a trickle of invitations

Someone discussing Jackie Kennedy in a TV special stated, "No one really gets what they feel is the 'right amount' of publicity. One either gets too little, or too much. She got too much."

Tina Brown wrote, in The Diana Chronicles,
---------- [excerpt] {In 19779}In the face of the merciless new gossip press, seriously grand personages had to hide from the pervasive influence of envy. Everyone was startled when the Duke of Argyll burst into print with a defensive announcement about the number of kilts he had (only one kilt for morning and one for evening wear, he defiantly alleged). Or when the Earl of Warwick went so far as to flee his ancient family seat of Warwick Castle for an apartment in New York, taking with him a cache of Old Masters that the nation expected to stay right where they were. "The castle stinks of old shoes, old socks and wet mackintoshes," Warwick proclaimed from exile with rather admirable candor. "How we dispose of the contents is entirely a personal affair."

The Royal Family didn't want or need any controversy like this. Ever since the abdication fiasco it had been much safer for the monarchy to be boring, and the Queen was striving to keep it that way. Her own social life was always carefully unadventurous. Childhood friends, horsey folk, courtier families.

...The trouble with all the discretion was that in a racier media age it made them look old hat....Pictures of a middle-aged Princess Margaret churning grandly around the dance floor in her caftan in Mustique hardly moved product....The bachelor Prince Charles was the only game in town.

When the Queen set off on one of her royal tours, an unthinkable thing happened: no one went to cover it. No television, no newspapers, not even the Press Association wire service (which no longer had a regular court reporter). The Palace saw this as a worrying sign, on the basis that the only thing worse than having yourself exposed is not being bothered about at all. Richard Stott, then editor of the Daily Mirror, expressed the underlying anxiety: "If the Royal Family is not being reported on, it becomes irrelevant, and if it becomes irrelevant it will die."

Throughout the seventies, the guessing game of the Prince of Wales's love life was the sole excitement for the media. A bevy of royal {media} sleuths, who were to play a major part in Diana's life, were poised to follow any scent in pursuit of the girl they referred to as "the One," wherever it led without regard to any of the conventional boundaries.

...They were welcomed by the royal machine on official foreign tours, but less welcome when they chased vacationing members of the family down the pistes of Davos and Klosters, hid under coconut palms for sneaky long-range photographs, or festooned in field glasses and fishing rods, adopted Clouseau-like countrymen disguises for trespassing at Sandringham and Balmoral....

Reporter Arnold was teamed with the jovial photographer Arthur Edwards, who approached royal scoops like a general plotting a siege. At Sandringham, Prince Philip once greeted Edwards's cheery "Happy New Year" with a succinct "Bollocks!"

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...The Prince's long-term lover needed to demonstrate, in public as well as in private, that she had the power to get the Prince of Wales back at her pleasure, and make that point to her philandering husband. When Charles asked Camilla to dance, the two of them were lip-locked half the night. "On and on they went...kissing each other, French kissing, dance after dance. It was completely beyond the pale," a guest recalled. ...

For the Royal Family, Charles's obsession with Camilla had gone from being an acceptable dalliance to a serious roadblock to matrimony. Plus, it was causing unsavory chatter. The Queen's private secretary had already come to inform her that there was dismay among senior officers in the Household Cavalry that the Prince of Wales was having a very public affair with a brother officer's wife.

The Queen said nothing, but she absorbed the implications and did not like them.

It was clear now that there were deeper emotional reasons why the slipper never seemed to fit....The awkward fact was that the heir to the throne, like his uncle, Edward VIII, was tenaciously in love with a married woman. Charles was now thirty-one, past the age he always promised he would marry. A bride must be found, and fast. But who?

..."All Ruth Fermoy wanted was that her granddaughter be the future Queen of England," said Lady Edith Foxwell....In turn, the Queen Mother told her eligible grandson over lunch in the spring of 1980 "not to miss the chance of Diana Spencer."

A trickle of invitations started to include Diana in theater parties where the Prince of Wales was present. While Charles persisted in his affair with Camilla, those invitations now began to increase.

...It is one of the ironies of Diana's story that the more Prince Charles fell in love with his mistress, the more pressing it was for the Palace to produce somebody to replace her. The arc of Diana's ascendance in Charles's life was thus always entwined with the arc of Camilla's.

What no one understood at the time, least of all the eighteen-year-old bride-to-be, was how much it suited Camilla, too, for Diana to marry Charles. The likes of Anna Wallace were way too assertive, worldly, and disruptive. In the words of Camilla's brother-in-law, Richard Parker Bowles, "She [Camilla] initially encouraged the relationship between Charles and Diana because she thought Diana was gormless.

She never saw Diana as a threat. . . Camilla knew that as a woman with a past she could never be accepted as Charles's wife. She wanted two things from her life: to retain her special relationship with the Prince of Wales, and a marriage to someone who she was genuinely fond of..." The youngest Spencer girl was such a sweet little thing. She was sure to be quiet, passive, and obedient. How could she possibly be any trouble?

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"It would have been very easy to play to the gallery," {Prince Philip told an interviewer}, "but I took a conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. You can't fall too far."

{Tina Brown continues}: If the Duke of Edinburgh is making a veiled suggestion here that the only qualitative or quantitative difference between Diana's fame on the one hand and that of himself and his royal wife on the other was Diana's pushiness and their self-restraint, then he is kidding -- and flattering -- himself.

It wasn't just that since the 1950s the mass media had multiplied its outlets and abandoned its reticence. There was also an order of magnitude's difference between the containable, appropriate, rather formal admiration bestowed on the young Queen and her consort and the incendiary star power of Princess Diana. Its wattage kept increasing every year Diana was alive, rather than damping down as the Royal Family had expected.

...Diana's unerring female antennae rightly told her that Camilla's "friendship" was a strategy for deftly sustaining her control. ...
It was not till mid-October that the Prince and Princess of Wales finally ended the honeymoon from hell....Among the Royal Family there was growing trepidation when they left about what appeared to be Diana's incipient nervous breakdown. They had seen nothing yet. For the next sixteen years, the unacknowledged nervous breakdown was theirs.

----------- [excerpts, The Diana Chronicles.
Tina Brown. Copyright 2007. Random House, New York.]

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