Sprained Wrist Association AGM. I know you wouldn’t understand, but people with sprained wrists are excluded by society. I think we ought to make a speech about it.’
The opening volley was designed to saturate my defences. While still distractedly craning out of the window for a telltale sign of red carpet and a press posse, I would subconsciously assess the incoming missiles:
- She has deliberately chosen a bad moment for me. This kind of premeditation always spells trouble. Look out for the second salvo. (My God, I hope she doesn’t know about that business with her new car…)
- She is accusing me of deliberately concealing an invitation from her because I disapprove of it or because I am too lazy to research it. (Both true on occasions, as she probably knows.)
- Why the Sprained Wrist Association, for goodness’ sake? Aha – cherchez a handsome radial osteopath. Extra trouble: she loves to pretend you are jealous.
- Note that I am too insensitive to understand. This means I have missed a recent opportunity to be sympathetic, exacerbated by the fact that, unlike herself and people living with SWS (Sprained Wrist Syndrome), I have no idea what it is like to feel rejected.
- And now ‘we’ have to make a speech. This means a heap of exploratory work with the Department of Health (again) and probably a ruined weekend while I draft the speech (again). The speech will then be rejected because take your pick – she has gone off the osteopath/the Daily Mail says SWS is all in the mind/the astrologer forbids speeches during the current transit of Pluto/the Prince is patron of the Sprained Knee Association and we are making a show of not competing at the moment.
- Worst of all, somebody has snitched on me. How else did she find out about the invitation? Surely not one of the girls in the office … somebody looking through my papers … maybe the butler … the driver … Oh no! So she must know about—
‘Patrick! And when were you going to tell me you’d ruined my new car?’ [CURTAIN]
Of course it helped, always having the last word.
As time passed and I travelled with her more and more, I observed a phenomenon more usually associated with declining politicians and rock stars. The Princess found foreign tours stressful, both physically and mentally, yet she needed the buzz only they could provide. Tours also put her under unusually intense press scrutiny, because the travelling pack had no distractions other than her and the hotel bar, yet she delighted in the unmatched range of exotic and heart-tugging photo opportunities they provided. This persisted even when, as sometimes happened, the resulting press coverage back home was infuriatingly inaccurate and slanted.
When I challenged one of the travelling correspondents with a particularly misleading front-page story bearing his by-line, he genuinely seemed to share my outrage. ‘It’s the editors,’ he protested. ‘They rewrite my stuff to conform with their current line on the War of the Waleses.’
This last remark came back to me later. The Princess’s relations with the media were becoming a subject of growing interest to me, and to the public at large. I had already noticed that both she and her media pursuers had almost made a game out of satisfying their mutual requirement for each other (with truth as the first piece to leave the board), even though at times she would show flashes of resentment at press attention.
It was also dawning on me that there was something in her character which was attracted to this love-hate relationship. It was echoed elsewhere in her life. I often saw it in her attitude to her husband, or his family, or the public duties she did so well, and on each occasion it was the love half of the equation that seemed hardest for her to feel. Time and again, like an untrusting child, she doubted the dependability of the love she was shown. Small wonder, then, that she protected any affection she felt able to give – except to her children – with a portcullis of preconditions.
On a day-to-day basis, our job was to design her programme in such a way that the press had the best possible chance to report her routine public duties favourably, without inconveniencing the organizations she was visiting. If those organizations benefited in the process – and some did in spectacular fashion – then so much the better. On a deeper level, however, a dangerous mutual dependence was certainly growing. The media stimulated the Princess’s appetite for attention, but never satisfied her true requirement for love and security.
This produced some confusing results. You might not readily associate media phobia with the star of Panorama, but it became a daily reality for me. A distressed Princess is famously remembered to have asked, ‘What have the tabloids ever done for me?’ To this plaintively rhetorical question tabloid editors gave rather less rhetorical replies along the lines of, ‘We made you, darlin’!’ And so, in a sense, they had.
Unfortunately, it was not in a sense that gave her any feeling of genuine worth. After all, if being ‘made’ is to have a life as thin as the paper it is printed on, it might make you doubt your very existence. I came to think that the media were a kind of family to her. Theirs was the language of a desensitized childhood – extravagant praise followed by harsh rebuke. Like a child coaxed on to its parent’s lap for comfort, the pain of then being pushed carelessly aside was all the greater for her.
Although I only dimly understood the reasons for the Princess’s childlike temperament, I knew they were deep and traumatic. They left her constantly in need of reassurance. Tragically, she cared less and less whether this reassurance was healthy, or where she found it. For her, words of comfort were even more essential than for the rest of us.
It was one reason why she was so good at dispensing them herself. How often her messages of kindness and encouragement must have seemed a mirror of those she would have liked to receive. Perhaps the most poignant difference was that from her the words were as genuine as she could make them, but those she received were avidly gathered up like flowers on a walkabout, unconditionally and indiscriminately. The words were what mattered, and she cared little whether they had been truly meant, or whether they came from policeman or President, butcher or baker, butler or playboy.
For me, however, especially in those early years, it was enough to know that she had to be jollied along with flattery, humour, gift-wrapped advice and very visible loyalty – especially from men. I had only to master the formula, combined with an alert sense of self-preservation, to see out my brief appointment successfully.
Another thing I noticed about the Princess as my apprenticeship came to an end was her tendency very vocally to dread overseas tours but then, as soon as one was over, to look forward eagerly to the next. Given the many extra stresses and strains imposed by touring, this mystified me.
Then I realized what the attraction was. Travelling press aside, tours provided her with an endless supply of new and interesting supporting casts. She liked foreigners and, of course, the only ones she met abroad were the ones who liked her. In fact, it must have seemed to her that they adored her, unreservedly and unconditionally. They did not read menacing broadsheet newspaper analyses of her waning relevance to the power of the British establishment. They did not stop to consider whether she manipulated London’s popular media. They did not question her sincerity and motives in the way increasingly favoured by her Pharisee critics back home.
It is hard to blame her if, in the end, she preferred the company of enthusiastic foreigners to the wan faces of rain-soaked, provincial England; or the simple gratitude of a limbless Pathan tribesman to the false smiles of London society; or the attentiveness of a playboy lover to the lizard-like watchfulness she felt scouring her from the drawing rooms of Gloucestershire or the smoking rooms of St James’s.
Noticing the quick approval she seemed to attract abroad, I wondered how much of the Princess’s glamour was due to her innate qualities and how much she owed to the status she had acquired on marriage. The answer, I suppose, was an intricate mixture of both. Deprived of one – as she was when she effectively relinquished her royal status towards the end – the other had less chance to shine. Only the unique conjunction of inbred talent and historic opportunity could have created such a phenomenon.
Few film stars survive the transition from big screen to real life without losing