THESE DAYS, COVERING BUCKINGHAM Palace isn't the cushy beat that one might imagine. What with the Yorks' marriage crumbling, newly divorced Princess Anne mooning over boyfriend Timothy Laurence, and Fergie's father accused once again of philandering, Fleet Street reporters have been earning their overtime. Now comes a fresh crop of stories about Princess Diana to refuel speculation about the troubled Waleses as well.
A new biography by Lady Colin Campbell, a 42-year-old Jamaican-born socialite with a mysterious sexual history, Diana in Private is the latest bombshell. Among its allegations: that the Princess had at least three lovers before she married Prince Charles in 1981, that she enjoyed a passionate sexual relationship with Charles before their engagement, and that after her marriage she took "confidants"—a word that in Britain can be taken as a euphemism for "lovers"—including King Juan Carlos of Spain. The controversial book, which the posh Harrods department store has banned from its shelves, has sparked a new wave of Di-mentia in the press and climbed to No. 3 on Britain's Sunday Times best-seller list.
Does Campbell's story hold up? Some Palace watchers note that she has an impressive rosier of well-placed contacts and credit her with writing the most believable Di bio to date, while others scoff at her sensational claims. She portrays Diana as a schemer who used sexual wiles and shameless flattery to capture Charles, then dropped the act after the honeymoon. ("If she'd been a wild animal," a relative says, "she'd have made an excellent hunter.") By Campbell's account, the Waleses had grown apart by their first anniversary. By then, she writes, Charles had decided that his wife was "an airhead." For her part, says Campbell, Diana concluded that he had "never loved her," and screamed at him like "a fishwife."
In 1986, Campbell claims, the Princess packed her bags but was persuaded by her astrologer to give the marriage a second chance. Nevertheless, she alleges, Diana took a series of confidants—including bodyguard Barry Mannakee, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1987. Campbell maintains that Charles, for his part, has also dallied with women, including onetime girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles, a 44-year-old aristocrat married to a retired Army brigadier.
As the palace braces for two more tell-all Di bios this summer and tabloid reporters stumble over one another with can-you-top-this claims, Campbell is trying hard to position herself as the class act of the bunch. Most royal biographers, she sniffs, "are not interested in the truth. Nine out of 10 of them don't even know the truth because they don't mix in sufficiently illustrious circles to know it."
At home in the Belgravia section of London (where her cozy quarters contain minor works by Miró and Picasso), Campbell has just come from a TV interview. With spaniels Turn Turn and Popsie Miranda nipping at her heels, she collapses onto a battered sofa. "The last few weeks have been sheer hell," she says. "I've had to endure the most hysterical lies."
Most annoying to her ladyship, it seems, is her rivals' attention to her curious upbringing, which, in the words of one tabloid, "[was] even more bizarre than her claims about the royal family." Descended from Lebanese Maronites who settled in Jamaica, she was the second child born to department-store owner Michael Ziadie and his wife, Gloria. Christened George William, she was dressed in boys' clothing and sent to a boys' school, even though, as she puts it, "everyone knew that I was really a girl."
Although Campbell refuses to explain her childhood difficulties, she has been quoted by London's Evening Standard as saying, "I had a medical condition, and it was the custom...for girls with such a condition to be brought up as boys." She reportedly told the Daily Express that just before she turned 14, "the doctors...carried out a very minor operation and had a long chat with my parents. So when I came out, I was a girl through and through."
Lord Colin Campbell found the Jamaican immigrant fascinating when he met her in New York in 1974. After leaving home in 1968, Georgia Arianna, as she called herself, had studied design and done some modeling by the time she encountered his lordship while visiting her friend Lady Jeanne Campbell (his sister and Norman Mailer's third wife). "He proposed to me the night we met," she says. The marriage—which took place three weeks later—lasted less than two years.
After their 1975 divorce, Campbell sold cosmetics at Harrods, worked as social secretary to the Libyan Embassy and as an account manager at Lloyd's of London—all the while dabbling in charity work to maintain her social contacts. She turned out a successful etiquette book called A Guide to Being a Modern Lady in 1986; the next year she began a social column for a glossy monthly called Boardroom.
In 1990, she says, she decided to do "a serious biography" on Diana. "Although I like the royals in a vague sort of way, and I meet them socially, I don't at all go along with all this royalty worship," she explains. Diana, she says, is "a woman with great strengths and human foibles. In other words, a real person—not a cardboard cutout."
Never mind the criticism of the book from her upper-crust cronies: "Everyone [in the aristocracy] knows it's the truth," Campbell says. "There is nothing in the book that they don't know already."
What do she and her confreres expect for the Waleses? "I think we will see more of the same," says London's least conventional author. "It's a traditional royal marriage. He leads his life. She leads her life. She is a very good Princess of Wales, and he is a very good Prince of Wales. But they lead parallel lives, and I think they'll continue. I don't think there'll ever be a divorce."
MICHELLE GREEN
TERRY SMITH in London
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- Terry Smith.
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