Earl Spencer: Diana's brother to wed third time after ditching fiancee 4 months ago | Daily Mail Online
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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.
Charles Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has announced he will marry his fiancee Canadian philanthropist Karen Gordon on June 18.
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.
'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'
A source close to Earl Spencer
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 fiancé.
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.
Earl Spencer was married to his first wife, the former model Victoria Lockwood, for eight years, and they divorced in 1997
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.
Earl Spencer's second wife was Caroline Freud who he married in 2001. The couple also had two children
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.
Called off: Earl Spencer was engaged to Lady Bianca Eliot last year
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 Spencer’s spokesman  declined to comment further.