Princess Diana’s brother Charles has become engaged to a glamorous Canadian divorcee following yet another whirlwind romance.
Earl Spencer, 46, is thought to have dated Karen Gordon, 38, for only four months before telling his children that he plans to make her his third wife.
Friends and family were said to be “shell-shocked”. It was only in September that he broke off his engagement to widowed aristocrat Bianca, Lady Eliot, after proposing in March.
Yesterday his spokesman released a statement announcing that “Canadian philanthropist” and mother-of-two Mrs Gordon will marry the earl “privately” at his Althorp seat in Northamptonshire on June 18. Diana is buried on an island in the lake on the estate.
Insiders have told the Mail that Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer with an estimated £120million fortune, plans to spend more time in the US after the ceremony.
The timing of the announcement means that former model Mrs Gordon, who lives in Los Angeles, is certain to be invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April, where the earl’s son Louis, 16, will be a groomsman.
A source said: “This is bombshell news for everyone. He only revealed what was happening in the past couple of days after proposing and people are shell-shocked.”
An official portrait of the couple released yesterday shows them wearing matching blue flannel shirts.
The brunette, ex-wife of Hollywood film producer Mark Gordon, leans affectionately against her solemn and greying fiance.
The couple were first seen in public in October at the Wolseley restaurant in London, where they shared dinner and copious amounts of wine as she ran her hand up and down his back.
The pair seemed keen to keep their rendezvous secret, with the earl donning a red baseball cap and slipping out of a back service door when they spotted a photographer.
The following month they were seen emerging arm in arm from a five-star hotel in uptown New York, and are said to have been sharing her home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. Most houses in the suburb, which is surrounded by the dense woods of Topanga State Park, have a swimming pool and tennis courts.
Mrs Gordon, the daughter of a park ranger, was born Karen Villeneuve in Edmonton, Canada.
She dropped out of college to become a catalogue model, before meeting Mark Gordon while working as a receptionist at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto aged 21.
They married three years later in 1997 and hit the jackpot the following year when Gordon produced Saving Private Ryan. He went on to create the TV hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy.
The pair had two daughters - now aged 12 and eight - but Gordon filed for divorce in 2003. His wife received a $1.3million (£800,000) advance payout on her divorce settlement and used it to set up the orphans’ charity Whole Child International. She appeared on Good Morning America and met the Dalai Lama to promote the plight of abandoned youngsters. “Why did I not take the money and just live off it?” she once said. “I would have been bored, wouldn’t I?” She has said that her upbringing, which saw her move home 22 times and attend ten different schools, meant she struggled to build a sense of attachment and stability. Friends and family of the earl remain doubtful, however, that she will find security in a marriage with him. During a bitter 1997 divorce battle after eight years with his first wife, South African model Victoria Lockwood, a court heard how Earl Spencer had affairs while she was in rehabilitation to overcome drink problems and anorexia.
He remarried in 2001 and had two children with Caroline Freud, ex-wife of the PR guru Matthew, but filed for divorce in 2006 when their youngest, Lara, was four months old. He then began a relationship with American journalist Coleen Sullivan after she was sent to interview him, but dumped her after 18 months.
The earl then met Bianca Eliot at the Groucho Club in London, two years after her 40-year-old husband Jago - heir to the 6,000-acre Port Eliot estate in Cornwall - died following an epileptic fit in the bath while the couple’s three children were in the house. An inquest found he had cocaine and cannabis in his blood. She was still wearing her £25,000 engagement ring when the earl announced in September that the wedding was off. At the time, friends of the earl spoke of their relief amid fears that the union would have been a disaster.
Some claimed the earl was a “control freak” while others said he had decided not to risk marrying and complicating his inheritance.
A source said yesterday: “The earl’s own family have no idea whether the wedding will go ahead, and if it does whether it will end in success or failure.
“He has offered to help his daughters (Cape Town-based Lady Kitty Spencer, 20, and 18-year-old twins Lady Eliza and Lady Amelia) find work or study in America. But they are not prepared to uproot themselves.”
Clarence House said any message of congratulations from the earl’s nephews William and Harry would be “private”. Earl SpencerÕs spokesman declined to comment further. - Daily Mail