law's hysterics. Blaming the press, the Queen summoned Fleet Street editors to tell them to leave the Princess alone. The royal press secretary, Michael Shea, met with them first.

"We expected that, following the honeymoon, press attention would wane somewhat," he told them. "But it has in no way abated. The Princess of Wales feels totally beleaguered. The people who love her and care for her are getting anxious at the reaction it is having."

The Queen entered the room to underscore the message. She said it was unfair of photographers to hide in the bushes with telephoto lenses to track the Princess without her knowledge. The Queen cited the picture published the day before of Diana with her arms around her husband's neck, smiling affectionately at him as they stood outside Highgrove, their house in Gloucester. Royally chided, the editors agreed to back off. In an editorial headlined "The Captive Princess," the Times declared, "It would be nice to think we are grown up enough not to imprison a princess in a palace." The truce lasted six weeks. Then Diana threatened to kill herself.

Shortly after the Christmas holidays at Sandringham, she warned Charles that if he left her alone again to go riding, she would commit suicide. As he stormed out, she threw herself down a short flight of stairs. The eighty-one-year-old Queen Mother heard the commotion and found the Princess in a heap, sobbing. Diana was led to her room by a footman, and her doctor was summoned. After his examination, he said she was fine, except for slight bruising around her abdomen; the fetus was unhurt. Hours later the footman sold the information about the Princess's fall to the Sun, proving that nothing weighs as heavy as a royal secret worth money. The tabloid ran the story on the next day's front page but did not say it was an apparent suicide attempt.

"The Princess just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas," said her hairdresser Richard Dalton. "She told me it was freezing cold and dinner had to be over by three o'clock: `It's three and time to watch me on TV,' she'd say, imitating you-know-who. The royal family had to watch the Queen's Christmas message on television. Diana said it was a command performance."

The Queen Mother talked to her nephew John Bowes-Lyon about Diana's behavior, which seemed to be exacerbated by a physical malady. "She had fits which would last just a few minutes,

during which she would go crazy and become uncontrollable," said Bowes-Lyon.* "And then it was all over as quickly as it began.

"At first, doctors thought her outbursts might have been epilepsy, but that was discounted because she didn't swallow her tongue or have other epileptic symptoms. Apparently what she suffers from can be hereditary, and there have been other instances in the Fermoy family, so the royal family have been told."

Over the next three years Diana would try several more times to take her life. Each was a desperate attempt at self-mutilation. "I tried four or five times," she told Dr. Maurice Lipsedge, a specialist in eating disorders at Guy's Hospital in London. She told him of the various attempts: she slashed her arms with a lemon slicer; she cut her wrist; she ran a knife down the veins of one leg; and she threw herself into a glass cabinet.

"When no one listens to you, or you feel no one's listening to you, all sorts of things start to happen," she said. "These attempts were my cries for help."

When the Queen saw the first signs of dissension between the couple, she proposed Charles and Diana take a trip. "In that type of situation, Her Majesty always recommends escape," said one of her friends. "Her solution is to get away together, sort things out, and everything will be fine. It's always worked for her. Why shouldn't it work for them?"

A few days later the Prince and Princess left for the island of Windemere in the Bahamas. "What Diana needs is a holiday in the sunshine," said Charles, "to prepare for the birth." Again the couple were followed by the long lenses of freelance photographers, who captured the Princess, five months pregnant, skipping through the surf in an orange bikini. Once again Diana was on the front pages of the tabloids, and the Queen was incensed. "This is one of the blackest days in British journalism," she said through her press secretary. The Sun later printed an apology and published the pho-

*` `John Bowes-Lyon had to apologize to Diana when it appeared in print that she was frothing at the mouth for a few seconds," said columnist Taki Theodoracopulos in 1993. "She has a slight disease that resembles epilepsy, which John Bowes-Lyon knew from the Queen Mother. He told me about it and I, of course, told Nigel [Dempster], who, like the dumb shit he is, used it in his book [Behind Palace Doors, written in 1993 with Peter Evans]. When the book came out, John had to write a note to Diana, saying, `I apologize and I had nothing to do with that.'"

tographs a second time, just in case its five million readers wondered why the publication was saying it was sorry.

Her Majesty had been burned again by the Sun and the man who had come to dominate Britain's media through buying the Sun, the Sunday Times, the Times of London, and Sky TV. Rupert Murdoch was now teaching the Queen that her stingy wages were no match for his checkbook journalism. Every tidbit of royal gossip from inside the Palace was for sale, and he spent freely for sensational revelations. An Australian, unrestrained by deference to the Crown, Murdoch was no monarchist. So his irreverent publications zoomed in on the royal family and printed unprettified stories and candid photos. Without the protective blanket of reverence, the royals flapped and squawked like geese in a gunsight. The Queen lectured editors, demanded (and obtained) injunctions, and, finally, went to court to stop her servants from selling secrets. She called for press sanctions and sued for damages.

"Her Majesty became annoyed after a photo appeared of her six-year-old grandson, Peter, twirling a dead pheasant by the neck during a bird shoot," recalled a member of the royal household. "She ordered reporters and photographers off the estate at Sandringham and barred them from Windsor. She tried to keep them away from all family events, including the royal christenings."

Charles and Diana's first child, the forty-third heir to the British throne, was born on June 21, 1982, and the Hussars of the Royal Horse Artillery fired the traditional forty-one gun salute in honor of the new Prince. The blond, blue-eyed boy was called "Baby Wales" for seven days until his parents stopped fighting over his name. "We're having a little argument about what to call him," Charles admitted to reporters. The couple eventually settled on William Arthur Philip Louis in honor of William the Conqueror, the legendary King Arthur, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Lord Louis Mountbatten. Prince William ("Wills" to his parents) was to be christened on the Queen Mother's eighty-second birthday.

"It had been quite a difficult pregnancy I hadn't been very well throughout it," Diana recalled in a television interview. "But I felt the whole country was in labor with me . . . so by the time William arrived, it was a great relief."

Britons rejoiced, except for William's crotchety aunt, Princess Anne, who was on a goodwill tour in the United States when Diana gave birth and resented the press queries.

"Your Royal Highness, any word about Princess Diana?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "You tell me."

"Your reaction to her having a son?"

She shrugged. "I didn't know she had one."

"This morning."

"Oh, good," she said sarcastically. "Isn't that nice?"

"How are you enjoying your visit to New Mexico?"

"Keep your questions to yourself."

"Ma' am, how does it feel to be an aunt?"

"That's my business, thank you."

The sourpuss Princess skidded to the bottom of the royal popularity polls. "Naff off, Anne," screamed the Daily Mail, which claimed she was envious of the fuss over Diana. Other newspapers dismissed the Queen's daughter as rude, surly, and miserable. Within ten years the pundits would change their minds. After her charity work for Save the Children, Anne would emerge as one of the most respected women in Great Britain. Some polls would show that the public thought her more worthy than Charles to ascend to the throne. But then, she was one of the most reviled people in the United Kingdom.

Within the royal family the relationship between the Princess Anne and the Princess of Wales was visceral: they loathed each other. Anne thought Diana was vain, dim-witted, and neurotic. "Too gooey about children," she said.

Diana dismissed her sister-in-law as a male impersonator. "I think she shaves."

"You forget," said a friend. "Anne was the only female competitor at Montreal Olympics [1976] not to be given a sex test."

"Results would've been too embarrassing," joked Diana. "She's Philip in drag."

The Princess of Wales did not understand a woman like Anne, who appeared to be so determinedly unfeminine. She refused to wear makeup, pulled back her hair in a bun, and wore clothes that looked like thrift shop rejects. Diana had heard about Anne's adul

tery with a Palace guard but did not understand his sexual attrac~ tion. "What do men see in her?" she asked.

Blunt as a bullet, Anne did nothing to ingratiate herself with others, especially the press, which she detested. "You are a pest by the very nature of that camera in your hand," she snapped at a photographer who was trying to take her picture.

Charles agreed that Anne could be difficult but said she was his only sister and had honored him by making him godfather to her firstborn son. So he suggested that he and Diana return the honor by making Anne one of Prince William's godmothers. Diana refused.

"Darling, please," Charles said plaintively. "Please."

Diana was unmovable, and Charles, after a halihearted struggle to change her mind, gave up. Days later they announced their choice of godparents: Princess Alexandra; the Duchess of Westminster; Lady Susan Hussey; King Constantine II of the Hellenes; Lord Romsey; Sir Laurens Van der Post.

At the christening, the Archbishop of Canterbury poured water over the baby's head and handed a lighted candle to his father to signify the young Prince's admission into the church.

"The windows were open, the sun streaming in," Sir Laurens told Horoscope magazine. "Then the sky went grey as a great storm gathered. Just as the Archbishop handed over the lighted candle, a violent gust of wind blew through the windows. The candle flickered, but did not go out."

The sage saw that as a portent for the Prince and Princess of Wales, who both believed in mysticism. Van der Post said it was a good sign and explained that the flickering candle represented a crisis in Prince William's future, but one that he would survive.

Two years later, after the birth of their second son, Charles again suggested choosing his sister as a godmother, but again Diana refused. Instead she chose Lady Celia Vestey; Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, the daughter of Princess Margaret; and Carolyn Pride Bartholomew, her former roommate from Coleherne Court. As godfathers, Charles chose his brother, Andrew, the Duke of York; artist Bryan Organ, who painted flattering royal portraits; and Gerald Ward, a rich polo player.

The announcement of the baby's godparents sparked a furious row within the royal family. Prince Philip was so angry at Charles for bypassing Anne a second time that he didn't speak to him or visit his new grandson for six weeks. At the end of the year he fired off a memo, telling Charles he was not carrying his weight as heir apparent. Philip praised Anne, his favorite child, as the hardest- working member of the royal family. "She's represented the Crown at 201 events whereas records indicate you made 93 appearances and your wife 51. Taken together, these figures [for 1984] don't add up to your sister's efforts."

Three years later the Queen rewarded her daughter's dedicated service by naming her Princess Royal, the highest honor a sovereign can bestow on a female in the royal family.

But Anne was so humiliated at being passed over again as godmother that she declined to attend the christening of Prince Henry Charles Albert David ("Harry" to his parents). She said the date conflicted with a shooting party that she and her husband had planned. The Queen and Prince Charles moved the christening from Buckingham Palace to St. George's Chapel at Windsor so it would be closer to Anne's estate, hoping then she might change her mind. She didn't. The Queen's press secretary telephoned and begged her to reschedule her shooting party, saying that her absence would be interpreted by the press as a slight to the Princess of Wales.

"So what?" said Anne, who sent her children in her place. "Peter and Zara will be there, and that'll be quite enough."

Michael Shea pleaded, but to no avail. As he predicted, the Murdoch press buried the Queen's daughter as petulant and vengeful. They canonized the Princess of Wales, and next to the Queen Mother, she was proclaimed the most beloved figure in the kingdom.

TWELVE

Charles was in Iceland to fish when he received a call on August 27, 1979, from the British Ambassador. "Your Royal Highness," said the Ambassador, "I'm afraid I have some tragic news. . . . Lord Louis has been . . . Sir, I'm so sorry. . . . Earl Mountbatten of Burma is dead."

Charles was too stunned to cry. Stammering in disbelief, he asked for details, but the Ambassador said he knew only what he had heard on the BBC news flash. So Charles called his mother at Windsor Castle. She told him that "Uncle Dickie," on holiday in Ireland, had been blown up by an IRA bomb.

Mountbatten, seventy-nine, had been aboard his boat with his daughter, Patricia; her husband, John Brabourne; their fourteen- year-old twin sons, Nicholas and Timothy; and Lord Brabourne's elderly mother. They were going lobstering in Mullaghmore harbor when the bomb was detonated. The explosion instantly killed Mountbatten; his grandson, Nicholas; and an Irish boat boy hired as crew. Lord Brabourne was severely wounded, and his wife almost died. She spent days on a life-support system and underwent several operations to save her eyesight, then weeks in intensive care. Their son Timothy was knocked unconscious but recovered; Lord Brabourne's eighty-three~year~old mother died the next day.

Prince Charles was heartbroken. He wired Mountbatten's private secretary: "This is the worst day of my life. I can't imagine

going on without him." That night he poured his grief into his journal: "I have lost someone infinitely special in my life. Life will never be the same now that he has gone

Days later Charles met his mother and father for lunch at Broadlands to discuss Mountbatten's funeral arrangements. Still distraught, he said he didn't think he could get through the service without breaking down.

"He's gone now, Charles," said his father. "You've got to get on with it."

The Prince of Wales started crying and left the room. The Queen, who did not respond, just continued eating. She dropped bits of chicken from her salad on the floor to feed her corgis. Prince Philip threw down his napkin.

"I hope that has ensured that Charles will shed no tears when he goes out in public," he said. The Queen sipped her water and said nothing.

"Sounds cruel,,, recalled John Barratt, "but the Duke of Edinburgh was determined to put some steel in his son's spine. Her Majesty couldn't have given a tinker's cuss. Poor Charles was destroyed. He was so dependent on Lord Mountbatten. They spoke every day and wrote weekly. He was everything to Charles his grandfather figure, his father, his tutor, his best friend."

Although Philip sometimes chafed at this closeness, he mourned his uncle's death and never forgave the Irish Republican Army. Two years later, during a tour of Australia with the Queen, he passed a group of IRA demonstrators. The Queen ignored them and stared straight ahead; Philip raised his hand to wave and gave them the finger.

On the day of Mountbatten's funeral, Charles stepped sadly onto the podium at Westminster Abbey to read the prayer that his great-uncle had selected years before when he planned his state funeral. The Prince of Wales had pinned to his own naval uniform all his ribbons and medals because, as he told his valet, that's what Mountbatten would have preferred. Tapping his chest, he said, "If the IRA want to get me through the heart, they'll have a hard job."

In a quavering voice, Charles recited Psalm 107 in memory of the Admiral of the Fleet: "They that go down to the sea in ships

These men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. . . ." He struggled to keep his composure, but as the buglers sounded the last post, he broke and brushed away a tear.

His emotion contrasted starkly with that of his mother, who sat a few feet away, as impassive as stone. On the day of the bombing, ten days before the funeral, the Palace had issued a statement that Her Majesty was "deeply shocked and saddened," but she did not write a letter of condolence to Mountbatten's children, who were her cousins and her closest friends from childhood. Nor did she interrupt her vacation at Balmoral, where she was joined the next day by her daughter, Princess Anne, for a picnic. The Queen was seen walking in her garden with her corgis and playing with her two-year-old grandson, Peter.

Such ordinary activity in the face of tragedy jolted one royal reporter, who watched the scene through high-power binoculars. He said he was stunned to see the Queen skipping and laughing as if she didn't have a care in the world. "This was the day after Mountbatten had been blown to bits," he recalled, "and I've never seen Her Majesty so relaxed and happy* in all her life." Ever the loyal subject, the reporter filed a story for his newspaper, saying that the grief-stricken sovereign walked through the gardens of Balmoral in solitary sorrow.

Charles mourned his great-uncle's death for months and turned for guidance to Laurens Van der Post, a writer who had served as an aide to Mountbatten in India. Charles was in awe of the older man, who now replaced Mountbatten as his guru, spiritual mentor, and political adviser. Van der Post, a friend and biographer of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, talked to Charles about the concept of

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*Although relations between the Queen and Mounibatten had always been warm, one subject caused them to cool: Japan. In 1971 Her Majesty invited Emperor Hirohito to Britain for a state visit. And she restored the seventy-four-year-old Mikado to the Order of the Garter. He had been stripped of it after Japanese forces attacked the Allies in 1941. His visit made Mounibatten furious. He was further enraged in 1975 when the Queen made a state visit to Japan. "You should have waited until I was dead," he told her.

Mountbatten, who had fought the Japanese for more than three years and served as Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia, never forgave Japan its wartime savagery. But the Queen pointed to the passage of time since hostilities ended and what she saw as the need for reconciliation. "The Emperor is an old man now, Dickie," she said. Mountbatten snorted. "He's a doddering, incompetent old fascist."

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the collective unconscious, which is expressed through myths and dreams. He encouraged Charles to believe in the supernatural and to be open to the world of spirits. He accompanied the Prince to the Kalahari Desert in Southwest Africa to commune with the ghosts of bushmen. Charles was fascinated by the elderly mystic and soon sought the consolation of seers, mediums, and psychics. He dabbled in the paranormal, took part in seances, and consulted clairvoyants to communicate with the departed Mountbatten.

"Charles tried to summon the shade of Lord Louis on a Ouija board," said John Barratt, "but when the press found out, the Palace made him deny it because he looked barmy."

During this time, Charles became intensely involved with a beautiful Indian-born actress who had been the mistress of Hollywood director John Huston. Zoe Sallis, who gave birth to Huston's son in 1962, was a Buddhist and devoted to swamis. Her influence on Prince Charles disturbed the Palace. She espoused transcendentalism and the doctrine of many divinities, which is inconsistent with the Anglican belief in one omnipotent God.

Charles was enraptured by his new lover, who was ten years his senior, and he began practicing what she was preaching. She had given him a book entitled The Path of the Masters and said that her mission was to convert him to belief in reincarnation. To the dismay of his staff, she succeeded. He began talking about the transmigration of souls and speculated about the form that Lord Mountbatten might assume when he returned to earth.

The Prince's private secretary, Edward Adeane, became alarmed by what he saw as incoherent ramblings. The tough- minded barrister, whose father, Sir Michael Adeane, had been private secretary to the Queen, expected more of the future King of England than Charles was demonstrating. Adeane was dismayed by the hairshirt mentality, the do-good speeches, and the forays into alternative medicine. Mostly he was concerned about Charles's attitude toward religion. Adeane tried to redirect him back to the conventional teachings of the Church of England. He stressed the responsibility of the heir apparent to his future subjects, but Charles was not receptive. He was too enthralled by the message of nirvana. Under the influence of his new lover, he became a vegetarian and

resolved (temporarily) to stop killing animals. "I want to purify myself," he declared, "and pursue a oneness with all faiths."

"It's got to be stopped," said Adeane to other members of the staff. Asserting himself, the private secretary told the Prince his relationship with the beautiful Buddhist was potentially harmful to the monarchy. Adeane felt the older woman's influence was warp~ ing Charles's perspective. He said Charles was destined to become Defender of the Faith-not, as Adeane put it, defender of many faiths. He recommended that Charles end the relationship, but Charles refused until Adeane threatened to go to the Queen. Then Charles relented. At the age of thirty-one he was still afraid of his mother.

Charles ricocheted from casual dates to one-night stands and, in between, pursued brief relationships with tall, beautiful blondes whose fathers were rich landowners. "I fall in love so easily," he told reporters, trying to explain away the numerous women drifting into and out of his life. He proposed marriage twice once to Davina Sheffield and again to Anna Wallace but neither blonde accepted his proposal, and both fell out of favor once their pasts were revealed in the press.

"Oh, God," Charles moaned to his valet, "will I never find a woman worthy enough?"

During the summer of 1980, he found her sitting on a bale of hay. The fresh and lovely nineteen-year-old Lady Diana Spencer seemed too young and too innocent to have a past. Charles, who was fourteen years older, noticed her during a weekend house party at the country home of his friends Philippa and Robert de Pass. The Prince had met Diana in 1977, when he briefly dated her oldest sister, Sarah, and spent a shooting weekend with the Spencers at Althorp, their family estate in Northamptonshire, about seventyfive miles northwest of London. So she was not a stranger when he saw her three years later. He noted how much she had grown up from the sixteen-year-old girl he remembered. "No more puppy fat," he said.

Diana blushed, lowered her eyes, and looked down at her long legs. "I'm just taller now," she joked. "I've stretched the puppy fat."

Amused by her self-deprecating humor, Charles laughed and sat down to talk. They chatted about her sister, Sarah, who recently had married Neil McCorquodale, a former officer of the Cold- stream Guards. Charles mused about how pleased he was to get away from his royal duties and be with friends. (The "never-ending bloody" burden of being Prince of Wales would become a constant refrain in the next few months, as Charles complained about his workload.) Diana listened sympathetically and told him how wonderfully he performed his duties. She mentioned how touched she had been watching him on television at Mountbatten's funeral.

"You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at the funeral. It was the most tragic thing I've ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched it. I thought: It's wrong. You are lonely. You should be with somebody to look after you."

She later recounted this conversation to her roommates and said that she had talked to the Prince as if he were one of her nursery school charges. She added that he drew close to her, just like the little children she looked after at the Young England kindergarten. Charles, leaving early, asked her to drive back to London with him, but she demurred, saying it might be impolite to her hosts.

"That was a good move on her part," said one of her roommates. "She didn't want to appear ill-bred, and she certainly couldn't look too eager.

For Diana, the courtship had begun. She was excited to be noticed by the Prince of Wales and told her roommates that if she had a chance with him, she would not treat him as dismissively as her sister, Sarah, had when she'd talked to the press. "I think of the Prince as the big brother I never had," Sarah had told a reporter. "I really enjoy being with him, but I'm not in love with him. And I wouldn't marry a man I didn't love, whether it was a dustman or the King of England. If he asked me, I would turn him down." Diana, who read the romance novels of Barbara Cartland, had fantasized about marrying a prince. She would never turn him down.

Diana confided her fantasies to her roommates, who started ransacking their closets to find the right clothes for her to wear on her royal dates. They never saw the future King of England be-

cause he never visited Diana's apartment. Nor did he pick her up when they went out. "There weren't many presents, either," recalled one roommate. "A book at Christmas, a watercolor he had painted at Balmoral, one bouquet after they got engaged that was delivered by his valet but without a card, and a little green plastic frog, which Diana kept on the dashboard of her car. She had teased Charles about not having to kiss any more frogs because she'd finally found her prince. I guess he agreed."

During their six-month courtship, Charles rarely telephoned Diana, and he relied on an equerry to issue his last-minute invitations. She was expected to provide her own transportation to wherever he might be. "We referred to him as `sir,'" said one roommate, "because that's what Diana had to call him in the beginning. .

We helped her plot her strategy. It was great fun, and a bit of a game."

The young women, whom Charles referred to as Diana's "silly flatmates," shared an apartment at No. 60 Coleherne Court in London, near Harrods department store. Diana had bought the three-bedroom apartment with money she had inherited from her great-grandmother. "It was my coming-of-age present," she said. Like her two older sisters, she had received the money ($75,000) on her eighteenth birthday. Her mother advised her to invest in London real estate, so Diana bought the apartment. To meet the mortgage, she collected rent from three friends and assigned them cleaning chores. "Truth to tell, Diana did most of the housework," said one roommate. "She loved to clean. Pride of place and all that."

Growing up, Diana had been the meticulous member of the family. She spent hours cleaning and scouring, rearranging her dresser drawers, and hanging her clothes. She lined up her shoes by color and made her bed every day, tucking the corners precisely. She vacuumed constantly and learned to launder because she said she loved the smell of freshly ironed shirts. Like Cinderella, she worked cheerfully as a maid for her oldest sister, who paid her $2 an hour to clean her London apartment. Years later Diana told friends that her psychiatrist explained this compulsion to clean as an attempt to impose order on the chaos around her. Recognizing

her obsessive nature, she avoided medications like tranquilizers, fearing that if she ever got started, she would become addicted.

Her family had been torn apart by divorce, alcoholism, and violence. For the first ten years of her parents' marriage, her father had blamed her mother for not producing an heir. "It was a dreadful time for my parents and probably the root of their divorce," said Diana's brother, Charles, "because I don't think they ever got over it."

Diana's father, Edward John Spencer, was known informally as Johnny Spencer. As Viscount Althorp, he was heir to a large fortune and a thirteen-thousand-acre estate, Althorp House, which his ancestors had acquired in the sixteenth century. A former equerry to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, he was destined to become the eighth Earl of Spencer; when he inherited his title, he needed a son to pass it on. In 1954 he married Frances Roche, the beautiful blond daughter of the fourth Lord Fermoy. They moved into Park House in Norfolk, on the Sandringham estate. Their first child, Sarah, was born the next year, and two years later, 1957, they had another girl, Jane. Johnnie Spencer wanted a boy and insisted his wife be examined by specialists to find out why she produced daughters. Willing to try again, Frances became pregnant in 1958 and gave birth to a boy in January 1959. The baby was named John in his father's honor. "I never saw him. I never held him," Frances said. "He was an eight-pound baby boy who had a lung malfunction, which meant he couldn't survive." Ten hours after he was born, he died. Frances tried again, and eighteen months later, on July 1, 1961, she gave birth to a third daughter, whom they named Diana Frances. "I was supposed to be the boy," said Diana many years later.

Johnny Spencer started drinking too much and abusing his wife. He sent her back to London's Harley Street specialists to find out what was "wrong" with her. Three years later, when she was twenty-eight, she produced a son. "Finally," she said, "I've done my duty." The Queen was named godmother.

The heir, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, was known as the Honourable Charles Spencer, while his grandfather, the Earl Spencer, was alive. Upon the Earl's death in 1975, Johnny Spencer in-

herited his father's title and his son, Charles, then nine years old, became Viscount Althorp.

"Waiting for dead man's shoes," is how Frances bitterly described her husband's life before he inherited his father's title. By then she had fallen in love with a dynamic married man, who she said gave her life passion and purpose. Although Peter Shand Kydd, forty-two, did not have a title, he was wealthy and glamorous and had a wild sense of humor. Unlike Johnny Spencer, a courtier who approached royalty with reverence, Kydd was unimpressed. After dinner with the Queen, he told his children that Her Majesty "was as boring as ever' and "Buckingham Palace was a bit of a fucking Trust Forte House."

Kydd was heir to a wallpaper fortune and a former naval officer who owned land in England, Scotland, and Australia. He was the father of three young children.

"That didn't stop Frances," said one of Peter Shand Kydd's sons. "She's tough a predator. When she moved on my father, my mother didn't stand a chance."

Diana was six years old in 1967 when her mother left her lather and moved into a rented apartment in the Chelsea section of London to be closer to her lover. Frances told her husband that she wanted a divorce and expected to receive custody of their children. Johnnie drunkenly raged at her as "a bolter" and beat her. When he sobered up, he sobbed and begged her to return home. She tried a reconciliation but said it was torture, so she moved out of Park House and returned to London.

Shortly after that, Mrs. Peter Shand Kydd sued for divorce and named Frances as correspondent. Johnny Spencer was so humiliated by his wife's adultery that he sued for custody. He was supported in court by Frances's mother, Lady Ruth Fermoy, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Lady Fermoy testified under oath that the Spencer children appeared to be happier with their father than their mother. She also swore that she had never seen Spencer lose his temper.

"Ruth was an old royalist humbly born in Scotland but incredibly snobbish and she's been in royal circles all her life," said a Spencer family member. "I adored her and she was wonderful to

me, but I must admit that she was rotten to her children, especially Frances. In the custody fight, Ruth sided with Johnny because, as she told me, and testified in court, she'd never seen him actually strike Frances. Ruth hadn't been around for the drunken thrashings, so she could swear without compunction that she'd never witnessed Johnny's physical violence. And Frances would never have told her mother about the abuse; she and Ruth weren't that close to begin with, and the subject wasn't one you discussed freely in those days.

"Ruth would never be party to anyone let alone her own daughter embarrassing one of the Queen's courtiers. But the real reason she turned on her daughter was to protect her grandchildren. She didn't want them living with a commoner when they could be living with an aristocrat. Frances never forgave her mother. They didn't speak for nine years and then just barely."

The writer Penny Junor concurred. "Lady Fermoy really could not believe that her daughter would leave a belted earl for a man in trade."

The court ruled in favor of Viscount Althorp, so Diana and her brother, who had moved to London with their mother, moved back to Park House to live with their father. Their two older sisters, Sarah and Jane, remained at boarding school. That year, 1969, Frances married Peter Shand Kydd, who was so torn about abandoning his children that he almost backed out of the marriage. "He never got over the guilt," said one of his closest friends, "and that, coupled with drink later on, probably led to the divorce from Frances in 1990."

A child of a broken marriage, Diana had trouble learning to read. Her brother teased her about being slow and dull-witted because she barely made passing grades. The only award she received in school was in the fourth grade when she won the Palmer Cup for Pets' Corner for being nice to her guinea pig. She loved to dance and spent hours in front of the mirror practicing toe, tap, and ballet exercises, but she was not scholastic. So she dropped out of school at the age of sixteen, and her father, who worried about her lack of education, enrolled her in a Swiss finishing school (Institut Alpin Videmanette in Gstaad). She went reluctantly and studied

cooking and French halfheartedly. She spent most of her time skiing. After three months she said she was too homesick to complete the term. She badgered her father to let her come home, which, upon her grandfather's death, had become the grand Jacobean mansion of Althorp.

Her father continued to worry about her future, but Diana was unconcerned. After reading an article in the Daily Telegraph about academic failures who later became roaring successes in life, she clipped the story and slipped it under his door. Then she pestered him about moving to London. She wanted to get an apartment like her older sisters.

"I couldn't bear Althorp anymore," she said. "A hard Raine was falling."

Raine was the daughter of the flamboyant Barbara Cartland. More subdued than her mother, Raine, forty-seven, was known as Lady Dartmouth after her marriage. She was a Tory disciple in the lacquered mode of Margaret Thatcher. She had met Johnny Spencer at a local political meeting and invited him to dinner at her London apartment when her husband was away. Spencer, so lonely since his divorce, fed on her attention. Drawn to her strength, he turned to her for advice, especially about running Althorp. She advised him to renovate his estate and to pay for the work by selling off some of his family heirlooms, including three Van Eyck paintings. She suggested pitching an immense tent on the grounds, filling it with huge bouquets of plastic flowers, and serving tea in paper cups to paying customers. She recommended converting the stables into a gift shop and selling souvenirs. She even drew up a list of items to appeal to tourists, including rape whistles and her mother's romantic novels.

The Spencer children were aghast. "We didn't like her one bit," said Charles. "As a child, you instinctively feel things, and with her I very much instinctively felt things."

Diana was less direct than her brother but equally hostile. Behind her back she made fun of Raine's elaborate ball gowns, which were borrowed from film studios, and called her "Countess Come Dancing." Her sister Jane treated Raine like dust on the closet shelf, but Sarah was more outspoken.

"Since my grandfather died and we moved to Althorp," Sarah told a friend, "Lady Dartmouth has been an all-too-frequent visitor." When a reporter called asking to speak to the new Earl Spencer, Sarah said, "My father is in bed with Lady Dartmouth,* and I wouldn't dream of disturbing them."

Diana ran up and down the corridors of Althorp with her brother, chanting the nursery rhyme "Rain, Rain, Go Away." They called their father's lover "Acid Raine" and sulked in her presence. Charles refused to talk to her, and Diana deviled her with anonymous poison-pen letters and hang-up phone calls a scare tactic she allegedly used on others years later. When Raine insisted on dressing formally for dinner, the children came to the table in jeans.

Like Frances Shand Kydd, Raine was still married when she began her love affair. She, too, was publicly humiliated by being cited for adultery in her husband's divorce action, and she also lost custody of her children. "It was quite a traumatic time for all of us," said one of her sons. "My father never forgave her."

Raine's husband, Gerald Legge the Earl of Dartmouth was so embittered that he commissioned an artist to paint her out of a family portrait; he replaced her with a tree.

By then Raine had moved into Althorp with her Vuitton trunks. The Spencer children pleaded with their father to send her away, but he was bewitched. In 1976 they married and she became the Countess Spencer.** None of their children attended the civil ceremony.

"We weren't invited," Sarah told a reporter. "Not grand enough."

"The inference is unwarranted," snapped Barbara Cartland.

"After all, my daughter gave up a sixteenth Earl for an eighth Earl. Hardly social climbing."

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*Raine's husband, Gerald Dartmouth, filed for divorce on May 29, 1976, and threatened to name Johnny Spencer for alienation of affections. When Raine admitted to adultery, her husband deleted Spencer's name from the public document and cited him only as "the man against whom the charge has not been proved."

**During a 1980 trip to New York, Raine corrected an American journalist who described her as the Countess of Spencer. Raine explained that she reflected her husband's title and he was the Earl Spencer, not the Earl of Spencer. She said that earls whose names are part of their title count for more socially than earls named for a place.

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Raine relished the Spencer title, the fortune, and the estate. In fact, she loved everything about her new marriage, except the children. "I'm absolutely sick of the `wicked stepmother' lark," she said years later. "You're never going to make me sound like a human being because people like to think I'm Dracula's mother, but I did have a rotten time at the start. . . . Sarah resented me, even my place at the head of the table, and gave orders to the servants over my head. Jane didn't speak to me for two years, even if we bumped in a passageway. Diana was sweet, always did her own thing . . . and Charles, well, he was simply hateful."

Raine was more rancorous in the early months of her marriage. "Sarah is impossible, and Jane's all right as long as she keeps producing children. That's about all she is good for. As for Diana, how can you have intelligent conversation with someone who doesn't have a single O-level? If you said `Afghanistan' to her, she'd think it was a cheese."

The animosity between stepmother and stepchildren became even more vitriolic in September 1978, when Johnny Spencer suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage. He lapsed into a coma for two months and lay in the hospital two more months. Raine visited him every day and sat by his bed, playing opera records and willing him to recover. She fought his children over his medical treatment and barred them from seeing him in a coma. She said she did not want them absorbing the life energy she felt he needed to recover. His doctors braced her for death, but she would not accept their diagnosis. She insisted her husband would live, if only he could be treated with a powerful new German drug (Aslocillin) that was not yet licensed in England. Citing legal restrictions, the doctors said they could not give him the drug, even if they could get it. So Raine moved her husband to another hospital and exerted her influence to get the drug imported for experimentation. She succeeded, and as she predicted, the Earl Spencer rallied and recovered, but not completely. He remained partially brain- damaged, which affected his speech and mobility.

"I could have saved my husband's life ten times over and spent all my money doing this," she told a writer, "but it wouldn't have changed anything in his children's attitude toward me.

"But I'm a survivor, and people forget that at their peril. There's pure steel up my backbone. Nobody destroys me, and nobody was going to destroy Johnny so long as I could sit by his bed

and will my life force into him."

Raine appreciated the opportunity for social advancement and welcomed Diana's new royal relationship. And her father felt flattered about his favorite daughter's catching the eye of the Prince of Wales. But her mother was troubled. Frances Shand Kydd had seen the royal brush swipe her oldest daughter, and she remembered the embarrassment Sarah had suffered when she was dropped from the royal guest list. Sarah, who was fighting anorexia while she was dating Charles, had treasured his invitations and hired a clipping service to send her all the stories written about them. She proudly started a scrapbook that chronicled her rise as one of the chosen few. After her "dustman" interview, there were no more articles and no more invitations. Now her younger sister was receiving them.

Prince Charles had been intrigued enough by his conversation with Diana during the weekend house party in July to invite her to the opera. He extended the invitation through his secretary and at the last minute. But Diana didn't care; she was thrilled. She accepted and pretended to share his appreciation of Verdi. Charles later invited her to watch him play polo at Cowdray, to watch him hunt at Sandringham, to watch him race at Ludlow. Diana accepted and watched adoringly. "Mostly," she told her mother, "I just enjoy being with him."

Diana joined Charles aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, to watch the races at Cowes, and a week later she accepted his invitation to join his small party for dinner at Buckingham Palace. She admitted feeling intimidated by such friends of his as Nicholas "Fatty" Soames, who were so much older, but she managed to ingratiate herself with them and fit in. They especially appreciated her youthful adoration of the Prince. "She was clearly determined and enthusiastic about him," recalled Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, the wife of one of Charles's closest friends, "and she very much wanted him." Years later Diana's biographer, Andrew Morton, would state it more bluntly. "During their bizarre courtship," he wrote, "she was his willing puppy who came to heel when he whistled."

Diana was not discovered by the press until the autumn of 1980, when she was sitting beside Charles on the bank of the river Dee, watching him fish. The high-powered binoculars of newspaper reporter James Whitaker and his photographer, Arthur Edwards, spotted her through the trees. When she saw them watching her, she slipped away discreetly. They tracked her down in London, and days later, "the wicked Mr. Whitaker," as she teasingly referred to the leader of the royal tabloid pack, introduced his readers to "Lady Di."

"She was pretty, but not staggeringly so," he recalled. "She had charm, but no magic. Yet, before my eyes, she performed a miracle and transformed herself into the most glamorous woman in the world, worshipped by the media and the masses."

The portly reporter, who wore silk handkerchiefs in the breast pocket of gold-buttoned blazers, became to Diana what the fairy godmother had been to Cinderella. Whitaker waved his magic wand of publicity and, in story after story, presented her as "the most suitable choice for our future Queen." He praised her "innocence," her "delightful charm," her "blessed modesty." He rhapsodized about her "abundant freshness" and her "regal carriage." His colleagues followed his lead in varying degrees.

Within two months the Earl's sweet daughter had captivated the kingdom that wanted nothing more for its bachelor Prince than a beautiful blond princess. Diana was perfect. More British than Charles, who was her sixteenth cousin through King James I, she was an aristocrat with five lines of descent from Charles II. "She's also related to practically every single person in the French aristocracy," said Harold Brooks-Baker, editor of Debreu's5 the bible of bloodlines. "She's even related to Napoleon's brother and eight American presidents, including George Washington."

Most important, Lady Diana Spencer was a Protestant without a past. Her virginity validated her as the most worthy candidate to become Queen and beget an heir. Even Prince Philip approved. "She can breed height into the line," he said as if she were a brood mare.

The British press was as beguiled as the public and couldn't get enough of the young woman they glorified as "Shy Di." They put her picture on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, with her head tilted coyly to one side or her eyes demurely cast down. "She's 19 and a perfect English rose," gushed the Sun. In her frilly blouses, she was the epitome of schoolgirl innocence. "Dfvine" raved the Mirror. Reporters dogged her on foot, chased her small red car through traffic, and climbed over rooftops to photograph her. They pursued her every day down the street, on the phone, to her job.

"Darling, how do you put up with the bloody creatures?" Charles asked.

"I love working with children, and I have learned to be very patient with them," said Diana. "I simply treat the press as though they were children."

She gently reprimanded photographers who became too familiar. "Hey, Di," hollered one. "Cheat [turn] to the left."

She smiled sweetly. "My name is Diana," she said evenly. She never stopped smiling.

Unshakably poised at first, she gave way to tears when a posse of press cars almost drove her off the road. On another occasion, contrite reporters left a note on the windshield of her car: "We didn't mean this to happen. Our full apologies." She agreed to pose only after a photographer frightened the children at her nursery school by crawling through the lavatory window with his clattering gear.

"You've got two minutes," she told him sternly. He fired off four flashes, startling two nursery school tots, who clung to her for protection. The photographs became the world's first glimpse and most lasting impression of the winsome beauty. Balancing one child on her hip and holding the hand of another, she did not realize the sun was shining through her gauzy skirt and revealing what Prince Charles appreciatively described as "a great pair of legs." The caption was "Lady Diana's Slip." British newspapers called on Charles to make the guileless girl England's future queen.

The Sunday Times said she was perfect: "serious but not bor-

ing; sweet but not too sweet; funny, not silly; sporty, not horsey; and sexy without being brassy."

"I'm told she's ideal," said the Daily Mail's Nigel Dempster. "She has been pronounced physically sound to produce children."

One headline advised, "Charles: Don't Dfther." Another screamed, "To Di For."

The press expected the Prince to propose on his thirty-second birthday in November 1980, when Diana spent the weekend with him and the rest of the royal family at Sandringham. So reporters camped out at the estate, waiting for an announcement. They watched Diana arrive on Friday and leave on Sunday. After her departure, Charles strolled by them as he walked his dog.

"Why don't you all go home to your wives?" he said. "I know you were expecting some news Friday, and I know you were disappointed. But you will all be told soon enough."

When the Prince did not propose, he was chided by an editorial in the Guardian: "The Court Circular that issued from Buckingham Palace last night," wrote the newspaper, "was profoundly disappointing for a nation which, beset by economic and political dissent, had briefly believed that the sound of distant tumbrels was to be drowned by the peal of royal wedding bells."

The romance was almost derailed on November 16, 1980, when the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined "Royal Love Train." The newspaper cited an unidentified police officer, who claimed that Lady Diana had spent two secret nights with Prince Charles aboard the royal train. The train, with its elaborate kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom suite, was used only by members of the royal family for travel on official business. The story alleged that Charles was spending the night aboard the train after engagements in the Duchy of Cornwall and had summoned Diana, who was secretly escorted through a police barricade in the middle of the night. The caption accompanying a photo of the secluded train in Wiltshire: "Love in The Sidings."

"Absolutely scurrilous and totally false," thundered the Queen's press secretary. "Her Majesty takes grave exception." The Palace demanded a retraction and an apology, but the editor, Robert Edwards, stood firm. He said he had a sworn statement from an eyewitness who saw a woman board the train on two nights, spend several hours with the Prince in his private bedroom compartment, and leave clandestinely. But the editor made one mistake: he identifled the blond as Diana.

"It was Camilla Parker Bowles," said John Barratt. "She had started up again with Charles after Mountbatten's death, when she called to offer her condolences. I know because I was wrapping things up at Broadlands then and [was] in regular contact with the Prince. He did not hide the fact that Mrs. Parker Bowles was back in his life. He said she was helping him sort things out. They spent hours together riding, hunting, shooting. She acted as his hostess at dinner parties, and arranged luncheons and country weekends, and, naturally, controlled the guest lists. Charles called her his Girl Friday.

"She was perfect for him horsey and accommodating. Charles is like all the Windsor men, and I include Lord Louis and Prince Philip. They like women who look like men. Long legs in riding breeches. They want their tarts to look like their horses. Mountbatten's women, Philip's women, Charles's women all cut the same, beginning with Sasha [the Duchess of Abercorn], who is the Queen's cousin. She was Mountbatten's before he passed her on to Philip, which is what they do in that family. Lord Louis and Philip also shared that chinless wonder [Barratt names a woman married to one of Prince Philip's close friends] whom Charles also inherited. Camilla was different. She didn't come in under Mountbatten or Philip before she got to Charles. She was under him from the start."

The Prince of Wales continued seeing Camilla during the time her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles, was posted to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)* to help the emerging British

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*In March 1980 Priyate Eye published an item about Andrew Parker Bowles on duty without his wife, who elected to stay in England: "Andrew, 39, is married to a former (?) Prince Charles fancy, Camilla Shand, and if I should find the royal Aston Martin Volante outside the Parker Bowles mansion while the gallant Colonel is on duty overseas, my duty will be clear." The next month the Daily Mail reported that Prince Charles was to preside over the Zimbabwe independence celebrations. His official escort was "old flame, Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles." Noting that Andrew Parker Bowles would be in England, the report said: "Buckingham Palace officials have always been happy to see Charles in the company of happily married women because such sightings cannot give rise to rumour."

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colony make its transition to independence. She did not accompany him on his overseas assignment.

"Charles said he couldn't bear for her to leave, so she didn't," said a friend who boarded her horses with Camilla. "It was no hardship for her husband not having her with him because Andrew Parker Bowles was already involved with another woman.

Diana did not realize the complexities facing her. She did know that Camilla was a constant presence whenever she turned around, and she wondered how the older woman always knew so much about her relationship with Charles. But she didn't feel secure enough yet to question the Prince about his former lover. She confided her discomfort to her roommates and her sisters but said nothing to Charles. She felt slightly reassured by his anger over the royal train incident; he lashed out at the press and called them "bloody vultures." When the editor refused to apologize and retract the story, Charles insisted the Palace issue a second denial.

He left for India days later on a trip that had been planned for months, and Diana accompanied him to the airport to say goodbye. As he nonchalantly skipped up the steps of the royal plane without looking back, she burst into tears.

Reporters followed Charles on his visit to the Taj Mahal and asked what he thought about the great monument to passion built by a Moghul emperor in memory of his wife. "A marvelous idea," said Charles, "to build something so wonderful to someone one loved so very much." An Indian reporter asked about the Prince s own prospects for a wife, and Charles left him breathless with his odd response. "I'm encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim," he said, "I could have lots of wives.

The British reporters glanced at one another uncomfortably, wondering if the Prince was joking. None quoted him verbatim. Even with the arrival of Australian Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid papers, Britain's reporters remained deferential to royalty. They softened their stories on the Queen and her heir by withholding newsworthy details and, in this case, ignoring the revealing quotation. Instead they wrote as Her Majesty's obedient servants. They reported that Charles said: "I can understand that love could make a man build the Taj Mahal for his wife. One day I would like to bring my own back here."

In England, reverberations from the royal train story were still rattling Diana, who became hysterical when she read the Sunday Times report of the "tawdry" incident. "Whatever the public expects of her," wrote the newspaper on November 30, 1980, "the monarchy demands that her copybook be unblotted. Part of Lady Diana's suitability is held to be the fact that she is, in the Fleet Street euphemism, `a girl with no past' that is, with no previous lovers."

Up to this point, Diana had carried her own pedestal wherever she went. Every word written about her had been laudatory. Now she was scared and called her mother in tears. Frustrated and angry, Frances Shand Kydd fired off a letter to the Times, deploring the "malicious lies" and "invented stories" printed about her daughter. She demanded that reporters stop harassing Diana, and her letter prompted sixty members of Parliament to draft a motion "deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is being treated by the media." An editorial entitled "Nineteen and Under Siege" followed in the Guardian, stating that no teenager deserved to be put through such an ordeal.

Fearing that her mother might have overreacted, Diana quickly called James Whitaker at the Daily Star to disavow the letter. She said she did not want to alienate the press but needed to proclaim her innocence.

"Diana wanted nothing more than to become Charles's wife," recalled Whitaker. "Everyone wanted it, the Queen included. Diana called me to deny that she had been involved in the royal train incident. `Please believe me,' she said. `I've never been on that train. I have never even seen it.' I ran the story and quoted her as saying she'd been at home all evening, watching television with her flatmates."

Most people, with the possible exception of her stepmother, assumed that Diana was as pure as Portia. She never proclaimed her virginity directly but years later her biographer Andrew Morton did it for her. He claimed that even as a young girl she had a sense of destiny about her future marriage. "I knew I had to

keep myself tidy for what lay ahead," she supposedly said. Her stepmother thought she knew differently. Raine suspected that Diana's virginity had vanished in 1978 when she was dating James Gilbey, a member of the wealthy Gilbey's gin family. Lady Spencer had overheard conversations between her seventeen-year-old stepdaughter and the playful London bachelor, who occasionally stood her up to take someone else out. Diana got back at him by making a secret midnight run to his apartment building. His car was parked in front, and she and her roommate doused it with flour and eggs.

Raine had watched disapprovingly as Diana continued to pick up Gilbey's dirty laundry each week, lovingly wash and iron his shirts, and deliver them on hangers to his apartment. During an earlier infatuation, she had done the same thing for Rory Scott, a lieutenant in the Scots Guards.

Concern over Diana's tarnished image in the press was shared by Raine's mother, Barbara Cartland, who had made millions because she understood the importance of the soft lie over the hard truth: one fuels a fantasy while the other breaks your heart. She accepted the unspoken agreement between royals and commoners: they pretend to be superior and we accept the pretense. So the eighty-year-old novelist wrapped herself in pink marabou feathers and summoned a reporter to her house to declare Diana's innocence. She conducted the interview from her bed surrounded by five poodles in rhinestone collars.

"Prince Charles has got to have a pure young gel," she said, "I don't think Diana has ever had a boyfriend. She's as pure as one of my heroines. This is marvelous. Quite perfect."

Raine knew she needed more than her dear mother's breathless proclamation. She consulted a lawyer because she also was concerned about rumors that nude photos of Diana might surface in the press. "She particularly feared Private Eye," recalled the lawyer. Raine had remembered Diana's giggling on the phone with girlfriends about pictures* that had been taken of her at a pool in Switzerland, where she had taken off her bikini. The lawyer reas-

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*The nude photos of Diana were offered for sale in 1993 by a German magazine but were withdrawn and given to her. "They have no journalistic relevance for us," said the editor, "and could only be used to satisfy voyeurism."

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sured Raine that an injunction might be obtained before such photos could be published. He then advised her to turn to someone within the aristocracy to publicly proclaim Diana's good name. So Raine contacted Lord Fermoy, who was Diana's uncle, and asked him to uphold the family honor. The nobleman, a manic-depressive who would commit suicide four years later, readily agreed to talk to the press.

"Diana, I can assure you, has never had a lover," he told a reporter. "Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible royal bride for Prince Charles at the moment. And after one or two of his most recent girlfriends, I am not surprised. To my knowledge, Diana has never been involved in this way with anybody. This is good."

"The consensus," declared Newsweek, "virtue is intact." The press coverage of the royal romance heated up as zealous reporters followed the Prince of Wales everywhere, pestering him about his intentions. By January of 1981 the royal family felt as if they were under house arrest at Sandringham, where reporters and photographers gathered outside.

"It's like a goddamned death watch," Prince Philip said to his aide as he looked out the window.

The Queen complained that she couldn't go riding without being pursued by "a ragtag band of reporters."

"Her Majesty, if you'll excuse me, behaved like a fishwife one morning and told me to `eff off,' " said James Whitaker, who recalled the incident at Sandringham more vividly than he reported it. "I simply quoted the Queen as saying, `Go away. Can't you leave us alone?' But she was more explicit than that.

"I was camped out with two photographers when she came out of her stables on the royal steed. She drove there to avoid the press and then rode out of the stables on her horse, but we were close enough to get to her. There were three of us: Les Wilson and Jimmy Gray, both photographers, and myself. The Queen galloped toward us, looked directly at me, and hissed. `Get away, you fu--." I started moving before she could finish the sentence.

`Ma' am,' I said, `I'm just about to do exactly that. To get away.' I scampered off and yelled over my shoulder for the two

photographers to carry on. One froze, and the other reared back. `If you think I'm going to knock the fucking Queen off her own fucking road to take her fucking picture,' he said, `you're fucking crazy.' He ran off, too. None of us was brave enough to pursue the story."

When reporters approached Prince Philip later in the day to say "Happy New Year," he was just as vulgar. "Bollocks," he snarled. Putting his head down, he barreled through the swarm of reporters and photographers, swearing at them as he passed.

A reporter for the Sun said a hunting party that included Philip and Prince Charles peppered her car with shotgun pellets. And a Daiy Mirror photographer was warned away from a public road near the family estate by sixteen-year-old Prince Edward. "I wouldn't stand there," the Prince said. "You could get shot."

Charles was incensed at being hounded, and when he encountered reporters, he struggled to be cordial. "May I take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year," he said through clenched teeth, "and your editors a particularly nasty one.

Diana arrived a few days later, prompting a commotion among photographers, who blocked the entrances to Sandringham, trying to get pictures. Exasperated, the Queen admonished her son, "The idea of this romance going on for another year is intolerable for all concerned." Prince Philip was more explicit. He told his indecisive son that he had to make up his mind one way or the other before he ruined Diana's reputation.

Always the more involved parent, Philip monitored the women Charles dated. He disapproved of his son's attraction to black women, and he ignored Charles's fling with a Penthouse centerfold. He knew about the affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and warned Charles that such an illicit relationship could endanger the monarchy. Pushing him toward marriage, Philip was concerned about the woman Charles would marry because that woman, whoever she might be, represented the future of the Firm. Philip had invested his life in the monarchy and intended to protect his investment. After Charles turned thirty,* his father became especially vigilant

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*No other Prince of Wales since Charles II, three hundred years earlier, took so long to make up his mind about getting married. Only two others James Stuart and Henry V from even earlier times-were still unmarried at the age of thirty.

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and did not hesitate to say who was suitable, who was not. When Charles was dating Sabrina Guinness, from the banking side of the brewery family, he invited her to a house party in the country with friends of the royal family. The invitation was leaked to the press, and it triggered another spate of speculative stories about the new woman in Charles's life. "Is He in Love Again?" asked one headline. It so infuriated Philip that he called the hosts and instructed them to disinvite the young woman. To ensure that they did, he mentioned that he would be arriving at five P.M. that weekend. Mortified, the friends did as they were ordered and told Miss Guinness that she was "welcome to leave" by a certain time "to avoid confusion" with Prince Philip's visit.

Philip arrived early and met the young woman as she was leaving. He told her to join him in the drawing room. There were no break-the-ice pleasantries when she walked in and not so much as a perfunctory hello. As exacting as a guillotine, Philip told her to get out of his son's life. He said he never wanted to see her name linked with Prince Charles again. Philip tidied up the landscape by telling her to get out of the house. She fled in tears.

Philip spoke to his son in the same gruff manner about marrying Diana Spencer. He didn't tell Charles to marry her, simply to make up his mind. "Get on with it, Charles," he said.

"The difference between father and son," explained one of the Queen's secretaries, "is that Charles dithers, and Philip decapitates."

Charles spent the next four weeks agonizing over whether to marry Diana. He recorded his "confused and anxious state of mind" in his diary, and he consulted his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. She said she approved and described Diana to friends as "a mouse." In a letter to a friend, Charles wrote: "It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me, but I expect it will be the right thing in the end. . . . It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this Country and for my family but I'm terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it." Years later he blamed his father for forcing him into a marriage that he was reluctant to embrace.

Yet despite his doubts, he proposed on February 6, 1981, in his third-floor quarters at Buckingham Palace over dinner for two. Diana accepted eagerly, and he apologized for not having a ring to give her. A few days later he contacted Garrard's, the Crown jewelers, who arrived with several black velvet trays filled with rings. Diana chose a six-carat sapphire surrounded by eighteen diamonds. Price: $50,000. "The Queen's eyes popped when I picked out the largest one," she said, giggling, "but I love it."

The engagement of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer was officially announced on February 24, 1981. "I couldn't have married anyone the British people wouldn't have liked," said Charles. Most of the country joined the royal family in rejoicing. But Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd, was afraid for her daughter.

"I cried for six weeks after that," she admitted to a relative. "I had a terrible feeling about what was going to happen to Diana when she married into that family."

THIRTEEN

The prize for best performance in a supporting role should go

to Lady Diana Spencer's gown--bold, black, and strapless.

When Diana wore it barely to London's Goldsmith Hall in 1981, she and the gown drew gasps. It was her first public appearance with Prince Charles since they'd become engaged, and the press pounced on them like condors on carrion. Flashbulbs popped and hydra-headed microphones closed in.

As the couple swept into the Royal Opera benefit, the BBC commentator stuttered as he tried to describe the eye-popping dress. He stumbled on the word "decolletage" and struggled not to look at Diana's cleavage. Spilling out of her low-cut gown, she smiled shyly. Off-camera, the BBC man whispered, "Now there's a bosom built to burp a nation." An American reporter whistled softly and quoted Raymond Chandler in FarewelL, My Lovely: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stainedglass window."

Diana had carefully selected her dress for the evening. The black taffeta confection, which sold for $1,000, was given to her by the designers David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who were making her wedding dress. She told them she needed to look "drop dead gorgeous" because she was meeting her movie star idol, Grace Kelly, at the benefit and dining with her later at Buckingham Palace.

Diana did not realize that Her Serene Highness had probably been invited to the Palace only because she was performing for charity.

The Queen of England still considered the Princess of Monaco a bit of Hollywood fluff, who had married a poseur from a tiny principality. Her Majesty was not moved by the enthusiasm of her husband, Prince Philip, for the beautiful blond American, who also had been a favorite of Lord Mountbatten's. When Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier in 1956, the Queen declined to attend their wedding. "Too many film stars," she had said. As far as she was concerned, the Rainiers did not count as royalty, although Prince Rainier had reigned longer* than any crowned head in Europe.

"Her Majesty can be stuffy about that sort of thing," admitted one of her ladies-in-waiting. "Too many jewels, fur coats, and fast cars. Jet-setters, you know. Prince Philip, on the other hand, does not feel that way, particularly if the wife is pretty."

Diana, too, was fascinated by the former film star and sat spellbound through her poetry reading at the benefit. After the hour- long recital, Diana walked into the press reception rubbing her side. Someone asked if she had hurt her back.

"No, not at all," she said brightly. "It's just that I've pins and needles in my bottom from sitting still so long."

Her spontaneity charmed everyone. "She was enchanting then," said British journalist Victoria Mather. "So fresh and beguiling. At that reception, she spilled a little red wine on her gloves, held up the stain for us to see, and laughed. `Oops,' she said, `Guess I'll have to nip round to Sketchley's [a London cleaner].'

Seconds later Diana showed off her engagement ring and offered to let an admirer try it on. "I'll have to have it back, though," she quipped. "Otherwise they won't know who I am."

The woman gazed at the ring on her finger. "Oh," she exclaimed. "It's beautiful. I've never seen such a large stone."

"I know," said Diana. "The other day I even scratched my nose with it. It's so big the ring, that is."

Someone asked what it was like now that she had moved from

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*By 1996 only Prince Rainier of Monaco and King Bhumibol Adulyade of Thailand had reigned longer than Queen Elizabeth II.

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Clarence House to Buckingham Palace. "Not bad," she chirped. "But too many formal dinners. Yuck."

A young man stepped forward. "May I kiss the hand of my future Queen?" he asked.

Diana smiled coyly and tilted her head. "Yes, you may," she said, extending her hand.

The young man kissed her wrist lightly and everyone clapped. He blushed with pleasure.

"You'll never live this down," Diana said, teasing him.

Delighted reporters crowded around her, and the cameramen bore in, jostling guests and pushing them to the edge o$the room. Prince Charles headed off to greet someone, expecflng the media to follow him, but they were taken with Diana. I?eeling self- conscious about the disturbance she was causing, she excused herself and escaped to the powder room with Grace Kelly. The Princess-to-be confided her distress over the unrelenting press coverage and asked Her Serene Highness how sAe coped with it. The movie star who became a princess comforted the teenager, who would become royalty's movie star. Princess Grace, accustomed to unwelcome media attention, told Diana to treat it like the weather. "It'll get worse," she said with a warm smile.

And it did the very next day. The tabloids were full of breathless reviews of Diana and her gown, accompanied by revealing photographs and suggestive headlines. "Lady Di Takes the Plunge," blared the front page of the Daily Mirrnn "Di the Daring," exclaimed the Sun. "Shy Di Shocks," the Daily Ex~ress reported. Even establishment newspapers noted the dress that seemed so startling for the modest kindergarten teacher. "Shy Di R.I.P.," read the photo caption in the Times.

Diana was puzzled. "I don't know why everyone is making such a fuss," she said to Prince Charles's valet. "It's the sort of dress I would have worn anyway.

The valet lowered his eyes. "Well, it certainly caught everyone's attention," he said disapprovingly. He was fired a month after the wedding.

The Daily Express reporter praised Diana's decision to go strapless. "Her Gone-With-the-Wind dress . . . takes courage, and

a lot more, to uphold it," wrote Jean Rook. "All Di must learn to watch, which the TV cameras noticed, is the ounce or two of puppy fat which boned bodices tuck under a girl's arms."

Diana cringed as she read the reviews of her "bounteous figure" and "blooming physique." She shrieked when she saw the television coverage.

"I look hideously fat," she wailed. "Fat as a cow. I can't stand it.

Charles, who never forgot the embarrassment of being called "Fatty" by his classmates, kidded her. Fanatic about staying slim, he exercised like a fiend and ate like a monk. On tours he carried snack bags filled with wheat germ, linseed, and prunes. His dinners at home consisted of two strips of dried fish or a yolk-free mushroom omelet. That was followed by green salad and a drink of lemon squash and Epsom salts, which Diana pronounced "revolting." Charles said he needed the concoction "to keep regular." He twitted her about her passion for sweets and called her "Plumpkin." As she agonized over her newspaper photographs, he teased her again. "No more puddings for you," he said. He had tossed off the remark casually, not realizing that she would plunge into bulimia. But after seeing herself on television, Diana was so distraught that she soon began bingeing and purging.

The eating disorder was seeded in the wreckage of her parent's marriage, which had thrown her oldest sister, Jane, into anorexia. As a young woman, Jane had starved herself to the frightening weight of a child, until her family forced her to seek help. Diana, too, reacted to her insecurities by secretly starving herself. But then she caved in to her hunger cravings and ate several bowls of cereal with sugar and rich Guernsey cream. She devoured bags of soft jelly candies, followed by vanilla cookies lathered with white frosting, which she quickly threw up.

She had moved into Buckingham Palace a few months before the wedding so she could learn the royal routine, and when Charles was traveling, she ate alone. Most of her meals were served in her room. At first she left her trays untouched, which concerned the chef, who felt he was not pleasing her. After he began asking, she flushed the food down the toilet.

"She nicked so many boxes of Kellogg's Frosties from the pantry," said royal reporter Ross Benson, "that one of the footmen was accused of stealing and nearly lost his job. Diana stepped forward then and admitted she was to blame."

At first no one believed her. The staff was not ready to accept the image of their future Queen as a glutton who regularly gorged and vomited. "The picture of Lady Diana wrapped around the porcelain chariot no, no, no," said a member of the royal household with a shudder. "That was inconceivable to us." The staff refused to see any dark shadows beneath the sunny exterior. "You've no idea how sweet she seemed on the surface," said one of the Palace maids. "The few flashes of temper we saw we put to wedding jitters and worked harder to be of help." The staff did not believe that Diana was the culprit consuming the missing food. Even when she admitted it, they thought she was protecting a footman previously suspected of petty theft. They did not accept what was happening until the upstairs maids, who cleaned Diana's suite, reported evidence of her throwing up in the bathroom. Even then most of the staff did not accept it.

As Diana began losing weight, she increased the pernicious cycle of bingeing and purging until she was going through it five times a day. Within three months she'd lost twenty pounds. Charles was unaware of the problem because he was not with her all day every day.

For five weeks during the spring of 1981, he traveled on previously scheduled visits; he toured the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, where he explored the possibility of a real job. The Queen and Prince Philip had been concerned for some time about the way Charles flitted from one cause to the next without direction. "He never sticks to anything," complained Philip, who once blamed his wife for being an inattentive mother. At a private dinner party attended by an American, Philip jerked his head toward the Queen and referred to Charles as "your son." Both parents despaired whenever he made impassioned statements about the jobless, the homeless, or the penniless. The Duke of Edinburgh, especially, had no patience with his son's concerns for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. "He wrings his hands like an old

woman," said Philip after one of Charles's speeches. "Why can't he leave the weltschmerzen to the vicars?" Philip warned Charles not to become embroiled in politics and not to comment on "sacred cows" like the Church of England and the National Health Service. He said the one institution that could be insulted was the press

"I've relished doing it myself," Philip said~but nothing else. Charles ignored his father's advice. As Prince of Wales, he resented being cast as a pitchman for Britain. He wanted to be taken more seriously than a salesman who dressed up in gold braid and waved. "I'm not good at simply being a performing monkey," he said. His father disagreed. He thought Charles was perfect in the part.

Having enjoyed Australia as an exchange student, Charles was open to his mother's idea for a job there after his wedding. He and Diana would move to Canberra, the capital, and Charles would become ~Overnor~general The position paid an annual salary larger than the premier's, but it did not carry great powers, other than commander in chief of the armed forces. Under the Australian constitution, it would enable him to summon and dissolve Parliament and carry the kind of responsibility that the Queen felt her son needed. She had discussed the appointment with her Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who approached the Foreign Office in 1980; she reported back that Charles had permission to "informally explore the possibility" during his next Australian tour. But, on that trip, Charles decided if the position were to be offered, he would have to refuse because the Australian Prime Minister was too dour.

"The difficulty is that he does not have any humor," Charles told Diana in a phone call from Australia that was secretly taped. "He is terribly serious. I made a terrific effort to be amusing, but he just stared at me all the time."

That was just one of the five phone calls between Charles and his fiancee, and Charles and his mother, that had been recorded. The tapes, made by anti-British republicans within the Australian telephone company, were given to a freelance British reporter, who tried to sell them in England. Afraid of further straining relations with Australia, which had been threatening to break away from the Commonwealth, the Queen's courtiers moved swiftly. They called

the Queen's lawyers, who claimed the transcripts were not authentic.* The Queen's courts agreed and issued an injunction to prevent publication of the transcripts in England. The Queen's lawyers then sought an injunction in West Germany, but they were too late: extracts had appeared in the magazine Die Aktuelle and were translated from German to English and published in the Irish Independent.

In one of the purported conversations, Diana mentioned her wedding preparations and complained about the behavior of her stepmother, Raine, who had appeared on British television. Standing alongside her beaming husband, Countess Spencer did all the talking. The Earl Spencer, who never completely recovered from his stroke, smiled benignly.

"She's got Daddy autographing photos and selling them in the gift shop," said Diana. "It's so embarrassing." She added that her stepmother was conducting paid tours. Priced at $2.50, the fee included tea with "the ghastly pink lady," as Diana now referred to Barbara Cartland. "The wedding," she said, "will be a catastrophe if Raine continues."

"Don't worry too much about that," Charles told her. "Edward [Adeane] can organize it when we come back. You will see the Queen will be in a position to give the necessary instructions so that objections will not be possible."

"Yes, I know," said Diana. "But can I not have any say about my own wedding?"

"Naturally, but let your mother advise you."

"I will, I promise," said Diana. "I really don't want to complain, Charles, really not. I'm going to talk through everything tomorrow with Mummy. She has a very good feeling for things like this. She's very sensible."

The Spectator had already put out the call for Diana's mother to take over. Following Raine's television interview, the conservative magazine pleaded: "Come home, Mrs. Shand Kydd, your country needs you." In an editorial railing against the participation of Raine

*writing in the Daily Telegraph in 1993, Alastair Forbes challenged the royal denial and said the authenticity of the taped conversations had been "proved to me beyond doubt, despite the Palace's glib denial."

Spencer and Barbara Cartland in the royal wedding, Alexander Chancellor wrote: "If a special Act of Parliament is necessary, so be it. For it would be more than a little unfair on everybody if these two absurdly theatrical ladies were permitted to turn a moving national celebration into a pantomime."

Diana could do nothing about keeping her stepmother away from the wedding, but she was adamant about her stepgrandmother. "She struck Barbara Cartland from the guest list," said a former aide to Prince Charles, who tried to intercede. Six months later the aide was fired.

"It was so cruel to do that to Barbara," he said. "She was distraught, really deeply hurt, but there was nothing we could do. Diana had insisted her stepgrandmother not be allowed near St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Queen did not object. Barbara was so humiliated she wanted to go abroad for the wedding day, but her sons said that it would make it look as though she had been banished."

To save face, Barbara Cartland gave a party for the volunteers of the St. John's Ambulance Brigade. Forgoing her usual costume of ostrich feathers, she wore the tailored brown uniform of the Order of St. John and appeared on international television in a feature about the organization. She asserted that the St. John volunteers were devoted to providing "a Christian answer to the problems of a troubled and materialistic world."

By then even the spiritual participants were cashing in on the royal wedding. The Archbishop of Canterbury had divulged to the media details of a private conversation he had had with Charles and Diana.* And the three choirs of St. Paul's Cathedral had collected $1,200 each for 250 singers. By comparison, Barbara Cartland seemed positively benign.

During one of her conversations with Charles in Australia, Diana said she felt overwhelmed by having to learn so much in such a short time. "I'm so excited that I can't concentrate properly," she said. "I miss you very much."

*Years later, after his retirement, the former Archbishop confided to his biographer that the Prince of ~ales was severely depressed before his marriage because he was in love with another woman. He also described Diana as a "schemer."

"I miss you, too," he said, adding that he was late for a party but his hosts would have to wait. "I've done my duty all day and now I'm talking to my fiancee, whom I love very much." He told her about the Di look-alikes who had greeted him at the airport in Australia. "Not as good as the real thing," he said. She giggled. He complained about the press.

"During the whole trip, this guy had nothing better to do than to try to take photographs of the bald patch on my head."

Diana laughed. "I didn't know you had a bald patch."

"It's too stupid. I'm doing all of these things and the only thing they want are these ridiculous details."

"I think it's very funny."

"Yes. As children, we were all very amused at the way my father tried to hide his baldness."

"Oh, I really hope that yours is not as big as his," she said. "In any event, you seem to have much more fun than I do."

This was as close as Diana came to complaining about her royal tutelage. She pretended to Charles that she adored the Queen Mother but told friends she was "virtually ignored" for the few days she stayed with her in Clarence House. After Diana was moved into Buckingham Palace, she was given a small office near Oliver Everett, Charles's assistant private secretary. Everett was amused the first time she bounced into his office wearing headphones and workout tights. He soon learned that her weekly dance class took precedence over every other activity and that she loved rock and roll. "I actually wanted to be a dancer," she said, "but I overshot the height by a long way." She watched television day and night and was devoted to soap operas. The courtier began his classes in how to be a princess by giving Diana instructions on her royal engagements, which would average 170 a year and include Ascot, Trooping the Color, Badminton Horse Trials, Opening of Parliament, Chelsea Flower Show, Wimbledon, Garden Parties, Cowes Regatta, Hospital benefits, charities, and anything for the military.

The Queen's lady-in-waiting, Susan Hussey, helped Everett guide the Princess-to-be through the maze of royal rules: wear hats in public and bright colors to stand out; wave from the elbow, not

the wrist; never use a public lavatory. "The worst thing about being a princess," said Diana years later, "is having to pee.

Everett hit his first snag when he recommended a course of study and gave Diana several history books to read about her future role as Princess of Wales. In the throes of bulimia, and lonely for Charles, she balked. When the equerry left the room, she told a friend that she threw the books on the floor. "If he thinks I'm reading these," she said, "he's got another think coming."

Weak from losing weight, she frequently cracked under the strain of preparing for one of the biggest ceremonies in British history. "I think I am realizing now what it all means," she told a reporter a few weeks before the wedding, "and it's making me more and more scared." She broke into tears in front of photographers at a polo match and had to be whisked away by her mother. "It was a bit much for her," Prince Charles explained to the press. Privately he told friends he was worried. "I wonder if she is going to be able to cope with the pressures."

An avid tennis player, Diana attended the finals at Wimbledon but left the royal box before U.S. tennis star John McEnroe won. He had objected to thirteen calls, shouted obscenities, and cursed the umpire. "I always get robbed because of the fucking umpires in this country," he snarled.

"The wedding's off now," said one television commentator, watching the abrupt exit. "Lady Di's ears are no longer virgin."

In the tea room below, Diana met the Wimbledon women 5 champion, Chris Evert, who asked why Prince Charles was not with her.

"He can never sit still," said Diana. "He is like a great big baby. But one day I hope to calm him down enough to enjoy it."

Diana admitted to the tennis star that she was nervous about getting married. "I assured her that marriage was great, and she had nothing to be concerned about," said Evert, then married to the British tennis star John Lloyd, whom she later divorced. "I told her to relax and think about other things."

The men who worked for Prince Charles also tried to be reassuring and help Diana ease into her future responsibilities. They showed her the daily and monthly events calendar and explained

the tour schedule, which was planned six months in advance. Her only concern was the Prince's relationships with other women. His staff did not know how to deal with her persistent and personal questions. "I asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla Parker Bowles," Diana said to Francis Cornish, "and he didn't give me a clear answer. What am I to do?" His assistant personal secretary lowered his eyes and changed the subject.

A few days later Michael Colborne, who was Charles's personal assistant, faced more uncomfortable queries. On his desk Diana had found a bracelet Colborne had ordered for Charles as a farewell present for his mistress. The gold bracelet with a lapis lazuli stone was engraved with the initials G.F. [Girl Friday]. Diana pressed Colborne about the gift and asked to know whom it was for. "I know it's for Camilla," she said. "So why won't you admit it? What does it mean? Why is Charles doing this?" Reluctantly Colborne acknowledged that he had ordered the present, but he refused to answer any more questions. He, too, lost his job shortly after the wedding.

Diana confronted Charles, who admitted that the bracelet from Asprey's was for Camilla Parker Bowles. He said he intended to give her the present in person to say good-bye. He maintained that the farewell gift would put a full stop to their affair. Diana didn't believe him. They quarreled, and she ran out of his office in tears. She later confided to her sisters that she didn't want to marry a man who was still in love with his mistress. "It's bad luck, Duch," said her sister Sarah, using the family nickname for Diana. "Your face is on the tea towels, so you're too late to chicken out now." For weeks feminists had been wearing buttons that warned, "Don't Do It, Di!"

The next day Diana retaliated by striking Camilla's name from the guest list for the wedding breakfast. She also crossed off the name of Lady Dale "Kanga" Tryon. She could not keep them from the wedding, but she insisted they be barred from the breakfast. Charles, who had grown up watching his father shuffle mistresses like a deck of cards, decided not to press the issue with his edgy fiancee. He told his private secretary that he didn't understand Diana's sudden moods and sulks, and her crying jags unnerved him.

He also said he was alarmed by what one of his equerries had told him about her sitting hunched in a chair for hours with her head on her knees, absolutely inconsolable. Charles said he found such behavior to be irrational and unsettling. His private secretary dismissed Diana's behavior as wedding nerves.

Charles, never a decisive man, now reevaluated his decision to marry Diana. He visited his sister at Gatcombe Park and confided his doubts. Princess Anne, who was a month from giving birth to her second child, was in no mood for her brother's soul-searching whines. Airily she dismissed him as gumless. "Charles," she said, "you've got to play the hand you're dealt." She repeated Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter on how to survive the act of love: "Just close your eyes and think of England."

Still pondering his decision, the Prince visited a former lover, Zoe Sallis, in London. Her Ebury Street apartment was a few yards from the police station, where patrolmen watched Charles arrive and depart. He tried to disguise himself by wearing a gray fedora hat, which he pulled over his forehead. Several policemen, watching from a window, laughed at the royal camouflage. One said, "He looks like a bloke with big ears in a bonnet."

"Zoe told me later that Prince Charles had confided in her his misery and fear of marrying Diana," said Time's Roland Flamini, "but he felt he had a duty to go through with it."

Resigned to prudence over passion, Charles visited Broadlands, where he planned to spend the first part of his honeymoon. "Five days before the royal wedding," said John Barratt, shaking his head, "Charles told myself and Lord Romsey [Mountbatten's grandson] that Camilla was the only woman he had ever loved. He told us, `I could never feel the same way about Diana as I do about Camilla.' Lord Romsey simply assured him that his feelings would, most likely, change."

Although the bride was bulimic and the bridegroom a bounder, they looked like an ideal couple. The public had been entranced by their romance: the Prince had finally found his Princess, and after their wedding on July 29, 1981, they would live happily ever after. Abracadabra, and bippitty boppetty boo. Most Britons needed to

believe in this fairy tale to distract themselves from the awful reality of inner-city riots, IRA bombings, and widespread unemployment.

The Queen understood the spell a royal wedding could cast on an impoverished country. Despite more than three million people unemployed, Her Majesty did not hesitate to spend taxpayers' money. She felt any expense for ceremony (engraved invitations alone cost $10,000) was a hedge against hopelessness. Much as she disliked the whiff of show business, and the comparisons between royalty and celebrity, she staged an extravaganza worthy of Hollywood, complete with drums, trumpets, and coaches. Her production combined the romance of High Society with the magic of Fantasia. She had better costumes and more horses than Ben-Hur. The royal wedding she produced in 1981 gave the British monarchy its biggest ratings to date and British tourism its greatest revenues. The Queen knew that her crown and country depended on such moments of pageantry. "This is what we do best," said her Lord Chamberlain.

The site was St. Paul's Cathedral because it could accommodate more people than Westminster Abbey. "I'm glad it's there," said Diana. "It would be too painful for me to marry Charles where my parents were joined for life." The wedding hymn she chose emphasized "the love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price, and lays upon the altar the final sacrifice."

The Queen sent 2,500 invitations* to friends, family, and heads of state, plus the crowned heads of Europe. King Juan Carlos of Spain declined his invitation when he learned the newlyweds would board the royal yacht at Gibraltar during their honeymoon. Spain had long disputed British occupancy of the little colony on the tip of the Iberian peninsula, and the King said Britain's decision to have Charles and Diana join the Britannia there was a diplomatic blunder. Face-to-face, Prince Philip told Juan Carlos he was an idiot. "We're fed up with the story of Gibraltar," Philip said, "and it is very expensive at that."

*The bride was allowed to invite one hundred people and her parents fifty. The bridegroom was allotted three hundred invitations, which he distributed to his beloved nanny, Mabel Anderson; former girlfriends like Sabrina Guinness and Susan George; and, of course, his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, and her husband, Andrew Parker Bowles.

The President of the United States also declined the Queen's invitation, but only because his White House staff insisted. They told Ronald Reagan that his first foreign trip as President should not be to a glittering spectacle with British royalty. People might get the wrong impression. So his wife went without him. "I'm just crazy about Prince Charles," said Nancy Reagan, who arrived with twenty-six suitcases, eleven hatboxes, seventeen Secret Service men, and one borrowed pair of diamond earrings worth $880,000.

The U.S. networks also invaded London, bidding up the price of window space along the parade route. The Palace press office issued regular bulletins about the ceremony to be telecast to 750 million people. Journalists, untutored in titles, learned that Lady Diana Spencer soon would outrank all other women in the realm, except the Queen and the Queen Mother. As an earl's daughter, she was below thirty-eight categories of British women who had titles superior to her own. But upon her marriage, she soared to the top of the social heap. The ancient title of Princess of Wales entitled her to deep curtsies from all other female royals, including her sister-in-law, the Princess Anne, and her husband's aunt, the Princess Margaret.

"Most definitely, that's the protocol," explained Princess Margaret's butler, "but not the reality. Never in your life would you see Princess Margaret drop a curtsy to anyone but Her Majesty or her mother. After all, Margaret was born royal; Diana was only marrying royalty. There's a big difference. And as for Princess Anne, well, as her father once said, `If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested.'

The Palace press office announced the formal style for Lady Diana Spencer. "Following the wedding, she will be known as Diana, the Princess of Wales," said an aide. "She's not Princess Diana because she was not born a princess, and she's not the Princess Diana because only children of the sovereign are entitled to `the' before their title." Americans, who did not understand titles or their subtleties, called her Princess Di.

In Time, British literary critic Malcolm Muggeridge sounded skeptical about the century's grandest nuptials: "Only fortunetellers, Marxists and Jehovah's Witnesses will venture to prognosticate

whether Prince Charles and Lady Diana will actually one day mount the throne as King and Queen of England. In the course of fifty years of knockabout journalism, I have seen too many upheavals of one sort and another to feel any certainty about anything or anyone.... Popularity, however seemingly strong and widespread, can evaporate in an afternoon, and institutions that have lasted for centuries disappear overnight. So I can but conclude by simply saying, `God bless the Prince and Princess of Wales.' " Within fifteen years the critic looked like a visionary.

The night before the wedding, the royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for the largest display of fireworks since World War II's Blitz. British police estimated 175,000 people camped on the sidewalks around St. Paul's Cathedral to watch the procession of horse-drawn coaches. Crowds started forming the day before as aristocrats arrived at the Palace for the Queen's ball.

"That evening had a Waterloo feeling to it," said one titled British woman. "You could almost smell the formaldehyde from the mothballs. That was the last time I put on my tiara. It was gloriously dotty. We walked down the Mall with our diamonds and our gowns swirling and headed for an enormously grand occasion that everyone wished to be attending, except for those of us who had to go."

After the ball, Diana spent the night in Clarence House. Charles spent the night in the arms of his mistress. Camilla Parker Bowles later confided to her brother-in-law that she had slept with the Prince in his suite at the Palace. "She was cozy in the knowledge she had his heart when he married Diana," said Richard Parker Bowles.

The next day, as she recited her vows, the nervous bride transposed the order of her bridegroom's first two names: Charles Philip Arthur George became Philip Charles Arthur George. But even in error, she charmed. "Well," she said later, "with four names it's quite something to get organized." When the bridegroom pledged to share all his worldly goods, he, too, was nervous. He forgot to include the word "worldly." A prophetic omission, considering what he parted with fifteen years later.

The Princess of Wales was not resigned to giving up her hus-

band to his mistress. Diana was determined to cement her marriage by getting pregnant. She packed accordingly for her honeymoon, taking a green bikini bathing suit that Charles liked, six satin lace teddys, and several sheer nightgowns. He took his fishing tackle. He also packed one book by Arthur Koestler on parapsychology and five scholarly books by Laurens Van der Post, which he said he wanted to share with his bride. She took two paperbacks by Danielle Steel, although she knew Charles disapproved. "He doesn't like me reading trash novels," she said. "But I love them."

Years later she read a psychological profile about the Unabomber, whose crimes were attributed to his being a loner. A mathematical genius at the age of ten, he took a book on vacation entitled Romping through Mathematics from Addition to Calculus. Diana said, "Sounds like Charles on his honeymoon."

Aboard the royal yacht, Britannia, the Princess charmed the crew of 256 navy men, especially the galley staff, whom she pestered for extra desserts. Near the royal stateroom, attendants wore rubber-soled slippers so as not to make any noise that might disturb the royal couple. "We were told to fade into the background," said seaman Philip Benjamin. "We were to act like air. Unless spoken to, we said nothing, just looked straight ahead. Bit difficult at times to look straight ahead with the Princess of Wales dashing about in her nightgowns.

"I remember her coming out of the royal suite one afternoon in a filmy white negligee with a pink satin bow at the bosom, which was untied and open. She was trying to lure the Prince away from his books.

"`Chulls,' she said in a sexy singsong, `come here and do your duty.' He was reading in a deck chair and she wanted him to go inside and produce an heir. I was standing guard a few feet away and looked straight ahead. She giggled when she realized I had heard her, but she was unembarrassed. She just kept teasing Charles to go to bed with her. She teased him a lot. I never saw the awful moods that His Royal Highness complained about later."

Prince Charles told his authorized biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby, that he learned on the honeymoon his young wife was suffering from bulimia. Charles said it triggered sudden mood shifts,

leaving Diana cheerful one minute and morose the next. After two weeks aboard the yacht, the couple joined the royal family at Balmoral. At times Diana felt overwhelmed by the heavy presence of her in-laws and excused herself from meals to throw up. Charles became so concerned about her eating disorder that he contacted Laurens Van der Post and implored him to help. The older man, whom Diana trusted, talked gently with her at each session, but he quickly realized that she needed more professional help than he could provide. He gave Charles the name of a psychiatrist, who made discreet visits to counsel the couple. The therapist met them in their suite at Balmoral at eleven A.M. for an hour every day. He spent thirty minutes with them together and then thirty minutes alone with Diana, trying to address her anxieties. Charles said he worried about her emotional state. "She's so high-strung," he said. He wondered whether or not his wife was suffering from manic- depression. "What else can explain the moods vivacious charm in the morning and verbal assaults in the evening?" The therapist recommended tranquilizers. After the honeymoon, Diana continued psychotherapy in London but resisted taking sedatives. For eleven more years her bulimia haunted her.

"It's an insidious disease from which to recover," she said years later. "You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up four or five times a day and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It's like having a pair of arms around you, but it's temporary. Then you're disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and you bring it all up again. . . . It's a repetitive pattern and very destructive."

Outside Balmoral, the international press had gathered, staking out the entrances and clamoring for photographs. Charles was incensed, saying they had enough photos from following the Britannia for two weeks with their snoopy long lenses. He was even annoyed at Patrick Lichfield, the Queen's cousin, for having taken a candid shot of the royal wedding party that he sold around the world. "He never even submitted the pictures to the Queen," Charles grumbled. Lichfield's unstaged photo showed the Prince and Princess of Wales and their bridal attendants sitting on the

Palace steps after the wedding, collapsed in laughter. Charles thought the photo taken in a relaxed moment made them look undignified. Having given Lichfield exclusive access to photograph the wedding, Charles felt used. He had not expected him to sell the photos without approval. "I can't believe Lord Lichfield could have let us down so badly," Charles said. Lichfield later made copies of the famous photograph and distributed them instead of business cards.

"He gave me one," said the Pulitzer Prize-winning photogra~ pher David Hume Kennerly. "He's an arrogant guy, but the picture of Charles and Diana is a great moment."

Charles was in no mood to placate the press, but by the fourth day of the Balmoral segment of the honeymoon, he had no choice. The royal family felt besieged, so the Queen dispatched her press secretary to negotiate a settlement: an interview with the newlyweds, plus photographs, in exchange for privacy. The deal was cut, and Charles, who groused, was required to cooperate.

The Prince of Wales was Colonel in Chief of the Gordons in Scotland, so for the interview he dressed in full tartan garb knee- high socks, plaid kilt, and leather sporran (a pouch worn in front of the kilt). He appeared at the appointed hour to meet the news- people, holding his wife's hand.

"Where do you want us to perform?" he asked.

"Right here is fine, Your Royal Highness," said a reporter.

Charles recognized him. "I hope you had a nice time going round the Mediterranean."

"Bit expensive," said the reporter.

"Good," said Charles with a tight grin.

The cameras whirred and clicked as the churlish Prince and his charming Princess chatted with the press.

"How was the honeymoon?"

"Fabulous," said Diana.

"And married life?"

"I highly recommend it," she said, beaming.

"Have you cooked breakfast for your husband yet?"

"I don't eat breakfasts."

Charles looked bemused. "This must be very exciting televi-

sion," he said sarcastically. Diana lowered her eyes and smiled. Seconds later he kissed her hand, she laughed gaily, and the photographers grabbed their picture.

As the couple prepared to leave, one of the cameramen presented the Princess with a bouquet of flowers.

"Thank you. I suppose one of you puts them on his expense account," she joked.

Two months later, on November 5, 1981, the Palace announced the Princess was pregnant. She tried to continue her royal engagements, but frequent bouts of morning sickness forced her to cancel. Her husband explained to reporters.

"You've all got wives, you know the problems. . . . It's better not to do too many things. . . . After about three months, things are inclined to get better." Then, sounding officious, he added, "I am prepared to take full responsibility."

A few days later the Princess resumed her duties, but as she walked through crowds and accepted bouquets, she was hit by waves of nausea. She did not try to hide her discomfort. "This is terrible," she said. "Nobody told me I would feel like this." Seeing a pregnant woman in Derbyshire, she grabbed her hands in sympathy. "Oh, that morning sickness, isn't it dreadful!"

At every outing she was trailed by the press. She performed flawlessly in public, but each performance sapped her energy, leaving her emotionally exhausted. At home she flew off the handle. "It was tears and tantrums behind closed doors," recalled a Palace aide. Charles did not know how to cope with his wife's erratic emotions. He called his mistress for advice, and he played more polo. "I've got to get out," he'd tell his bodyguard. "Too many hormones."

The more elusive Charles was, the more upset Diana became. She accused him of sneaking away to visit Camilla, and he became so exasperated by her jealousy that he stalked out, which only infuriated her more. Angry over his absences, curious about his whereabouts, and frustrated by the prying lenses of photographers, Diana complained bitterly to the Queen, who was unnerved by her daughter-in-law's hysterics. Blaming the press, the Queen summoned Fleet Street editors to tell them to leave the Princess alone. The royal press secretary, Michael Shea, met with them first.

"We expected that, following the honeymoon, press attention would wane somewhat," he told them. "But it has in no way abated. The Princess of Wales feels totally beleaguered. The people who love her and care for her are getting anxious at the reaction it is having."

The Queen entered the room to underscore the message. She said it was unfair of photographers to hide in the bushes with telephoto lenses to track the Princess without her knowledge. The Queen cited the picture published the day before of Diana with her arms around her husband's neck, smiling affectionately at him as they stood outside Highgrove, their house in Gloucester. Royally chided, the editors agreed to back off. In an editorial headlined "The Captive Princess," the Times declared, "It would be nice to think we are grown up enough not to imprison a princess in a palace." The truce lasted six weeks. Then Diana threatened to kill herself.

Shortly after the Christmas holidays at Sandringham, she warned Charles that if he left her alone again to go riding, she would commit suicide. As he stormed out, she threw herself down a short flight of stairs. The eighty-one-year-old Queen Mother heard the commotion and found the Princess in a heap, sobbing. Diana was led to her room by a footman, and her doctor was summoned. After his examination, he said she was fine, except for slight bruising around her abdomen; the fetus was unhurt. Hours later the footman sold the information about the Princess's fall to the Sun, proving that nothing weighs as heavy as a royal secret worth money. The tabloid ran the story on the next day's front page but did not say it was an apparent suicide attempt.

"The Princess just hated going to Sandringham for Christmas," said her hairdresser Richard Dalton. "She told me it was freezing cold and dinner had to be over by three o'clock: `It's three and time to watch me on TV,' she'd say, imitating you-know-who. The royal family had to watch the Queen's Christmas message on television. Diana said it was a command performance."

The Queen Mother talked to her nephew John Bowes-Lyon about Diana's behavior, which seemed to be exacerbated by a physical malady. "She had fits which would last just a few minutes,

during which she would go crazy and become uncontrollable," said Bowes-Lyon.* "And then it was all over as quickly as it began.

"At first, doctors thought her outbursts might have been epilepsy, but that was discounted because she didn't swallow her tongue or have other epileptic symptoms. Apparently what she suffers from can be hereditary, and there have been other instances in the Fermoy family, so the royal family have been told."

Over the next three years Diana would try several more times to take her life. Each was a desperate attempt at self-mutilation. "I tried four or five times," she told Dr. Maurice Lipsedge, a specialist in eating disorders at Guy's Hospital in London. She told him of the various attempts: she slashed her arms with a lemon slicer; she cut her wrist; she ran a knife down the veins of one leg; and she threw herself into a glass cabinet.

"When no one listens to you, or you feel no one's listening to you, all sorts of things start to happen," she said. "These attempts were my cries for help."

When the Queen saw the first signs of dissension between the couple, she proposed Charles and Diana take a trip. "In that type of situation, Her Majesty always recommends escape," said one of her friends. "Her solution is to get away together, sort things out, and everything will be fine. It's always worked for her. Why shouldn't it work for them?"

A few days later the Prince and Princess left for the island of Windemere in the Bahamas. "What Diana needs is a holiday in the sunshine," said Charles, "to prepare for the birth." Again the couple were followed by the long lenses of freelance photographers, who captured the Princess, five months pregnant, skipping through the surf in an orange bikini. Once again Diana was on the front pages of the tabloids, and the Queen was incensed. "This is one of the blackest days in British journalism," she said through her press secretary. The Sun later printed an apology and published the pho-

*` `John Bowes-Lyon had to apologize to Diana when it appeared in print that she was frothing at the mouth for a few seconds," said columnist Taki Theodoracopulos in 1993. "She has a slight disease that resembles epilepsy, which John Bowes-Lyon knew from the Queen Mother. He told me about it and I, of course, told Nigel [Dempster], who, like the dumb shit he is, used it in his book [Behind Palace Doors, written in 1993 with Peter Evans]. When the book came out, John had to write a note to Diana, saying, `I apologize and I had nothing to do with that.'"

tographs a second time, just in case its five million readers wondered why the publication was saying it was sorry.

Her Majesty had been burned again by the Sun and the man who had come to dominate Britain's media through buying the Sun, the Sunday Times, the Times of London, and Sky TV. Rupert Murdoch was now teaching the Queen that her stingy wages were no match for his checkbook journalism. Every tidbit of royal gossip from inside the Palace was for sale, and he spent freely for sensational revelations. An Australian, unrestrained by deference to the Crown, Murdoch was no monarchist. So his irreverent publications zoomed in on the royal family and printed unprettified stories and candid photos. Without the protective blanket of reverence, the royals flapped and squawked like geese in a gunsight. The Queen lectured editors, demanded (and obtained) injunctions, and, finally, went to court to stop her servants from selling secrets. She called for press sanctions and sued for damages.

"Her Majesty became annoyed after a photo appeared of her six-year-old grandson, Peter, twirling a dead pheasant by the neck during a bird shoot," recalled a member of the royal household. "She ordered reporters and photographers off the estate at Sandringham and barred them from Windsor. She tried to keep them away from all family events, including the royal christenings."

Charles and Diana's first child, the forty-third heir to the British throne, was born on June 21, 1982, and the Hussars of the Royal Horse Artillery fired the traditional forty-one gun salute in honor of the new Prince. The blond, blue-eyed boy was called "Baby Wales" for seven days until his parents stopped fighting over his name. "We're having a little argument about what to call him," Charles admitted to reporters. The couple eventually settled on William Arthur Philip Louis in honor of William the Conqueror, the legendary King Arthur, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Lord Louis Mountbatten. Prince William ("Wills" to his parents) was to be christened on the Queen Mother's eighty-second birthday.

"It had been quite a difficult pregnancy I hadn't been very well throughout it," Diana recalled in a television interview. "But I felt the whole country was in labor with me . . . so by the time William arrived, it was a great relief."

Britons rejoiced, except for William's crotchety aunt, Princess Anne, who was on a goodwill tour in the United States when Diana gave birth and resented the press queries.

"Your Royal Highness, any word about Princess Diana?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "You tell me."

"Your reaction to her having a son?"

She shrugged. "I didn't know she had one."

"This morning."

"Oh, good," she said sarcastically. "Isn't that nice?"

"How are you enjoying your visit to New Mexico?"

"Keep your questions to yourself."

"Ma' am, how does it feel to be an aunt?"

"That's my business, thank you."

The sourpuss Princess skidded to the bottom of the royal popularity polls. "Naff off, Anne," screamed the Daily Mail, which claimed she was envious of the fuss over Diana. Other newspapers dismissed the Queen's daughter as rude, surly, and miserable. Within ten years the pundits would change their minds. After her charity work for Save the Children, Anne would emerge as one of the most respected women in Great Britain. Some polls would show that the public thought her more worthy than Charles to ascend to the throne. But then, she was one of the most reviled people in the United Kingdom.

Within the royal family the relationship between the Princess Anne and the Princess of Wales was visceral: they loathed each other. Anne thought Diana was vain, dim-witted, and neurotic. "Too gooey about children," she said.

Diana dismissed her sister-in-law as a male impersonator. "I think she shaves."

"You forget," said a friend. "Anne was the only female competitor at Montreal Olympics [1976] not to be given a sex test."

"Results would've been too embarrassing," joked Diana. "She's Philip in drag."

The Princess of Wales did not understand a woman like Anne, who appeared to be so determinedly unfeminine. She refused to wear makeup, pulled back her hair in a bun, and wore clothes that looked like thrift shop rejects. Diana had heard about Anne's adul

tery with a Palace guard but did not understand his sexual attrac~ tion. "What do men see in her?" she asked.

Blunt as a bullet, Anne did nothing to ingratiate herself with others, especially the press, which she detested. "You are a pest by the very nature of that camera in your hand," she snapped at a photographer who was trying to take her picture.

Charles agreed that Anne could be difficult but said she was his only sister and had honored him by making him godfather to her firstborn son. So he suggested that he and Diana return the honor by making Anne one of Prince William's godmothers. Diana refused.

"Darling, please," Charles said plaintively. "Please."

Diana was unmovable, and Charles, after a halihearted struggle to change her mind, gave up. Days later they announced their choice of godparents: Princess Alexandra; the Duchess of Westminster; Lady Susan Hussey; King Constantine II of the Hellenes; Lord Romsey; Sir Laurens Van der Post.

At the christening, the Archbishop of Canterbury poured water over the baby's head and handed a lighted candle to his father to signify the young Prince's admission into the church.

"The windows were open, the sun streaming in," Sir Laurens told Horoscope magazine. "Then the sky went grey as a great storm gathered. Just as the Archbishop handed over the lighted candle, a violent gust of wind blew through the windows. The candle flickered, but did not go out."

The sage saw that as a portent for the Prince and Princess of Wales, who both believed in mysticism. Van der Post said it was a good sign and explained that the flickering candle represented a crisis in Prince William's future, but one that he would survive.

Two years later, after the birth of their second son, Charles again suggested choosing his sister as a godmother, but again Diana refused. Instead she chose Lady Celia Vestey; Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, the daughter of Princess Margaret; and Carolyn Pride Bartholomew, her former roommate from Coleherne Court. As godfathers, Charles chose his brother, Andrew, the Duke of York; artist Bryan Organ, who painted flattering royal portraits; and Gerald Ward, a rich polo player.

The announcement of the baby's godparents sparked a furious row within the royal family. Prince Philip was so angry at Charles for bypassing Anne a second time that he didn't speak to him or visit his new grandson for six weeks. At the end of the year he fired off a memo, telling Charles he was not carrying his weight as heir apparent. Philip praised Anne, his favorite child, as the hardest- working member of the royal family. "She's represented the Crown at 201 events whereas records indicate you made 93 appearances and your wife 51. Taken together, these figures [for 1984] don't add up to your sister's efforts."

Three years later the Queen rewarded her daughter's dedicated service by naming her Princess Royal, the highest honor a sovereign can bestow on a female in the royal family.

But Anne was so humiliated at being passed over again as godmother that she declined to attend the christening of Prince Henry Charles Albert David ("Harry" to his parents). She said the date conflicted with a shooting party that she and her husband had planned. The Queen and Prince Charles moved the christening from Buckingham Palace to St. George's Chapel at Windsor so it would be closer to Anne's estate, hoping then she might change her mind. She didn't. The Queen's press secretary telephoned and begged her to reschedule her shooting party, saying that her absence would be interpreted by the press as a slight to the Princess of Wales.

"So what?" said Anne, who sent her children in her place. "Peter and Zara will be there, and that'll be quite enough."

Michael Shea pleaded, but to no avail. As he predicted, the Murdoch press buried the Queen's daughter as petulant and vengeful. They canonized the Princess of Wales, and next to the Queen Mother, she was proclaimed the most beloved figure in the kingdom.

FOURTEEN

I'm fed up to the teeth with your bloody security," exploded the Duke of Edinburgh. "Let's get going."

"I'm sorry, sir," said the U.S. Secret Service agent, "but there's nothing I can do until the President's car moves.

The Queen and the Duke, touring California as guests of the Reagans in 1983, sat in the back of their limousine, waiting for the motorcade to move through the rainy streets of San Francisco. Philip strained with impatience.

"I said to get this car moving," he snapped.

"Sir, we're waiting for President Reagan's car."

The Queen stared straight ahead. Seconds passed. Bristling with anger, Philip grabbed a magazine from the seat pocket, rolled it up, and smacked the driver across the back of his head.

"Move this fucking car," he screamed, "and move it now!"

The Queen sat impassively and did not say a word as her husband whacked the agent like a horse. An hour later, after they had arrived at their hotel, she sent her embassy representative to the agent's room with an invitation to join the royal couple for a nightcap.

"No, thank you," said the agent. He made no attempt to disguise his anger over the treatment he had received from the Queen's husband as she said nothing.

"Please, sir. You must accept Her Majesty's invitation."

"I said, `No, thank you.' I will not be in their company any more than I absolutely have to."

The Queen's messenger appealed to the White House aide in the room. "Please, sir, I'm begging you. I cannot go back to Her Majesty and say her invitation was refused. I would lose my position. My tour of duty is up in six months and I can't afford to retire without my pension. I acknowledge the Duke of Edinburgh was beastly rude beyond redemption but I'm asking you as a personal favor to please accept this invitation."

The White House aide looked at the Secret Service agent, who stared at the anxious messenger and reconsidered. "I want to make it clear," said the agent, "that I'm doing this for you, not for them."

The U.S. Secret Service had struggled throughout the visit to provide the highest standard of protection for the royal couple, but the Duke of Edinburgh balked at every security measure proposed. The night before, he had turned on the light inside his limousine.

"I'm sorry, sir," said the agent. "I must ask you to turn off that light. It makes you too easy a target."

"I'm damned if I will," snapped Philip. "Why do you think these people are out here? They want to see me, and I want to wave to them."

The U.S. Chief of Protocol, Selwa Roosevelt, interceded. "Sir, these men are only doing their job," she said. "If anything happens to you, it would be due to their negligence. Please do not take it out on them. They have their orders." As he got out of the car, Philip slammed the door in her face. Hours later, at a dinner, he apologized.

From San Diego to San Francisco to the Reagan ranch in Santa Barbara, the Duke fumed about the security. "They're bloody baboons," he groused to the Queen, who also chafed at extreme protection. Privately she agreed with her husband. Publicly she said nothing. She was on a goodwill trip her fifth to the United States and she was visiting at the express request of her government to solidify what the two countries now called their special relationship. The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, a political soulmate of Ronald Reagan, needed U.S. aid, so she fed the

American appetite for British royalty by sending the Queen on tour.

Reagan had backed Thatcher when British troops landed in the Falkland Islands in 1982 to reclaim them from Argentina. The cost: 237 British servicemen and $3.7 billion. Most people had assumed Britain was too poor and too passive to mount such an attack, so the invasion boosted the country's prestige. Argentina's surrender in June 1982 allowed the forceful Prime Minister to emerge with a newfound respect as the Iron Lady. Prince Andrew, the Queen's favorite child, flew a navy helicopter in the war and returned home a hero.

The "special relationship" between London and Washington became strained after the United States invaded Grenada, a former British colony in the Caribbean, wh~ch had remained part of the Commonwealth. As Queen of England, Elizabetb II was also Q~~ueen of Grenada and not receptive to invaders, especially allies. She is immensely displeased with President Reagan over this matter," said a Labor Party spokesman. The Queen summoned Margaret Thatcher to the Palace to explain why Her Majesty had had to hear the news of the invasion from the BBC and not from the Prime Minister herself. Mrs. Thatcher said she hadn't known about it until she called the President minutes before. "It's a benign invasion," Reagan had told her, asserting that one thousand Americans had to be evacuated from the island after a communist takeover. Mrs. Thatcher told the Queen that she, too, was upset, but Britain would not condemn the invasion. "We stand by the United States and will continue to do so in the larger alliances," said the Prime Minister. "The United States is the final guarantor of freedom in Europe."

The Queen showed her displeasure during that meeting by not offering the Prime Minister a seat. Afterward she reported Thatcher's reaction: "Only two curtsies today." The exaggerated deference of the Prime Minister, who referred to herself as "we," amused the royal family. Prince Philip dismissed her as "the greengrocer's daughter" because she was born in a flat above her family's grocery in Grantham. The Queen, known for her wicked mimicry, relished telling Margaret Thatcher jokes. Her favorite was about the Prime Minister's visiting an old age home.

"Do you know who I am?" said the Queen, imitating Thatcher'S grandiose accent as she shook the hand of an elderly resident.

"No," replied the befuddled resident, "but if you ask Matron, she'll tell you."

Once, however, a joke backfired. There is a story, probably true, about a Commonwealth diplomat who went to Buckingham Palace to present his credentials. When the Queen thought he had gone, she began to mimic him, then saw, to her distress, that he was still in the room. "Not bad, ma' am," he said courteously as he bowed himself out, "not bad."

The Queen's press secretary tries to humanize the monarch by emphasizing her sense of humor, which frequently lurks behind a stern facade. He disclosed that the royal family called the Queen "Miss Piggyface" when she looked bored or displeased. She, too, made fun of herself that way. Watching a video of the royal wedding, she called to her husband, "Philip, come here and look. I've got my Miss Piggyface on."

"Sometimes, certainly not always, Her Majesty enjoyed watching her puppet on Spitting Image," said her press secretary, referring to the satirical television show that used rubberized puppets to make fun of the royal family and other establishment figures. One sketch that amused the Queen featured a rubber caricature of the Prime Minister heavily rouged cheeks, pointed nose, and hair plastered in place talking to the Queen's puppet, dressed in a dowdy sweater set with a babushka tied over her crown.

"At least we don't strut around in ludicrous little hats," said the Margaret Thatcher puppet.

"But you'd love to, wouldn't you," retorted the Queen's puppet.

The Queen's relationship with Margaret Thatcher was always proper and cordial, but never as warm and cozy as the rapport she had enjoyed with Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson. Part of the problem was the Queen's preference for men. "She regards female inferiority as the natural order of things," said British historian David Cannadine. "The other part of the problem was Margaret Thatcher herself," Prince Charles told his biographer. "She was too formidable." The Prince described the Prime Minister to the

editor of the Sunday Express as "a bit like a school ma'am." Charles eventually became so disenchanted with Thatcher's conservative policies that he sent a memo to the Queen, imploring her to do something before the Prime Minister ruined the country. The Queen, who came to agree with her son, could do nothing, but she occasionally shared her displeasure with Commonwealth leaders.

"Her Majesty was not at ease with Margaret Thatcher's policies," said Robert Hawke, the former Prime Minister of Australia. "She saw her as dangerous." During a dinner with Lord Shawcross, the Queen expressed anger toward her Prime Minister because Margaret Thatcher had reneged on granting the Shah of Iran asylum in England. "Once you give your word," the Queen said, "that's it."

Despite her negative feelings, the Queen did not withhold the Order of the Garter from her Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher left office. Limited to twenty-four citizens, the Garter, the highest order of chivalry, is usually bestowed by the monarch on a retired prime minister who has not been defeated in a general election.

The Queen was just as politically suspect to Margaret Thatcher, who told conservative aides that Her Majesty was not "one of us." The Iron Lady clashed with the Queen over a Commonwealth statement opposing apartheid. She did not share the monarch's fervor for the Commonwealth; she cared more about Britain's stature in Europe. In fact, she dismissed the Commonwealth as a bunch of greedy beggars.

The Queen confided in Anthony Benn, a Labor MP, that she loathed the Common Market and considered its leaders rude, cynical, and disillusioned. In his diary Benn suggested that the Queen's negative attitude came from seeing there was no role for her in a European union. Benn, a republican, also derided the Queen, saying she was incapable of saying "Good morning" without a courtier's script.

Yet the Queen, despite her Prime Minister, remained devoted to her dominions. And she did everything possible to shore up the creaky concept of monarchy, especially in Canada and Australia, where republican sentiments ran high. By 1982 she had made twelve

royal tours of Canada and nine of Australia. And she maintained the Crown's presence in both countries by regularly dispatching members of her family to visit. In 1983 she sent the Prince and Princess of Wales to Australia for six weeks, although the Princess at first refused to go. After considerable wrangling, she agreed, but she insisted on taking their nine-month-old baby and his nanny.

"You know how you felt," Diana told Charles. "You were miserable when your mother left you for months at a time, and you were older than Wills." She reminded her husband of what he had told her about his lonely childhood. Diana felt that he had been emotionally damaged by his parents, who were too busy for him because they were constantly traveling. "I will not do that to Wills," she said in front of her staff. She cited books she'd read about the first two years of a child's life being the time when a sense of self-esteem and security are implanted. "I know he's just a baby," she said, "but he still needs our attention."

Diana believed in tactile mothering or, as she defined it, "lots of hugs and cuddles." Frequently she startled the nanny, Barbara Barnes, by dashing into the nursery at odd hours when the baby was sleeping. "I just came to kiss him," Diana said, reaching for Wills and waking him up. An anxious mother, she hovered over his bassinet and worried about his crying. "Are you sure he's all right?" The nanny, whom Wills called "Baba," became exasperated with the Princess, who worried about being displaced. A few years later Diana felt that her child was having trouble distinguishing between "Baba" and "Mama," so she fired the nanny.

When Charles suggested taking the baby on the 1983 tour, the Queen was dubious. But he explained that Diana did not want to be separated from their child for six weeks. The Queen listened patiently and agreed to make the necessary arrangements with the Foreign Office so the couple could travel with their baby. Even so, she was concerned.

Diana's behavior had been worrying the Queen, especially since Diana's ski trip to Austria months before. The Prince and Princess had attracted throngs of paparazzi, who crowded the slopes, shops, and restaurants, causing pandemonium. Pushing and shouting to get closer to the royal couple, the press jostled a crush

of tourists gathered to gawk. The resort town looked as if it had been invaded by lunatics, all carrying cameras and microphones. Photographers, desperate to get a picture of Diana, crashed through doors and broke shop windows as they chased after her. It took the police to restore order.

Once charming and cooperative with the media, Diana now refused to pose. She resented being followed every time she appeared in public. She hid her face in her coat collar, jammed her hands in her pockets, and lowered her head. She pulled her ski cap over her eyes, wore large goggles, and refused to smile.

On the slopes, Prince Charles begged her to cooperate. "Please, darling, please," he said. "Give them a smile and we'll get on with it." Diana stared at the ground.

"Please don't hide like that," he implored, leaning toward her. She stiffened and pulled away, keeping her head down.

"Diana, you're just being stupid," he said, irritated. "Please, darling, you've got to cooperate." She would not look up.

"Your Royal Highness," begged one photographer, "just a little smile. Like the old days." Diana buried her face in her hands and held her head for a full five minutes, further frustrating Charles and the cameraman.

Photographs of the sulking Princess and her forlorn husband appeared in the British press with daily stories about the commotion she was causing: there were reports of one~hundred-mile-an-hour car chases of the Princess trying to dodge photographers and blond decoys she sent out to distract photographers; barricades thrown up and borders closed to the press; reporters roughed up and photographers driven off the road. When the Queen read about a British cameraman bloodied by a royal security guard, she sent a member of her staff to calm the disturbance.

Victor Chapman, a Canadian diplomat with a merry sense of humor, flew to Liechtenstein that afternoon with Francis Cornish of Charles's staff to deal with the Princess. During their meeting with the royal couple, Cornish began by reciting to Diana her obligations as royalty. He told her sternly that she owed it to Her Majesty to cooperate with the press people. Diana, who could no longer abide the courtiers, ignored Cornish, but she responded to

the gentle flirtation of Chapman, who winked during the stern lecture.

"Vic was a lovely man," recalled one of his friends. "He'd been married twice and had five daughters. He loved women and knew just how to handle Diana. He flattered and cajoled and teased her."

At the time, the Princess of Wales was a psychological mess. But she looked stunning, having starved off the weight (fifty-three pounds) she had gained during pregnancy. She had shopped every day to keep her mind off her hunger, and the results were remarkable. Diana knew that style was the first priority of a princess, and she was determined to become the best-dressed Princess of Wales in history. She would show substance beneath the surface later; right now all she cared about was creating a lip-smacking first impression. She studied her photographs in the newspapers and read every word of commentary about her clothes. She consulted fashion editors and designers. She let them know that she intended to bring style and glamour to her role and distance herself from the rest of the Windsor women in their white purses, garden party hats, and sturdy platform shoes. With glistening blond hair and a year-round tan, she looked as bewitching as any movie star. "Gorgeous is the only word for her," sighed Vogue magazine. "Heart-stoppingly gorgeous.

Certainly few suspected that the Princess was bulimic or that she was suffering from postnatal depression. The Palace assumption was that she was merely acting spoiled and temperamental. She later confided to Chapman that she was bored with performing her royal duties and intended to get pregnant again as soon as she could. "I'd rather eat and have babies* than collect bouquets," she said.

"I quite agree, ma'am," he said, "but please let's not share that information with Francis [Cornish] just yet." Chapman achieved such a warm rapport with Diana that the Queen sent him on the royal tour of Australia in 1983.

*Months later the Princess was pregnant and announced her news to the royal family at Balmoral. The Queen ordered Champagne to celebrate. Within a week Diana had miscarried. She became pregnant a third time in 1983 and gave birth to Ptince Harry on September 15,1984.

"That's where he revolutionized Diana," said a woman also on the trip. "Vic showed her how to be a princess. He coached her: `It would be lovely if you did a dance for the cameras with your husband,' he said before the night of the charity dance at the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne. Diana pulled a face, but he encouraged her. `Have fun with it. Show them your style.' He flattered her, said that Diana was the best dancer he'd ever seen.

`The best?' she asked.

"Vic laughed. `The best after Dame Margot Fonteyn. And that's only because she's got Nureyev.' Diana said she was stuck with Charles, who had admitted to all of us how much he dreaded having to get up at formal dinners and start the dancing. `I assure you,' he had said, `it makes my heart sink to have to make an awful exhibition of ourselves.'

"Vic was playful with Diana. He relaxed her. She mugged at him as her lady-in-waiting fussed with her jewelry that evening. Diana took the necklace and put it over her head rather than wait to have it clasped around her neck. She couldn't get it over the bridge of her nose. `My honker's too big,' she said. Vic roared. `Leave it there,' he said. `It's young and fun, like you. Just be your wonderful self. They want nothing more than a beautiful princess. They'll love you.

And they did. The photograph of Charles and Diana dancing relieved Britons, who had begun to worry about their less-than- perfect Princess. With Queen Mary's emeralds wrapped around her head, Disco Di was a triumph.

When the tour was over, Diana gave her lady-in-waiting Anne Beckwith-Smith an expensive pair of earrings. The card read: "I couldn't have done it without you."

The problem of the Princess had been solved, but the solution upset the Prince. "We've got trouble," Chapman told his friend Carolyn Townshend when he returned to England. "She's too popular, and he doesn't like it a bit."

The Prince did not understand his wife's appeal. He expected his intelligence to be prized over her beauty and resented the adulation she stirred in crowds, who wanted to see her and not him. He smarted when people crossed the street to be on her side, not his.

Because Diana looked like an angel and carried the aura of a royal princess, she fulfilled people's dreams in a way that he never could. And he was envious. She tapped into emotions that were deeply rooted in fantasy and nourished by fairy tales as an image of perfection, worthy of adoration. The title of Her Royal Highness, conferred by marriage, elevated her in people's eyes. Like a saint, she was automatically revered and considered deserving of worship. She packaged herself exquisitely, and her beauty, combined with natural warmth, made her magnetic. Charles, for all his worthy causes, looked dull, whereas Diana dazzled.

"One of the world's few true generalizations," wrote Simon Sebag Montefiore in Psychology Today, "is that all nations, includ - ing the British and the Americans, fight the boredom of everyday life by admiring and despising the flaws and glamour of their dynasties."

So, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Grace of Monaco before her, the Princess of Wales became a decorative focus for the masses. Treated as a natural phenomenon, she became an object of mass hysteria. People lined up for hours to see her pass by. They reached out to touch her and felt blessed if she smiled in their direction. Unlike her earnest husband, she excited people. She possessed the incandescence of a movie star, and he couldn't stand it.

"Vic had seen the conflict developing in Australia," recalled Townshend, "so he tried to set things right for Charles. Vic suggested some jocular comments for the Prince to make at the farewell banquet in Auckland a' la President Kennedy's wonderful line about being the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and enjoying every minute. But Charles was not John F. Kennedy."

Whenever the Prince tried to be self-deprecating, he sounded strained and unnatural. Seeing someone wave a bouquet in Diana's direction, he offered to give it to her. "I'm just a collector of flowers these days," he said. His delivery suggested a sinner who sees redemption in self-inflicted humor but can't make the leap of faith. Although distinctly uncomfortable poking fun at himself, he made an effort. "I have come to the conclusion that it really would have

been easier to have had two wives," he said. "Then they could cover both sides of the street and I could walk down the middle, directing operations."

Because he was the Prince of Wales, everyone laughed. But Chapman knew how hard it was for Charles to step aside and let his wife be the star.

"Vic stayed with us in the country," said Townshend, "and the calls came in late at night from the Prince of Wales, who was worried about some negative article that had appeared. `There's nothing you can do about it,' Vic would say. The rest of the people around Charles would shuffle and shamble: `Oh, yes, Your Royal Highness, you are absolutely right, sir. Such rubbish. It's an outrage. Indeed. Yes, sir. Yes sir. Three bags full, sir.' But not Vic. He shot straight and told Charles exactly like it was.

"Diana bit her fingernails to the quick because she worried about the tabloid stories displeasing the Palace. She once appeared in a new hairstyle that, unfortunately, upstaged the Queen, who was opening Parliament. Princess Margaret was furious and said something to Charles, who gave Diana unshirted hell. Poor thing, she quaked in those days. Her nails were the giveaway: if they were short and chewed, there was trouble."

The British press reported that for the first three years of her marriage, Diana said only five hundred words in public. She was too intimidated to make a speech or appear without her husband. Her first solo appearance was in France, not England, when she attended the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco. On the strength of their one meeting, Diana had considered the Princess to be a close friend. "We were psychically connected," she told Grace's daughter Caroline. Diana, who believed in astrology and numerology, felt that she and the Princess of Monaco were born under the same star and shared mystical characteristics. In fact, both came from dysfunctional families. Both were third children. Both had married royal princes. Both became more famous than their husbands. Both paid a heavy price.

This was confirmed for Diana several years later, when Robert Lacey published a biography entitled Grace, which disclosed her excessive drinking, her fraying marriage, and her extramarital love

affairs. Diana said the book substantiated her psychic intuitions. When Grace died in 1982, Diana had to fight to attend her funeral. The Palace did not want her to go, although no one else in the British royal family had volunteered. Diana said the glowing press coverage she received for going to the funeral had reassured her that she had done the right thing.

Charles was more concerned about receiving credit for his own good works. He said he had been the first member of the royal family to give blood, but no one paid attention. "I did this to reassure the country after the AIDS scare caused a drop in blood bank donations, but all the press cared about was Diana's frock," he complained to his equerry. "Journalists are creeps bloody hacks, all of them."

His equerry realized how much the Prince of Wales longed to be appreciated as a humanitarian. "I wish I were Bob Geldof," Charles said after the Irish rocker was honored for raising millions for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Eager to please his master, the equerry phoned a reporter and mentioned that the Prince carried a donor card authorizing doctors to use his organs in a lifesaving operation. The reporter wrote the story, but it was barely noticed because Diana had appeared at a benefit the night before wearing a one-shouldered silver-spangled sheath, and her photographs dominated the news coverage.

Days later the dogged equerry called a BBC radio show to say the Prince had been studying the causes of unrest in inner cities. He said Charles had spent a night walking the dark streets of London, visiting shelters and talking to the homeless.

The polo-playing Prince saw himself as a man of the people, but his sister said he was far "too grand" for the role. She pointed out that his staff at Highgrove had to wear specially designed uniforms, including the feathers of the Prince of Wales, and bow every day when they first addressed him. When leaving the room, they usually backed out. His valet of twelve years concurred. "I was successful in knowing him well,,, said Stephen Barry, "but I could never forget that he was the master and I the servant."

Charles did not recognize the irony in preaching fuel conservation while driving a gas-guzzling ten-miles-to-the-gallon Bentley.

He described himself as a gentleman farmer who was committed to urban renewal when not presiding over his country estate. Although one of the richest men in the world, he was passionate about the poor. He demonstrated his concern during a two-day visit to the United States: he spent the first day touring the slums of Pittsburgh and the second day playing polo in Palm Beach. He recuperated from both stops by flying to Switzerland to ski.

In England Charles craved a role in the public policy debate. He seized his opportunity in May 1984, when he addressed the Royal Institute of British Architects on their 150th anniversary. The architects expected to be praised, but the Prince of Wales lambasted them as elitists. He said their inhospitable designs ignored the feelings and wishes of ordinary people. He cited as an example the modern glass-and-steel annex proposed for the National Gallery of Art in London. Charles said the design was a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."

His speech made the front pages of Britain's newspapers, and he felt quite pleased, especially when the proposed plan was canceled. "I've fought hard for a role as the Prince of Wales," he told the editor of the Sunday Telegraph during a private lunch. "I feel I should do and say things in my position that, one hopes, can be a stimulus to the country's conscience, a bit of a pinprick." Some architects griped that he was less the first half and more the last half.

"I later felt obliged to challenge his opinion," said Gordon Graham, former president of the Royal Academy of British Architects. "I did it politely, but I did do it." Graham said he had experienced no royal repercussions after his speech, but his friends disagreed.

"Nonsense," said Ian Coulter, an international consultant who once worked for Randolph Churchill. "Gordon Graham gave up his knighthood with that speech. By directly challenging the heir apparent, he tilted at the biggest windmill of them all. If the Sun King turns his back on you, you're in his shadow. Royalty has patronage and support, and if it's withdrawn, you're a dead man."

Charles understood his power, but he did not understand criticism. He was accustomed to excessive praise, but for months now

magazines and newspapers had ridiculed him, his wife, and his marriage. Vanity Fair said he was "pussy-whipped from here to eternity." His mistress had described his wife as a mouse, but others considered her a royal rat. She had purged his staff of over forty p~eople who had either resigned or been fired. She retired most of the pink mafia," as she called the homosexuals on Charles's staff, because she did not want them around her young sons. She even banished her husband's old Labrador because the dog was incontinent.

Diana was just as miffed as Charles by the tabloid stories of her "compulsive shopping" and the "exorbitant amounts of money" she was "squandering" on "high-style fashions." One newspaper estimated that after British Vogue started advising her, she spent $1.4 million in one year for 373 outfits, complete with hats, belts, shoes, and purses. "It's not true, it's not true," she wailed. "In the beginning, I had to buy endless new things, of course, because on a tour you change three or four times a day. I bad to buy new things. I couldn't go around in a leopardskin."

Since then her closets had expanded to six suites in Kensington Palace. One room was reserved solely for shoes: "Three hundred and twenty pairs," she gleefully told her friend Sarah Ferguson, "and that's not counting my trainers." Diana soon learned to send her bills to the British Foreign Office for the designer clothes she wore on royal tours. For a sixteen-day trip of Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, her clothing bill was $122,000.

She was distressed by the stories of how she had changed from a dewy-eyed virgin into a self-obsessed harridan. She was inaccurately blamed for turning her husband into a muzzy mystic, whom she no longer allowed to hunt and shoot.

Charles fretted continually about his media coverage. He did not read the tabloids, which he called "the cheap and impertinent gutter press." But he complained that the quality papers he did read were not adequately reporting his worthy endeavors. Over a private lunch he grumbled to Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne, "I sometimes wonder why I don't pack it in and spend my time playing polo."

Like politicians, who live and die by polls, Charles and Diana

scrambled to find spin doctors. They asked everyone around them for advice, calling upon Tory Members of Parliament, discreet editors, and worshipful courtiers. They sought counsel from lawyers and media consultants, inviting them all to Kensington Palace to pick their brains.

"It was in November 1984 that I lunched with them," John Junor, former editor of the Sunday Express, wrote in his memoirs. "The Prince remarked that he hoped Princess Diana would begin to give interviews. But he added, `Perhaps not just yet. It might be wise to wait until she has more experience.'

The Princess agreed. "I just hate the sound of my own voice," she said. "I can't bear it. When I launched that new liner last week, I just couldn't believe it when I heard myself afterward. It just didn't sound like me."

The Prince laughed. "I felt exactly the same way. I just couldn't believe that yakkety-yak voice was mine. So upper-class."

Charles asked Junor for advice on how to handle public relations and combat "the idiotic stories" that appeared in the press. The Prince spoke at length about his concerns the disadvantaged youth of the country, the inadequacy of the Church of England and the editor listened. So did Diana, until Junor turned to include her in the conversation.

"Darling, I'm so sorry," said Charles. "I've done all the talk ing. Did you have something you wanted to say?"

The Princess nodded. Then she poured out to Junor her resentment about the way in which she had been attacked for influencing her husband and turning him against shooting and hunting.

The Prince broke in. "I'm angry about that, too. Because my wife is doing nothing of the kind. My wife actually likes hunting and shooting. It is I who have turned against it."

"It's all his own decision," Diana told another journalist. "I was brought up in the country and like shooting. I shot a deer at Balmoral on our honeymoon. I just think Charles has gone a bit potty."

Charmed by the Princess, John Junor had reservations about the Prince. "Charles was a serious, perhaps too serious, young man,

obsessed with the idea of serving the nation, in some danger of overwhelming his wife, and in even greater danger of boring her."

After weeks of consultations with their advisers, including an astrologer, the Prince and Princess decided to go on television. They said they wanted to be interviewed ("by a respectful interviewer, of course," Charles stipulated) so they could present themselves to people without the subjectivity of newspapers. "Let people see us as we really are," said Diana. In exchange for the privilege of this interview, Independent Television gave them editorial control and assured them of soft lighting. "I wouldn't want my [bald] patch to blind viewers," Charles joked.

They called Sir Richard Attenborough, the film director, to coach them. Under his guidance they became world-class illusionists. Charles played the romantic lead; Diana was the pretty ingenue. The two little Princes, Wills and Harry, were the extras pounding the piano in the background. As the future King, Charles was to appear strong, resolute, and worthy of trust. As his consort, Diana was to sit by his side, sweetly and supportively. By October 1985 they knew their parts to perfection.

"People expect a great deal of us," Charles began earnestly, "and I'm always conscious I'm sure you are, too, darling of not wanting to let people down, not wanting to let this country down." Diana looked up at him demurely and nodded.

She was asked about her role. "To support my husband," she said, "and always be behind him and encouraging. And also a more important thing, being a wife and mother."

For forty-five minutes they performed flawlessly. She said she never dieted; he didn't even know what a Ouija board looked like. She denied being a shopaholic; he did not practice homeopathy. She professed the greatest respect for Princess Anne. He kept an open mind about architecture.

When the interviewer delicately approached the rumors about Diana's being a domineering wife and dictating her husband's taste, she looked surprised. "I might pick the odd tie now and then," she said, "but that's it." Later, she said Charles chuckled about that response, remembering her frenzied efforts to overhaul his appearance. She had spent days rummaging through his closets, discarding

his solid blue shirts "so boring" and substituting Turnbull & Asser's stripes, tossing out single-button jackets in favor of double- breasted blazers, throwing away lace-up cordovans "too fiddy duddy" and bringing in tasseled loafers. She even sent him to her hairdresser with instructions for blow-drying: "Cover up the patch." Because of his big ears, she told Charles not to wear hats. "You'll look like a Volkswagen with both doors wide open.

On television the royal couple shared an easy camaraderie and playfulness that dispelled rumors about their marriage. They bantered briefly, smiled frequently, and enchanted viewers. The interview was later shown on American television to coincide with their 1985 trip to Washington, D.C. This was to be Diana's first visit to the United States, so the Queen sent her Palace press secretary to the States to handle the media. Michael Shea briefed American reporters on how they were expected to behave, admonishing them to question only the Prince and not the Princess. "She will not answer," he said, "so don't even try."

Throughout the two-day tour Diana said nothing publicly. As they were leaving, she was asked how she liked Washington.

"Very good," she said softly, "I

Charles interrupted. "Speaking as her spokesman," he said in a booming voice, "she thinks it's wonderful."

Shea shot a reproving look at the reporter who had dared to address his question to the Princess instead of the Prince. The reporter rolled his eyes.

"Well then, sir," said the reporter, looking at Charles, "did the Princess enjoy the White House dinner?"

"I think you enjoyed it, didn't you, darling?" said Charles. "She would be an idiot if she did not enjoy dancing with John Travolta, wouldn't she?"

Days before the Reagans' dinner dance for the royal couple, the President's wife had instructed the Marine Band to rehearse the music from Saturday Night Fe~er so that its star, John Travolta, could twirl the Princess around the Grand Foyer of the White House. Knowing that Diana once dreamed of becoming a ballerina, Mrs. Reagan had seated her next to Mikhail Baryshnikov, director of the American Ballet Theater. The First Lady also invited Diana's

favorite stars: Neil Diamond, Tom Selleck, and Clint Eastwood. Much as the Republican First Lady loved Prince Charles, she did not invite his favorite movie star Barbra Streisand because she was a liberal Democrat. By happy coincidence, all of Diana's favorite stars were conservative male Republicans who had supported Ronald Reagan.

Still, the Princess was not impressed by the President and the First Lady. Diana privately referred to Reagan as "Horlicks," her slang for a boring old person, and she told Andrew Neil (editor of the London Sunday Times) that she considered Nancy Reagan a vulgar American. She said the only reason the First Lady had come to London the year before was to get her picture taken with the royal couple and Prince William.

At the White House the President claimed the first dance of the evening with the Princess, who had to bite her lip to keep from laughing when he flubbed her name during his after-dinner remarks. Standing up to welcome the couple, Reagan offered a toast to Prince Charles and "his lovely lady, Princess David." He quickly corrected himself and called her "Princess Diane."

"What did he say?" whispered ballerina Suzanne Farrell. "Did he call her Princess David?"

"Don't worry," replied actor Peter Ustinov. "He's just thinking of next weekend at Camp Diana."

The White House dinner in honor of the royal couple was touted as the most glittering party of the year. But the British press corps was unimpressed. They sniped at the Reagans and their tireless efforts to mingle with royalty and criticized the White House press corps as lazy. "They don't even know how to doorstep," said James Whitaker of the Daily Mirror. Whitaker and his colleagues prided themselves on dogging reluctant targets to their doorstep. Mrs. Reagan had barred press coverage of the dinner dance, so the British reporters followed the movie stars to their hotels. "We ambushed them to find out what went on," Whitaker said proudly. "The American reporters didn't care. They went home to bed. They were indescribably indolent." For their part, the American reporters said the British might sound cultivated but behaved like animals.

The BBC correspondent had set the scornful tone of British media coverage when he reported the royal couple's arrival at the White House: "President Reagan greeted the Prince and Princess wearing a plaid jacket that was remarkably similar to the carpet at Balmoral Castle."

That evening, after the royals and the Reagans had danced the first dance, the First Lady approached Travolta. "It's time now, John," she said. The movie star walked over to the Princess's table and asked her to dance. "I was thrilled," Diana said. Everyone stopped talking to watch them and completely ignored the Prince of Wales, who was dancing with Suzanne Farrell.

"The Princess got wind that it was a special moment," recalled Travolta, "and she really seemed to take off. She had great rhythm. We did spins and turns. We did a kind of modern fox-trot, and she followed me very well. She's a good little mover.

The guests applauded wildly when the music stopped and Travolta escorted Diana back to her seat. The willowy Princess, flushed with excitement, wanted to dance again. She whispered to Clint Eastwood how much she would enjoy dancing with a man taller than she was. She confided to him that at five feet ten inches, she had been told to wear low heels so she would not tower over her husband.

"But you're over six feet tall,,, she said to the craggy-faced actor.

"I'd ask you to dance," Eastwood said, deadpan, "but you're too old for me."

"I'm only twenty-four," Diana said flirtatiously.

"Oh, all right," said the fifty~five-year-old movie star. "I'll make an exception."

Eastwood described his dance with Diana by paraphrasing a line he had made famous in his Dirty Harry movies: "She made my day.

As dazzled as the celebrities were to meet Diana, she in turn was just as excited to meet them, including explorer Jacques Cous-

*When the author called the actor in 1996 to confirm the 1985 incident, Eastwood's agent said to delete the "made-my-day" quote: "We don't use that line anymore."

teau, skater Dorothy Hamill, artist David Hockney, Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, and actress Brooke Shields. She told Baryshnikov that she had gotten his autograph years before when he'd appeared at Covent Garden.

"I was one of those girls who was waiting for you for hours and hours after your performance," she said.

She asked Dorothy Hamill if there were gossip magazines and society magazines in America as there were in England. "They can be so nice," Diana said. "They ask you three lovely questions, and then they throw in a zinger question." She also inquired about television talk shows and wanted to know about Johnny Carson and the Tonight show.

"Of course, Joan Rivers's name came up," recalled Dorothy Hamill, who sat at Diana's table, "and Baryshnikov chimed in, `No, don't do that! Don't go on Joan Rivers's show.'"

At a luncheon the next day in Upperville, Virginia, at philanthropist Paul Mellon's estate, the British royal couple were introduced to Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. A few days later in Palm Beach at a charity ball, the Prince and Princess met Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, and Joan Collins, who had recently married a man sixteen years younger than she. Diana was fascinated by the fifty-three-year-old television star of Dynasty and cornered a reporter from the Daily Mail to pump him about Collins's latest wedding. "She's amazing," said Diana. "At her age. Husband number four."

In Washington and Palm Beach large crowds had lined the streets to welcome the royal couple. Young girls jumped up and down and screamed with excitement when they saw Diana. The Princess of Wales had become an international icon, who inspired the same kind of ear-splitting ruckus as a rock star. When she accompanied her husband to religious services in Washington's National Cathedral, more than twelve thousand people turned out. "I think it's her flying saucer hat," said Prince Charles.

In a lighthearted farewell toast in Washington, D.C., he said: "A gentleman of the press asked me, rather tactlessly, I thought, why there was a bigger crowd outside the cathedral than when I

was last here on my own. The answer, of course, is that they all turned out to see my new clothes."

The audience responded appreciatively and laughed again when he referred to his wedding as a production of sanctified show business. "My wife and myself have been completely overwhelmed by the extraordinary, enthusiastic, and friendly welcome that we've received here," Charles said. "Perhaps it's the fact that we got married four years ago in a rather well-known ecclesiastical bull ring in London and it wasn't actually filmed in Hollywood."

Although most of the attention was focused on Diana with her youth and beauty, Charles, not surprisingly, charmed several older women. "I must admit I found him the more interesting of the two, wrote U.S. Chief of Protocol Selwa Roosevelt in her memoirs. "He was well read, spoke beautifully, had his father's charm and a great sense of humor." But President Reagan's daughter, Maureen, was more candid. ``We all loved Charles," she said, "but Diana was stupid. Someone should tell her that it doesn't p)y well that dopey looking-up-through-the-eyelashes bit of hers.

By the time she returned to London, the Princess of Wales had become a walking monument. British opinion polls said she was the country's greatest tourist attraction a bigger draw than Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament combined. One national survey calculated that from 1983 through 1985 she had generated $66.6 million in revenue from magazines, books, and tourists. She was hailed as the only member of the royal family to shake hands without gloves, to sign autographs, to kiss heads of state, and to embrace AIDS patients. She brought charm to the stolid House of Windsor, and on the evening of December 23, 1985, she also bestowed sex appeal.

She had accompanied Prince Charles to a benefit at Covent Garden for London's Royal Opera House. During the intermission, she excused herself. Leaving him alone in the royal box, she quietly slipped backstage to prepare a surprise.

When the curtain went up, a reed slim blonde twirled from the wings to center stage in a slinky white satin slip with spaghetti straps. People gasped audibly when they recognized the dancer, who was swaying to the pop music of Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl":

Uptown girl, She's been living in her white bread world For as long as anyone with hot blood can And now she's looking for a downtown man.

In her white satin heels, the Princess of Wales (five feet ten) towered over her partner (five feet two), Wayne Sleep. The royal ballet dancer, who was in the Guinness Book of Records for making more scissor-legged leaps than Nijinsky, was hardly noticed. All eyes were riveted on Diana.

She had secretly rehearsed the routine in Kensington Palace as a Christmas present for her husband. She presented it to him in front of 2,600 people who had never seen royalty slink seductively across a stage.

"The Prince nearly fell out of his chair," recalled Sleep, "especially when she did the kicks over my head. . . . That kick routine brought the house down. . . . I could not believe how good she was. She was so confident and so sure of herself that she even curtsied to the royal box." Sleep gathered her up in his arms and carried her off stage. "I was the one who was nervous," he said, "knowing that I was holding the future Queen of England."

Roaring approval, the audience gave the pop Princess a standing ovation. Then they gave her eight curtain calls, and she took her bows, looked directly at her husband, and smiled. And she wanted to do an encore. "I said no," said Sleep, "because they would start nitpicking. She's a good dancer, but she isn't a professional. She started to do it again, and I had to drag her off. She loved it."

Diana returned to the stage months later to make a video of herself dancing to the theme song of Phantom of the Opera. After seeing the Andrew Lloyd Webber show six times, she told the manager of Her Majesty's Theatre in London that she wanted to be filmed dancing to the love song "All I Ask of You." She said it was to be a gift for her husband's birthday. Because it was a request from the Princess of Wales for the Prince, the theater manager agreed to make the stage and orchestra available to her. She admitted later that the video was never intended for Charles but, rather, for her own private use.

She did not object when the official photographer for the Opera House sold his pictures of her daring dance with Wayne Sleep for thousands of dollars. "It was the sexiest performance I'd ever seen at Covent Garden," said the photographer.

Unfortunately, the Prince, who had stood up to applaud his wife publicly, berated her in private for flaunting herself in an undignified manner. He rejected her gift of dance as a narcissistic exhibition and said it was just another one of her ploys to upstage him. He took no pride in her talent. Instead he felt humiliated and consoled himself in the comforting arms of his mistress.

FIFTEEN

Sarah Ferguson was one patient we never wanted to lay eyes

on again. She was obnoxious rude, demanding, and coarse," said Stephen Maitin, a London practitioner of homeopathy. "A few months before her wedding, she came to our Victoria Street clinic to be treated for obesity. She was brought in by her wedding dress designer, who was frantic to get her in shape.

"The designer, Lindka Cierach, was going through hell getting Sarah slimmed down and calmed down. We treated her at the clinic with needles and prescriptions, and my partner also treated her at Buckingham Palace, where she was living. But, after a few sessions, we washed our hands of her. She expected us to be on call for her around the clock: if she was bingeing, we were supposed to drop everything and treat her. If she was overwrought, we were supposed to tranquilize her. If she was hung over, we were supposed to give her massages. Whether it was food, sex, or alcohol, her appetites were out of control; she did everything to excess

everything. She abused herself with too much cocaine, too many amphetamines, too much Champagne. Food, food, food, and sex all the time."

The spring of 1986 was a trying time for Sarah Margaret Ferguson, the twenty-six-year-old known as Fergie, who was engaged to marry Prince Andrew. "Sarah definitely needed help," said Lindka Cierach, "and I tried to get it for her. . . . I would take her through the back door of the clinic and let her pay me for the treatments so no one would know."

The announcement of her engagement to marry HRH Prince Andrew had thrilled her family. The Prince's valet, James Berry, recalled her father's reaction when the news became public. "He hopped up and down on one leg in sheer happiness, chewing his fingers on one hand, and letting out shouts of joy."

"We did get quite emotional about it," admitted Sarah's step- mother, Susan Ferguson, who months later was still awestruck. The Socialist W6rker, a British newspaper, had reported the news under the headline "Parasite to Marry Scrounger." The February announcement had jolted the Queen's press secretary, who had been advising reporters for months to disregard the relationship on the assumption that the exuberant Fergie would be just one more conquest for the Queen's twenty-six-year-old son.

Andrew, who had developed a reputation as a love-'em-andleave-'em bachelor, seemed to prefer actresses and models, and freckle-faced Fergie certainly did not fit the mold.

"I remember Michael [Shea] inviting two of us onto the royal yacht, Britannia, for a briefing on the Andrew and Fergie romance," recalled Steve Lynas, then a reporter for Today newspaper. "Shea reassured us, `There is no chance of these two becoming engaged.' We filed accordingly. But within a couple of days, the engagement was announced."

One cartoonist greeted the news by drawing the couple as Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. They stood before a preacher. "Do you, Raunchy, take Randy Andy, to be your lawful. .

Burke's Peerage, the bible of the aristocracy, was aghast that Prince Andrew, fourth in line to the throne, would choose a woman like Sarah Ferguson, "whose private life has, by the traditions of the royal family, been not only unorthodox, but well documented in the national press . . . six previous romances in six years . . . far more than Victorian in nature."

Sarah's father, Ronald Ferguson, a former army major, snorted with derision. "If she didn't have a past at twenty-six," he said, "people would be saying there was something wrong with her."

Precisely because of her background, some thought Fergie was

ideal for Andrew, who defined making love as "horizontal jogging" and whose idea of playfulness was to jam a live lobster down the front of his date's bathing suit. His boisterous style puzzled his friends. "I asked him about this once," said Ferdie Macdonald, who knew the Prince as a young bachelor. "`Why are you always squirting girls with water, sir, and throwing things at them?' I said. He seemed baffled. `They like it, don't they?' he said. `When I squirt them with water they squeal. Doesn't that mean they like it?'

Fergie, too, liked to play hard and play around. She made no apologies for her raffish love life. "I am a modern woman," she said. She swore easily, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and swapped dirty jokes with the boys. In one of her first television interviews, she used the word "prick." Wisecracking and raucous, she acted like the only dame dealt into the poker game. She said "yah" instead of "yes." When a BBC reporter asked what she had had for breakfast, she quipped, "Sausages and a migraine."

She said she suffered severe migraine headaches because of the frequent falls from her ponies when she was a child. A daredevil athlete, she won championship ribbons for skiing, swimming, and horseback riding. After competing in a steeplechase at midnight, she was awarded honorary membership in the Dangerous Sports Club, enabling her to wear the DSC badge of golden crutches. She was the only woman in the race. She never outgrew being the roughhousing tomboy who climbed trees and played pranks. She walked like a cowhand, with bowed legs and big strides, and she talked out of the side of her mouth.

Her classmates at Hurst Lodge, a boarding school in Sunning- dale, Berkshire, remember her for her hearty appetite. They called her "Seconds" because she lined up twice for every meal. Expansive and enthusiastic, she was also generous, sometimes embarrassing her friends by sending them huge bouquets and expensive presents. To support herself, she worked odd jobs sales clerk, messenger for travel agents, waitress, driver, and tour guide. To pay for ski trips to Switzerland, she worked as a chalet girl and cleaned hotel rooms.

Barely educated beyond high school, she took a course at

Queen's Secretarial College in London. "She does not show the influence of too many schools," noted one of her teachers. When she finished at the bottom of her class, she bragged that she'd barely learned how to type. Shrugging happily, she said, "I'd rather ride than read."

Her father also preferred horses to books. When Major Ron, as he liked to be called, was accused of using his daughter's engage~ ment to better himself, he insisted he did not need social advancement, especially through the royal family. "My mother was born Marian Louisa Montagu Douglas Scott, daughter of Lord Herbert Montague Douglas Scott, the fifth son of the sixth Duke of Buccleugh," he said. "To my amusement, Mother's family have always regarded their Buccleugh lineage as being socially superior to that of the Windsors!" Ferguson made sure the press knew that his family tree included four dukes and such ancestors as King Charles II and his mistress Lucy Walters. The Major was also a cousin of Robert Fellowes, the Queen's private secretary.

The Times wrote that Sarah Ferguson descended from landed gentry, landowners rather than aristocracy, with generations of service in the cavalry: "Every generation, down to her father, has held a commission in the Life Guards," the newspaper noted. "It is a family of old money, but not much."

The pursuit of money became a necessity in 1970, when Major Ron accepted the unpaid position of polo manager to Prince Charles. Having flunked the examination to become a colonel in the Life Guards, which ended his advancement in the military, the Major resigned from the army. He opened an office in the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, where he tacked a pinup calendar on the wall. Even as a civilian he insisted on his military rank. "Most people address me as Major," he told a writer who had called him Mr. Ferguson. He entitled his memoir T~e Galloping Majon

The Prince of Wales was twenty-one years old when he offered Major Ferguson the honorary job of arranging his polo games, and Ferguson, a passionate polo player, accepted gratefully. He solicited corporate sponsors like Cartier and Rolex, who were eager to be associated with the Prince of Wales, and asked them to underwrite polo tournaments and cover the Prince's expenses. This lucra

tive patronage also included handsome compensation for the Prince's polo manager himself.

"Ronald was delighted to get the offer from Prince Charles," recalled his first wife, Susan. "It allowed him to spend a lot of time with the Prince, and it also enabled Ronald to stay in the world which interested him most, the world of horses."

Two years later, in 1972, the Fergusons separated when Sarah and her sister, Jane, were teenagers. Ronald Ferguson intimated to friends that his wife, Susan, had had a love affair with Prince Philip when the two men played polo together during the l960s. Susan Ferguson, with her long hair and lean legs, was so sporty and elegant that designer Ralph Lauren once considered asking her to pose for a Polo ad. "She was definitely Philip's type," said her daughter. Publicly all Major Ferguson would say about his wife and Prince Philip was that the Queen's husband "certainly found my wife Susie's company much more enticing than mine."

Susan Ferguson denied having an affair with Prince Philip during her first marriage and swore that she had been faithful to her husband. "It was Ronald who had been seeing other women," she wrote in her memoir, "even while I was pregnant. . . . His flirtations caused me a lot of suffering. . . . I cried endlessly."

But she did not write about her relationship with Prince Philip after the end of her second marriage. Her daughter Sarah, though, frequently touched on the secret romance. She mentioned to acquaintances in New York City that her mother had been with Philip in Argentina during a World Wildlife Fund visit in November 1992. "It was the night of the Windsor Castle fire, which also happened to be the Queen's forty-fifth wedding anniversary," recalled one of Fergie's confidantes. "While Philip was with Susie in Buenos Aires, the Queen was by herself running pails at Windsor, trying to put out the fire." Ronald Ferguson was not surprised. "I always suspected that Prince Philip had an eye for Susie," he wrote in 1994. "Certainly, they remain friends to this day."

After sixteen years of marriage, Susan Ferguson left Ron Ferguson for another man and lost custody of her children. Her two daughters remained in England with their father in the Hampshire village of Dummer, sixty miles southwest of London. Once the

divorce was final, Susan Ferguson married Hector Barrantes, a dashing Argentinian, who had been Ronald Ferguson's keenest rival on the polo field. The couple moved to Buenos Aires, where Barrantes raised and trained some of the world's best polo ponies.

"Major Ron remained bitter for years," said writer Nicholas Monson. "He was still bleeding about his divorce when I interviewed him in 1986, and asked if Argentina could not play England in polo because of the Falklands War. `Hell, no,' he said. `Argentina can't play here because one of those bastards ran off with my wife.'

Major Ferguson admitted he was traumatized by his divorce. "It was a bit of a fright, to put it mildly, for everyone," he said. "It meant that at that vulnerable age my daughters didn't have Mother, so Father took over and did his best." He never fergave his wife. "That woman, you must remember, deserted her children," he told friends. He remarried in 1976 and started another family with Susan Deptford, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. Sarah jokingly introduced her to friends as "my wicked stepmother." The second Susan Ferguson soon learned that she, too, would have to contend with humiliation by a philandering husband.

"It's very acceptable behavior for some men," said Ronald Ferguson after he was caught patronizing a massage parlor employing prostitutes. "In fact, it's what I first liked about Prince Andrew. He had acquired quite a reputation as a ladies' man, for which I was rather relieved. He was a normal young sailor who had had a string of girlfriends; it all seemed very healthy as far as I was concerned."

Ever since Andrew's publicized love affair with the American actress Koo Stark, the Prince had been described in the press as "Randy Andy." During their romance, the tabloids had published nude pictures of Koo when she appeared as a lesbian in one of Britain's biggest-earning soft-porn films. These photographs showed her taking a shower with another woman. Months later the tabloids published pictures of Andrew as he skinny-dipped in Canada: "It's strip ahoy as naked Prince Andy larks about in the River." One downmarket magazine printed the photograph with a poem:

A rose is red

Koo is blue

Andy is Randy

What's HM to do?

On television, the satirical revue Spitting Image caricatured the handsome Prince as a nude puppet, holding up a glass of Champagne with links of sausage draped over his upper thigh. The Palace threatened to sue the show's producers, but the Director of Public Prosecutions urged royal restraint. "If I were you," he said to the Queen's lawyers, "I'd forget about it, because if you prosecute, they're going to turn up in court with that puppet." The palace backed off.

Weeks later, Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot's publisher, announced plans to publish a book with the photograph of the naked Prince Andrew puppet.* This time, instead of threatening a lawsuit, the Palace tried the tactic of shame.

"The Queen's press secretary rang me up," recalled Mathew Evans, chairman of Faber & Faber, "and said, `We are very disappointed that a publisher of your standing is marketing this tasteless book. We request that you do not reprint any more copies." Evans immediately upped the print order to five hundred thousand copies, and the book became a national best-seller.

"The Queen was hopping mad," recalled a secretary. "She said she didn't see any difference between the prestigious publisher of T. S. Eliot and the lurid Murdoch press."

Her Majesty had previously sued Murdoch's Sun for publishing breakfast-in-bed details about Prince Andrew's entertaining women in his private apartment at the Palace. "The women were always young and fanciable," a former Palace pantry aide told the tabloid, "and Andrew was always so sure of his chances so cheeky that he would order double bacon and eggs the night before."

*This image of Prince Andrew, as a highly eligihie hachelor, appeared in The Appolliogly Durespecefitl S~hting Jmage Book. Entitled "Hot Dog," its caption read: "Andy is hy far the dishiest royal, not having inherited many of the genetic disorders which mar the royal hloodline. Not for him the hump of Richard III, nor the hahhling insanity of Canute hut rather the legendary genitalia of Cuthhert the Ploughman (~l5-S20) who, according to the legend, plowed a small furrow wherever he went."

In selling his story, the former aide violated the confidentiality agreement he had signed as a condition of employment. The Queen was more incensed by his breach of contract than she was by his revelations. But Murdoch's paper paid the servant more than half ($3,~00) of what he made in one year working for the Queen. So the former kitchen helper spilled the beans. He said Andrew's lover, Koo Stark, romped through the Palace kitchen in short skirts and skimpy T-shirts, wearing the bright red dogtags that Andrew had given her after the Falklands War. The actress, four years older than Andrew, issued orders to the staff, organized picnics for herself and the Prince, and helped herself to the Queen's favorite chocolates. The first installment of the story ended with a titillating headline about the Princess of Wales: "Tomorrow: When Barefoot Di Buttered My Toast."

The Queen, who was on tour, contacted her lawyers in London, and within hours they obtained a permanent injunction. The next day's headline: "Queen Gags the Sun." The Queen then sued Murdoch for damages, and the Palace justified the monarch's unprecedented action with a terse statement:

The servant has breached an undertaking of confidence which all palace employees sign. In this declaration, they agree not to make any disclosures about their work at the palace. It is a legally binding document under civil law.

"We might have to move toward some policy of sanction," the Palace press secretary warned royal reporters. "The line must be drawn between legitimate public interest, which all members of the royal family recognize, and prurient interest in their private lives." The Queen was awarded damages of $6,000. The Sun agreed to pay the amount to the Newspaper Press Fund, plus payment of the Palace's legal costs.

The Duke of Edinburgh phoned his son and told him that his love affair with Koo Stark was over. "It's finished, Andrew," Philip said sternly. The twenty~three-year-old prince did not even think of protesting. He was too afraid of his father and too afraid of embarrassing his mother. In love, but immobilized with fear, he did not know what to do. So he did nothing. Despite avowals of love

to Koo Stark and a marriage proposal, he now drew back. He never apologized or explained. He simply did not call her or accept her callS.

"Koo Stark's life was ruined as a result of Andrew," said her friend Louise Allen Jones.

Although stunned and heartbroken, Koo Stark departed gracefully and maintained a discreet silence. She married months later and tried to resume her acting career. But she could never shed the identification with Andrew. Her marriage ended in divorce several years later, but she did not see Andrew again for years. Although he dated other women, he remained in love with Koo until the Princess of Wales decided to distract him with her friend Sarah Ferguson.

Diana had met Fergie at a polo match before her marriage, and they quickly became friends. They shared a fascination with astrologers, clairvoyants, and tarot card readers and compared notes on each of their sessions. During her marriage, Fergie regularly visited the basement apartment of a London faith healer known as Madame Vasso, who placed her under a blue plastic pyramid and chanted. Fergie said the Madame cleansed her while performing psychic cures.

Sarah had attended Diana's wedding and visited her several times in Kensington Palace when Diana was depressed, always making her laugh. She was the only person invited for lunch at Buckingham Palace on Diana's twenty-first birthday. "She's great fun," Diana told Andrew, who was her favorite in-law. She submitted Sarah's name to the Queen as someone young and single to include in the Windsor Castle house party for Royal Ascot week.

At the time, Fergie had hoped to marry Paddy McNally, a race car driver she had been living with on and off in Switzerland. She had proposed to him several times in their three-year relationship, but McNally, a forty-eight-year-old widower with children, kept saying no. Finally she issued an ultimatum: Either marry me or I'll leave. He offered to help her pack.

"She's been badly treated by men," said her friend Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine.

As her father had done to her mother, McNally frequently re-

duced Sarah to tears by openly pursuing other women. Now, hop ing to make him envious, she waved the Queen's invitation for Royal Ascot. He responded by encouraging her to take advantage of the opportunity to socialize with the royal family. He even drove her to Windsor for the weekend and deposited her into the hands of a royal footman. McNally cheerily waved good-bye and told her to enjoy herself.

Over lunch before the races, Sarah and Andrew became acquainted. Rather, reacquainted: they had met as children, twenty years earlier, at a royal polo game. At this reunion he fed her profiteroles and she punched him in the arm, saying they were much too fattening. He tried to stuff them into her mouth, and she laughingly threatened a food fight. Both rowdy and rambunctious, they shared the same lavatory sense of humor and fondness for bodily noises belches, burps, and grunts. "She whooped and hollered at all his fart jokes," recalled the waiter who served them at Windsor Castle. "As a joke, she later gave him an anatomically correct doll, and he displayed the ghastly thing in his suite at Buck House."

The gauche Prince, who banged his silverware on the table and helped himself to food before others were served, was described by some acquaintances as "Germanic, boorish, and a show-off just like his father." Others applauded him as the only one of the Queen s children "to pursue an honest-to-God job in the navy." He also studied photography and played golf like a pro.

Like his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father, Andrew had bypassed a university education to join the Royal Navy. When he went into the service, he was second in the line of succession, so he was accorded the privileges of royalty. He did not eat with the rest of the officers and insisted on having meals served to him in his private cabin. The chest patch on his flight suit read "HRH Prince Andrew." His nickname was "H" for Highness.

In 1981 he made a twelve-year commitment to the navy. The next year, during the Falklands War, he distinguished himself as a helicopter pilot. By the time he met Sarah in 1985, he was a lieutenant aboard the frigate HMS Bra~n. A few days after Royal Ascot,

he returned to his ship. But before going aboard, he sent Sarah roses and signed the card "A."

The Princess of Wales helped the courtship along by arranging to visit Andrew's ship with her four-year-old son, Prince William. She invited Sarah as her lady-in-waiting, and the press turned out in full force to photograph them. Fergie was startled by the media clamor.

"God, what's this all about?" she said with a gulp as photographers pressed in.

"Keep smiling," whispered Diana as she held her son's hand. "Whatever you do, just keep smiling."

The Princess later invited Sarah and Andrew to spend private weekends at Highgrove, where the housekeeper remembers Fergie's pocketing the crested stationery and asking for more. "I've just got to send some letters on Highgrove paper," she said, giggling. "I promised a friend, who will be so ternbly impressed." The housekeeper brought her extra stationery along with her clean laundry. "Ever time she came," the housekeeper recalled, "we had to wash and iron all her dirty clothes."

Most of the courtship was conducted on weekends in the privacy of friends' country estates, where guests remember an unmistakable physical attraction between the couple and incidents of exuberant horseplay. On one winter weekend in 1985, during a game of hide-and-seek, Andrew hid under a table, and Sarah, who was blindfolded, crawled around the floor looking for him. When she found him, she pinched his behind hard. "Steady on!" he shouted. "You're not allowed to squeeze the royal bottom yet!" That evening he proposed.

Sarah replied, "When you wake up tomorrow morning, you can tell me it's all a huge joke."

The next morning Andrew proposed again and gave her a $37,000 ruby ring.

Sarah immediately called her father. "Dads, he's asked me to marry him," she yelled. "I made him propose twice, just to be sure." She cautioned her father not to say anything until Andrew received the Queen's permission to marry.

Intent on ingratiating herself with the royal family, Sarah spent

weekends at Windsor when Andrew was home on leave. She took morning horseback rides with the Queen, something Her Majesty was never able to do with Diana, who was afraid of horses. Diana had been thrown as a child and broken her arm; since then she had not ridden. Unlike Diana, Sarah enjoyed playing charades and all the card games that Her Majesty liked. "Sarah cheats even more than my mother at Racing Demon," the Queen told Sarah's grandmother. The Queen called her future daughter-in-law by her Christian name. "It was never Fergie," recalled an aide, "always Sarah." Her Majesty enjoyed the spirited rapport between her son and his fiancee and observed approvingly, "He's met his match this time." Trading barbs with Prince Philip, Fergie laughed uproariously at his off-color jokes and asked him to teach her his favorite sport of competitive open-carriage driving. "I think she will be a great asset," Philip told the press. Prince Charles agreed. "She's so spunky, so enthusiastic," he marveled. "Delightful company. Just delightful."

Andrew was clearly besotted. "I know that the decision I made to marry Sarah was, and always will be, the best decision I have made, or ever will make in my life," he said. He felt especially reassured when she announced plans to take forty hours of flight training so she could share his career as a helicopter pilot. "She'll be a great navy wife," he told his family.

In Andrew, Sarah had finally found a man who treated her respectfully. "The most important thing that I felt . . . is his amazing ability to make one feel like a lady, like a woman. . . . I just couldn't get over how in my life outside, as I call it, there were so many men strutting around thinking that they were so smart while they were being so foul to women."

Eager to prove herself, Sarah offered to accompany Andrew on one of his few royal duties. As the couple walked through the corridors of a convalescent home, she spotted the pool used for physical therapy and flippantly suggested that Andrew take a dip. She knew he was afraid of water and had not learned to swim. He smiled at her remark but looked slightly embarrassed. "Oh, dear," she told a patient, "he thinks I'm getting too excited."

Sarah raved to her father about her weekends at Windsor Cas-

tle. "She's either in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family," Major Ron told the press, "and I think it's the latter." The royal family welcomed Sarah Ferguson into their midst, but other people questioned her suitability. Some patricians felt she would make royalty a roadkill. "Mark my words," predicted Ruth Fermoy, lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. "Nothing good will come from that common girl."

At least one Fleet Street editor agreed with the straitlaced aristocrat. "Fergie will topple the House of Windsor," predicted Brian Vine of the Daily Mail.

The fashion press took Sarah to task for being "stout," "full figured," and "Rubenesque." One columnist called her "the future Duchess of Pork." Another said, "She's as hearty and down-to- earth as a potato."

"I am not fat," she said defensively, "and I do not diet. I do not have a problem. A woman should have a trim waist, a good `up top,' and enough down the bottom but not too big a good womanly figure."

When hers was displayed at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, the sculptor, who had taken her measurements, would not divulge them. So one newspaper gleefully estimated 39-49-59 and said: "Here comes the bride, 41 inches wide." During a ride up an escalator, the wind blew Fergie's skirt above her knees as photographers snapped away. The picture was published over the caption: "Her Royal Thighness."

"Fergie is a jolly hockey-sticks type of girl," said one fashion editor. "A breath of fresh air. Lots of bounce. Yes, bounce. Very bouncy. Rather like a bouncing ball."

Without makeup and her hair in a ponytail, Fergie looked like the country cousin lost in the city. Snobbish fashion designers considered her a disaster all freckles and frizzy hair but the public embraced her freshness and accepted her oversize dresses and rundown heels. So did the Queen, whose only advice to her future daughter-in-law was to wave more slowly. Fergie imitated the Queen's wave, which she called "screwing in lightbulbs." But she was as herky-jerky as a week-old puppy, never learned restraint. Instead she bounded into crowds like a glad-handing politician. "Hi

ya, hi ya, hi ya," she would say, pumping hands and collecting bouquets.

By then the Princess of Wales had become the darling of the British fashion industry, and in her designer clothes she radiated so much cinematic glamour that she was called the popcorn Princess. Reader's Digest called her "The World's Number One Celebrity." An international survey of magazines in 1986 reported her face graced more covers than that of any other woman, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Fergie in her baggy jumpers and horizontal stripes was relegated to covers of Saddle Up and k~ight Watcliers.

"Some of the clothes Sarah wore were awful," admitted her father, "but she would not be told." Understandably, she was wounded by the unkind fashion commentary, especially the comparisons with the Princess of Wales. "I don't want to be a Diana clone," she wailed.

"Not to worry," retorted British Vogue.

Fergie tried to pretend she didn't care about being svelte and elegant, but she begged her wedding dress designer Lindka Cierach to make her look beautiful. She felt the pressure of five hundred million people who would be watching the wedding on television.

On the morning of the wedding, July 23, 1986, the Queen invested her son with the titles of Duke of York, Earl of Iverness, and Baron Killyleagh. His bride, Sarah, became Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York. The title had not been conferred since 1936, when the previous Duchess of York became the consort Queen. She was now Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and at the age of eighty-six she remained the most beloved figure in the country. Sarah's sudden elevation to royalty entitled her to be addressed as Your Highness and to receive a respectful bob of the neck from men and deep curtsies from women, except for the only three in the realm who outranked her the Queen, the Queen Mother, and the Princess of Wales. Fergie said she was "blissed out" by the title.

Always a stickler for protocol, she had mastered the rudiments of form by the age of twelve, when she insisted her father dismiss a butler who didn't know the difference between knickerbockers

and plus fours. In a television interview after her engagement announcement, she was asked whether her uncle, who worked as a servant, would be invited to her wedding. "Of course he'll be invited," she said. "How absurd. But he'll know the form well enough not to come." Her comment was edited out of the interview. To a writer, she chided Prince Andrew for his less than elegant language. "He uses words that simply aren't on," she said. "He must have picked them up in the navy: mirror instead of looking glass; phone, mantelpiece, heads for lavatory at least he doesn't say toilet!"

As the Duchess of York, Sarah expected the salutation of Your Royal Highness upon introduction. After that she was to be addressed as ma' am. "It rhymes with Spam," she said.

She knew she was entitled to a crest, so she designed one with a bumblebee and thistle and took the motto Ex Adversis Felicitas ("Out of Adversity Comes Happiness").

After her marriage, she insisted on receiving public formalities from her family, which meant her father had to bow and her stepmother curtsy. She exempted her friends but instructed her staff to advise strangers about royal protocol. On foreign trips, especially to the United States, she had a written sheet of instructions issued to those present before she made her entrances:

1.Do not speak unless spoken to.

2.Do not offer to shake hands unless she shakes first.

3.Do not instigate any topic of conversation.

4.Address her by her royal title, which is not Your Majesty, but Your Royal Highness.

As Duke of York, Andrew received a pay raise from the Civil List to $100,000 a year in addition to his annual naval salary of $20,000. He also received income from a $1 million trust fund his mother had set up for him. But Fergie kept her $35,000-a-year job as a publishing assistant. The Queen paid for the $350,000 wedding and presented the bride with a diamond tiara, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond necklace. Her Majesty also gave the royal couple five acres of land and paid for the $7 million construction of Sunninghill Park, their forty-six-room mansion, which was five miles

from Windsor Castle. "I did it for Anne," said the Queen. "So of course I'll do it for Andrew." The rambling ranch-style house that Sarah and Andrew designed for themselves had twelve bedrooms, plus a swimming pool, a bomb shelter, and a medieval minstrel's gallery. There were two master bedrooms and a master bath with musical toilet rolls that played "God Save the Queen." The circular tub set in the middle of a white marble floor was so big that the builders called it HMS Fergie. Prince Philip said, "It looks like a tart's boudoir." The imposing residence was ridiculed as "a fifty- room pizza palace" and called "Southyork," after the Southfork ranch in the l980s television show Dallas.

On the morning of the wedding, crowds began assembling early to watch the royal procession of coaches and celebrities. Major Ferguson marveled at the masses of people, who were standing ten deep in some places along the streets. "Just look at all these people," he said, "come to see my smelly little daughter."

America's First Lady, Nancy Reagan, had been preceded into Westminster Abbey by twenty-two U.S. Secret Service agents. Cosmetics tycoon Estee Lauder walked in behind movie star Michael Caine. Pop singer Elton John, in purple glasses and a ponytail, waved to the crowds, as did Prince Albert of Monaco. Minutes later Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arrived, but she was booed for having sent in mounted police to settle a miners' strike.

The crowds erupted and cheered loudly when they saw the titian-haired bride, looking slim and lovely in her Victorian ivory gown. Royal trumpeters heralded her arrival as she stepped out of the glass coach. Trailed by 171/2 feet of flowing satin beaded with anchors and the initial A, she proceeded up the steps of the Abbey. She halted at the top, unable to move. She turned around and yanked at her gown.

"Who the hell is standing on my train?" she yelled. The wedding dress designer dropped to her knees and quickly rearranged the folds of the gown. The bride then moved forward and grabbed her father's arm.

"C'mon, Dads," she said, "let's show `em how it's done."

Major Ferguson nervously began the long walk down the aisle of the eleventh-century Abbey with his daughter, who smiled

nonstop. She made faces at one guest, gave a thumbs-up to another, and cracked jokes about the outlandish outfits she spotted among the 1,800 guests.

Major Ferguson was unnerved. "When we reached the archway leading to the chancel with the Queen and Prince Andrew gazing down expectantly," he recalled, "I had to say, `Come on. You've got to be serious now.

Fergie tried to rein herself in, but the effort showed. At the altar, Prince Andrew stepped forward with his Falklands medals pinned to the breast of his naval lieutenant's uniform. "You look wonderful," he said.

"Thank you, darling," she said, smiling. "I forgot to pack my toothbrush."

"Never mind," said the beaming duke.

The Queen, who occasionally took deep breaths to control her emotions during the service, could not take her eyes off her son.

Princess Michael of Kent, who was married to the Queen's cousin, could not stop looking at the bride. "All that ghastly winking as she came down the aisle," she said. "So common."

The Princess of Wales seemed not to notice. Sitting with the royal family on pink-and-gold chairs, apart from the rest of the congregation, she looked sad and distracted, staring into space. She brightened up only when she saw her son, William, one of the four little pages. Dressed in a sailor suit, the four-year-old Prince tugged on his cap, wound the string around his nose, chewed it like taffy, and then pulled out his ceremonial dagger to bedevil the six-year- old bridesmaid next to him.

Having brought Sarah and Andrew together, Diana had looked forward to having a friend as a sister-in-law and to sharing what she called "the royal load." But she was unprepared for sharing the spotlight. The sudden media attention directed at Fergie jolted Diana, who was accustomed to being the focus of press interest. She slipped into second place temporarily. She tried to make light of her reduced status by joking to reporters. "You won't need me now," she teased. "You've got Fergie."

Sarah and Andrew's royal wedding was characterized most amusingly by an Italian newspaper, Milan's 11 G'iorno: "And so to

conclude, if it is true, as Flaubert asserted, that to be happy, it is necessary not to be too intelligent, to be a little bit arrogant, and above all, to have good health, then there is no doubt that the future of Andrew and Sarah will be among the best." And it was. Sublime. For a time.