Diana in Search of Herself (13 page)

On February 18, 1978, the
Daily Mail
and
The Sun
published Sarah’s comments about her relationship with Charles, along with a brief reference to her history of anorexia. “
This is the first time one of Charles’s girlfriends has talked publicly and frankly about her relationship with the Prince,” Nelson wrote in the
Mail
. The
News of the World
was positively gleeful the next day, proclaiming, “
What a girl! Prince Charles will be lucky indeed if he finds one to match her for candor, charm and common sense.”

Yet it wasn’t until more than a month later that Sarah got into serious trouble for her indiscretion. Whitaker wrote a longer article based on the interview for the widely read
Woman’s Own
magazine, under the byline Jeremy Slazenger,
one of his six pseudonyms. (A gossip columnist in the
Daily Express
later described Whitaker as a “
panicky perspiring figure who begs me not to reveal his true identity.”) Whitaker, as Slazenger, recycled Sarah’s comments about Prince Charles, along with her descriptions of her drinking and expulsion from boarding school, a detailed account of her battle with anorexia, and her claim to have had “
thousands of boyfriends.” According to Whitaker, Sarah told him that when she called Charles to alert him to the article, he remarked, “
You’ve just done something extremely stupid.” Sarah frantically tried to backpedal, telling the
Daily Mail
that her comments were obtained “
by foul means,” perhaps forgetting that a shortened version had already appeared in two tabloids, including the
Mail
. “
My sister Sarah spoke to the press,” Diana later told Mary Robertson, her employer in London, “and frankly … that was the end of her.”

Nevertheless, Diana seemed intrigued by Sarah’s brush with fame. When James Whitaker showed up to cover her sister Jane’s wedding in April 1978 at the Guard’s Chapel in London, Diana recognized the tabloid reporter and approached him. “
I know who you are, you’re the wicked Mr. Whitaker,” she said. “Who are you?” Whitaker asked. “I’m Sarah’s baby sister,” Diana replied. “I know all about you.”

Chapter 6

S
arah Spencer was correct when she said Prince Charles was “not ready for marriage yet.” “
He was a complete bachelor,” said Michael Colborne, who worked as an aide to Charles from 1975 to 1985. “I think if he hadn’t had the pressure to produce an heir to the throne, he might not have married.”

Nevertheless, Charles’s romantic entanglements had become a tabloid press preoccupation as the young prince approached his thirtieth birthday in November 1978—a benchmark he had rashly set for himself during an interview with
Woman’s Own
magazine in February 1975. “
I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls,” Charles had said, “but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with.… I personally feel that a good age for a man to get married is around 30.”

With those jaunty words, Charles inadvertently issued a challenge to the tabloid hacks, who had already been amusing themselves with reports on the dashing young naval officer—an “action man” who parachuted out of airplanes, flew jets, skied, surfed, and played polo.
By pushing himself to the limit physically, Charles was showing the world that he was a made of stronger stuff than anyone might have anticipated a decade earlier.

As a young boy born in the first years of the postwar baby boom, Charles had been strikingly timid, with a sensitive, easily wounded nature. Like most of his aristocratic contemporaries, he had been cared for largely by servants, and his relationship with his parents had been highly ritualized: half-hour sessions with his mother in the mornings, ninety-minute intervals in the evenings. Even in her days as Princess Elizabeth, his mother had been diverted by the burden of her public duties, and when she became Queen at twenty-five, she grew even more distant.

Neither parent was emotionally demonstrative, and both were often away on official tours during Charles’s birthdays and holidays. According to his official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, they both had a “
deep if inarticulate love for their son,” yet their way of life prevented them from sharing much of it with Charles. His father was an intelligent, robust character who utterly lacked the sensitivity required to motivate a diffident boy. Philip viewed Charles’s manner as weak, and in his irritation mocked and criticized the boy, often unfairly. Charles reacted by withdrawing further into his shell, while his mother declined to intervene. Explained Dimbleby, “
she was not indifferent so much as detached, deciding that in domestic matters she would submit entirely to the father’s will.”

Charles found emotional solace from two women: his nanny, Mabel Anderson, and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Anderson was a constant presence from Charles’s infancy, providing physical affection and moral support—the very sort of “surrogate mother” Diana Spencer could have used. During his parents’ prolonged absences, Charles also spent a great deal of time with his grandmother, who cuddled him, regaled him with stories, and nurtured his interest in art and music. His connection with the Queen Mother was “
the most intimate of the Prince’s relationships within the family … for him a vital source of praise and encouragement,” wrote Dimbleby.

From his earliest years, Charles’s education groomed him to inherit the throne from his mother. He had a governess until age five, when he was sent to Hill House, a London private school, in an effort to expose him to everyday life outside the royal cloister. Like Diana, he was an indifferent student. At age nine, he went to Cheam, a boarding school in Berkshire, where his father had done well. Charles felt lost, but managed to hide his unhappiness. Although he emerged as a school leader by the end of his five years at Cheam, he had little enthusiasm for the place.

When Charles turned thirteen, his father marched him into another alma mater, Gordonstoun in Scotland, which prided itself on instilling physical and mental toughness—just the thing to bring out a reticent boy, in Prince Philip’s view. The Queen Mother had wanted her grandson to attend Eton instead. Located in the shadow of Windsor Castle, Eton would have offered Charles the camaraderie of boys more like himself, but Philip’s preference prevailed.

The rigors of Gordonstoun’s infamous cold showers, early morning runs, and mandatory dress code of shorts year-round seemed of dubious value. Yet in theory, the school’s egalitarian ethos and the diversity of its student body offered a sensible way to broaden the horizons of a privileged royal prince. In practice, the culture of humiliation among the boys—cruel
taunts and gratuitous punches, organized gangs of older bullies who preyed on younger students—proved harrowing for Charles. Because of his position, Charles felt the brunt of this malicious treatment. “
I simply dread going to bed as I get hit all night long,” he wrote in one letter.

A loner by nature, Charles became even more so at Gordonstoun. “
I’m not a gregarious person,” Charles later said. “I have always preferred my own company or just a one-to-one.” Yet Charles did well academically, passing five O levels. Thanks to several gifted teachers, he gained confidence as an artist by learning pottery, and as an actor by playing the lead in
Macbeth
. He also learned the cello, prompting his grandmother’s best friend Ruth Fermoy to pronounce him a “
sensitive musician”—a judgment she declined to bestow on her granddaughter Diana’s piano-playing. Nevertheless, Charles remained afflicted by low self-esteem, which was only intensified by his hazing at Gordonstoun and his parents’ inability to applaud his achievements.

Prince Philip posed one more character-building challenge after Charles turned seventeen: a sabbatical in the Australian outback at a school called Timbertop. Charles was reluctant at first. When he left, he told his grandmother that he would wear two watches. “I have one set to Australian time and the other to English time,” he said, “so I can think about what you are doing at all times.” As at Gordonstoun, the emphasis at Timbertop was on fostering initiative and self-reliance, and this time the lessons stuck. Charles thrived on learning to prepare meals, cutting down trees for fuel, and hiking in the wilderness.

He also made some friends and found what Dimbleby called a “
surrogate elder brother” in his father’s equerry, David Checketts, who served as an aide to the young prince. Charles spent weekends with Checketts, his wife, and three children. It was the Prince’s first exposure to real family life, and he could relax in the informality of the Checketts household. In Australia, Charles was able “
to find himself—free of Gordonstoun, away from his parents, away from the British press, away from the suffocating certainties of royal life,” wrote Dimbleby.

The experience made Charles’s last year at Gordonstoun more bearable. He was also appointed head boy, which offered new responsibilities such as serving as the intermediary between students and staff, as well as privileges. Rather than living in a communal dormitory, Charles had his own bedroom, which adjoined the apartment of his art teacher, Robert Waddell, who stimulated his intellectual curiosity during long conversations about music, art, history, and archaeology. In such encounters, Charles’s boarding school years differed significantly from Diana’s. He may have endured his classmates’ tyrannies, but because he was male, and the
heir to the throne at that, teachers took a keen interest in making the most of him intellectually. At eighteen, Charles passed his A levels and secured admission to Trinity College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Charles fell in with the sort of young men he would have known at Eton: aristocrats who spent their free time hunting, shooting, fishing, and playing polo. He joined the drama group, in which he appeared in a revue, spent a term at University College of Wales to learn Welsh, and submitted to his first radio and television interviews as part of his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969. Charles was a diligent but less than dazzling student; however, when he earned a “lower second-class degree” in history in 1970, he became the first future king to graduate from college. At the suggestion of his father and his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, Charles entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in the autumn of 1971 for a career in the service—once again following his father’s path.

Unable to talk to his parents about intimate subjects, Charles turned to Mountbatten for advice on his late-blooming interest in romance. Mountbatten encouraged him to “
sow his wild oats,” and offered the use of his home, Broadlands, as a safe haven for trysts, away from the nosy press.

Shortly after Charles turned twenty-three in November 1971, a friend from Cambridge named Lucia Santa Cruz, the daughter of the Chilean ambassador, introduced him to someone she considered “
just the girl” for him. Her name was Camilla Shand, and she was a year older than Charles. The daughter of Major Bruce Shand, a wine merchant and avid huntsman, Camilla was related to Lord Ashcombe of the Cubitt family that built much of fashionable Belgravia in London. She was also the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, the longtime lover of King Edward VII. Gossip columnist Nigel Dempster wrote that the connection prompted Camilla to greet Charles on their first meeting “
with a searching look,” and say, “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-grandfather.” (According to Dempster, when he printed this anecdote in July 1981, Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, told him it was “
dashed [emphatically] accurate.”)

Camilla was known to be quick-witted, and she was full of the confidence that Diana lacked. She had been through a similarly unchallenging education, topped off by school in Switzerland and a turn as a popular London debutante. She was also attractive to men: “She has laughing eyes,” said a friend of the Shands. “She is an intensely warm, maternal, laughing creature, with enormous sex appeal.” For a young girl, Camilla had an engaging directness, and an earthy streak that came through in what another friend described as a “slightly sexy, ginny voice” deepened by cigarette smoking. “She is about dogs and gum boots, and a cozy life,” continued the friend. She shared Charles’s self-deprecatory humor and fondness for the
absurd, as well as his love of the country and its range of sporting pursuits. Most of all, Camilla made him feel secure, not least because she was so comfortable in her own skin. “He always liked older women,” said a friend of the Queen’s who knew Charles from childhood. “He is able to relax with them.” “
With all the intensity of first love,” wrote Dimbleby, Charles “lost his heart to [Camilla] almost at once.”

Years later, with the release of the infamous “Camillagate” tape in 1992—a telephone conversation between Charles and Camilla, surreptitiously recorded in 1989—it would become clear that Camilla knew how to please the Prince, and perhaps to manipulate him as well. Although much attention would focus on the silly sexual banter (especially Charles’s desire to be reincarnated as Camilla’s Tampax to “
live inside [her] trousers”), the more revealing aspect of the tape was Camilla’s solicitude toward him: her eagerness to read one of his speeches, to mop his brow, soothe his doubting ego, and encourage him at every turn (“I think, as usual, you’re underestimating yourself.… You’re a clever old thing, an awfully good brain lurking there, isn’t there?”).