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The Prince of Wales was convinced that his wife was having

an affair with her bodyguard. Barry Mannakee, a gregarious police sergeant, had been assigned to protect the Princess in 1985 when the Waleses' marriage started falling apart. He accompanied her wherever she went, and as Charles spent more time away from his wife, she turned to her personal detective for company.

"He was like all the protection officers for royalty,"* said the former head of Scotland Yard, who received a title when he retired. "They are selected for sensitivity and diplomacy. They're highly skilled at security and armed at all times, but they must also blend into any circumstance. This requires a range of social skills

skiing, sailing, horseback riding, hunting, even carriage riding. The royalty protection boys have expensive haircuts and wear Turnbull and Asser shirts. They're handsome, charming, and seductive."

The thirty-nine-year-old protection officer for the Princess of Wales was a married man with two children, so he got along well with three-year-old Prince William. "Barry was such a colorful and easygoing character," recalled the Highgrove housekeeper. "He

*The Royal Protection Unit of Scotland Yard provides full protection to the monarch, her hushand, her heir, the Queen Mother, and all the monarch's children. Partial protection is provided tO some of the Queen's cousins when they are performing public duties, hut not to their spouses. "Most of the time, Prince Michael gets security," said the former head of security, "hut not his wife."

was fun and everyone adored him. He was an ideal personal security officer for the Princess. . . . She hung on to his every word, flirted with him outrageously, and pulled his leg in a way that suggested the two of them were very close. There have been many rumors about them having an affair, but I am sure that is completely untrue. For Diana, Barry was simply a friend, someone she could rely on and trust."

The Princess's detective escorted her on her endless rounds of shopping and took her for long drives through the hills of Balmoral when her husband went fishing alone and she wanted to get away from the rest of the royal family. She turned to Mannakee when she was upset, which was often in those days, and he offered consolation and a strong shoulder to cry on. He comforted her when she became unstrung before public engagements.

"On one occasion, she kept saying she couldn't go ahead with it, and just collapsed into my arms," said Mannakee. "I hugged her and stopped her crying. What else would you have done?"

The policeman became the repository of Diana's secrets, including her suspicions about her husband and Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana told Mannakee she was convinced that despite Charles's promises to her before they married, he had gone back to his mistress. Diana said she confirmed her suspicions one weekend when she arrived at Highgrove and Charles was not there. His aide said he had left minutes before she arrived, roaring off by himself in his sports car. He did not say where he was going and didn't leave a number where he could be reached in case of emergency.

Diana went into his study and pushed the recall button on his mobile phone, which rang the Parker Bowles estate. When the butler answered, she hung up. She checked Charles's private calendar and saw a "C" marked on that date. She searched his desk drawers and told her bodyguard that she had found a cache of letters from Camilla. Some were chatty and some extremely intimate, addressed to "My Beloved."

After that, Mannakee felt even more protective toward the Princess, who tearfully asked him why her husband had turned away from her. "He's a fool," said Mannakee, shaking his head. "A bloody fool." Diana was touched by her detective's loyalty, and

his working-class London accent made her smile. He became her close friend, her confidant, even her fashion consultant. She turned to him the way a wife turns to a husband, looking for approval. Servants recall many occasions when the Princess dressed for a public engagement and came out of her room to ask her bodyguard for his opinion.

"Barry, how do I look? Do you think these are the right earrings?"

"Perfect," he said. She twirled in front of him, smoothed down her evening dress, and applied more lip gloss.

"Are you sure?" she asked, looking in the mirror. "Do I look all right?"

"Sensational, as you know you do," he said with a laugh. "I could quite fancy you myself."

"But you do already, don't you?" she said flirtatiously.

Their easy banter disturbed Charles, who lived by a double standard: he confided in his gardener at Highgrove about the woeful state of his marriage, but he could not stand Diana confiding in her bodyguard. Charles accused her of lacking decorum and said her behavior with the staff was deplorable.

He was embarrassed that their marital fights, which had gone on behind closed doors, were now being waged in front of the servants. He blamed Diana for the open warfare because she had started to talk back. In the beginning of their marriage, she had been too insecure to speak up. But she gradually overcame her shrinking deference, and as her confidence grew with her popularity, she was no longer willing to defer.

Usually restrained in public, the Princess let loose in private. She railed about her husband's "toadying" friends, his preoccupation with polo, his dinner parties with "boring old men who smell of cigars," and his solitary trips to fish and paint and ski. She said his excursions were simply excuses to get away from her.

The Prince responded that he needed the trips to restore his peace of mind after enduring her neurotic behavior. He taunted her about her eating disorder, which caused fainting spells in public. "You're always sick," Charles said with disgust. "Why can't you

be more like Fergie?" During meals, he chided her. "Is that going to reappear later? What a waste."

Diana struck back by accusing him of being selfish and stingy, and he yelled at her for being extravagant. "The meaner he got, the more she would spend," said interior designer Nicholas Haslam, a close friend of the royal family. "That meanness of his drove her crazy . . . but the royals love to play at being poor. Camilla is the same way; she can't abide spending money, and Charles adores that quality in her. They turn each other on with their stinginess. When Camilla comes in bristling about how much the cleaner costs, Charles becomes aroused and leaps in to exclaim about how much he had to pay for the same thing. Back and forth they go, banging on about the cost of having their clothes commercially cleaned. The two of them nearly expire with exasperation about having to spend their money on such a necessity.

The Princess carped that his penny-pinching deprived her of a tennis court at Highgrove.

"You know it's the only thing I have ever wanted here," she told him.

Charles said he could not afford the $20,000 to build a tennis court.

"You cannot be serious," Diana shouted. "What about the thousands you pour into your precious bloody garden and anything else which takes your fancy? I don't think you realize quite the efforts I make to go along with what you want to do all the time. What about my wants?"

He shrugged and walked out of the room. Diana yelled at him through the closed door. That evening she did not show up for dinner. While he sat in the dining room waiting for her, she ate alone in the nursery, where she said she did not have to beg for love.

During their most heated arguments, they flung curses and objects. After one blistering row, Charles stormed out the door, jumped into his car, and roared out of Highgrove. Diana opened an upstairs window and screamed at the top of her lungs, "You're a shit, Charles, an absolute shit!" During another quarrel, she threw a teapot at him, stomped out of the room, and slammed the door,

nearly knocking over a footman. She yelled over her shoulder, "You're a fucking animal, Charles, and I hate you!"

Soon Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail gossip columnist, who said he socialized with royalty, denounced Diana in print. He called her a spoiled, fiendish monster who was making the Prince of Wales "desperately unhappy."

Her growing distrust of Charles and her jealousy over Camilla Parker Bowles marked Diana in her husband's eyes as irrational. Charles expected to do as he pleased without objection from his wife. Her tearful outbursts about his long absences only convinced him of her instability. Worse, he was bored with her. He dismissed her interests clothes, dancing, rock and roll as trivial. He said her hospital visits were self-serving, and her humor, which he once found so delightful, grated on him.

A university graduate with intellectual pretensions, Charles was embarrassed to be married to a high school dropout who did not know the difference between Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. During the taping of a television interview at Highgrove in 1986, she poked fun at herself for failing the college entrance exams. "Brain the size of a pea I've got," she chirped. Charles insisted her comment be edited out. Diana said he should have edited out his own comment about talking to the plants in his garden at Highgrove. "It's very important to talk to them," he had told viewers. She had told him, "People will think you're barking [mad]." That was the last television interview the couple did together.

But Diana was right. Charles's remark made him look slightly eccentric, if not ridiculous. "He's really not the nut-chomping loony you read about in the papers," insisted his brother Andrew.

"Charles sometimes complained to friends about what he considered Diana's coarse, even vulgar, sense of humor,'' reported journalist Nicholas Davies. "Once the couple were lunching with Charles's old friend, the South African philosopher Sir Laurens Van der Post. The two men were enjoying a weighty conversation about the problem of blacks and whites living together in South Africa when Diana suddenly put in, `What's the definition of mass confusion?'

The two men looked perplexed.

"Father's Day in Brixton [a predominantly black area of London]," Diana told them merrily.

"I can't believe you just said that," said Charles.

"Oh, well, if you two are having a sense-of-humor failure, I'll leave you to it," said Diana as she left the table.

Miserable, Charles wrote to a friend on March 11, 1986, that his marriage "is like being trapped in a rather desperate cul-de-sac with no apparent means of exit." He dipped into the poetry of Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) to describe his despair: "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage. . . ." Diana's demands for attention exasperated him, and he was not willing to pump her up for every public appearance. In the past he had quoted Shakespeare's Henry V and told her (to) "Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. . . ." Now he ignored her or else snapped with irritation, "Just plunge in and get on with it." He complained to his biographer about her self-absorption and extraordinary vanity, saying that she spent hours every day poring over newspapers and magazines, examining her press coverage.

Acknowledging Diana's preoccupation with herself, her friend Carolyn Bartholomew defended her to author Andrew Morton. "How can you not be self-obsessed," she asked, "when half the world is watching everything you do?"

Charles, previously controlled and gracious in public, started losing his temper. He clashed with Diana at a polo game when she posed for photographers while sitting on the hood of his 1970 Aston Martin convertible. The rare automobile, then worth $125,000, had been a twenty-first birthday present from his mother.

"Off, off! What are you doing to my wonderful car?" he shouted. "You can't sit there! Get off! You'll dent the bodywork."

Diana was mortified by his outburst. She quickly slid off the fender and slyly stuck out her leg to kick him. Startled, he grabbed her arm and pushed her against the car, but she slipped away and leaped inside. He started to cuff the back of her neck but realized that people were gathering around, so he pulled back. He smiled thinly and pretended the incident was a joke.

During another screaming argument, Charles threw a wooden

bootjack at Diana. "How dare you speak to me like that?" he yelled. "Do you know who I am?"

At first he had responded to her outbursts with grim silence. Now he struggled to restrain his temper but was not always successful. Once he stalked out of the room, strode into his bathroom, and, in front of his valet, Ken Stronach, ripped the porcelain washbasin from the wall and smashed it on the floor. "I have to do it," his valet recalled him saying. "You do understand, don't you? Don `t you?" The wide-eyed valet nodded.

Despite his violent outbursts, Charles denied ever striking his wife. In fact, he blamed her for throwing lamps and breaking windows. During one of their visits to Althorp, her family estate, they stayed in a newly decorated suite that Diana's father admitted Charles and Diana left "somewhat damaged." An antique mirror was smashed, a window cracked, and a priceless chair shattered. "It was an almighty row," said the Earl Spencer, who added quickly that every married couple had fights. "It's nothing," he said. "Diana is still very much in love with Charles."

Diana stopped going to Althorp because of her father's wife. So the Earl Spencer had to go to London to see his daughter and grandchildren. After her brother's wedding, Diana said she could no longer bear the presence of "that woman [her stepmother]." The sight of Raine presiding over the Spencer ancestral home during a prenuptial party for her brother had incensed Diana. She felt that her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had been slighted. Frances had recently been abandoned after nineteen years of marriage when her husband left her for another woman. Although she had left Johnny Spencer before he inherited Althorp, Diana and her siblings felt, perhaps without justification, that Raine had usurped their mother's rightful place. Even as adults they continued to revile their stepmother.

During a prewedding party for her brother at Althorp, Diana watched Raine go into the nursery and graciously pour tea for her husband's grandchildren. When Raine left the room and headed for the grand staircase, Diana followed her. As Raine started down the first flight of stairs, Diana lunged forward and knocked her over with her shoulder. The fifty-eight-year-old woman fell to her knees

and tumbled down the steps, coming to a stop on the first landing. Diana walked around her and, without a word, proceeded into the party.

The assault alarmed the Countess's personal assistant, Sue Ingram. "I wanted to run upstairs and ask Her Ladyship if she was all right, but I was too embarrassed, not only for myself, but for her," she said. "The servants and I pretended that nothing had happened we just looked away."

Later Raine mentioned the outburst to her assistant. "What has happened to Diana?" she asked. "Why such an occurrence? I just don't understand that girl."

Beset by her eating disorder and her husband's infidelity, Diana was volcanic and erupted frequently. After another of their incessant fights, Charles found her in tears in her bedroom, pouring out her heart to her detective about Charles's late night telephone calls to Camilla Parker Bowles and his unexplained absences. Charles was appalled by her lack of discretion.

Within days the detective, who had guarded the Princess for a year, was suddenly transferred into the Diplomatic Unit. A member of the Prince's staff told a reporter that the abrupt change was due to the sergeant's "overfamiliarity" with the Princess.

"He's just punishing me," Diana told friends bitterly.

"I was transferred for domestic reasons," Mannakee admitted to the press, "but I have no intentions of discussing those reasons."

The Prince, who was polite but aloof with his servants, did not approve of his wife's familiarity with the help. He maintained a certain distance from the staff and expected her to do the same. But she treated her dresser, her detective, and her butler like extended family.

"Do not misinterpret the Prince's demeanor," said one of his equerries. "There's a seemly remove about him that comes from being reared as royalty."

Diana, who did not possess that royal remove, embraced servants like friends. She thought nothing of eating in the staff kitchen, where her first question upon arrival at Sandringham, Balmoral, or Buckingham Palace was usually, "What's for dinner?" She attended staff parties, brought records, and asked the servants to

dance with her. Her husband rarely attended these employee gettogethers because he knew his presence would impose undue formality. Still, he regarded his wife's behavior as highly improper.

Her indiscriminate displays of affection also irked him. He said that she kissed everyone she met, even strangers. She did not discriminate between highway workers and heads of state. At polo games she kissed Major Ron Ferguson to say hello. After the royal wedding she kissed the Lord High Chamberlain to say thank you. On the honeymoon she kissed the President of Egypt, Anwar alSadat, to say good-bye. In New Zealand she rubbed noses with a Maori tribeswoman. When she returned home she kissed her servants.

When the royal family attended a grand ball at Buckingham Palace for the household staff, Diana circled the room in her tiara to greet everyone. She understood how much her title meant and how special people felt being in her presence. "I could see Charles watching her out of the corner of his eye," recalled Wendy Berry, who worked at Highgrove. "He looked on as she took the mother of one servant in her arms and kissed her expansively on the cheeks. Charles's expression was one of horror mixed with fascination that any wife of his could behave so normally with ordinary people."

Eight months after Barry Mannakee was transferred from the Royal Protection Unit, a car smashed into his motorcycle and he was killed. Charles was given the news immediately, but he waited twenty-four hours before telling Diana. When they were on their way to the airport to fly to France for the Cannes Film Festival, he turned to her moments before she was to get out of the limousine in front of photographers.

"Oh, by the way," he said, "I got word from the Protection Unit yesterday that poor Barry Mannakee was killed. Some sort of motorcycle accident. Terrible shame, isn't it?"

Diana burst into tears as the limousine pulled up to the royal flight. Charles pushed her out.

"Let's go, darling," he said sarcastically. "Your press awaits you.

Diana did not believe Mannakee's death was an accident. She

was convinced that her former protection officer had been assassinated by MIS [Britain's intelligence agency] at the instigation of her jealous husband. She blamed herself for Mannakee's death and tried to summon his spirit through several seances. When a writer published a book suggesting a nefarious plot by MIS, Mannakee's father insisted his son's death was an accident. Diana eventually accepted that, but she never forgave her husband for the cruel way he broke the news to her. She told the story to friends to demonstrate his heartlessness and to show the diabolical pleasure he took in tormenting her.

Privately the fairy tale was over, but the public did not yet see the cracks behind the facade. The first glimpse came after a polo match when Charles kissed his wife in front of hundreds of people when his team lost; she turned her head quickly as if she had just been licked by a slobbering dog. Then she wiped his kiss off her cheek.

"I suppose I should've seen something askew in 1985 when I interviewed Prince Charles for my biography of the late poet laureate John Betjeman" said writer Bevis Hillier. "But I wasn't looking for a shadow on the romance. I'm in my fifties and grew up singing `God Save the King.' I now sing `God Save Our Gracious Queen.' The monarchy is like religion to me, and absurd as it might sound, I want it to survive. .

"The Prince and I talked in his office at Kensington Palace, where a clock chimed every fifteen minutes. He was very messy- heaps of papers on the floor and red leather boxes with gold- embossed Prince of Wales feathers all over the place. But he was sweet and could not have been more pleasant.

"My last question to him was: Which was your favorite Betjeman poem? He flipped through the book of poetry and fell upon one dealing with the aging sex drive. He read the last stanza:

Too long we let our bodies cling,

We cannot hide disgust

At all the thoughts that in us spring

From this late-flowering lust.

"He smiled ruefully and said, `I'd like to choose "Late Flowering Lust," but I guess I better not.' Instead he chose `Indoor Games

Near Newbury.' " The Prince had carefully selected a poem about little children holding hands in a cupboard.

"I knew something was amiss in the fall of 1986, after an off- the-record interview with Prince Charles at Highgrove," recalled the London bureau chief of Time. "As a condition of the interview, I was not allowed to ask questions about his family. We talked in his study, where there were at least forty sterling silver-framed pictures the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke of Edinburgh, King Juan Carlos, Mountbatten, Wills and Harry, the royal horse, the royal dogs. But not one picture of the royal wife. Although Diana was the most photographed woman in the world, her picture was nowhere to be found in her husband's study."

The royal watchers on the tabloids noticed the strain between the Prince and Princess and reported that the couple had spent thirty-seven consecutive nights in Britain without once sharing the same bedroom. They noted that Charles returned early and alone from family vacations and that even when he and Diana were going to the same place, they arrived separately. She attended fashion shows and rock concerts with other people in London while he worked alone in his gardens at Highgrove, 113 miles west of the city. When he went fishing by himself at Balmoral, she remained at Kensington Palace with their children.

A Norwegian manufacturer capitalized on the discord and made the Prince and Princess of Wales role models for people too busy to cook. Billboards in Oslo featured the mournful faces of Charles and Diana looking at single-serving cans of pasta and beef stew marked Middag for en Dinner for one. Yet Britain's establishment press did not take the rift rumors seriously. They dismissed the tabloid stories as "downmarket tittle-tattle" and called on establishment figures like Harold Brooks-Baker of Debrett's Peerage to dispel the rumors.

The reverent monarchist complied eagerly. "Outrageous, simply outrageous," said Brooks-Baker. "These rumors of marital discord tarnish the royal family's image and diminish the monarchy. They must stop. There will never be a separation between the Prince and Princess of Wales, and there certainly will never be a divorce."

His denial did not dent the tabloids' credibility among royal servants. ``Too much of the information was accurate and true,'' said one of Princess Margaret's butlers with dismay. "We knew that it had to be coming from someone on the inside. One of us. The royal family knew it, too. But there's nothing they can do about servants, who sell their stories, unless, of course, they catch them outright. Then we can be fired, fined, even imprisoned.

"The only people who knew that the Prince and Princess of Wales were no longer sharing the same bed were their personal maids. You don't think Her Majesty knew that. Or even wanted to know it. Princess Margaret used to say that she had to read the papers simply to find out what was happening in her own family. The floor-shaking fights between them [Charles and Diana] were known to their staffs, and the word traveled fast through the royal houses.

The butler offered an explanation for the disparity between the upmarket press, which proclaimed the marriage as solid, and the tabloids, which depicted the marriage as shaky. He said a footman at Highgrove had seen the Princess throw a teapot at the Prince and rush from the room in tears. Hours later the royal couple had composed themselves and appeared together in public at a benefit. Their smiling photographs in the Daily Telegruph made the teapot story in the Mirror look fabricated. "Actually, both stories were accurate," said the butler, "but the tabs ran the juicier bits."

Diana resented the press speculation about her marriage but did not know what to do. "Just because I go out without my husband," she protested, "doesn't mean my marriage is on the rocks." She had taken on more public engagements 299 in 1985, 70 percent more than her 177 in 1984 and more than half of those in Britain were without her husband. Heartened by her increasing commitment to performing royal duties, Prince Philip told her to ignore the rumors, and she tried.

"When we first got married," she said, "we were everybody's idea of the world's most perfect couple. Now they say we are leading separate lives. The next thing is I'll start reading that I've got a black Catholic lover."

The unrelenting pressure of having to appear in public and be

gracious to a press corps that acted like a firing squad wore her down. During a visit to a children's nursery school, she was asked by the supervisor whether she wanted to accommodate the photographers clamoring outside.

"I don't see why I should do anything for them," she replied. "They never do anything for me.

The next day the Sun fired back with an editorial: "Princess Diana asks: `What have the newspapers ever done for me?' The Sun can answer Her Loveliness in one word everything! The newspapers have made her one of the most famous women in the world. They have given her an aura of glamour and romance. Without them, the entire Windsor family would soon become as dull as the rulers of Denmark and Sweden."

The burden of maintaining a sunny public image sapped the Princess's strength. "I got no help from anyone carrying this load," she complained to her lady-in-waiting. Like Diana's husband, the Palace expected her to do her duties without comment: show up and shut up. But Diana needed reassurance. Without Barry Mannakee beside her, she had no one to buoy her, to provide advice and offer affection. Her husband had come to regard her as a whiner. "Oh, God, what is it now," he'd say when she approached him. She felt increasingly isolated within the royal family and uneasy about confiding in her sisters, especially Jane, who was married to Robert Fell owes, the Queen's assistant private secretary.

Diana was also wary of Sarah Ferguson, who, she said, acted too eager to please Charles. Diana didn't want to disappoint her friends by admitting her fairy-tale marriage was a sham, so she said nothing. When her former roommate, Carolyn Pride Bartholomew, noticed her startling weight loss, Diana finally admitted her eating disorder and said she was throwing up four to five times a day because she was so unhappy. The Princess said her Prince was no longer charming.

When Mrs. Bartholomew was badgered by reporters in Australia about the state of the Waleses' marriage, she declined to comment. Pressed about the royal couple's separate quarters and separate vacations, she said nothing. One reporter pointed out the

twelve-year age difference and suggested the twenty-six-year-old Princess was bored by her thirty-nine-year-old husband.

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Bartholomew.

"Well, what do they possibly have in common?"

"Well... uhmmm... uhmmm.. . they. .. uhmmm... have their children."

Diana was at her most vulnerable in 1986 when she met Captain James Hewitt at a cocktail party. She had been lonely, neglected, and despondent. The twenty-seven-year-old bachelor knew how to flirt with a princess without overstepping the line. He was introduced as a skilled horseman with the Life Guards' Household Division. Diana told him that she had been afraid of horses since falling off her pony as a child. She said her fear of riding was a disappointment to her husband and his equestrian family, and she wanted to do something about it. The handsome cavalry officer smiled and offered to help her. Two days later she phoned him for riding lessons.

After graduating from Millfield, a private academy, James Hewitt received his military training at Sandhurst, joined the Life Guards, and made the army his life. He considered himself honored to be among the sovereign's elite personal guard. Out of uniform, the officer dressed like a gentleman in double-breasted blazers, Gucci loafers, and gold cuff links. He wore silk cravats, played polo, and cultivated good manners. And he listened to the wartime recordings of Winston Churchill to improve his enunciation. With wavy russet hair, full lips, and sleepy blue eyes, he was beguiling to women. "All I know," he said, "is horses and sex." Years later he boasted that he had shared both with the Princess of Wales.

Their love affair started in the stables of Knightsbridge barracks. For the first two months Diana arrived every week for her riding lesson, accompanied by her detective and her lady-in- waiting. Soon the lady-in-waiting was left waiting. And the detective remained discreetly in the barracks while the Princess and her riding instructor rode alone on the trails, laughing and talking. "Their horses," recalled the groom Malcolm Leete, "were hardly ever ridden." The groom later sold his recollections to a newspaper.

In James Hewitt, Diana had found a man her own age who thoroughly relished women and treated them with the same respect he accorded high-strung horses. He calmed and comforted them.

The Princess of Wales crossed class lines to find Hewitt, the son of a marine captain and a dentist's daughter. Diana described Hewitt to a friend as "my soul" and said that despite their backgrounds, they were very much alike. Both were graceful athletes, who reveled in their bodies and were extraordinarily vain about their appearance. They loved to dress up and spent hours getting ready to appear in public. Both were seducers who knew how to exploit their charms.

On a deeper level they bonded through the trauma of their parents' divorces. Diana said she was determined that her children would not suffer the same kind of childhood she had. Yet despite her best efforts, she was subjecting them to the same violent quarrels and tearful recriminations she had seen between her parents. Hewitt had avoided making those mistakes by not getting married. As the only son, he was spoiled by his mother and indulged by his two sisters, with whom he remained close.

Unlike Charles, Hewitt lapped up Diana's conversations. He listened attentively to her discuss her charity work and how much she enjoyed her royal duties when "they" (the Palace courtiers) left her alone. She felt as if she had a divine ability to minister to the sick and dying; she said this healing touch came from "spirits" that guided her. This enabled her to go beyond the ceremonial role of a royal princess visiting hospitals. She saw herself as Mother Teresa in a crown. She said she identified with victims and felt their pain. Although Hewitt did not understand her mysticism, he listened raptly and did not question her judgment unlike the Bishop of Norwich, who was startled by Diana's claims. When she told the cleric that she was a reincarnated spirit who had lived before, he looked puzzled. When she said she was protected by a spirit world of people she had known who had died, she said the Bishop looked horrified. But Hewitt was a simple man with no orthodox religion, and his silence encouraged her to keep talking.

She told him about her children, whom she called "my little knights in shining armor," saying they were the most important

people in her life. Over several weeks she guided Hewitt through the swamp of her marriage, and as she revealed the dismal secrets the bulimia, the suicide attempts, the separate bedrooms, and the mistress he saw a woman reeling with rejection. Like most men who met Diana, he felt protective.

Wisely, he let her make the first move, which she did by inviting him to dinner at Kensington Palace when Charles was at High- grove. She dismissed most of her staff that evening and greeted Hewitt excitedly at the front door. She led him to her private sitting room and handed him a magnum of Champagne. She said she rarely drank, but this was a special occasion. He popped the cork and filled the flutes as she sat on the apricot-and-white~stnped sofa. Looking around the room, he chuckled when he saw the embroidered maxim on one of her scattered pillows:

If You Think Money Can't Buy Love You Don't Know Where to Shop.

He appreciated her expertise at shopping London's finest stores because he'd been the lucky beneficiary of several extravagant sprees. He told her that members of his regiment had been impressed by the presents that had been arriving at his barracks. She lowered her eyes and giggled.

"Whether it's friends, lovers, or relatives, Diana is very generous," said interior designer Nicholas Haslam. "She's incapable of not giving presents. She always arrives at my flat with some kind of lovely gift a tie, a plant, a book. Unlike the rest of the royals, she knows how to spend money on other people."

Among the presents Hewitt received from the Princess were a rust cashmere sweater from Harrods, four silk Hermes ties, and a pair of $1,500 hand-tooled leather riding boots from Lobb's, London's finest shoemaker. He also received a tweed hacking jacket with suede patches and leather buttons, three custom-made suits, ten Turnbull & Asser shirts with matching ties, two blazers, one dozen pairs of cashmere socks, two dozen silk boxer shorts, gold cuff links, a diamond-studded tie pin, and an eighteen-carat gold clock from Asprey, the royal jeweler.

Limited by his $50,000-a-year salary, the cavalry officer could

not afford to reciprocate in the same grandiose style. "Instead I gave her the clothes off my back," he said lightly. She asked him for his T-shirt to wear to bed and his cricket sweater to wear under her ski parka. She also asked for one of his down-filled jackets, which she wore frequently on walks. His most luxurious gift was a pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings, which he sent her as a reward for not biting her fingernails.

Following their first dinner at Kensington Palace, Diana served him coffee on the sitting room couch. She turned off the lamp on the side table and then slipped into his lap, putting her arms around his neck. Moments later, he told his biographer, she stood up and, without saying a word, led him into her bedroom.

For the next eighteen months their affair was vigorous and passionate and not conducted with utmost discretion. They visited Althorp, and according to Hewitt, they made love in the poolhouse. They stayed with Hewitt's mother in Devon and made love in her garden. They spent nights together at Kensington Palace with Diana's children and weekends at Highgrove when Charles was traveling. The young Princes became so accustomed to Hewitt's presence that they called him "Uncle James." He spent hours teaching them how to ride. He took them to his army barracks, where they were enthralled by the men in uniform. He taught the little boys how to march, salute, and hold a gun.

In turn, Diana invited Hewitt's father and his two sisters to London for a private dinner. James had confided in them about his relationship with Diana. She also accompanied him to Devon and spent many days with his mother, who ran a riding school. "She would always help carry the things out after lunch," recalled Shirley Hewitt. "She would wash up the dishes and, on one occasion, helped clear out a cupboard. She said, `What is all this? It's disgusting!' and cleared the whole lot out and gave the cupboard a good wash." On those trips Diana endeared herself to Mrs. Hewitt with her girlish questions about James's childhood. Together they teased him as they paged through the family scrapbooks, looking at his baby pictures.

Hewitt said he had not intended to fall in love with the Princess, whom he described as emotionally vulnerable and distressed.

"But," he admitted sheepishly, "it happened. . . . We spoke a great deal about what the future may hold for us both. I think it was perhaps fun to fantasize and to believe in a situation which quite clearly might not be possible . . . the dreams of being able to spend the rest of our lives together."

Joking nervously about the Treason Act of 1351, he wondered aloud if he could be sent to the Tower and beheaded for sleeping with Diana. The archaic law forbids adultery with the wife of the heir to the throne to ensure that all heirs are legitimate. When the Princess's affair with her riding instructor was disclosed by Hewitt and confirmed by Diana, some royal biographers noticed a startling resemblance between the copper-haired Hewitt and rusty-haired Prince Harry. But Hewitt denied he was the father and staunchly maintained he did not meet Diana until two years after the birth of her second son. "In fact," stated Priyate Eye, "Hewitt first met Diana five years earlier at a polo match in 1981, before her marriage."

The Princess did not exercise prudence in her relationship with the cavalry officer. Careful to disguise her voice when she called him on the pay phone at his barracks, she took few other precautions. In a sense, she felt immune from scandal because people were accustomed to seeing her at public events with escorts like Major David Waterhouse and the banker Philip Dunne. So the image of her in the presence of other men had already been established. She relied on the reservoir of goodwill she enjoyed as the Princess of Wales, knowing that most people would never suspect her of committing adultery, especially with the man in charge of the army's stables.

"It was simply too inconceivable," said one of her closest friends. "Even after she admitted on television that it was true- that she had been unfaithful with that cad, who cashed her in by writing a book-I still couldn't believe it."

Nor could her brother, Charles Spencer, who, despite contrary evidence, defended her against insinuations of promiscuity. "Hand to heart," he said, "my sister Diana has only slept with one man in her life and he is her husband."

Some of the men in Hewitt's regiment suspected the relation-

ship from the beginning and nudged each other with burlesque winks about the Princess and her riding instructor, whom they had nicknamed the Red Setter. But none dared publicly to suggest anything improper. "Even when I saw them kissing and cuddling in the middle of the riding school, I was so shocked that I didn't tell anyone about it, not even my wife, for a year and a half, until after I left the army," said the former groom.

He described what he saw: "It was in the middle of November 1988 and Hewitt had been transferred to Combermere Barracks, not far from Windsor. I got the Princess's horse ready for her three-thirty P.M. lesson . . . and took it to the riding school because the weather outside was awful. . . . The two of them met inside, and I stood on a mounting block to watch them. I saw his hands going up the back of her blouse. Her blouse was outside her jodhpurs. She was all over him. He was all over her."

As the affair progressed, Diana drew her former roommate, Carolyn Bartholomew, into her confidence as well as her friend Mara Berni, who owned the San Lorenzo restaurant in Knightsbridge, where Diana and Hewitt sometimes lunched together. She also relied on her detective, Ken Wharfe, who accompanied her with Hewitt, making their trips look like casual excursions rather than romantic outings.

Diana included her lover on the Queen's invitation list for a formal white-tie ball in November 1988 to celebrate Prince Charles's fortieth birthday. She knew without looking at the list of five hundred guests that Charles would invite his mistress. So she added the name of her riding instructor next to her favorite dress designer, Bruce Oldfield. Everyone in the royal family attended the ball at Buckingham Palace, except Prince Andrew, who was aboard the HMS Edinbutg~ in Australian waters. King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia flew in from Spain to join the kings of Norway, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein and the deposed king of Greece. The Dukes of Northumberland and Westminster danced and drank Champagne until three in the morning with rock stars, disk jockeys, and industrialists.

Charles had started his day by visiting the inner cities of Birmingham northwest of London, where the charity he founded in

1976, the Prince's Trust, employed disadvantaged young people. He arrived in the morning wearing a "Life Begins at 40" button, a gift from his children, and was cheered by crowds, who burst into a chorus of "Happy Birthday."

"When will you be King?" shouted a mechanic.

"Dunno," said Charles. "I might fall under a bus before I get there."

The inner-city celebration did not impress the chairman of the Labor Party. "It's just a way in which the benevolent hierarchy operates," said Dennis Skinner. "They have to push a few crumbs off the table for the poor and underprivileged . . . to ease their conscience and create an image of benevolence."

That evening's Palace party aroused even further indignation. "They'll spend as much on this celebration as many poor families would be able to spend in a lifetime," said Skinner. "Those on Easy Street, including the royal family, should take great care not to treat poor people with contempt. This party is like kicking sand in the faces of those people at the bottom of the ladder."

Charles said he would not be deterred by criticism, especially from cranks. "Now that I'm forty," he said, "I feel much, much more determined about what I'm doing." He considered his work for the underprivileged of Britain worthy of royalty but said his wife's patronage of AIDS patients was inappropriate'' and that the press coverage she received by visiting them was at times "sentimental" and "exploitative." He said her trip to visit AIDS babies in New York City's Harlem Hospital a few months later was totally unnecessary. When he refused to accompany her to Harlem, the capital of black America, she went by herself. He then dismissed the newspaper photographs of her hugging a dying black AIDS baby as "predictable."

Diana responded with calculation. On the return flight to London, she talked to a Daily Mirror photographer about her whirlwind tour, saying how tense she felt being whisked from one engagement to another. "I feel so sad when I think about how I held that little boy in my arms," she said. "It was so moving. Maybe it's because I'm a woman traveling alone. It never feels so bad when my husband is with me."

The Palace interpreted her comments as a veiled attack upon her husband and scrambled to issue a statement, which implied that she was overwrought: "Visiting Harlem Hospital was a very emotional experience for her. She has been working non-stop for two days and the full impact is only just catching up with her." That was the first shot fired in the media war between the wily courtiers and the willful Princess.

"Diana played the game of one-upmanship like a maestro," said London columnist Ross Benson. "When she and Charles visited a music college, he was prevailed upon to play a note or two on the cello. It was too good an opportunity for her to mis~. While he was playing, she strode across the stage, sat down at the piano, lifted the lid, and struck up the opening theme of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. Every camera swung around to follow her, leaving Charles beached and abandoned in his humiliation."

Diana had insisted on accompanying her husband, over his objection, to a birthday party for Annabel Elliot, the sister of Camilla Parker Bowles. The forty guests were part of what she dismissed as her husband's stuffy Highgrove set, so no one had expected her to attend. But she was determined to confront her husband's mistress.

"I remember meeting her at that party shortly after her Harlem hugging trip," recalled a London attorney, "and thinking she was either dumb or else jet-lagged because she couldn't carry on a conversation. She kept looking at Charles, who had left her and gone off in a corner all night with Camilla. I didn't get what was happening until later, when my wife explained it all."

Toward the end of the party, Diana approached Camilla and said she wanted a word with her in private. Diana waited until the last guests had left the room. Then, looking her rival in the eye, she spoke bluntly: "Why don't you leave my husband alone?" Taken aback, Camilla started to protest, but Diana cut her off, saying she knew all about their affair. She cited the telephone calls, the love letters, the foxhunts, the Sunday night visits. She said she knew that Camilla played hostess at Highgrove in her absence, and Diana resented Camilla's being in Diana's home. Diana blamed Camilla for turning Charles away from his children and ruining his

marriage. That said, Diana walked out of the room and told Charles she wanted to go home.

The next morning she called Carolyn Bartholomew and told her what she had done. She also phoned James Hewitt and related every detail of the confrontation, relishing her bold performance. She said she finally felt free of Camilla's clutches. "Why, oh, why," she asked him, "didn't I say all of that to her sooner? What a difference it would have made."

Hewitt said she deserved a medal for bravery and inquired about Charles's reaction.

"Stone cold fury," Diana said proudly, "and `how could I possibly.'

Diana's father invited the royal couple to a sixtieth birthday party in honor of Diana's stepmother in May 1989. But Charles had planned a trip to Turkey and wouldn't cancel it. "I'll be traveling," he announced by memo, which was how he communicated with his wife to avoid bickering. He had quietly moved out of Kensington Palace and lived entirely at Highgrove, where his children visited him on weekends. He did not tell his wife that he would be going to Turkey with Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband, Andrew, but Diana found out.

When she told Hewitt about the trip, she said she no longer cared about Charles and Camilla and "Andrew Park-Your-Balls," the nickname she had picked up from Pn"'ate Eye* for Brigadier General Bowles. Hewitt suspected that she still cared very much and, despite her disavowals, wanted to revive her marriage. But he said nothing and jumped at the invitation to escort her to her father's ball. "With five hundred guests, we'll be safe," Diana assured him.

Soon after, Hewitt received transfer orders to Germany to command a tank squadron. Excited by his promotion, he worried about telling Diana he would be gone from her life for two years. He later said she had berated him for leaving her and putting his

*Behind their hacks, Diana referred to the royal family by their Private Eye nicknames: the Queen was Brenda, the Duke of Edinburgh was Keith. Princess Margaret was Yvonne, Charles was Brian; Edward was Cled (Peter Phillips's abbreviation of Uncle Ed), and Diana herself was Cheryl.

career ahead of their relationship. For several months she did not take his calls, and he left for Germany without seeing her.

Within weeks Diana sought out the man she had been infatuated with when she was seventeen. This time James Gilbey was much more receptive. Over lunches and quiet dinners he listened worshipfully as she unfolded the saga of her miserable marriage. And he became her cushion. They had started seeing each other again after a private dinner party at the home of their friend David Frost, the television interviewer, and his wife, Carina. As Diana and Gilbey were leaving that evening, they were photographed in front of Frost's house, kissing good-bye. The kiss was so intense that the photographer decided to stake out Gilbey's apartment in London's Lenox Gardens, near Harrods department store. Days later the photographer was rewarded with a shot of the Princess leaving Gilbey's apartment at 1:15 A.M. Gilbey said they were playing bridge but added: "I suppose it wasn't that wise for Diana and I [sic] to meet in those circumstances."

From then on, Diana acted with much more caution. Instead of visiting Gilbey's apartment, she arranged to meet him secretly at Mara Berni's home, around the corner from the San Lorenzo restaurant. She also bought a shredder for her office at Kensington Palace. She used post office boxes for personal correspondence and talked on the phone in code. She preferred mobile phones because she thought they were more secure. But when she found out they were less secure, she stopped using them. When using the phones in Kensington Palace, she often closed the doors of her suite and turned up the television so servants couldn't eavesdrop.

Despite her efforts to avoid detection, her telephone conversation with James Gilbey on December 31, 1989, was intercepted by a stranger's scanning device and tape-recorded. When the British tabloids published the transcript three years later, they withheld an explicit ten-minute segment in which the Princess and her lover discussed masturbation. They also talked about Diana's fear of getting pregnant. "Darling, that's not going to happen," Gilbey said reassuringly. "You won't get pregnant." Diana said she was worried after watching a soap opera that afternoon in which one of the main characters had had a baby. "They thought it was by her hus

band," said the Princess. "It was by another man." She and Gilbey laughed.

"Squidgy [his nickname for Diana], kiss me. . . . Oh, God. It's so wonderful, isn't it, this sort of feeling? Don't you like it?"

Diana replied, "I love it, I love it."

By the time the tape-recorded conversation known as Squidgygate became public, the Princess's pedestal had toppled into the ditch, and she was struggling to keep her head above the muck.

SEVENTEEN

The Duchess was teetering. She had `teered from the path marked "Duty and Decorum" a few weeks before her wed-

ding. And she was blamed for leading the Princess of Wales astray. The two women had been photographed at Ascot, poking a man's bottom with the tips of their umbrellas. Days later they dressed up as policewomen to raid Prince Andrew's stag party. With badges and billyclubs they barged into Annabel's nightclub and sat at the bar, drinking. The British press reported the incident in terms of class that Americans could understand: bush league vs. Junior League. Sarah was pilloried as the biker babe from hell. Diana, the sweetheart next door, emerged unscathed. They were like the fairy tale of the two Princesses: One opened her mouth and out came rubies and diamonds. The other one spoke and out came toads.

"The Princess of Wales escapes such censure because she is prettier," wrote Sunday Times columnist Craig Brown, "and less, well, obyious than the Duchess of York. It is the peculiar capacity of the duchess to mirror modern Britain, its gaudiness, its bounciness, its rumbustious lack of mystery."

Within the first year of her marriage, the Duchess of York became the Duchess of Yuck. She took 120 days of vacation, yet she complained about overwork. She carried out 55 royal duties during the year, compared with 429 for Princess Anne. That earned Sarah Ferguson the title the Duchess of Do Little. When she gained

fifty pounds during her first pregnancy, she was dubbed the Duchess of Pork. When she accepted free first-class plane tickets, free hotel suites, and free limousines, she became "Freeloading Fergie." She also accepted free watches from Cartier and free luggage from Louis Vuitton. As the Duchess of Dough, she expected payment for interviews and asked designers to give her expensive clothing. French couturier Yves St. Laurent agreed to, but British designer Zandra Rhodes turned her down flat, saying, "I don't need the publicity."

Sarah careened into controversy like a drunk with vertigo. She was seen in public playfully tossing bread rolls at her husband. On another occasion she emptied a salt shaker in his hair and squirted him with Champagne. As the auctioneer for a charity benefit, she exhorted bidders to pledge more money. "Come on, George," she hollered at one startled man, "your wife wants it b-i-g." At a private party for a Middle Eastern emir, she dropped to the floor in front of forty guests and screamed at a female stripper, "Take it off! Take it off!"

"Fergie thinks by throwing food around, she can identify with the lower orders, which only revile her vulgarity," said columnist Taki Theodoracoupolos. "If you want to clear a room in London and get rid of stragglers who've stayed on too late, just say: `Oh, Fergie. At last. How are you?' People will start running. Whenever Philip wants to make the Queen laugh, he picks up the phone and says, `What? You say that Fergie has been hit by a truck and run over?'

The press even took potshots at her when she went deer hunting with the royal family in Scotland and bruised her forehead on the telescopic sight of her rifle. One columnist said she was sorry to hear that Fergie had hurt herself while "pursuing the innocent girlish pleasure of murdering a large mammal for sport."

"To a certain extent," admitted her father, "becoming Duchess of York did go to her head. She didn't always read the rule book properly. In the royal family, certain privileges are there for the taking, but there have to be limits. Sarah thought she could get away with much more than she did. In those early days, Andrew

should have been strong enough to guide her and advise her, but he didn't."

Andrew did not hesitate to rebuke her in public when she acted up, especially if she had been drinking. Once, after he corrected her, she wheeled on him. "Why do you have to keep embarrassing me and pointing it out in front of other people when I get things wrong?" she asked. "It's not very charitable. Sometimes you're as bad as your father."

Fergie, who resented her negative press coverage, tried to ingratiate herself with reporters, while Andrew ignored them. "Don't talk to them," he advised her. "They're knockers. They create heroes and then knock them down."

"What can I do?" she said to a friend. "Andrew tells me to take no notice, but he's away on his ship, not in the midst of things."

The press criticism abated slightly in February 1988 when the Yorks agreed to a tour of Los Angeles to promote British arts and industry. Sarah, three months pregnant, arrived wearing French couture. But she quickly disclosed that her underpants were made in Britain.

"My knickers are from Marks and Sparks," she chirped, using the nickname for Marks & Spencer, the budget department store where middle-class British housewives shop.

In anticipation of the royal visit, Chinatown merchants had put up a banner: "WELCOME FERGIE AND WHAT'S-HIS- NAME." Andrew grinned at it good-naturedly. Stuffed into his pin-striped suit, he looked as if he had just won the all-you-can-eat contest. On his previous visit to Los Angeles, he had been called a royal brat after turning a spray-paint hose on the press. The British Counsulate had had to pay one American photographer $ 1,200 in damages and issue an apology.

"I was given the check to repair my cameras," recalled photographer Chris Gulken. "I was told: `Her Majesty wishes you to know that this money comes from Andrew's personal funds and not from the public funds of the British people.'

A Los Angeles television commentator reported Andrew's 1984 trip to California as "the most unpleasant British visit since they burned the White House in the War of 1812."

The Prime Minister was so distressed by Andrew's press coverage that she commissioned a confidential study from public relations specialists in the London office of Saatchi & Saatchi to try to tone down Andrew's image. Mrs. Thatcher's report was sent to the Queen, who refused to read it. She said, "I hardly think I need advice on family matters from that frightful little woman.

On this trip Andrew was better behaved. Arriving in Long Beach on the royal yacht, Britannia, he and Sarah spent ten days touring Southern California. They visited schools and supermarkets, where she blew kisses and he signed autographs. She appeared with tiny American and British flags in her hair and told photographers, "Check out the hair, boys." During their tour of Bullocks Wilshire, the Los Angeles department store, the couple visited the boutiques of several British designers. Andrew spotted a black suede jacket that he admired, so the president of the store had the jacket gift-wrapped for him. Andrew accepted the present and then decided he would prefer something more contemporary, like a navy blue suede bomber jacket. The store made the switch.

Schoolchildren, who had never met a duchess before, crowded around Fergie and peppered her with questions about living in a castle. She said the hardest part was going to the bathroom. The youngsters grew wide-eyed as she told them about the Queen's old-fashioned toilets. "You've got to pull up on the loo, not push down," she explained. "I always bungle it."

The British press branded her as coarse as a braying donkey. Once described as a breath of fresh air, she became a skunk at the garden party. "She's an international embarrassment," complained London's Sunday Times. "Americans will likely retreat to their more refined dinner parties, there to cap each other with anecdotes about the awful vulgarities of the British."

That evening the Duchess swept into a party decked out in the diamonds she had received from the Queen. Sparkling in her tiara, necklace, earrings, and bracelet, she quipped to onlookers, "Clock the rocks." When someone asked her whether she liked Gilbert and Sullivan, she said she preferred Dire Straits. One London journalist cringed. "We wanted a silk purse," he said, "and we got a sow's ear.

But Americans were charmed by the vivacious redhead, especially the movie stars, who lined up in Hollywood to meet her. Morgan Fairchild curtsied breathlessly, and Pierce Brosnan was speechless. "I didn't know what to say to her," he admitted with a blush. Jack Nicholson was not so reticent.

"She told me she was disappointed she wasn't sitting next to me," he said with a characteristic leer. "I told her that maybe she was lucky she didn't, because I didn't know what I might have done to her, if I had."

Fergie hurried up to John Travolta to tell him the Princess of Wales was still bragging about their dance at the White House. "She told me that Diana never stops talking about it," said Travolta, beaming.

At one gala dinner the Duchess appeared in a gown that looked like a playing field of pink tulle waffles topped with pink satin roses. London's Sunday Times commented disdainfully, "She looked like she came in third in a Carmen Miranda look-alike contest."

The next night, at the Biltmore Hotel, Sarah appeared in a long black gown wrapped with galloping puffs of orange silk. The designer Mr. Blackwell pronounced the dress "God-awful" and pushed her to the top of his Worst-Dressed List for 1988 as "the Duchess who walks like a duck with a bad foot." Her long red hair was twirled and twisted into a hive of fussy curls held in place by diamond combs with corkscrew ringlets cascading to her shoulders. The effect was startling, even by Hollywood's excessive standards.

As she approached the microphone that evening, she looked around at the audience of 750 people, who had paid $1,000 each to be in the presence of royalty. She winked broadly at Roger Moore, the master of ceremonies, and spotting the actor George Hamilton, she smacked her lips. "All these men around here," she said lustily.

An exuberant male guest shouted, "We love you, Fergie!"

She yelled back, "I'll see you later."

"That was it for Fergie," said columnist Ross Benson, shaking his head sympathetically. "That was the beginning of the end. I filed a story that she had been a great hit in the United States, but the rest of the British press turned on her with a vengeance. They said her behavior was disgraceful, and with the inherent snobbish-

ness of this country, they dismissed her as the ill-bred daughter of a stable boy in a blazer."

The Yorks traveled from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, where they were weekend guests of Walter and Lee Annenberg at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs' 208-acre desert estate. The former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and his wife greeted the royal helicopter on their private runway. The Annenbergs had arranged for a flotilla of golf carts with Rolls-Royce hoods to transport the Duke and Duchess, their dressers, their aides, their guards, and their luggage.

Fergie hopped out of the helicopter with a large gold clasp in her hair fashioned like a guitar with the word "ROCK" on it. Andrew wore tasseled loafers. They jumped into two of the Annenbergs' golf carts and, like little children in bumper cars, drove up and down the runway with clownish abandon.

The next day they attended a polo game and a black-tie dinner party in the evening at the Annenberg estate. "Oh, it's just for a few friends," said Mrs. Annenberg of her party for one hundred people. U.S. State Department dogs sniffed for bombs as the movie stars and socialites arrived. Actor Michael York (``No relation,'' joked Fergie) took pictures, and the Duchess asked Frank Sinatra to sing her a song; he obliged with "The Lady Is a Tramp."

"I'm offended absolutely by the criticism the Duke and Duchess have received from the British press," snapped Los Angeles's Chief of Protocol. "Mayor Bradley found the Duchess to be great fun, and their royal tour of Southern California was a huge success.

Other Americans rallied to Fergie's side, finding the madcap Duchess immensely likable with her manic mugging and breezy asides. "It doesn't matter that Fergie's fashion statements sometimes end up with a question mark," said USA Today. "When a personality sparkles like hers, she could wear a lampshade and still light up a room.

Fergie, in turn, appreciated Americans. "I love visiting the United States," she told a National Press Club audience in Washington, D.C., several years later, "because Americans are so nice to me. I could've been an American in my last life." The audience

cheered, apparently not realizing that the Duchess believed in reincarnation. She said she especially enjoyed her trips to New York City. "That's where I really load up," she said about her marathon shopping sprees. On one return trip to London, an airline charged her $1,200 for fifty-one pieces of excess baggage.

"Those U.S. jaunts began to cost her dearly in terms of her image here," said British journalist Ingrid Seward, who was also a personal friend.

But Sarah didn't care. With her husband away at sea, she was bored. So she began flying the Concorde to New York, where her presence triggered shameless jockeying among the nouveau riche. The social cachet of her title drew moguls and tycoons, who scrambled to meet her. "She's very pretty," said multimillionaire Donald Trump, "very bubbly, with lots of personality."

Sarah never failed to amuse and entertain. She regaled her new friends with anecdotes about the royal family. Citing the Queen's appreciation for bawdy humor, she repeated Her Majesty's favorite jokes and included the story of the state visit of Nigeria's General Gowon.

She said the Queen had met President Gowon at Victoria Station and was riding with him in a carriage when one of the horses lifted its tail and broke wind.

The Queen turned to President Gowon. "Oh, I do apologize. Not a very good start to your visit."

"Oh, please don't apologize," said Gowon. "Besides, I thought it was one of the horses."

After a few drinks Sarah continued with her repertoire of gamy jokes, her favorite being one about the Queen as a guest on a radio show called WIiat Is It? The answer is given to the audience by a panel of experts before the guest appears. The guest gets twenty questions to figure out the answer.

The night the Queen appeared as a guest, the answer was "horsecock."

The no-nonsense monarch got down to basics with her first question. "Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" she asked.

"Animal," replied the panel.

"Can you kiss it?"

"Why, uhmmmm, yes . . . I suppose one could kiss it, if one were so inclined."

"Is it a horse's cock?" asked the Queen.

Sarah howled with laughter as she delivered the punch line, wh~ch startled one of her hostesses. "She certainly wasn't what I expected of a duchess," her hostess said carefully, "but she was lively and always sent us a thank-you." Sarah's letters, mailed from Buckingham Palace, arrived on her personal stationery, which featured a small crown atop a large "S."

An accomplished impressionist, Sarah also entertained her new friends with impersonations of her in-laws. She imitated Prince Philip by goosestepping around the room like a German soldier, barking out orders. Then she scrunched her face into a scowl and said, "This is Her Majesty when we call her Miss Piggyface." She mimicked the Queen's walk with her handbag dangling from her arm. Next, to the astonishment of her audience, she picked up a kitchen knife and knighted her host's dog. As she placed the stainless steel blade on either side of the pup's ears, she piped, impersonating the Queen, "Arise, Sir Rutherford."

The Duchess met her match for outrageous behavior at a New York City dinner party given by her first literary agent, Mort Janklow, who seated her across from author Norman Mailer.

"I've never read any of your books," she admitted, "so which one should I begin with?"

"Thugli Guys Don't Dance," replied Mailer.

"What's it about?"

"Pussy," he said.

There was an audible intake of breath from the writer Tom Wolfe, but the Duchess did not blanch.

"You know, Mr. Mailer," she said, "the most interesting thing for me at this moment is watching everyone's face[s] at this table."

Mailer was impressed by her quick response. "She fielded it nicely," he said, recalling the evening with a tinge of regret. "I had a devil in me that night. . . . I said the book had an interesting discussion of the differences between pussy and cunt. I must say she was terrific. A lot of people were offended, but Sarah Ferguson couldn't have been nicer about the whole deal, making a point of

telling a lot of nice Nellies she wasn't the least bit offended, and I felt bad about it afterward because she got trashed in the papers, and I expect it didn't do her any good in England."

When Sarah returned to her office in Buckingham Palace, she was greeted by the unsmiling face of Sir Robert Fellowes, who had been promoted to the powerful position of the Queen's private secretary. * He walked in brandishing a pile of press clippings.

"Well, we didn't do very well again today, did we?" he said, shaking his head with disapproval. He dropped the stack of newspaper stories on her desk as if they were dead mice. She glared at him.

"Oh, Robert, really," she said with exasperation.

"This must be such a disappointment for you," he said, peering over his steel-rimmed glasses. Turning to leave, he added, "I know it is for Her Majesty."

Fellowes, or "Bellowes," as Fergie called him, was her father's first cousin and a man she came to detest. She dreaded his visits to her office. He always arrived looking dour and brandishing a pile of clippings that chronicled her latest misadventure. She told friends she got a stomachache as soon as she saw him approaching her door. "He could hardly wait to show me the story of the MP who said I was flagrantly abusing the royal name," she said.

"He was her Lord High Executioner," said a New York businesswoman whom the Duchess had adopted as her unofficial adviser. "Bad-news Bellowes, as we called him, made Sarah's life a living hell. She had to stand alone against that unremitting Palace machine which wanted nothing so much as to extinguish her delightful spirit. She had no one to help her. Not even her husband. As much as Andrew loved Sarah, he would not defend her against the courtiers. He was simply too terrified of them.

*In her reign, the Queen has had six private secretaries all men. The first four were Sir Alan Lascelles: 1952-1953; Sir Mid~ael Andeane: 1953-1972; Sir Martin Charteris: 1972-1977; Sir Philip Moore: 1977-1986. All were older than the Queen. The last two were younger: Sir `ii'illiam Heseltine: 1986-1990; Sir Robert Fellowes: 1990-.

By the l990s the Queen's preference for men showed in her staffing of executive posts within the royal household. Out of forty-nine positions, only four were held by women, and one woman was forced to resign when she married a divorced man. Although much of the Commonwealth is black, the Queen has only ten blacks on her staff of nine hundred, and they hold menial positions.

"She felt the weight and power of the monarchy crashing down on top of her; she knew she was in trouble, but she had no adult in her life to advise her. No one in the Palace wanted to help her. The Queen adored her, but the Queen is not the power in the Palace. Prince Philip runs everything, and once he had decided that Sarah was not worth the trouble she was causing, she was finished. Away at sea every week, Andrew was never there for her. Neither was the Princess of Wales, who saw her as a rival. Sarah's mother was dealing with a dying husband in Brazil. Her sister, Jane, was dealing with her own divorce in Australia. And Sarah's father was no help whatsoever after he became involved in a sex scandal. So, as her friend, I stepped in and tried to help."

The New Yorker advised the Duchess to improve her image by performing more royal duties and becoming active with charities for crippled children and the mentally retarded. "I told her to take a page from Diana's book," the adviser said. She explained the onagain, off-again friendship between the Duchess and the Princess as fraught with rivalry and petty jealousies. "Sarah felt that she was being sacrificed to make room for Diana as the future Queen. She resented the unfair comparisons in the press between them Diana was depicted as a loving mother while Sarah looked like a wench who abandoned her children for months on end to go on luxury holidays."

Her ski guide in Switzerland, Bruno Sprecher, described her as a woman who did not like other women. "She could always ski well," he said, although she stopped every twenty minutes for a cigarette, "and was great chums with the men in the party, but she didn't like female competition."

Her New York adviser saw it differently. "Unfortunately, Sarah was too forthright for her own good. She admitted she never liked babies much before she had her own. Diana, of course, was portrayed as a madonna who adored children. But Sarah had reservations about Diana as a mother, especially when she tried to alienate her boys from Charles. She [Diana] constantly asked the little Princes, `Who loves you the best? Who loves you more than anyone else in the whole world?' And the boys were supposed to say, `You do, Mummy. You do.' Sarah felt that was troubling. She also

did not agree with the hateful picture Diana painted of Charles, who, Sarah said, was just not that bad. Obtuse, yes, but definitely not the monster Diana said he was.

The New York adviser continued: "Sarah never publicly criticized the Princess of Wales she wasn't that stupid but there were many times when she felt badly used by Diana. For instance, the Princess was no comfort to her during the lurid business with her father. [In May 1988 Major Ron was exposed by the tabloids as a regular patron of massage parlors. Private Eye ran a competition for anagrams of "Ronald Ferguson." Winners were "organ flounders" and "old groaner's fun." Four years later his love affair with Lesley Player became public, and she admitted to aborting his child; and Prince Charles fired him as his polo manager.] Diana shrewdly put as much distance as she could between herself and the Major, even ushering her children off the polo grounds so they wouldn't be contaminated by his presence. Sarah was hurt and humiliated by her father, but, as she said, Diana's family wasn't so exemplary that she could act holier than thou."

Shortly after his wedding, Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, called the Daily Mail's gossip columnist to own up to an extramarital fling with a former girlfriend days before her story appeared in the tabloids. Spencer's story became a front-page scandal in Britain. "I have caused my wife more grief than I would wish her to have in a lifetime with me," he said, "and I accept full responsibility for the folly of my actions. Now, after the birth of our baby, we are deeply in love and our marriage is the most important thing in our lives."

He later said that his wife, the former model Victoria Lockwood, was deeply disturbed and suffered from anorexia nervosa and alcoholism. She required treatment at a detoxification center and was institutionalized for three months for what her husband described as "serious psychological problems." In a speech at his birthday party, Charles Spencer, known as "Champagne Charlie" before his marriage, said his father had advised him to find a wife who would stick by him through thick and thin. "Well," he told his guests, "those of you who know Victoria know that she's

thick and she certainly is thin." Within six years the couple, who had four children, separated.

Publicly the Duchess of York stood by her father after he was caught in the massage parlor, but she complained bitterly to friends that she felt soiled by his scandal. She said that his adverse publicity had affected her chances of attracting the charity work she needed to rehabilitate herself. She felt that "the galloping Major," as he began calling himself, made her look less respectable. Organizations seeking royal patronage, especially those that needed to raise money and maintain a worthy profile, avoided her. The Princess of Wales was patron to 120 charities; the Duchess of York had only fifteen.

"I had friends who were in drugs," Sarah said, "so I asked if I could join a chemical dependency movement." She became the patron of the Chemical Dependency Centre. "People tend to be very judgmental about drug users," she said. "But I see drug addicts as my equals." At the time, she, too, was a drug addict. "She had given her body over to these slimming drugs [amphetamines], and that was the beginning of her downfall," said seventy-nine-year- old Jack Temple, one of the many healers she turned to for help. "Slimming drugs fogged her brain. Her actions weren't normal."

From New York her American adviser watched in dismay as the Duchess was increasingly portrayed in the press as someone who advanced on the world with both hands extended like horseshoe magnets. She sold an exclusive interview to a British newspaper for $201,600. The newspaper complained that she had not been forthcoming and withheld part of her payment because she had denied that she was pregnant. The day the article was published, she admitted to a television interviewer that she was expecting her second child. "I forgot," she told the newspaper, insisting on full payment. She threatened to sue, but the Queen intervened, and Sarah backed down.

Sarah collected $500,000 for opening the doors of her home, Sunninghill Park, to Hello.(, a large glossy picture magazine that caters to celebrities, especially royalty. The magazine, which pays huge fees for exclusives, was Sarah's favorite; over the next ten

years she was featured on several covers. She sold exclusive interviews, plus photographs of herself, her husband, her children, her mother, her father, and her sister. In her debut issue she posed with her husband while they changed their babies' diapers. The magazine spread seventy photographs over forty-eight pages of the Yorks holding their two daughters, the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. And the cover boasted "The Duke and Duchess of York Grant Us the Most Personal of Interviews and for the First Time Ever Throw Open the Doors of Their Home and Invite Us to Share Their Intimate Family Moments." The Queen said it looked like a movie magazine launch for a Hollywood starlet. Even the novelist Barbara Cartland, whom Mrs. Thatcher's government had made a Dame of the British empire, expressed disgust. "We might as well have pictures of the Queen Mother taking her clothes off and climbing into the bath."

The Duchess's New York adviser had her hands full: "The newspaper stories about Sarah became so horrendous that I finally told her to stop giving interviews because her spontaneous comments were killing her. She would say something light and humorous that was invariably misinterpreted or came out sounding brash and stupid. So her secretary began telling reporters to submit their questions in writing. Sarah would fax the questions to me with what she'd like to say; I'd edit her comments and fax back what she should say. That worked for a while. . .

The New York businesswoman tried to protect the Duchess from the press, but the Duchess's worst enemy was the Duchess herself. She didn't follow her friend's advice or learn from her own mistakes. Instead she bemoaned her public image and blamed everyone around her the courtiers, the press, the Princess of Wales ("I know she leaks stories about me," Sarah said), her father, and even her husband, whom she now described to friends as "boring. . . a darling, but a boring darling." She complained that An- drew did not make enough money to maintain a royal lifestyle. Enthralled by the big-spending ways of her new American friends, especially Croesus-like Texans, she set out to augment her income.

During her first pregnancy, she decided to write a children's book, although she admitted that her best subject in school had

been modern dance. Her headmistress at Hurst Lodge once described her in a school report as "an enthusiastic pupil who makes a cheerful contribution to life at the Lodge . . . [but] . . . consistently fails to do herself justice in written work."

Undaunted, Sarah said she didn't want to sound like a writer who swallowed the dictionary. So she put her name to a simple story about a helicopter called "Budgie" (slang for the budgerigar parrot) that is looked down upon by the bigger aircraft, until he does something heroic. "I sat down at the dining room table with a big pile of scrap paper, the backs of photocopied stuff and printouts," the Duchess told Publishers Weekly, "and started writing with just one pencil."

With that one pencil she made a fortune. She received a $1 million advance from Simon & Schuster, and within three years she had produced four Budgie books; they earned more than $2.5 million from serial rights, foreign rights, and paperback rights. Later, with the help of her financial adviser, she sold merchandising rights, including rights to cartoons, wind-up dolls, T-shirts, hats, and lunch pails. The books became best-sellers in England, despite literary critics who dismissed them as "bland and ghastly" and "utter rubbish."

Sarah was so severely criticized for marketing her royal title that Robert Fellowes sternly suggested she consider donating at least 10 percent of her royalties to charity. She balked at first, saying Budgie was her only source of significant income. But she backed down as soon as she realized that the "suggestion" had come from Her Majesty. Sarah knew those royal demands usually came through the thin lips of Robert Fellowes. When she was accused of plagiarism,* she announced that she would donated "a certain percentage." But, after making the public announcement, she reconsidered and kept the royalties. Then her Budgie books hit severe turbulence.

*The Duchess of York was not the first member of the royal family to be accused of plagiarism. in 1986 Princess Michael of Kent, who wrote Crowned in a Far Country (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), was accused of copying from the author Daphne Bennett. The Princess was forced to pay Bennett several thousand dollars.

tThe Duchess of York did not acknowledge the author's written requests in 1993, 1994, and 1995 for confirmation of her charitable donations from the royalties of Budgie. Her private secretary said, "She donated a certain percentage for so long, then it just ended."

An observant reader was struck by several similarities between Budgie The Little Helicopter by HRH the Duchess of York and Hector the Helicopter by Arthur W. Baldwin, an Englishman who had died several years before.

Both books centered on the adventures of a little helicopter with eyelashes; both were similarly illustrated, and both told essentially the same story:

The adventures of Baldwin's Hector begin with the helicopter feeling "unwanted and forgotten" because he's left twiddling his thumbs in the hangar while all the other planes are traveling to exotic places. Budgie, too, feels dejected and twiddles his thumbs because all the planes in his hangar are going to an air show.

Hector falls asleep and has a "wonderful dream." So does Budgie. Upon waking, Hector goes for a spin. So does Budgie. Hector cheers up. "In the distance he could see the sea shining and sparkling in the morning sunlight." Budgie also "cheered up. The sea was sparkling and the cold wind whipped his cheeks." Both Hector and Budgie perform rescue missions that save people's lives; both little whirlybirds earn the respect of the big airplanes; and both live happily ever after.

The Duchess maintained that Budgie was her own creation

and she wouldn't budge: "The books are all me. Every page." The publisher holding the copyright for Hector was dubious but did not publicly dispute the Duchess. "It is difficult for us to say that anything has been literally `copied,' " wrote Jane Moore, group legal adviser of Reed International Books in a letter, "but if this was not a major source of inspiration for the `Budgie' books then it is a remarkable coincidence." She did not say whether she thought the coincidence was accidental or significant.

During Sarah's second pregnancy in November 1989, she flew to Texas as the guest of honor of Lynn and Oscar Wyatt. The Wyatts' estimated wealth of $8 billion paid for a gold-plated life of private planes and French villas. Lynn, the Sakowitz department store heiress, was Oscar's fourth wife. Oscar, an oil tycoon, owned Coastal Corporation. Like little kids who collected Barbie and Ken dolls, the Wyatts collected celebrities movie stars, models, artists, designers, and royals. "Grace and Rainier are our neighbors in the

South of France," drawled Lynn Wyatt, making the Prince and Princess of Monaco sound like "just folks" on the nearby ranch. A petite blond beauty on the international best-dressed list, Lynn Wyatt thrived on socializing with the likes of Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan, Princess Margaret, and the Aga Khan.

"The Wyatts are walking wallets," Fergie told a friend, describing the international socialites and their free-spending style. She breathlessly recited the lavish details of the Monte Carlo Sporting Club Ball that Lynn Wyatt had decorated. "She flew in four thousand yellow roses," said Fergie, snapping her fingers, "and she didn't blink."

As the patron of the Houston Grand Opera, Lynn Wyatt had invited the Duchess to represent the royal family at a benefit salute to the British opera. She gave a dinner party in Sarah's honor and included her own two sons from her first marriage. Mrs. Wyatt seated her older son, thirty-six-year-old Steve, next to Sarah. He lived in London and worked in his stepfather's petroleum empire, dealing with sales to the Middle East. He flew from London to Houston solely to attend his mother's party for the Duchess of York.

Fergie fell hard for the tall, lanky Texan, who had thick dark hair, a year-round tan, and rippling muscles. He described himself as spiritual and attributed his spirituality to Madame Vasso, who later claimed that Sarah and Steve started their affair when Sarah was five months pregnant. The Madame offered this account to an editor at Little, Brown in New York in hopes of selling a book in 1996. But the editor turned down the book proposal, saying people were not interested in the Duchess's indiscretions.

Sarah, who regularly consulted astrologers, told one that she could not resist the Texan. She described him as "incredibly delicious . . . like a blue-eyed pudding." She also told her father that "Fred," her code name for Wyatt, was wild in bed. At first Major Ferguson objected to their relationship and told her to stop.

"Do you really feel that strongly?" she asked.

"Yes, I do," said the Major. "Stop. Now."

"You surely can't expect me to stay in on my own night after night," she retorted. She didn't speak to her father for six months.

"Other people advised Sarah to stop seeing Steve Wyatt," admitted Major Ferguson, "and they weren't spoken to for months, either."

Steve Wyatt had been adopted by his mother's second husband after his natural father, Robert Lipman, was convicted of killing a woman during a drug overdose and served six years in prison for manslaughter. Steve idolized his freewheeling stepfather, Oscar Wyatt, and rarely referred to his natural father. If asked about him, Steve implied that Lipman had died before he was born. From his mother, Steve had learned the basics of moving in high society; he flattered rich wives and deferred to their rich husbands.

Steve and Sarah spoke the same New Age language of mystics and channelers and crystals full of electromagnetic fields that they fancied as healing and restorative. She told him about the voices she heard in her head and the spirits that protected her from harm. He told her he slept with one of Madame Vasso's pyramid shields over his bed to protect his psyche. He meditated every morning and ate a macrobiotic diet. "He bored everyone to tears by talking about diets and good karma and the rest of the bullshit modern Americans pollute us with," said the columnist Taki.

Wyatt despised cigarettes, so Sarah tried not to smoke in front of him. A physical fitness enthusiast, he said, "Mah body is mah temple." The Duchess said she'd like to start worshiping. Both laughed heartily.

The day after the dinner party, Oscar Wyatt proposed an aerial view of his 29,000-acre ranch near Corpus Christi; he flew Sarah in his private helicopter and allowed her to take over the controls. Steve marveled at her flying skill. "Did your husband teach you how to do that?" he asked.

"My husband doesn't have much time to teach me anything," she said.

"What a waste," said Wyatt. He was entranced with the Queen's daughter-in-law and let her know.

Sarah had given him her private phone number at the Palace and told him to call her when he returned to London. When he

did, she immediately invited him over for drinks. He reciprocated with parties, restaurant dinners, and holidays. She visited him in his apartment in Cadogan Square. Weeks later she introduced him to her unsuspecting husband, and when Andrew returned to sea, she brought Wyatt into their Berkshire home. She invited him to their housewarming party, to their daughter's christening, and to dinner with her in-laws. She even gave him a place of honor next to the Queen.

Shortly after Andrew returned to his ship in January 1990, Sarah called him, saying she felt despondent. She asked how they could continue a marriage that was subjected to month-long separations. Andrew reminded her of what he had said before they married: he was a prince and a naval officer before he was a husband. He suggested she was feeling overwhelmed because of her plegnancy, but she insisted she wanted to escape from their marriage and the Palace courtiers. "I want to live in Argentina with my mother," she wailed. Their conversation was tape-recorded by a stranger, who had eavesdropped on his scanner, and sold the tape to a British newspaper.

Andrew rushed home for the March 23,1990, birth of his second daughter and stayed six weeks. While he and the nanny took care of the new baby, Steve Wyatt flew Sarah and two-year-old Beatrice in a private plane to Morocco for a holiday. The next month Wyatt flew Sarah to the South of France, where his mother had rented a villa. Weeks later, in August 1990, he asked her to entertain Dr. Ramzi Salman, Iraq's oil minister, at Buckingham Palace. Sarah did not hesitate.

She invited her lover and his Iraqi business acquaintance to dinner in her second-floor suite at the Palace. Naively she did not consider the political ramifications of entertaining the representative of Saddam Hussein days after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. When Prince Philip found out what she had done, he sailed into her for poor judgment. For a member of the British royal family to publicly embrace Iraq when British soldiers might be going to war against the country was "unconscionable" and "just bloody stupid." Sarah blamed the courtiers. She said, "Someone should have told me.

After dinner that evening, she had taken her two guests to Le Gavroche, one of London's finest French restaurants, to join a small party hosted by Alistair McAlpine, former treasurer of the Tory Party. Lord and Lady McAlpine were friends of the Yorks and had dined at Sunninghill Park; they were fond of Sarah but were uncomfortable having to extend hospitality to Saddam Hussein's envoy. They were also disquieted by Sarah's blatant behavior with Steve Wyatt. "It was a display of mutual fondling I have never seen before in a three-star restaurant," said one of the McAlpines' guests.

"There is in the Duchess a free spirit," Alistair McAlpine wrote later, "an instinct she believes justifies whatever she may do, regardless of how ridiculous or unsuitable her actions are."

Surprisingly, Sarah, a master of what Punch magazine called "snoblesse oblige," did not comprehend the social liability of taking an American lover, especially one who sounded like Sammy Glick with a southern accent. It was a cultural clash of aristocrats versus armadillos on an island that defers to aristocrats. Despite his father's money, the Texan could not lasso a position within the British establishment. The social barriers were too high, even for an expert climber like Steve Wyatt. One American who had tried to scale the wall ended up living in exile and she had married the King of England. "The attitude of most British people," said Harold Brooks-Baker, "is that Americans are savages.

By 1990 everyone knew that Sarah's marriage was over, except her husband. Her lover, who continued sleeping with other women, still reveled in her royal invitations. "For the Jewish boy from Houston, whose parentage was shrouded in scandal," wrote the Daily Mad, "there could have been no greater social triumph than his invitation from the Duchess of York personally to the December 1990 Buckingham Palace Ball to celebrate the birthdays of the Queen Mother (90), Princess Margaret (60), Princess Anne (40) and the Duke of York (30)."

Soon he had no more royal invitations. Through her equerries the Queen communicated her displeasure about the relationship and forced the Duchess to stop seeing the high-flying Texan. "There'll be nipples on a bull `fore I'll embarrass that little lady," Oscar

Wyatt told a business associate. Rather than offend Her Majesty, he cooperated with the Palace by having his son transferred to the United States. "It's very embarrassing," Lynn Wyatt told a gossip columnist. "Prince Andrew even called Steve to tell him how sorry he was about it all."

During the move from his apartment in Cadogan Square, Steve Wyatt left behind 120 photographs from his May 1990 holiday in Morocco with Sarah and her two children. A mover found the casual snapshots, recognized the Duchess of York, and sold the photos to a tabloid. Sarah was traveling to Palm Beach with her father and his mistress when she received the call from her husband prior to publication.

Andrew was aboard his ship when the Palace contacted him about the pictures. The Queen's press secretary suggested that the Duke tell his wife. So Andrew dutifully called Sarah, who took the call in the Palm Beach airport. She screamed at him for not defending her.

"It's not like you didn't know about those pictures," she said. "You saw them. You knew about the holiday. You wanted me to go. Why didn't you say that? Why do you never defend me to those bastards?" She slammed the phone down and that night got drunk. Very drunk.

She admitted overindulging when she addressed the Motor Neurone Disease Association the next day. "I had too many mai tais last night," she told the group. She brightened up during her visit to the Connor Nursery in West Palm Beach, where she posed for pictures with black children suffering from AIDS. That evening she attended a dinner party at the restricted Everglades Club in Palm Beach and the next day was severely criticized in newspapers for lending royal presence, even unintentionally, to a club that bars blacks and Jews.*

On her return flight to London, she started drinking again.

*"It {Everglades Club] represents in its policies the old-fashioned, albeit somewhat refined, bigotry which is no different in kind from the gutter-level bigot who wears a hood and sheet," said Arthur Teitelbaum, southern area director of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors anti-Semitism. "We had alerted the embassy . . . with the expectation that it would sufficiently value the reputation and sensibilities of the royal family to advise the Duchess not to attend. They chose to turn a blind eye to the character of the club, which we find regrettable."

After two glasses of Champagne she began throwing sugar packets at her father. She lobbed wet towels at his mistress and tossed peanuts around the cabin. "Then Sarah pulled a sick bag over her head," recalled the Major's mistress, "and started making telephone noises into it. We shrieked with laughter like silly schoolgirls." Other passengers watched the rumpus. Among them, three journalists taking notes.

"The way that story was embroidered," huffed Major Ferguson, "convinced me more than anything else that the press was out to discredit my daughter."

Two months later, on March l9,* 1992, the Palace announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were separating. The Queen's press secretary, Charles Anson, privately briefed the BBC correspondent, who reported, "The knives are out at the palace for Fergie." The BBC man said the Queen was very upset with the Duchess, and the rest of the royal family considered her unsuitable to be among them.

"I was furious," recalled her father, "and rang Sir Robert Fellowes, and told him how monstrous I thought it was . . . it was unforgivable."

The courtier responded coolly. "It's my job," he said, "to protect the family, and particularly the Queen. I have to."

"You don't have to go that far," said Ferguson.

Eventually the press secretary apologized to Sarah for his indiscretion and offered his resignation to the Queen, who did not accept it.t Rather, four years later, she knighted him.

"Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar." That's the word Lord Charteris used in triplicate to damn the Duchess. Charteris, the Queen's former private secretary, denounced Sarah in a Spectator interview with journalist Noreen Taylor. And a columnist for the Sunday Times, John Junor, condemned the Duchess as "highly immoral." He ran her down as the "royal bike" ridden by everyone.

*The Palace, which goes along with the Queen's superstitions, chose March 19 to announce the Yorks' separation. March 19 had been the date of Princess Margaret's separation announcement in 1976 and Sarah and Andrew's engagement announcement was March 19, 1986.

**"The Queen didn't accept Charles's resignation," said Anson's good friend Maxine Champion, "because the Queen agreed with him. That's what he told us when he came to Washington, D.C. We had dinner with him one night and he told us all about the Fergie mess."

By this time she was thoroughly disgraced as a wife and as a mother. But even more disheartening for her was the news that the man she called the love of her life, Steve Wyatt, was leaving her life for another wife: he was marrying an American society beauty, Cate Magennis. When he told Sarah the news, she struggled to wish him well. But she admitted later that she almost cried. After the wedding she said, "I can't have the man I love because he's got married. What's the matter with me? Why wouldn't he marry me?"

In Wyatt's wake, another smooth-talking Texan was already circling in the waters. "If you want to ride swiftly and safely from the depths to the surface," Truman Capote wrote in a novella, "the surest way is to single out a shark and attach yourself to it like a pilot fish."

For the next three years it would be difficult to distinguish between the shark and the pilot fish, but the Duchess was about to embark on the ride of her life.

EIGHTEEN

He's absolutely brill about money," burbled the Duchess of York. "Really, really brill."

In her slangy way, Sarah was describing John Bryan to her husband as brilliant. She recommended they sit down with the thirty-five-year-old American to discuss their finances. "He can help," she said. "I just know he can."

By 1991 the Duke and Duchess were spending four times their annual income, and the Queen was balking at paying their overdrafts. Sarah, who spent wildly, refused to cut back. The worse her marriage became, the more money she spent, running up staggering bills. Her kitchen staples included caviar, raspberries (in season and out), a variety of imported cheeses, and at least thirteen flavors of ice cream. In one year she spent $102,000 for gifts and $84,560 on psychics. Then Steve Wyatt introduced her to his friend Anthony John Adrian Bryan Jr., known to his family and friends as Johnny." He promised to come to her financial rescue. "Johnny stepped in," said columnist Taki, "and took over the Fergie account so to speak."

A self-described financial wizard, John Bryan understood the art of making deals. He knew the intricacies of Swiss bank accounts and offshore tax shelters. He unraveled the mysteries of high finance and reduced complex transactions to simple logic. He reassured people like Sarah and Andrew, who did not know how to manage their money. After Bryan explained the tax advantages of incorporating Sarah's publishing ventures and funneling her Budgie profits through a corporation, Andrew and Sarah eagerly incorporated. Bryan helped set up ASB [Andrew Sarah Bryan] Publishing Inc. and, at Andrew and Sarah's insistence, became a member of the board.

Susceptible to gurus, astrologers, and fortune-tellers, the Duke and Duchess were drawn to the fast-talking American. Their goals were his goals: to make money big money or, as he put it, "megamillions."

During their first meeting, recalled a secretary who was in the room, Bryan endeared himself to the Duke of York by offering to restore the Duchess's image in the press. "Most everything written about her is rubbish," Bryan told them. Andrew nodded in agreement. Despite their marital problems, he remained devoted and wanted the rest of the world to see his wife as he did.

"Sir," Bryan said respectfully, "I want to show Her Royal Highness's commitment to charity and emphasize the good work she does which enhances the royal family." Sarah beamed as Bryan pitched his fastball without a pop. He spoke with quiet authority. As he later told one writer, he operated on the principle of "softly, softly . . . catchee monkey." Within fifteen minutes of their meeting, the organ-grinder had snared the Duke of York.

Andrew and Sarah sat spellbound as the American spun their debts into assets. He made their financial future look glowing. The bald sorcerer sounded as though he could sell toupees to Rastafarians. And he was such a fast talker that he made gypsy moths look like butterflies.

"He was clever, and he certainly knew business," said a British man who had known Bryan since he had moved to London. "But he was as ambitious as the Gordon Gecko character in [the movie] Wa/i Street. Johnny was hard charging, high energy; he lived on the edge. As you Americans say, he performed without a net."

John Bryan executed his high-wire act with style. He understood packaging and the importance of the first impression. He looked rich. He wore custom-made suits, hand-tooled leather shoes, and gold cuff links. He skied, golfed, and played squash in

private clubs. He competed fiercely on the tennis court. He dated models and debutantes.

But there was little behind his fancy facade. He possessed none of the hallmarks of wealth no property, no portfolio. He spent most of everything he earned and more. When his businesses in New York City, London, and Munich ran out of money, and he became insolvent, he left town.

He did it first in New York City. Following graduation from the University of Texas in 1979, he received a master's degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He moved to Manhattan and started a small communications company with $1 million that he had raised from private investors. He promised them big profits, but after four years the company went broke.

"I lost over $50,000 on the guy," said Taki. "I based my investment on my friendship . . . and I have to say I'm deeply disappointed. He said it was a sure thing, we couldn't miss, and that my $50,000 would turn into millions. After the company failed, he went doggo for a while, and then turned up [in London] with Fergie."

The British Home Office wouldn't give him a work permit because it wasn't convinced he could support himself. His London apartment, which doubled as his office, was rented. So was his furniture. He also rented a country house in Gloucestershire. "That's where I met him," recalled journalist Rory Knight Bruce. "He was dressed in American tweeds and smoking a joint."

His leased car accumulated so many parking tickets that he was arrested and fined $800. After paying the fine, he continued collecting parking tickets. Finally police booted and towed the car, and he was reduced to taking cabs. He hired an occasional limousine that he charged to his business before the business collapsed. He rarely paid cash for anything, except occasional cocaine.* "Fergie

*In My Story: The Duchess of York, Her Father and Me (HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), Lesley Player said John Bryan used cocaine. She wrote that Bryan invited her and another woman to his apartment, where he sniffed the drug. Bryan did not comment on the book, but Allan Starkie, his business partner in Oceonics Deutschland, a German construction company, denied Player's story. "I was there that night in John's Chelsea flat, and I certainly did not see anyone taking any drags." Player indicated only three people were present that evening she, a woman friend, and Bryan.

Starkie, who accompanied the Duchess of York on her charity trips to Eastern Europe, was later arrested in Germany when Oceonics collapsed. He was held in a German jail for five months, pending a police investigation of the company that left debts of $ 15 million.

In 1995 Bryan, who had moved back to the United States, allegedly offered cocaine and prostitutes to entice investors into a Las vegas real estate deal. The "investors" were reporters for the British tabloid News of the World, which published the story under the headline "Fergie's Ex in vice and Drugs Shame."

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sniffed a lot, too," said Taki, who socialized with the couple. "I should know. I've done my share."

Although Bryan was described as a Texas multimillionaire, he was born in Wilmington, Delaware. But at the age of nine he moved to Houston when his father divorced his mother and married a Texas heiress, Josephine Abercrombie. During this second marriage, his father began an affair with (and later married) Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz, the wife of the Sakowitz department store heir Robert Sakowitz who was Steve Wyatt's uncle.

Bryan bragged to one writer that he was part of "the American establishment" because his godfather was Felix DuPont, and his mother, who had married three times, was listed in the Social Register. He boasted to girlfriends that his mother had once dated Frank Sinatra and that his British-born father had graduated from the Harvard Business School.

"It is perhaps no coincidence," said Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz after her divorce from Bryan Sr., "that Johnny's father seemed to single out wealthy, influential, and sometimes married women for conquests, me included." Although his father had married four times and very well, he had never married a duchess.

Skimming the surface of London society, John Bryan partied in expense-account restaurants and nightclubs like Annabel's and Tramps. When he became the Yorks' financial adviser, he moved into more rarefied circles. Still, the exclusive world of White's and Brooks's (private men's clubs in London) eluded him. To British aristocrats he looked like an American hustler on the make. To the Duchess of York he looked like a man on a white horse.

He had promised to make her rich and restore her image. He revered her title as much as she did and commended her for correcting Maria Shriver on camera when the NBC-TV interviewer addressed her as Sarah Ferguson. "I'm Her Royal Highness," Sarah pointed out. "I'm the Duchess of York." Bryan emphasized to her the value of her title in the marketplace. "Your image is all you have," he said over and over. "It is absolutely one hundred percent your biggest asset."

Capitalizing on Fergie, he made her his biggest merger and acquisition. Within days of her separation from Andrew, Bryan took over her life. "When Sarah moved from Sunninghill Park to a rented house, Romenda Lodge in Wentworth, John assisted with details like staff contracts, rental negotiations, security, confidentiality agreements," recalled her father, Major Ferguson.

After the move, Sarah said she would have a nervous breakdown if she didn't have a vacation. So "J.B.," as she and her children called him, arranged an extravagant six-week trip to the Far East. He planned the itinerary, complete with chartered flights, limousines, and luxury hotels. He said he paid for everything: $135,000. He joined the Duchess, her two children, their nanny, and their protection officers in Phuket, a resort island near Thailand, and traveled with them through Indonesia.

He was photographed traveling with the Duchess and described in the press as the unknown man who was seen carrying Princess Eugenie on his shoulders. He later explained that he was a family friend acting as a marriage counselor for the Duke and Duchess, trying to help them reconcile. He also said he had been asked by the Queen and Prince Andrew to handle Sarah's finances. "It's completely absurd to suggest that there is anything unprofessional in my friendship with the Duchess," he said. "I am acting in a purely professional manner.

Weeks later he and Sarah visited her mother on her polo pony breeding farm four hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Sarah wanted Bryan to advise Susan Barrantes on handling her husband's estate. Bryan told Susan he could make* her "megamillions" if she wanted to make a film about playing polo in Argentina.

Throughout the summer of 1992 he and Sarah were seen shop-

*John Bryan also negotiated for Sarah's sister, Jane Ferguson Luedecke. He sold exclusive coverage of her second wedding to Hello! magazine for $300,000, but Jane and her husband received only $217,000. They sued Bryan for the rest $73,000. Sarah was outraged by the lawsuit. Siding with Bryan, she stopped speaking to her sister. A London judge ordered Bryan to repay the money, plus interest, and all court costs, a total of $82,500. But as of July 1996 Bryan had not paid. The next month he was declared bankrupt.

ping in New York City, partying in London, and dancing in Paris. Still, he insisted their relationship was strictly platonic. When Clive Goodman of News of the W6rid asked him about a romance, Bryan snapped, "Even such a suggestion is not just rude, it's impertinent and insulting." By then he had moved his clothes into her closet at Romenda Lodge and put his slippers under her bed.

With military precision he began organizing her finances. A big spender himself, he said he was startled by her spending, which he calculated at $81,000 a month. He told her she was spending almost $ 1 million a year far more than she was making. She shrugged. She was still the daughter-in-law of the richest woman in the world. "It was madness," he said later, "spending for the sake of it, with no thought for the present, let alone the future." At the time, he joked about setting up a charity called Duchess in Distress.

The financial adviser was captivated by his investment. When the writer Elizabeth Kaye compared him to Cinderella, John Bryan did not disagree. "I am like Cinderella," he said. "It's a kind of wonderful love story." He fully expected to marry the Duchess after her divorce, but his friend Taki was skeptical. "It'll never happen," Taki predicted. "He doesn't have enough money for Fergie."

Making himself indispensable, Bryan supervised her investments, her vacations, her wardrobe, even her diet. "It's very important to Johnny that Sarah look good and continue to keep her weight down," said his mother. Nothing escaped his attention. He even arranged her furniture. He called reporters regularly to tell them about her efforts for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. He said proudly that she generated 25 percent of the charity's income.

The grateful Duchess rewarded him with lavish gifts: a $ 1,500 Louis Vuitton trunk embossed with his initials; a Tag Heuer watch; Turnbull & Asser shirts with an oversize pocket for his mobile phone; a coffee machine from Harrods; silk burgundy boxer shorts; a trip to Paris; and a $20,000 birthday party under a canopy with a jukebox playing his favorite songs.

For her thirty-third birthday he reciprocated with $ 1,000 worth of lingerie, including a $330 teddy and a $22 garter belt.

"They tried to top each other with extravagance," said a friend, who decided that John Bryan won with his trip to Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1992. "At least in terms of radioactive publicity." He was alluding to the fallout from photographs that were secretly taken through the far-seeing lens of a long-range camera as the Duchess and her lover cavorted by a pool. She was without the top of her red~and~yellow-flowered bikini, and the pictures from that topless romp on France's Cote d'Azur produced a mouthwatering scandal.

Sarah was captured on film as she lolled on a chaise alongside Bryan, whose bald head gleamed in the sun. The camera caught him lifting her foot to kiss her instep. Click. He massaged her leg, nuzzled her shoulder, and rubbed her breasts. Click. Click. She slathered suntan oil on his bald head. He climbed out of his chaise and lay on top of her. Click. Click. Click. She put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips. Click. Click. They shared a cigarette. Playing alongside them were Sarah's two children; next to the children were their two royal protection officers, sunbathing. They later lost their jobs.

The embarrassing photos were published when Sarah was vacationing with the royal family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. She had arrived with her estranged husband and their children for a week. On the morning of Thursday, August 20,1992, the Duke and Duchess appeared for breakfast while the children remained in the nursery. Sarah and Andrew had been warned that the photos were to be published, but they had not seen them. So they were unprepared for the shock: the front page of the Daily Mirrnr featured John Bryan in swimming trunks lying on top of Sarah, who was bare-breasted. "Fergie's Stolen Kisses," blared the headline. The Evening Standard ran the photos under the banner "Duchess in Disgrace."

When Sarah saw the newspapers on the table, she went white. "I almost heaved," she recalled. Within seconds the Duke of Edinburgh was standing at her side. Months before, he had dressed her down for attending Elton John's fortieth birthday party when newspapers said the singer was involved in a sex scandal. He criticized her for lending her royal presence to someone who was the

subject of lurid headlines. She felt vindicated when the rock star collected a $1.8 million out-of-court settlement from the Sun for falsely accusing him of using the services of a male prostitute. But by then Philip had moved on to blame her for embarrassing the royal family by going on a ski holiday during the Gulf War. So now Sarah braced herself for another blast.

But Philip, who was known to be a womanizer, looked at her with sympathy. "Look," he said softly, "you may like to know that there but for the grace of God go I." He straightened his shoulders and announced loudly that he intended to go grouse hunting with Charles and Andrew. Abruptly he turned and strode out of the room.

Sarah stayed at Balmoral for three more days until Sir Robert Fellowes pointedly suggested she "might feel more comfortable taking the children home." The suggestion carried the weight of an edict. Feeling the royal boot, she decamped.

Since her separation, she had been prohibited from representing the royal family in public. She had shrugged off her exclusion from events like Ascot and Trooping the Color by saying, "What the hell? I'll save on hats." But she stopped laughing when she found herself locked out of her office at Buckingham Palace. She blamed the courtiers, whom she called "the Queen's Rottweilers."

To her chagrin, newspapers around the world gave full play to her topless antics. "Monarchy in the Mud," blared Italy's La Stampa. The mass circulation Bild in Germany screamed, "Fergie Naked During Love Play." The New York Daily News ran the photo of John ("I was not sucking her toes, I was kissing the arch of her foot") Bryan under the headline "Toe Sucker and Duchess of Vulgarity." USA Today: "The Lens Doesn't Lie."

The editor of The Washington Post editorial page observed: "If your average American welfare mother had been photographed as she was, bare-breasted and fooling around with her lover in the presence of her toddler children, it probably would have been enough to get their caseworker a court order removing the kids from the home. We would have used words like `disadvantaged' and `sick.'

But the Duchess's mother defended her sort of. "Sarah is not

sorry because she was caught topless with Bryan," Susan Barrantes told the Italian magazine Cente. "Being separated from Prince Andrew, she can do what she likes. But she is sad because she is sure

somebody . . . wanted to get at her and put her character in a bad light before the divorce."

John Bryan, who had tried but failed to get an injunction against publication of the photos, spun into action. "We'll turn this around," he promised Sarah. "You'll see. We'll turn this fucker

around m going to have those Palace bastards by the balls." He filed a $5 million invasion of privacy lawsuit in France against the photographer, who had dug a trench on private property and camped out for two days with his cameras' high-powered lenses. Bryan also sued Paris-Match, saying the French magazine had intended to damage the Duchess. "From being an admired figure," his lawsuit stated, "she has become a figure of ridicule." A French judge agreed and awarded her $94,000, which she announced would go to the British Institute for Brain-Damaged Children. "It's appropriate, don't you think?" she said. "Most journalists are brain- damaged, too."

Still, she knew she looked foolish in the world's press. "I've been criticized so much over the past seven years that I've lost all my confidence and self-esteem," she said. She cried over the photo caption: "Fergie The Final Footnote." And she cringed when she saw sidewalk vendors in London selling chocolate toes. "It's hell," she told her father. "I can't bear reading newspapers." One English reporter wrote that since she had become the Duchess of York, "covering the royal family is like riding down a sewer in a glass bottom boat." Some writers dredged history to draw mischievous parallels between Fergie and the fat, gaudy Caroline of Brunswick, who married the Prince of Wales in 1795. The English critic Max Beerbohm said of that promiscuous* Princess, "Fate wrote her a most tremendous tragedy and she played it in tights."

Sarah was not so carefree about her burlesque. She hid in her house for five days so she would not have to face people. One

*Afier Caroline was found in a compromising position with a naval officer, she was tried for adultery. "was the man involved an admiral?" she was asked. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "He wasn't wearing his hat." She was not convicted.

woman took pity and wrote a letter offering a "shoulder of friendship" to cry on.

"I simply felt, `Poor thing!' " said Theo Ellert, who ran Angels International. The London-based charity raised money for children in Poland with leukemia. "The Duchess was at her lowest ebb, and when I suggested she come with me to Poland, she agreed instantly and said, `I need to think of others to take my mind off myself.'"

John Bryan seized on the trip as an opportunity to repair her image. He was determined to showcase her as the do-gooding Duchess. "If we had to, we'd pay for the trip ourselves, so no one could accuse us of another Freeloading Fergie number," he said to her secretary. "Forget the British press. We'll get this on American television where it counts. . . . We'll give exclusive access to someone like Diane Sawyer on Prime Time Live . . . she's the best .

she needs the ratings . . . but no personal questions . . . only a serious interview, substantive, about your work

With frenetic energy he started negotiating behind the scenes. "He used a husband-and-wife team to front for him," recalled the ABC-TV producer, "but he was definitely calling the shots." Bryan told Sarah he would control the interview and the questions she would be asked. Diane Sawyer does not share that recollection. Sawyer's producer recalled Sarah's major concern was being asked about her relationship with the Princess of Wales and the rest of the royal family. "That worried her more than the toe-sucking pictures," said the producer. At the end of the interview, Diane Sawyer slipped in a question about John Bryan. "What is the relationship? What can you tell us about him?"

Sarah was prepared. "He's done a wonderful job, helping me with all my financial work," she said on the air, "and he's been a fantastic friend."

"But he's not just a financial adviser," pressed Sawyer.

"I didn't say he was. I said he's been a fantastic friend, helping me with financial work."

Despite her plucky performance, Angels International dropped her. "She had a bad image and they didn't want her involved with them," said Theo Ellert. "I said, `If you don't want her, you can't have me,' and my services were dispensed with." So Theo Ellert

helped Sarah start her own charity, Children in Crisis, to raise money for youngsters in poor countries like Albania, Poland, and the former Yugoslavia. With this organization the Duchess finally had a vehicle for respectability. But she couldn't follow the road map. "Sarah has had everything," her father wrote in his memoir, "but she threw it away.

She tried to transform herself into a goodwill ambassador like the Princess of Wales but was criticized as self-serving. "I cannot think of anybody else I would sooner not appoint to this post [United Nations High Commission for Refugees]," said the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. "She is a lady short on looks, absolutely deprived of any dress sense, has a figure like a Jurassic monster, is very greedy when it comes to loot, no tact, and wants to upstage everyone else." Fergie was not appointed.

The Royal Army Air Corps would not accept her as its honorary Colonel in Chief because, according to a senior officer, she was "dowdy and we didn't feel she had the right image."

When she took a group of mentally handicapped youngsters on a climbing expedition in Nepal, she was derided for checking into a suite at Katmandu's most luxurious hotel. During the trek, she toted only her bottle of Evian water, prompting the Spectator to snicker:

The grand old Duchess of York She had ten thousand men, She marched them up to the top of the hill And she marched them down again.

When a twenty-two-year-old Sherpa accepted her invitation to leave his remote Himalayan village and return to Britain with her, she was accused of exploitation. "Perhaps the wayward duchess is simply keeping up the honourable aristocratic tradition of hiring a native and bringing him home," sniffed the Daily Telegraph. The Sherpa, who had cooked her meals and carried her rucksack when she went mountain climbing, found himself doing much the same thing at Romenda Lodge. One woman said, "She was using him like a dogsbody, and he wasn't being paid."

"He is a guest of the Duchess," said her spokeswoman. "She thought it would be nice for him to see another part of the world."

Sarah, who was convinced that the Palace courtiers would use anything to hurt her chances for a hefty divorce settlement,* sent her Sherpa packing. Bryan tried to allay her fears, vowing again to negotiate "megamillions" for her. Eager to create a sympathetic climate, he tried to discredit her husband.

He called The People newspaper, a British version of USA Today, and said Prince Andrew was having an affair. "I know 100 percent he is going out with the girl, and I know she has spent the night a lot at South York," said Bryan. "I will produce a name. But I want $30,000 because I'm going to have to go through his personal address book . . . and I want it on goddamn publication, baby. I want immediate payment."

The paper drew up a contract, and Bryan amended it three or four times. When he finally produced the name of Andrew's alleged lover, the paper decided there was nothing to his story and didn't publish it. Instead they printed their tape-recorded conversation with him: "Jetset John Demanded £20,000 for Andrew Lie."

Barely embarrassed, Bryan asserted it was just a practical joke. He said he was setting up the newspaper. But Sarah was livid. "She screamed at me, `You do not do that sort of thing to the Duke of York it's totally irresponsible,' " Bryan confided to a friend as he recounted his regular rows with the Duchess. On that occasion she threw him out of the house. But days later they made up, and he moved back in. As a welcome home present, she gave him a silver globe of the world, inscribed "Together We Can Conquer It."

After the damaging photographs of their cozy romp on the C6te d'Azur had been published, the couple decided to be discreet. In the belief that they could conceal their affair, they no longer appeared in public together. When Bryan traveled from London to Sarah's house in Surrey, she sent a member of her staff to meet him at the train station. Disguised in a baseball cap and sunglasses, he hid in the trunk of her car and was smuggled into Romenda Lodge

*Sarah wanted a lump-sum payment of $10 million, plus $5,000 a month in child support and her title. She received $750,000 for herself and a $2.1 million trust fund for her children, and she lost her title.

like stolen goods. Publicly Sarah professed to be confused about divorcing Andrew. She said she considered him to be "my very best friend." But privately she complained. "I think she felt she could never go to bed with him again," said Theo Ellert, "that their sex life had not been good from the beginning and couldn't be saved now." Mrs. Ellert made her comments after she and the Duchess had parted bitterly; she said Fergie had not supported her as chief executive of their charity. "I think she believed that I was deflecting the glory from herself."

Seeking guidance from everyone around her, Sarah consulted her circle of psychics, astrologers, and fortune-tellers. She called New Age mystics in Los Angeles, mediums in New York City, and channelers in London. She also consulted a Bosnian priest who was known at the shrine of Medjugorje as "the Eyes of Christ."

"Go back to your husband," Father Svetozar Kraljevic counseled her. "The best thing for you, for your soul, for your children, and for the royal family is for reconciliation."

"I can't," moaned Sarah. "If I did, I would have to lead the life of a nun."

The monk recommended she spend time with some nuns in a convent in Bosnia. "They will teach you how to lead a celibate life," he said.

Dismissing his stern advice, she turned to her friend Alistair McAlpine, who wrote about their private lunch: "She has often asked advice, thanked the giver profusely, but gone the way she wished in the first place. Perhaps she feels that those who give her advice will go away satisfied with just the honor of having had her ask. How terribly she misunderstands human nature."

Sarah told Lord McAlpine that she wanted to divorce her husband. "He is so boring," she said. "He only wants to play golf and watch science-fiction videos."

Lord McAlpine advised her against divorce. "It was at this point she informed me the Princess of Wales had had it in mind to leave her husband on the same day but had decided to postpone that event for a month or two, in the Duchess's words, `to see how I get on.

While Diana stayed on the bus, Sarah decided to hop off. But

she said she was nervous about public reaction and the way she would be treated by the royal family. McAlpine explained, "She meant, of course, financially."

Like a squirrel scampering to find nuts, John Bryan scurried in all directions trying to generate money for Sarah. He was never off the phone. Bombarding the media with proposals, he hawked her to the highest bidder: $25,000 for exclusive photo shoots, $50,000 to $200,000 for exclusive interviews. He dictated the rules to journalists: he provided the questions and demanded editorial control of the answers. When he negotiated a cover story with Harpers & Queen magazine, he insisted on their best fashion photographer, then demanded copyright to the photographs. "Do you know how many pictures she uses in a year?" he argued. "We send out a thousand, maybe two thousand pictures sometimes. She needs pictures for charity brochures, programs, book jackets, Christmas cards . . . She wants free and unencumbered use of the pictures for private purposes, to exploit them any way she wants to."

In his demands the deal maker became as noisy and disruptive as a high-speed water bike roaring up the Thames. "Mr. Bryan had everyone curtsying and making tea," recalled one frazzled editorial assistant. "He was remarkably quick to shout, `Ma' am, if you please,' if one of us forgot for a moment to grovel to Her Royal Highness."

Put off by his hustle, the magazine finally withdrew from negotiations because Sarah would not be interviewed. She wanted her picture featured on the glossy cover but did not want to submit to questions. She phoned the editor, Vicki Woods, to try to change her mind. Miss Woods later wrote that she was exhausted from the round of "hideous telephone calls" she had been receiving from John Bryan.

"Poor you," Sarah told Miss Woods. "I know you think I just see myself as a celebrity . . . but I'm a serious person and I'm not doing this just so that I can get free Christmas cards or something. . .

The editor told the Duchess she could make her own arrangements with the photographer, but the magazine could not pick up the tab without getting an interview from her. Sarah pleaded Palace

protocol. She told the editor: "It's always me who has to carry the can; it's always me who gets the blame for this kind of thing; it's always my fault, and I've had enough of it; that's why I want out of the whole thing, so I can get on with my own life. . . . I'm so tired of carrying the can for all of them. I've been the scapegoat of the Waleses for the past four years.

After the photo shoot, John Bryan called to taunt the editor about the pictures. "This is the hottest set of photos I've dealt with ever," he said. "You really lost out. . . . We were only ever gonna [sic] do this in our style. She's a goddamn pro. She's not some dead, common, fucking trashy little model."

Over the next sixteen months he jetted from New York to London to Paris, making deals for Her Royal Highness. He tried to sell her as a model, a writer, an ambassador. He courted publishers and producers to sell Budgie The Little Helicopter as a television cartoon series. "That property was totally dead when I got hold of it," he recalled. "It had no credibility, nobody would deal with it nobody would touch it with a ten-foot pole. . .

But he managed to sell Budgie for television, and then he sold commercial rights to Budgie trinkets: water wings, swimsuits, beach towels, greeting cards, gift wrap, night-lights, lamp shades, balloons. The lucrative contract guaranteed the Duchess $3 million, plus a percentage of sales. The British media reported the transaction with a little awe and a lot of envy.

The Queen Mother heard the news as she sat in her drawing room at Clarence House, sipping a gin and tonic. She would have two more tipples before she picked up the telephone and called the Queen.

"I can assure you she was not drunk," said a former butler, offended by the suggestion. "Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother does not get drunk. And on that particular evening, she wasn't even tipsy."

The Queen Mother listened carefully to the news report on television:

The Duchess of York is set to make eight million pounds [about $12 million]," intoned the broadcaster, "as

her book, Budgie The Little Helicopter, takes off on TV channels around the world. The Duchess has sold her book to be made into a television series. She also signed licensing contracts with thirteen American firms to market souvenirs ranging from tableware to lavatory seat covers.

"Lavatory seat covers? Did he say lavatory seat covers?" asked the Queen Mother.

"Yes, ma' am," the butler said with a sigh. "I'm afraid he did."

The Queen Mother motioned for another gin and tonic and requested the day's newspapers. Within minutes her drink was freshened from the table that served as a bar in her living room. Finding the newspaper took a little longer; she rarely read anymore because of the cataract in her left eye. The butler appeared with a copy of the Daily Mail of that day, April 19,1994, and opened the paper to the story that concerned her.

She remained impassive as he read aloud the report of the Duchess's weekend visit to Cannes: Sarah had held what she described as a "power dinner" for two hundred key buyers attending the world's largest convention of television programmers.

"I'm absolutely delighted," Sarah was quoted as saying. "I've made merchandising deals all over the world from the little book I wrote in 1989."

The Queen Mother sighed but appeared benignly detached. She had never uttered a word of criticism about Sarah Ferguson- publicly. She had even feigned serenity when she heard about Fergie's clowning at her expense. The boisterous Duchess had been seen tearing through the food halls of Harrods department store in London, where she spotted a biscuit tin bearing the Queen Mother's likeness. She astonished onlookers by banging on the lid and shouting, "Are you in there, dear?"

During monthly planning meetings with her stafI, Sarah further rattled sensibilities by referring to the death of the Queen Mother as a way of getting out of engagements she did not want to do. One participant recalled, "If there was a tricky commitment in the offing, she would say, `Oh, well, look on the bright side-the Queen Mum might die and we'll have to cancel everything because of mourning.'"

From the pinnacle of public esteem, the Queen Mother gazed down on Sarah Ferguson. On the surface both women shared certain characteristics. Each was a commoner who had married the second son of a monarch to become the Duchess of York; each was the mother of two daughters. Both were friendly, ingratiating, strong-willed women who thrived in the spotlight; both were outrageous flirts who loved being the center of male attention. The Duchess gravitated to young heterosexuals, while the Queen Mother contented herself with elderly homosexuals. She called them "my knitting circle" and "the Queen's queens." So indulgent was she toward her high-camp coterie that she once buzzed the Clarence House pantry and said, "When you old queens stop gossiping down there, this old queen up here needs a drink."

The sixty years that separated the Queen Mother from the Duchess of York defined their differences. The older woman was traditional; the younger woman was modern. The former accepted the high price of membership in the royal family; the latter refused to pay the dues. Consequently the Dowager Queen was revered as a royal who retained the common touch; the young Duchess was reviled as merely common.

After the butler had read the Cannes story to the Queen Mother, he handed her the newspaper. But she waved it away in disgust. "Not even Wallis at her worst was this blatant," she said, referring to her implacable enemy, the Duchess of Windsor. She ordered another gin and tonic and picked up the telephone to call her daughter the Queen.

"That was the kiss of death for Fergie," said a Clarence House servant. "You can chart her downfall from that evening."

Most of Sarah's perquisites had already been stripped from her the royal guards, the royal train, the royal duties, the royal invitations. Deprived of postal privileges, she was no longer allowed to send her letters free. She had been barred from accompanying her husband and their children to Windsor Castle over Easter, but the Queen felt bad about having to exclude her. As Sarah told her father, "I'm not going. Andrew's going. Apparently the Queen wants me, but the rest of the family don't."

Sarah had lost her seat in the royal box at Wimbledon, and her

life-size wax figure had been yanked from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Denied entry to the royal enclosure at Ascot, she looked pathetic as she stood on the side of the road, clutching the hands of her children and waving to the Queen as she passed in her royal carriage. Without Her Majesty's continuing tolerance, the Duchess would lose what little remained of her standing in British society. And she didn't stand a chance of retaining the Queen's affection without the goodwill of the Queen Mother.

Shunned by the Palace, the Duchess soon despaired. She sought help from a psychiatrist. But with no royal protection officers she no longer had privacy, and her psychiatric visits became public. A newspaper photographer followed her to the mental health clinic and snapped pictures of her arriving and leaving.

"It's been terrible," said Fergie. "All I can do is pray to the Lord for help."

At the age of ninety-four, the Queen Mother knew better than to waste time on the Duchess. At this point she was worth only a telephone call. After the Queen Mother had a word with Her Majesty, she felt confident that the family would finally be rid of the troublesome young woman, who had embarrassed them even more by announcing that she had been tested three times for AIDS.

The Queen Mother knew there was still the pesky matter of a $3 million divorce settlement, but that was only money. Once it was paid, the Duchess of York would be nothing more than a red- haired footnote to history. The elderly Queen knew better than to get distracted by a sideshow. As the center pole holding up the big tent, she stayed focused on the main event and conserved her dwindling energy for what was happening inside the three-ring circus.

NINETEEN

he sixty-eight-year-old Earl Spencer was ill with pneumonia in a London hospital, and Diana visited him the day before

she left to go skiing in Austria. She hadn't spoken to her father for several months, and when she visited him, she took her children for their softening presence.

Unfortunately, none of the Earl Spencer's other children had been speaking to him at the time of his death. "It is a matter of great regret," said his son, Charles, "that no one was with him when he died." The children had been feuding over the renovations of Althorp and had publicly criticized their father and stepmother for their plans to pay for the $3.5 million restoration. The children had accused the Earl and his wife of flogging the family name and selling off heirlooms, including eleven Van Dyck paintings, to "tart up" the dilapidated estate, as Diana described the redecoration of Althorp. She was particularly incensed when she learned that her father had sold merchandising rights to the Japanese to make copies of her wedding dress. She told friends that she was thoroughly disgusted. And she said she was embarrassed by her stepmother's "tacky" decor and her father's "crass" commercialism. Then the family began slugging it out on the front pages.

The Earl, who was devoted to his second wife, railed against his children for denigrating their stepmother's efforts to make Althorp profitable. He bitterly singled out Diana.

"I have given Diana a hell of a lot of money-between $750,000 and $1.5 million to invest for Harry," he said, and disclosed Diana's concern about her second son's future. Her firstborn, William, destined to become Prince of Wales and eventually King, was guaranteed immense wealth. But not Harry.

"Diana doesn't understand about money," said her father. "She has no experience. She is too young." He accused all his children of "financial immaturity," said they were spoiled and "ungrateful," and said they did not realize what was involved in running a grand estate.* Soon the children stopped visiting Althorp and stopped speaking to their father.

Minutes after Diana learned of his death on Sunday, March 29, 1992, her lady-in-waiting dashed to the luggage room of the Swiss ski resort and removed the black dress, black shoes, and black hat that were customarily packed for royalty in case of death. Diana wanted to return home alone, but her husband insisted on accompanying her. She dug in. "It's too late for you to start pretending now," she snapped. He knew how unacceptable it would be for her to return by herself. But she was adamant that he remain with the children, skiing. She resented his using her father's death to look like a loving husband.

The Prince's private secretary recognized the couple's impasse and called the Queen's private secretary. Only when Her Majesty interceded and called Diana did the Princess agree to return with her husband. The next day she got off the plane, looking red-eyed and stricken with grief.

"There was such dissension surrounding that funeral," said a relative, who ruefully recalled the misleading headline in the Times: "Earl Spencer Goes to Rest at Peace with His Family." In truth the family's antipathies had followed the late Earl to his grave. Johnny Spencer's bitter relationship with his father had forced Johnny to move off the family estate. He did not return until his father died.

*The late Earl Spencer proved right. After his death his son struggled to operate Althorp, a fifteen-thousand-acre estate valued at $132 million. After four years the new Earl Spencer turned it over to a manager, who rented the property for corporate conferences for $5,262 a day. The young Spencer moved to South Africa with his wife and four children. He later separated from his wife but remained in South Africa. Like his father, he, too, exploited the Spencer name for profit. In 1996 he sold several of the family's honorary titles at auction to pay for new plumbing.

Johnny then repeated the acrimonious behavior in his relationship with his son, Charles, who was estranged from him at the time of his death.

The Spencer children accepted such acrimony as part of their life. They had grown up watching their father reject his father and their mother reject her mother. The children had seen nasty fights between their parents, which did not end with the divorce. Although both parents remarried, they continued to compete for the children's attention and affection by showering them with expensive gifts. "It makes you very materialistic," their son admitted later.

In his eulogy for the Earl Spencer, Lord St. John of Fawsley tried to make light of the family's discord. "Birds twitter and peck in their nests," he said, "even when they are gilded ones." He assured the congregation in the little country church of Northamptonshire that the Earl Spencer had loved all his family, especially the Princess of Wales.

Diana's floral wreath to her father was prominently displayed in front of his oak coffin with a card she had inscribed personally: "I miss you dreadfully, Darling Daddy, but will love you forever

Diana." Behind the coffin and barely noticeable was a tribute of flowers from the Prince of Wales, "In most affectionate memory."

In front of the press, the four Spencer children appeared cordial to their stepmother, with Diana reaching sympathetically for her arm at one point. "The sight [of that gesture] . . . made me feel quite sick," said Sue Ingram, who had worked for Raine Spencer for seventeen years. The assistant, who was fired by the new young Earl the day after the funeral, recalled what happened behind the scenes. When Raine, who had moved out of Althorp within forty- eight hours of her husband's death to make room for the new heir, sent her maid to collect her clothes, Diana and her brother were waiting.

The maid arrived and packed two Louis Vuitton cases monogrammed with the Spencer "S." Diana stopped her from leaving. "What have you got in there?" she demanded. "Those are my father's cases. They don't belong to you.

The maid explained that Raine had bought the luggage for a trip to Japan to match suitcases with the initials "R.S."

Diana ordered the maid to empty the Vuitton suitcases into black plastic garbage bags. The maid complied, and Diana snatched il~e suitcases. Her brother kicked the garbage bags down the stairs.

Days later, when Raine returned with a roll of red stickers to identify the pieces of furniture she wanted to move, she was confronted there by her stepson's lawyer. He told her she could not remove one single stick from Althorp until she supplied proof of purchase.

"She had to telephone the new Earl for details of the memorial service [held six weeks later in Westminster Abbey]," said her assistant, "and he told his solicitor to send her a fax." When her husband's ashes were placed in the Spencer vault, Raine was not invited to the family ceremony.

The last merchandising contract that the Earl Spencer had signed before he died was with the publisher of Diana: Her True Story. Having been assured that the book would portray his family positively, especially his daughter, he sold the rights to eighty personal photographs from the Spencer family albums. This time Diana did not object.

She wanted the photographs to illustrate a book, which she hoped would set her free from her marriage. Months before, she had given permission to a few friends to talk with the author, Andrew Morton. Through the eyes of her brother, her best friend, her lover, and her masseuse, she presented a shattered fairy tale: she had kissed a prince who turned into a toad. His love for another woman had driven her into bulimia and five attempts at suicide. She had been abandoned by his family, which did not appreciate her efforts to breathe life into their dreary dynasty.

An excerpt from the book ran in the Sunday Times. Its placement on the front page of the once respected newspaper had elevated its credibility above tabloid tittle-tattle. And its apparent endorsement by the Princess of Wales made it even more tantalizing. But it rattled the establishment. The Prime Minister, Members of Parliament, and the chairman of the Press Complaints Commis

sion* denounced it as sensational and sordid. The Archbishop of Canterbury said it exceeded the limits of a society claiming to respect human values. Harrods refused to sell it. "Our customers would not expect us to stock such a scurrilous book," said the store's spokesman. The Spectator called it "a farrago of rubbish."

The book became an instant best-seller, but its author was dismissed by the British press as a former tabloid reporter whose father was a picture framer. From the snobbish commentary, it appeared that the author had compounded the misfortune of being born working-class: he was a republican in a country that revered royalty. "I asked Andrew Morton if he wasn't in danger of killing the golden goose which lays his eggs," said Michael Cole, the BBC's former royal correspondent. "He replied, `Well, I can quite happily live on the ashes of the House of Windsor for the next twenty years.

Only two of Britain's eleven national newspapers ignored the published excerpt. The editor of the Financial Times said, "Not our subject matter." The Daily Telegraph editor said the subject matter was distasteful. "It's odious," he wrote in the Spectator, explaining why he would not permit coverage. The Telegraph, sometimes called the Torygraph, is the royal family's favorite newspaper, and its editor, Max Hastings, is a close friend of Prince Andrew. "The tabloid reporting of the Wales marriage," Hastings wrote, "makes lager louts look like gentlemen."

The morning the excerpt appeared, the Prince of Wales was reeling. "I'd say he was close to a panic," recalled his Highgrove housekeeper. Over breakfast Charles had read the serialization that his press secretary had faxed from London. Charles had known that a Diana-inspired book was going to be published, but he'd assumed that it would be nothing more than a self-serving account of her good works, plus pretty pictures. He was not prepared for her assault on him as a man, a father, and a husband.

*The goverument can restrict journalists because there are no formal guarantees of freedom of speech in Britain. Rather than be restricted by law, British journalists decided to restrict themselves by establishing the Press Complaints Commission in 1991 to monitor their excesses. The commission of seventeen people includes local, regional, and national newspaper editors. It has no enforcement power but is obligated to publish its findings.

When he finished reading, he left the table and went to Diana's room with the excerpts in hand. Like Richard III, he had one question for his wife: "Why dost thou spit at me?" Diana later corn- pared their confrontation to the scene in The Godfather where Al Pacino berates Diane Keaton for humiliating him by trying to break free of their marriage. This was not the first time Diana compared the monarchy to the Mafia. "The only difference," she told her cousin, "is these muggers wear crowns." Minutes after Charles stormed out of her room, she left Highgrove in tears. Although she had denied having a hand in the book, he knew better.

"I can just hear her saying those things," he told his private secretary, Richard Aylard. "Those are her words, exactly."

Diana's grandmother Lady Ruth Fermoy visited Highgrove a few days later to console Charles. He embraced the frail eighty- three-year-old woman and asked her to walk with him in the garden. "Ruth never forgave Diana for causing the separation," said Lady Fermoy's godchild. "She felt that Diana had brought shame to her family by not remaining within her marriage. She didn't speak to Diana until the last few days of her life, and even then, Ruth told me, she could not forgive her for betraying the monarchy."

Charles was stunned that his wife had had the nerve to break the royal code of silence by revealing his mistress. Diana went further by calling Camilla "the Rottweiler" and describing her as a killer dog that had sunk her teeth into the Waleses' marriage and wouldn't let go. Television star Joan Collins said she wanted to star in a TV special of the royal soap opera: "I could play Camilla Parker Bowles," she said. "I could ugly up for that." The press unkindly described Camilla as "plain-faced" and "looking like her horse." The Scottish Herald sniffed, "She smokes, she jokes, and is capable of dressing for dinner after a day in the saddle without pausing to have a bath." The revelation that the Prince of Wales had long been in love with her so upset the public that when she went to the grocery, angry shoppers pelted her with bread rolls.

Charles had dismissed his wife's rantings about his mistress as adolescent jealousy. He didn't understand Diana's despair or her need to strike back. He had expected her to accept her loveless

marriage in exchange for the privilege of being the Princess of Wales. He was taken aback when she balked and felt mauled by the book that made him look like a beast. Quickly the Palace went to his defense.

Sir Robert Fellowes phoned Diana before she left Highgrove. "I need to know the extent of your participation," he said sternly. His marriage to Diana's sister Jane had strained family relations on occasion. Diana replied tearfully that she had never met the author or granted him an interview. Her trembling voice convinced her brother-in-law that she was telling the truth. He didn't realize that she was simply panicked by the uproar that she had caused.

But she was rattled only momentarily. She later told one of her astrologers that she had no regrets about her decision to cooperate because her husband did not deserve to be protected by silence

least of all, she argued, because he was the Prince of Wales. "He's supposed to be a paragon to people," she said. "He's going to be the goddamned Defender of the Faith." After eleven years of marriage she had decided his infidelity deserved to be exposed. By entering into marriage, Robert Louis Stevenson had warned, "you have willfully introduced a witness into your life . . . and can no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions." If Charles wouldn't, Diana would. But even she was startled by what she had wrought.

She was appalled by the degree of detail in the book, and she felt betrayed by her brother, who had described her as a liar. He said she was someone who "had difficulty telling the truth purely because she liked to embellish things." He recalled, "On the school run one day, the vicar's wife stopped the car and said: `Diana Spencer, if you tell one more lie like that, I am going to make you walk home.' " He related that one of her school reports asserted, "Diana Spencer is the most scheming little girl I have ever met."

She was also taken aback by James Gilbey's remarks in the book, which she thought made her look like a suicidal maniac. She knew that Gilbey had spoken only with her approval and her best interests at heart, but she was dismayed by the pitiful picture of her that he painted. After publication, she closed the book on him.

Diana's assurances that she had had nothing to do with the book prompted the Queen's private secretary to fire off several protests to the Press Complaints Commission. He also drafted a public statement for her, disavowing the "preposterous" claims of her participation. He told her that anything short of an official denunciation would not be convincing. The public was prepared to believe the worst based on what they had read and seen in the past year.

Months before, Prince William was accidentally hit on the head with a golf club, which fractured his skull, necessitating emergency surgery. Diana, who was at San Lorenzo restaurant when she received the news, hurried to her son's side and spent two nights in the hospital with him until he could come home. Charles visited him for a few minutes after his surgery but did not otherwise interrupt his schedule. He said he had to attend a performance of Tosca. The press was appalled. "What Kind of a Dad Are You?" shrieked a Sun headline. Jean Rook in the Daily Express asked: "What sort of father of an eight-year-old boy, nearly brained by a golf club, leaves the hospital before knowing the outcome for a night at the opera?"

Charles blamed Diana for making him look like a callous parent. Feeling slightly chastened, he made a point a few weeks later of being photographed riding a bicycle with his sons, but Diana told the press that Charles left the boys twenty-four hours later to go to a polo match. Jean Rook accused Charles of treating his sons like "well-fed pets who know their place in the world of their utterly self-involved parent. Certainly, it must hurt William and Harry to see their father more often on TV than in the flesh."

Photos appeared of Charles going to church with his sons at Sandringham, but when someone in the crowd asked him where the Princess was, he replied with a strained smile, "She's not here today, so you can get your money back."

Other photographs had also indicated friction between the couple. On a royal tour of India, Diana was shown sitting by herself in front of the Taj Mahal. That sad picture (which some reporters said was staged by the Princess) recalled Prince Charles's visit to India before his wedding. He had promised to bring his bride back

to the seventeenth-century temple, a world-renowned monument to eternal love. But when he brought Diana in 1992 for a four-day tour, they were not speaking. They had arrived in India on separate planes; he flew from Oman, and she flew from London. They followed separate schedules. They stayed in separate suites on different floors of the hotel in New Delhi and communicated through their staffs. They smiled only in front of the cameras.

Then came a picture of Diana in front of the Pyramids alone again. She had let it be known that while she was traveling on an official tour of Egypt, her husband was vacationing in Turkey with his mistress. More pictures followed of Charles playing polo while Diana visited leper colonies; Charles shooting birds at Sandringham while Diana consoled cancer patients in Liverpool; Charles partying with the Sultan of Brunei, the world's richest man, while Diana conferred with Mother Teresa, who ministered to the world's poorest people.

The Palace tried to counteract the discordant images of the Waleses and their marriage, but new disclosures kept popping up like frogs from a swamp. When police constable Andrew Jacques, a guard at Highgrove, disclosed that the Prince and Princess led separate lives, the Palace dismissed his story as tabloid fiction. The constable, who worked at Highgrove for four years, stood firm. "The only time they meet up is at mealtimes," he said, "and very often that ends in a blazing row for all to hear." He revealed that Prince Charles slept alone in one bedroom (with his childhood teddy bear in bed with him), while the Princess slept by herself in the master bedroom. "They never smile, laugh, or do anything together. . . . In four years, I only ever saw him kiss her good-bye once, and that was a peck on the cheek."

Predictably, the establishment press called upon peerage expert Harold Brooks-Baker to respond to the constable's assertions, and, as always, the American-born royalist complied. "You can't break down a marriage that's been put up the way the press has put this one up," the peerage expert told The New York Times. "The press made a lot out of the fact that they were apart on her thirtieth birthday last month, but very little out of the fact that on the fol

lowing weekend she and her husband were together; there was a birthday cake, and he gave her a lovely bracelet."

The former housekeeper of Highgrove disclosed that the gift from Charles was paste. In a diary she kept while working for the Prince and Princess of Wales, she noted that when Diana found out, she burst into tears. The Princess, accustomed to being consoled with expensive gifts, was distraught that her husband bestowed a diamond necklace on his mistress but gave her only costume jewelry. The housekeeper quoted Diana as saying: "I don't want his bloody fake jewels. I thought cheating husbands took great care to keep their wives sweet with the real things, saving the tawdry stuff for their tarts."

For her thirtieth birthday Charles offered to throw a party. But Diana didn't want to celebrate with him. So she said no and celebrated privately with her lover, James Hewitt, who had recently returned from the Gulf War. Charles was stung by press accusations that he had neglected the occasion of his wife's birthday, so he dispatched a friend to call Nigel Dempster to set the record straight. The gossip columnist obliged with a front-page story in the Daily Mail about the Prince's loving gesture. Diana responded the next day through a friend, who told the Sun that the Princess did not want a grand ball filled with her husband's "stuffy friends."

Princess Anne, disgusted by the newspaper sparring, confronted Diana about turning her marriage into a media free-for-all. "Before you joined, there were hardly any leaks," said the Princess Royal. "Now the ship is so full of holes, it's no wonder that it's sinking."

Diana stared hard at her sister-in-law without saying a word. But Anne didn't flinch.

"I wouldn't go telling too many tall tales if I were you," she warned. "They might just come back to haunt you one day."

After Anne's rebuke, Diana became convinced that the entire royal family was against her. She decided then to cooperate with Andrew Morton by giving her friends permission to talk to him about her dismal marriage. "Do what you think is best," she told her friends when they called her about the book. She made sure

that nothing was said to the author about her love affair with James Hewitt.

Months later she could hardly disavow the book, so when Robert Fellowes called and read her the statement he had drafted for release, she withheld her approval. He insisted that she publicly disapprove the book, but she said, "I cannot be held responsible for what my friends say.

Waiting for the Princess to respond, the editor of the Sunday Times was getting jumpy. "We thought she would break under all the pressure," recalled Andrew Neil. "We would not have been surprised had she committed suicide at that point. She was that unstable.

"Initially, I did not believe the book. Not for a minute. The Princess of Wales suffering from bulimia, throwing up in toilets, and attempting suicide? Impossible. But I grilled Andrew Morton, demanded to have the names of his sources, and independently interviewed all of them. Once I was satisfied the book was accurate, I decided to go with it, provided the two major sources, Carolyn Bartholomew and James Gilbey, signed affidavits backing up what they had said was true."

The newspaper's sensational excerpt appeared on the morning of June 7, 1992. That afternoon the Queen invited Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband to join the royal family in their box at Windsor to watch a polo match. Diana saw the gesture as one more kick in the teeth. Privately she questioned the Queen's sensitivity. "If she wants this marriage to work, why won't she help by acting like a decent mother-in-law?"

The next day the editor of the Sunday Telegraph said the editor of the Sunday Times was a scandal-monger who deserved to be horsewhipped. Andrew Neil published James Gilbey's statement:

"I can confirm that the Princess discussed with me on numerous occasions her attempted suicides, as she has done with other close friends."

The Sunday Times editor said he knew the monarchy was beginning to crumble when he received calls of support from aristocrats like Alan Clark, the former Tory Minister of State. "It's a

shame," Clark told Andrew Neil, "but no great loss. The royal family is just a bunch of pasty-faced Germans."

An avalanche of news stories, editorials, and television commentaries questioned what was once accepted as unassailable-the future of the monarchy and whether Britain really needed a royal family. There were even questions about the dutiful monarch, who lavished more attention on her dogs and horses than on her children. Public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for the Princess, especially among American women. People magazine, whose twenty million weekly readers are predominantly female, put her on forty-one covers in sixteen years; and the issue featuring her with an excerpt from Morton's book was the best-selling cover in the magazine's history. The American writer Camille Paglia proclaimed the Princess a twentieth-century icon: "Diana may have become the most powerful image in world popular culture today."

Frustrated aides in the Palace press office strained to be civil. Their original denunciation of the book had been unequivocal: "outrageously irresponsible." Now they backtracked. "We have no further comment at this time." Their accents became more clipped, as if cut-glass enunciation would ward off further questions.

As the press office was trying to deflect questions about the extramarital affair of the Prince of Wales, an internal memo surfaced that illustrated the standard of behavior the Queen expected from her servants. Her estate manager at Balmoral had issued a "gentle reminder" to any employee engaged in an illicit love affair. The reminder threatened eviction from Her Majesty's premises. "If you re living in sin," warned the Queen's manager, you could lose your home." The Palace tried to dissociate itself from the tone. "Any correspondence on whatever is going on up there is totally private," said a press assistant. But Diana said the Queen should send a "gentle reminder" like that to her son. Although she had plenty to say about Morton's book privately, Diana said nothing publicly. With no response from her, the editor of the Sunday Times was worried. "I didn't know what to do to restore our credibility," said Andrew Neil. Within hours he was saved by an anonymous female caller. She told the Press Association, England's national news agency, that the Princess of Wales would be visiting

the home of Carolyn Bartholomew. A photograph of Diana embracing her friend, a major source of information in the book, put the lie to skeptics.

When the picture was published, Sir Robert Fellowes knew he had been deceived by Diana. Having inaccurately reassured the Queen that Diana had had nothing to do with the book, he offered his resignation, but the Queen turned it down. She summoned Charles and Diana to Windsor on June 15, 1992, for a family conference. With self-preservation on her mind, she insisted on a public show of unity, beginning with the Royal Ascot. Her husband objected. "Why the bloody pretense?" he snapped. "Let's be done with it." But the Queen had seen the crowds cheering Diana days before and waving placards: "Diana, We Love You" and "God Bless the Princess of Wales." The Queen knew those crowds would be angry if Diana was not part of the royal family's traditional carriage procession into Ascot. She stressed the importance of not disappointing people. Turning to Diana, she said, "Do you understand?"

Diana did not have the nerve then to openly defy the Queen, so she did as she was told. "I know my duty," she said, lowering her eyes. When the crowds saw her riding with the Queen Mother in the carriage, behind the Queen and Prince Charles, they roared wildly and gave the second coach more applause than the first. The Duke of Edinburgh scowled.

"He openly snubbed Diana that day," said reporter James Whitaker. "When she walked into the royal box, Philip turned away and would not speak to her. She sat by herself as he buried his nose in the program. He did not look up or acknowledge her presence, but she didn't seem particularly to care."

When someone mentioned the Duke's rebuff, Diana shrugged and said, "The man has the warmth of a snow pea." She was buoyed by the rousing cheers she had received, but her elation later evaporated as her confidence sagged.

During the meeting at Windsor Castle, the Queen had asked Diana what she wanted. "A legal separation," she replied. Instead the Queen recommended a cooling-off period. "We'll revisit the subject in six months," she said, adding that she expected the couple

to proceed with their long-standing plan to tour South Korea. They agreed, but the trip was a public relations disaster. Diplomatic cables indicate almost as much tension between Charles and Diana as between North and South Korea. Press photos supported the topsecret cables flying back and forth from Seoul to London: they showed a dour Prince and a grim Princess, who clearly despised each other.

When the Queen saw the pictures, she called her son. "Charles, I don't understand," she said. The implication was that he was not trying hard enough.

"Don't you realize she's mad?" he said angrily. "She's mad!"

Before the Queen could respond, Charles had hung up on his mother.

Upon their return to England, Diana told friends that she did not think her husband was fit to be King. In the past she had said she knew she would never become Queen and that Charles would ascend to the throne without her. Now she questioned his ability to reign. She said she based her assessment on her instincts and her intimate knowledge of her husband. This raised questions about Charles, who was remembered as a shy little boy who always seemed fretful. Was he too timid to become King? asked an editorial under the headline "Unfaithful AND Reluctant?"

Charles wanted to respond but didn't know how best to defend himself. His zealous equerry urged him to cooperate with the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby on a book about his life. So the Prince decided to give the respected journalist unprecedented access to his private diaries and letters. The biography, to be preceded by an exclusive television interview, was timed to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales.

Such anniversaries gave the royal family opportunities to celebrate themselves with stirring parades and fireworks. But in 1992 the Queen, then in her fortieth anniversary* year on the throne,

*To commemorate her forty years on the throne, the Queen authorized a BBC television documentary, Eh~beth B: A Year in the L'fr of the Queen. The film focused on her work as head of state and showed little of her family. "The Palace felt it was perhaps necessary to remind people what the Queen did and her enormous devotion to duty," said producer Edward Mirzoeff. "we deliberately tried not to reveal everything about her life." The New York Times described the film as "the most boring BBC import ever to make its way to American public television." The Queen loved it and knighted the producer.

canceled plans for a grandiose celebration. She stopped the fundraising for a $3.6 million fountain that had been planned in Parliament Square and said no to a military parade. "The past year is not one I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure," she said in a speech. "In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis." One newspaper headlined her remarks: "One's Bum Year." Another criticized her for using Latin to express travesties made all too plain in English throughout the year:

Januaty: Publication of photos of the Duchess of York and Steve Wyatt on vacation in Morocco. The Palace denies there is a problem in the Yorks' marriage.

February: The Princess of Wales is criticized as unpatriotic when she exchanges her British-made Jaguar for a German-made Mercedes. "This is another example of the royal family showing contempt for British workers," says Dennis Skinner, a Labor MP. "They live off the fat of the land with taxpayers' money coming from British workers, and then they spit in their faces." At the Queen's insistence, Diana gives up the Mercedes seven months later.

March: The Palace announces the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York.

April.' After three years' separation, Princess Anne divorces Captain Mark Phillips. A paternity suit filed against Phillips by a New Zealand teacher who claimed she conceived after "a one-night stand" is settled. Without acknowledging fatherhood, Phillips agrees to pay the mother an undisclosed sum of money for "equestrian consulting services."

May: A love affair is reported between Princess Anne, forty-two, and thirty-seven-year-old Navy Commander Timothy Laurence. That prompts one newspaper columnist to exclaim, "Not Again, Anne!" Another warns: "Keep Your Hands off the Hired Help." The Palace denies the Princess is involved with her equerry. Seven months later she marries him in Scotland, where divorce is permitted.

Some courtiers deem the match unsuitable, not because the royal bride is divorced, but because the bridegroom on his great-great-great-grandfather's side was Jewish. In 1826 the Laurence family had changed their name from Levy. Almost two centuries later this still prompts comment. One royal correspondent wrote, "One could not avoid the idea

[of] . . . his Jewish ancestors."

June.. Prince Edward, the Queen's twenty-eight-year- old son, denies again that he's homosexual. He then denies that he issued the denial, which prompts a Washington Post columnist to observe, "The youngest son gets by far the best press, by Windsorian standards, which means that he merely needs to spend every second Tuesday denying in print that he is a woman.

July: Diana's masseur tells the press Diana wants to end "the inherent deceit, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction" of her marriage. "The situation has to end," says Stephen Twigg, who visited Kensington Palace regularly for three years to give the Princess holistic massages. "Otherwise there will be a tragedy." Hours later Diana fires the therapist.

August: Newspaper photos show Sarah Ferguson topless with John Bryan in the South of France. Days later the Sun publishes a tape-recorded telephone call between Diana and James Gilbey in which she complains about her treatment from the royal family. "My life is torture," she says. "Bloody hell. And after all I've done for this fucking family."

September.' The Palace denies there is a problem in the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

October.' The Queen is booed in Germany. Residents of Dresden throw eggs at her limousine shortly after the British unveil a statue in London to honor the memory of Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who directed the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II.

"November brought the worst," said the Queen. On Friday morning, November 20, 1992, the skies over Windsor Castle filled

with orange balls of flame etched with black clouds of acrid smoke. A fire, started by a lamp that ignited the curtains in the Queen's private chapel, threatened to destroy what Samuel Pepys called "the most romantic castle in the world." Instead of sounding fire alarms, the staff called the castle switchboard for help. Prince Andrew, who was staying at Windsor for the weekend, rushed to save his mother's treasures. He joined the human chain of employees who passed pictures and tables and clocks from hand to hand until they were safe from destruction. Firemen poured a million and a half gallons of water on the structure, but the fire burned for fifteen hours.

"The Queen is devastated, absolutely devastated," Andrew told CNN television shortly after his mother arrived from London. "She is helping to take stuff out of the castle works of art. She has been in there for thirty minutes."

Charles arrived the next day to survey the damage. He called it "a tragedy," then left for a shooting party at Sandringham. The Queen's other children, Princess Anne and Prince Edward, did not show up at all.

The sixty-six-year-old monarch looked worn and beleaguered as she tramped through the charred remains. Of all her royal residences, Windsor Castle, the symbol of her dynasty, was her favorite. It was where she had lived as a child during World War II. It also was the main repository of her art, considered the most imp ortant private collection in the world. Her holdings included works by Rembrandt, da Vinci, Holbein, Rubens, and Vermeer, as well as priceless porcelain, tapestries, furniture, and armor from William the Conqueror.

In her hooded slicker and rubber boots, she bleakly surveyed the tangle of fire trucks, hoses, and ladders. It was her forty-fifth wedding anniversary, and her husband was in Argentina with another woman. "Philip was traveling with us as president of the World Wildlife Fund," a member of his group reported, "and while I don't recall seeing him with Susan Barrantes [as her daughter, Sarah Ferguson, later alleged], there was talk about him and his secretary. . . . What I remember most is the board of directors meeting the morning after the fire. . . . We were all talking about the television coverage of the Queen and Prince Andrew at Wind-

sor Castle, hauling out the debris. Philip walked into the room [in Buenos Aires] and started the meeting without mentioning a word about the fire, about his wife, or his son. We couldn't believe it. Not one word."

Britain's heritage secretary declared the fire a national disaster and expressed the nation's sympathy. He promised the Queen the government would restore her castle. But with no fire insurance, he said the cost to taxpayers would be about $80 million. He said people would be "proud" to carry the burden. England, though, was mired in a recession, and Her Majesty's subjects resented the implication that they should pay for the restoration.

"While the castle stands, it is theirs," wrote Janet Daley in the Times, "but when it burns down, it is ours."

The Palace argued that it was the government's responsibility to purchase the Queen's fire insurance.

"For the richest woman in the world?" boomed a Member of Parliament.

"She's not the richest," retorted a courtier. He flashed a recently published list of the country's wealthiest women, showing the Queen ranked tenth, with assets of about $ 150 million, which disputed previous estimates of her wealth at $7.5 billion. The Palace recognized the line between the "haves" and the "have nots"; and to some of her subjects, Her Majesty just had too much. So when Business Age magazine said she was the wealthiest person in Britain, the Palace protested to the Press Complaints Commission. The Queen's courtiers said it wasn't fair to lump in royal residences, art treasures, and crown jewels with her personal wealth. The commission agreed and said the evaluation should be lowered from billions to millions.

"I'm sure that will be immensely comforting to my unemployed constituents," said the MP.

The country's largest-selling tabloid, the News of the World, asked its readers to vote on the issue. Providing two telephone numbers, the paper said to call one number if "we should pay" and another if "she should pay." There were sixteen thousand calls, and fifteen thousand said "she should pay."

"She" struck a profitable pose. Like a business tycoon who

recognizes there's money to be made in changing with the times, the Queen saw there was a dynasty to be saved. Not even the British monarchy could survive indefinitely in the thin air of unaccountable privilege. So she announced through her Prime Minister that she would start paying taxes. She also agreed to open Bucking- ham Palace to the public for two months a year. She said she would charge $ 12 admission to help finance restoration of Windsor Castle. And she would also help restore the castle with profits from the Palace gift shop, where tourists could purchase commemorative cup-and-saucer sets ($36) and crown-shaped chocolates ($6). Over the objections of her husband, she agreed to give up the royal yacht, Britannia, in 1997. That was when it was scheduled to be decommissioned to spare the taxpayer the expense of an overhaul.* Also, to the dismay of her relatives, she removed most of them from the public payroll and reimbursed the government for everyone but hersell", her mother, and her husband. This gesture returned approximately $14 million to the taxpayers. But she kept herself on the Civil List for $ 11,850,000 a year, her mother for $972,000 a year, and her husband for $547,000 a year.

Perhaps to underscore his worth, Philip had agreed in 1993 to be profiled by journalist Fiammetta Rocco in the Independent on Sunday. His office had provided her with the phone numbers of fifty people to call. Her most interesting interview proved to be with the Duke himself. "I arrived at the Palace on the day of the Queen S annus horribilis speech," recalled the writer, who had to submit her questions in advance. "He had barred all personal questions about his family his parents, his wife, his children. He only wanted to discuss issues, but not all issues. I couldn't ask about ordination of women in the church, but he would talk endlessly about the World Wildlife Fund."

During the interview, the reporter strayed slightly from the script. She mused that Philip seemed to be a man surrounded by many myths. He brightened slightly, so she proceeded.

*Six months before the Britannia was to be decommissioned, the Defense Minister announced that a new $100 million ship would be built in time for the Queen's golden jubilee in 2002. "The Britannia is a symbol of the Crown, the kingdom, and its maritime traditions," he said, "and should be funded by the nation."

"One myth is that you have had many mistresses."

He looked exasperated. "Have you ever stopped to think that for the last forty years, I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So how the hell could I get away with anything like that?" He stared straight ahead and waited for the next question. That subject was closed.

His response amused the former head of the Royal Protection Service, who chuckled when he read it. "The truth is our function is to protect the person, not his morals. . . . If he's inside a woman's flat, we stand outside. We don't care what he's doing inside as long as he emerges unharmed . . . so he can get away with whatever he wants. . . . We're not there to protect him as the Queen's husband, but to guard him as the Duke of Edinburgh. . .there's a consider- able difference. .

The British historian and writer Richard Hough, who spent time with Philip in the 1 970s researching a book and traveling with him on the Britannia, acknowledged the other women in his life. "There were two secretaries on board ship, both very pretty," he recalled. "And I know that he keeps a mistress . . somewhere in Notting Hill. But he was very discreet." Years before, Philip had underscored the importance of discretion when he was asked the secret of a successful marriage. ``A home of one's own,'' he said,

and common sense."

The reporter did not push the point with Philip. "A second myth," she said, "is that Prince Andrew is not really your son. That he is the son of Lord Porchester [the Queen's racing manager]."

Philip did not flinch. Knowing that any reaction would be front-page news, he said nothing. He sat as impassive as stone. "Like a child with porridge in his mouth," the reporter later told a colleague. She had addressed the issue of his son's paternity because it had been raised weeks before by Nigel Dempster in The New York Times Maga~ine: "Get hold of a picture of Prince Andrew and then one of Lord Porchester at the same age," Dempster was quoted telling writer Christopher Hitchens. "You'll see that Prince Philip could never have been Andy's father."

The Palace did not challenge the published statement, and nei-

ther did Philip. When his silence became uncomfortable, Rocco moved on.

"The third myth is a rumor that you once had an affair with Valery Giscard d'Estaing [former President of France]," she said.

Philip laughed. "Oh, Giscard is a delightful old boy, but I never stayed at the Elysee Palace when he was President. I would stay there when [Vincent] Auriol was President [1947-1954], and he was a frightful buggerer."

The reporter laughed, too, as if to acknowledge that her impertinent question deserved no more than his mischievous answer. A few days later a courier knocked on her door with an envelope. The thick heavy white stationery from Windsor Castle contained a curt message from HRH Prince Philip: "Do not use the Auriol anecdote on your tape." And her editor received a call from the Queen's press secretary, complaining about the reporter's impudence. Both journalists were summoned to the Palace for a meeting with Prince Philip's private secretary, Sir Brian McGrath. He reminded them he had provided the names and phone numbers of people whose recollections lent credibility to the profile. "At least, while those recollections remain on the record," said the courtier. The implication was clear. If the journalists used Philip's tape- recorded comment, they would lose their sources, who had agreed to be quoted because Philip gave permission. Without named sources, the journalists knew the profile would lack punch.

They argued that the anecdote about the late President of France showed Prince Philip's sense of humor. The Palace was not to be conned. A deal was struck: the newspaper would not use the anecdote, and the Palace would not withdraw their sources.

Afterward Philip said he would never give another interview to a British reporter. But by then his personal life, once off limits to the press, had become vulnerable. The Independent on Sunday reported that he and the Queen slept in separate bedrooms. Vanity Fair said he kept a mistress. The New Yorker said it was a "succession of actress-mistresses who regularly appeared on television, prompting viewers in the know to smile and say, `She's one of his.'" For those not in the know, the Tatler published "The Royal Collection," which provided the names, biographies, and photo-

graphs of thirteen women described as "the Duke of Edinburgh's fan club." The list included minor British stars but omitted major American ones like Jane Russell, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Shirley MacLaine. The British aristocrats included two Princesses, one Duchess, one Countess, and five titled ladies, including the seventyyear-old wife of one of the Queen's former equerries. "That's an appalling image of my mother-in-law in bed with Prince Philip," pooh-poohed the woman's son-in-law. "It's like Love Among the Ruins."

"The [Tatler] list was a good lineup but hardly complete," said the columnist Taki. "Everybody knows that Sasha [the Duchess of Abercorn] is Philip's mistress. . . . She's lasted the longest six to eight years. . . He would take the Britannia to the Caribbean to attend an opening in St. Kitt's because she would be there." A private photograph from one Caribbean trip was sold to newspapers, showing Philip with only a towel wrapped around his waist. He had his arm around the Duchess, who was in her swimsuit. Her husband, James, who was standing a few feet behind her, was cropped out of the picture. "James is the nicest man in the world," said Taki. "He'd have to be to put up with Philip."

Before he died in 1993, John Barratt, who was Lord Mountbatten s private secretary for twenty years, also discussed Philip's extramarital love affairs. "The Duchess of Abercorn is Philip's now, but Mountbatten had her first she was his godchild, and he loved her greatly, although she was forty years younger. Then he passed her on to Philip. .

"The Queen can be very imperious and cold. Austere, really. So it's understandable why Philip goes elsewhere, and make no mistake about it, he does. But he hasn't had as many affairs as people think. Many women are social mountaineers who feed off the association with him. For them, it's a badge of honor to be perceived as a lover of the Queen's husband. . . . I'd put Patricia Kluge in that category," he said, referring to the former soft~porn belly dancer from Liverpool. "Before her divorce from John W. Kluge, the American tycoon, she had him purchase an estate near Balmoral and obtain Philip's trainer to teach her carriage riding, which was his favorite sport. . . .She was always ringing up to say,

`I'm having a party and would like you to come and bring some friends.' Through her husband, who was worth $6 billion, she was too rich for the royal family to ignore. Philip and Charles worked her for over $500,000 to sponsor the Royal Windsor Horse Show, but I seriously doubt whether Philip took a canter outside the rails for her

Barratt went on to say: "Now Princess Alexandra [the daughter of Princess Marina, who married the Duke of Kent] is different. .

She and Philip have been long involved. ... She's the Queen's first cousin a tall blond beauty who married Sir Angus Ogilvy. .

Her looks are reminiscent of Princess Anne, who is Philip's favorite child. You'll notice that many of his mistresses have his daughter's long, lean looks. The same horsey teeth, arched hair, Knightsbridge [slim] legs. .

"Basically, Philip is not a happy man. He's solidly married, but not happily. . . . He's blindingly energetic; travels constantly to fill the void of being the Queen's husband. . . . He probably should've married some rich American woman, had a good time, and then divorced her. At least he'd have autonomy. Here, he looks like a kept man, and for someone as proud as he is, that's dehumanizing."

What the Queen did not see, she overlooked, and her husband pursued his flirtations with discretion. Except for the occasional actress, he confined himself to married women within the nobility. The aristocratic wives were impressed by his royal lineage and reveled in his attentions. The few who were not flattered pretended otherwise because he was married to the Queen. "It's a subtle form of blackmail," said one woman, who was subjected to what she called "an excessive overture" from the Duke of Edinburgh.

When one of the Queen's bankers was invited to Balmoral for a house party, he brought his very attractive wife. Philip insisted that she and the other female guests join him in a musical parlor game. He arrayed the women in a circle around him, and he stood in the middle. Placing a bottle of wine between his legs, he told the women they had to remove it without using their hands. The competition was to take the bottle away from him with their legs before the music stopped. "No hands, now," he warned the bank-

er's wife. "No hands." Deeply embarrassed, she played the Duke's game because she said it would have been rude to decline.

"My wife felt the same way when he asked her to dance," said Robin Knight Bruce, an army officer. "Philip is Colonel-in-Chief of the Queen's royal Irish Hussars, and he comes to the regimental dinners to grope the officers' wives. When he did it to my wife, I went to my supervisor and said, `Do not let the fucking Duke of Edinburgh dance with my wife again or I'll kick him in the balls and so will she.'

For a sophisticated man who spoke three languages, traveled the world, collected art, painted, and published numerous books, the Duke of Edinburgh could act like an oafish adolescent. One of his son's young girlfriends said she was "terribly embarrassed" by his juvenile behavior. Romy Adlington was sixteen years old when she spent her first weekend with Prince Edward and the royal family. She said that the sixty-six-year-old duke leered and winked, patted her bottom when she walked down the hall to her room, and ogled her cleavage during dinner. She did not realize that it could have been worse.

"If it's in his head, it's on his plate," said one of his former equerries, dismissing Philip's frank observations about women and sex. The former aide smiled as he described the Duke as a man s man." In his defense, the aide offered a "boys will be boys" shrug. He laughed as he recalled Philip's comment at a film premiere when he saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. As the Duke walked toward the star in a receiving line, he noted her revealing gown and her bosom, which he said, looked like two pillows. Turning to his aide, he said, "Hop in.

He theorized that the differences between men and women were best illustrated by women's ability to knit. "I do think it shows that girls have an ability to disassociate what they are doing with their hands from what they are doing with their minds," he told the writer Glenys Roberts. "It is why they are able to carry out repetitive production line jobs which intellectuals find so deadening. I once asked a girl in a factory what she thought about while she was working. She said she thought about her boyfriend, the shopping, the film she was going to see. Fascinating."

Philip scattered his opinions on a broad canvas, always colorfully, sometimes offensively. The Mother's Union of Great Britain took exception when he equated prostitutes with wives. In defense of hunting, he had said there was no moral difference between killing animals for sport and killing them for money. "It's like sex," he said. "I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing."

When a Member of Parliament asked him how he could justify being president of the World Wildlife Fund with his pursuit of blood sports, Philip snapped, "Are you a vegetarian?"

"No," replied the MP, Anthony Beaumont-Dark.

"Do you eat red meat?" Philip demanded.

"Yes, but that's a different matter from blasting poor birds out of the sky."

Philip disagreed. "It is like saying that adultery is all right as long as you do not enjoy it."

The MP smiled. "You, sir," he said, "might know more about that than me."

TWENTY

The Princess of Wales stood in the middle of her shoe closet and pointed to three rows of low heels. She waved her hand

at the stubby shoes she had worn so she wouldn't tower over her husband. "You can throw out those dwarfers," she told her dresser. "I won't be needing them anymore." Within days she started wearing her highest heels the ones with ankle straps and open toes that she called her "tart's trotters." She had been liberated by the Prime Minister's statement to the House of Commons:

It is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected.

This decision has been reached amicably. . . . The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, though saddened, understand and sympathize with the difficulties which have led to this decision. .

When the Prime Minister made that announcement, he looked like a man at a funeral forced to deliver the eulogy. His words had been crafted by the Queen's lawyers and courtiers to convey sad news without quite telling the truth. Despite the public reassurances, the couple did plan to divorce, their decision was not amicable, and their constitutional positions were affected. The Queen and

Duke of Edinburgh were not saddened: they were incensed. And they did not understand or sympathize. Rather, they believed that the marriage should continue, no matter how miserable, for the sake of the monarchy.

Television programs were preempted on December 9, 1992, to carry the Prime Minister's statement, and when he rose to speak, the House of Commons fell strangely silent. Afterward the fiery Labor MP Dennis Skinner said, "The royal family has just pushed the self-destruct button." He was immediately barraged by indignant shouts. But he continued: "It is high time we stopped this charade of swearing allegiance to the Queen and her heirs and successors, because we don't know from time to time who they are.

The reigning Queen could possibly be the last."

The Prime Minister bristled. "You do not, I believe, speak for the nation or any significant part of it."

But the Prime Minister was wrong. After his announcement, polls showed that three out of four Britons believed the House of Windsor was crumbling.

The Queen, who was at Sandringham, did not watch the announcement on television; she was walking her dogs. When she returned, her page was waiting to offer his sympathy. She nodded briskly and said, "I think you'll find it's all for the best."

Charles was more forthcoming with his staff at Highgrove. "I feel a surging sense of relief," he told them. He had already started refurbishing the rooms that Diana had vacated. He ordered all the belongings she had not taken with her to be burned, including some of the children's old toys. On top of the bonfire was a carved wooden rocking horse that had been a birthday gift to Prince William from the President of the United States and Mrs. Reagan.

After the Prime Minister's announcement, reporters descended on Camilla Parker Bowles's manor home in Wiltshire, but she feigned ignorance about the Waleses' separation. "Obviously, if something has gone wrong, I'm very sorry for them," she said. "But I know nothing more than the average person in the street. I only know what I see on television." Fifty miles away, her husband emerged from his London apartment. The couple, who had been married nineteen years, lived apart quietly and saw each other only

on rare weekends. When reporters asked his reaction, Andrew Parker Bowles kept walking. "Like everyone else," he said, "one feels sad about this." He scolded a reporter for suggesting that his wife had been instrumental in the breakup.

"No, it's not true, he said. "How many times do I have to spell it out? Those stories are pure fiction."

Some people on the street told reporters they felt betrayed. "The royal family is supposed to be better than us," said one middle-aged woman. "They're supposed to show us the way to behave. Other- wise, what's their purpose?"

Reaction split down generations. Those who had spent childhood nights huddled in London's underground during World War II looked to royalty as a beacon. But those who grew up listening to the Beatles, not to the bombs, viewed the royal family as a relic. To the postwar generations, especially those reared on video games, the monarchy just looked plain silly. One nineteen-year-old student from Liverpool said, "Just a bunch of out-of-date, out-of-touch richies."

But the royalist, Lord St. John of Fawsley, disagreed. He rationalized that the royal family was emblematic of the modern dysfunctional family. Next to the United States, the United Kingdom had the highest rate of divorce in the Western world, which was reflected in its royal family. "For this century the monarchy has been held up as an example of family rectitude," he said with a straight face. "Well, that can't go on. So the royal family will have to adapt itself to new circumstances. In some ways it will be nearer to the people because it will be sharing the family problems all of us have faced."

No dynasty had taught its subjects more emphatically to shrink from divorce and no dynasty had given them more from which to shrink. Yet by 1992 all the monarch's married children were legally separated and headed for divorce. "Great weddings," observed writer Valerie Groves, "too bad about the marriages."

Half the country now believed that by the end of the twenty- first century the monarchy would be finished and that Britain would not suffer. The press reflected the public's sentiments. "Charles will not be King," predicted the Sun, "Di will not be Queen." The

Daily Mirrnr said: "The latest royal mess is making a mockery of the monarchy. Unchecked, that mockery will destroy the monarchy itself."

Measured against people's expectations, Charles had fallen alarmingly far. Even Tory members of Parliament debated his right to the throne. Fearing a constitutional crisis, he called his friend Lord Arnold Goodman for advice. The eminent lawyer said that a divorce would not prevent him from becoming King but a second marriage would. So Charles said he did not intend to remarry. He maintained stoutly, "I will be the next King."

The separation had international repercussions. In Germany wax museums moved the mannequins of Charles and Diana suitably apart. In Australia the government dropped all references to Queen Elizabeth II from its oath of allegiance. In Britain Labor MP Anthony Benn introduced a bill to abolish the monarchy. He suggested replacing the Queen with an elected president, separating church and state, and giving Wales and Scotland their own Parliaments. The Benn bill was never debated, but people who cared about monarchy were concerned.

From the United States, Prince Philip's onetime Hollywood press agent offered his services. Henry Rogers of Rogers & Cowan had orchestrated the publicity for Philip's 1966 trip to Los Angeles. The two men had met on the recommendation of Philip's Hollywood pal Frank Sinatra, a client of Rogers & Cowan. Now, twenty-six years later, Rogers offered to come out of retirement to help again. Philip thanked him in a handwritten letter from Windsor Castle:

Dear Henry,

Life appears to have changed out of all recognition. Whoever first said, "It never rains, but it pours" made a very profound statement!! So much happened at once and as bad luck would have it, it all took place against the sombre backdrop of the recession.

In spite of the dramatic media, we have had tremendous support through the mail from people of all kinds. I have every hope that things will get better this year.

But thank you all the same for generously offering your help. .

The royal family appeared calm and tried to hold firm, especially the Queen Mother. She knew the country had survived bad kings, mad kings, weak kings, dumb kings, homosexual kings, even foreign-born kings. At the age of ninety-two she was not so acute as she had once been, but she was determined to help Charles, her favorite grandchild, achieve what she saw as his destiny. For she was a king maker. In her time she had rammed steel down the spine of her weak husband and made him look strong to his subjects. Now she longed to do the same for her beleaguered grandson.

But she opposed divorce so much so that she would not let Charles move in with her after the separation as he waited for his apartment in St. James's Palace to be renovated. The Queen Mother had been reared during an era when divorce spelled social disgrace, and she remained convinced that the only real threat to the monarchy was divorce. She tolerated all kinds of deviant behavior in her family, from alcoholism to drug addiction. But she did not countenance divorce. She said that was the death blow to family stability, which she felt the House of Windsor must represent to survive. She resisted attending Princess Anne's second wedding in Scotland because she did not want to pay tribute to another divorce in the royal family. Despite her reservations, she eventually relented.

She dismissed those who said the monarchy was in crisis because royalty had stepped off the throne to marry commoners like Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer. As the most exemplary commoner of them all, the Queen Mother naturally disagreed with that. She said the problem was divorce and that Sarah and Diana were "unsuitable" because they were the children of divorce.

Both Sarah and Diana had grown up with mothers who had run off from their homes and abandoned their families to seek happiness with other men. Neither Sarah nor Diana had seen a marriage grow into a lifetime partnership that overcame adversity and boredom. Instead both had watched their mothers place personal satisfaction before duty and responsibility. To the Queen Mother,

those were the hallmarks of royalty. Now the daughters were following their mothers' wayward footsteps by breaking their marriage vows. In doing so, they were betraying crown and country.

"You take in two girls from broken homes," the Queen had said, "and look how they repay you.

The Queen Mother agreed. She blamed Diana especially for allowing the world to see the "sordid" misery of her marriage. The Queen Mother had used that word in talking to her grandson. Charles had warned her about his wife's "instability" and her "confounded unreasonableness," but the Queen Mother was unprepared for Diana's unholy disclosures.

"The bulimia . . . the business of overeating and then vomiting that thoroughly revolted her," said one of the Queen Mother's friends. "The image of the future Queen of England riding the porcelain chariot was, well . . . I'm afraid she couldn't get beyond the picture of the Princess of Wales crouched over a toilet bowl purging herself of puddings by throwing up."

"A traitor entered our house," the Queen Mother told Ruth Fermoy, her lady-in-waiting. Lady Fermoy agreed, but sadly the "traitor" was her own granddaughter.

"Flesh and blood and family count for little when you're a royalist," said Ruth Fermoy's goddaughter, "and Ruth was a royalist to her core. She turned on Diana when she separated from Charles, whom she absolutely adored. She said it was the saddest day in her life. Despite what has been written about her and the Queen Mother engineering the marriage, Ruth told me that she didn't want Diana to marry Charles. She had warned her at the time of what she would encounter by joining the royal family. But Diana was helplessly in love and assured Grandma Ruth, as she called her, that she wanted to dedicate her life to Charles. . .

"Diana mended things a little before Ruth died but just. I was there when she visited Ruth's flat in Eaton Square for the last time, and I felt sad for her when she left because Ruth said she still didn't forgive Diana for what she had done.

"But then neither did Diana's mother. She [Frances Shand Kydd] told me, and these were her exact words: `I know Charles

has hurt Diana terribly, but I love him and I refuse to take sides.' That's from Diana's own mother.

"And as for the Queen Mother . . . well, she unleashed her dogs, and it's been bloody hell for Diana ever since."

In public, the Queen Mother, who avoided any unpleasantness, never snarled, barked, or growled. For that, she "unleashed her dogs," who were the emissaries she designated to communicate her opinions to the press. She, like her daughter, insisted on maintaining the myth of never granting interviews, although both talked to favored writers. After the Prime Minister's announcement about the separation, Lord Wyatt stepped forward to comment on the behavior of the Princess of Wales.

He was identified as "a close personal friend of the Queen Mother," so readers of the Sunday Times were expected to know whose sentiments were being expressed:

Princess Diana could never have won a university place, but she won a prince and failed to keep him. She is addicted to the limelight her marriage brought. It's like a drug; to feed her craving she will do anything, even if it meant destroying the throne she solemnly swore to uphold.

Within weeks Diana was portrayed as a woman more sinned against than sinning. A transcript of her husband's intimate telephone conversation with his mistress was published on January 12, 1993. The secret recording, known as Camillagate, was made on December 18, 1989, a few days before the secret recording of Diana' 5 telephone conversation with James Hewitt, known as Squidgygate. Both conversations had been picked up by men, both hobbyists who claimed they scanned the airwaves in their spare time like ham radio operators. But those who tend to conspiracies hinted at something more sinister: they said that publishing transcripts three years after the conversations were recorded suggested more than mere coincidence. They speculated that the furtive interceptions had been carried out by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, MI~, to embarrass the royal family and destabilize the monarchy.

The embarrassment was profound. In the words of one writer,

the public was "well and truly shocked" to hear the prospective Supreme Governor of the Church of England declare his passion for another man's wife. "I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out . . . particularly in and out," Charles told Camilla. "I'll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier. .

During the late night conversation, Charles proposed living inside Camilla as "a Tampax," which she found delightful. "Oh, what a wonderful idea," she exclaimed. He paused. "My luck to be chucked down a lavatory and go on forever swirling around the top, never going down." Sounding enthralled, she said she wanted him day and night . . . "desperately, desperately, desperately

The day the transcript was published, reporters surrounded Camilla's home. When she heard why they were there, she was stunned. "I can't believe it. I can't believe it," she said. "I must speak to my husband. He is on his way home." She closed the door and took the phone off the hook.

"6 Min Love Tape Could Cost Charles Throne" shrieked the Sun, but the London Evening Standard asked, "So What's Wrong with a King Who Can Talk Dirty?" Charles said he was "appalled" by the publication of his private conversation and called friends to apologize for embarrassing them. They deplored publication of a private conversation that was taped, duplicated, sold, and printed in transcript form. "You might argue Charles and Camilla deserve the embarrassment," said his biographer Penny Junor, "but surely not their children."

Already nine-year-old Wills had been reported fighting with classmates at school, where he shoved a boy's head down the toilet. Deeply depressed by his parents' quarreling, he locked himself in the bathroom for hours, and his grades slumped. His younger brother, Harry, was seen sneaking cigarettes at school. Both children sucked their thumbs and wet their beds. Thomas Parker Bowles, the teenage son of Camilla and Andrew, was arrested for possession of drugs. He was not threatened with suspension from Oxford because he was off campus when apprehended by police for possession of cannabis and ecstasy pills. To escape the gibes of students, he began calling himself Tom Bowles. He did not admit

that his middle name was Charles in honor of his godfather, the Prince of Wales.

Although the tabloid press condemned Charles as a knave, he found compassion in unexpected quarters: Peter McKay wrote in the London Evening Standard that the six-minute phone call was "silly, touching and filthy . . . [but it] made me think better of Charles. . . . He comes out of it as a daft romantic, dying to leap under the duvet, fond of terrible sex jokes." The novelist Fay Weldon said she thought the transcript was moving. "What it's got to do with Charles being King I don't know. My opinion of him goes up no end because it shows he has some proper emotions. .

But most of the country was disgusted, and the next time he appeared in public, he was booed. At an official engagement, a man in the crowd shouted: "Have you no shame?" Opinion polls showed that only one in three Britons felt Charles was entitled to become King. Uncharacteristically, the English treated him like a politician, who could be deprived of his position because of his negative image. His friend and former equerry, Nicholas Soames, hastened to spell out the hereditary principle involved in succession. He explained that Charles's right to the throne did not depend on his popularity: barring abdication or an act of Parliament, Charles was not disposable. "The throne is his duty, his obligation, his destiny," said Soames. "It's not something he seeks, but it will be his. . . . Twelve hundred years of British history are not going to be overturned by Mr. Murdoch's republican press, engaged in a circulation war. The heir to the throne will be the next King, and that's all there is to it."

Another close friend said: "It was a terrible moment, the worst moment of his life. . . . He wanted to be taken seriously. He sincerely believed he had important things to say. And in six minutes of private conversation, a conversation that was nobody's business but his and the woman to whom he was speaking, his reputation was ruined. . . . He really didn't deserve to be destroyed so publicly and so cruelly."

Even the far-off Fiji Islands were upset. The government announced it would discontinue celebrating Charles's birthday as a national holiday because he no longer represented greatness to

them. In Australia the Prime Minister's wife would not curtsy to him, and the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that he not be invited to open the Olympics in the year 2000. "Let's have Prince William do it anybody but his father."

If Charles had chosen one act, short of child molestation, he could not have alienated his future subjects more. Through The Prince's Trust he had established one of the country's biggest charities to benefit disadvantaged children, but no amount of grants to inner-city youngsters could make him look princely now. As his biographer Anthony Holden put it, "No one listens to do-gooding sermons from a man who is two-timing the world's most desirable woman.

Shaken by the crisis, Charles summoned six friends to Sandringham to advise him. Afterward one man was dispatched to tell the Telegra~h that the Prince was prepared to make any sacrifice to insure his succession to the throne. The headline on the next day's front page: "Prince of Wales Chooses the Celibate Life."

The attempt to win back public confidence did not work. Nothing could stop the sniggering jokes. "That' 11 be one pack of Charlie's," sang a London grocery clerk, ringing up a box of sanitary napkins. A cartoonist drew Charles's face as an egg cup with yolk dribbling down his nose. Greeting cards appeared with his caricature: "For your birthday, I'd like to treat you to a Chuck and Di margarita. It's cold, frosty, and it's on the rocks." The Palace finally intervened to prevent a safe-sex poster from appearing on British billboards. The proposed advertisement had shown a wedding picture of the Prince and Princess of Wales kissing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in front of huge crowds. The caption read "Appearances Can Be Deceptive. Use a Johnny Condom." A spokesman for the British Safety Council resented the Palace interference: "We really could not care less what the royals think," said Fiona Harcombe. "The benefits far outweigh the offense it might cause to the Queen."

Charles was humiliated. "His Royal Highness didn't want to leave the grounds," recalled one of his security guards, "but his friends encouraged him not to retreat. `Be seen helping people,'

they advised. But he was scared. We saw it in his eyes. Like a rabbit in the clamp of a trap."

When Charles visited the scene of an oil tanker spill off Scotland's Shetland Islands, he imposed a "no children" rule. His aide explained: "They tend to ask awkward questions." The Prince arrived looking drawn and worried. His thinning hair was combed to conceal his bald spot, and he appeared stooped and defeated. He avoided the press as he tramped through oil-soaked fields, and he strained to make small talk with farmers whose fields and crops were buried in gunk. Later, at a midmorning reception, he passed on orange juice and ordered a Scotch whiskey. "We asked HRH [Philip] to visit the oil spill as president of the World Wildlife Fund," said the WWF's former communications director, "but Charles's staff didn't want him [Philip] there. . . . They needed the sympathetic coverage for the Prince of Wales. But the WWF is the most prestigious conservation organization in the world, and we, too, needed a presence. . . . We finally worked it out so both of them would go and pursue separate agendas. Charles said beforehand he would not respond to the press, but Philip agreed to answer questions. After the first one, though, he lost his temper."

A television reporter had asked Philip whether his visit had been overshadowed by headlines about his son's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

"It's nothing to do with that," snapped Philip. Growing angry, he wheeled on the reporter. "I might have guessed someone like you would ask that question. Who do you represent?"

The reporter replied: "ITN [Independent Television Network]."

"Figures," said Philip, storming off.

The Duke of Edinburgh complained to the WWF communications director that the question was rude and boorish. "The ITN reporter wasn't disrespectful, just straightforward," said the WWF employee. "But the lack of deference shown in posing the question in the first place was not lost on HRH

That lack of knee-bending deference jolted the country in May 1993. More than five hundred people streamed into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London to listen to a day-long de

bate by royalists and republicans on the future of the monarchy. The forum mirrored the mood of national anxiety as ninety speakers assembled. They discussed the Crown and why, or even whether, it continues to matter in twentieth-century England.

"Something has died," said Professor Stephen Haseler, "and that something is the enchantment of the British people for the monarchy." Historian Elizabeth Longford disagreed: she argued in favor of Prince Charles becoming King. But playwright David Hare recommended abolishing the monarchy because he viewed it as the fountainhead of falseness and snobbery. In between was Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times, who called himself a royalist but acknowledged the need for constitutional reform. He observed that an institution that had survived since the sixth century could be dislodged only by war or revolution. Because neither option was desirable for the country, he urged his audience to believe in the monarchy's ability to adapt.

But the Queen moved like moss. Less than three years after agreeing to pay taxes (on her public income, not on her private investments), she decided to fly commercial. By not using one of the eleven jets in the Queen's Flight, she saved taxpayers about $3 million on one trip. "Her Majesty took over the entire first-class cabin," said an Air New Zealand flight attendant, "but that's as it should be. After all, she is the Queen of England, not some bicycle monarchy."

But the Queen flew commercial only once. For comfort and convenience, she preferred the Queen's Flight. So instead she decided to economize on household expenses. She received $70 million a year in public funding for her travel expenses, her security costs, and the upkeep of her eight residences. She started trimming costs by eliminating her employee's traditional benefits: her chauffeurs, who earned $9,000 a year, had to start paying for their own shoe repair. Servants, paid $8,000 a year, no longer received free bars of soap. And the $60,000 a year courtiers who accompanied the Queen on foreign tours could no longer expect to receive a free suit. "They will receive a cash stipend in exchange," the Palace announced. "We want to make things work better and more efficiently."

As part of her cost cutting, the Queen reconsidered giving cash bonuses to the two hundred employees at Windsor Castle who had helped save her treasures during the 1992 fire. Instead of money, she offered them a free tour of the castle library. Few accepted.

The royal family remained aloof from the debate about their future. Lord Charteris, the Queen's former equerry, said the idea of a republic never penetrated the Palace walls. Lady Longford, a friend of the Queen, disagreed. "They have been perfectly open about it," she said. As far back as 1966, when they toured Canada, they discussed the possibility of Britain's becoming a republic. If anything, they treated the subject lightheartedly. "We'll go quietly," the Queen said. Philip joked that he could be packed in a day, but she would need several weeks. "Too damn many corgis," he quipped. Walking into her office at Buckingham Palace one afternoon, he looked out the window and asked: "Have they got up the guillotine?"

The Queen, too, used humor in addressing a Commonwealth conference in Cyprus. She had arrived on the island in the fall of 1993 aboard her royal yacht. After dinner she relaxed with her guests. When she said she wouldn't wager on a similar Commonwealth conference in the next forty years, they knew she had studied the recent polls in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that showed growing support for independence from the Crown. "The only safe bet is that there will be three absentees Prince Philip, Britannia, and myself," said the Queen without emotion. "But you never know. . . . Nowadays, I have enough experience, not least in racing, to restrain me from laying any money down on how many countries will be in the Commonwealth in forty years' time, who they will be, and where the meeting will be held."

Within the royal family, the Queen did not need a trackside tip sheet to see who was running best in the mud and who was showing signs of weak knees. She read the opinion polls, which showed that her estranged daughter-in-law was winning the race while her son was still stuck in the paddock.

Charles stumbled along, trying to redeem himself, but even as he tried to make light of his predicament, he sounded more self- pitying than self-deprecating. As he autographed a soccer ball for

youngsters at a London recreation center, he told them: "Now you've got my name on it. You can kick it all over the place." He gave up polo entirely; he cut ribbons, laid wreaths, inspected factories, visited troops in Bosnia, toured a former concentration camp in Poland.

But he could not compete with his wife, who radiated in the press like a movie star elevated to sainthood. As one headline put it: "The Princess Bids Halo and Farewell to Her Critics." She toured hospices and orphanages and Red Cross feeding centers. In India she touched untouchables. In Nepal she hugged lepers. She embraced amputees and ladled soup for starving refugees. People turned out in droves to see her, mesmerized by her warmth, her beauty, her glamour.

Although Charles could not draw crowds like Diana, his equerry said he was well rid of her. He said the Prince had grown more confidant because he was no longer saddled with the Princess and subjected to "superficial handshaking tours." Rather than belittle Diana, the equerry might have been better advised to announce that Charles had lashed himself to the steps of Canterbury Cathedral to do penance for his adultery, as his ancestor did to atone for the murder of Thomas a Becket. The public adored the Princess, and she reveled in the adulation.

She was regularly photographed visiting homeless shelters and talking to battered wives. She seemed especially taken with one woman, who admitted pouring gasoline on her husband and setting him afire as he slept. The woman, who said she had been driven insane by her husband, pleaded not guilty to murder and was freed. The Princess hugged her and said, "You have been so brave." Later, as Charles visited an inner-city housing project, he shook hands with a woman in the crowd who said she had met his estranged wife. He grimaced. "You lived to tell the tale, did you?"

Measured in newsprint, there was no contest between Diana and Charles. A media research firm measured the number of column inches allotted to each during the first six days of March 1993: Diana scored 3,603 inches of newsprint, Charles only 275.

One of Britain's prizewinning feature writers, Lynda LeePotter, advised the Prince to ignore the tally and stay out of the

fray. "He should not play his wife's games," she wrote. "He should remain uncomplaining and dignified." She said Diana had declared open war on her husband. "She desires to be utterly vindicated. She yearns to diminish Prince Charles. She wants revenge, not merely justice. But the continuing public battle she plans can only take place if her husband and his family retaliate. If they do that, they may be defeated. If they refuse to fight, they will surely win."

By then the Princess had the Palace on the run. They appeared to support her charity work, but behind the scenes they sabotaged her. They kept her from becoming president of the British Red Cross and would not recommend her as head of UNICEF. They allowed her to make a few speeches but winced when she spoke about bulimia and depression. The courtiers, all middle-aged men, did not see her declarations of victimhood as a plus for a female whose poor self-image once made her feel as if she deserved to be dysfunctional. The courtiers said her speeches about self-esteem were silly and self-indulgent.

They sputtered with indignation when she spoke out on issues, especially AIDS, which they said were not in her domain. Diana paid no attention. She told a national AIDS conference: "It is doubly difficult to deal with AIDS in a country like Britain, where there is still an understandable reluctance to have frank and open discussions on emotional issues. We need to learn how to break through this barrier of inhibition

When the Princess was asked to deliver the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC to discuss her views on AIDS, the courtiers finally took action. The invitation was withdrawn.

What they did not take away from her, Charles did. He wanted her removed from public life with no access to the Queen's Flight, the royal train, the royal yacht, or any other privileged form of royal travel. In fact, he wanted her to be shorn of all royal trappings. But the Queen worried about isolating Diana and the effect it might have on her troubled mind. The monarch dispatched the Prime Minister to visit Kensington Palace to reassure the Princess that she had a continuing part to play. Her Majesty then authorized publication of the Prime Minister's visit in the Court Circular so the public and Diana would think she was still considered valuable.

The Palace allowed her to make a few goodwill tours, but, instructed by Charles, they cut back the honors she had once been accorded. No more high-level courtiers or official ladies-in-waiting. Her airline seating arrangements were downgraded from first class to business class, and the Palace banned playing the National Anthem upon her arrival in Nepal. The tabloids, which revered her, reported the petty slights and wrote editorials calling for more dignified treatment for the mother of the future King.

But the courtiers were dropping the curtain on the star and inching her off stage. She was no longer invited to appear with the royal family at public celebrations like Trooping the Color. When the Queen did not extend an invitation to Royal Ascot in 1993, Diana took her boys to Planet Hollywood. The next day's newspapers showed a doting mother in blue jeans romping with her children alongside a stiff picture of the royal family waving from their carriages. One tabloid headline captured the contrast: "The Hugger and the High Hats."

Nor was Diana invited to the Queen Mother's birthday party in August of 1993. So she took her children go-carting. Again, her picture frolicking with her sons appeared on the front pages. When the Queen went to Hungary, her first visit to a postcommunist state, Diana went to Paris to shop. The monarch's visit received minor coverage while Diana's was given the front pages. An Evening Standard editorial wondered: "Might it not be appropriate to place the Princess under house arrest when visits abroad by her less newsworthy royal superiors are imminent?"

Intent on being seen as an angel of mercy, Diana had wanted to attend the memorial service for two children killed by an IRA bomb in the Cheshire town of Warrington. But the Palace said no and sent Prince Philip instead. Diana let the Palace know that she understood how to play hardball: she phoned the grieving mothers of both bomb victims.

"I want to be there with you and give you a hug," she told them, "but I can't because they are sending my father-in-law."

Even Diana's critics felt the Palace looked petty and spiteful.

She saw the royal family siding with her husband and arrayed against her. He viewed it differently, saying he received more sup-

port from his friends than from his family. His father kept in contact by sending messages through his laptop computer, not all of which were appreciated. "Ah, yes, the Duke and his helpful bulletins," recalled one of Charles's aides. His arched eyebrows indicated the communications were unwelcome. The aide said nothing about the Queen, who maintained a cool distance from her heir. Sometimes the courts of mother and son clashed like fighting cocks.

"I nearly went mad trying to accommodate them," recalled the interior designer Nicholas Haslam. "The competition between the two circles is fierce and strangulating. There is no regard for the bond of mother and son: none whatsoever. It's a pitched battle: Her Majesty the Queen versus upstart Prince, who is the King-in- waiting....

"I came into Buckingham Palace in 1993 at the bidding of Prince Charles, who wanted me to do the decoration for a dinner he planned for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I surveyed a few rooms with one of the Queen's men and asked that the chairs be rearranged for a softer, more hospitable setting.

`Absolutely not,' said the Queen's man. `Her Majesty would not approve.

"I asked another man for assistance with the lighting.

`Her Majesty likes the lights as they are.'

"I inquired about moving some tables, saying that the Prince was having a dinner for three hundred people and we needed a bit more space.

`Her Majesty prefers the tables to remain in place.'

"I was nearly around the bend with frustration," said the decorator. "I couldn't address the subject of candles because `Her Majesty does not approve of dining by candlelight.'

"It was a disaster trying to represent Charles in his mother's domain, but I finally managed to pull it all together for him, and he was very gracious. He said that Buckingham Palace had never looked lovelier than it did that evening. Of course, I aged fifty years trying to negotiate arrangements with all the Queen's men....

That evening, with his mother not in residence, Charles flew the Prince of Wales flag from Buckingham Palace. He endeared

himself to his guests with his after-dinner remarks. "I've become quite familiar with the works of Shakespeare in the last year," he said. "I've lived through The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love `5 Labors Lost, and The Taming ofthe Shrew. . . . It's about time for All's Well That Ends Well." He brought down the house.

On occasion, Diana, too, poked fun at her plight. While visiting a London hostel for battered wives, she sat in on a therapy session and listened to the women talk about rebuilding their lives. When she was asked if she wanted to join in, she flapped her blouse and fanned herself: "I have a hot flush coming on."

Her regular tabloid press pack enjoyed her sly levities, especially when she targeted their counterparts in the upmarket press. "Oh, you're from the Financial Times?" she said to one man. "We took that at home. Yes, I believe we used to line the budgie's cage with it." One of her regular reporters complimented her on how fit she was looking. She startled the group by asking if they remembered her when she was younger and had had a large bosom.

"Oh, yes, ma'am, and weren't those the good old days," joked her favorite photographer, Arthur Edwards. He had covered her since she was nineteen and waiting for the Prince of Wales to propose. During that period she had ventured out the front door of her apartment at Coleherne Court and burst into tears when she found a horde of press men blocking her car. Edwards had barreled through the mob to help her. "Don't let them see you cry," he'd advised. "It's Queen Di for you, and when you finally get the job, it's Sir Arthur for me!"

After that, Diana rewarded the tabloid photographer with her sweetest smiles. When he fell ill, she took him medicine. "She calls me by my Christian name and has done [so] from the beginning," he said. "Prince Charles still calls me Mr. Edwards and is very formal. I think in this age it is out of place."

The Sun photographer did not flatter himself about why the Princess courted him. "The reason is most likely that thirteen million readers will see her at her gorgeous best," he said. "Funnily enough, it is always the papers with the highest circulation to whom Diana is the most cooperative."

Whenever the Princess appeared in a spectacular new gown,

the photographer hollered approvingly, "You look lovely tonight, ma'am." When she wore something she had worn before, he complained. "Oh, not that one again."

She shot back, "Arthur, I suppose you `d prefer it if I turned up naked."

He countered, "Well, at least I could get a picture of you in the paper that way."

"I'll tell the jokes, Arthur," she said reprovingly.

He later used her retort as the title for his book of royal reminiscences. Diana let him know that she did not appreciate the exploitation. Withholding her usual smile, she asked, "How many books have you sold, Arthur?"

He smiled sheepishly. "I think you are wonderful, ma'am. I would never do anything to harm you.

Diana's father, the late Earl Spencer, once called her "pure steel inside," and Arthur Edwards occasionally felt her jabs. Commenting on a new hairstyle, he said if her hair got any shorter, she would look like Sinead O'Connor, the Irish pop star who shaves her head.

"At least I've got some hair," said Diana, looking at the photographer's bald head.

When she felt offended, reporters felt her sting. One young woman was pointedly ignored by the Princess when she wrote that Diana had worn comfortable but dowdy clothes on a royal tour. On the return flight home, Diana eyed the writer's ankle-length skirt and said, "She won't last long." Hearing the Princess discuss plans for making other overseas visits, the young reporter inquired, "Oh, more trips?" Without smiling, Diana said, "More trips and more dowdy clothes."

Usually Diana courted the media, especially after her separation, when she and her husband competed for coverage and used the press to take a poke at each other. Both had recruited national newspapers to carry his and her versions of their marital rifts. She received more sympathetic coverage because she befriended reporters: she gave cocktail parties for those who covered her royal tours, sent them notes when she was especially pleased by their stories, and remembered their birthdays. She regularly briefed the Daily

Mail's royal correspondent Richard Kay, who was photographed whispering with her in a car. She invited media baron Rupert Murdoch to lunch at Kensington Palace and sent similar invitations to television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. They all accepted. She ingratiated herself with Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company, by visiting her in Martha's Vineyard and Washington, D.C. Diana also attended parties sponsored by Peoole magazine, Harper's Ba~aar, and Vanity Fair. She posed for Vogue. She was so accommodating to the photographers who accompanied her on ski vacations with her children that supporters of Prince Charles accused her of using the boys to look motherly at his expense. He countered with more exotic vacations for the children in Italy and on the Greek islands. She topped him by taking the boys to Disney World in Florida. Charles was determined not to be outdone. When he went with his sons to Balmoral for Easter, he gave them a set of soccer goalposts, a garden badminton set, two mountain bikes, a trampoline, guns for shooting rabbits and crows, and two minimotorbikes that cost $3,000 apiece. But even his staged photo opportunities with his sons could not overcome the popularity gap.

"The big trouble with some of the royals is that they treat the press like telegraph poles," said Arthur Edwards. "They just walk round them and totally ignore them. That has been one of the reasons for the bad publicity they get. . . . Diana has gone more than halfway to stop that."

She became the most photographed woman in the world, and photographers made thousands of dollars taking her picture. She was reminded what a valuable commodity she had become after receiving a call from Lady Elizabeth Johnston, a friend of the royal family, who lived near Great Windsor Park. She had heard from her hairdresser that Diana was being secretly photographed during her weekly workouts at the gym. Lady Johnston warned the Princess that the owner of the gym was the Peeping Tom.

"Oh, God," said Diana. "Am I decent?"

"As far as I know, you are.

"That's a relief. My mother-in-law would die."

The next day Diana asked her detective, Ken Wharfe, to check

out the story. He talked to the owner of L.A. Fitness, Bryce Taylor, who denied taking pictures of the Princess.

"For chrissakes," said Taylor. "She's been coming here almost three years now. You're always with her. Have you ever seen a security problem?"

The detective satisfied himself by walking around the club. He did not inspect the premises thoroughly, but even if he had, he might not have noticed the hole cut in the ceiling panel.

Six months later a sneak shot of Diana appeared on the front page of the Sunday Mirror in spandex cycling shorts and a snug turquoise leotard. The newspaper had agreed to pay $250,000 for photos that showed her pushing a shoulder press with her legs spread wide apart. The poses were unflattering, even for a young woman as beautiful as the Princess, and the harsh angles emphasized her pelvis, revealing every bulge and fold and crease around her hips.

Looking at the voyeuristic photos made some people feel as if a dirty trick had been played on an unsuspecting maiden. Although Diana had borne children and taken lovers, she still retained an aura of demure innocence. People had seen photos of her plunging cleavage and her high kicks across a stage in a slinky satin slip; they had even seen her pregnant in a bikini. But they had never seen her looking coarse.

"It was a crotch shot, plain and simple," said one magazine editor. "Undignified and disgusting."

The royal biographer Brian Hoey said the pictures would never have been published in Britain if Diana had not been separated from Prince Charles. "She is now treated by the media with the same sort of disdain and contempt as film stars or . . . Fergie."

Diana felt bruised and abused. "I burst into tears when I saw that photograph," she said. "I felt insulted and humiliated and violated.

The Palace and Parliament rallied to her side, deploring the invasion of her privacy. Her husband felt she got no more than an exhibitionist deserved, but her father-in-law urged her to sue. The furor over the pictures dominated the media for days, with politicians demanding press curbs and publishers protesting. The Mirror

Group, the owner of the offending paper, withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission, and the editor admitted he was a "ratbag." But the gym owner was unapologetic.

"What I did was sneaky, surreptitious, and preplanned," said Bryce Taylor. "I don't make excuses. . . . It was underhand. .

But if I told you I had an absolutely legal scam which didn't hurt anyone and would make you a million pounds, wouldn't you say yes?"

He hired a publicist and contracted with a photo agency to syndicate the eighty-two pictures of Diana he had taken. The Princess's lawyers obtained an injunction that froze the money Taylor was supposed to receive. With the full support of the Queen, Diana sued the newspaper and the photographer. She declared in sealed court documents:

I was shocked when I saw photographs of myself exercising at the club as published in The Sunday Mirror on 7th November 1993 and The Daily Mirror on 8th November 1993. I was unaware that any such photographs had been taken and had at no time given my consent to being photographed at the club in any circumstances. I considered Mr. Taylor's conduct to be a betrayal of the trust I had vested in him.

The Princess intended to create a privacy law in England that did not exist and was prepared to testify in court. "I will do whatever it takes to achieve justice," she said. She issued a statement, expressing her gratitude to everyone who had condemned the actions of the Mirror newspapers. Within weeks the disgraced gym owner went broke trying to defend himself. But under Britain's legal aid system, he now qualified for expert counsel, because he was an indigent defendant in a case that sought to establish a new law. So he petitioned the court, and the presiding judge appointed one of the country's best-known lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson QC (Queen's Counsel), to represent him.

Suddenly, what had looked like a case weighted in favor of the Princess now became even odds. Robertson was well matched to the skills of Diana's lawyer, Anthony Julius of the law firm Mischon

de Reya. The gym owner felt especially fortunate because Robertson was an Australian, known to be a republican, and not impressed by royalty. To Robertson, the Princess of Wales was merely a rich plaintiff named Diana Windsor. The sealed court documents show that he referred to her as Mrs. Windsor; Anthony Julius referred to her as HRH the Princess of Wales.

Within days Robertson's defense team had deposed employees who swore that the Princess actively encouraged attention in the gym by exercising in front of a window so the public could see her better. Several employees said she flirted openly with male club members and wore provocative, skintight clothes to show off her body. To them the Princess looked like a pickup.

Diana's lawyers countered that she wore appropriate exercise attire every time she went to the gym, but no matter what she wore, she was entitled to privacy. They produced a letter from Bryce Taylor dated September 25, 1990, promising to protect her from publicity.

His lawyers responded that by accepting a three-year membership as a gift, Diana was not entitled to the privileges of someone who had paid. They argued that by freeloading, she had forfeited her rights to privacy, especially when she agreed to be weighed and measured. They produced the personal data form she herself had filled out using the name of Sally Hughes, her former secretary:

Blood Pressure: 120/60

Height centimeters: 1.83

BMI (Body Mass Index) 60.5

Girth measurements:

Shoulder: 40"

Chest: 35"

Right arm: 91/7~~

Waist: 27"

Rt. thigh: 22"

Calf: l3'/2"

The Palace became dismayed when they learned that some of Diana's sworn statements did not jibe with those of her personal detective. When Ken Wharfe was scheduled as a defense witness,

the detective was swiftly transferred out of her service. Then Diana's chauffeur decided he wanted to work for Prince Charles. Diana had not been consulted about either move. Losing both men, who had been in her service for several years, left her shaken. Hours after being informed of the transfers, she arrived at a theater gala with red, puffy eyes. She stayed less than an hour before she ran out sobbing. The Palace said she was suffering from a migraine.

The next day's newspapers carried stories about "the tormented mind of a princess" and speculated she was suffering from a recurrence of bulimia. The employees' transfers were interpreted in the press as Palace plots to undermine her stability.

She tried to put the matter to rest three days later in a speech to charity workers: "Ladies and gentlemen, you are very lucky to have your patron here today," she said. "I am supposed to have my head down the loo for most of the day. . . . I am supposed to be dragged off the minute I leave here by men in white coats."

Her audience applauded her good humor. "If it is all right with you," she concluded, "I thought I would postpone my nervous breakdown to a more appropriate moment." Smiling, she added, "It is amazing what a migraine can bring on."

By then the Queen had reconsidered her support for Diana's lawsuit. She questioned whether the emotional Princess could stand up to tough cross-examination. Further, she was troubled to learn that Diana's former lover James Hewitt was a houseguest of Geoffrey Robertson. The lawyer indicated he might subpoena Hewitt to establish just how averse the Princess really was to invasions of her privacy. The Queen was disconcerted to read Hewitt's comment to Robertson's wife, Kathy Lette, who asked him what the Princess was really like: "She's got bad breath," said Hewitt, "and she wants sex all the time."

The press was salivating over the prospect of a trial, and more than nine hundred reporters had applied for credentials in a courtroom with seventy-five seats. The Queen was concerned about the international media hoopla and did not want to see a member of the royal family take the witness stand. She recommended the case be settled out of court.

An overture was made to Bryce Taylor, but without a trial he

would no longer be eligible for legal aid and would have to pay his own legal fees. So he had no incentive to settle. Now bankrupt, he was relying on a sensational trial to sell world rights to his story. The press agent he had hired said, "For him, it was always a matter of money only money."

The Queen's private secretary contacted Lord Peter Palumbo, a close friend of Diana's, to say that the Queen wanted to spare the Princess the ordeal of taking the stand. Lord Palumbo understood. Although Diana wanted to proceed, the Queen did not. So Lord Palumbo negotiated with a few of the lawyers involved and worked out a confidential arrangement that benefited everyone: the Princess looked victorious; the newspapers avoided regulation; the Peeping Tom escaped poverty. The basic terms:

1. The Mirror Newspaper Group agreed to issue a public apology, pay $40,000 in damages to charity in Diana's name, and not to write about the case.

2. Bryce Taylor agreed to give Diana the photographs and negatives and issue a public apology. In exchange for agreeing never to discuss the case, he was to receive secret monthly payments totaling $450,000 from a blind trust. He did not know who provided the money but speculated on King Juan Carlos because the blind trust was incorporated in Spain. The final payment was made in June 1996. The trust also was to pay Taylor's taxes and his legal fees.

3. Part of Diana's legal fees were to be paid by the money that had been frozen by the court's injunction; the fees not covered by that money were waived by Lord Mischon's law firm.

4. All parties signed confidentiality agreements not to divulge the details.

When the settlement agreement was announced, the News of the World sighed in relief: "The Royal Family Is Safe." A rash of stories in London's other newspapers crowed mistakenly about "Di's smashing victory."

"I suppose we could've won," said a Mirror editor, "but it would've cost too much. Not in terms of cash, but in hatred from

the public, especially from our downmarket readership, which adores Diana."

Although she looked like a winner in the media, the Princess knew she had been defeated. Most of her staff had resigned her chef, her equerry, her dresser, her chauffeur, her detective. She struck back by firing her butler, Harold Brown, who had been with her since her marriage to Charles and stayed with her after the separation. Now she insisted he leave "as soon as possible" and give up his grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace. When Princess Michael of Kent offered to hire the tall, courtly butler, who had spent his adult life in royal service, Diana said no.

Disturbed by her behavior, the Prince of Wales sent for the man. "I'm so sorry for what she's done to you," he said, "but I can't interfere . . . I can't even take you on myself. But I want you to know that I know what has been done. And the Queen has been informed about what the Princess has done."

The butler was eventually hired by Princess Margaret, who told him to keep his rent-free apartment. "The Princess of Wales dare not tell Princess Margaret whom she can employ," said a member of Margaret's staff. "After all, Princess Margaret is royal by birth. Diana is royal by marriage. There's a big difference. Even though Diana is senior to Margaret in terms of protocol, that's just on paper. That isn't the way it is. Princess Margaret is the Queen's sister, and Diana can't pull rank on someone who's really royal, like she can on Princess Michael of Kent."

By then Diana's royal duties had been curtailed and her husband had rejected her offer to reconcile. He said he would rather immolate himself than live with her again. She felt ostracized by the royal family and hounded by the press. So she decided to withdraw from public life. On December 3, 1993, again in tears, she publicly announced that she wanted privacy.

"When I started my public life twelve years ago," she told workers for the Headway National Head Injuries Association in a luncheon speech, "I understood that the media might be interested in what I did . . . but I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become, nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner that has

been hard to bear." Then she dropped her bomb: "I will be reducing the extent of the public life I have led so far."

The next day a tabloid screamed: "Ab-Di-Cation."

Her admirers bemoaned her withdrawal from public life as a tragedy for the country; her detractors disparaged her as a cunning actress who had milked the public's sympathy. Her royal retreat created reams of editorial commentary. Even the Irish Times sounded wistful. In the United States, writer Calvin Trillin begged her to reconsider in an amusing bit of doggerel:

"Oh, Di," repentant tabloids cry, "Don't leave the role you occupy. For we can quickly rectify The misbehavior you decry. We need you, Di. We'll tell you why: The Prince is not the sort of guy Who causes lots of folks to buy Our papers. So we all must try To get along together, Di.

So come now, be a sweetie-pie, We promise we'll no longer pry, Nor pay some sleazeball on the sly To photograph your upper thigh. So promise us it's not goodbye. Di?"

TWENTY-ONE

Members of the British royal family were starting to look like impostors: they wore jewels, dressed up in gold braid, and

rode in carriages. But they did not behave like royalty.

They tried to appear brave and true, but they were not even good-hearted. They did not understand royalty's obligation to behave with probity, to bestow kindness, to set a good example. The traditions of royalty passed on by literature and by art seemed to have bypassed them. They had forgotten the legends of King Arthur and his shining Knights of the Round Table.

Many of their loyal subjects, once enthralled by royalty, became disenchanted. Some became indifferent, some turned faintly negative, some were decidedly hostile. The public's respect, even reverence, for the Crown had eroded severely. Obeisance was no longer automatic. Only the Queen Mother, bobbing along in her feathers and veils, seemed capable of inspiring genuine affection.

The Queen, who had reluctantly agreed to pay taxes, trim the Civil List, open Buckingham Palace, and give up the Britannia, was barely accorded customary courtesies. In a breach of civility, she was not consulted when Britain's National Blood Service removed the crown from its insignia. Her representative was mooned in New Zealand by a Maori protester, who bared his tattooed buttocks and spat on the ground. And in South Africa she was asked by the

government to return the Cullinan diamonds, which had been presented to her great-grandfather Edward VII.

The royal family was sinking in its own muck, and their problems were as unpleasant as rotting possums under the country s front porch. The press began fuming. London's Sunday Times summed it up for antiroyalists: "Gone With the Windsors." The New York Times was equally pun-ridden: "Windsors and Losers."

Monarchists looking for a morality play to guide them had been shoved into a lurid soap opera, complete with illicit sex, phone sex, foot sex, and, according to Charles's valet, garden sex. The valet, who sold his secrets to a tabloid, asserted that he had found the grass-stained pajamas the Prince had worn during a romp in the Highgrove gardens with his mistress.

The media, once monarchy's obedient servant, had become the master. So many rumors were circulating that the Palace broke its usual stance of "No comment" and began responding to the most salacious gossip. When scuttlebutt persisted about the health of Prince Andrew, courtiers denied that he was HIV-positive.

"Our stand on the rumors has been constant," a Palace official told the Sun's royal correspondent. "Any suggestion that the Duke of York has AIDS is utter rubbish. . . . He is in command of servicemen, and there is no way he would be allowed to continue his duties if there was any question about his health and fitness."

The rumors arose after Andrew's wife, Sarah Ferguson, had been tested for AIDS three times. Her previous drug use and her continued promiscuity with drug users raised concern about what she might have transmitted to her husband. His closest friends worried but said nothing to him. "We wouldn't dare," said a woman friend. "And we certainly would say nothing derogatory about Sarah. He won't hear a word against her."

Four months after the Palace denied that Andrew had AIDS, he resigned from the navy. He said that as a single father he needed to spend more time with his children. Others suggested the Lieutenant Commander was resigning after seventeen years because he was not qualified for promotion to commander. The navy quickly issued a statement saying that Andrew was a "highly competent and reliable officer."

Traditionally, military service validates male members of the royal family as manly and patriotic. The thirty-four-year-old Duke of York had served in the Royal Navy like his father, a decorated navy veteran of World War II, and his grandfather Prince Albert, who took part in the Battle of Jutland in World War I and later became King George VI. Andrew had distinguished himself as a helicopter pilot during battle in the Falklands. With his resignation from the military, no longer was a prince of royal blood serving in Her Majesty's forces.

His younger brother, Edward, had joined the marines, but after ninety days in uniform, he quit. His resignation disturbed his family greatly. His mother implored him to reconsider, saying he would no longer be allowed to wear a military uniform on ceremonial occasions. His sister, Anne, feared that he would be branded a quitter and a weakling. But Edward, then twenty-two years old, said he could not continue with the tough commando training. His father, honorary Captain General of the Royal Marines, shouted at him to pull himself together to spare the royal family embarrassment. The young Prince broke down and cried for hours. But the next day he resigned his commission. The headline in the New York Post: "The Weeping Wimp of Windsor."

Prince Philip wrote to the marine Commandant, expressing his dissatisfaction. "This is naturally very disappointing," he wrote, "but I can't help feeling that the blaze of publicity did not make things any easier for him. I think he now has to face a very difficult problem of readjustment."

When Philip's personal letter was published in a newspaper, the Queen sued the paper and won damages, but by then the country knew of the father's dashed hopes for his son. A comedian on British television announced: "Rumors abound that Prince Philip fathered an unwanted son who has threatened to embarrass him ever since. [Long pause.] His name is Edward."

When the young Prince decided to become an actor and joined Andrew Lloyd Webber's acting company, he was further ridiculed. Columnist Taki complained in the Spectator that Edward "is paid out of the public purse to pursue a theatrical career and assorted bachelors." The hint of the Prince's homosexuality, previously only

whispered, was now hinted at in print. The press snidely characterized him as "the Queen's youngest son, a confirmed bachelor." The sexual innuendo became a japing bit of film dialogue in the Australian movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, when one transvestite asks another transvestite:

"Can the child of an old queen turn out all right?" "Well, look at Prince Charles."

"Yes, but there's still a question about Prince Edward."

Whether an outrageous slur or a sly truth telling, the insinuation of homosexuality was treated as fact. When Prince William enrolled at Eton, the headmaster censored an article in the school magazine that claimed the royal family was "full of homosexuals." He said he did not want to upset the student Prince. But the insinuation resurfaced in The New Thrker, where novelist Julian Barnes wrote of "the seemingly unmarriageable Edward." In a lecture at the Smithsonian, historian David Cannadine opined: "The Queen is worried that Edward is not divorced. She thinks he's not normal." Writer Christopher Hitchens said in an interview, "Gay friends of mine refer to Prince Edward as Dishcloth Doris. `Skirts down,' they'll shout, `here comes Dishcloth Doris.' " Gore Vidal later corrected Hitchens. "He's not Dishcloth Doris," said Vidal. "He's Dockyard Doris." When gossipist Nigel Dempster wrote in the Daily Mail that Edward had a "touching friendship" with a male actor, the young Prince finally responded angrily. During a visit to New York City, he snapped at reporters and said, "I am not gay.

When the Queen's thirty-one-year-old son started dating Sophie Rhys-Jones, their romance was disparaged by one newspaper as "arranged for public consumption." The tabloids speculated that the tall, blond Prince and his attractive girlfriend were decoys put forward by the Palace to divert attention from the rest of the family. Edward, always prickly about criticism, faxed London's news organizations and demanded that reporters "leave me and my girlfriend alone and give us privacy." The Queen obliged by letting it be known she had given permission for Sophie to spend nights with Edward in his apartment at Buckingham Palace. The Archdeacon of York scolded Her Majesty for allowing the couple to live in sin.

"We still look to the royal family to set an example," he said, urging the Windsors to return to the values of "no sex before marriage." The Queen ignored the clergyman, and Prince Philip called him a pompous ass.

In June of 1994 the Prince of Wales yanked the loose thread of monarchy and watched in dismay as the ancient tapestry began unraveling. He admitted on television that he had been unfaithful to his wife. But, despite his adultery, he asserted that he would still be King. "All my life," he said, "I have been brought up to .

carry out my duty."

The television interview conducted by Jonathan Dimbleby had been calculated by the Prince as his tit for her tat. His big bow- wow journalist would muffle the tinny arf of her tabloid lapdog. While Andrew Morton's book had put the camel's nose under the tent, Jonathan Dimbleby's book brought the tent crashing down. In presenting his version of his marriage, Charles had ignored proverbial wisdom: "If you seek revenge, dig two graves."

But Charles discarded the advice of his family, his friends, and his mistress, who had warned that nothing good could come of his candor. His beloved grandmother said she would have nothing to do with the project. But his private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, had played to his pride and his vanity by arguing that he had to reclaim his status. "Put your side of the case, sir," he said. Aylard convinced him that his best chance was to cooperate with the journalist and give him unprecedented access to personal letters and diaries. The zealous equerry was determined to help the Prince get even with the Princess. He felt that Dimbleby would be the most devoted vessel and vassal. Aylard envisioned a one-two punch, starting with a flattering documentary, Charles: The Private Man, The Public Bole, followed by a laudatory book, The Prince of Wales.

In the television interview Charles tried to prove his worth as a statesman by tackling the touchy subjects of religion, politics, and sex. He presented himself as qualified to become philosopher-king: an Oxbridge graduate, artist, minesweeper skipper, organic farmer, businessman, philanthropist, sportsman, ambassador, humanitarian.

He complained about the media and "the level of intrusion,

persistent, endless, carping, pontificating, criticising, examining, inventing the soap opera constantly, trying to turn everyone into celebrities."

He also spoke about the monarch's role as Defender of the Faith, saying he would prefer not representing one religion, but rather all religions. Most memorable, though, was his admission of infidelity.

"Gobsmacked," said the tabloids after hearing the Prince of Wales own up to adultery on television. While they pounded him, his supporters praised him. Historian Elizabeth Longford applauded his honesty, but most people were just plain appalled. The Sun set up a "You the Jury" telephone poll and reported that two-thirds of those who called said they did not want Charles to become King- ever. The Daily Mirror ran an editorial on the front page: "He is not the first royal to be unfaithful. Far from it. But he is the first to appear before 25 million of his subjects to confess."

The Scout Association considered altering its pledge of duty to God and the monarchy. "We extol the virtues of honesty, integrity, and the sanctity of marriage," said an Association spokesman. "But Prince Charles does not represent those virtues." Jonathan Dimbleby defended him on the radio as a deeply spiritual man. "He kneels to pray every night," said the biographer. Unmoved, one listener called in to say that kneeling down to pray is easy. "It's getting up to behave well that takes stamina."

The Queen had insisted on an advance viewing. She worried about what Charles would say on television, especially after his comment weeks before, citing the Scandinavian monarchies as "grander, more pompous, more hard to approach than we are. Now she watched the two-and-a-half-hour documentary without much comment. She shot the equerry a look when Charles recommended hiring out Britain's army to other countries like rent-a- cops. She raised her eyebrows when he complained about his staff's overworking him, and she sighed when he bad-mouthed her staff. "They drive me bonkers," Charles said of the Queen's courtiers.

Philip reportedly exploded when he saw the documentary. "Oh, God," he said, listening to the interview. He muttered something about his son's brain being sucked dry. Then he added causti

cally, "Maybe he's the `missing link.' " Philip's comment referred to the unresolved mystery of the Piltdown Man, supposed to be the unknown connection between humans and apes.

"It would not have been appropriate then," said a man in the room, "to repeat to the Duke what he had once said: `Every generation gets precisely the younger generation it deserves.' " The man was accustomed to Philip's outbursts. By way of defense, he said, "There's a saying that when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

The Queen was heard to say that she thought the interview had been "ill-advised." She appeared to disapprove of Charles's redefining the monarch's role as "Defender of Faith" rather than "Defender of the Faith." Charles had said that omitting "the" would embrace all religions, not simply Anglicans. "I belong to a hereditary monarchy," he said. "I understand the parameters, but I'm prepared to push it now and then because I feel strongly about things." His mother, who had forbidden him to attend the Pope's Mass during a visit to Rome, was not comfortable with her son's idiosyncratic attitude toward the Church of England. His father was convinced that his forty-five-year-old son had just set the record for stupidity.

The Palace did not comment on the interview, but almost everyone else did. Time headlined it as "Charles's Cheatin' Heart." And Newsweek reported it as "a bad heir day." Newsweek also characterized the documentary as "bad sex: painfully tedious foreplay followed by a lightning-quick climax." The Daily Mail headlined its story "Charles: When I Was Unfaithful," while the Sun said, "Di Told You So." One cartoonist drew the Prince of Wales in bed, grinning foolishly with his crown askew. Sitting between two women, he had his arms wrapped around both. The caption: "The Lyin' King." Another cartoon showed him standing before two stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments: he was scratching out the Sixth Commandment "Thou Shalt Not Commit (nor admit) Adultery."

The Queen's former private secretary sighed. "In time it will fade," Lord Martin Charteris told writer Noreen Taylor. "People will forgive. There is an awful lot to be said for honesty." The

courtier added sadly that this wasn't the first time the monarchy had gone through troubled times. "But the Queen is enough of a realist," he said, "to know there is nothing but to sit it out."

Sitting was her specialty. So she sat for weeks, dreading the biography that was to follow her son's television interview. Unfortunately the book was published on the eve of her departure for Russia. This was the first trip by a British monarch to that country since Edward VII had visited in 1908. Ten years after that, when the Queen's grandfather George V declined to send the navy to save his cousins, the Bolsheviks murdered the Czar and his family in a particularly gruesome crime. After the Russian Revolution, the British government turned down all invitations for a state visit to Moscow on the grounds that the communists had killed the monarch's family. Eventually some members of the royal family did visit the Soviet Union, but the Queen was not allowed by her government to go. Until now. The British government finally gave her permission after Russia's difficult transition from communism. She considered the trip to be the most important of her reign. But as she stood in Moscow's Red Square, extending her hand in friendship, she took a hit at home from her son in that long-awaited book.

Through his approved biographer, Charles showed the Queen as a cold and uncaring mother. He said he had grown up "emotion- ally estranged" and craving affection that she was unable or unwilling to offer." He depicted his father as an acid-tongued martinet and his Gordonstoun teachers as bullies. He described his estranged wife as a self-absorbed neurotic who was mentally unhinged. He said she was twisted with jealousy and temperamentally "volatile," "hysterical," "obsessive." In addition, she was prone to "violent mood swings," "black phases," and "bouts of gloom." He said the only reason he had married her was that his father had pressured him. The middle-aged Prince sounded like the hapless young man in the Danish ballet "The Young Man Must Marry," who was forced into marriage by his family and ended up betrothed to a girl with three heads. Through Dimbleby, Charles made it clear that Diana was nothing more than a hired womb.

His level of contempt disappointed people who expected their

future King to be high-minded and big-hearted. Through Dimbleby, Charles tried to put his case forward and set right the real and imagined wrongs he felt had been done to him. But he came across as petty and small, and he offended his wife, his parents, his sister, his brothers, his children. He even managed to slight his favorite movie star, Barbra Streisand, whom he had once described as "my only pinup . . . devastatingly attractive and with a great deal of sex appeal."

Months before, the star had serenaded him in front of twelve thousand fans in London's Wembley Arena, her first public engagement in twenty-eight years. She sang "Some Day My Prince Will Come" and told her British audience that she was particularly fond of songs about imaginary princes. "What makes it extra special is that there's a real one in the audience tonight," she said, looking flirtatiously at the royal box, where Prince Charles was sitting. He beamed. She recalled their first meeting, saying she had not been very gracious. "Who knows, if I had been nice, I might have been the first real Jewish Princess Princess Babs!"

She imagined the newspaper headlines that might have accompanied their romance: "Blintzes Princess Plays the Palace" and "Barbra Digs Nails into Prince of Wales." Charles laughed with everyone else and looked pleased when she sang "As If We Never Said Goodbye." The audience went wild and gave her a two- minute standing ovation. She raised more than $250,000 for The Prince's Trust. Yet in the Dimbleby book, Charles said her "attractiveness has waned a little."

He made it up to the diva several months later by inviting her to Highgrove for an overnight visit. But he almost withdrew the invitation after her secretary called to make advance arrangements. She told the Prince of Wales that the star wanted only white flowers in her bedroom and for breakfast an omelette of egg whites. Charles complained to his friend Geoffrey Kent. "She sounds daft," he said. But he sat up all night with Streisand, who, he said, arrived with eight suitcases. "We discussed philosophy," he reported to friends.

In the Dimbleby book, Charles described his nanny and his mistress with the same words "loving," "warm," "sympathetic,"

"gentle," and "caring" words a child might use to describe his mother. He also admitted to three love affairs with Camilla: one before she married in 1973, the second after she had children, and the third in 1986, when he said his marriage to Diana had "irretrievably broken down."

His parents were greatly upset. "They had no idea what he was going to say," recalled a friend who had spent a weekend with the Queen and Prince Philip earlier in the summer. "I will not go into details because they did not go into details they never do. . . . A mention was made in passing about concern over a book that's all. A book. We assumed it was James Hewitt's dreadful kiss-and-

tell The Queen's friend waves a hand dismissively to indicate the book Princess in Love, which detailed Hewitt's five-year love affair with the Princess of Wales. "But the Queen didn't seem to care about Major Hewitt's tittle-tattle. Her concern was over what Charles intended to say

The Prince proved that his disclosures were every bit as sensational as those sold by his servants. Violating royal precedents of restraint, he astonished even those who were accustomed to gaudy sensationalism. "A Foolish and Sorry Authorised Version," was the Guardian's opinion. The left-wing newspaper soon declared itself republican (opposed to a monarchy and committed to a republic), as did the Independent on Sunday. The temperate Economist called the monarchy "an idea whose time has passed." Even the conservative Daily Telegraph chided the Prince for placing the book in the public domain. Columnist John Junor excoriated him as "wicked" and said he should feel "suicidal." The Washington Post called him "the Prince of Wails" for forgetting the cardinal rule of the monarchy: "The son never frets on the British Empire."

The Duke of Edinburgh also registered disdain publicly. "I've never discussed private matters, and I don't think the Queen has either," he told reporters who asked for his reaction to his son's book. "I've never made any comments about any member of the family in forty years, and I'm not going to start now.

Charles's brothers and his sister criticized him for using the book to bash their parents. But the self-pitying Prince didn't see it that way. He rationalized that at his age he was entitled to a little

happiness. He said he wanted to make a clean breast of it. "You'll see," he predicted. "At the end of the day, it will be for the best." This wasn't the first time he had been wrong footed.

His mistress's long-suffering husband was fed up. For years Andrew Parker Bowles had stoically endured gossip in his circle about the Prince's passion for his wife. "Actually, some people felt he rather enjoyed it," said Jocelyn Gray, a close friend of Prince Andrew. "Having your wife bonked by the future King of England lends cachet . . . in some circles." Barely suppressing a grin, British writer Anthony Holden explained on American television that some old-fashioned English men consider it an honor to share their wives with their monarch. "Comes from the French droit du seigneur and refers to the master of the house sleeping with his servants. . .

When Andrew Parker Bowles saw himself derided in the press as "the man who laid down his wife for his country," he was angry. He had held back on getting a divorce two years before only because Charles had asked him to wait. The Prince had said that after his own separation he didn't think the monarchy could take another marriage scandal. "I'm afraid I've cocked up things a bit," Charles said apologetically So his mistress's husband, who was also his friend and former aide, agreed not to start legal proceedings that might embarrass the royal family.

As Lieutenant Colonel Commanding the Household Cavalry, Andrew Parker Bowles held the honorary position of Silverstickin-Waiting, which entailed accompanying the Queen on ceremonial occasions. Even after his love affair with Princess Anne in 1970, he had remained close to the royal family, particularly the Queen Mother. But after Charles made him nationally known as a cuckold, he felt he had no choice. "I can't keep on living someone else's life," he said. Although a devout Roman Catholic, he resolved to seek a divorce.

The year before, Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles had celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary with a big party at their country estate. Some of those invited had extended discreet hospitality over the years whenever one or the other wanted to entertain a lover. These same friends, part of Prince Charles's hunting and shooting circle, now professed surprise when the Parker Bowleses

announced their plans to divorce. "We have grown apart to such an extent that . . . there is little of common interest between us," read the couple's statement. Their divorce was granted in January 1995, and less than a year later Andrew Parker Bowles remarried. Camilla sold their house and bought one closer to Charles.

Diana appeared unfazed by the divorce of her husband's mistress. She smiled at photographers as she made her early morning visit to her new gym. But away from the cameras, she seethed. She confided in the Dady Mail's royal correspondent, Richard Kay, that she considered the Parker Bowleses' divorce part of a "grand scheme" to force her out of the public life she had gradually resumed. She worried about Camilla's influence on her children. She fretted about "enemies" out to get her. "They" wanted to harm her. She feared her phones were tapped at Kensington Palace, so she had her lines swept electronically. She talked of a "whispering campaign" against her conducted by friends of Charles such as Nicholas Soames and members of the Prince's staff at St. James's Palace.

Diana had summoned the Daily Mail's royal correspondent for a three-hour audience. She wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled over her eyes as she drove to meet him in London's West End, where he climbed into her car to talk. Whenever they met, she spoke freely and he quoted her as "a friend of the Princess." He published so many exclusives about her that he became known as her unofficial spokesman. Colleagues teased him about being "ma' am's mouthpiece." The tabloid reporter James Whitaker, who had helped engineer Diana's courtship, lamented his being "traded up." Realistically and without rancor, he explained why he had been replaced as her favorite reporter: "The Dally Mail is her crowd. That's what they read. It's more upmarket than my down- market paper."

In fact, any story on the Princess of Wales appearing under Richard Kay's byline was assumed to come directly from her. He had reported her strong denials of an affair with James Hewitt. "We were never lovers," she swore to the reporter, although later she admitted on television that she had committed adultery with Hewitt. She denied to Richard Kay that she had had an affair with

James Gilbey, although their taped phone conversation revealed her fears of getting pregnant. She also denied having an affair with England's rugby captain Will Carling, despite Julia Carling's public threat to name Diana in a divorce suit for adultery.

"I saw the Princess sneaking men into the back way of Kensington Palace," said a butler in the royal household, "because she brought them round by my apartment. . . . I couldn't help but see because she had to pass by my window."

The gamy insinuations swirling around the Princess inspired raucous jokes from late night comedians. In the States, The Dana Carvey Show lost two sponsors after the comic, performing as a p~nssy church lady, clucked disapprovingly about Diana's being a slut." On the Tonight show, Jay Leno joked: "Princess Diana was in an accident today, but she's recovering. Soon, she'll be out of the hospital and flat on her back again."

In most of Richard Kay's exclusives, the Princess appeared as a paragon. When she told him how her phone call had saved a drowning man, Kay wrote dramatically: "She rushed to the water's edge and helped pull the unconscious tramp to the bank, where he was given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation." When she told him she had taken her children on a secret visit to a homeless shelter so they could see how others less privileged live, Kay's "exclusive" dominated the entire front page: "Princes and the Paupers."

Diana reveled in her role as a mother and felt threatened when Charles hired Alexandra Legge-Bourke to plan activities for the boys when they were with him. The former nursery school teacher, known as Tiggy, joined the Prince's staff a few months after his separation from Diana. Tiggy forged a close bond with the children, who enjoyed her rollicking enthusiasm. The Princess admitted feeling a "gut kick" the first time she saw Tiggy racing to embrace the children, whom she called "my babies." And Diana felt upstaged as "Mummy" after seeing pictures of the twenty-nineyear-old assistant skiing with the children at Klosters in Switzerland, grouse hunting with them at Sandringham, and deer stalking at Balmoral. Tiggy was quoted as saying: "I give the boys what they need at this stage fresh air, a rifle, and a horse."

The Princess fumed. "She's undermining my boys," she said.

She complained about Tiggy's cigarette habit and said she didn't want the young woman smoking in front of the boys. "What is it about Charles, who professes to hate smoking, and women who're addicted to cigarettes?" she asked, alluding to Camilla Parker Bowles, also a pack-a-day smoker. And when Diana read about Tiggy in the press as "warm and cheerful" and "a wonderful surrogate mother," she hit the roof.

Diana acidly pointed out to Richard Kay that if she employed a surrogate father" to be with the Princes when they were at home with her, she would be criticized as a bad mother. Unlike her husband, who took Tiggy with him to events at the boys' schools and on all vacations with the children, Diana said she did not feel compelled to take a man with her when she visited her sons or took them on holiday. After seeing pictures of Charles embracing Tiggy on three occasions and greeting her with a kiss on the lips, the Princess speculated that the Prince was "probably having an affair with the little servant girl."

The kissing drew questions from reporters, but Commander Aylard dismissed the Prince's public displays of affection for his assistant. "Tiggy is a member of the household," said Aylard, "and an old family friend." He added that her mother was a lady-in- waiting to Princess Anne, her aunt was an extra lady-in-waiting, and her brother had been a page-of-honor to the Queen. When the Prince and Princess later started divorce negotiations, Tiggy called herself "Tiggy in the middle."

By then Diana felt displaced as a mother, so she fired off directives to her husband regarding Tiggy's role in the children's lives. The Princess banned the younger woman from the boys' bedrooms and bathrooms. She said Tiggy should stay in the background on any occasion when the boys were seen in public. "She is neither to accompany them in the same car nor be photographed close to them." She insisted that when the boys called her from Sandringham at Christmastime, they were to be taken to another lodge on the estate, where they could speak to her privately. "No one else, no staff or servants, is to be present during our conversations."

Diana publicly reinforced her image as the mother of a future King by talking to Richard Kay about her firstborn son. She

bragged that at thirteen he was "taller than his father . . . and so very different." She belittled Charles by building up William: the son is "decisive"; the son has "sense and sensibility"; the son takes "people for what they are, not who they are." The son is handsome, "not burdened" with stick-out ears. "Tell him he's good- looking," wrote Richard Kay after visiting with Diana, "and Wills says he can't be because that would make him vain." In contrast with his father, the gentle son protected his mother. When he saw a tabloid story about her having a crush on Tom Hanks and bombarding the movie star with phone calls, she said she was prepared to laugh it off, but Wills had insisted she issue a denial. "As he crossly told a school friend later, `It made my mother look like a prostitute.'

When the Princess phoned the reporter on Saturday, August 20, 1994, she was distraught. "Someone somewhere is going to make out I am mad," she sobbed. She had just found out the next day's newspapers were reporting that for eighteen months she had been peppering the art dealer Oliver Ho are with anonymous telephone calls. She was suspected of making the crank calls to Hoare's home and hanging up when his wife answered. Sometimes the caller stayed on the phone without saying a word. Diane Hoare complained to her husband about the "silence" calls, which she found "unnerving." After a mysterious woman caller screamed torrents of abuse at her, Diane Hoare insisted her husband call the police. At first the art dealer, an expert in Islamic art, feared a terrorist threat against his family. So he insisted on answering the phone himself. But when the sinister silent calls continued, he realized that whoever was calling just wanted to hear his voice.

"I would be polite and say, `Hello, who's calling? Who's there?' " he said. "But there was just silence at the other end. It was eerie.

After tapping the Hoares' telephone line, police traced the calls to Diana's and Charles's private lines at Kensington Palace, to Diana's mobile phone, and to Diana's sister's phone on the days Diana was visiting. An investigator from the Nuisance Calls Division speculated that the Princess was using different lines to avoid detection.

"Mr. Hoare went white as a sheet when he saw our report," said the investigator. "He never imagined in his wildest dreams that Princess Diana could be making the calls."

The Hoares, who were close friends of Prince Charles and had known Diana since their marriage, showed him the police report that logged the time of every call. A confidential extract from January 13,1994, shows:

8:45 a.m. Phone rings. Silence. Hoare punches in the police code. The number that flashes up is a private office at Kensington Palace.

8:49 a.m. Phone rings. Hoare: "Who's there?" Code reveals Diana's private line.

8:54 a.m. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles's office phone at Kensington Palace. [Charles no longer living or working at Kensington Palace.]

2:12 p.m. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles's office at Kensington Palace.

7:55 p.m. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles's line from Kensington Palace.

8:19 p.m. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles's line from Kensington Palace.

The Prince shook his head sadly and expressed concern for his children. "They are the ones who will suffer from all this and will get it all played back when they return to school," he said. The Hoares declined to press charges, but someone in Scotland Yard leaked the story to the press, and the Princess looked pitiful. People began questioning her sanity. "Is the Princess of Wales going mad?" asked an editorial. "She's an hysterical woman," wrote a columnist, "clearly teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown."

Her therapists explained her alleged pathological behavior as typical for a bulimic experiencing loneliness and isolation. "For a woman who has difficulty confronting people, and is struggling for control," said one specialist who treated Diana, "phone harassment gives a feeling of empowerment. It's a safe way to retaliate."

Then came a few tasty tidbits. The art dealer, a dashing married man and father of two children, apparently had extended

friendship to the troubled Princess, and she had turned into an obsessive pest. But that was not entirely accurate, said Oliver Hoare's chauffeur, Barry Hodge. He spoke up after Hoare had fired him for unrelated reasons. The chauffeur asserted that Diana and the art dealer had been having an affair. He said the couple had set up a "love nest" in Pimlico, where they had been meeting three or four times a week for almost four years. The chauffeur said Hoare, who did not want to leave his wealthy, aristocratic wife, was very much taken with the Princess. And he said they dined secretly at the homes of friends such as Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of a Brazilian diplomat. The chauffeur said the Princess "could phone [the limo] more than twenty times a day."

When Hodge's story was published, Diana contacted Richard Kay, who wrote that the chauffeur's "claims are said to have reduced the Princess of Wales to peals of laughter."

Oliver Ho are admitted that he had met with Diana on several occasions, but only to advise her and console her about her marriage. Still, his wife insisted on a separation, so he moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Pimlico. A few months later the Hoares reconciled and he moved back into their estate.

"All we know is that Mr. Hoare did not want to prosecute the Princess of Wales," said an investigator from London's Metropolitan Police Department. "He agreed to withdraw his complaint and said he would talk to the lady privately."

Diana denied making the harassing calls. "There is absolutely no truth in it," Richard Kay quoted her as saying. She showed him extracts from her calendar, saying she was at lunch with friends or at the movies when some of the calls were made. "They are trying to make out I was having an affair with this man," she said, "or that I had some sort of fatal attraction. . . . It is simply untrue and so unfair. . . . What have I done to deserve this? I feel I am being destroyed."

He listened sympathetically. When she acknowledged that she and Hoare were "friends" and had spoken on the phone "occasionally," he asked if she had placed any of those occasional calls to him from pay phones.

"You can't be serious," she said indignantly. "I don't even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box."

Her response made James Hewitt smile ruefully. He remembered many calls from Diana, who always disguised her voice when she called him at his army barracks. She told him she was dialing from a pay phone so the call would not appear on the phone bills that Charles examined. "I feel sorry for her," Hewitt said. "Very sorry.

Less sympathetic were the cartoonists, who lampooned her without mercy. One drew the Princess on the phone, saying: "Can you hold on a second? There's someone at the door. .. ." Through a window, two men in white coats were approaching with nets and manacles. In another cartoon an old woman answers the phone. Hearing nothing but heavy breathing, she turns to her husband. "I think it's Princess Di for you.

Charles took advantage of the crack in his wife's stature. Having portrayed her as intellectually vacant and television addicted, he now said her only goal in life was to empty Chanel's boutiques and stock her closets at his expense. He complained loudly during a London dinner party about her expenses for travel and clothing and said she cost him $13,900 a month for "grooming." When Diana heard the comment she snapped, "I don't cost half as much to groom as his goddamned polo ponies." Days later people could decide for themselves when her yearly "grooming" expenses were itemized in the papers:

$25,000: manicures and pedicures

$24,000: hair, including color, cuts, and daily styling

$ 7,000: fitness instructor

$ 4,400: chiropractor

$ 4,300: colonic irrigation

$ 4,290: reflexology

$ 3,800: osteopathy

$ 2,200: holistic massage

$ 3,800: aromatherapy, plus home visits

$ 1,000: acupuncture

$ 2,000: hypnotherapy

$65,000: astrologers, psychics, and holistic counselors

$20,000: psychotherapy

Again Diana rang up Richard Kay in dismay. "This is a deliberate attempt to discredit me," she said. She did not deny the therapies or their costs. Rather, she said that "someone" in the Palace wanted to make her look like a New Age flake who had her colon flushed every week because she was obsessed with being thin and didn't have anything better to do with her time or her husband's money. The reporter quoted "a friend of the Princess" as saying: "If the Prince had not treated her so shabbily, she would not have needed to turn to expensive therapists."

Her estranged sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, phoned to commiserate. She, too, felt persecuted by the Palace machine.

"They are out to get us especially Bellowes," Fergie said, using her nickname for the Queen's private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, who was Diana's brother-in-law. "First me, now you.

We're the bad girls and we must be punished."

During her protracted divorce negotiations, Fergie had been accused by the Palace of "insane extravagance" for running up expenses of $3 million. Details of her expenditures $6,500 for twenty pairs of shoes and $85,000 for twelve dresses were leaked to the press. After they were published, the Palace announced that the Queen would not pay the Duchess's bills. A spokesman said, "She lives beyond her means and ours."

Fergie admitted she was "paranoid" about the courtiers. She started carrying a shredder with her wherever she traveled. And she stopped keeping a diary because she was afraid someone might expose her private life. "Andrew used to write me wonderful letters from the ship, but I haven't kept them," she told her friend David Frost, the television interviewer. "I did for a bit, in the bank, but then I thought the bank would be robbed."

Diana, who also used shredders for mail and scramblers on her telephones, subscribed to Fergie's conspiracy theory. She, too, distrusted the courtiers, including her brother-in-law, and believed they were trying to destabilize her. "They think we were crazy to start with," she joked to Fergie, "but we didn't get crazy until we married into this family

During their marital separation, both young women consulted psychiatrists, and both were put on antidepressants. Straining under the restrictions of being royal wives, both had taken lovers, who betrayed them for money. Now emotionally fragile and frightened about their future, the two women turned to their astrologers, numerologists, and spiritualists for help. But many of these celebrity- by-association gurus also sold them out. After Diana learned her beautician, her palmist, and her zone therapist were writing books, she stopped seeing them and told friends she could not rely on anyone around her. "She's alone, and she's so lonely," said fifty- three-year-old Lucia Flecha de Lima, who had become close to Diana after her 1991 tour of Brazil. "She doesn't know whom she can trust."

Fergie hired lawyers to stop publication of books by her former chef, her former psychic, and her former lover's business partner. But she was unable to prevent her former butler from selling his recollections of her and John Bryan splashing in the tub together. "Their lovemaking in the bath was always very noisy," the butler said. "Fergie would squeal her head off."

The Duchess and the Princess later joined forces to fend off the press. No longer members of the royal family or receiving public money, they fought for their privacy. They filed a criminal complaint and sought an injunction against photographers who trespassed on private property in the French Riviera to take pictures of them on vacation. They hired lawyers to notify Britain's Press Complaints Commission that they would not tolerate further invasions of their privacy, and Diana obtained an injunction against a freelance paparazzo she claimed was stalking her. She filed an affidavit with the court, saying: "He seems to know my every move. I shall suffer undue psychological pressure and become ill."

Feeling betrayed by everyone around them, both women kept track of insults in the press and made lists of reporters who could be trusted short lists. They phoned each other when negative stories appeared and discussed what to do. Fergie usually chose the direct approach and called the offending writer.

"She rang me from London," said New York Post columnist

Cindy Adams, "to bitch about my saying she'd been late for people her last visit."

In that case, the phone call was effective. On her next trip to New York City, the Duchess invited Cindy Adams to tea, and the columnist was elated. She told her readers: "I adored . . . Her Skinny Highness."

Still, the list of trustworthy reporters was shrinking. Diana, who had once complimented the Dady Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter for her perceptive feature stories, dismissed her as a hack when she said the Princess was addicted to praise.

"She's off the list," said Diana. She also scratched Chrissy Iley of the Manchester Evening News for carping about her secret midnight visits to hospitals to comfort the sick and dying. The writer offended Diana by calling her "the super martyr" and "the husband stealer." When Noreen Taylor wrote an essay entitled, "Diana: A Princess in Love . . . with Herself," she, too, was dropped from the list of trustworthy reporters. Noreen Taylor had asked readers why, since the breakup of Diana's marriage, she allowed it to be known that she spent most of her Christmas alone. Noting that Diana had a mother, twin sisters, a brother, and countless friends, the writer asked, "Is this another cry for attention from a public she believes is besotted by her?"

Diana called Fergie to complain.

"The women are the worst," moaned Fergie. "They're so bitchy." She made an exception for Ingrid Seward, the editor of Majesty magazine. "Ingie is okay, and her husband [columnist Ross Benson] is divine looking." Diana did not share Fergie's enthusiasm for Ross Benson because the columnist had declared himself firmly on the side of Charles in the war of the Waleses. She and Fergie agreed that they were much better treated by male writers than the females, except for gossip columnists such as Nigel Dempster. But both Diana and Fergie dismissed him as "an old woman."

When Dally Telegraph journalist Victoria Mather described Fergie in one of her "famous rump-straining sad floral prints," Fergie again picked up the phone and protested.

"This is the Duchess of York," she announced grandly, "and I'd like to talk about your sweeping judgments."

"Good afternoon, Your Highness," said the journalist, switching on her tape recorder.

Fergie asked, "Why did you write such a scathing article?" Without waiting for an answer, she continued: "I understand that journalism that you have to do your job but to talk about people's weight . . . and the size of their backsides and floral dresses

is so below the belt . . . so pathetic. . . . I still do so much good work. . so much good work. . . . Nobody knows the good work I do.

The reporter listened respectfully as the Duchess sounded ready to duke it out. She carried on for twenty minutes: "In this day and age, when the whole of Bosnia [is filled] with blind children and blind adults and you lower yourself to pull someone apart and [say] she's got a big bottom. I mean it's absolutely farcical .

maybe you should come with me to Bosnia . . . and see then what is the real world and what real life is about. I mean, who cares whether someone is a size fourteen or size eighteen? Absolutely pathetic. .

Fergie cared desperately. She tried everything to lose weight

pills, diets, hypnotism. "I've even switched from white wine to red wine, ` she told a friend, "so I could cut down on drinking." Finally she sought out an "alternative healer" who gave her a nutritional plan and helped break her addiction to diet pills. After losing forty- two pounds, she emerged from his clinic-a hut in a field in Surrey and announced her intention to become a professional model. "When I'm thin like this, my legs are better than the Princess of Wales's," she said gleefully. She hired a public relations agency and posed for photographers. Her picture, showing a newly slim and glamorously made up Fergie, appeared on the cover of Paris- Match. But London's Sunday Times was not impressed: "A little more mascara around the eyes," sniped the paper, "and the Chinese will be sending pandas to London for mating."

The pounding Fergie took in the press made her defensive and defiant. "They might hate us here," she told Diana, "but they love us in America." Both women enjoyed their trips to the States, where they were treated like royalty, not royal discards. Diana, who appeared regularly in the United Kingdom wearing sweatshirts

emblazoned with "U.S.A.," skied in Colorado, shopped in New York City, and vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. But Fergie came to the States to prospect for gold.

After selling her Budgie rights to a consortium in New Jersey for $3 million, she set up a nonprofit charity in Manhattan. With Chances for Children, Inc., she tried to re-create herself as a humanitarian. She said the foundation was designed to give her a philanthropic presence in America. In one year it paid out $89,384 on expenses while disbursing $62,295 to needy children. The bare- bones operation, with its small budget, rented room, and part-time secretary, did not seem designed for substantial fund-raising. But the nonprofit corporation gave Fergie a way legally to raise money in the places where she liked to socialize: New York, Connecticut, Florida, and California. She said she enjoyed doing good while doing well.

During one of her visits to Greenwich, Connecticut, she appeared at a Champagne reception and dinner for which guests had paid $500. As she worked the room, her three assistants followed in her wake, toting copies of her book Victoria andAlber~ A Family Lifr at Osborne House. They asked: "Would you like to buy the Duchess's book? It's $100. She'll sign it for you!"

Fergie insisted that she needed the money to support herself and her children. As she told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., "It's rubbish to say that I'm rich. . . . I can't afford to buy a house. . . .1 rent a pile in Surrey and have to be out with a month's notice. . . . My husband pays only the school fees. I have to pay everything else m Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, but I'm not a mlllionairess."

She challenged critics who questioned her moneymaking schemes, including her $2 million advance from a U.S. publisher to write a manual for single working mothers. "The facts are that I'm a separated mother of two children and responsible for the finances of my family," she said. "Therefore, a great deal of my time has to be, has to be, occupied with commercial work. Believe it or not, that is the truth."

The unquestionable truth was that Fergie accepted the largesse of rich friends and eager admirers. Her rationale: She said she

couldn't pay her own way. So she charged for personal appearances at benefits and theme parks. She picked up $75,000 for flying to Sydney, Australia, to launch Rupert Murdoch's pay-TV network. She flew to Beijing, China, for the opening of an $8 million restaurant because the owner paid her. Diana was more discreet, but she, too, freely accepted the gratuities that came her way as royalty. Both women were friends of the flamboyant founder of the Virgin empire, Richard Branson, and enjoyed free trips on Virgin Atlantic Airways and free holidays at Virgin Hotels, preferring Necker Island in the Caribbean, which cost paying guests $ 15,000 a week. Fergie and Diana reciprocated by giving Branson their royal endorsements. They appeared at his openings, posed with him for pictures, and appeared in public wearing his company T-shirts.

Diana's friends, who preferred her association with the saintly Mother Teresa, warned her about the errant Duchess. "Freeloading Fergie is the worst friend you could have," wrote John Junor, but Diana decided that her sister-in-law was her only ally. "She's been over the same course," Diana said of Fergie.

In the past, the two young women had experienced edgy relations. Separated by competition and envy, they had avoided each other and sniped to friends about each other. During her taped conversation with James Gilbey, Diana dismissed Fergie as "the redhead" who was trying to cash in on her good image. For her part, Fergie thought Diana's good image was manipulated and undeserved. During her Mt. Everest expedition, the Duchess asked photographers who wanted to take her picture at a marker: "This doesn't look posed, does it? It doesn't look like those Taj Mahal pictures?"

When their marriages broke up, the two young women grabbed on to each other like the only survivors of a shipwreck. Ostracized by the royal family and "outside the net," as Diana put it, they took refuge in each other. They felt that no one else understood their problems as well as they understood each other. They talked constantly about the Palace machine that was grinding them down. They supported each other in standing up to the courtiers who had become their enemies.

After two years of legal separation, both of them could file for

divorce, but neither wanted to look like the aggressor in ending her marriage.

"No mileage in it," said Diana, who clung fiercely to her position as a wronged wife.

"Especially without a signed financial," said the pragmatic Duchess, who was calling for a settlement of $10 million. She was also hoping to keep her status as Her Royal Highness. Fergie with no title was like Saudi Arabia with no oil.

Diana, too, was determined to hang on to her position, but her lawyers advised her to let Fergie lead the way through the divorce maze. They called the Duchess "the yellow canary" (referring to the bird that miners take underground to check for deadly gas; if the canary keels over, the miners back out of the pit).

Although both women were privately exploring financial settlements, they maintained publicly that they were very much married. "The subject of divorce has never come up between myself and my husband," Diana assured Richard Kay in the fall of 1995. By then the Princess was struggling to appear virtuous. Branded a home wrecker by Will Carling's wife, she was accused of breaking up the Carlings' marriage of less than a year. "This has happened to her before," said Julia Carling, who looked like a younger, blonder version of Diana, "and you only hope she won't do these things again, but she obviously does. She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger."

But within days the Carlings separated, with Julia Carling blaming the Princess. Reacting to reports that her husband had had an affair with Diana, Julia Carling told reporters: "I have always valued my marriage as the most important and sacred part of my life," she said. "It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control."

Diana's relationship with the rugby captain was headlined in the News of the World as "Di's Secret Trysts with Carling." So she called Richard Kay. She assured him that her "innocent friendship" with Carling had started only because of her rugby-mad sons. She summoned the News of the World's managing editor to Kensington Palace and begged him to lay off. She also contacted the Daily Mirror and insisted her friendship with Carling was platonic. The

paper quoted her as saying, "I don't need a lover." In distress, she phoned her friends "endlessly," recalled one woman, who finally lost patience with the Princess. Diana also consulted her therapist, Suzie Orbach, who began seeing her on a daily basis.

"Through these sessions, Her Royal Highness determined to take control of her life," explained a friend who spoke with Diana during this time. The words sounded measured, as if they had been written in advance: "Eventually she desired a respectable forum to demonstrate that she was not deranged or mentally incapacitated.

She felt she needed to answer her critics, reclaim her sanity, and prove her strength. . .

Having pleaded for privacy two years earlier, Diana now sought the world stage. She decided the only way she could banish the image of herself as deranged was to give a television interview. She was encouraged by Fergie, one of the few people she confided in, who said that she had benefited from going on television and admitting her mistakes. So she urged Diana to do the same. Fergie agreed that Panorama, the award-winning current affairs program, was the proper vehicle to treat her seriously. But she cautioned Diana to keep her plan under wraps, because if the Queen found out, she would put the kibosh on the interview. Diana concurred.

Coached by her therapist and confident of her telegenic skills, the Princess met secretly with the BBC's Martin Bashir and his camera crew at Kensington Palace on November 5, 1995, to talk about herself, her husband, her marriage, and her life in the royal family. She had not sought permission from the Palace. And she informed the Queen only a few days before the interview was to be aired. The BBC announced its "world exclusive" four hours after playing the National Anthem to celebrate Prince Charles's forty-seventh birthday. Diana's press secretary, who had not known of her plans, was so angry that he resigned the next day. Her private secretary, also unalerted and equally angry, waited a few more weeks to resign. And in a small display of spite, the Queen retaliated the following year by ending the BBC's sixty- year monopoly on carrying her Christmas broadcast. She gave the assignment to the commercial network for two years, after which she said the two networks would alternate the production.

On the night of November 20, 1995, more than twenty-two million Britons gathered in front of their television sets to watch the Princess perform. "And it was a performance," said the royal biographer Penny Junor. "A brilliant performance totally plausible. Charming, demure, and vulnerable. .. but a performance an acting job."

Grid engineers had installed an additional power station to accommodate the expected national surge in electricity after the 9:40 P.M. program; they estimated the extra megawatts to be the equivalent of three hundred thousand teakettles being plugged in at once. When the show was broadcast worldwide, some two hundred million people in one hundred countries were watching.

Calmly and with poise, Diana discussed her postnatal depression, her suicide attempts, her crying jags, and her bulimia. She said she suffered because her husband made her feel useless and unwanted a total failure. She said he had taken a mistress and then blamed her, his wife, for getting upset. He said she was an embarrassment to the royal family, and his friends, "the establishment that I married into," considered her unstable enough to be committed to a mental institution. She said her husband was jealous of her "because I always got more publicity, my work was more, was discussed much more than him." Yet she maintained she did not want a divorce.

She admitted having been unfaithful during her marriage. She denied having affairs with James Gilbey and Oliver Hoare but said she had been in love with James Hewitt. "Yes, I adored him," she said. "But I was very let down." She told the interviewer that she did not tell her children about her affair with Hewitt, but she did tell them about their father's adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles. "But I put it in gently," she said, "without resentment or any anger.

She faulted the press for its intrusions: "I've never encouraged the media. There was a relationship which worked before, but now I can't tolerate it because it's become abusive and it's harassment."

Conceding she would never become Queen of the country, she asked instead to be a queen of people's hearts. "I'd like to be an ambassador," she said.

The interviewer asked, "On what grounds do you feel that you have the right to think of yourself as an ambassador?"

Diana replied: "I've been in a privileged position for fifteen years. I've got tremendous knowledge about people and know how to communicate, and I want to use it."

Minutes later she was asked whether she thought her husband would ever be King. She raised her kohl-rimmed eyes to the camera and replied, "I don't think any of us know the answer to that. Who knows what fate will produce, who knows what circumstances will provoke?" She expressed hope that her tormented husband would find peace of mind. Without uttering an unkind word, she questioned his ability to reign. "I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don't know whether he could adapt." Perhaps, she concluded, because of his "conflict" about becoming King, he should forgo the throne and allow the crown to pass directly to their son, Prince William, when he comes of age.

"You could almost hear the country's collective gasp," said a television commentator on the late news.

The next morning every one of Britain's newspapers devoted its front page to Diana. Every aspect of the interview was scrutinized: her clothes (tailored navy blazer, opaque black hose), her lighting (harsh), her demeanor (restrained), her vocabulary (impressive, according to Time, which reported she said "albeit" five times and "daunting" or "daunted" fourteen times).

Few people criticized her, but Nicholas Soames, Charles's friend, was outraged. His attack lent credibility to her charges. "The Prince has been wronged," Soames said. He pronounced her performance as "toe-curlingly dreadful" and said she was "in the advanced stages of paranoia."

But the working classes loved the Princess. The opinion polls showed public support for her running as high as 85 percent. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson declared her a heroine. He forgave her sexual indiscretions because "she was chaste when the Prince began the adultery game." In defense of Diana, he quoted Jane Austen's defense of Queen Caroline, the estranged wife of

George IV: "She was bad, but she would not have become as bad as she was if he had not been infinitely worse."

The Charles and Diana camps formed along class lines. Elderly Tory squires and Anglican bishops backed the Prince, while a majority of working-class people, along with Catholic Church populists, supported the Princess. Emotions on both sides divided the country. And newspapers begged the Prince and Princess to put their marriage out of its misery. Tory members of Parliament beseeched the Prime Minister to consult with the Queen about a divorce. "We've become an international laughingstock," said one conservative MP. "A spectacle."

Within hours of Diana's interview, Olympus had prepared a full-page ad to promote its new camera. The commercial showed a picture of the Princess perched demurely on her chair in Kensington Palace. The photograph was cropped at the neck. The caption: "Avoid getting your head chopped off by the in-laws this Christmas."

In the United States Omnipoint Communications wanted Diana to launch its new mobile telephone network. "My idea," said the company's president, "is that she will hold a digital phone and declare, `If I'd had one of these, I could have been Queen.'

In Norway a condom advertiser featured Diana's picture at the precise moment she confessed to adultery on television. The caption: "It's hard to see on the outside whether someone has had casual sex."

The Queen was ready to listen to her Prime Minister. He arrived for their weekly meeting armed with the support of former Prime Minister James Callaghan and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Prime Minister told the Queen that the uncertainty surrounding the couple's marriage had interfered with the country's business. Britain was losing face, and the monarchy was diminished. "I am only Your Majesty's adviser," John Major said respectfully. Then he recommended that the Queen step into the ring to stop the brawling.

On December 17, 1995, the Queen wrote to Charles and Diana, suggesting that for the sake of their children they resolve their differences "amicably and with civility." She asked them to agree

to a divorce and to let her know their decision as soon as possible. She said she looked forward to the family's annual gathering during the Christmas holidays and assured them both of her personal affection and her continuing support in difficult times. She sent the letters by messenger and, two days later, authorized the Palace to confirm their delivery.

Diana was shocked by the Queen's public disclosure, which she felt was pushing her into a divorce she did not want. She called her lawyers, who advised her against making an immediate decision. They needed time to negotiate. She angrily canceled plans to join the royal family for Christmas.

Charles responded promptly to his mother's letter and agreed to a divorce, but only on condition that Diana agree, because he did not want a contest. He also declared he would not remarry.

The same day as the Queen's letter arrived, Diana received a letter from lawyers representing Tiggy Legge-Bourke, the young assistant who planned outings and activities for Wills and Harry. Tiggy sought a retraction of Diana's "false allegations" about her, plus acknowledgment that what Diana had said days earlier during a staff Christmas party was "totally untrue. The Princess had arrived at the Lanesborough Hotel for the annual holiday luncheon for the Waleses' employees. Instead of ignoring Tiggy, who was standing near the entrance, Diana walked over and confronted her.

"So sorry to hear about the baby," Diana said with a sneer.

The young woman was taken aback. Then she realized the taunt was based on gossip that she had become pregnant and had had an abortion. Crushed by Diana's accusation, Tiggy fled to a private room, where she was comforted by Prince Charles's valet. She returned to the party but confided her distress to Commander Aylard, who told the Prince of Wales. Charles counseled her to contact Peter Carter-Ruck, one of England's most widely known libel lawyers.

Two days after putting the Princess on notice, the lawyer sent letters to newspapers warning that the allegations were false. "Reports have reached her [Tiggy] and her family that a series of malicious lies are circulating in the press which are a gross reflection on

our client's moral character. These allegations are utterly without the very slightest foundation."

With the full support of Prince Charles, Tiggy was prepared to sue Diana over her remark. But the Prince's friends cautioned him that the Princess would dig in her heels, even relishing the spectacle of the royal family in a courtroom fight. Charles agreed, and after lengthy talks with her lawyers, Tiggy decided not to sue.

Diana's oblique attack on Tiggy came within hours of being named Humanitarian of the Year. She attended the staff Christmas party upon her return from New York City, where she had received the prestigious United Cerebral Palsy award from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The seventy-two-year-old statesman seemed transfixed by the Princess in her low-cut gown and stared at her bosom like a high school boy. In his gushy introduction, he said Diana was a symbol to humanity of caring and compassion.

"She is here as a member of the royal family with which the USA has a long history of cooperation, friendship, and standing as allies," he said. "But we are honoring the Princess in her own right tonight, having aligned herself with the ill, the suffering, and the downtrodden."

Seven hundred people paid $1,000 each to attend the dinner and applauded Diana as she walked to the microphone, sparkling in diamonds. She spoke movingly of how her thoughts were with parents who were holding vigil at the bedsides of their desperately sick children, who might not live until the morning.

Then a woman called out from the audience: "Where are your children, Diana?"

"They're in school," replied the Princess, barely looking up. Then she resumed her speech. When she finished, the crowd stood up and cheered as if to drown out the rude interruption.

Afterward a reporter approached the middle-aged heckler and asked why she had yelled at the Princess of Wales, expressing surprise that someone would dare to yell at royalty. Without apology the woman replied: "I don't like being lectured on humanity."

TWENTY-TWO

battle royal was brewing. For two months the Queen had been waiting for the Princess to respond to her letter. Her

Majesty's private secretary had phoned Diana three times to nudge a response, but Diana kept stalling. Then Prince Charles wrote her. Finally she deigned to respond.

She called her husband and proposed a meeting with him: February 28, 1996, 4:30 P.M., in his office at St. James's Palace. She insisted they meet privately no lawyers, no equerries, no secretaries. At the appointed hour, Charles and Diana were on the scene. His courtiers objected to the restrictions because they wanted to take notes, but Charles waved them off. As the last of his staff backed out the door, Diana sniped, "They'll probably bug the room anyway.

She later told Richard Kay of the Daily Mail that she had told Charles, "I loved you and I will always love you because you are the father of my children." But when Charles saw that statement in pflnt he became angry. He told one of his aides that she had never uttered those words. What he clearly recalled and said he would never forget was his wife's threat months before. He quoted her as saying: "You will never be King. I shall destroy you.

When he read Diana's rendition of their private meeting as recounted in the MaiL, he decided to get a gag order. He insisted a confidentiality clause be included in their divorce agreement to

keep her from writing or speaking about their marriage. Diana accused him of extortion and demanded that he sign a similar pledge, but he resisted. He said his word of honor was enough.

During that meeting in his office, she had told him that if he made it clear to the world that he, not she, was requesting the divorce, she would agree to proceed with negotiations. She even offered to give up her royal status. Her title became a sticking point, but at first she said she didn't care about it. After the meeting she called the Queen to say she agreed to a divorce "with deep regrets." She told the Queen it was "the saddest day of my life."

Then her lawyers started haggling. They began by insisting on a lump sum payment of $75 million. His lawyers protested the amount and the method of payment: Charles wanted to pay less and in yearly installments rather than a lump sum. That way he could withhold money, in case Diana got out of line. But she refused. For her it was all or nothing. When he balked at paying her legal fees, which he said were "excessive," negotiations stalled. Her side reminded his side who wanted the divorce. She threatened to withdraw and force him to wait two more years to get a no-consent divorce decree. Then he would be able to get one automatically because their separation would have met the requisite five years. But, for the Queen, further delay was intolerable. She intervened, and Charles paid his wife's legal bills $120,000.

After five months of acrimony over almost every issue, the lawyers for both sides produced a document as intricate as a treaty between two warring nations. "The only element missing was a map delineating the deployment of troops," mused a man familiar with the agreement. "Everything else was covered insignias, titles, possessions, even boundaries. [Diana was required to seek the Queen's permission to leave the country, unless on private holiday. With the Queen's permission, she could use the Queen's aircraft, but only if accompanied by her children.] Diana is entitled to keep all gifts of royal jewelry [the value of which is said to exceed $100 million] for her lifetime. She agrees not to lend or sell any jewels given to her by the royal family, including the thirty-carat sapphire brooch that was the Queen Mother's wedding present. Upon Diana's death, the jewelry passes to her son, William, for the future

Princess of Wales. A codicil to her will nailing this down is attached to the divorce settlement."

The only area not disputed was the children: Charles and Diana agreed to share responsibility for raising their sons, including equal access and custody. Every other aspect of their contentious marriage was bartered down to the last square foot of office space Diana would be allocated. Charles agreed to pay her about $26 million, including her taxes, over a period of five years. In addition, he will pay $600,000 a year for her office staff, supplies, and equipment.* Diana retained use of her residence at Kensington Palace, until she chooses to move or remarry.

In the middle of the negotiations, Diana reconsidered her royal status. She said she wanted to keep her title "for the sake of the boys." Previously she had joked, "I don't need another title I was born with one." But her friends emphasized that while Lady Diana might get a seat on the bus, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales could commandeer the bus, the driver, and all the curtsying passengers. They said the title of HRH gave her protection against being run over.

So important is the designation of royalty in a class-bound society that her friends don't want to see Diana curtsying to others. Nor do they want to see her lowered in public esteem like the disgraced Sarah Ferguson, who had been forced to give up her royal style upon divorce. Shorn of her HRH, the poor Duchess became a national punching bag. Frequently derided as greedy and moneygrubbing, she was roundly denounced after her divorce. A union flag raised to mark her thirty-seventh birthday was lowered after four hours when some union members objected; they said she did not deserve the honor. They placed a call to Buckingham Palace, which said the only official day that should be marked was the Queen's birthday. "After all we've heard about Fergie's love life," said one union member, "they'd be better off flying a pair of knickers from the flagpole."

When the Duchess signed a $2.2 million book contract, one

*In 1997, Britain's annual survey of the 1,000 wealthiest people listed Diana as 916th with a personal fortune of $98 million.

newspaper placed the story alongside a cartoon showing two men walking in the park. One man, hanging his head in shame, said: "I lied. I cheated. I betrayed my spouse. My boss. My friends. And my Sovereign. I sullied my reputation m the lowest of the low. . . ." The other said, "Call Fergie's publisher."

When Sarah sent Princess Margaret an extravagant bouquet on her birthday, the Princess pitched the flowers. Then she fired off a letter to Fergie: "You have done more to bring shame on the family than ever could have been imagined. Not once have you hung your head in embarrassment even for a minute after those disgraceful photographs. Clearly you have never considered the damage you are causing us all. How dare you discredit us like this and how dare you send me those flowers."

After published disclosures from former lovers and former employees, Sarah locked herself in her home for days, weeping inconsolably. Newspapers reported the Queen became so concerned, she placed her under a suicide watch. But the Palace denied the story, implying the Queen couldn't care less what her former daughter- in-law did to herself. The Palace reaction seemed to signal tacit permission to pile on. Days later the Sun ran a poll asking, "Who would you rather date Fergie or a goat?" The goat won by a ratio of seven to one. *

Seeing what happened to Fergie when she lost her title, Diana objected to relinquishing hers. When Charles's lawyers suggested that she trade in HRH the Princess of Wales for the Duchess of Cornwall, she balked. Then they proposed that she be styled HFRH (Her Former Royal Highness). Diana turned to her supporters in the media, who debated the offer, pleading with the Queen to retain Diana's status and keep her within the royal family. They argued that as the mother of the future King she deserved no less. Historian John Grigg wrote, "The reductio ad absurdum is that,

*Ridiculed in Britain, Fergie came to the U.S., where she was treated like royalty. Her memoir, My Story, became a best-seller, earning her more than $3.7 million. She was paid $1.2 million to appear in a commercial for Ocean Spray Cranapple Juice and another $1 million to represent Weight Watchers International. Weeks afier her lucrative American promotions, she amazed the Queen's bankers by paying off her debts of $6.2 million. "I love Americans," she said. "They give a girl a break."

if she were to cease to be HRH, she would be obliged to curtsy to Princess Michael of Kent." And to her own sons.

Charles maintained that he did not care one way or the other about his wife's royal status. But he let it be known that his parents cared, particularly his father, who said that Diana was not entitled to be treated as royalty. In Philip's eyes she had betrayed the Firm, and her indiscretion and disloyalty barred her from any consideration other than bare civility. He was riled by her demand that any future children she might have by another man be given an hereditary title. And she pushed too far when she proposed that Clarence House become her official residence upon the death of the Queen Mother. Philip insisted her title be lifted, and the Queen agreed.

"At the end of the day, it became clear," said one of Diana's representatives, "that the lamb was going to be fleeced." So Diana was advised to yield what was about to be snatched. Her lawyers tried to save face for her by negotiating a title that sounded like the one she had enjoyed during her fifteen-year marriage. They settled on Diana, Princess of Wales. They also inserted a clause into the final agreement that she would be "considered on occasion a member of the royal family." One skeptic familiar with the legal document realistically assessed such an "occasion" as "when corgis fly."

Diana said she stopped fighting for her title after talking to her fourteen-year-old son. She asked Wills if he would mind her not being called Her Royal Highness. "I don't mind what you're called," said the young Prince. "You're Mummy."

Yet by the standards of her world, she had been shorn of what had made her most valuable. Stripped of HRH, she lost her prized standing in society. As Diana, Princess of Wales, she was socially inferior to her own children. No longer royal, she resigned her patronage of more than one hundred charities and gave up her military regiments. Her friends worried about how she would survive such a blow. "I fear for her," wrote historian Paul Johnson, one of her staunchest defenders. "One society matron said to me yesterday: `If I was publicly cast off like that, I really think I'd be tempted to do away with myself.'

To the outside world, the thirty-five-year-old Princess still radiated royalty. Her sparkling beauty made her as lyrical as the

"glimmering girl" of Yeats's poem who inspired the wandering aengus to pluck the "silver apples of the moon." But within her own world she was no longer a contender: "DI KO'd in Palace Rigged Title Fight" was one newspaper appraisal. Even antiroyalists, who sneered at social precedence, recognized that she had been flattened. "Throne for a loss," as one man put it. "She has lost something," wrote Stephen Glover in the Daily Telegraph, "which, according to the standards by which she lives, was infinitely predous."

The loss showed itself within days. Her once respectful press corps turned snippy. Photographers still showed up in full force to cover her because she remained the most famous woman in the world. But they started acting like hooligans, shouting in a way they would never have dared to do before. When she was royal they groveled: "Please, ma' am, one more shot." When she was no longer royal they were less respectful. One photographer, urging her to smile in his direction, hollered, "Hey, Di, cheat it to the left a little, will ya?" Unflattering photos began popping up: one caught her getting out of a car with mussed hair; another showed her skirt hiked up to her hips. Once adoring, some photographers acted as if she had personally offended them by losing her royal status. In retaliation they subjected her to the same harsh lens they aimed at pop divas and rock stars. Without the protection of her royal nimbus, Diana had been reduced to celebrity camera fodder like Mick, Michael, and Madonna.

Another indignity was inflicted on her while she was shopping in Harvey Nichols, her favorite London department store. A security guard directed a surveillance camera at her bosom and gathered footage of her cleavage. The guard was arrested for theft and taken into court, where the tape was produced. He was accused of video rape, but his female lawyer blamed Diana: "If a member of the public, whether royal or not, is willing to go into public showing a low cleavage, it ill behooves anyone to criticize the taking of a picture."

Weeks later a London tabloid published grainy photographs from a staged video that purported to be Diana in her bra doing a striptease for her former lover, James Hewitt, before jumping on

top of him for a horsey-back ride. The photographs were published around the world. But the video was a hoax, and the newspaper apologized on page one. "We were conned by cunning fraudsters," said the editor, "and are sorry for any hurt or offense caused." What went unsaid was that Diana's previous behavior had been such that editors and readers were prepared to accept the trick as truth.

The royal divorce became final on August 28, 1996, and the Sun headlined the news triumphantly: "Bye Bye Big Ears." Even Mother Teresa was pleased. "I know I should preach for family love and unity," the eighty-five-year-old nun told a reporter in India, "but nobody was happy anyhow." Britain's Prime Minister acted swiftly to reassure the country that Charles had no "immediate" plans to marry again. Then he briefed the Queen, warning her that remarriage, especially to Camilla Parker Bowles, would be disastrous for the monarchy. Neither the Prime Minister nor the Queen acknowledged the irony: the Church of England had been established precisely because of King Henry VIII's desire to divorce one wife and marry another.

Charles had a talent for shooting himself in the foot. He let the press know that he had sent a letter to forty stores where Diana regularly shopped: "With effect from 2 September 1996, any expenditure incurred by or on behalf of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, on or after that date should be invoiced directly to the Princess of Wales's Office, Apartment 7, Kensington Palace, London." Then he announced that he planned "to celebrate" his divorce at Highgrove with a Champagne party.

The country's sentiment was best expressed by the cartoonist who showed a huckster outside Buckingham Palace hawking royal playing cards. Chomping a cigar, the hustler pushed a deck of cards on a hapless young man who looked perplexed. "It's just like an ordinary pack, son, without the Queen of Hearts."

The monarchy had lost its brightest star, but the Queen was determined that the show go on without her. She instructed the souvenir shops of Balmoral, Windsor Castle, and Buckingham Palace to remove all memorabilia with Diana's likeness ashtrays, mugs, postcards. She also struck the Princess's name from the offi

cial prayers said for the royal family in Parliament. The move appeared "comically vindictive" to Tory MP Jerry Hayes. "To most people," he said, "it looks like they are trying to airbrush the Princess from the establishment in a Stalinist manner."

The Sunday Mail agreed. "Diana should still be in our prayers," stated an editorial that chastised Parliament for its "mean and vengeful" decision. "They should recall that forgiveness is the first Christian virtue."

The final humiliation came when the Queen ordered the London Gateue to publish the Letters Patent: this was Her Majesty's official notice to her government, her embassies, and her diplomatic missions that both her former daughters-in-law were toast.

"It's Wallis all over again, isn't it?" said the Queen Mother, shaking her head. She had received an advance copy of the notice that deprived Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer of their royal status without ever mentioning them by name. The Queen Mother had supported the move to strip "the troublesome girls" of their titles and was as complicit in the purge as she had been in depriving the Duchess of Windsor of her royal status. Now as then, the courtiers were as slick as seals. They dismissed the dry announcement as a routine matter of protocol: to inform people of the correct form of social address. But most everyone else saw the announcement as tactless and vengeful. They saw the monarch once again using the Letters Patent as a broom.

"First, you cauterize," said one of the Queen's advisers, "and then you heal." The scholarly adviser had written to the Queen, quoting the wisdom of England's sixteenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon, who said, "[He] that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator."

But the seventy-year-old Queen did not feel she needed the advice. After forty-five years on the throne, she had developed her own endgame. Without a shrewd Prime Minister such as Queen Victoria had in Disraeli, Elizabeth relied on her courtiers. They believed, as she did, that she was anointed by God. With her position divinely ordained, she did not feel a need to respond to the whims of public opinion like a politician. She viewed the monarchy as a sacred destiny, not a popularity contest.

But when her authority was challenged, she showed that she understood the past was prologue. Her grandfather had built the House of Windsor on an act of expediency, which enabled the monarchy to survive during the First World War. By camouflaging his German ancestry and reinventing himself as English, King George V had appeased his Hun-hating subjects. "He knew and understood his people, and the age in which they lived," said C. R. Attlee, MP, "and progressed with them." The Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Montgelas saw it differently. "The true royal tradition died on that day in 1917, when for a mere war, King George V changed his name."

The Queen understood the price her grandfather had paid to save the monarchy, and she intended to protect his investment. She made her initial concession to survival when she became the first British monarch of the twentieth century to pay taxes. Then she removed most of her family from the Civil List. When her subjects would not pay to finance the restoration of Windsor Castle, she opened Buckingham Palace to the public and charged admission. She even made a gesture toward the largest religious denomination in her country by visiting a Roman Catholic church. This was the first time in four hundred years that a reigning British monarch had done so. By 1996 the Church of England represented only 2 percent of the population, while Roman Catholics represented 43 percent of churchgoing Britons.

Despite the Queen's concessions, the monarchy looked vulnerable as it tottered toward the year 2000. Viewed as a golden coach, the institution that represented Britain to the world was tarnished and absurdly grandiose. The chassis wobbled and the wheels creaked. Shorn of its majesty, it barely limped along.

The Queen knew there would be a resurgence of fervor when the Queen Mother died. But she recognized the ardor would fade soon after the period of national mourning. As pragmatic as she was, she did not want to examine the elaborate plans for her mother's funeral.

"I don't need to address this now, do I?" she said, pushing aside the folder that contained the memorandum code-named Operation Lion. Its five pages outlined the procedures to be followed

by the media after the Queen Mother's death. The Queen had determined that her mother would be accorded the grandest funeral since Winston Churchill's. She would lie in state for three days before being eulogized in Westminster Abbey. As a mark of respect, the broadcast networks had planned to suspend commercials. Their coverage of the funeral was to be solemn and stirring, featuring documentaries of the royal family during World War II. Historical footage would show King George VI and Queen Elizabeth waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the two little Princesses "Us Four," as the King had called them.

The services were designed to remind Britain of its glorious past when the country withstood Nazi bombs and the monarchy responded admirably. With full military honors, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother would be laid to rest with the extravagant title she had styled for herself after her husband died.

Ordinarily unsentimental, the Queen resisted dealing with the harsh reality of her mother's eventual death, even after the Queen Mother reached her nineties. "My worst fear," the Queen told a friend, "is that Mummy will die, and then Margaret and I'll be left alone."

Her subjects' worst fear was that the Queen might die and leave them alone with Charles. Resistance to her heir had grown increasingly vocal since his divorce. Polls showed that he did not have the support of his prospective subjects. Most said they did not want him to become King, and the Members of Parliament who represented them did not want to sacrifice their offices for an unpopular heir.

"Charles is unfit to be King," declared the Labor MP Ron Davies on television. "He's an adulterer who does not practice the precepts of the church. . . . He spends time talking to trees, flowers, and vegetables and . . . he encourages his young sons to go out into the countryside to kill wild animals and birds just for fun

The leader of the Labor Party, Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister in 1997 demanded the MP retract his remarks. So the MP reluctantly apologized for calling the future King a fornicating environmentalist who hugged trees and indulged in blood sports. Throughout his campaign, Blair had reiterated his party's support

for continuing the monarchy. He could not afford to jeopardize his lead by threatening the country's natural conservatism with radical proposals. But his party, once firmly monarchist, was no longer unified. And a few rogue MPs, refusing to be silent, suggested eliminating the monarchy by an act of Parliament.

"The view that Charles is not fit to be King is shared by threequarters of the people in the country," said Paul Flynn, a left-wing MP. "Forget the sycophantic drivel that the royals are somehow superior beings who have stepped out of a fairy tale. That has gone forever."

It looked as though the buzzards were circling the monarchy. Calling it an anachronism, another Labor MP demanded a referendum at the end of the Queen's reign on whether Britain should continue to have a hereditary head of state. The Press Association conducted a straw vote of the Labor Party and reported a majority favored an open debate on the future of the monarchy.

"I was threatened with assassination when I made that suggestion twenty years ago," said former Labor MP Willie Hamilton, reflecting on the dramatic change in attitude. "I was called a crank and a communist. It was easier to criticize God in this country than to criticize the monarchy. But no more.

"At such a turning point," asked the Guardian newspaper in 1996, "is it not also time seriously to consider the mechanisms for constructing the British Republic?"

The question seemed preposterous to those who judged the royal family by its entertainment value. "The American answer is simple," said a New York Times editorial, recommending that Britain retain its monarchy. "Of course they should keep it for our amusement."

There were no more seasoned actors than the British royal family. Like an old vaudeville troupe, they filed on stage to go through their practiced routines. Looking like rouged curiosities, they performed at weddings and funerals. In costume, they still drew a few regular spectators, but they lost their biggest crowds with the departure of their ingenue Princess. They knew that they were viewed best from afar; up close, their imperfections showed.

They had learned the hard way, and perhaps too late, the wis-

dom of the eighteenth-century revolutionary Thomas Paine. "Monarchy is something kept behind a curtain," he wrote, "about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity. But when, by any accident, the curtain happens to be open, and the company see what is is, they burst into laughter."

The colorful cast was ridiculed when Fergie starred as its vixen. But when she bowed out, she had left behind a prince who finally became charming. Through his failed marriage Andrew had learned to behave with dignity in the face of disgrace. No matter what his former wife did to humiliate him and provoke criticism, he remained blessedly silent, discreet, and steadfast.

His father continued playing his role of leading man, although he had faded slightly as a matinee idol. His handsomeness had disappeared beneath age spots, which emphasized his sharp features under taut skin and made him look like a hawk. Still, at the age of seventy-five, he managed to stir a few hearts when he marched alongside the elderly veterans of World War II. Instead of standing with the royal family during a Remembrance Day ceremony, Philip stood with his shipmates. His noble gesture brought tears to the eyes of many who remembered the dashing naval officer, kneeling before a young queen at her coronation and promising to be her liegeman for life. After fifty years of marriage (give or take a few mistresses), he was still at her side with his elbow crooked, ready to receive her hand.

Because of his constancy to the Queen, most people tried to overlook his gaffes. But it was difficult, especially when his boorish remarks caused international incidents. In France he infuriated half his wife's subjects by saying, "British women can't cook." During a trip to Holland he observed crossly, "The Dutch are so po'faced." In Canada he snapped at officials, "We don't come here for our health." In Egypt he complained about Cairo's traffic. "The trouble with you Egyptians is that you breed too much," he said. In Peru he was presented with a history of the town of Lima, which he thrust into the hands of an aide, saying: "Here, take this. I'll never read it." In Scotland he asked a driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them to pass the

test?" In Hungary he spotted a British tourist in Budapest. "You can't have been here long," he observed. "You haven't got a pot belly." He warned British students in China, "If you stay here much longer, you'll get slitty eyes."

An avid hunter, Philip publicly criticized England's proposed legislation to crack down on handguns. During a discussion of the massacre of sixteen schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, the Duke said guns were no more dangerous than cricket bats. Parents of the slain children were shocked by the comment, and the Queen's husband was taken to task by the nation's press. "Wrong again, Prince Philip," was the headline of the Manchester Evening News editorial that criticized him "for shooting his mouth off without regard to the feelings of others." The next day the Palace issued an apology.

But the Queen appeared unruffled by her husband's diplomatic pratfalls. She tolerated his curmudgeonly manner and made no excuses for his off-the-cuff humor. Charles was the one who cringed. He worried most about the family's declining popularity, and he accused the press of making them look like lumpen royalty. He urged his parents to address the future-his future and consider ways the monarchy could prepare for the twenty-first century.

From the shadows of Balmoral, he let it be known that the royal family was looking ahead. He indicated that he and his parents, his brothers, his sister, and his advisers were meeting twice a year. Their committee was called the Way Ahead Group, and their goal was to renovate the dilapidated House of Windsor. Under discussion were ideas that would radically reform the Crown. The most immediate was the family's intention to get off the public payroll. They agreed to end the annual Civil List payments (approximately $ 14 million from taxpayers) and suggested restoring to the Crown payments from the Crown Estates. These consist of three hundred thousand acres of prime London real estate, whose rents and revenues produce more than $ 100 million a year. They were surrendered to Parliament by King George III in 1760.

"Devilishly cunning," said a government minister who showed the respect of a pickpocket for a bank robber. He figured the arithmetic (more than $ 100 million) as a break for the public and a boon for the royal family. "This would spare taxpayers while manifoldly

enriching the monarchy; at the same time, it removes the Crown from public scrutiny, which legitimately keeps the press at bay. .

How can the media justify invading their privacy when they are no longer supported by public dollars? Doubtful it would pass Parliament, but the proposal is admirable in its audacity."

Equally creative was the royal family's proposal to end the eleventh-century rule of primogeniture and allow women equal rights to succeed to the throne. They also committed themselves to downsizing: no more HRH aunts, uncles, or cousins. Upon the deaths of certain members of the royal family, the Firm would consist solely of the monarch, the consort, their children, and those grandchildren who are direct heirs to the throne.

The vote around the table at Balmoral was unanimous: Ditch the minor royal s like HRH Prince Michael of Kent and his wife. The Kents had contributed their share of bad publicity to the royal family. She had been caught leaving her American lover's house disguised in a wig and sunglasses. He had cashed in on being the Queen's cousin; he appeared on television to hawk the House of Windsor Collection, a mail-order catalog selling ersatz royal trinkets. Within months the marketing scheme became a financial disaster, which caused further embarrassment. "We've got Ali Baba," joked one member of the royal family. "We don't need the Forty Thieves."

Charles recognized that an act of Parliament could deprive him of the throne, especially after he said that he did not want to be Defender of the Faith. Under the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement, the sovereign must swear to uphold the established Church of England and Church of Scotland. Charles was not in communion with either church. So the Way Ahead Group proposed separating the monarchy from the strictures of religion and dissolving the bonds of church and state.

As sovereign, Charles would have to commit himself to uphold the Protestant succession, which also troubled him. He did not understand why Roman Catholics had to be specifically excluded from succeeding to the throne. He said the rule, which also precluded a sovereign from marrying a Roman Catholic, was inherently unfair and discriminated against the 10 percent of Britain's 60 million people who were Roman Catholic. So he proposed eliminating the 295- year-old ban.

The heir was determined to acquire the throne. Although he had disappointed his future subjects by discarding a young wife and taking up with a weatherbeaten mistress, he would not step aside. Despite growing objections, he soldiered on. "I have dedicated myself to putting the great back into Britain," he said, "and that's what I intend to do." Yet even those who recalled the empire of Great Britain did not think he would become King.

Throughout the country people continued to stand for the loyal toast at formal black-tie dinners. They raised their glasses to salute the sovereign: "To the Queen," they would say in unison before sitting down. Even respectful republicans stood for the tribute. "No one is recommending a revolution," said Professor Stephen Haseler, chairman of Britain's Republican Society. "For most of us heading into the twenty-first century, the sentiment is: `God save the Queen,' and then, `Save us from her heirs.'

To the professor, the monarchy looked as if it were ready to be walked to the wall for one last cigarette. He predicted dissension throughout the land if the Prince of Wales ascended to the throne. "King Charles III will split the nation down the middle," he said. "The only solution, short of anarchy, which no one advocates, is an act of Parliament, agreed to by the Queen, that upon her death or abdication, the monarchy would end and a new head of state would be elected."

The republicans were asking the Queen to dissolve her dynasty. The royalists were spluttering. They warned that abandoning the monarchy would traumatize the country and cause great upheaval. They said it would require restructuring the entire system of government and creating a written constitution. And they predicted that the class system would disappear and the House of Lords would collapse. The republicans agreed and approved. They argued that the structural moves were necessary to revitalize the country. The national debate had begun, and words once considered treasonous were uttered without rebuke.

Crowded between republicans and royalists, though, was the majority. They wanted to retain the monarchy but bypass the fu

ture monarch. "It's as simple as ABC Anybody But Charles," said one MP, recommending that the Queen move to make Princess Anne the next monarch. Polls showed great support for the idea. Others suggested skipping Charles and going directly to his older son, as Diana had proposed.

"The best hope is to jump a generation and appoint Prince William as the Queen's successor," wrote Paul Johnson in the Spectator. "That solution would eliminate the foolish and unpopular Charles and might prove a winner with the public."

Americans agreed. For their youth-crazed, celebrity-driven culture, the solution was ideal. People magazine described the young prince as "a looker just like his mom." Time put him on the cover and asked: "Can This Boy Save the Monarchy?" British commentator Julie Burchill expressed doubts. "I hope for the best for Wills," she said, "but I would be very surprised if he turns out to be normal, because that's the maddest family since the Munsters.

We wouldn't be shocked if he turned out to be a cross-dresser who wanted to marry a corgi.

Bookmakers began taking bets on whether the monarchy would survive into the next century. The odds soared to one hundred to one in 1994 but tumbled the next year to five to one. Assessing the imponderables in 1996, one London bookmaker from the William Hill firm predicted: "The smart money says Her Majesty steps aside at the age of seventy-five and turns the crown over to Charles. Right now, that's the only way she can ensure her heir succeeds her to the throne. Within the next five years, she works out a deal with the Prime Minister. Whether the government is Tory or Labor makes no difference because both parties have committed to supporting the monarchy. If the Queen makes the request, she won't be refused."

The "if" is operative. Some bookmakers are hedging their bets because they question the maternal instincts of the dutiful monarch. At best they see her as an inattentive parent, who is no longer inclined to give up her crown for her middle-aged son. "She is dedicated to her duty," said one London bookmaker. "She has described her job as a job for life. She'll never abdicate. Based on

that, I'd give long odds on the Queen stepping aside before she goes to the angels."

Few criticize the Queen as a monarch. It's the mother who has failed. She has produced three children who are divorced and one who is still floundering. That's a sorry score for people whose only job in life is to live happily ever after. They are not evil, just venal. But being hapless and unheroic, they rubbed the luster off the House of Windsor and left it looking shopworn.

Many years ago, Farouk, the last King of Egypt, had predicted that most monarchies would disappear by the turn of the century. "By then there will be only five kings left in the world," he said. "The king of hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades-and the King of England." He, too, had been beguiled by the mystique of the British monarchy.

"In its mystery is its life," wrote historian Walter Bagehot more than a hundred years ago. "We must not let daylight in upon magic."

Since then the magic has been harshly exposed. Yet the weight of history favors survival of an institution that continues to reinvigorate itself. Even as Britain reassesses its monarchy, the monarchy retains its genius for adaptability and compromise, almost defying destruction. Rooted mystically in religion and patriotism, it cannot be removed without leaving a gaping hole in the psyche of the country. As durable as the White Cliffs of Dover, the institution has existed for 1,200 years among people who have cherished pageantry and treasured mythology. The magic is not completely understood, even by devoted monarchists, who acknowledge that not all kings and queens have been good and noble and wise. But they have survived because their subjects had a need to believe in them. That yearning to look up to someone or something grand, even grandiose, still exists. Although the godlike luster has eroded and the institution has been diminished, even disgraced, the need for enchantment endures and the hope for renewal remains.