Life Worth Living (33 page)

Neither Associated Newspapers nor Express Newspapers could have been in any doubt that I would institute proceedings against them. Of course, I sued them for defamation and asked for an apology, a retraction, damages and aggravated damages. They played the same old game, stirring up as much trouble for me as they could in the hope that they would overload me with financial obligations and break my bank account or my spirit. Doubtless they thought they were only fulfilling their obligations by vigorously pursuing their quarry, but I was determined to hit them where it hurt – in their pockets. Nothing else would satisfy me, for nothing else would keep them in check.

Of course, I recognised that there were forces here that had nothing to do with me personally. Associated Newspapers and Express Newspapers were both spearheads of a segment of the press which represented the Establishment point of view. While I might qualify as an Establishment figure when it suited them to write about me as such, the newspapers had no compunction about downgrading me when it suited them to do so. The fact is, some segments of the British Establishment have a strict scale of values. Few women are the equals of men, and an ex-wife is seldom rated on a par with an ex-husband when he is a lord, and certainly never when he or his brother is a duke. To those of us who know the true as well as the relative value of dukes and lords, such an attitude is antiquated, anachronistic, indeed naïve. It also perpetuates a myth, about the power, position and influence of a group of people who have become increasingly marginalised as the
century has worn on. The result is that the mighty dukes and lords one reads about are frequently only mighty within the confines of Establishment newspapers. Everywhere else, they are pretty much judged according to their worth or merit, which is often rather less than their public image implies. Because of this inclination towards anachronistic reportage, the Establishment newspapers chose to ally themselves with Lord Colin Campbell and the Duke of Argyll. Which meant that I had to be presented adversely, and the two men complimentarily.

A
s the falling of the leaves and the dropping of the temperature signalled the arrival of autumn 1992, I turned my attention to my next book.
The Royal Marriages
was an examination of the marriages of the Queen, her children and her parents. The idea had been my publisher’s and it made me uneasy, chiefly because of the rumours about the legitimacy of the Queen’s second son. I was painfully aware that I had a readership in the United States to whom I owed a duty, and that many of the people who read my book, or interviewed me about it, would have read Christopher Hitchen’s article of May 12 1991 in the
New York Times
in which he quoted Nigel Dempster asserting that Prince Andrew was not Prince Philip’s son.

How best to deal with the issue of Prince Andrew’s paternity niggled me throughout the writing of the book. Although I had no reason to believe that the rumours were true, and I had no desire to do the Queen an injustice, I recognised that I would have to confront them headlong. This was principally because Dempster himself was also writing a book on the royal family and I was not prepared to allow him to peddle his whispers without comment.

I had learned from my previous book that no royal writer can be too careful in closing gaps. I had been the first author to be fed the suicide stories which Andrew Morton had reproduced wholesale as fact, when he ought to have known they were nothing of the kind. In
Diana in Private,
I had avoided mentioning the tales Diana herself was spreading, partly out of a sense of compassion for her, but mainly because reason clearly dictated that these ‘suicide attempts’ were no more than hysterical tantrums thrown by a young woman at the end of her emotional tether. After the Morton book was published, I saw that I had made a mistake in not defusing such an explosive issue with the dampener of truth. I should have raised the matter and dismissed it as insignificant. Instead I left the field open for Morton’s sensational claims, which press and public alike then endowed with a seriousness they did not deserve.

So in
The Royal Marriages
I mentioned the question of Prince Andrew’s paternity, emphasising that the stories were only rumours. With hindsight I can see that I was right to do this. By airing the whispers I destroyed the potential they held to be twisted. And when Sarah Bradford came to publish her acclaimed biography of the Queen in 1996, she too dealt with them in the same way, helping to put them into their proper perspective and thereby taking the sting out of them. People might wonder why I cared at all, especially given the way Buckingham Palace had behaved over
Diana in Private
. But I did not blame the Queen for the conduct of her underlings. Indeed, I both admire and like the Queen. Not only has she been a conscientious Sovereign, but in person she is unstuffy, with dancing eyes and a lack of pretentiousness that her stiff public image decries.

To give an example: one of her ladies-in-waiting used to live above me when I resided at Lochmore House. From time to time, HM would drop in for drinks. One evening she was departing with her hostess giving a deep farewell curtsy and Commander Osborne King holding open the inner swing doors by leaning against them, when I opened up my ground floor flat front door to let my dogs out for a walk. Of course, they couldn’t care less whether someone is a queen or a dosser. They promptly bolted for the open doors.

The Queen, being sharp and a dog-lover, made a quick judgement call, springing into action to open the outer door which she was afraid the dogs, who run like furies, would slam into. The only problem was that the police cars which protect the Secretaries of State resident in the flats always drive around the circular inner courtyard so fast that you dare not let out the dogs until you’ve checked that the coast is clear. More worried about my dogs’ well-being than ceremony, I screamed out their names as I dashed past the Queen, nearly knocking her over in the process. Did she mind? Did she feel insulted? Decidedly not. She fully understood the situation and was even complimentary about my ‘girls’!

Moreover, anyone who has been the subject of rumour and speculation herself identifies with others in the same boat, whether it is the Queen and her two younger sons or someone in much humbler circumstances. If I had shown no consideration, I would have been no better than the prejudiced people who seem to think I can’t possibly have feelings just because I have had more advantages than they. Apart from that awkwardness, and the unpleasantness generated by the breakup of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales,
The Royal Marriages
was fun to work on. I love doing research, and I happily took loads of documents and books down to the country, spread them out in the drawing room and my bedroom, and read away to my heart’s content. The juiciest morsels, however, came, as ever, through friends. And after the Morton book, I was flavour of the month with certain courtiers to such an extent that they approached me when they heard that I was writing a new royal book, and provided me with damning information about their
bête noire
, the newly separated Princess of Wales.

Diana’s camp, of course, continued to funnel through dirt about Charles. I treated all of this with scepticism. Proof, proof, proof, I demanded, and I was careful only to use what could be substantiated. I was sickened by the game being played as the Waleses’ marriage unravelled publicly. There was no way of writing about what was going on without feeling defiled by it, but I had little choice in the matter unless I was prepared to return the advance. I needed the money, for I would soon have an extra mouth to feed.

Aside, of course, from his worst characteristics, I felt there were some similarities between Diana and Colin, such as a troubled family background riven with strife and recrimination. Diana, I was told by a close mutual friend, was doing everything in her power to destroy Charles’ life. The popular belief was that she was seeking to deprive him of his reputation and his throne. Female solidarity alone made me want to sympathise with
Diana, but my own experience of a vengeful spouse left me in no doubt that Charles was the person to be pitied.

I had such a tight deadline that again I had to work from early in the morning till late at night, seven days a week. I would just about finish on time if I had no interruptions. I took no breaks for anything except preparing my papers for the adoption. Eugenie had sent me a list of the many documents I needed: health and police checks, character references, proof of earnings, and, of course, a home study. The last document was the most time consuming to organise. While the social worker attended to the report at a measured pace, I continued writing the book, grateful to have this time free to work. If I got the baby, I would never again have such freedom.

In November 1992, out of the blue, Eugenie telephoned me to say, ‘Come next week. There’s a baby for you.’

Oh my God, I thought. I was torn by a multitude of conflicting emotions: joy, nervousness, crunch-time disbelief, anxiety about how I could possibly finish writing the book if I had to care for a newborn child. Well, I rationalised, life is about rising to occasions, and the baby takes precedence over any inconvenience or difficulty caused by its sudden arrival.

Visas for Russia are not obtained at the drop of a hat, but I had met Vladimir Voronoff of the Russian embassy in London through the Russian Princess Helena Gagarin-Moutafian. ‘Can you please help?’ I asked him. He put me on to the consul, who could not have been more kind, and I got the visa without delay.

Next I got in touch with the social worker preparing my home study. ‘Can you please have it finished as soon as possible?’ She couldn’t complete it in time, but what she could do was prepare an interim report, which would have to do until the final draft was ready. That necessitated her rushing down to the country to see what the place was like. I groaned, wondering how I would ever be able to make up the lost day.

No sooner did I have my visa and interim home study than Eugenie rang again. ‘Don’t come. The baby was born in Ukraine, near Chernobyl. The doctors say they won’t let you have him. He most likely has radiation sickness. Wait.’

The feeling of relief that I would be able to finish the book before embarking on a monumental new role as a mother was supreme. There were ten other books on the royal family coming out at the same time. The others were written mostly by, in my opinion, dull uninspired writers like James Whittaker and Nigel Dempster, who hoped to muscle in on the success Andrew Morton and I had achieved with our Diana books, both of which had sat on the bestseller lists in the London and New York
Times
for months, reputedly earning us millions. This was an exaggeration, but I must say that I didn’t do badly.

My new book, therefore, could not be delivered one day later than the deadline of 28 February, for if it were not published on time, it would enter a market that had already been cleared of readers.

In February, just as I was nearing the home stretch, Eugenie called. ‘Come as soon as you can. We’ve got your son for you. I’ve seen him. He’s a beautiful boy with brown eyes and blond hair.’

Once again I applied for a visa, and once again Eugenie telephoned to delay my departure just as I was ready to leave. This time the hitch was that I needed to have all my papers legalised.

‘But they’re perfectly legal,’ I said.

‘“Legalised” is a specific term which the Hague Convention covers. Get in touch with the embassy and ask them if they can authorise the papers,’ she advised.

I contacted Vladimir Voronoff again, explaining the situation. It was only after the papers had sat for three weeks in the Russian embassy, been couriered back to Russia and handed over to the authorities that I discovered I had made a mistake. The Russian powers that be took one look at the papers and said, ‘They have been verified by the embassy in London. That’s not the same as being legalised. They must be legalised by the British Foreign Office.’

Every cloud has a silver lining. By this time, I had finished writing the book and was in the middle of the libel-checking and editing processes, so in a way I was grateful that this new hiccup had saved me a second time from being torn between the baby and meeting my professional obligations.

Once the papers had finally been given their individual apostils, they went back to Russia while I awaited the call that would tell me I was a mother at last. Eugenie telephoned. ‘You’re not getting the boy born in January,’ she said. ‘There’s been a change. You’re getting a beautiful, blue-eyed blond boy who was born on 1 March. I’ve seen him myself. He’s lovely.’

No mother who gives birth naturally has a choice about her baby. ‘Eugenie, I’m happy to have either baby,’ I told her. ‘I only hope this change won’t delay the process.’

‘No,’ she said.

This was a relief. Moreover, it would be in the baby’s interest if he were two months younger when I adopted him, for he would have spent less time in the orphanage, suffering less damage from the traumas of institutionalisation.

‘I’m coming over as soon as I can,’ I told Eugenie. ‘Whether the papers are ready or not.’

Nothing hastens progress like the presence of the most interested party, and the time had come to make mine felt.

First I had obligations to fulfil in Britain. The serialisation rights to
The Royal Marriages
were bought by the
Sunday Mirror
, whose decent and talented royal correspondent at the time, Tim Willcox, was one of the few journalists in his field. An author has to collaborate with the journalist who converts his or her book
into a serial, and I can say without hesitation that it was a real treat to be able to entrust the serialisation to someone as capable as Tim.

Naturally, publication in Britain caused another sensation, but it was less traumatic and less intense than the last. The novelty value of
Diana in Private
and the Morton book was a thing of the past, for everyone now knew that the private lives of the Windsors were a mess. Only those people who loved reading in detail about the royal family felt the need to supplement the wealth of information – and misinformation – published by the papers on a daily basis with a book on the same subject, and consequently sales of the book were lower. The response in America was almost identical, with one notable exception.

Nigel Dempster had arrived in the US a few days before me to plug his own book. At the same time, he was busy telling everyone that I was a man, and everywhere I went, journalists asked me about it. I recognised, of course, that the subject of the British royal family was large enough to accommodate more than one fairy at the top of the Christmas tree. Dempster, however, obviously felt it necessary to sabotage the competition by giving his favourite hobby horse yet another airing. When a journalist from San Francisco telephoned me in New York and asked for my comments, I explained that Dempster had an obsession with my crotch going back nearly two decades. I still have no idea why – I’ve only ever met the man on maybe five occasions, on three of them for no more than twenty seconds.

Enough was enough. I decided to retaliate by furnishing the journalist with a few truths about Dempster. It was with relish that I later read, in various American and British newspapers including
The Sunday Times
, that the Greatest Living Englishman, as his colleagues at
Private Eye
had dubbed him, was in fact an Anglo-Indian from Calcutta.

Of course, I do not despise Dempster for his Indian origins. India has one of the oldest cultures in the world, and anyone who hails from the subcontinent should be proud of his heritage. I do despise him for what I perceive as a lack of pride by him about the Indian part of his heritage, and for his behaviour towards me, and what it tells me about him as a person. I had always nicknamed him the Calcutta Creep.

Having made my response, I mentally flicked Dempster off the lapels of my consciousness the way you would a dying fly. I knew he was rattling around the world implying that he was so mighty I didn’t dare sue him, but as long as he stayed within his own boundaries, I proposed to ignore him. I had far more important things to deal with.