The photograph is black and white, and it's devastating. A 21-year-old Diana, Princess of Wales, is crying on her first official tour of Australia. At the time, the public only had half the story. Here was a young royal bride who'd just become a mother, and it seemed she was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the crowds waiting for the couple in Sydney.
© Getty ImagesHer younger brother, Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, has now filled in the rest. In the caption he wrote for the image, one of dozens of photos in his new book, he reminds readers what was really going on: "As she herself would say: 'With the media attention came a lot of jealousy [from her husband]. A great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.' Sometimes, it was all too much."
The book is "Swan Song: Diana, My Sister" and it's caused a sensation across the U.K., offering a detailed account of Diana's life and death while shining a light on topics that the British monarchy would rather leave alone, from the way she was "left to fend for herself" after her divorce from then-Prince Charles to the decisions surrounding her funeral.
© Getty ImagesThe memoir provoked a rare response from Buckingham Palace: "While we do not comment on books as a matter of principle, His Majesty is mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and color memory in ways others do not recognize, even many years after such a loss."
Spencer has made it clear there are still things he knows about King Charles III that he hasn't shared and never will. But his intimate portrait of his sister reawakens some of the monarch's most sensitive territory, including the jealousy that he's rumored to have felt over his wife's success and how beloved she was by the world.
How Diana has spoken about her dynamic with King Charles
Diana described it in her own words in Andrew Morton's 1992 biography. "Everybody always said when we were in the car: 'Oh, we're on the wrong side, we want to see her, we don't want to see him,' and that was all we heard as we went through those crowds and, obviously, he wasn't used to that, and neither was I."
"He was jealous. I understood his jealousy, but I didn't know how to explain to him that I hadn't asked for it. I kept telling him that he had gotten married and whoever his wife was would become the center of attention for the way she dressed or the way she behaved in one situation or another, and that he would always have to lay the foundations so that his wife could eventually stand on her own, but he didn't understand."
Diana also discussed the Australian tour and the infamous photos. "It was the hardest moment of being the Princess of Wales... It was hot, I was jet-lagged, and I felt sick. I was too thin. The whole world was focused on me, day after day. I was the front-page story in the newspapers. It seemed outrageous to me because I hadn't done anything important myself, like climb Everest or something extraordinary like that."
© Princess Diana ArchiveNone of this is new, but it's a chapter the King would surely prefer to forget. The people who worked for the Prince and Princess of Wales knew it, the press knew it, and Charles himself didn't try very hard to hide it: being outshone by his wife was never part of the plan.
When young Diana Spencer was dropped into that rigidly hierarchical, relentlessly media-driven world in the early 1980s, her connection with the public was unexpected and overwhelming, especially for an heir whose own image was under constant construction and scrutiny.
It's a problem that crops up regularly in the British monarchy, where popularity and rank don't always go hand in hand. Charles grew up, and spent many more years, in the long shadow of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, while also carrying the burden of standing out among siblings with more outgoing, charismatic personalities, at least back then. Princess Anne and Prince Andrew were both press favorites in their day.
Those same dynamics are still at play. Says ago, on September 22, the new Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Kate, attended the world premiere of Tom Cruise's Digger in London, where the spotlight once again landed almost entirely on her. But William appears to play the game better than his father did and has never seemed intimidated by his wife's popularity.
© Rob Taggart
