invisible thread

While the House of Windsor was increasingly consumed with its need to pick a malleable bride for the heir to the throne, one who would suit their dynastic needs and consummate a pact with tradition, Lady Diana Spencer was living in her own movie....A prince was in love with her!

{excerpts From The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown. Copyright 2007. Random House}

---------------- It was her sister Sarah who brought...Charles into her life....In November of that year, [1977] Sarah felt confident enough to invite the Prince to shoot with her father at Althorp. Schoolgirl Diana was there. She registered on Charles's radar only as a "jolly" and "bouncy" (or "binecy," as he would pronounce it) younger sister of Sarah, but for the sixteen-year-old Diana seeing Prince Charles for the first time since her childhood was a "whoomph" moment of her own. Once she had caught sight of the number-one royal bachelor striding with his Labrador through a plowed field with the guns and "beaters" and dogs, there was no other rival for her heart but twenty-eight-year-old Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH The Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland....

After the shooting day, Diana could not forget this thrilling multiple presence. How could she? The Royals had been embedded in the Spencers' idea of themselves for centuries. They were raised up by kings. The source of their wealth and influence was propinquity to the crown. Diana may have disliked her childhood visits to Sandringham, but her imagination still revolved round the magical rescue power of princes. ...

...Diana...was included in the invitation to Prince Charles's thirtieth-birthday ball in November 1978. It was one of the most lustrous private parties the Royal Family had thrown since the 1930s, when the then Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, had been in his partying prime.


The Argentine...Luis Basualdo, a polo-playing friend of Charles, accompanied Diana into the Picture Gallery to watch the cabaret by The Three Degrees, the all-female vocal group from Philadelphia (whose big hit, back in 1974, had been "When Will I See You Again"). Basualdo thought she was "very shy, very naive but rather nice."

Diana gazed down from the Picture Gallery at the thrilling sight of the elegant Prince dancing the night away, sometimes with Sarah, sometimes with the other lovely, sophisticated girls in his life, all of them more self-possessed and more accomplished than she: Lady Leonora Lichfield, Gerald Grosvenor's beautiful sister; Lady Jane Wellesley, the cool daughter of the Duke of Wellington; the curvaceous screen actress Susan George; Lady Tryon, glamour-girl Australian spouse of Charles's shooting friend Anthony; and one especially intimate-seeming dance partner, the confident, laughing blonde Camilla Parker Bowles.

It seemed to Diana she could hardly compete in this company. She had left West Heath in December 1977 having failed every one of her O-level exams not once but twice. How could she win Charles's heart with so few accomplishments?

...She did, in fact, have a talent that West Heath had already noticed. She had a keen emotional intelligence. Whether it was inherited from her Spencer grandmother's instinctive kindness or her Fermoy grandfather's gift of spontaneous intimacy, Diana made her warmth available to anyone regardless of race, creed, or nationality.

An invisible thread of kindliness drew her to people who expected the least and needed the most.

The distinguished historian Paul Johnson believes that Diana's empathy was a unique gift. "...She had something that very few people possess. She had extraordinary intuition and could see people who were nice and warm to them and sympathize with them...Very few people compare to what she had."

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Diana was restive, not emancipated enough to challenge ladylike patterns that were increasingly obsolete but modern enough to want inchoately to escape them. She came across an article in the Daily Telegraph that seemd to speak directly to her, about academic failures who later become roaring successes in life. Diana, the third girl who should have been a boy, ...who was always the butt of her sharper siblings' gentle condescension, secretly longed to show the world she was a star. Beneath the timid conventionality there were signs of gathering conviction. She clipped the Telegraph story, slipped it under her father's door, and began to pester him about moving from Northamptonshire to London.

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