by Dylan Howard
But despite witnessing Charles’s distress over the boy child, Diana had a little secret that she’d been keeping to herself during the pregnancy. She had known the child’s gender ever since they’d had a scan in the early stages—and she’d simply not told her husband. Perhaps it was because they were enjoying such rare intimacy and tenderness, perhaps she needed that power over the Royals. Whatever the reason, Diana later pinpointed Harry’s birth as being the moment her marriage hit the rocks for good.
Speaking to Morton, Diana confessed: “Suddenly, as Harry was born, it [their marriage] just went bang. The whole thing went down the drain. Something inside me closed off. By then, I knew Charles had gone back to his lady.”
Far from saving the royal marriage, Harry’s birth had the opposite effect. Now that the novelty of children had worn off, the painful divisions between the couple had solidified beyond all hope of repair. Charles, abstracted, seeking higher truths and deeper meanings, simply had nothing left to say to the young Princess, who wanted to have fun, giggle, and gossip. She robustly resented the strictures of royal life. Their mutual interests and pursuits drew them further apart, and the Prince and Princess increasingly avoided each other by spending time alone either at Kensington Palace or Highgrove.
Despite having tried to understand and treat Diana’s depressions and bulimia, Charles’s entire family was starting to grow restive. There was another problem, too. Though the pair enjoyed a very physical attraction in their premarital courtship, by the time William was a few months old and Diana knew what Mama really needed, she had had enough of Charles’s unwillingness to get busy in the bedroom. “He’s dead below the waist!” she complained to friends, including her confidante, Lady Colin Campbell. Lady Campbell in fact claims that Diana, desperate for some love action after William’s birth, set her sights on the dashing, older seventeenth Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert. The Earl, whose family line was one of the grandest in the kingdom, managed to boost and reassure the perpetually insecure Diana’s self-confidence. When the fling ended, she happily returned to her husband to prepare for Harry’s birth, believing she was succeeding in “training” the Prince of Wales into becoming a model dad and husband.
But Charles saw things differently. Having coped with Diana’s worsening bulimia during her pregnancy with Harry, he had become trapped in a nightmarish situation. A man who valued, above all, a peaceful life, he had dealt with Diana’s demands, tempers, and symptoms of depression by trying to accommodate her as far as possible. As a result, Diana thought she had placed him under her thumb. In fact, Charles was, as had been his wont since childhood, retreating into a shell from where he could wring his hands helplessly and grimace impotently at his wife’s bonkers behavior. He took solace in ever-longer spells alone at his country retreat or, increasingly, on the sympathetic shoulder of Camilla Parker Bowles.
One close friend of the couple at the time observed that “Diana had become too domineering. She’d gone and become anti-everything he liked. You can’t make a success of your marriage if you’re anti-everything your husband stands for.”
Diana was permanently on edge. She knew her erratic behavior was pushing Charles away, yet she couldn’t seem to help herself. And the more she acted up, the more convinced she was that Charles was seeing someone. Maybe that person was Camilla, that eternal presence hovering on the margins of the marriage, as she confided to Lady Colin Campbell: “I didn’t particularly suspect the Rottweiler [Diana’s code word for Camilla], but I just knew he had to be having an affair. My instincts told me he was.”
“Diana’s problem was that she had no sense of control over her own situation,” said astrologer Penny Thornton, to whom the Princess had turned for advice in the mid-1980s. “I used to see her in 1986 and 1987 especially when things were really very bad. Things got better in 1989 and 1990 was all right, but by 1991 they were not very good again.”
The marriage had also suffered from a number of infidelities on both sides. From around 1986, a lonely and exasperated Charles began discreetly fooling around with a number of aristocratic women, including old friends such as the elegant Eva O’Neill and the Italian stunner Marchesa Bona di Frescabaldi. Meanwhile, Diana also sought excitement from within and outside the palace walls. A handsome personal protection officer, Barry Mannakee, was “one of the biggest crushes of my life,” according to the Princess herself. “I don’t find it easy to discuss, [but] when was I was twenty-four, twenty-five, I fell deeply in love with somebody who worked in this environment. And he was the greatest fellow I have ever had.”
Diana believed that Mannakee may have paid the ultimate price for falling for the Princess. The dashing Royal Protection Squad officer was transferred from his duties at Kensington Palace in 1986 amid suspicions he was getting too close to Diana after Charles’s bodyguard, Colin Trimming, allegedly caught him being overly affectionate with his boss’s wife.
“I should never have played with fire. But I did—and I got burned.” Nine months later, Mannakee—who was married with two young children—was killed when his Suzuki motorbike collided with a teenager’s car. Despite a verdict of accidental death, it was revealed at the inquest that a mystery car with dazzling headlights played a part in the crash.
Said Diana, “It was all found out and he was chucked out—and then he was killed. I think he was bumped off. But, um, there we are. I don’t … we’ll never know.”
Other than her well-honed instincts, Diana had no proof of foul play behind Mannakee’s death. But in secret tapes she made with her former voice coach and confidant, Peter Settelen, between September 1992 and December 1993, one of the most turbulent periods of her marriage, she made no attempt to hide her feelings for her former protector. She didn’t use his name but described his death as “the biggest blow of my life.”
“I was always waiting around trying to see him. Um, I just, you know, wore my heart on my sleeve. I was only happy when he was around. I was like a little girl in front of him the whole time, desperate for praise, desperate.”
So enamored was she with the handsome cop that she was “quite willing to give all this up” and said she had talked of running away with him. “Can you believe it? And he kept saying he thought it was a good idea too.”
There was also the romance with hunky rugby captain Will Carling, and in 1987, the sleazy James Hewitt, long rumored to be Harry’s father (he’s not; it’s chronologically impossible). In Hewitt, Diana thought she’d found her shining white knight riding to her rescue on horseback. As it turned out, British Army Major Hewitt was a rat who betrayed his secret lover by cashing in on their relationship with a tell-all memoir.
Hewitt and Diana first met at a party. He offered to teach William and Harry how to ride—and to help Diana overcome her fear of horses. It wasn’t long before the couple were regularly meeting in secret at Combermere Barracks in Windsor. A skilled and apparently well-endowed lover, Hewitt’s lessons went way beyond horseback riding. According to Hewitt, the couple also had trysts at Althorp, her ancestral home; in the bathroom at Highgrove, Charles’s country estate; and even in his mother’s Ebford, Devon, home. When he reported to duty as a tank commander in the first Gulf War in 1991, Diana was said to be frantic about his safety.
In her love letters, she used her nickname for him, “Dibbs.” “Every minute we’re apart, I count the seconds till we meet again. You are my man, my moon, my stars, my everything.”
But when Hewitt returned from war, their passion began to wane, and Diana worried their affair would mean she would be blamed for the collapse of her marriage. She stopped accepting his calls. It wasn’t until 1994 that the relationship would come back to bite her. By then their fling was history, and Hewitt decided to risk Diana’s wrath by selling her out. His book, Princess in Love, contained shocking details about their five-year romance.
“He was a great friend of mine at a very difficult, yet another difficult time, and he was always there to support me. And I was absolutely devastated when
this book appeared, because I trusted him, and because, again, I worried about the reaction on my children. And, yes, there was factual evidence in the book, but a lot of it was … comes from another world … didn’t equate to what happened.”
Diana told friends she was “heartbroken” that the money-grabbing former soldier had sold her down the river.
She also had to explain what happened to William and Harry before they read it splashed across the front pages of all the newspapers.
“Well, there was a lot of fantasy in that book, and it was very distressing for me that a friend of mine, who I trusted, made money out of me,” Diana said. “I really minded that—and he’d rung me up ten days before it arrived in the bookshops to tell me that there was nothing to worry about, and I believed him, stupidly. Then when it did arrive, the first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children. William produced a box of chocolates and said, ‘Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt. These are to make you smile again.’”
Then there was the semipublic romance with the strapping Old Etonian merchant banker and scion of an old British family, Philip Dunne. By now, Charles was so blasé about his wife’s public cuckolding that he even encouraged it, by inviting Dunne on skiing holidays to Klosters and, astonishingly, to the Royals’ private box at the Ascot races. There was even a liaison with King Juan Carlos of Spain, ignited on a family holiday with Charles, William, and Harry.
There was a dalliance with dashing art dealer Oliver Hoare and a brief affair with James Gilbey, details of which were embarrassingly brought to light when a recording of an intimate phone conversation between the pair was leaked to the media in 1992. Dubbed “Squidgygate,” after Gilbey’s lascivious nickname for the Princess, the tape, which was recorded on New Year’s Eve 1989, embarrassed and upset Diana incredibly.
Speaking to the BBC’s Martin Bashir in 1995, Diana reflected ruefully on the affair: “I felt very protective about James because he was a very good friend to me, and I couldn’t bear that his life was going to be messed up because he had the connection with me. And that worried me. I’m very protective about my friends. I mean he is a very affectionate person. But the implications of that conversation were that we’d had an adulterous relationship, which was not true.”
Asked if she had made the call, she answered: “Yes, we did. Absolutely, we did.”
Excerpts of the tape included Diana giggling as she told the heir to a gin fortune: “I don’t want to get pregnant.”
“Squidgy, kiss me,” he demanded.
“Oh God, it’s so wonderful, isn’t it? This sort of feeling? Don’t you like it?”
“I love it, I love it,” Diana told him, getting friskier when she asked him: “Playing with yourself?”
He let her know: “I haven’t played with myself actually—not for a full 48 hours.”
Diana burst into laughter and made kissing noises, telling Gilbey he was “the nicest person in the world.”
“[Leaking the tape] was done to harm me in a serious manner, and that was the first time I’d experienced what it was like to be outside the net, so to speak, and not be in the family,” Diana remembered. “It was to make the public change their attitude toward me. It was, you know, if we are going to divorce, my husband would hold more cards than I would—it was very much a poker game, chess game.”
Diana never knew exactly how the recording got out, but she was fairly certain that her husband’s establishment friends were responsible. Charles was losing the popularity war that was being played out between the couple in the media. By revealing the contents of the tape, it was clear the Princess wasn’t quite the innocent angel people believed. Needless to say, the whole episode “mortified” the Princess and the Firm.
There were no such revelations from the man she would later describe as being the “love of her life,” Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, with whom she separated in June 1997, a year after her divorce from Charles was finalized. Diana’s closest friends say the soft-spoken, dedicated surgeon was very different from the other men she had turned to in an attempt to escape the misery of her marriage. He shunned the spotlight and had little interest in the razzle-dazzle glamour of a royal lifestyle. He was also a devout Muslim. But when Diana first met him in 1995 during the final throes of her marriage, she told pals it was love at first sight. She’d gone to London’s Royal Brompton Hospital, where Khan worked as a lung and heart surgeon, to visit a friend recovering from surgery.
It was the beginning of a discreet two-year relationship that ended shortly before her death. Diana’s aide, Paul Burrell, claimed the Princess begged the doctor to marry her—and Khan’s parents said she even talked at one time about converting to Islam and moving with him to Pakistan to start another family.
Close friend Rosa Monckton said Diana was “very much in love with” the shy and quiet physician. She was so smitten, she once turned up at the hospital where he worked completely naked except for a long fur coat, said Burrell, who claimed his boss even asked him to speak to a priest about the possibility of organizing a secret marriage to Khan. “I found my peace,” Diana said of Khan. “He has given me all the things I need.”
But for Diana, the affair would turn out to be yet another bitter disappointment. For all her urging to make their relationship official following her July 1996 divorce, Khan decided the cultural divide between them was too wide and they would be doomed to failure.
“If I married her, our marriage would not last for more than a year. We are culturally so different from each other. She is from Venus and I am from Mars. If it ever happened, it would be like a marriage from two different planets,” he told his family. At the inquest into Diana’s death, Rosa testified that her friend was still infatuated with Khan at the time of her death. She said Diana was “deeply upset and hurt” when he broke off with her in the summer of 1997. “She hoped that they would be able to have a future together. She wanted to marry him,” she said.
That romance gave way to a dalliance—her last one—with the man who would ultimately die by her side, Dodi Fayed.
***
On the rebound from her Good Samaritan surgeon Hasnat Khan, Diana ended up in the arms of Egyptian playboy Fayed, the son of Mohamed Al-Fayed, the multimillionaire owner of London’s exclusive Harrods department store.
Other friends—and much of the world—were doubtful about Dodi’s intentions. He had, after all, romanced a series of famous women, including Julia Roberts and Brooke Shields. But unlike Khan, he cared little about the round-the-clock media exposure. Some thought he relished it. He also offered Diana a tender understanding and unlimited funds to hire private yachts and planes to try to ensure her privacy.
The couple first went public with their relationship when they showed up together at Lucas Carlton restaurant in Paris on July 25, 1997. Two weeks later, the pair was spotted cuddling on a $32 million yacht off Sardinia. Their families had known each other for years, but now, it seemed, Diana and Dodi were taking it one step further. She was thirty-six at the time, and he was forty-two. It was Dodi’s softer side that attracted the Princess. “He was so romantic and thoughtful,” said Suzanne Gregard, who was amicably divorced from him in 1987 after a lightning eight-month marriage.
After the couple was snapped together off the coast of St. Tropez in the South of France, Diana zoomed over to the paparazzi in a motorboat and shouted out that she was planning to catch everybody off guard. What did she mean? We would never find out, as she was killed a few weeks later with Dodi in the infamous Paris car crash. There was talk after the accident that Dodi had bought an engagement ring days earlier and his father was convinced a marriage was in the works. But Diana’s friend, Rosa Monckton, told the crash inquest that the Princess had no plans to marry Dodi. We will never really know.
MISERABLY EVER AFTER
The words “Happily Ever After” were never in Diana’s stars—quite literally, as the People’s Princess was fixated on astrology, the pseudoscience that claims to divine information a
bout human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the movements and relative positions of celestial objects. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that romantic happiness was fleeting, at best, in her life … despite a long string of lovers.
Like Meghan, Diana was somewhat of a rebel in the royal ranks. She didn’t fit into the Windsor’s way of doing things. History will define that she was often mocked, scorned, and resented by her in-laws—and her own husband, Charles, considered her little more than an irritation. She, too, would go on to despise him.
But it didn’t start like that.
Charles was the man initially idolized, then despised, by Diana.
Diana was an introverted virgin who thought she was unfit to become a Princess when they met, even though she was said to have had posters of Charles on her wall at both her divorced parents’ homes, seeing him as some sort of James Bond character. Though he was not the sporting type, Charles viewed himself as some kind of a Renaissance Man—a swashbuckling eligible bachelor with a fierce intellect, to boot.
A year before he proposed to Diana, the Prince of Wales was on the rebound from his affair with Anna “Whiplash” Wallace, whose ferocious temper earned her that nickname. Wallace was a dangerous version of Lady Diana—tall, blonde, and a reckless horsewoman.
Charles was sexually obsessed with her and would probably have married her if she hadn’t dumped him—because of his love for Camilla Parker Bowles. It was that enduring love that drove Diana to tears a week before her wedding to Charles, who, according to folklore, famously once told Diana he refused to be the only British prince without a mistress.
Instead of spending their honeymoon sleeping with Diana—a trip aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia for a fourteen-day cruise of the Mediterranean before ending their getaway at Balmoral Castle, the Queen’s estate in Scotland—he was said to have lain in bed reading the books of Laurens van der Post, about the author’s mystical and religious experiences in Africa.