When they met he was a prominent 38-year-old leader of the African National Congress and she was a beautiful 22-year-old social worker. They conducted a passionate courtship in moments stolen from his political career and his struggle to stay out of jail. They had been married only three years when Nelson Mandela went underground to wage war on white rule in South Africa. Then he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Her husband was gone for 27 years, and during that span of time Winnie Mandela became first a martyr, then a celebrity and finally an embarrassment to the black-nationalist cause-the “Mother of the Nation” who acted at times like a tyrant. That was the woman Nelson Mandela went home to when he was released from prison in February 1990. And by last week, when a verdict against her was handed down in a Johannesburg court, Nelson and Winnie were bound together by a habit of loyalty in a marriage that has become an all-too-public political institution.
Winnie was convicted of kidnapping four black youths in 1988 and of being an accessory to the vicious beating of the young men, one of whom was later found dead. “She showed herself on a number of occasions to be a calm, composed, deliberate and unblushing liar,” said Michael Stegmann, the respected white judge who heard the case without a jury. Winnie was sentenced to six years in prison, and although many ANC supporters considered the punishment excessive, they blamed her for hurting her husband and their cause. Nelson, a lawyer himself, seemed shaken by the verdict. “It must be a hell of a trauma for him,” said one ANC member. But Mandela stood behind the woman who had stood behind him during his prison years. “I believe she did not know of any assaults or that anybody was held at her house against their will,” he said. “I trust that soon her name will be cleared completely.”
The 72-year-old Mandela is a guiltstricken husband. A man of strong patriarchal feelings, he was forced to abandon his young wife early in their marriage. Years later Winnie wrote that “life with him was a life without him.” Nelson did not get to know their daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, until they visited him in prison as teenagers. The unswerving support that Winnie gave him in visits and letters, the harassment she suffered at the hands of the police and her eight-year banishment to the dour Afrikaner town of Brandfort instilled in Mandela powerful sentiments of gratitude and affection, tinged with remorse. “There have been moments,” he wrote to her once, “when conscience and a sense of guilt have ravaged every part of my being.”
Yet her role as the wife of the world’s most prominent political prisoner inflated Winnie’s ego. By the late 1980s she had assembled a small private army of thugs who called themselves the Mandela United Football Club. The bodyguards apparently kidnapped the four youths from a nearby church house as part of a plot against its minister. The victims were beaten in Winnie’s home, and one of her closest aides, Jerry Richardson, was later convicted of murdering 14-year-old “Stompie” Moeketsi. Winnie’s own conviction will be appealed-a process that could take a year or more-and meanwhile she is free on $72 bail. If the appeal fails she could be pardoned by President F. W. de Klerk, who might find it expedient to spare the wife of the man with whom he is negotiating South Africa’s future.
Last week the talks broke down. Amid continuing black-on-black violence, the ANC had demanded a ban on the carrying of spears, weapons used by Zulu members of the rival Inkatha Freedom Party. Pretoria refused, and the ANC announced that it “will not involve itself in constitutional discussions with the government” until issues raised by the violence have been resolved.
The ANC has already begun to distance itself from Winnie. Even before her 14 week trial ended, she suffered a landslide defeat in an election for president of the ANC Women’s League. Her husband did not take her along on his international tour last fall, and he has not appeared with her in public for several weeks, apart from his periodic visits to the trial. When Winnie was sentenced the day after her conviction, Nelson was not there. But no one who knows him questions his almost blind devotion to his wife. Their marriage has survived separation, imprisonment and widespread gossip about Winnie’s love life, and nothing seems to snuff out Nelson’s abiding commitment to her. “Had it not been for your visits, wonderful letters and your love,” he wrote to her from prison in 1979, “I would have fallen apart many years ago.” Winnie Mandela’s greatest contribution to the marriage-and to her country may have been the encouragement she gave her husband during the long, lonely years before hope suddenly blossomed and celebrity exacted its price.
title: “Portrait Of A Marriage” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Nelda Stanford”
No, this is not completely surprising. There have long been signs of strain in the marriage that has a larger purpose than most, a union that exists in part to symbolize what Dan Quayle would call “family values.” The paparazzi for years have struggled to lasso Charles and Di in the same lens. Last month, when she paid an official visit to Egypt, he took a “sketching trip” in Turkey. About some other trips, Charles has been sketchier still.
Yet no one would have guessed the news would be this bad-and no one, it seems, could get enough of it. In Australia, thousands of people have been calling the equivalent of a 1-900 number to hear royal-marriage updates reported as if they were the highlights of a soccer match. At Sandringham, the royal family’s country estate, officials put up velvet ropes last week to keep gawkers off the staircase that Diana is said to have flung herself down when she was three months pregnant with Prince William in 1982. Suddenly, England has a grisly new tourist attraction to go with the Tower of London and the walking tour of Jack the Ripper’s old haunts. Mother and baby survived the reported plunge down Sandringham’s stairs without serious injury. But it seems clear now that starting with the honeymoon-a strange word, really, for two newlyweds who hardly knew each other and the 276-member crew aboard the royal yacht Britannia-Charles and Di have been living a fractured fairy tale.
Might the marriage be beyond saving? Andrew Morton, the author of the 156-page “Diana, Her True Story,” which is being published this week in America by Simon & Schuster, says that he was told by James Gilbey, a longtime friend of Diana, that the princess “hadn’t made a date (in her appointment calendar] past July because she doesn’t think she is going to be there.” Morton also says that Diana has long had a premonition that she would never be queen. The furor itself seems to be contributing to the marital tensions. Last Thursday, while dedicating a hospice in Merseyside, the princess broke into tears when she saw supporters carrying signs that said, WE LOVE YOU, and had to be helped out of the spotlight.
Prime Minister John Major, responding to a typical question from The Week That Was, predicted that the 1,000-year-old English monarchy would survive this current crisis. He is right about that. Charles and Diana wouldn’t be the first royal-family members to have their marriage run aground, or even the first this year; in April, Sarah, the Duchess of York, separated from Prince Andrew. But a divorce by Charles and Diana would no doubt be the biggest blow to the monarchy since Edward VIII abdicated to marry an American divorcee in 1936. It could also put a fair-size crimp in Charles’s plan to become king. The sovereign also serves as the supreme governor of the Church of England, which does not sanction remarriage. The only divorced person to ascend the English throne was George I, in 1714.
That the discussion has gotten so serious so fast is in itself impressive. “This is not just a case of newspapers going too far, intruding into the lives of two unhappy people,” the distinguished novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson wrote in his column in the Evening Standard.“It has turned into something bigger than that.” The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, urged the press to exercise some restraint, expressed concern for the couple’s two children, William and Harry-and then added that the “royal family was in [my] prayers.” It’s rare for figures of that stature to get involved in this kind of debate. Books about the royals usually cruise through English life like sightseeing boats on the Thames, some making slightly larger ripples than others. A few months ago, Lady Colin Campbell, herself a marginal member of the upper crust, published a biography of Diana in which she that Di was rotating five male “confidants” through the various royal residences. The tabloids ran with that story for a while, but no one took it seriously, if only because Diana–slumped in the stands on Harry’s school “sports day,” scuffing her toe in the Sahara while waiting for the photographers to finish–has looked too utterly miserable to be living it up the way Campbell contended.
What makes Morton’s book more credible is certainly not the author’s credentials; at 38, he’s served time on the flashier tabs, and his previous books include the fawning " Diana’s Diary." Tabloid legend has it that Morton was made a royal correspondent because at 6 feet 4 inches, he was best qualified to peek over crowds. His technique seems classic Fleet Street: he comes, he peeks, he goes back to the office and turns out serviceable prose. “Her True Story” is not a great read; Morton admits it was rushed out when he began to get a sense that the marriage “might come tumbling down at any minute.” In the end, what sets these particular shocking revelations apart is that they are unusually specific; they are extraordinarily well sourced–and they make eminent sense in light of Charles’s and Diana’s recent public behavior.
The two rarely make joint appearances anymore, and according to the tabs they have maintained separate bedrooms for several years. It was Charles who pulled away first, the book says, occupied as he was with Camilla Parker Bowles, an unglamorous upper-class woman whom he first met in 1972, when both were 23 and single. Unlike Diana, who turns 31 next month, Parker Bowles shares Charles’s penchant for hunting and polo. The prince, then a young naval officer, was not in a marrying mood when he and Camilla first dated, and she soon became the wife of army officer Andrew Parker Bowles-a man who, lest you think the monarchy is all silly pomp and meaningless titles, is now the official Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen. He is also known less formally as the world’s best sport. On the day that the book excerpts first broke in London, Brigadier Parker Bowles went with his wife to watch Charles play polo, and when they visited the royal box at Windsor Great Park, the couple reportedly “chatted amiably” with the queen. Her Majesty and the brigadier both seem to think that the Charles-Camilla relationship is bigger than both of them.
The signs of a bond certainly have endured. Shortly before she married Charles, Morton says, Diana discovered a bracelet that he intended to send to Parker Bowles, and she considered calling off the wedding. On the honeymoon, Morton says, Charles came to dinner one night wearing cuff links given to him by Camilla, which featured intertwined C’s. Morton traces Diana’s alleged emotional problems directly to the prince’s callous behavior. “His indifference pushed her to the edge,” says an unnamed friend.
If this version of the truth sounds slanted, the author doesn’t deny it. This is " without a doubt, [Diana’s] side of the story," Morton told NEWSWEEK. " I very quickly came to realize that you choose which side you are on-his or hers. If I had tried to straddle the divide between them, word would have gotten back to the palace and doors would be closed." In exchange for his loyalty, Morton says he found himself being received favorably by a select group of Diana’s friends,–the kind of people who always check with the princess before talking, and who in the past have been signaled not to cooperate. “She’s obvious authorized her friends to speak with Morton,” says Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine. “There’s no way, for instance, that James Gilbey, a dear friend of hers, would have talked about such soul-destroying things without her approval, or without her suggesting to him that he did.”
Gilbey, a handsome 36-year-old heir to the gin fortune, was Morton’s source on the alleged suicide attempts. These, the author admits, were “not really serious attempts to take her life” but rather “cries for help” from a young woman “struggling desperately to accommodate herself to her new position and new family.” The reported incident on the stairs at Sandringham, just six months after the wedding, followed a bout of morning sickness and, as Morton writes, “the dawning realization that another woman … meant more to her husband than she did.”
A brief period of domestic tranquillity followed the birth of William in June of 1982. But, we are told, the Waleses’ relationship ultimately got no better. One apparent reason is that there was precious little to build on. Charles, who met Diana when she was 16, may have been attracted to the pretty young Spencer girl for a while, but the two had nothing in common. She liked to listen to pop music and read Danielle Steel novels. He preferred to fish, shoot birds and dip into the philosophical works of Sir Laurens van der Post. The story now told by Charles supporters is that he may never have loved Diana. “The plain fact is,” says Anthony Holden, Charles’s biographer, “that there were very few eligible brides left. There weren’t many non-Catholic virgins left in Europe. Diana fit the bill terrifically well, given that he was actually quite desperate.”
The prince’s supporters claim that they don’t recognize the cold brute depicted in Morton’s book. “Charles deserves an awful lot of sympathy,” says Penny Junor, yet another of his biographers. " He saw his friends reaching the pinnacles of their careers while he was training for a job he still may never get. He was having a midlife crisis, and Diana wasn’t there for him." Both sides agree that the prince was bewildered–and jealous–of the attention his bride received. When he and his wife went out to press the flesh, the crowd groaned if he took their side of the street. " He had spent his life until then as a star," Junor says, “and the loss of status ate away at him.” Diana’s mood, meanwhile, swung, she says, from “utter elation about the adoration of the crowds to deep depression when she realized the effect on her marriage.”
That depression, it seems, only led to more self-destructive behavior. Diana, according to Morton, hurled herself against a glass display cabinet at Kensington Palace, “slashed at her wrists” with a razor blade, cut herself with “the serrated edge of a lemonslicer” and scored her chest and thighs with a penknife. In each case Charles is depicted by Morton as daring her to commit the deed, scorning her for doing it–or being off riding. " They were messages of complete desperation–please, please help," Gilbey told Morton.
Carolyn Bartholomew, a former flatmate of Diana’s, is Morton’s on-the-record source on the subject of bulimia, an eating disorder characterized by gorging and purging binges. Diana’s reported habit of consuming, for example, an entire steak-and-kidney pie, then forcing herself to vomit, has “been there through her royal career, without a doubt,” says Bartholomew. “I hate to say it but I feel it may erupt when she feels under pressure.” Diana does seem to think a lot about food. When she fainted at the opening of the Vancouver Expo in 1986, she had eaten only part of a candy bar in the last four days. Charles’s reaction? According to Morton, he told her that if she was going to faint, she should do it in private. Despite a wide range of treatments from acupuncture and meditation to conventional medical and psychiatric care, Morton says, she still seems to suffer from bulimia and depression: “She’s coming out of it, but she’s not finished with it.”
Of course the true test of the current revelations is not whether people would speak to Morton, but whether those who did say he got the story right. Morton’s chief sources came forward last week to say that he had. And on Wednesday, shortly before 8 p.m., a woman described as " well-spoken" called the picture desks of five London newspapers and reached the Daily Mirror photographer at home. “The Princess of Wales is visiting Carolyn Bartholomew,” she said. “Do you know where that is?” Then she hung up without asking for money–a rare occurrence in the London tabloid world.
By the time Diana arrived, the Royal Pap, as the paparazzi are called, were all in place. In an extraordinary display of support for a friend who’d gone public with some very intimate royal problems, Diana arrived in full view of the press, stayed for nearly an hour and finally emerged “red-eyed,” according to the press. Lingering on the steps outside the house while shutters clicked, Diana kissed Bartholomew and her husband goodbye, even though they would meet in a restaurant 20 minutes later for dinner. “It was almost like a regular photo call,” said photographer Darryn Lyons.
It would be ironic if Diana left now, just when she was learning that there was more to the game of being a royal than toughing it out with a brave public face. The morning after she seemed to signal her support of Morton’s book, Charles decided to take Prince Harry to school-a move The Evening Standard derided as “clearly a public gesture,” since Charles seems not to have done the dropping off duties since last September. Score one for the princess. And look-the Daily Express is referring to Parker Bowles as “plainfaced.” Score another. Those who sympathize with Diana might say, as Morton does, that she is just “trying to break the logjam” in her unhappy marriage. Maybe this crisis, he says, will mean that “they could decide to lead properly separate lives and the public would accept that.” There is historical precedent for such an arrangement. Legend has it that Queen Alexandra, in 1910, summoned Edward VII’s mistress to the side of his deathbed so the woman could share his last moments. How terribly British. How positively civilized. But come to think of it, how utterly unlike Diana.
