Lord of the Rings You Shamed Me Again

The lonely death of Charles's other mistress

At the races:  Kanga with Prince Charles at a polo match in 1987

She was the Australian who married a peer and became a prince's lover. But the affair broke her heart and unhinged her mind.

The name is largely forgotten. The big hair, the luscious lips, and the constant partying have so faded in memory that they might never have existed.

When Kanga Tryon  -  once a household name and a central figure in the life of the Prince of Wales  -  died almost three months after Princess Diana, in 1997, she was quickly forgotten.

Nobody ever quite understood how she fitted into the royal jigsaw.

For most people, the battle for Charles's heart was a straight playoff between two women  -  married Camilla, his one true love, and virginal Diana, a knee-jerk response to a nation baying for a royal bride.

But, for a time, Kanga was just as important to Charles as Camilla. Yet the story of how she came to love and lose her prince has never been fully told. Until now. For the first time, a Channel 4 documentary reveals the extraordinary bed-hopping antics of the heir to the throne in the years leading up to his marriage to Diana.

High Society reveals how, for a period during the 1970s, when both women were married to friends of his, HRH bounced from the bed of Camilla to that of Lady Tryon, then back again.

While dithering over the very necessary duty of finding a suitable wife, Charles was happily having his cake and eating it.

For both women were his mistress. Both bore sons whose godfather he became. Both named them Charles (in Camilla's case, it was a second name). And, in the end, both hated the other with a loathing that bordered on the pathological.

Yet we only know about Camilla.

Andrew Morton's seismic expose; Diana: Her True Story, published in 1992, first revealed Charles's lifelong craving for the horsy ex-debutante from Sussex. Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles's official biographer, went on to confirm the detail, wondering whether, if things had been different, Charles and Camilla might not have got it together the first time around.

 Homeless: Kanga in 1997, shortly before she died

But no book has been written on the former Dale Harper, born in 1947, to a wealthy middleclass family in Melbourne, Australia.

The bare bones of her life  -  childhood spina bifida, youthful dalliances, and a swift engagement to an Old Etonian peer and banker, Lord Tryon  -  fill out the yellowing cuttings in newspaper archives. But, these days, you don't hear her name mentioned anymore.

I knew her in her heyday. As a gossip columnist for a national newspaper, it was my job to tread the same red carpets and sample the same fine vintages that Kanga enjoyed on a nightly basis. Back then, she played a shrewd game, appearing to hate the limelight, but all the while, it was secretly meat and drink to her.

There were other aristocrats' wives  -  many  -  who were never spotted in the company of the glitterati, but Kanga wasn't one of them. At such events, she would deliberately display a haughty demeanour  -  God forbid someone of her social standing should court publicity. But the truth is, Kanga was an astute businesswoman and understood that notoriety meant money.

Only she and her husband  -  one of Prince Charles's inner circle  -  knew the details of the family finances, or rather lack of them.

Illicit: Charles with Kanga and her baby son in 1976

At the time that she and Lord Tryon married in 1973, his ancestral home, the Old Manor House at Great Durnford, near Salisbury, had been handed over to a school. Kanga later claimed it was her father's money that provided the first roof over their heads.

Yet, before too long, it was reacquired and became once more a family home  -  refurbished and repolished under her vigorous supervision, and, as she said, with her money.

It was through her husband that she met Charles, and her beauty and Australian informality soon won his heart. In fact, the rest of his family adored her too: she and Lord Tryon were invited to Balmoral, where she would ride out with the Queen.

Returning the compliment, Lord Tryon invited Charles to his fishing lodge in Iceland. Sequestered so far away, Charles fell swiftly in love with his friend's wife.

Suddenly, Kanga discovered the enormous power wielded in high society by a woman who'd become the Prince's mistress. It was something Camilla understood all too well, but, to a middle-class maven from Melbourne, so far removed from the arcane behaviour patterns of Britain's blue-bloods, it came as a complete revelation.

Smitten by Charles she may have been, but she was smitten, too, by the new respect she was being shown by aristos who, up to this point, looked down their noses at her.

Deceit: Lord and Lady Tryon with their children

In London, Kanga threw herself into the party circuit, mixing with the movers and shakers.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, her life, with four lovely children and a peer for a husband, seemed effortless and easy. But behind closed doors, she was grafting away at making money  -  buying, refurbishing and selling property, and then branching out into the fashion business.

Each time she wanted to plug something, she would discreetly let slip a nugget of gossip. Did we know that her nickname Kanga came from HRH's very own lips?

Or that he'd labelled her 'the only woman who ever understood me'. Then there was Charles's 'private' visit to her parental home in Melbourne that became common knowledge. A coincidence, indeed, that the paparazzi, alerted by anonymous phone calls, were outside the house on that very night.

Finally, it emerged Kanga was in possession of a number of letters from HRH. Their content was never revealed, but if people were to imply they were love letters, what harm could there be in that? She knew what she was doing.

For when it came time for her to set up her stall in Beauchamp Place, one of London's smartest addresses, she had no hesitation in calling her fashion business Kanga. It was as good as hanging 'by Royal appointment' over the door.

The customers flocked in, despite the barely veiled titters in the fashion industry  -  from where they stood, there was little class or style attached to Kanga creations. Yet I watched her blithely sell an astonishingly awful dress, in lightweight, crushproof material that no couture house would touch with a bargepole, for a colossal sum to a highly impressionable young lady. Kanga had brass neck all right.

But even then there was a gap, a painful one, between the public and private persona of Lady Tryon. She had given herself to the Prince of Wales and he had loved her, for however brief a time, but the rules of the game were such that she couldn't shout this great triumph from the rooftops.

Camilla, her rival, understood this instinctively  -  as one would, when one's greatgrandmother had had an affair with another Prince of Wales. Kanga was from very different stock and bottling it up, both the triumph of love and the loss of it to a rival, affected her deeply.

As the years wore on, she deemed her marriage to be loveless, although her husband was clearly devoted to his children.

And, as the gap between them widened, her health took a series of alarming downward lurches. There was a recurrence of her childhood spina bifida and, as she fought this off, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.

Through it all, Kanga never gave any sign of her inner distress, and her outward calm and steely backbone were the talk of those who knew her: always a popular figure, she became more loved as she struggled with her physical ailments. Now, on the occasions that I met her, I was astonished by her lack of bitterness at the hand fate had dealt her.

Finally, after enduring all the agonising treatment associated with cancer, she was given the all-clear and, in 1996, checked herself into Farm Place, the fashionable rehab clinic, to rid herself of her dependence on painkillers, which had since become a necessary part of her life.

What happened next remains the subject of immense speculation to this day. While undergoing treatment there, Kanga fell from a high window, shattering her spine. As she lay in hospital recovering, she claimed to have been pushed, but it was always assumed that, emotional as she obviously was then, she had jumped.

In Channel 4's documentary, the actress Sarah Miles, a great friend of Kanga's, gives an electrifying account of what happened, as she describes Kanga insisting to her that she was indeed pushed.

She also recounts the family's bizarre response to this latest calamity, when Lord Tryon invited her to lunch, along with ten other hangers-on, to reassure her that Kanga wasn't pushed and had, in fact, fallen.

Barely a matter of weeks after her fall, Kanga was to be told by her husband that he wanted a divorce. Then came the final coup de grace -  she was arrested on the drive to her country mansion and then sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Friends say that she had started fantasising that someone was trying to kill her.

Her behaviour, it's true, had become erratic. But few people who knew her at the time would say that she presented a threat to herself or anyone else, and the decision to have her arrested remains inexplicable. Wheelchair-bound and in a very distressed mental and physical state, she was locked up for hours in a Salisbury police cell  -  an act which, to this day, seems incomprehensibly and unnecessarily cruel.

But, once more, Kanga bounced back. Summoning what strength remained, she put her affairs in order and booked herself into a suite at The Ritz  -  after her divorce, she had no other home, so why not the Ritz, darling? It was there that I found her, at an adjoining table at lunch, one day. We talked about old times  -  the people we knew, the parties that we'd gone to. I was astonished that, after all she'd endured, she was in such fine fettle.

But at the time, I didn't know the complete story: that she had swapped her addiction to painkillers for an addiction for alcohol. She kept it fairly well concealed, but not totally.

Dark thoughts were clouding her mind, not all of them rational. The end was coming  -  and in November 1997, she died. She had travelled to India, where she contracted an illness and had to return to the UK. Here, she was hospitalised but developed septicaemia and, just two months short of her 50th birthday, died.

She had been very famous, but, in the end, Kanga's celebrity proved to be so short-lived that she was never written about again. Maybe the nation had had enough grieving. Princess Diana's death occurred some three months earlier. You could say there were no tears left.

Certainly, it's likely that Prince Charles had few to spare for his former mistress, for in those last dog-days, Kanga had gone a little bit crazy. At a time when he was trying to rehabilitate his reputation with the British public  -  Diana's death triggered angry accusations against Camilla, and Charles's reputation was in danger of going down with hers  -  the Prince needed Kanga like a cat needs a dog.

Tragically for her, it was at precisely this time that she became increasingly obsessed by him.

On one occasion, in July 1997, she was seen, at a polo match at Tidworth, furiously pursuing her former lover in her wheelchair.

When news of this tragic  -  comic even  -  event reached the general public, and anxiety was expressed as to her state of mind, the Prince coolly issued a statement saying he was in touch with Kanga 'once or twice a year', but that they were no longer the friends they had once been.

To most rational people, this could only be interpreted as the very direct snub that it was intended to be. But to Sarah Miles, Kanga now declared, 'I am going to be Queen of England.'

And so, on 15 November, 1997, the once cuddly, lovable, gorgeous Lady Tryon went to her lonely death: not a queen, no longer even married to a peer, and homeless. Loving Prince Charles broke her heart and  -  in the end  -  cracked her mind.

High Society is on Channel 4 on 4 November.

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Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1076026/The-lonely-death-Charless-mistress.html

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