The Cad Strikes Again

Going home has not been easy. One moment she was on the edge of becoming the chatelaine of ancient Althorp House, with its old masters, priceless antiques, endless acres and unique history as the resting place of Princess Diana.

The next she was returning to a little wooden house with a vegetable garden and a pole flying the American flag, in the dusty township of Bonny Doon, south of San Francisco, explaining to her police sergeant father why things hadn't turned out as they'd hoped.

Friends had warned television presenter Coleen Sullivan that she'd never end up a countess but just another notch on Earl Spencer's aristocratic bedpost. And so it has turned out.

'She was in love with the bastard,' shrugs a former television colleague. 'What else could she do?'
Nearly two years ago, the glamorous Coleen threw up her career - and a long-term fiance - to make her life with Charles Spencer in England after meeting him on the free relationship dating site Devil Called Love.

At around the same time, Spencer cruelly walked out on his second wife, Caroline, and their two children, including his daughter, Lara, aged just four months. Caroline - 'Pidge' to her friends - was 'devastated' - the same word that friends of Coleen have been using about her this week.

Back home in Bonny Doon, a wine-growing township with a church and two fire stations but no shop, her family are putting on a brave face. Her stepmother, Lisa Sullivan, assured one well-wisher: 'She's fine.'

But the truth is very different. Once again, the 9th Earl Spencer had raised a young woman's expectations to dazzling heights only to dash them with a callous finality.

'Charles attracts women by displaying a certain vulnerability - something of a little boy lost. It's real, not phoney,' says one of his oldest friends.

'But he gets bored with a woman the moment he realises he has total control over her. It is not a pretty characteristic, but there it is. I'm sure it goes back to his childhood when his mother ran off with another man. He loves the chase of women, and seducing them, but he can be ruthless with them.'

Lord Spencer's pursuit and capture of the glamorous brunette Coleen after she interviewed him for a documentary in the late summer of 2006, followed a pattern that will be familiar to his ex-wives, Caroline - who has two other children by her first husband, PR guru Matthew Freud - and Victoria, mother of his four older children.

It is a tale of flowers, candle-light, whispered compliments and lavish attention. And at intimate moments, gifts of jewellery under the pillow.

Coleen was a girl whom one of his friends describes as having 'a nice American sheen, a lively talker but not sophisticated like Charles'.

Even so, he appeared to be so serious about her that he accompanied her several times to see her family in America. He particularly liked her father, a former SWAT police marksman, who told him: 'Don't mess with my daughter. She knows how to use a gun - I taught her! This is not a woman who is going to let any man mess her around.'

Yesterday, the warning sounded pretty hollow - as hollow as the former police officer's claim to understand people so well after 36 years in the Force that he judged the 9th Earl Spencer to be 'a gentleman'.

Spencer's older children, living with their mother Victoria in South Africa, never came to terms with the speed with which their father had dumped his second wife, Caroline, whom they all liked, and taken up with the 35-year-old Coleen.

When Spencer, 43, took Coleen to spend their first Christmas together at his splendid mansion in the exclusive Cape Town suburb of Constantia, the plan was for the children, then aged 12 to 15, to join them.

But they refused to come to the house if Coleen was there, and he was forced to put her up in the five-star, ??350-a-night Cellars-Hohenort hotel, a brief drive from his house.

In subsequent visits, even though Coleen never had her own home in England and had become part of the everyday scene at Althorp, the children continued to have little enthusiasm for her. Yet bit by bit, Spencer worked on them and eventually began to win them over.

Like their father, Coleen had also been brought up without a mother because when her parents divorced, her father won custody. Then in July last year, Spencer took the children, Kitty, now 17, twins Eliza and Katya, 15, and Louis, 14, with him and Coleen on a week-long holiday in Mallorca. By all accounts it broke the ice.

Just three months ago, in April, Spencer finally convinced them of his commitment to Coleen, and they all agreed to sit down together and talk. Crucially, according to a family source, the children accepted that he loved her and that he wanted her to be a part of the family.

For Coleen Sullivan, the small-time television presenter, this moment of full acceptance into one of the nation's great families released a flood of relief and gratitude. However, just what it released in Earl Spencer's mind, after such a herculean effort to bring his children on-side, can only be a matter for speculation.

'One morning,' says a family friend, 'he simply woke up and decided he no longer found her attractive. And that was it. But isn't that so very Charles?' Of course, there had been clues along the way. When he hosted a shooting party of smart friends and their wives at Althorp last Christmas, Coleen went out of her way to look beautiful at dinner.

One of those present recalls that she 'really did look gorgeous and the other chaps murmured what a lucky chap Charles Spencer was, but, to our surprise, he never offered her a single compliment'.

For students of Earl Spencer and his treatment of women, this was a pivotal moment. He was, as one explains, moving from conquest and fascination, to indifference that would lead to boredom and, finally, 'shipping her out'.

This is what makes the April meeting with his children inexplicable. It certainly indicates a measure of cavalier indifference to her feelings. But isn't this how he treated the two women who did become Countess Spencer?

He is, after all, a man who never displays too much concern over upsetting women - whether they are former wives or even his sister, Diana, from whom he famously - and selfishly - withheld the sanctuary of a cottage on his estate when she was desperate for a bolt-hole after the break-up of her marriage to Prince Charles.

He claimed the pursuing paparazzi would upset his family peace. When Diana, shocked by his refusal to help, wrote to him, the loving little brother returned her letters unopened. As for the wives, theirs are both stories of grotesque betrayal. During the 1999 divorce hearing involving Victoria, held in South Africa because he was advised it would be cheaper there, he described himself (in a letter to a girlfriend) as having been 'vicious, cruel and a bully' towards Victoria.

He was labelled a serial and deceitful adulterer who had affairs with a dozen women while Victoria, whom he had met and married in 1989, was in a sanatorium for five months overcoming drink problems and anorexia.

The cruelty manifested itself in other ways. At a party, when he was reminded of his late father's remark that he should stick with Victoria through thick and thin, he jocularly told guests that Victoria 'was thin, and certainly thick'.

These days, Victoria is remarried with another child and lives happily in Cape Town. Caroline became his second Countess Spencer in 2001 and they were divorced a year ago. But the divorce is not yet absolute as they continue negotiations over her settlement.

More than anything, Caroline wants to keep, for herself and the children, the lovely canal-side house in Little Venice, North-West London, that Spencer bought for ??4.5million from Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, through the family trust based in London and the Channel Islands.
Most people would imagine that the very least a man worth in the region of ??100million would do, having walked out on his wife and small children, is make over the family house to them.
But according to family friends, this is what he is refusing to do. 'He wants the house for himself and doesn't want her to have it,' one of them said.

'This seems to be the big sticking point in the divorce and is why the nisi hasn't yet become absolute. He's offered her money, but that too, in her view, isn't much.'

Friends who meet Earl Spencer say he displays no sense of ordeal involving any of these women. 'He's in good form,' says one. 'You'd never know he was in the middle of wrangling with an ex-wife and dumping a girlfriend.'

You have to wonder just how deep the effects of his childhood runs, as well as his conscience. This is a youngest child, the long-awaited son to continue the line of Earl Spencers, whose arrival was greeted with relief and celebration.

The child has become a man who gives all the appearance of doing precisely what he wishes and is prone to bouts of anger if he does not get his own way. And in wanting his own way, he has strayed into forbidden and dangerous areas, drawing criticism from even his most devoted friends.

On Thursday, when a memorial service to Shusha Guppy, mother of his lifelong and closest friend since Eton, Darius Guppy, was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, Lord Spencer was not in the congregation. Of course, circumstances may have prevented him from being there, but no one was seriously surprised by his absence.

Things have not been the same between Darius and Charles since an extraordinary series of events that began in April 2006, when Guppy's pretty wife, Patricia, a delicate blonde from Sunderland who once ran an escort agency, revealed something that shocked her husband.
She told him that while he was in prison for an attempted jewellery insurance fraud back in 1993, she'd had dinner at Althorp and Spencer had tried to seduce her after his then wife, Victoria, had gone to bed.

Patricia had kept the incident to herself all these years on account of Charles's and Darius's lifelong friendship, as she didn't want to upset him. But she had heard that two other women who were at the dinner, and towards whom he also allegedly made advances, had been talking about it, and she didn't want her husband to hear from someone other than herself.

Guppy, a man of quick and inflammatory temper, shook with anger. He telephoned Spencer accusing him of betrayal, and refused to accept his vehement denials. In the end, Spencer agreed to go to Guppy's South African home.

What followed, as gasping children watched through an upstairs window, was a savage fight in which both men were smeared in blood and sweat as they grappled and thrashed around. One man could be seen kicking and punching the other on the ground.

Guppy was said to have been 'like a man possessed'. His marriage, now 19 years old, remains strong. Spencer suffered a fractured cheekbone and injuries to his ribs and nose, which he later passed off to inquiring friends as 'cricket injuries'.

Charles Spencer took a real hiding that night. It has become an episode of his life that he never mentions. Friends joke these days that they never allow their wives to go to Althorp unless they accompany them personally.

When that thrashing took place, he had only just met Coleen and it would be several months before he walked out on Caroline. Today, there is another casualty in the life of the 9th Earl Spencer. Back in the U.S., Coleen will try to revive the television career she thought she'd no longer need.

Meanwhile, the man she went out with for 11 years and was engaged to when Lord Spencer came into view, handsome, 6ft 3in Justin Allen, has long since stopped licking his own wounds, and has become a star sports presenter for Tampa Bay's 10 News.

Who will be next in finding intimate gifts under her pillow in Charles Spencer's bed? Watch this space. But as one of his old friends says: 'I doubt if Charles will ever fall completely in love with any girl. The only person he really loves is himself.'