Chapter Twelve

Dynasty Di

Did Joan Collins’s wedding kick me off the front page?

—Diana to Sir Nicholas Lloyd, November 1985

ENGLAND IN THE 1980s was defined to the rest of the world by three globe-girdling divas: Diana Princess of Wales, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Joan Collins, middling movie queen turned gigantic television star. The British Isles have shrunk a little since they reverted to a culture curated by men.

Maggie force-fed her political medicine to the trade unions, the Tory “wets,” and the presumptuous Argentine generals like an avenging nanny administering castor oil. Joan ruled the airwaves as Alexis Carrington, the sexy, scheming, big-haired, magnificently mascaraed British bitchissima in the ABC (and worldwide) hit nighttime soap opera Dynasty. And Diana, vamping around in backless lamé dresses by Bruce Oldfield, unleashed the full force of her star power. “She did enjoy the feeling of being a forties movie star,” Jasper Conran told me. “It was all about the entrance, everyone clapping and cheering. She loved that.” Big women ruled the runways, too. The first wave of anorexic waifs—Twiggy, Penelope Tree—had receded, and heroin-flavored anorexia chic still lay in the future. Amazonian supermodels like Christie Brinkley, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford ruled. And Diana—tall and athletic, like a supermodel herself—outshone them all.

The defining moment of her global metamorphosis came at the White House dinner hosted by Ronald and Nancy Reagan on November 9, 1985, when she was spun around the dance floor by John Travolta as the marine band played “You’re the One That I Want.” She always knew how to seize a moment for maximum exposure. The day before the dinner, at a morning press reception at the British Embassy in Washington, the Princess met Sir Nicholas Lloyd, then editor of the Daily Express. Her first words to him in the receiving line were “Did Joan Collins’s wedding kick me off the front page?” If she did, it wasn’t for long.

Dynasty Di. It was irresistible not to see the Princess’s life in these years through the prism of Aaron Spelling’s hit show, which epitomized Reagan-era arriviste glitz. In Britain, where Dynasty was never as big as in the United States, the show was appreciated as an upmarket version of Coronation Street, the hugely popular, long-running daily saga of a working-class neighborhood in Manchester. British viewers were tickled that Dynasty’s female lead, Collins, with her gloriously campy manipulativeness and her glittery veneer of designer flash and clawing red fingernails, was one of their own. But the press never needed any help in constructing narratives of caricature that branded the weary protagonists for life. Even the Queen got caught up in the tabloid trope of catfights. Rarely do we know what Her Majesty thinks about a current prime minister, but British gossip columns feasted on the displeasure the Queen was supposed to harbor toward an increasingly regal Mrs. Thatcher. “We have become a grandmother,” declared Maggie to waiting reporters when her son Mark’s wife had a baby boy in March 1989. On another occasion, she made the much-lampooned comment “We are in the fortunate position in Britain of being, as it were, the senior person in power.”

Her Majesty was painted as unamused to be blown off the front page of The Times, no less, when Diana chose November 6, 1984, the day of the State Opening of Parliament, to experiment with a swept-back Vera Lynn coif held in place by combs. As Her Maj droned on about the Government’s legislative agenda—an agenda “almost devoid,” The Times wrote, of “any striking initiatives except in the municipal line,” all eyes were on the Princess of Wales—who was sitting below the throne to the Queen’s right—and her controversial updo. “How dare she make a fool of you like that?” an incensed Princess Margaret is alleged to have complained to the Queen.

Princess Anne’s aversion to personality press did not protect her, either, from getting written into the feline story line. Diana’s omission to invite her to be a godmother to Prince Harry was supposed to have peeved Anne so much she declined to attend the christening. A statement put out by the Palace said that the Princess Royal and her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, had a shooting party at Gatcombe Park and could not leave their guests. It “fooled no one,” writes James Whitaker in his book Diana v. Charles. “There was no love lost between the two women. They had little in common and Anne was irritated by Diana, the constant carry-on in the press about her clothes and her charm. When it was suggested to Diana that she might have Anne as a godmother for any daughter she might have, Diana retorted: ‘I just don’t like her. She may be wonderful doing all that charity work for Save the Children and others, but I can do it as well.’ Princess Anne responded by calling Diana ‘the Dope.’”

The scenarios of female conflict poured forth from both Royal Palaces like oil from a Carrington gusher. The same characters who for years had churned along with their low-boil royal lives were now seen in cartoon Technicolor for one reason only: the unforgiving spotlight following Diana, the glamour blonde whose presence was turning the Monarchy’s dull, unchanging rhythms into a year-round Sweeps season of vivid melodrama.

The themes were so persistent that even the members of the family themselves capitulated to tabloid characterization. Diana herself likened Kensington Palace to Coronation Street when newsman Jeremy Paxman lunched with her there in 1996. “As we go out you’ll see all the curtains twitching,” she told him. Ten years later, when Paxman joined a royal house party at Sandringham, he asked Prince Charles what he thought the function of monarchy was. The heir to the throne replied, “in a world weary way, ‘I think we’re a soap opera.’” He did not mention that the opening scene of the soap opera had been a fairy-tale wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

In the fall of 1985, a year after I moved from London to New York to become editor in chief of Vanity Fair, I wrote a cover story updating the American public on the status of the relationship between the Prince and Princess of Wales. Published on the eve of their first official visit to the White House and headlined “The Mouse That Roared,” the piece chronicled the full extent of the marital discord between Charles and Diana. It was hardly a scoop that all was not well with the couple, but the piece’s narrative of role reversal—the thesis being that the girl who’d been picked to be the Royal Mouse of Windsor had turned into a hellacious ballbreaker in the space of four years—lent it a certain novelty.

Arriving in London in the summer of 1985 to research the report, I had found that back-stairs gossip at Kensington Palace was reaching a crescendo. Forty members of the Waleses’ household had resigned, including Charles’s private secretary Edward Adeane, whose family had served the monarchy since Queen Victoria. Some of this was the inevitable staff fallout of a fusty bachelor finally getting a wife, some just the equally inevitable transition of the Princess’s journey from freedom to royal purdah. Diana’s clashes with two successive police protection officers, Paul Officer and David Robinson, fall into that category. Unlike Princess Anne, who’d put up with a police protection officer in her daily life ever since she was a child—and for whom Robinson went on to work most happily after his six-month bronco ride with the Princess of Wales—Diana wasn’t used to the presence of a detective shadowing her around when she slipped off to have lunch with a girlfriend or shopped surreptitiously for underwear in Marks and Spencer. Robinson, especially, was new to the job himself and hadn’t yet mastered the art of melting into the background. He was nonetheless devastated when he was summoned by the Queen’s Personal Protection Officer, Commander Michael Trestrail, and told without warning that “the chemistry didn’t work.” Other voluntary departures, including those of Diana’s private secretary Oliver Everett, yet another of the Prince’s valets, Ken Stronach, and the butler Alan Fisher, were further signs of trouble. A scary new picture of the golden ingenue was emerging from Palace circles. A variety of well-placed sources—the Queen Mother’s friend Woodrow Wyatt, the Queen’s cousin and celebrity photographer the Earl of Lichfield, a lady-in-waiting, a former private secretary—were eager to fill my ear, lending plenty of credence to the below-stairs tattle.

All of them in one way or another portrayed the Princess as a temperamental fantasist and press hog and Prince Charles as an increasingly sad-sack, eccentric figure racked by self-doubt and appalled by the megastardom of his wife. “She has banished all his old friends,” ran the summary of complaints I listed in Vanity Fair. “She has made him give up shooting. She throws slippers at him when she can’t get his attention. She spends all his money on clothes. She forces him to live on poached eggs and spinach. She keeps sacking his staff. The debonair Prince of Wales, His Royal Highness, Duke of Cornwall, heir to the throne, is, it seems, pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” The Princess, I reported, now spent hours in isolation dancing to Dire Straits and Wham! in her Sony Walkman while Charles talked to his plants and turned for solace to assorted gurus, quack philosophers, and spiritualist mediums through which he hoped to communicate with the spirit of his “Uncle Dickie” Mountbatten. His new wimpishness had led to more tension with his father. “When Prince Charles walks into a room,” I wrote, “Prince Philip walks out of it.”

Two days after “The Mouse That Roared” hit the newsstands, I was woken up in New York by the gravelly voice of a Daily Mail reporter called Rod. (All reporters at the Mail, it seemed, were called Rod at the time.) “Is that ’Urricane Tina?” said the voice, alluding to the advent of Hurricane Gloria, said to be on its way. “You’ve certainly caused a ruckus over here.”

The ruckus was all the tabloids in concert pretending that what I had written was a scandalous pack of lies in order to justify repeating every juicy detail. According to the Daily Mirror, I was “a rat bag of gossip” who had traduced the sanctity of the royal marriage—Now read on! The Daily Mail kept up the bashing for a week, climaxing—with its usual demonic creativity—in a parody written anonymously by the editor Sir David English himself. The spread was titled “How Would Tina and Harry’s Marriage Stand Up to the Vanity Fair Treatment?” It cast me as “the Joan Crawford of journalism” in big shoulder pads, barking orders at cowering underlings while my husband, “once known as the James Bond of journalism,” moped at home, a ghost of his former self, longing to return to England and the safe comfort of the House of Lords. In Tatler, my alma mater, the polemicist and wit Auberon Waugh teasingly speculated, in a piece headlined “Blue Wales,” that “The Mouse That Roared” was the revenge of the career woman (i.e., me) who had dreamed of becoming Princess of Wales herself on the shy girl with no O levels (i.e., Di) who had actually snagged the Prince.

If I harbored any doubts that my sources for “The Mouse That Roared” had got it right, they were dispelled when the Prince and Princess of Wales used the occasion of an ITV interview with Sir Alastair Burnet to refute it. The Palace usually only bothers to deny something that’s true. To go to the unusual step of having the Prince and Princess address the content of a story in person—even obliquely, without reference—meant the facts in it were probably only a glimmer of what more was there.

One point on which I had defended Diana in the piece turned out to be mistaken: I claimed the Princess was not, in fact, to blame for the unhappy departure of her private secretary Oliver Everett. I later learned she had in truth unfairly frozen him out. His crime was as follows: One day, after having been informed by the Princess that she could not meet with him because she was “going over to see the Queen,” Everett knocked and entered her rooms to leave papers to sign. The Princess turned out to be there after all, engaged in a desultory row with Prince Charles. After that, Everett found himself reduced by Diana to a “nonperson” and felt he had no course but to resign, a disappointing career move for a man who had been a rising star in the Foreign Office and given it up at the request of Prince Charles. I suspect the breakdown in relations occurred because the Princess had been caught out by Everett in a lie. Who else but Diana would use such an overstated excuse as an audience with the Queen to avoid dealing with a boring in-tray of official admin? Being caught heightened her sense that the brainy Everett was judging her all the time.

Diana’s frantic desire to be seen as nothing short of perfect was apparent in an especially inauthentic moment in the ITV interview, in preparation for which she had gone so far as to be coached by Sir Richard Attenborough. When Alastair Burnet asked Charles a question about whether as a couple they had arguments, the Prince replied, truthfully, “Most married couples do”—only for Diana to insist that no, never, they didn’t argue at all. Still, when Sir Roy Strong’s diaries, published in 1997, included an account of the state of play between Charles and Diana, written on May 24, 1984, it was almost identical in message to “The Mouse That Roared,” except this time quoted from the mouth of Diana’s neighbor at Kensington Palace, Princess Michael of Kent. Strong recorded how at a concert for the Prince’s Trust charity, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Princess Michael had launched into a confidential after-dinner salvo about what Strong summarized as “the catastrophe of the Princess of Wales: droves of the household were leaving, and then there was the terrible mother, Mrs. Shand Kydd, who was a baleful influence. Poor Prince Charles, who had bought Highgrove to be near his former girlfriends. Nothing was happy. Diana was hard. There was no pulling together, no common objectives, and it was misery for him. How long can it last? And Diana has become a media queen which only makes it worse…” Diana, she had concluded, was “a time bomb.”

Princess Michael was right about that. Diana’s tantrums, her bulimia, her whole crazy drama—it all feels today like a furious desire to repudiate not just her Windsor present but her Spencer past. All of it—the whole bill of goods she’d been sold as a female from the moment she’d been able to gaze up fetchingly at her father’s camera, the ladylike education that continually assured her that she was stupid, the generations of beauties gazing down from the picture gallery at Althorp telling her to be pleasing and powerless, the fraudulent fairy-tale wedding, the force feeding of mothball traditions and duplicitous double standards, all the women she didn’t want to be, her mother, her grandmother, her stepmother, her old blushing, gullible, romantic self—she wanted to vomit it all up, tear it apart, hurl it into a pit of fire. That’s what all the screaming and cutting and bingeing and starving was about. She would be her own Frankenstein’s monster, and nobody else’s.

Like most new identities forged in an inferno of suppressed emotion, Diana’s was at first exaggerated and unconvincing. She stopped dressing only to please and started dressing only for effect. Remember that Catherine Walker white suit with drum majorette gold frogging and asparagus-like epaulettes that she wore to meet King Fahd at Gatwick Airport? Or the gondola-sized, bottle-green Emanuel hat and matching coatdress, upholstered in loud check like a Scottish club chair, that appeared on her gaunt frame on the waterways of Venice? In the first half of the eighties, the times she got it wrong were as numerous as the times she got it right. She recognized it herself when the honed, streamlined nineties Diana cleaned out her wardrobe for the auction at Christie’s in New York and marveled at all the blunders she’d worn on her back. The curator of the show, Meredith Etherington-Smith, recalls Prince William commenting, “Mummy, that’s too awful to sell” when they added one especially over-the-top bugle-beaded number to the pricey inventory of glittering duds.

The Dynasty Di construct reflected the exact opposite of Diana’s self-view at the time. The more emphatic the clothes got, the more she was searching for inner definition. All she knew was that the Grand Sloane act had to go. It just encouraged acts of repression from a royal machine that took her comme il faut outfits to mean capitulation.

It wasn’t such unreasonable paranoia. Diana was watched and informed on constantly by the old guard at Buckingham Palace. Patsy Puttnam remembers a dinner in 1984 that she and her husband, the film producer David Puttnam, attended with Diana and Charles at the London home of Lord Waldegrave and his wife, Caroline. Just as the royal couple were leaving, Waldegrave’s sister, Lady Susan Hussey, the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, called to check with her brother on “how it had gone”—an obvious code, Patsy sensed, for “how the Princess had behaved,” which clearly flustered Diana. “She hated Susan Hussey,” said Patsy. “She knew she was all about the crowd that was trying to control her. They couldn’t even wait till the two of them were out the door. The network needs to know tonight. I would die under that sort of circus.” In fact, it was Charles’s bad behavior, not Diana’s, that made an impression on the Puttnams that night. While Diana was solicitous and affectionate toward the Prince, he was openly dismissive toward her. “He behaved as if she was an irritant,” said Patsy. “He would have liked her to be invisible, and she knew it.”

It is worth noting that Camilla Parker Bowles, twice Diana’s age and sophistication when she married Prince Charles in 2005, has sensed similar dismissiveness from the Prince’s overhauled coterie since she graduated from mistress to Duchess of Cornwall, wife of the Prince of Wales. Richard Kay’s report in the Daily Mail in October 2006 on the eve of Charles and Camilla’s state visit to Pakistan reads like such a reprise of Diana in the eighties, you can almost hear the theme music of Wham! come up from Diana’s Sony Walkman.

“When Charles first brought Camilla home as his wife, the staff couldn’t do enough for her, falling over themselves in their unctuous bowing and scraping,” reported Kay. “The phrase ‘Camilla wants’ became an incantation as members of the household strained and sweated to respond to the Duchess’s every whim.” (Note: At the Palace, men have wishes. Women, except for one, have whims.)

“To their surprise, they found the easy-going countrywoman to be ‘quite sharp and demanding,’ and her liberal use of the phrase ‘I need’ had similar magical properties to rubbing a magic lamp—things were done and problems solved with astonishing speed.” Now, says Kay, the un-thought-out nature of Camilla’s role in public life, combined with the Palace’s determination not in any way to diminish the spotlight on the Prince of Wales as he closes in on the British throne, leaves Camilla feeling “increasingly isolated.” “She feels a general air of disapproval hangs over her,” one of Camilla’s friends tells Kay. “It’s a very uncomfortable position for her to be in, and she doesn’t know the way out of it.” Kay concludes that the overarching strategy is that nothing and no one should ever again be allowed to overshadow the Prince of Wales, “and if this means keeping Camilla down, then so be it.”

In the light of the Duchess’s experience, perhaps Diana’s turbulent rejection of numerous members of her own and her husband’s staff looks less like tantrum and more like self-preservation. She sensed, correctly, that their loyalty was not to her but to the system. In May of 1983, an anonymous courtier told the Daily Mirror: “The problem is it appears that Diana does not appreciate that the slightest alteration in her schedules involves an immense upheaval for those who have to accommodate the new arrangements. After a particular plan has been drawn up, Diana will pop her head round the door and announce at the last minute that she would rather prefer to add a walk-about to the program or visit a kindergarten or whatever. As delightful as such ‘whims’ [that word again] are, they create a nightmare for those who serve her. A small demand could involve massive, heart-thumping mayhem, with courtiers scurrying hither and thither like Sandringham chickens with their heads chopped off.”

What else, one might ask, did the headless chickens have to do that was so pressing? Diana’s desire to rescue a marmoreal royal trudge through some comatose British institution with a more spontaneous act of human flair is the thing that made her visitations such a triumph. Plus, her understanding of the emotional dimension of Charles’s commitments often made more of a difference to how the Prince was received than any amount of briefing and planning. Diana instinctively seemed to know that the only power royalty has left is the power to disappoint, and she never did, either with her physical presence or in her responsiveness to human detail. While the Prince’s correspondence piled up for weeks, her thoughtful thank-you letters were not just round the next day to her host, they were often written the same night and delivered before breakfast the next morning. The evening of the Waldegrave dinner, Lady Puttnam remembers, the Prince and Princess had been committed by Charles to go on to see an art exhibit at a gallery and it was getting late. “Diana was concerned,” she said, “because the host was holding the gallery open for them and they were keeping them waiting, something he didn’t seem to care about at all.” Had their marriage worked, Diana could have been as politically useful to Charles as Nancy was to Ronald Reagan. Diana had a shrewd instinct for detecting the freeloaders, charlatans, and sycophants for whom her husband had a fatal susceptibility. “She used to say, ‘Why are we having these people to dinner?’” a member of the Prince’s staff told Anthony Holden. “She knew they had ulterior motives for sucking up, like being asked to shoot at Sandringham.” The Prince’s three mentors Earl Mountbatten, Laurens van der Post, and Armand Hammer had more than a whiff of fraudulence about each of them. Hammer, whom Charles tried to foist on Diana as a godfather to William (she rejected him as a “rather reptilian old man”), turned out to be an outright crook whose money came from a slush fund established to pay bribes to the corrupt middlemen who had arranged his company’s oil concession in Libya. He was also accused by investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein of being “a KGB stooge” who had “long provided a convenient conduit for the laundering of Kremlin funds used to finance Soviet espionage activities.” Since the Prince had been told all his life he was brilliant, it was hard for him to discern or admit it when he’d been taken for a ride.

This worrying trait was one of the tensions that underlay the departure of Edward Adeane. Diana’s opposition to him as private secretary only accelerated what was an inevitable parting of the ways between Prince and royal servant. In Adeane’s eyes, Charles, since his marriage, was changing as alarmingly as Diana was. In fact, in his own way the Prince was acting out as surely as if he, too, was wearing an outsize emerald green Emanuel hat. The more attention his wife received, the more Charles sought attention for his ideas. Adeane, a barrister by profession, who’d been Charles’s private secretary for six years, saw his role as guiding the Prince toward kingship. He was known to be appalled by Charles’s increasingly controversial causes and serial public outbursts. Indeed, some of the Prince’s choices of forums at which to sound off were either inspired or insane, depending on how you looked at it. Charles denounced modern architecture in general and a proposed steel-and-glass addition to the National Gallery in particular (he called it a “monstrous carbuncle”) at a dinner honoring architects. He inveighed against the evils of a technological approach to medicine when he was a guest of the professional body epitomizing that approach, the British Medical Association. He delivered a radical assault on conventional farming methods to a large conference of conservative farmers at the Royal Agricultural College. Then there was the little matter of the Prince’s desire, on his visit to Rome with Diana in April of 1985, to take communion with the Pope—an act which, had the Queen not intervened, would have violated the 1701 Act of Settlement, creating the unfortunate side effect of depriving the Windsors of their legal hold on the throne.

As noted, Adeane made it clear he was deeply opposed to the “excessive” amount of time Charles now devoted to his children instead of to his princely duties, an issue on which Diana immediately had taken a stand. In fact, you could argue that all the things Adeane disapproved of were Charles’s most redeeming features: his obsession with global warming, his “hokey” fascination with alternative medicine, his interfaith initiatives, his most unroyal desire to be with his young sons. It turns out the issues the Prince was mocked for in the eighties and nineties are not just relevant but cutting-edge. “The degree of misunderstanding between the Islamic and Western worlds remains dangerously high,” he told a yawning audience in 1993, “the need for the two to live and work together in our increasingly interdependent world has never been greater.” It seems he even had some clever business ideas. The “half-baked” concept everyone laughed at of creating a Duchy Originals line of organic foods at Highgrove raked in a million pounds ($1.78 million) for his charities in 2005. In his muddly, Eeyoreish way, Charles had come up with his own version of a project as novel as Paul Newman’s salad dressing. Talking to plants no longer looks so wacky either. Four percent of British farmland, following his Highgrove lead, has gone organic in recent years. In 2006, the new Tory party leader, David Cameron, touted his green credentials by proposing to put a wind turbine and solar panels on the roof of his west London home. Prince Charles was way ahead of him, having installed eco-friendly insulation at Highgrove long before.

It was just bad luck for the Prince that while Diana’s personal transformation synchronized perfectly with the zeitgeist, Charles’s generation has never recognized him as its own—not because of what he does or what he thinks but how he seems. Who else but Prince Charles, at the age of thirty-six, would wear a navy blue suit while accompanying Diana to the July 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium and refer to it afterward as “some pop concert jamboree my wife made me go to”? It’s not his fault that the body language bequeathed to him by his bizarre Edwardian upbringing was a vanishing tribal semiotic that modern Britain had almost lost the ability to decode. Diana, who was supposed to be so much in love with him, couldn’t see past it either, so buried under the Windsor training and veneer was the Prince’s own struggle for identity.

Instead, Charles’s work, his “hobbyhorses,” and his country pursuits were another wedge between them when they should have been the glue. Diana, unlike Camilla, was not practiced enough to flatter Charles as a man of ideas. (On the notorious Camillagate tape of 1989, the Prince’s mistress shows what an old hand she is at the seduction game by begging, no, really, begging Charles to send her a copy of his latest riveting speech.) Nor was Diana able to keep up with him in “grown-up” discussions. Andrew Neil, then editor of the Sunday Times, noted the intellectual disparity between the royal couple when he lunched with the two of them at Kensington Palace in 1984. “Charles roamed far and wide on the issues of the day,” recalled Neil. “He was particularly keen that Britain’s armed forces developed a rapid reaction out-of-NATO-area capability to respond to threats to our interest outside Europe, a sensible view with which I concurred. Diana played little part in the conversation, talked about a rock concert she had been to the night before and piped up when President Reagan’s imminent visit to London was mentioned. She said Reagan was ‘Horlicks’—apparently a Sloane Ranger expression for boring old fart—and claimed Nancy Reagan was only coming so she could have her photograph taken with the royal couple and the children. She was determined not to oblige the First Lady. She seemed to have the typical English upper-class distaste for supposedly vulgar Americans. Charles made no attempt to involve her.”

Diana had keen emotional intelligence, but her lack of education meant she struggled with the framework of public affairs. Nor did she grasp what underpinned the things that other people understood as their work. How could she? She had no experience of it. No men in her family did, and the women were not expected to. She married virtually right out of school. Until her travels as a princess over the years exposed her to other cultures, she was hopelessly class-bound and local. Her own star power made her underrate process. Her presence alone obviated the necessity for content, something that was not true for her husband, who toiled for hours in his study on the speeches that were such a source of comic relief to the press. For her own public utterances, Diana often tapped clever friends like Dr. James Colthurst to come up with good lines or ventriloquize bright responses for visiting dignitaries rather than trek through briefing papers from her private secretary. “I’m sitting next to Mitterrand at lunch in fifteen minutes,” she would tell Colthurst. “Quick! Give me something to say.” She knew her poise and beauty meant she could fake her way through. She saw Charles’s earnest efforts to be “substantive” mostly as a good visual foil to her own ability to dazzle.

On their tour of Italy together Diana, even with her repertoire of unfortunate hats, was so beguiling she had the Italians eating out of her hand. When Charles told her to mind her head under an arch in the garden of the famous aesthete Sir Harold Acton, she responded prettily, “Why? There’s nothing in it.” In Rome, she was mobbed like a rock star. A former private secretary on the British embassy staff told Nigel Dempster, “It was a huge success but not necessarily for Charles. He wore the horns. He was, as Florentines so delicately put, it il vecchio cornuto—the old cuckold. He was seriously boring. It corresponded exactly to the age-old Italian fantasy—old, rich, impotent husband…Beautiful young wife…They loved the way she would slip her shoes off beneath a restaurant table. They pitied the way he had to roll up his spaghetti with the help of a spoon.”

“We’d have been such a great team,” Diana said to me regretfully about her ex-husband in New York in 1997. But a team in Diana’s terms meant one that acknowledged something that would always be unacceptable to the Heir to the Throne: that the starring role was hers. She no more understood why Charles valued the earnest audiences he provided to architects, philosophers, and environmentalists than she could later see why cardiologist Hasnat Khan spent such an unreasonable amount of time at the hospital. “I just don’t get him,” she told her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima about Khan on a phone call in 1997. “He’s always so busy and his work is so important to him. I keep telling him he doesn’t need to work at the hospital. We would make a great team. We could do my work together. But he doesn’t want to know.”

All divas eventually subjugate the world around them to support the qualities and conditions that allow them to shine. Charles may have read more, but Diana was a swift, decisive executive in her own cause, as clear in what she wanted as Charles was confused. Her ballet dancer friend Wayne Sleep says he thinks Diana could have been an editor or a director, so clear was she on visual details that did or did not work. She was a director in a sense, of her own mise-en-scène. Even Edward Adeane was impressed by the speed with which she cleared her desk, compared to her husband, whose executive style one aide likened to “nailing jelly to a wall.” Only a year after her ditzy comments at lunch with Andrew Neil, she sat next to the former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead at a National Gallery dinner in Washington and impressed him with her incisive questions about the American political system and the structure of Congress. She was a work in progress, while Charles was a work in aspic—that’s how she saw it, anyway. Where the Prince of Wales had once cut such a dashing, accomplished figure in her eyes, she now considered most of Charles’s public commitments, his dull, interminable round of seasonal royal rituals and treks to cheer on efforts of industry, philanthropy, and commerce—what he termed on the eve of their wedding his “dashing abite”—as “a waste of space,” to use another Diana term. After all, wasn’t it she everyone wanted to see? Bruce Oldfield records a touching moment of marital disconnect when he went to fit Diana for one of her backless showstopping dresses in her sitting room at Kensington Palace and Charles interrupted the fitting bearing a catalogue from the Tate Gallery exhibit of George Stubbs paintings. The Prince pointed at the image of a Duchess astride a horse and asked Oldfield hopefully: “Do you think my wife would look good in something like that?” “A full seventeenth century riding outfit?” thought Oldfield. “It wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind.”

Stephen Fry, who was and is a friend of Charles, sensed in Diana what he calls “an instinct of recruitment.” She knew how to draw the people it was expedient to charm to her side of the aisle. Dread of this subtle guerrilla warfare of his wife’s became Prince Charles’s own special paranoia. While Diana saw his staff as oppositional, the Prince saw his staff as slowly but surely falling under her spell as well. It was too much to bear. According to one of them, he exploded with such vehemence about it at Michael Colborne on the tour of Canada in June of 1983 that it led, after nine happy years of service, to his personal secretary’s resignation in 1984. Colborne’s mistake had been to respond to Diana’s request to join her on the quarterdeck of Britannia to advise her about upcoming events. When Charles returned from an engagement and found them in an animated planning session, he asked Colborne to step into the cabin normally used by the Duke of Edinburgh for a “private word.” He proceeded to go ballistic: “I hired you away from the Navy. You owe your loyalty to me!” His Royal Highness yelled. When Colborne emerged severely rattled from the cabin, he found Diana outside, where she’d been listening at the door, sobbing.

It was futile, of course, for Charles to declare war on his wife’s powers of seduction. It was an area where he could only meet with defeat. You could interpret Charles’s resistance to Diana in the bedroom (once every three weeks, she told her voice coach Peter Settelen, was about as often as he sought her out) as a necessary act of self-definition, a line in the sand against the one seduction his wife could not achieve.

“Somehow we had Harry,” Diana told Andrew Morton. Jasper Conran, who made many of her clothes during her second pregnancy, says it was clear she was striving hard to be a turn-on for her husband, eager for Conran to design outfits that would show off her fuller cleavage. “She wanted to be sexy during her maternity,” he says. “There is no doubt in my mind that she was madly in love with her husband and wanted to please him until after Harry was born.” Diana herself told Andrew Morton that the last six weeks before Harry’s birth were some of the closest times in her marriage but that their relationship effectively died as soon as the baby was born. Conran observed that after the pregnancy Diana would often be weepy in her fittings. “I didn’t ask her what was the matter,” he says. “With royalty you don’t intrude. Her hormones were racing, coupled with her uncertainty and she felt such immense pressure from the outside world. I’d sit her down and give her a cup of tea. One assumed that her family was helping her. She was really deeply alone.”

Diana claimed to Morton that it was her husband’s obvious disappointment that she had given birth to a second boy, rather than the girl that he wanted, that plunged their marriage deeper into crisis. “He’s even got red hair!” Charles is said by Diana to have cried in a hurtful voice of alarm when Harry emerged after nine hours of labor at St. Mary’s, Paddington. If he did, it seems an unlikely source of incapacitating marital grievance. Charles could not have been that surprised to find that his son, in British toff parlance, was a “ginge.” Most of the Spencers were, including Diana’s eldest sister, Sarah, and half the ancestors on the walls of Althorp, preeminently the so-called Red Earl (1835–1910), with his resplendent orange beard. Charles’s sharp exclamation about Harry’s coloring seems no more than the kind of fascinated sense of otherness many parents feel when a baby only imagined for nine months suddenly appears in all its amazing refusal to conform. Diana’s obsession with being perfect may well have made her misread her husband’s reaction. The Windsors had had an uncanny knack of producing first a boy then a girl. Diana was so reluctant to be different that, even though she knew after her amniocentesis test in 1984 that she was carrying a boy, she had failed to share that information with her husband.

Two Diana biographers, Anthony Holden and James Whitaker, both allege that it was the reemergence of Camilla that was to blame for the breakdown. They say that by 1983, the year before Harry’s birth, Charles had gone back to his mistress physically as well as emotionally, and that Diana knew it. I accept this view, and I accept it in spite of—no, because of—the insistent testimony of Charles’s friends and his official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby that the affair didn’t recommence until three years later, in November 1986. The repeated assertion feels like talking points provided by St. James’s Palace. How can they or anyone claim to know the secrets of the bedroom with such vehement certainty? It’s logical to conclude that they are repeating what they must have been told by the two people who shared a strong interest in looking as decorous as possible: Charles and Camilla. Gyles Brandreth, the Prince’s more recent apologist, goes so far as to introduce a new reason why The Date was 1986 or after: the sight of Diana dancing provocatively with her old boyfriend Philip Dunne at the wedding of Tracy Ward to the Marquess of Worcester in June 1987. According to Brandreth, Charles, seeing this, decided that Diana was probably pursuing extramarital affairs herself. But this version overlooks the provocative fact that Charles had already spent half the night dancing first with his former lover Anna Wallace and then with Camilla herself.

There is other evidence, swept aside in the cleaned-up version, that the affair with Camilla resumed earlier than 1986. When Diana was in London, Charles would join Camilla at the Beaufort Hunt, with all its opportunities for dusk assignations. A member of Highgrove’s household told Anthony Holden that one weekend in November 1983 Diana pressed the recall button in Charles’s study and it connected to Camilla. They had a “monumental” row in front of the staff—Diana in tears; Charles striding off. Diana herself told Andrew Morton she saw many more concrete signs of marital subterfuge: “Nocturnal telephone calls, unexplained absences and small but significant changes in his usual routine.” Marie Helvin, who began dating Camilla’s brother Mark Shand in 1983 and often stayed with the Parker Bowleses at weekends, had the strong sense that Camilla was always in Prince Charles’s life. “There was a hint that [the ongoing relationship] was always there,” she told me. “My feeling was that they were always together.” The testimony of Stuart Higgins, the editor of The Sun (1994–1998), who had formed a friendly relationship with Camilla when he was The Sun’s royal reporter, suggests the same conclusion. Higgins told one of Diana’s biographers, Sally Bedell Smith, that from 1982 to 1992 Camilla briefed him about once a week on background about all that was going on in the Charles/Diana relationship. “I never sensed that she was out of contact,” Higgins said, “though I definitely believe there was a cessation in the relationship and that Charles put an effort into the marriage. Our relationship was two ways…she [Camilla] was really trying to gauge whether the press was on to her [and Charles] so it was a question of her keeping in touch too.” Since making those remarks, Higgins has gone silent. He says he now prefers not to discuss those habitual phone calls with Camilla, citing as his reason that he “continues to work on projects for the Duchess of Cornwall.”

At a loss to win Prince Charles’s attention after the birth of Harry, Diana tried to dance his way into his heart. In private, she would put on sexy lingerie and low music and attempt to tantalize him with a striptease he is said to have only “mildly enjoyed.” And, in December of 1985, she made a painful public attempt to woo him.

The occasion was a performance for the Friends of Covent Garden, a VIP evening of skits and entertainment the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden puts on every year for special patrons. Ballet dancers sing, singers appear in tutus, and there’s often a surprise turn from a guest celebrity. Though a Royal often shows up in the audience, no one that year was expecting the Princess of Wales. But for weeks, in secret, Diana rehearsed with the diminutive ballet star Wayne Sleep, devising and preparing a dance routine. Two numbers before the end of the show, she slipped from the Royal Box, where she was seated with Charles. Minutes later, to his—and the audience’s—utter astonishment, she emerged before the footlights to the rocking sounds of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” wrapped in slinky white satin and dancing a lithe pas de deux with Sleep. “I was worried she’d fall apart under the spotlight,” Sleep says now. “But she totally carried it off. Not many people could handle being under such scrutiny in front of an insiderly audience on that huge Covent Garden stage. She showed natural star quality.” Diana received a standing ovation and eight curtain calls—except from her husband. She had played all her moves to Charles up in the Royal Box. But afterward, when she and Sleep joined the Prince for a small reception, he behaved coolly, even distantly. It was embarrassingly clear that he had not been ravished by the spectacle of his wife en pointe. His disappointing response, when it leaked, was interpreted as frigid disapproval of Diana’s lapse in royal etiquette. She was, after all, the future Queen. Sleep, however, believes that what actually irritated the Prince was that he had been left out. The previous year, at the same occasion, Charles and Diana had performed a skit together—as Romeo and Juliet, in which the Prince’s role was to sing the ad jingle “Just One Cornetto.” But this year, Diana had chosen to appear without him. It made him uneasy. “It was her first sign of independence and the Palace got worried. I think they thought she was going to be the dumb blonde, and suddenly this thing started to grow,” Sleep said.

If Diana felt emboldened to an act of such sexy exhibitionism, it was because she had experienced seismic acclaim for another high-octane dance. A month earlier—on the evening of November 9, 1985—le tout Washington had been mesmerized by her whirl across the East Room of the White House in the arms of the movie star and disco dance icon John Travolta. For the Reagans and Diana alike, it was a moment of what investors of that go-go era called synergy.

The finest face-lifts from Bel Air and Georgetown floated above the pouffiest frocks from Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Dior to rattle their rocks in honor of the Prince and (really) the Princess of Wales. Diana alighted from a silver Rolls-Royce in a midnight blue velvet Victor Edelstein number with long dark blue gloves and demurely dazzling pearl-and-sapphire choker.

The Russian ballet star and choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was to be seated next to the Princess at dinner, was walking with a cane as he advanced along the receiving line to where Diana stood with Prince Charles next to the President and Mrs. Reagan. “You’re a lucky man,” Prince Charles told him with practiced urbanity. “My wife has requested that you sit next to her tonight. She loves to make me jealous.” Baryshnikov warned the Princess that, sadly, an injury to his ankle meant he could not ask her to dance. “My loss,” she blushed. He was struck by “the extraordinary transparency of the Princess’s skin against the tight blue dress, the deep blue eyes, so much more beautiful than any photographs or TV.” John Travolta, also in line, thought Diana looked ten feet tall. “She was so charismatic and full of presence, like a movie star,” the movie star recalled to me.

Travolta had no idea he was going to end up with top billing that night. At the time, his career was idling. Two years had passed since his last big moneymaker, Staying Alive, and the movie that would put him back on top, Pulp Fiction, was still nine years in the future. The marquee Hollywood guest at the White House was not the second-magnitude star of the now-antique hit Saturday Night Fever but Clint Eastwood, who was soaking up Oscar buzz for his role as the somber Preacher in Pale Rider. As Travolta donned his new Armani dinner jacket before the party, he mused to himself, “Wow, I’m lucky to be asked! I may not be hot, but I’m not forgotten!”

When he reached Diana in the receiving line, she asked him sweetly about the bigger star. “Have you seen Mr. Eastwood tonight?” “No, I haven’t,” he replied. “You do suppose he will be here?” she said. “Oh, yes,” Travolta said. “Of course,” Diana said, smiling. “Where else would he be?”

“I thought that was pretty clever and pretty neat,” Travolta told me two decades later. “I thought, She not only knows who she is, she knows what this is—and how big this is. She was so savvy about the media impact of it all.”

For the dinner of eighty guests, Diana was seated, as promised, between the President and the ballet legend. She established immediate intimacy with Baryshnikov by telling him about her children (“from the heart,” the dancer recalled), showing him pictures of William and Harry, and asking him about his own family. “She talked to me as if I were her girlfriend. She could create complicity straight away.” She giggled at the Californian kitsch of a white chocolate cookie with her profile stamped on it and asked him to point out who was who in “such a lovely mischievous way.” Paul Burrell has reported that Baryshnikov asked for Diana’s autograph, but that is not what happened. “No, I asked her if I could keep her place card as a souvenir,” the dancer told me. “She looked at me sideways, placed her finger to her lips, and said, ‘Only if I can keep yours.’”

Prince Charles’s dinner partners were the First Lady and the opera singer Beverly Sills. “I asked Nancy how I got so lucky,” Sills recalled, “and she said, ‘Because he loves opera—and you’re the only person in this room who knows anything about it.’” “Sadly, there were no lovely actresses or singers,” Charles wrote in his diary the next day. “I had been rather hoping that Diana Ross would be there.”

About 9 P.M., right before the entrée, John Travolta, seated at another table, was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder from the First Lady. “She said, ‘Look, there’s only one wish that the Princess has,’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘That’s to dance with you.’ I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Well, would you do the honors?’ Mrs. Reagan said. ‘Yes, where, how, when?’ I asked. She said, ‘Around midnight. I will tap you on the shoulder and tell you it’s time.’ It was clearly planned. I knew it would be an attention-grabbing moment, and I had three hours to sweat.”

Travolta relived for me what happened next. “I try to recall Diana dancing with Charles. I’m six feet tall. I think with heels she’s probably my height. Tall woman, and slender—so the illusion is tall. I go back in my mind to my formal ballroom-dancing school days . Put hand in middle of back so you can guide her. I’m remembering all the tricks. Whatever you do, let her know you’re in control. The tap tap on the shoulder comes. My heart starts to race. Nancy takes me over. Princess not facing me, she’s facing toward the president. I tap her on the shoulder and I say, ‘Would you care to dance?’ Her head dips in the famous dip, she blushes a little and says, ‘Of course. I would love to.’ As soon as we get out there, the whole place clears for our encounter. I think I hear songs from ‘Grease’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ I want it to go off well and show her I am in control and she doesn’t need to worry and knows I’ll lead. I bring her hand from a higher position and gracefully position it lower so she knows I can run the dance. No talking. Talking during a dance is difficult when seventy-five people are watching you. And I look her in the eyes and reassure her with my eyes, to say, ‘We’re ok.’ We probably only dance ten minutes but it feels like twenty.”

Travolta said that up close he could feel how seductive Diana was. “Absolutely I found her sexy, yes. People are either innately sexual or sensual or not. She had both. She was aware of me and I was aware of her. I didn’t know anyone was taking pictures, to be honest—but I did know it had to look like a million dollars, because it was history being made. And it was my job to make it look as good as if it was in a movie.”

All the guests I spoke to about that night sensed they were participating in an iconic moment. Washington was and is a dowdy town, a center of power but not of fashion. The wives of heads of states trundle squatly through in their Lurex Escada knits. Among the “cave dwellers” of Georgetown, the reigning bottle blondes from the network news bureaus are what pass for heat. The imported A-listers, Blisters, and “Hollywood Squares” C-listers from the Reagans’ Bel Air and Park Avenue circles added glitz but not tone. Diana’s combination of beauty, refinement, and youth made her exactly the corrective the Reagans needed. The glow she lent their little dinner-dance made up for roomfuls of Nancy’s usual gnarled, air-kissing, lunch-lady friends and fussy walkers. (“She was a baby,” marveled Beverly Sills. “That’s what we were all thinking. Her skin was like peaches and cream.”) Baryshnikov was struck by the vision of Diana on the dance floor, “so radiant and fresh, and John, so very dashing, this great American symbol of popular culture, and the White House Marines in their dress uniforms looking on.”

So what if Paul Burrell tells us now it was Baryshnikov himself whom Diana was really hoping to dance with that night? (“It was probably as well it was Travolta, not me, out there,” says the five-foot-seven-inch Baryshnikov. “My nose would have been round about at her bosom.”) So what if at the next morning’s reception at the British Embassy Christopher Hitchens saw the Princess looking “pale and ill” and the couple descending the stairs as if they’d just had “a really, nasty, bitter, pointless row”? The language of gesture is more powerful than any murky subtext. There was a Hollywood dimension now to Diana’s glittering fable of the shy girl who married a dashing prince.

“You could feel the awe in the moment from people in the audience,” Travolta insists. “It was dense with life, filled with life, and you’d have had to have been dead not to feel the joy around it. You had the sense that she’d seen ‘Grease’ or ‘Saturday Night Fever’ as a teenager. Clearly a Princess’s dream of a big magnitude that you could feel. She was a young woman watching those movies, she wasn’t a Princess back then, and now even a Princess’s dreams can come true. You got it—all you had to do was see the picture the next day and you got it. At the end she curtsied, and I bowed, and—well, I guess I turned back into a pumpkin.”