Diana's Nightmare - The Family (48 page)

Dividing her time between her husband's penthouse suite atop the Metropole Hotel in Brighton, the country manor in Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, and a Mayfair town house, she progressed, as her husband's relatives died, from being Mrs Legge through Lady Lewisham to the Countess of Dartmouth.

One who remembers her through those heady days, recalled: it was as if she always wanted to create a lasting impression which was all part of her curious charm. Raine appears to be a very vain woman. She likes to show herself and her things off. I remember going round to her home in Mayfair when she was married to Lord Dartmouth. She had a child late in life and made a big point of the pram sailing through the drawing room so everyone could admire her and the child. The house was very stylishly furnished with great attention to detail. Everything was perfect - a very gracious London home. Everyone seemed to take to her simply because she was so likable, although I imagine if you crossed her she would put her foot down and blow you up.'

In recognition of her charitable works William Douglas- Home (brother of Sir Alec who became Prime Minister) wrote a poem for her called
Lovely Lady Lewisham
and, unhindered by an unfortunate singing voice, Raine recorded a lyric written by her mother called
I'm In Love.

Ms Cartland remained a power to be reckoned with in her life. The Marquess of Bath (then the thirty-four- year-old Viscount Weymouth) recalled: 'I remember being summoned by Barbara to take tea at her house and sitting next to her very nervous daughter, Raine Legge as she then was. I made what was probably a sexist remark and Barbara admonished me by insisting that the woman was the truly dominant member of any family. When I dared to argue the point she rolled up a copy of
The Times
and beat me over the head with it. Poor Raine sat there and said nothing. I was glad to get home to Longleat.'

She bore Dartmouth four children, William, Rupert, Henry and Charlotte, before their seemingly blissful union came to a sudden end. No one but the parties themselves knew what really went wrong inside the marriage. Through Gerald, she had met Johnnie Spencer, who was available following the unseemly defection of Frances. Not only did Earl Spencer need a wife, but his awesome Althorp needed a mistress. The house was dirty and badly run and the finances were in such an awful state that there was never enough money to pay the wages on a Friday. Raine decided to arrange her own fee-less transfer from one earl to the next. Used to speedy processes, she sensed this had to be yet another one, lest his daughters try to dissuade him from the match.

Whatever pressures Diana, Jane and Sarah did bring to bear, her marriage to Johnnie Spencer was largely a happy one, and when it ended in his death she tried to fill the vacuum by experimenting with a number of new liaisons, assuring friends that she would marry again within the year.

There was a flicker of romance with the mega-rich cereals millionaire Francis Kellogg who was besotted by her, according to his friends. Dame Barbara said: 'I think she needs to marry. She is not a person who would ever choose to live alone. But I am sure it will not be Francis Kellogg. He is far too old for her.' What's more, said the Dame choosing to disregard the Duchess of Windsor's view that 'one can never be too rich', Raine didn't need Kellogg's money: 'She has plenty of her own.'

Travelling widely through Europe and the United States, she arrived at one point on her journey in the principality of Monaco to visit friends. It was there, within the set year of Johnnie Spencer's demise, that Raine found a husband to succeed him. At sixty-two, the chocolate box widow had arrived at the door of marital experience yet again thanks to a dinner party encounter in Monte Carlo with Jean-Francois, the Count de Chambrun. The one dinner progressed to another in Antibes and the old electricity began to crackle. 'You know that lovely thing when you look across a room,' she later remarked like a starry-eyed teenager in a suite at the Connaught Hotel in London.

After the second dinner, they had sat up talking well into the small hours, and then the telephone calls started. He rang twice the next day and three times the day after that. When she returned to England, he continued his siege by fax, telling her that he could not wait for her return to France in the company of the woman she describes as 'my totally best friend', Therese Lawson, wife of the former Chancellor, Lord Lawson. The pushy suitor duly arrived in England and Raine took him to stay at the house Lord Spencer had bought her by the sea at Bognor and to visit various friends who, she said, were all entranced by him.

When word reached Diana of the match, she appeared disinterested. As a child she had prayed 'Raine, Raine, go away' so many times that she might have been relieved her prayers had finally been answered. This, after all, was the woman who had even made her father sell his surplus suits alongside tacky souvenirs in the Althorp gift shop. Nevertheless, the Princess told a lady-in-waiting that she had been 'amused' to discover her stepmother's suitor was not all he might have been. His water filtration company, CHF International, had made just forty pounds profit in the year prior to his meeting the wealthy widow Spencer, the family seat had been sold off and the cost of maintaining his chateau in the south of France was barely met by the cost of letting the place to paying guests. To raise further funds, 4,000 square metres of the grounds surrounding his Chateau Garibondy, near Cannes, had been sold off for the building of low cost houses and flats.

Times had indeed been hard for de Chambrun since French divorce laws had forced him to buy out his former wife's fifty per cent share of the chateau when they separated. The house had belonged to her family, but he wanted to keep it more than she did. When Josaleen, the ex-wife, went to live in Paris, the Count was left with a renovation bill in excess of £1 million and in the three years prior to meeting Raine his charges for letting it out had been £15,950 a week in the high season and £11,500 at other times. The family seat at Marvejols, Nimes, was sold at public auction after his brother Charles, then a National Front mayor, ran into debt and the bank had taken the furniture away.

Unperturbed by any financial clouds on the Count's horizon, Raine enjoyed the new courtship and accompanied him back to the Chateau Garibondy where she weighed up its possibilities for improvement once he had put a stop to his bed-and-breakfast venture. Then, travelling the scenic route home, they drove to Paris ignoring the torrential rain that marred their view of the Massif Central where they stayed overnight at the Hotel Panoramique. Even being compelled to dine in a downmarket cafe wreathed in Galloises fumes, when every better restaurant was closed, failed to daunt the spirits of the woman Diana once pronounced as 'too grand for us'.

In Paris they stayed at her old friend Mohammed Al-Fayed's Ritz Hotel, lunched with Liliane de Rothschild (who found Jean-Francois 'divine') and visited Place des Vosges where the Count de Chambrun proposed marriage and the Princess of Wales's stepmother accepted. Mindful of the pain she had suffered at the hands of her stepchildren, she told her suitor, before accepting his proposal: if there is the slightest
frisson
of disapproval from your children, I take to the hills. I tried so hard with those Spencers and I cannot go through that again.'

Back in London she warned her fiancé how intrusive the Press could be but after the paparazzi's most alert member, Jason Fraser, found them browsing in a village antique shop, he entered into the spirit of the publicity circus and told reporters that they had already enjoyed the honeymoon. It was the sort of confession that fifty years earlier would have required Raine to send a written apology to her mother, but the dowager countess merely nodded in agreement and said, 'Well at our advanced age, no one would think we'd just held hands'.

Her plans for her new home were already advanced: it's so funny, I had said never an old house again,' she told the writer Valerie Grove, i don't want to know about leaking roofs and guttering. But I have started rearranging his house - I can't help it, I always do it - and don't you think it's a scream, I said, "Where's the library?" And there isn't one! So we are making one upstairs and this sounds terribly bossyboots but he says he'll do the outside and I'll do the inside which is so divine because that's what Johnnie used to say. I am not into gardening - or dogs since I was bitten by Mummy's horrible Cairn in the nursery.'

Jean-Francois had met the essential qualifications required by Raine. He did not smoke, he was not ill-tempered and he was full of compliments. She had sorely missed Johnnie's courtesies: 'You know what one misses most? When you're dressing to go out and say, "Shall I wear the red or the blue? And how do I look?" And Johnnie would murmur, "You're always the best." '

The published remark did not sit well with Diana who had always believed her father when he told her that
she
was 'the best'. So Raine, Raine had not gone away after all. The woman who had blocked her from her father just when she needed his loving counsel over her failing marriage was still around. For Diana, there could never be a man to replace Johnnie Spencer and when the woman who had taken him from her found another on whom to shower her affections, it did not seem a time to celebrate. Nevertheless, knowing what a fuss the Press would make if she ignored it, Diana instructed a secretary to send flowers. Biting on the bullet, she also invited the newly engaged couple to lunch at Kensington Palace, just the three of them.

'After the coffee HRH took Raine by the hand and said to her, "Raine, thank you so much for the love you gave my father over all those years," ' Jean-Francois was moved to write to
The Times
about the touching reunion he witnessed. 'Raine and HRH fell into each other's arms and they kissed goodbye in the most affectionate way.'

Goodbye was to be the operative word.

'How would you feel if someone said you were gay?'

Prince Edward

PRINCE Edward had a good eye for an actress. Diana, he decided, was one of the best he had ever seen after watching some of her performances with professional detachment. The Princess called her youngest brother-in-law Scooter, which was kinder than the nickname his colleagues at the Palace Theatre gave him. There, he was known as 'Barbara' after the comedienne Barbara Windsor.

Edward Antony Richard Louis is the most enigmatic of the Windsor children. Single in status and single-minded in purpose, he perplexes people who try to categorise him according to his family's known traits. As he wasn't Action Man like Charles at the same age nor Randy Andy like his other philandering brother, he didn't fit easily into an identifiable male slot.
The Sun
decided that at twenty-five he was 'a lonely misfit' and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, declared: 'He does not even seem to be sowing his wild oats as both Charles and Andrew did at his age with a succession of beauties. He has lived the life of a monk, more chaste than chased and seldom, if ever, chasing anything but himself.'

The insinuation was that because he wasn't robustly masculine, he must be secretly gay. But anyone who dined with him at Manzi's, the seafood restaurant in Soho, or mixed with him at parties inside Harrods and elsewhere, knew that he was a nice man and a good companion. In truth, the only reason he hadn't married was, according to a friend, that he was wary about asking anyone to join the Family.

Edward is not only the youngest of the Queen's children, he is also the sharpest. As an observer of the royal world, he has seen every single royal marriage, apart from that of his parents, break up untidily and unhappily. Mark Phillips had been the first to explain to him how difficult it was for an outsider to survive among the Windsors. The experiences of Diana and Fergie had merely confirmed his brother-in-law's view.

Edward had also learned from the highly publicised mistakes that Charles and Andrew had made before marriage that flings with available women tended to end in big headlines. 'Affable, intelligent and thoughtful' in the words of one former girlfriend, he managed to avoid detection until years after he lost his virginity at the age of sixteen.

Once he overcame a natural shyness and a tendency to blush easily, he discovered that he was attractive to girls of his own generation. Quietly, he became Edward the Caresser, previously the title of his namesake, the more openly libidinous Edward VII. One of Edward's endearing tactics was to invite a new girlfriend to guess the colour of his eyes. Invariably, they said blue. Invited to take a closer look, they noted that the corner of his left eye was, in fact, green.

'No way is he gay - I know that for a fact!' said one of his girlfriends, the blonde television presenter Ulrika Jonsson. 'People misunderstand me,' said Edward. 'They don't know anything about me, apart from listening to lies and distortions, yet they are quick to make judgements.'

Romy Adlington was making her name as a model when the nineteen-year-old Prince invited her out to dinner. She claims that she was responsible for introducing Edward to sex one passionate night at Buckingham Palace. Her assertion raised the intriguing possibility that he might have misled her into believing he was still a virgin. Certainly, he was adept at two-timing his partners. As his eighteen-month affair with Romy drew to a close at Balmoral in 1985, a replacement was already in transit.

'The day I left, another girlfriend of Edward's turned up twenty-four hours earlier than originally intended,' she said. 'The Queen, Philip and Charles had waited up and shortly before eleven p.m. the other girl arrived. This girl was obviously new because when she came in she made straight for a chair which
nobody
sits in - I think it was the one used by Queen Victoria. The poor girl didn't know, of course, but just as she went to sit down, Prince Charles grabbed her in mid-air and said, "Sorry, not that one".'

In his thirtieth year, Edward dated the singer and dancer Ruthie Henshall, who starred in the hit musical
Crazy for You.
But his real love interest was a Sloane Ranger unconnected with the theatre who worked in Knightsbridge and saw him privately.