The Diana Chronicles

by Tina Brown

In the course of Dodi’s six-week relationship with Diana,

That left Diana her Fermoy grandmother, Ruth, who was a manipulative, self-absorbed snob, and her stepmother, Raine, formerly Lady Dartmouth, whom Diana saw only as a hated usurper.

It is ironic that Raine was the daughter of Barbara Cartland.

(If you slapped an Edwardian-style picture hat on the head of Camilla Parker Bowles, you would be struck by her resemblance to Prince Charles’s adored nanny, Mabel Anderson.)

The last debutante presentation at court was in 1958. “We had to put a stop to it,” Princess Margaret said. “Every tart in London was getting in.”

Nobody was more tenacious in the social marriage market than Ruth Fermoy. Before Frances was even out of school, Ruth went into action like a high-voltage Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Realizing that the less attractive older daughter Mary (described by one dance partner as “immensely tall, bosomy and goggle-eyed”) would be a tougher sell, she fixed her hopes on the prospects of Frances and delayed Mary’s coming-out dance until she could do a double whammy with the added value of both.

There was no greater catch in the early 1950s than Diana’s father, Johnnie. The image of the 8th Earl Spencer will forever be defined by the truncheon-faced old buffer who squired his daughter with labored pride up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But when Frances Fermoy first laid eyes on Johnnie Spencer, he was tall, debonair, and desirable. As Viscount Althorp, eldest son of the seventh Earl, he was the presumptive heir to Althorp House, a 121-room stately home with 14,000 acres (21.875 square miles) of rolling Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, and Norfolk farmland, complete with cottages, farms, and villages. The family was older by 250 years than that Hanoverian import of the eighteenth century, King George I, whose descendants are today’s House of Windsor. The Spencers could trace themselves back to 1469, when they were a respected clan of prospering sheep farmers in Warwickshire, already in a positi...

Johnnie may have played the field, but in the marriage market, he was spoken for. He was unofficially engaged to Lady Anne Coke, now Lady Glenconner, the nineteen-year-old slim, blond, and witty daughter of the Earl of Leicester, a Norfolk neighbor at the palatial Holkham Hall and friend of the Fermoys, whose violin recitals Ruth accompanied on the piano. A formal announcement was expected any minute.

Neither this fact nor her friendship with Anne’s parents stopped Lady Fermoy in her naked pursuit of the future Earl Spencer for her own daughter, Frances.

As Lady Glenconner told it to me, in the spring season of 1952, while she was a guest of Frances’s older sister Mary in the Fermoys’ Wilton Crescent house, Lady Fermoy encouraged her to invite her “young man” round for drinks. When Johnnie Spencer arrived, Ruth was all over him with her expert charm and seemed very eager to know when he would call on his fiancée again. The next time Johnnie visited Anne at Wilton Crescent that year, Lady Fermoy...

“And suddenly,” Anne recalled, “I could see that Lady Fermoy was pushing Frances like mad. ‘Do you like tennis, Johnnie? Oh, Frances adores tennis, don’t you, Frances? Do you like swimming? Oh, Frances just adores swimming, don’t you, Frances?’ and Frances just stood there and simpered. Afterwards Johnnie said to me ‘what a simply marvelous girl Frances is!’ and I thought no more about it. But the next time I saw him he said, ‘The most beautiful pair of stockings arrived for me knitted by Frances at school!’ You can guess whose idea that was!” Soon Anne started to perceive coolness in her fiancé. “I was devastated when Johnnie dropped me,” she admitted. “I was sent off on the QE to America ostensibly to sell Holkham pottery, but really to get over it. I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t rich enough.”

Frances’s private income was an attraction, but Johnnie was infatuated. To court her officially, he had to wait two years until she was seventeen (nice girls didn’t date until they had “come out”), but the romance flourished privately. A friend who was in the same dorm with Frances at finishing school remembers her slipping out to make numerous steamy telephone calls to Johnnie “with a lot of writhing around.” “She was always a very sexy girl,” her friend says. “Johnnie, of course, was over the moon.” Anne Coke couldn’t compete with phone sex.

The goal of the Fermoys’ coming-out ball for Frances and Mary the following year was to clinch marriage proposals. On May 21, 1953, they entertained 450 guests in the splendor of Londonderry House. “By two o’clock,” reported the Evening Standard, “eightsome reels and foursomes had made the ballroom bounce. By three o’clock the lights in the ballroom were switched off and guests danced in the darkness, illuminated only by the lights outside.” Lord Fermoy, in white tie and tails, opened the ball partnering the Queen Mother to the music of “It’s a Lovely Day Today.” When the tiny royal personage entered the ballroom at 11:15 P.M. wearing a pink and silver leaf-patterned organza gown and diamond tiara, the music stopped and all the women present dipped in a low, rustling curtsy. The glamour of it all was a deal-closer for the rising courtier Johnnie Spencer, who danced the night away with Frances in her white organza ball gown scattered with rhinestones. For him, there was no greater aphrodisiac than royal connections.

The Queen Mother was one of Sarah’s and the Duke of Kent was Jane’s, but only the esteemed wife of the Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and assorted county neighbors were pictured in Johnnie’s films of the christening of the future Princess of Wales.

It was not till 1964 that the Althorp bonfires blazed at last. Charles Edward Maurice, future ninth Earl Spencer, was born and christened in the noble grandeur of the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey, with the Queen herself as his godmother. Frances

Nanny Janet Thompson tells of peeking into the Sandringham drawing room and seeing the Queen in a game of hide-and-seek with six-year-old Andrew and a cheery five-year-old Diana. In her account, Prince Charles, then seventeen, walked in at teatime and asked, “Everything all right? It looks like a good party to me”—a cameo appearance that seems rather poignant now, conjuring up as it does the young heir to the throne’s large well-meaning ears, his fogeyish big brother concern, and his tiny future wife giggling behind a heavy silk curtain.

Once the two elder girls were in school, Frances started to please herself and go to town when she wanted. Her family income gave her independence, and at only twenty-eight she was even more attractive than as a young bride—more self-assured, more conversationally amusing, and more open for adventure. She wanted a taste of swinging London, and there were plenty of prospects. She had arrived at the sexual heyday of all the other aristocratic Desperate Housewives, alert for long lunches at the Causerie in Claridge’s and the offer of a diverting afternoon. It was inevitable perhaps that she fell in love. In the summer of 1966, her dinner partner at a London soiree she attended with Johnnie was the funny, rumpled charmer Peter Shand Kydd, forty-one, who was there with his wife, Janet, an interior decorator. He had inherited a reasonable fortune from the sale of his family’s wallpaper business and for the last few years had lived the life of a romantic wanderer, sheep farming in Australia. The two couples hit it off so well that they went on a ski holiday together in Courchevel in the French Alps.

Diana later told her friend Cosima Somerset that her mother’s exit was “the most painful thing in her life, that the children weren’t told why she was leaving permanently.”

In 1993, when she herself was ninety-two, Barbara Cartland put it this way: “The only books she ever read were mine and they weren’t awfully good for her.”

The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, and now the Independent, are supposed to occupy the high ground.

He understands the definition of manners as the ability to put someone else at their ease.

“Congratulations.” On the videotapes with voice

expression, and it’s never served him well as a means of mass communication.

For five hours, the Prince ruminated aloud about Diana’s baffling dislike of country pursuits, her possessive need to be in his company all the time, her lack of any sustaining hobbies. Penny Junor alleges that Diana had become so frustrated one night with the sight of Charles kneeling beside the bed saying his nightly prayers that she hit him over the head with the family Bible. Perhaps Charles forgot to mention that domestic detail.

Haha.

Edward Mirzoeff, the BBC filmmaker who spent many months studying her up close for his celebrated documentary Elizabeth R,

Martin Charteris [her former private secretary] was in love with her—you could see that.”

By 1992, Diana’s global magic was so intense that the bench she sat on at the Taj Mahal was renamed The Princess Diana Seat, blowing out 339 years of the historic karma surrounding the woman whose beauty had inspired the building, Mumatz Mahal.

“It would be really embarrassing,” she said. “On the other side of the road they’d all be going ‘Oh no!’ because they’d got him. He’d just turn around and say, ‘I’m really sorry, she’ll be here in a minute.’” When their Rolls approached an expectant village, the people yelled “There she is!” not “There they are!” A Palace official noted Charles kicking a pebble around. The Prince told him: “‘They don’t want to see me.’ He was wobbly. He seemed schizophrenic, deeply caring followed by deeply selfish.” The worst of it was that when Diana was resting, Charles would be off in other parts of Wales delivering speeches. Coverage for these the next day was nil.

But it’s safe to say that between Diana’s marriage to Charles on July 29, 1981, and their official separation on December 9, 1992,

“I’ve never done anything as intrusive in my life,” he said. “But it was a journalistic high.” A high, for sure. But not a journalistic one.

Queen Elizabeth’s first comment when she saw her new grandson Prince William was “Thank Heavens he hasn’t got his father’s ears.”

A more up-close-and-personal security breach that occurred in July 1982 left the Queen equally unfazed. A thirty-one-year-old unemployed laborer named Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom at Buckingham Palace at 7:15 A.M. by scaling a sixty-foot drainpipe. The Queen was still in bed at the time, awaiting her tea tray. When the intrusive Mr. Fagan appeared at her side, the Queen got up, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and told him sternly: “Get out of here at once.” No security officer appearing, Her Majesty sat on the edge of the bed and chatted politely to Fagan for a long five minutes about his family problems until a policeman finally surfaced. “Take him outside and give him a cigarette,” said the Queen.

To the Windsors, public appearances were not personal performances. They were acts of state, symbolic assertions of national identity, ex officio rituals having nothing to do with individual characteristics and everything to do with impersonal roles assigned by tradition and birth.

morning. The evening of the Waldegrave dinner, Lady

There is a creepy subtext to The Housekeeper’s Diary that keeps reminding the reader of something going on offstage.