Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (13 page)

When he was done, Charles and his Canadian mistress tumbled into bed together—“the last time we were sexually intimate,” said Jenkins, who insisted that at that point she was unaware that Camilla was still in the Prince’s life. Jenkins later conceded that it was “ironic” that Charles was “cheating on his mistress with me!”

FOUR DAYS AFTER THE DUCHESS
of York’s humiliating romp through the pages of the
Daily Mirror
, the tabloids were filled with titillating transcripts of an intercepted cellphone conversation between Diana and her car-dealer friend James Gilbey. He called her “Squidgy”—which provided a convenient label for the scandal—and, more than fifty times, “Darling.” He also repeatedly insisted that he loved her, while Diana gushed that Gilbey made her “go all jellybags.”

But most damaging was what she had to say about “His Nibs” (Charles) and the way she was being treated by the Queen even though her celebrity, charitable pursuits, and personal popularity had undeniably bolstered the monarchy’s image. She told Gilbey she felt “really said and empty. Bloody hell. After all I’ve done for this fucking family.” Her life inside the royal cocoon, Diana told Gilbey, was “torture.”

According to Ken Wharfe, the Squidgygate conversations had actually been intercepted by UK intelligence, then repeatedly
broadcast widely by Charles’s allies inside the government to insure a private citizen would pick it up—which is precisely what happened. This was all done, Wharfe added, “knowing that it would eventually reach the media.”

Morton’s tell-all book, Fergie’s toe-sucking scandal, and now “Squidgygate”—it all left the monarch reeling, although she never let on to anyone but those closest to her. “Can you imagine,” she asked her friend Lady Patricia Brabourne, “having two daughters-in-law like this?”

Nevertheless, Diana had actively sought guidance from the woman she jokingly referred to as “Top Lady.” She often appeared at Buckingham Palace on the spur of the moment, waiting in the page’s vestibule until the Queen could find a moment to speak with her.

Once inside the Queen’s study, Diana poured her heart out to her mother-in-law. “Mama,” she said on one occasion, “sometimes he calls Camilla from the bathtub. I listened at the door. Do you know what he said to her? ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’ ”

Then Diana cried, the Queen later told Paul Burrell, “nonstop.” When a weeping Diana, clearly at the end of her rope, simply asked, “Mama, what do I do?” the Queen threw up her hands. “I don’t know
what
you should do,” she answered. “Charles is hopeless.”

The Queen knew that she was being of no help at all to her heartbroken daughter-in-law. “I tried to reach out to Diana many times,” she later told Burrell. Referring to the two women’s polar opposite styles, the butler tried to explain to Her Majesty that she “spoke in black and white. The princess spoke in color.”

To the outside world, Diana radiated self-assurance. At a Westminster
Abbey service marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein, she glared daggers at Camilla, who tried to avert her eyes as she slunk back into her pew. Fleet Street, seizing this rare opportunity to publish photos of the two women at the same event, had a field day comparing the sleek young princess to her dowdy rival. Diana’s “eyes were wide, bright, and open,” reported the next day’s
Daily Mail
, and she wore a “jacket of silvery gray and a tight-fitting white skirt.” By contrast, Camilla was “a funereal figure—pale, thin, and hair flecked with gray, in shapeless, somber blue.” Camilla and Diana were, the paper’s correspondent concluded, “the twin faces of war—the dullness of defeat and the radiance of victory.”

The Royal Family had always been, in essence, the world’s longest-running soap opera. Yet the proliferating Windsor family scandals were turning out to be far more than merely embarrassing. They were clearly undermining public support for the monarchy. This became painfully evident when a grassroots campaign was launched to force the Queen, and not the taxpayers, to pay for repairs to still-smoldering Windsor Castle.

For months, the Men in Gray had been urging the Queen to open the state rooms at Buckingham Palace—a move she had resisted on the grounds that, said a senior official, it would lift “the veil too much on the mystery of the monarchy.” Now that money from admission fees was needed to pay for the repairs to Windsor, she reluctantly agreed.

To mollify critics in Parliament who felt the monarchy had grown far too expensive for a nation in the midst of an economic downturn, she also agreed to voluntarily pay taxes on her private income from the Duchy of Lancaster. Charles would
also pay taxes on his Duchy of Cornwall income—again, strictly voluntarily.

For the time being, the Queen was conveying the image of a more open, modern, and forward-looking monarch who was not afraid of change. In opening portions of Buckingham Palace to the public, she also tapped into a new and significant revenue stream that wound up raising 70 percent of the $59.2 million it eventually took to restore Windsor Castle.

Just four days after the fire, the Queen, suffering from the flu and running a temperature of 101, spoke to a Guildhall gathering in honor of her fortieth year on the throne. Looking pale and haggard, her voice raspy from the smoke she had breathed in at the scene of the fire, she told the crowd that “1992 is not a year in which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an
annus horribilis
.”

The capstone was yet to come. Now that separation or even divorce seemed inevitable, Elizabeth II worried about what impact it would all have on the succession. She recalled too well the chaos that surrounded her uncle’s decision to marry Wallis Simpson, and the abdication that forced her reluctant father into a job that was so stressful it killed him. Now she worried that by divorcing, Charles was putting his own claim to the throne in peril. “History,” she told Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, “is repeating itself.”

The Queen also talked to Carey about her very real concern that Charles intended to wed Camilla. “I saw despair,” the Archbishop recalled. “She thought Charles was in danger of throwing everything out the window by rejecting Diana and forging another
relationship.” In this scenario, Camilla was cast in the role of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor.

To ensure that a divorce would not spell the end for Charles, the Queen asked Prime Minister John Major to consult with the Archbishop, the Lord Chancellor, and the Foreign Secretary. Since there was really no precedent for this situation, they concluded only that it was “unlikely” in modern times that a divorce could prevent Charles from becoming king.

Just eight days after the Windsor fire, Charles—whom Diana now regularly referred to as either “the Great White Hope” or “the Boy Wonder”—was eagerly awaiting the arrival of William and Harry at Sandringham for his annual three-day shooting party when Diana canceled at the last minute. Unable to spend another tension-filled weekend with her Windsor in-laws, she took the boys to Highgrove instead.

This was the breaking point for Charles. Unwilling to let Diana continue to dictate the terms of his access to the young princes, he made the decision to call it quits. Once the shooting party was over, he drove to Kensington Palace and asked her for a separation. “You have left me with no choice,” he told her. “I’ve already told the Queen and she approves.”

Diana’s first concern was for William and Harry. On December 3, she rushed to Ludgrove to warn William and Harry that news of the separation would soon be everywhere. What she told her eldest son at the time would be critical to his understanding of the institution of marriage—and would ultimately redound to the stability of the crown.

“I put it to William, particularly,” Diana remembered, “that if you find someone you love in life, you must hang on to it and
look after it and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then you must protect it.”

William wept when Diana told him that, although she still loved Charles, she could no longer live under the same roof with him. As heartbreaking as the moment was, Diana felt a weight lifted off her shoulders as she drove her racing green Jaguar XJ-S back to Kensington Palace. “From Day One I always knew I’d never be the next queen,” she said. “No one ever said that to me, I just knew it. . . . I just had to get out.”

Just as she was convinced she would never become queen, Diana believed her astrologer’s prediction that Charles would die before his mother and never become king. Taking solace from polls in the
Daily Mail
, the
Sunday Times
, and other publications showing that the vast majority of Britons wanted William as their next king, Diana said she had been training her son for the job all along. “I want William to lead from the heart,” she said, “not the head.”

Perhaps. But when Prime Minister John Major stood in the House of Commons on December 9, 1992, to announce the separation, he made it clear that the royal couple had “no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected.” He went on to insist that “the succession to the Throne is unaffected by it. There is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen in due course.”

It was impossible to imagine, of course, that Charles and Diana could ever go through the motions of a coronation, much less reign together harmoniously as King and Queen of England. But as her
annus horribilis
drew to a close, the Queen held out hope for a reconciliation—and a resolution to Charles’s obsession with
“That Wicked, Wicked Woman,” Her Majesty’s shorthand for Camilla Parker Bowles.

THE NEXT YEAR, SADLY, WOULD
be even worse. In January, it was Charles’s and Camilla’s turn to embarrass the sovereign. This time, tabloids had a field day with transcripts of an intimate cellphone chat between the clandestine lovers. A ribald snippet:

CAMILLA:
Mmmmmm, you’re awfully good at feeling your way along.

CHARLES:
Oh stop! I want to feel my way along you, all over and up and down you and in and out.

CAMILLA:
Oh!

CHARLES:
Particularly in and out. . . .

CAMILLA:
I can’t start the week without you.

CHARLES:
I fill your tank!

CAMILLA:
Yes you do.

CHARLES:
Oh, God, I’d just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier!

CAMILLA
(laughing): What are you going to turn into? A pair of knickers? Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers?

CHARLES:
Or God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck!

CAMILLA:
You are a complete idiot! Oh, what a wonderful idea.

CHARLES:
My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever, swirling round the top, never going down!

CAMILLA:
Oh, darling!

It came as no surprise that press and public focused on Charles’s expressed desire to be reincarnated as Camilla’s tampon. But there were serious moments, as well:

CHARLES:
Your great achievement is to love me.

CAMILLA:
Oh, darling, easier than falling off a chair.

CHARLES:
You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.

CAMILLA:
Oh, darling, don’t be so silly. I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love. It’s the strength of love. Night night.

Charles then reverted to his lecherous self, offering to hang up by “pressing the tit”—a British term for button.

“I wish,” Camilla replied in her most sultry voice, “you were pressing mine.”

Harry was too young to quite comprehend what was going on, but William was another matter. Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry pointed out that “children don’t want to know that their parents are doing it. It’s out of the question. So when it’s obvious that your parents
are
doing it—and with different people—it’s a bit disturbing.”

William managed, in time-tested Windsor tradition, to conceal whatever feelings he may have had from classmates, teachers, and most significantly, his own family. Both princes continued to put on a resolutely upbeat front when Fleet Street reported that Diana had placed more than three hundred harassing calls to the home of another boyfriend, art dealer Oliver Hoare.

The Princess denied this, claiming that Charles’s allies were concocting another tale to make her look mentally unbalanced. In fact, it was eventually established that the harassing calls were
made by a teenage boy feuding with one of Hoare’s sons—but too late to undo the damage to Diana’s reputation.

In the ensuing months there was an uninterrupted stream of newspaper stories linking Diana to a variety of men, including British businessman Christopher Whalley, rugby player Will Carling (his wife accused Diana of ruining her marriage), Canadian rocker Bryan Adams, and suave American billionaire Theodore Forstmann.

There were countless other male admirers, from electronics tycoon Gulu Lalvani to legendary tenors Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. She also had a schoolgirl crush on Tom Cruise, who invited Diana to bring William to watch him film
Mission Impossible
at Pinewood Studios. She told her hairdressers Natalie Symonds and Tess Rock that she wouldn’t mind if Cruise’s then-wife Nicole Kidman was “out of the way. Nicole keeps giving me dagger eyes.”

Diana also said she “adored” then President Bill Clinton and found his “southern drawl” to be “incredibly sexy.” She was surprised, however, how nervous he seemed to be in the presence of the First Lady. Hillary, she told Symonds and Rock, “certainly is the one who wears the pants in that family.”

The Princess of Wales was also smitten with King Constantine’s eldest son, Prince Pavlos. When Pavlos married American heiress Marie-Chantal Miller, Diana was “devastated,” said Symonds. Diana was convinced she would never be Queen of England, but, she said, “there’s no reason I can’t be Queen of Greece.”