Chapter Eleven

Stardust

How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?

—Prince Charles, April 1983

THE BIRTH OF WILLIAM on June 21, 1982, at St. Mary’s Hospital Paddington was the fulfillment of Diana’s destiny. Prince William Arthur Philip Louis would one day be the forty-second monarch since the Norman Conquest, and the sixth in descent from Queen Victoria. Diana had done what she was hired to do, produce the next heir to the throne speedily and with success. There had been so much hype about the impending royal birth, the Princess felt the whole of England was in labor with her. Jingoistic excitement was at full throttle anyway after the week-old British triumph of ejecting the Argentines from the Falkland Islands after they rudely invaded the British territories without warning. “STUFF IT UP YOUR JUNTA” was one memorable headline in The Sun. The newly commissioned Prince Andrew found himself a national hero after courageously flying helicopter missions from the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible based in the South Atlantic, a terrific image-boost for The Firm that had become almost exclusively Diana-centric in the year since the wedding. The Falklands War was brief, victorious with many feats of British courage. Its success created the perfect Henry V flag-waving atmosphere in which to produce the next heir to the throne. The antimonarchist Labour MP Willie Hamilton was the only royal spoiler when he declared that baby Wales’s life would henceforth be “one long story of nausea, deference and Land of Hope and Glory rubbish for many years.”

Diana’s dynastic efforts were rewarded with a forty-one-gun salute in Hyde Park, a carillon of bells in Westminster Abbey, and a tsunami of tabloid sentiment. The Prince of Wales showed his gratitude to his wife by presenting her with a necklace of diamonds and cultured pearls with a sparkling heart at the center and a new custom-built, apple green mini with a convertible foldaway roof and enough space for a collapsible crib. Frances Shand Kydd, with her usual style, organized a champagne toast to the baby with her eighty-four fellow passengers on the Glasgow-London British Airways shuttle. “I love children. I always have,” she told the Daily Mail. “I had five of them in nine years.” Etiquette prescribed that the Queen, rather than Diana’s own mother, was her first visitor in hospital. The Princess of Wales was lucky not to come out of labor to find the owlish figure of Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw at her bedside. It was George VI in 1946 who abolished the arcane rule of having the Home Secretary present at the birth of a royal child to avoid a repetition of the 1688 Warming-Pan plot, when a substitute baby was reportedly placed between the sheets with the wife of James II. Queen Elizabeth’s first comment when she saw her new grandson Prince William was “Thank Heavens he hasn’t got his father’s ears.”

Diana later told Morton that William’s birth had been induced early to fit in with Charles’s polo calendar, but this is the forked tongue of later bitterness speaking, not a reflection of the couple’s joyous mood at the time. The Prince was present throughout all sixteen hours of Diana’s difficult labor, a most un-Windsor thing of him to do. In fact, he was the first-ever Prince of Wales to be in the room when his wife gave birth. Charles sounded like any besotted New Dad when he wrote to Patricia Mountbatten, “The arrival of our small son has been an astonishing experience and one that has meant more to me than I could ever have imagined. I am SO thankful I was beside Diana’s bedside the whole time because I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth and as a result was rewarded by seeing a small creature which belonged to US even though he seemed to belong to everyone else as well.”

It was Diana’s wish that Charles had such an intimate participation in the birth. Her campaign to reverse all past patterns of royal parenting was the best she fought. She fended off Charles’s lugubrious plan to invite his own former nanny, Mabel Anderson, to take charge of William, choosing instead the feisty Barbara Barnes, who’d worked in the unconventional household of Lady Glenconner. She wanted her boys raised as Oshkosh kids, not Little Lord Fauntleroys. Diana considered the photographs of the Prince of Wales as a child of six formally greeting the Queen on her return from a six-month Commonwealth Tour Exhibit A in a deprived childhood. She insisted, against the remonstrance of Charles’s uptight private secretary Edward Adeane, on taking up then Australian PM Malcolm Fraser’s suggestion of bringing William on their first big six-week visit to Australia and New Zealand. While the Prince and Princess toured every state in the Australian continent, the nine-month-old William was based with his nanny on a sheep station at Woomargama in New South Wales. His presence added severe complications to the planning of the tour—every three or four days, Charles and Diana would break off and visit the baby—but it also gave the beleaguered couple a taste of authentic family time. Charles acknowledged that in a letter home to his friends, the van Cutsems: “The great joy was that we were totally alone together,” he wrote, suggesting the hunger they both still had to forge a real bond after two turbulent years of marriage.

And I mean turbulent. The months leading up to the Australia trip had been another nosedive into hell for the couple who had everything. Peace reigned for a mere two months until Diana’s postnatal depression kicked in. The Prince cleared his diary and stayed home with mother and baby. “Charles loved nursery life and couldn’t wait to get back and do the bottle and everything,” she told Morton, but the Glorious Twelfth of August, official opening of the Scottish grouse-shooting season, descended on Diana’s psyche like the Highland mist. Charles still did not seem to get that his wife’s aversion to the annual sojourn at Balmoral now bordered, like Cherie Blair’s, on the allergic. The Prince remained bemused by what he saw as a lack of stamina in his wife that seemed to defy the hardy female ethic of her background. Had he been sold a bill of goods? Like most aristocratic wives schooled in country life, the royal women themselves are formidably tough. They are trained to a daily existence where they almost never do anything they really want to do or see anyone they really want to see. They are used to being on their feet all day, shaking hands in blazing sun and pounding rain and never betraying a day’s ill health. This means that their private life is conducted with the rigid intensity of borrowed time.

When the Queen Mother was at her Scottish home at Birkhall, she thought nothing at the age of eighty-two of hosting an elaborate picnic lunch, standing in her waders in freezing water fishing all afternoon, and hosting a bibulous formal dinner until midnight. At eighty-nine, she attended the forty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy landings at Bayeux, speaking fluent French to the veterans and returning to London by helicopter. Soon afterward, she breezed through five days of engagements during a heat wave in Toronto. Hugo Vickers recounts how, when at the age of 100, during a fire drill at Sandringham the treasurer, Nicholas Assheton, asked if the Queen Mother was coming down; the reply came back: “No, but she has put her pearls on.” She rarely betrayed emotion or encouraged it in others. Prince Charles saw his grandmother as a model of warmth and compassion, but when his beloved Jack Russell, Pooh, disappeared down a rabbit hole in 1994 during a walk across the moors surrounding Birkhall, never to be seen again, the Queen Mother’s only comment to the distraught Prince was: “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Anyway, have some tea.”

The Prince’s sister, Anne, the Princess Royal, is similarly stoic. She was the winner of the Individual European Three Day Championship at age twenty-one and is still ready to clear a hedge on horseback in driving sleet for the hell of it. With a gun, she’s the Windsor version of Annie Oakley. On an official visit to Saughton Prison in Edinburgh, Anne thawed a bunch of sullen youth in the prison recreation room by picking up a billiard cue and potting the ball on the green baize with such crack marksmanship the juvenile offenders thought she was cool. Athleticism underpins the prodigious stamina of the Queen herself. Elizabeth II is a horsewoman of international class. She rides at least four or five times a week, displaying toughness and mastery in the saddle. She brought her horse back under control within seconds in June 1981 when some seventeen-year-old fruitcake shot six blank cartridges directly at her as she turned down Horse Guards parade ground for Trooping the Colour. The Queen merely ducked, patted her horse, Burmese, and rode on. A more up-close-and-personal security breach that occurred in July 1982 left the Queen equally unfazed. A thirty-one-year-old unemployed laborer named Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace at 7:15 A.M. by scaling a sixty-foot drainpipe. The Queen was still in bed at the time, awaiting her tea tray. When the intrusive Mr. Fagan appeared at her side, the Queen got up, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and told him sternly: “Get out of here at once.” No security officer appearing, Her Majesty sat on the edge of the bed and chatted politely to Fagan for a long five minutes about his family problems until a policeman finally surfaced. “Take him outside and give him a cigarette,” said the Queen.

So rarely were the royal women discomposed or sick, they almost considered it bad manners to be so. “Maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful,” Diana said to BBC Panorama’s Martin Bashir. “And obviously that was daunting, because if you’ve never seen it before, how do you support it?” How do you acknowledge it, was more to the point. The Queen found it vexing, for instance, that when Princess Margaret was struck down by her third stroke she was unable to observe Sandringham’s appointed mealtimes. The Sovereign once complained to one of Margaret’s companions over the Christmas holidays that her sister “always insists on sleeping through lunch and when she wakes up the chef has gone off.” Margaret’s companion suggested that perhaps a plate of scrambled eggs in bed might be a nice treat for the malingering Princess. “Oh. I suppose so,” said the Queen. “We never thought of that.”

Diana had shown a royal ability of her own to withstand the stress and the weather on the tour of Wales, but the extended vacation in Balmoral surrounded again by the Family en masse was another matter. At one point there, she went for three nights without sleeping, spending most of the time locked in the bathroom throwing up after a bulimic junk-food binge. Bathrooms seemed to loom large in the Waleses’ Balmoral holiday that year. Diana told Andrew Morton it was as her husband took a bath that she’d heard the Prince on the telephone furtively calling Camilla Parker Bowles, signing off, under the disguising noise of pounding tap water, with the treacherous “Whatever happens, I will always love you.” Perhaps it was this incident that made the Prince take the classic guilty-husband action of insisting that his wife was in dire need of psychiatric help.

Diana might have said: “There were three of us in this marriage. Charles, me, and Laurens van der Post.” It was from none other than the venerable travel writer whose books dogged Diana on the honeymoon aboard Britannia that the Prince sought marital advice. He begged his mentor to come up to Balmoral to assess the Princess’s state of mind. One would like to have been present at the interview between the disconsolate twenty-one-year-old über-Sloane who pined for the boutiques of Beauchamp Place and the eighty-year-old explorer and Japanese prisoner-of-war camp survivor who had lived for months on end with the Kalahari Bushmen. Lucia van der Post, Laurens’s daughter, insists: “My father had a quick sense of people’s inner core. He was immensely human and tender with young people—he’d had problems with his father when he was growing up.” The discreet van der Post told Lucia only that “Diana had shown ‘great paranoia’ and had spent a lot of time ‘looking through keyholes.’” (Bathroom keyholes, one would guess.) Van der Post recommended Diana visit a psychiatrist he knew in London, Jungian disciple Dr. Alan McGlashan, which at least occasioned Charles and Diana making a joint trip to town. For Diana, the trouble with Dr. McGlashan was he was almost as old as van der Post and his expertise was in analyzing dreams. Since Diana’s dreams were mostly about her husband’s ex-mistress, she saw no effective reason to parse them out with Dr. McGlashan. “I was fine until I got sucked into the royal way of life. That’s my problem,” Diana commented to Lady Colin Campbell, a remark whose pragmatism might have sounded, in other circumstances, like the Queen herself.

Diana dumped McGlashan in favor of Dr. David Mitchell, who saw her every evening at Kensington Palace, but he too made little headway. Mitchell was on the right track, because he was more concerned about her relationship with her husband than investigating Diana’s subconscious. In every session, he would ask Diana to recount the details of her day, at which point, she told Andrew Morton, she would start howling and the talking would cease. Mitchell too was soon dumped, but it’s unlikely he would have gotten very far, as Diana again withheld the crucial facts about her bulimia. “The thing about bulimia,” she said to Martin Bashir, “is your weight always stays the same, whereas with anorexia you visibly shrink. So you can pretend the whole way through.” Not entirely. The press had started to notice how unwell she seemed. Daily Mirror photographer Kent Gavin had a picture withheld by the paper that showed just how haunted she looked. Her behavior toward the press was also less sunny and obliging. There was a bad moment on a ski slope in Liechtenstein in February when Diana reneged on a promise Prince Charles had made to press photographers to give them a joint photo op if they would cut the vacationing couple some slack. She shrieked: “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”—a display of dramatics that didn’t go over well with the usually adoring Rat Pack. “If she wants to sulk inside a wooly hat she shouldn’t have taken on the Crown,” fulminated the Daily Express’s Jean Rook. Royal reporter Judy Wade recalled a photographer going to Kensington Palace to take official pictures. “When he arrived, a highly placed official said, ‘if they start to fight and row, please try to ignore it.’ He was talking as if it was a regular occurrence.”

Where was Diana’s mother in all this sturm und drang? Nowhere that was particularly helpful, is the answer. Frances Shand Kydd had created some aggravation of her own in the summer with an unexpected outburst in the press about her marriage to Diana’s father. In Gordon Honeycombe’s book A Royal Wedding, which underwent a splashy serialization in the Daily Express, Frances had decided to give her side at last of her divorce story and explode once and for all the widely held notion that she was a “bolter” who had callously walked out on her four children. An outraged Johnnie called his ex-wife’s account of the custody battle “cheap and unkind,” and Diana was hugely distressed by her parents’ public feuding. “She feels like the embarrassed poor cousin with too many skeletons in the family cupboard,” a friend of Diana’s said.

The truth was that Frances had complicated feelings about her youngest daughter’s stardom and every so often shone the spotlight on herself. “I have good long legs, like my daughter,” she told the press when she arrived back from Australia before the royal engagement. In other words, I’m gorgeous too. Frances’s marriage, too, was suffering under the publicity burden of Diana. Adam Shand Kydd remembered his father, Peter, walking into the kitchen in the remote Isle of Seil and finding a TV camera crew setting up for sound bites about Diana. It did not please Peter Shand Kydd, any more than it did Frances, to find his identity entirely submerged in the fame of his wife’s youngest daughter. Marital rockiness of her own could be the only excuse for Frances being so little in evidence throughout Diana’s postnatal tribulations. “I’m a firm believer in maternal redundancy,” she told the Daily Mail in June 1982. “When daughters marry they set up a new home, and they don’t want mothers-in-law hanging around. They should be free to make their own decisions and maybe to make their own mistakes.”

Unfortunately for Diana, all the women in her family on both sides seemed to hold the same view. True to form, her grandmother Lady Fermoy was already distancing herself from a match that was turning out to have embarrassing problems. At a dinner in March 1982, Fermoy told Sir Roy Strong primly “how much the Princess of Wales had yet to learn.” To her close friend, Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, Fermoy was more candid. She confided how “distressed” she was by the behavior of Diana, whom she regarded “as an actress, a schemer.” Runcie reflected that Ruth was “totally and wholly a Charles person because she had seen him grow up, loved him like all women of the court do.” The Archbishop who, as the critic Clive James commented in his coverage of the royal wedding, could always be relied on to “put unction in your function,” did not point out that, as Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy had seen the Princess grow up, too. Given that it was Ruth’s decisive testimony in the Spencer custody suit that ensured Diana was raised without her mother around, Granny Dearest was in a better position than most to understand the challenges Diana faced as a child. The Spencer and Fermoy women seem to have matched the Windsors round for round in self-absorption. Asked by the Star’s James Whitaker about the evidence that Diana might have anorexia, her sister Sarah replied: “We would like to have a chat with her about it but she does not take advice kindly.” We would like to, yes. But who actually did?

No one at Balmoral, that’s for sure. Diana was like a half-evolved butterfly, dragged kicking and screaming back into the chrysalis every time she was around the Royals for any extended time. What is striking is how she was always able to pull herself out of her malaise when exactly the right opportunity to shine presented itself. Diana’s star quality was increasingly a survival mechanism. The Queen was not in favor of any Windsor women going to Monaco for the funeral of Princess Grace, who died on September 14, 1982, from her injuries in a car crash that eerily prefigured Diana’s own. “We women don’t go to funerals,” she said. “Charles must go.” The Prince had no desire to do so. Monaco is a tin-pot kingdom as far as the British monarchy is concerned, and Grace was a creature of Hollywood, albeit an elegant one. The Princess, however, knew instinctively that world-class glamour like hers thrived in the high-profile cosmopolitan settings the other royal women abhorred. It was clear that every fashionable celebrity and the world’s press would be at Grace’s funeral. Among the movie stars, crowned heads, and First Ladies of America and France, the Princess of Wales knew she would stand out as the luminous real thing. Besides, she felt a genuine sisterhood with the deceased Princess. Grace, with her cool beauty, self-discipline, and discretion, would have been an excellent mentor for Diana. “We were psychically connected,” Diana told Grace’s daughter Princess Caroline. Actually, they were connected in more ways than Diana knew at the time—the Princess of Monaco never allowed her own facade to crack. Grace’s distress about Prince Rainer’s infidelity, her battle with the bottle, and retaliatory love affairs were not exposed until some time after her death. Perhaps the keenly intuitive Diana sensed these painful under-currents. She was so intent on attending the funeral, she appealed over the heads of Charles and the Queen’s private secretary Sir Philip Moore to the Sovereign herself, who decided in the end, since no one else wanted to, to let Diana go.

The funeral of Princess Grace was like a small-scale dress rehearsal for Diana’s own. As many as 26,000 people filed past Grace’s casket in the scented shadows of the Cathedral. The whole affair had the devout atmospherics surrounding a medieval saint. The streets of “the sunny place for shady people” were awash in weeping women. Wearing a below-the-knee black dress with her diamond-and-pearl heart necklace and a black straw boater, Diana took her place between Nancy Reagan and Mme. Mitterrand. Her youthful dignity and poise won her rave reviews. She impressed a member of the Prince of Wales’s office, who noted that “Everything went wrong. The Rolls broke down. We got stuck in a lift. My respect for her rose a hundred fold. She was very hassled but behaved brilliantly.”

On the plane journey back at the end of a long day, she burst into tears of exhaustion. “Will Charles be there to meet us?” one of her team remembers her asking as they prepared to land at Aberdeen. It was an unrealistic expectation, since Diana’s arrival from Monaco coincided with Prince Andrew’s victorious return from the Falkland Islands and the Prince of Wales had accompanied his parents to Portsmouth to meet him. The British Navy’s role in the routing of Argentina had been an act of great skill, especially as the Ministry of Defence had equipped them with ships about as well suited to the task as camels in a polo match. The arrival of the HMS Invincible after 166 days at sea was therefore a major media event. The last great ship to return from the war was escorted into Portsmouth by a large flotilla of yachts and tugboats blowing their sirens. Not exactly an event the Prince of Wales could quietly skip. The homecoming hero, Prince Andrew, posed for a picture with the Queen at the quayside with a red rose clenched between his teeth. Charles’s friends bitchily implied that Diana regarded the Falklands War as an intrusion on her press coverage. More likely, it simply didn’t impinge at all. Real events like the Falklands occurred in a public world Diana was as yet too callow to comprehend. She was still engulfed in her Brigadoon mist. “We looked at her big eyes looking out of the window in expectation,” a member of the entourage on the plane home from Monaco recalled. “One police car,” Diana said, looking crestfallen. “That means that Charles isn’t coming.” The next day, she was equally crushed to receive no congratulations about her Monaco performance from the Palace. “Look at the papers. They say you did brilliantly,” one of her team reassured her. “Good,” she replied, “cos nobody mentioned it here.”

Not mentioning it was the point. This is Monarchy 101 and she better get used to it, was the Palace view. Diana, it seemed to them, was simply unable to come to grips with the double reality of being an international celebrity in the eyes of billions of people while simultaneously, in the Palaces and apartments where she actually spent most of her time, being treated as just a cog in the royal machine. That she struggled with that duality was the difference between being born and raised a Royal and becoming one, as it were, by adoption. “She wasn’t born into our way of life,” the Queen herself had said when she met the Fleet Street editors with Michael Shea. To the Windsors, public appearances were not personal performances. They were acts of state, symbolic assertions of national identity, ex officio rituals having nothing to do with individual characteristics and everything to do with impersonal roles assigned by tradition and birth. Their essence could not be affected by compliments or criticisms, by good reviews or bad ones. A favorite pejorative Elizabeth II likes to use to describe a certain kind of produced public appearance is “stunt.” “That’s just a stunt, and I am not going to do it,” the Queen will say if asked by her press secretary to do anything remotely theatrical in gesture or tone. Her goal has always been to exhibit museum-quality authenticity, whereas the world the Princess of Wales inhabited was applause.

Unluckily for Diana, the Prince of Wales was the member of the Royal Family most sensitive about his own image. Indeed, there are those who judge Charles’s persistent desire to be appreciated as the most hopeless of his causes. Responding to publicly voiced resentment that he was interfering in areas beyond his expertise, Charles told an interviewer in the mid-1980s: “There’s no need for me to do all this, you know. If they’d rather I did nothing, I’ll go off somewhere else.” Prince Philip has done endless good works and fund-raising and doesn’t expect people to appreciate him. This yields him the benefit of not having to appreciate people in return, which is probably the right course.

The six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand in March 1983 was a threatening experience for Charles’s ego. It confirmed the Princess as a global superstar and it scared her husband to death. There were 100 or more press on the tour from the UK alone, and 70 more photographers from France, Germany, America, and Japan. Daily Mirror photographer Kent Gavin observed that out of every 100 pictures he took on this tour, 92 involved Diana and only 8 showed Charles. “She is so popular,” added Gavin at that time, “that she is in my lens from the moment she arrives at a place until the moment she leaves.”

The tour had a serious political goal—persuading the grumpy and increasingly Republican Australian continent that it still wanted a monarchy in the first place. The Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had just lost a landslide election to the Labour leader Robert James Lee “Bob” Hawke, who epitomized the churlish mood of the populace when he commented, “I don’t regard welcoming them [Charles and Diana] as the most important thing I’m going to have to do in my first nine months in office.” Regarding Prince Charles, he added dismissively: “I don’t think we will be talking about Kings of Australia forever more.”

Diana’s magic turned the whole mood around. The crowds shouting her name were overwhelming, the tiara version of Beatlemania. In Brisbane alone, 400,000 turned out to scream for the Princess, bringing the city center to a dead halt. “I’d seen the crowds in Wales but the crowds in Australia were incredible,” Jayne Fincher said. “We went to Sydney and wanted to photograph her with the Opera House but just when we got there it was like the whole of Sydney had come out. It was just a sea of people as far as you could see, not just on the land, the harbour was full of boats and people. And all you could see was the top of this little pink hat bobbing along.” It was, as Diana put it herself, “the hard end of being the Princess of Wales.” She felt hot, jet-lagged, and was still intermittently throwing up, but Diana wooed the Australians like a pro, hurtling with Charles between mob-scene walkabouts, glamour receptions, marathon dinners, making forty flights between Australia’s eight states. Anne Beckwith-Smith, Diana’s new lady-in-waiting, realized that even though they had packed nearly 200 outfits, some of which she had worn before, it wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. They were insatiable for Diana. The crowds and the press wanted to see their love object in something new every day. What the Australians adored was Diana’s lack of pretension, the opposite of colonial arrogance. The Princess’s own intellectual insecurity was an unexpected asset. It made her head immediately for the underdog in any room—the aged, the shy, the very young. “She didn’t speak to confident people half as easily as those who weren’t,” her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, has said. “And this was, in her case, a kind of battle that went on. She wasn’t all that confident herself, she knew she had this gift with people and she used it wisely and generously. But in fact she felt going into a big room of people rather drawn to those who are feeling a bit nervous, rather as she was herself.”

The excitement of it all lifted Diana’s depression and gave the couple’s relationship a renewed charge. The dynamic between them was complicated, but it was alive. She was often in tears of exhaustion and fear, but she relied on Charles to help her get through it and he did. When they were driving through the crowds in an open car, she discreetly clung to her husband for comfort. In a letter home, she even confessed to feeling a trifle ashamed of how volatile her behavior had been before she left England.

Early in the tour, there was a dance in Melbourne at the Southern Cross Hotel and the royal couple got lost in the elevator trying to find the right floor. The AP photographer Ron Bell remembers the elevator doors opening and Prince Charles stepping out with shining eyes: “Ron, isn’t she absolutely beautiful?” he said. “I’m so proud of her.” It was true—Charles was smart enough to see what a stunning political asset Diana had become—but he was also deeply disturbed by all the adoration coming his young wife’s way. Its excess frightened him. You can see him still trying to figure out Diana’s mystique in a letter from Australia to a friend dated April 4. “Maybe the wedding, because it was so well-done, and because it made such a wonderful, almost Hollywood-style film, has distorted people’s view of things?” There’s a telling picture of Diana in a bright yellow dress at a school in Alice Springs, crouched down in a warm, natural way to the level of the kids who crowd around her in ecstasy while Charles stands stiffly by. Just like in Wales, the crowds that got him instead of her in their joint walkabouts openly groaned in disappointment. “It’s not fair is it? You’d better ask for your money back!” the Prince would say with a rueful, sporting smile.

The lukewarm reception for himself was especially discomfiting for the Prince because it had once been his treasured dream to become Governor General of Australia, an idea first mooted in the sixties. Again, when Charles was especially tormented by the nagging of his father in the mid-seventies, the idea of escaping down under for a few years surfaced, fueled in his imagination by his Aussie confidante, “Kanga” Tryon. The Prince felt an affinity with Australia after spending his impressionable post-Gordonstoun year living in the outback. In his bachelor days, Bondi Beach was the scene of some of his most glamorous photo ops. Unfortunately, Republican resentment still smoldered over the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative, Sir John Kerr, for failing to get a budget through Parliament. The sacking was the most controversial act in Australian history and outraged the chippy national pride of the former colony. By the time of the visit by Charles and Diana, even outgoing Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser believed the resentment of Sir John Kerr’s high-handed ways was still too strong to allow Prince Charles ever to be installed in Yarralumla (Government House). Now the Prince felt doubly snubbed by the euphoric reception the Australians were according his wife: “He took it out on me,” Diana told Andrew Morton. “He was jealous. I understood the jealousy but I couldn’t explain that I didn’t ask for it. I kept saying you’ve married someone and whoever you’d have married would have been of interest for the clothes, how she handles this, that, and the other, and you build the building block for your wife to stand on to make her own building block. He didn’t see that at all.”

Victor Chapman, the press secretary on the tour, got used to late-night phone calls from Charles complaining about the scant coverage of himself in the press compared to the hagiographic acres accorded his wife. The Prince retreated into Jung’s Psychological Reflections and wrote exasperated letters to his friends: “I do feel desperate for Diana,” he wrote in his April 4 letter to a friend. “There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly and I am quite convinced, mindless people photographing it…What has got into them all? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?”

Stronger than ever, is the answer. In Australia and New Zealand, Diana graduated to being a seasoned media sophisticate with the stamina and the charm repertoire of a big-time star. She mesmerized Bob Hawke and even extracted a curtsy from his wife, Hazel. By the end of Charles and Diana’s tour, a poll in Australia found that Monarchists outnumbered Republicans two to one and, hey, that was the point, wasn’t it? The twenty-one-year-old Princess of Wales had proved she was a dazzling new PR weapon for the British crown. She told Morton that she was “a different person” when she came home, and for once she was telling him the truth.

During the tour, she had become fascinated by the development of her own image in the pages of the British tabloids that were sent to her and reviewed them studiously on a daily basis. When she got home, she would begin the morning skimming the newspapers for pictures of herself, starting with the tabloids and going on to the broadsheets.

“She was a complete press addict,” Daily Express royal correspondent Ashley Walton alleges. “She would read everything about herself right from the beginning and knew exactly who had written what. We know that because she would remark on a particular story to us. When she was living at Highgrove she would take some money and go into Tetbury where she would buy armfuls of newspapers and magazines. We used to doorstep the newsagents. If her picture was on the cover, she would buy the magazine.”

Diana’s ballooning star power strengthened her growing independence from the Palace. At the end of the tour, the Princess was told by the Palace that the baby-in-tow format would not be allowed again. She responded by saying that in that case, she would not go on long tours. “Children cannot be left for that length of time at their age,” said the Princess, who knew all about being left. She later insisted that no trips away could be scheduled on the weekends the boys were home from boarding school. And she sent them both to Wetherby, an unpretentious pre-school in Notting Hill. The other mothers would turn up looking very dressed and eager to push their kids at Diana, but she would just be wearing a tracksuit and sneakers. Her personal protection officer Ken Wharfe remembers William standing in the school lobby in his cap and tie when a classmate asked him, “Don’t you know the Queen?” and William looked at him and replied, “Don’t you mean Granny?”

“I used to pass her every day in that little corridor where the children were divided into swans and cygnets,” writer Andrew Barrow remembers. “She had that wonderful vulnerable star quality.”

When his wife stood up to the Palace on issues like carving out more time for his children, Charles admired Diana’s spirit. He rarely took such a stance himself, especially when his father was involved. One of his aides once risked a friendly lecture about how the Prince should assert himself more often. As they walked around the grounds of Highgrove, the Prince had said: “You know, it’s awkward between me and my father,” and the aide replied: “You ought to stand up to him more.” Charles shrugged. At a family business meeting at Sandringham, a member of the Prince’s staff remembers Charles saying nothing in reply when the Duke of Edinburgh commented: “Hah. You’re here. I suppose the weather isn’t good enough for hunting,” as Charles took his seat. “Philip resented Charles,” the staff member said. “He felt he had come from nowhere himself and yet his son had everything done for him.”

Perhaps Diana was unafraid of Philip, first because she was a Spencer, raised at one of the most splendid country seats in England, Althorp, with the blood of the Stuarts running in her veins. (The Duke of Edinburgh’s crustiness was nothing compared to her terrifying grandfather, the seventh Earl Spencer, Jack.) And second, because she was beautiful and she knew that the Duke of Edinburgh was deeply partial to young, alluring women. Diana was too shrewd to risk the Sovereign’s displeasure by flirting with her consort, but it was a card her lowered lashes knew how to play.

Buckingham Palace was furiously competitive about the success of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s Antipodean travels. The frostiness from members of the household toward Diana when she returned was obvious. No one said a word about how well she had coped, how superbly she had represented her country over six grueling weeks and turned around the Australian attitude to the crown. Alan Clark, the patrician Tory MP and acidic diarist who died in 1999, believed that the Queen was more directly threatened by Diana than has previously been supposed. In an unpublished 1998 interview I’ve seen, Clark opined that ever since the Princess of Wales’s wedding day, “When Diana said, ‘I will’ a great roar went up—like the Middle Ages. This rang alarm bells for the Queen. Mrs. Thatcher and Diana—these two women threatened her. Here clearly from the outset was a rival. Here was the embodiment of The Way Ahead. A walking icon who conformed to every convention that young people fantasized about.” The Queen’s men were especially irked by the BBC devoting a half hour of Sunday prime time to the Waleses’ Australia and New Zealand trip, unprecedented coverage for a royal tour.

This time, though, Diana didn’t care that the Palace weren’t appreciative. She was building a power base beyond the Palace walls that would give her the leverage to play by her own rules. The royal women had been dismayed at how lacking in toughness Diana was in the first two years of her marriage. Now, thanks to her personal ordeals, her media experience, and her rigorous training on the road, Diana, just as the Queen feared, would become the most formidable of them all.