by Dylan Howard
While Charles was steeped in his newfound interest of horticulture and indulged his passion for fishing at Balmoral, Diana had two words for the place: “Rainy/Boring.”
His cruelties continued throughout the marriage—Diana spent every day crying during their month-long stay at the Queen’s rain-lashed Balmoral estate in Scotland when she found out he had been wearing a pair of cufflinks given to him by Camilla.
***
To understand Diana, we must understand the deep loneliness of Diana’s time as an official Royal, from her isolation from Charles to the icy royal snobbery served up to her as an outsider. We must also appreciate her bouts of depression, bulimia, and self-harming, and how after she produced the required “heir and a spare” sons, William and Harry, her usefulness was effectively over.
As Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles resumed their affair, Diana also sought comfort in the arms of other men … with sometimes tragic consequences, as in the case of bodyguard-lover Barry Mannakee, who, in 1987, shortly after their affair was discovered, died in a mysterious car crash.
She also admitted to a five-year affair with James Hewitt in a television interview. There was former car salesman James Gilbey, the other half of “Squidgygate,” the tabloid scandal when a newspaper got ahold of their intimate conversations in 1992. Others included art dealer Oliver Hoare, billionaire Theodore Forstmann, rugby star Will Carling, musician Bryan Adams, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan—and most scandalous, John Kennedy Jr., the son of former President John F. Kennedy.
According to Diana’s former “energy healer” Simone Simmons, Diana once told her: “We started talking, one thing led to another—and we ended up in bed together.” The rumor was never confirmed.
Outside the palace walls, however, the press provided the attention she so desperately craved, and soon Diana’s every move became front-page news. The rogue Princess was born—and as the paparazzi grew more insatiable, Charles’s resentment of her popularity increased.
***
The woman they called the “queen of hearts” was lauded with extraordinary affection. But the final year of Diana’s life was far more complicated; behind the headlines and photos, the Princess had cultivated enemies who could have cost her her life. Yet, for most of the public, these enemies were invisible and unknown. The legions of admirers knew only Diana and could not fathom that anyone would or could want to harm such a loving and dedicated woman.
As Diana’s biographer, Tina Brown, put it in an interview: “Diana had charisma … She had this great accessibility in which she always made everyone she spoke to feel as if she were only connecting with them.”
Put another way, people took Diana personally.
She meant something to them.
It went beyond being relatable; there was empathy and sympathy. She was painfully shy and had been thrust into the limelight of the world’s stage. There had been Royals before—and would be Royals after—but Diana was the first true superstar. What must this burden have been like? Many shuddered to imagine the burden on the poor girl’s shoulders. They felt protective of her.
And Diana touched millions in this way. Her adoring public hung on every word that she said, every item that she wore, and every time she changed her hairstyle. Even her facial expressions in newsreels were powerfully meaningful to many.
Explains Tina Brown:
You could tell what she thought from the flush of her face and her big, huge, luminous blue eyes that welled with emotion when she looked at you, and made you feel completely connected. She had this great accessibility in which she always meant everybody she spoke to feel as if she was connecting only to them. That was who she was. That combination of her stature, her incredibly refined beauty, that wonderful peachy skin that was just flawless. Then, this great accessibility and kindness where she was able to connect with people in this very human way. In a rope line, she would get down on her knees and bend down and talk to the children as if she was their mom, and she would have great personal conversations with people and made them feel very special.
Indeed, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that Diana’s beauty far surpassed those of other Royals.
She was literally stunning, sometimes rendering those who met her utterly speechless. Her grin could disarm the powerful and make people forget themselves utterly. On television it was one thing; but in person and up close, it was truly a kind of magic.
Yet the magic died forever in the early hours of August 31, 1997. Diana’s light was snuffed out forever, and in highly suspicious circumstances.
***
Among many other things, Diana’s death had the effect of freezing her in time. She would never grow wrinkled or old or suffer any of the indignities that come with age. Her failings and foibles would be, mostly, concealed. She would not make a slip of the tongue or rash statement in anger that might betray a secret. She would stay as she was—as she had been in people’s minds—forever.
As Ingrid Seward, royal expert and editor of Majesty magazine, said: “It was like a Greek tragedy, the whole of her life … Diana was so many different people whirled into one that she was endlessly fascinating. She was one thing to me, and she would’ve been one thing to somebody else, and it depended on her mood of the day. Because her life ended in such a terrible tragedy, she will be like Marilyn Monroe. She will be an icon forever … Because certain people in certain parts of the world are determined to believe that there was a conspiracy theory, the rumblings will always go on.”
But to tell the story in this book, we are forced to tell the story of another Diana. The one behind closed doors. The one whose life was—to put it indelicately—a complete mess. Diana doubted herself. She was self-conscious about her own body and feared that those who admired her were insincere. Further, she believed she had alienated herself from the very people she desired to be closest to, including husband Charles, Prince of Wales (the heir apparent to the British throne), whose wandering eye—and hands—would stab Diana in the heart.
Interviewed for one of my previous books, Diana: Case Solved, her butler of many years, Paul Burrell, expounded on the alienation Diana felt:
I think the Royal Family takes the view that things happen. The queen knows. She’s never interfered in any of her children’s relationships. Her attitude is they make their beds, they lie on them, and they have to get on with it. These things aren’t spoken about. They happen but they happen in private and very quietly. I stood beside the queen for a long time. I know how she performs, and I know what her attitude would be. The queen would say to Diana, “It’s your husband. You have to sort out this situation. It’s nothing to do with me.” She does not interfere until it upsets the apple cart, until it comes to a situation where it involves the constitution of the monarchy—or the country.
The one area where Diana really came into her own was in her tireless devotion to charity work. Millions benefited in real, tangible ways from her crusades against land mines and the spread of AIDS/HIV. What’s more, Diana always insisted that she should not be a figurehead only. She insisted on being in the trenches, sometimes literally.
As Burrell noted, “I remember the Red Cross once said to her, ‘We would like you to become an executive member of the board,’ and she said, ‘No, that’s not what I want. I want to be on the factory floor. I don’t want to be in the boardroom.’”
Put bluntly, Diana’s charity work—the most rewarding and straightforward part of her life—eventually became yet another place where she ruffled feathers and made enemies. But none would ever be as fierce as Charles.
When her marital feud spilled from the private to the public arena, Diana became an embarrassment … and a liability. For example, in a letter written ten months before the accident in the tunnel—and divulged years later by former butler Burrell—the Princess wrote that “this particular phase of my life is the most dangerous.”
“Immediately, there was Team Prince of Wales and Team Diana,” Paul Burrell said. “I was h
appily—by now—on Team Diana, and I thought I was on the winning side. I thought I was on the side that mattered most, but a lady-in-waiting whispered in my ear, ‘Oh, don’t you realize? Diana will be gone and forgotten within a couple of years, so you’re backing the loser. Remember who pays your wages. Remember where the money comes from. Remember who’s going to be king.’ All of that was being drilled into me as I gave my allegiance to Diana. Soon Diana was being undermined, seriously undermined, by Charles’s people. There was a movement.”
For any person in a Royal Family, going through marital difficulties would come with the added strains of being in the public eye.
But to say Diana was merely “in the public eye” would be a gross understatement. She was the most photographed woman in the world, probably the most photographed in all of human history. Media outlets were building an empire on her. She had created an entirely new level of interest in and adulation for the Royal Family. Even the most hardened journalists and photographers realized that something uncannily special was going on.
Darryn Lyons owned one of the largest international photo agencies in the world and photographed Diana personally many times. He told me: “Really, the hairs on the back of your neck stood up when the Princess of Wales was in your presence … It was just an extraordinary experience … She was truly hypnotic for a photographer, and truly an extraordinary experience to photograph. It was a penny for her thoughts, the world around her. Although, the penny turned into a multimillion-dollar business of photographing her every movement, of every minute of every day. I think she was the first of the great royal supermodels as well.”
Yet crucial to understanding her life and death is to understand that Diana was not only under the surveillance of photographers looking to get the next great cover shot. She was under almost constant surveillance by the Firm.
***
Diana was many things to many people. For many members of her adoring public, she was a naive waif who’d been cast into dangerous waters. She was a victim. She was beset on all sides.
This was true.
It was also just what Diana wanted people to think.
For, you see, Diana truly was a woman in great peril. She was mistreated by her powerful husband and had in-laws who did not particularly like her (and the way she stole the spotlight). She was acutely, and correctly, aware of the powerful forces she had angered through her targeted charity work. And she knew that her own romantic liaisons were transgressive in a way that would not be long tolerated.
But Diana had learned something. As the woman arguably subject to more press attention than anyone else in the world, Diana had come to understand the power of the printed word. (And the photograph. And the video clip.) Diana’s manipulation of the press started gently but quickly grew in intensity.
Diana had seen what kind of a weapon the press could be. What a powerful force it could create. And—in a move that further angered those who disliked Diana—she began using it to protect herself from her enemies.
There were the stories. At one point during the marriage, the frustration of an unfruitful union grew into rage and poisonous exchanges—Charles at one point telling Diana she was moronic and mocking her bulimia by telling her it was a “waste” for her to eat if food was going to be brought up again. There was the time she blamed Charles for sparking her self-harm and suicide attempt when pregnant with Prince William.
In retribution, the Royals circulated stories that Di was delusional and had developed a mental illness.
“Charles, Philip, and senior bureaucrats spread stories that she was crazy,” said one media insider. “They were always pushing the line that Diana had a screw loose and no one should listen to her.”
But Diana still hadn’t played the king in her deck of cards. She’d begun keeping diaries and recordings of both her personal experiences and the Royal Family’s secrets. She was perfectly positioned to access the innermost privacies. And when she saw that it would help insulate her from harm—or dissuade someone else from coming after her—she was only too willing to leak this material herself.
By the time Andrew Morton’s sensational, tell-all book Diana: Her True Story was published in 1992, the Windsors were already embittered against Diana—forever, in perpetuity, no takebacks—with Prince Philip especially furious. Diana had spoken to Morton about her marriage, about her bulimia, about her frustrations with the Royal Family, and about Camilla.
No other Royal Family member had ever done such a thing. There had been royal transgressions, certainly. There had been abdications. There had been forbidden romances. But no Royal had ever told tales out of school to the press itself.
This was a deep and profound shock.
As the marriage between Diana and Charles very publicly unraveled, Diana also gave a sensational tell-all interview with BBC journalist Martin Bashir.
Observed Tina Brown:
She elected to do go on television, on BBC of all channels, which has always been big supporters of the Royal Family, and give this wildly explosive interview to Martin Bashir where she really did look tragic with makeup that she’d applied very skillfully, with a pebble face and dark eyes and looking like a haunted woman, talked about the agony of being in love with a man who wasn’t in love with you, and who had always been unfaithful with Camilla. She said, of course, there are three of us in this marriage, which became a hugely quoted phrase all over the world. How she thought that Charles wasn’t appropriate to be king and how the Royal Family were out of touch. This was explosive stuff. In another century, she would’ve been sent to the Tower of London, and then executed for talking like that about the monarch.
This proved to be the final straw. It was more than manipulation of the press; it was a declaration of war. Charles would not have it, and the couple divorced in 1996.
Refusing to simply disappear (as the Windsors fervently hoped she would do), Diana instead chose to use her fame to “double down” on her charity work, most especially her work with AIDS awareness and campaigning against land mines.
And now the paparazzi were insatiable. Despite the royal divorce—or perhaps because of it—photos of Diana could be worth a fortune, and they had photographers hounding Diana day and night, watching her every move in the hopes of securing a bumper payday.
The ensuing chaos was unsafe—as we would come to learn on August 31, 1997. A more ominous date in Diana’s life there never was.
“YOU’LL BE KING, I WON’T!”
While the fissures were deepening in their parents’ marriage, the two young Princes were flourishing. Secure in their toy-stuffed nursery, on the top floor of Highgrove, and watched over by nanny Barbara Barnes, they thrived under their mother’s doting watch. Diana was like a lioness, protecting her cubs, even shooing Charles away when he attempted to spend time with Wills and Harry. Eventually, she alienated the loyal Barbara herself; she quit, unable to cope with Diana’s fluctuating moods and whims.
The two young Princes, meanwhile, were already emerging as distinctive characters. William was a naughty, tempestuous toddler and, from an early age, displayed a regal attitude. During playground brawls (always discreetly monitored by his security team), he would threaten opponents with his grandmother’s soldiers. He was also known to disrupt parties by throwing his weight around and on more than one occasion was sent home from a birthday celebration for throwing a tantrum when he couldn’t cut the birthday cake himself. William had been reared from birth for the role that was to one day be his—King. Just a year old when he went on his first overseas trip, to Australia and New Zealand with his parents in the spring of 1983, he quickly learned to respond to the constant presence of cameras and reporters, although his status as the coddled firstborn often led to naughty, rebellious behavior.
Harry, much shyer, was more prone to hiding behind his mother in public. He had quickly understood that his place in the pecking order was below his brother’s. He remembers from an early age William being favored by some senior members of
the family, including the Queen Mother, who would often ask William to sit with her, or invite him to her home at Clarence House, without his younger brother in tow. “Harry has always known he was number two,” Royal authority and writer Ingrid Seward explained. “Obviously Diana was very anxious that he shouldn’t feel that.”
But rather than complaining, Harry soon realized the advantages of his position. Family lore has it that at the age of just six, Harry taunted his older brother with the words: “You’ll be King, I won’t. So I can do what I want!”
Harry lived up to his promise. As he grew older, he reveled in his privileged position of relative freedom, until he managed to enrage even his most staunch supporter, his mother. Diana’s bodyguard, Inspector Ken Wharfe, who frequently looked after the boys, once saw Diana hit the roof when Harry walloped his older brother with a pool cue, when they were staying on Richard Branson’s Caribbean island, Necker. “Harry was always pushing the boundaries,” remembered Wharfe. “That was never the case with William.”
Unlike his brother, Harry was not academic. Again, Diana had eschewed private tutoring in the royal tradition, by sending her second son to a Mrs. Mynors’ nursery school in London’s trendy Notting Hill in 1987, before he went to the Wetherby School in 1989. He began boarding at Ludgrove Prep in 1992. William had preceded him there, enjoying the privileges and protection afforded by an old-fashioned British school. Aged eight, Wills was sent to board at the one-hundred-year-old school, a favorite choice of the aristocracy. For the first time, he experienced life outside the Palace bubble. He slept in a communal dorm, had a strict timetable for classes, sports, meals, and recreation, and despite the constant discreet presence of his security detail, he was treated like any other pupil. As Diana wished, her sons were receiving a solid grounding outside the bubble of the Royal Family. As it would turn out in the coming years, the two young Princes would need the security and safety of their schools more than anyone could have anticipated.