Camilla never wanted to marry Charles

12 April 2012

They lunched at a restaurant on Park Avenue in New York.

"The tall, soft-cheeked English rose I first met at the American embassy in 1981, when she was a new bride, had become as phosphorescent as a cartoon," observed Tina Brown. "Striding on three-inch heels across the high-ceilinged grill room of the Four Seasons, she towered like Barbarella."

So much was promised for the Chanel-suited Princess of Wales that July day almost ten years ago. Tony Blair had intimated to Brown that he wanted Diana to lead his humanitarian Africa initiative - a brilliant choice - and Diana was thinking of basing herself in America, among whose people "you can feel the energy".

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Diana: More extraordinary revelations

On the downside, as she told Brown, then editor of the influential New Yorker magazine, she was facing a potentially lonely August, as William and Harry would be with their father.

Just over a month later Diana was dead. The Paris car crash was the signal for endless examinations of Diana's life, most of them barely scratching the surface of the complicated woman that was the Princess of Wales.

Now comes Tina Brown's own brilliant examination in an explosive yet thoughtful book, The Diana Chronicles, which begins serialisation today in Weekend magazine.

This is no superficial look at Diana's life and times. Close witnesses to the saga who have maintained a discreet silence all these years talk for the first time.

They include: Charles's old girlfriend Sabrina Guinness; Dr James Colthurst, who was the gobetween for Andrew Morton and the princess, passing on Diana's taped reminiscences for Morton's groundbreaking book, Diana: Her True Story; and William Tallon - "Backstairs Billy", who worked for the Queen Mother for 50 years and saw everything when Diana came to stay in the final days before the wedding.

Teddy Forstmann, the American billionaire and former boss of the private jet company Gulfstream whose close friendship with the princess set tongues wagging, has also talked about their relationship for the first time.

The result is critical, but understanding, with Diana emerging, according to Brown, as "a temperamental fantasist and press hog" and Charles as "an increasingly sad, eccentric figure, wracked by self doubt and appalled by the megastardom of his wife".

Some are bound to be shocked at Brown's frank, almost cruel assessment that in August 1997, in the final days of her life, "Diana was seeking to replace what she had possessed as a still-married princess with a superstar's version of the same, a life of guarded insulationas she entered her 37th year Diana told herself she was looking for love - but what she was really seeking was a guy with a Gulfstream".

On the other hand, with the insight of a woman of 53 with a rich experience of life, Brown is also sympathetic to the plight of the princess living with a man who was sleeping with Camilla.

"It is not surprising that she sought solace in the arms of other men," says Brown.

Forstmann, who was 57 when he met Diana, discloses that he sent her flowers every week for three years. He tells of how she fantasised a scenario about the two of them in which, as he says, "Diana had the idea that we should get married, that I should run for president and she would be first lady". But he insists that he and Diana were never lovers.

She took that final holiday with Dodi Fayed "in part because of the gifts he lavished on her and the comfort she enjoyed aboard his father's yacht, the Jonikal".

Multi-millionaire art collector Lord Palumbo, who was a close friend of Diana, tells Brown: "She [Diana] just wanted to make the people at Balmoral as angry as possible."

One major new insight comes from "Backstairs Billy", who is now in retirement. The given wisdom about the royal marriage is that in the 48 hours before the St Paul's ceremony Diana was so miserably uncertain about going through with it because of the hovering presence of Camilla that she had to be jollied by her sisters, who told her: "Too late, Duch [their pet name for Diana], your picture's already on the tea-towels."

Billy Tallon tells a very different story about the night before the wedding when Diana was staying with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. He says that Diana came downstairs from her bedroom looking for company and drank orange juice with him and an equerry, who drank something stronger.

"She was very happy," he told Brown. "Then she saw my bicycle standing against a wall, and she got on it and started to ride round and round, ringing the bell and singing: 'I'm going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow.' Ring-ring. 'I'm going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow.' I can hear that ringing now."

Tallon's testimony is a crucial part of Tina Brown's belief that from a relatively early age Diana set her cap at the prince, crying exultantly "I've met him, I've met him at last" after he came to a shooting party at Althorp when she was 16 and cattily noting how, on that visit, she was "feeling desperately sorry for him [Charles] that my sister [Sarah] was wrapped around his neck because she's quite a tough old thing".

For her part, Sabrina Guinness's recollection of a Sussex weekend house party when Charles and Diana were first brought formally together is the opposite of Diana's.

Diana famously described Charles as being "all over me like a rash". Sabrina, however, whose own romance with the heir to the throne ended because she had a "past", saw things very differently.

"She was flirting, she was giggling," she says. "In the evening at the barbecue she was sitting on his lap, looking up at him and saying: 'I've got no fillings in my teeth, and no O-levels. Do you think that matters?'"

Brown claims that Diana's mother Mrs Frances Shand Kydd tried to talk her daughter out of marrying Charles "seeing the parallels between her daughter's relationship and her own disastrous first marriage to Johnnie Spencer - too young, too hasty, too incompatible, too great an age gap, with too many responsibilities".

Diana told her mother: "Mummy, you don't understand, I love him." To which Frances replied: "Love him, or love what he is?"

And Diana said: "What's the difference?"

As for the baleful presence of Camilla, the fact that Diana held dark fears about her from an early stage is not questioned. But for the first time, doubt is thrown on whether the Prince of Wales was being thoughtlessly cruel when he wore a pair of cufflinks with entwined Cs (for Charles and Camilla) on the honeymoon cruise - a gesture that so upset the young princess.

The cufflinks - a gift from Camilla - remained forever in Diana's eyes as a symbol of her husband's treachery with Mrs Parker Bowles.

Tina Brown intriguingly suggests that Charles wasn't the villain of the piece, as has been assumed until now. She blames Stephen Barry, the prince's valet, who disliked Diana and felt threatened and pushed aside by her arrival.

Diana never trusted Barry, Brown writes. "She found him too familiar with Charles. She actively resented him from the moment he refused her access to the Prince of Wales's rooms in Buckingham Palace during the engagement."

Barry did virtually everything for the prince, and Brown believes that it would have been "perfectly in character" for him to have destabilised the princess by deliberately inserting the Camilla cufflinks into the shirt he was laying out for the prince to wear when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his wife came aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia for dinner.

Brown also offers a fascinating insight into the rivalry that Camilla felt towards Charles's other blonde and married confidante, Australianborn Lady (Dale) Tryon, who was known to Charles as Kanga.

Early in 1981 - as Charles and Diana prepared for their July 29 wedding at St Paul's Cathedral - Brown and a photographer went to the Wiltshire home of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles to do a photo shoot for Tatler magazine.

When Kanga's name came up in conversation, Camilla hastily declared: "All this stuff about Dale Tryon being such a friend of Charles - she's never even met Diana Spencer."

Camilla, of course, had met Diana several times and pretended to be her friend. But Brown quotes Camilla's former brother-in-law Richard Parker Bowles as saying that she "initially encouraged the relationship between Charles and Diana because she thought Diana was gormless. She never saw Diana as a threat . . . she thought that Diana was someone she could manipulate".

"Camilla never wanted to marry Charles. She wanted to continue to be his paramour but stay married to Andrew," he added.

Brown dismisses "the gloss" that Charles's friends put on "Diana's crazy jealousy of the past (that) made Camilla ever-present" and nails their insistence that the prince had put his ex-mistress behind him as "deliberately disingenuous and obfuscatingly literal . . . Diana's unerring female antennae rightly told her that Camilla's 'friendship' was a strategy for deftly sustaining her control."

Tina Brown first saw the potential of the innocent girl, and of what might have been if they had been left to get on with their marriage without Camilla, when she attended a blacktie dinner at the American embassy in London soon after the wedding.

"It was an extraordinarily beguiling moment, when Diana's star quality was emerging but the schoolgirl was still there," she writes. "She was a princess poised in transition between innocent impact and calculated effect."

But it was Camilla's impact that was to shape the marriage, and Brown believes that, although Charles has always insisted it was 1986 before he resumed his affair with his old love, it in fact began again in 1983, the year before the birth of Prince Harry.

She totally dismisses any doubts about Harry's paternity and cavalry officer James Hewitt, quoting Diana with all the happy innocence of a mother-to-be telling a friend that she "didn't know how they (she and Charles) did it, but they did".

After Harry's birth in 1984 Diana tried to retain her husband's bedroom interest, says Brown, by "putting on sexy lingerie and low music and attempting to tantalise him with a striptease". Charles is said to have only "mildly enjoyed it".

Brown says the princess's famous pas de deux with Wayne Sleep on the stage at the Royal Opera House to the music of Billy Joel's Uptown Girl was planned by Diana as a public attempt to woo Charles and to reawaken his physical interest in her.

During this period Charles and Diana were guests at a dinner party at the London home of former Tory Minister Lord Waldegrave and his wife Caroline. Other guests included film producer Lord (David) Puttnam and his wife Patsy.

Lady Puttnam tells Brown that during the evening Diana was solicitous and affectionate towards Charles, but that Charles was openly dismissive towards Diana.

"He behaved as if she was an irritant," recalls Lady Puttnam. "He would have liked her to be invisible, and she knew it."

All in all, when James Hewitt arrived in her life in 1986, says Brown, "Diana needed this affair. Her sex life was non-existent. Charles was all but gone from her bed."

It seems Diana wasn't missing much. Brown's received intelligence from a former model is that the young Charles was not a good lover and "could only do it in the missionary position, with the lights out".

Little wonder his ardour for Camilla was, and remained throughout his life, so strong, for she is credited with relaxing him sexually to give him maximum pleasure, by telling him to "pretend I am a rocking horse". Only the final "Sir" is missing. Brown drily notes: "Royal men never quite escape from the nursery."

For his part, Hewitt was said by Diana to be an accomplished lover. Brown says: "He helped Diana achieve orgasms of a reliability and intensity she had never enjoyed before. He soon came to see that loving Diana was a mission to save her life, and he stepped up to it admirably."

But Brown is convinced that Diana's first extra-marital lover was not Hewitt but her personal protection police officer, the ruggedly handsome Sergeant Barry Mannakee.

Diana, in her tapes, admitted to seeking out his company but never to an affair. James Hewitt in his memoir Love And War said that Diana told him she and Mannakee were lovers. But Brown accepts the liaison as true only because it was confirmed to her by Dr James Colthurst, Diana's confidant and trusted friend.

The intensity of the closeness between policeman and princess could not escape notice and eventually the "overfamiliar" Mannakee was moved to other duties, saying he feared for his life as well as for his career.

Nine months later he was dead, killed in a motorcycle accident. He was riding pillion and although the driver of the car they hit was just 17, to her dying day Diana believed he was murdered.

The Queen, by now firmly en route to her famous annus horribilis of 1992, looked on with dismay at her son's refusal to give up his mistress,

Says Brown: "The Queen was of a generation and background that viewed infidelity in marriage as a regrettable weakness to be firmly ignored." But this infidelity, of course, was different because the stability of the monarchy could be involved.

And as the break-up became crisis, and eventual separation, Diana's need for consoling arms increased. In addition to Mannakee and Hewitt there was her well-connected friend James Gilbey - he of the Squidgygate tape scandal when his name for her was "Squidgy" - Will Carling, the former England rugby captain, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she loved, and art dealer Oliver Hoare.

Teddy Forstmann, who felt protective towards Diana, singles out the married Hoare for criticism. "He didn't treat her well," he told Brown. "These smooth guys used her. If I had to give a one-sentence summary, I'd say she was a great mother, and very bad to herself."

And what about that last romance with Dodi Fayed? When Diana accepted Mohamed Al Fayed's invitation to holiday in St Tropez that July, his first act was to summon his son Dodi from Paris to join the first holiday with the princess and, as Brown puts it, "made wooing her an urgent imperative".

"Dodi was the perfect antidote," says Brown, "charming, sexually attentive, intellectually unthreatening - and temporary."

As Labour peeress Baroness Jay, former wife of ex-ambassador to Washington Peter Jay (she left him for the Watergate exposer Carl Bernstein and is now married to Aids expert and government advisor Professor Michael Adler), told Brown: "We've all had our Dodi Fayeds."

It need never have come to this, of course. Brown agrees with Patrick Jephson, Diana's former private secretary, that but for Camilla's refusal to back off, the marriage could have been saved by a workable truce which might have become a negotiated peace.

When it seemed the day was lost, and her husband was irretrievably in Camilla's clutches, Diana made the move that Brown now sees as her biggest mistake - publicly revealing Camilla to be the reason for her own marital misery.

She did so as a pre-emptive strike because she was haunted by the fate that befell her own mother - losing care of her children, whom Diana was raising "with a commoner's hands-on warmth and informality".

As Tina Brown observes: "By outing Camilla she had unwittingly done her rival a favour. The two felt free to be less furtive about a known relationship."

And now on course to be King and Queen. But that's another story altogether.

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