‘She was the sort of person who didn’t like being out of a relationship,’ says Carolan Brown. ‘She didn’t like being on her own because she needed constant reassurance that she was loved. That was her ultimate dream – to find the perfect husband, have more children and settle down. She was looking for the right man.’
Certainly she had no shortage of suitors – flowers, invitations and gifts for her were arriving all the time at Kensington Palace. ‘Naturally these attentions flattered her and at some level she enjoyed them,’ said Simone Simmons. ‘Sometimes she would spend a cheerful evening with one squire or another but it was to be a long time before she was ready even to consider a whole-hearted relationship.’ More than that, she was intimidated and nauseated if a man became too ardent and began declaring his undying devotion and affection. ‘As soon as they say everyone is madly in love with you, it’s instant rejection. It’s absolutely repulsive,’ she told James Colthurst, referring to one particularly devoted admirer.
Diana tended to put the men in her life into compartments, and she, her hairdressers and Paul Burrell light-heartedly devised a ‘racecourse’, picking out nine admirers, who – besides Hasnat Khan, who was always the front runner – included a musician, a novelist, a politician, a businessman and a lawyer. These they moved up or down the course depending on how she felt about them. For a time the American billionaire Teddy Forstmann was deemed to be well in contention. Their relationship not only had a suitably transatlantic flavour but earned the approval of Patrick Jephson, who felt that his money, kindness and common sense made him an ideal partner. He first met her in 1994 at an Independence Day dinner hosted by her friend Lord Rothschild (on the advisory board of Forstmann’s company, Gulfstream Aerospace) at Spencer House (a magnificent eighteenth-century town house in St James’s, London, built by the first Earl Spencer, and eventually acquired by Jacob Rothschild’s company, which completed its restoration in 1987). Forstmann subsequently took her out to Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons restaurant in Oxfordshire and she reciprocated with an invitation to Kensington Palace. Later that summer they played tennis together, in suitably matching outfits, while she was on holiday with her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima at Martha’s Vineyard in the United States. Tongues really began wagging when Forstmann, who has also been linked to actress Liz Hurley, flew her, in October 1994, in one of his private planes from New York to Washington, where he was her partner at a movers and shakers dinner hosted by the late Katherine Graham, chairman and former publisher of the Washington Post. When the Princess returned to Kensington Palace she was on the telephone to her American hostess to discuss a surprise bouquet of fifty long-stemmed red roses – complete with an ‘over-familiar’ message which apparently came from Forstmann.
Besides Forstmann, Diana was linked to property developer Christopher Whalley, Canadian singer Bryan Adams – his Danish actress girlfriend Cecilie Thomsen accused him of having an affair with the Princess after her divorce – as well as the Asian electronics entrepreneur Gulu Lalvani and even an Italian count. There were plenty of other names mentioned, whether she had met them or not. As her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima cautioned when she spoke to TV producer Daphne Barak: ‘She doesn’t know who she can trust. And all the men they try to link her name to . . . really. Don’t forget what this is about. It’s obvious they are trying to connect her name to some man. This is a typical divorce struggle.’
While the thrill of the chase may have provided amusement and diversion, it did not entirely hide the desolation in Diana’s soul, a sadness and isolation arising from her personality and her circumstance. ‘She struck me as an incredibly lonely person,’ Will Carling observed. ‘She was able to alleviate emotional and physical suffering in so many people, yet retained a curious air of sadness herself.’ It was a constant refrain from those who knew her well. ‘She’s alone and she’s so lonely,’ was Lucia Flecha de Lima’s opinion. ‘Everybody criticizes her when she makes a mistake, but these mistakes are the result of her loneliness.’
In her book, The Impossibility of Sex, Susie Orbach describes a personality type that she calls the ‘vampire Casanova’ because people of this personality follow a predictable pattern of pursuit, seduction and then indifference. It is the conquest that matters, but only in so far as it alleviates the ‘dreadful emptiness’ within. Vampire Casanovas are figures more to be pitied than judged; frightened and anxious characters who are emotional black holes. The parallels with the Princess and her romantic experiences are unmistakable.
While she could be consumed by her needs and passions, Diana gradually mastered the ability to stand back and examine, often with amusement, her life and position. But, as reported in the Daily Mail of 14 July 1997, she commented sadly to the model Cindy Crawford, ‘I have my picture in the paper every single day. Who would want to take me on?’
Following the Waleses’ separation in December 1992, Diana began to see – alongside her idealized vision of living happily ever after, invariably abroad, with the man of her dreams, far removed from the everyday cares and constrictions of her existence – that she could use her position to do something worthwhile. ‘Her head tells her that she would like to be the ambassador to the world, her heart tells her that she would like to be wooed by an adoring billionaire,’ observed James Colthurst. A friend and counsellor of Diana’s agreed with Colthurst’s opinion about her ‘head’, but not about her ‘heart’: ‘She was on a trajectory where she was going to do something in the world that was really valuable. Her ambition was not to chase every man in her life.’
As for being ‘wooed’, while she no doubt enjoyed it, ‘It was bad enough getting to grips with being “Mrs W” [‘Mrs Windsor’], never mind bringing another one up,’ she said ruefully to James Colthurst.
Much as the Princess strove to come to terms with the past, inevitably the separation cast a long shadow over her life. She had greeted it as a step forward, but it hardly made her life any easier. She lived in a constant state of agitation and uncertainty, not only about the men she was currently involved with, but also about her husband, her fears and anxieties fuelled by speculation among her friends or in the media about what the Prince and his supporters might be plotting and planning. Yet, amid the lurid headlines about silent phone calls and affairs with married men, it is easy to overlook the fact that she and Prince Charles managed their separation in a way that, though understandably edgy, defensive, and suspicious, was reasonably civilized. From a position where Diana could not bear to be in the same room as her husband, there came a time when she felt sufficiently composed to make regular visits to Prince Charles in his rooms at Colour Court in St James’s Palace.
This was no ordinary separation. She had not only to cope with the emotional reality of the continuing place of Camilla Parker Bowles in Charles’s affections, but she had to contend with the attempts to downgrade her royal status, the whispering campaign against her – ‘Quite mad, poor dear,’ one of the Prince’s circle opined – and the ponderous hostility of her husband’s family as a whole. Indeed, if her own experience had taught her anything it was that once women like herself, who had married into powerful families, were considered no longer desirable as family members they risked losing everything. Not only was that borne out by the ruthless despatch of the Duchess of York from the bosom of the royal family, but also by the treatment of other aristocratic friends of her generation. Diana felt an immediate fellowship with Annabel Goldsmith’s niece, Lady Cosima Somerset, who found herself ostracized when she left her husband, the eleventh Duke of Beaufort’s youngest son, Lord John Somerset. ‘We shared the experience of being separated from our husbands and uncertain about what the future held,’ Cosima Somerset recalled. ‘We had both broken away from large, powerful families and therefore had lost our protection. Both of us were considered “hysterical, unbalanced, paranoid, foolish”.’
In contrast to her behaviour when in pursuit of love, Diana’s conduct in relation to the Prince and his family was in many ways a triumph
of restraint and shrewd counselling. She was quite aware that, as legal precedents for a divorced Prince and Princess of Wales were sketchy, the end game of her marriage would be played out in the court of public opinion. This meant, she knew, that the extent of her popularity would ultimately define the verdict, as the Duchess of York – ‘the canary down the mine shaft’ as Diana called her – had found to her cost. The Princess had witnessed the full weight of the Establishment bear down on Fergie in July 1993 when she accepted the post as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and had the offer quickly withdrawn. Diana, a woman now deemed mad, bad and dangerous to know, saw that she had to navigate her path with diplomacy and subtlety. ‘She was very grown up about that part of her life,’ Vivienne Parry noted.
The path she took was neither easy nor consistent. While the days of lurid imaginings that Camilla Parker Bowles was, in her words, ‘a sexual machine’ no longer held the capacity to torture her, she still pondered over her rival’s astrological fortunes, gossiped about the supposed smell in her house, listened with anger and disbelief to the roll-call of those she had once called friends who had played host to the lovers and, on one occasion, laid out an Ordnance Survey map to plot the devious routes the woman she still called ‘the Rottweiler’ took on her journey to meet Prince Charles. So while Diana was upset when Camilla was present at the memorial service for the Earl of Westmorland on 3 November 1993, which she also attended, she was not as emotionally wrung out as she once would have been.
Paradoxically the emotional book-end to her obsession with Camilla came a few weeks after the separation. If the love letters from Camilla to her husband that she had read in August 1991 had confirmed the intensity of the older woman’s longing for Prince Charles, so the late-night telephone conversation between the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles, illicitly recorded and broadcast by radio hams and subsequently published in tabloid newspapers in January 1993, was undeniable proof that these feelings were reciprocated. The so-called ‘Camillagate’ tapes were deeply embarrassing for the Prince of Wales, containing as they did distasteful references to his desire to be a sanitary tampon inside his lover (which Diana described as ‘just sick’). More pertinently, the tapes demonstrated just why the Princess had always been the third wheel in their marriage. Amidst her husband’s self-absorption and fretfulness he mused that the whole reason for Camilla’s existence was to validate his own.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ he tells Camilla.
‘Don’t be silly, I’ve never achieved anything,’ she replies.
‘Your great achievement is to love me,’ Prince Charles answers.
In happier circumstances this could have been the Princess herself speaking.
As far as Diana was concerned, while Camillagate was traumatic it was also cathartic, and although she continued to keep track of Camilla’s relationship with her husband, she was no longer totally consumed by thoughts of their affair. ‘She had this torment going on in her head,’ said a close friend. ‘Now she doesn’t care where he is and she isn’t interested and she doesn’t want to know.’ She was now following the ups and downs of the liaison between Camilla and Charles with a kind of disinterested fascination, at times even feeling sorry for Camilla, who had waited so long for her prince who still couldn’t make up his mind about their future together.
Diana felt a little sympathy for her husband too, conscious as she explored her own background in therapy, that his own bleak upbringing had made him the man he was. He had a ‘tricky, very tricky’ relationship with his father. ‘He has to sort out his childhood before he can sort himself out,’ Diana said to a friend. Likewise, as she began to make more public speeches, she began to appreciate the frustrations her husband felt when the press ignored or discarded his words for a picture of her on a shopping trip. ‘He is so unhappy, he is suicidal,’ she said to Penny Thornton. ‘He has such a struggle that he cannot be taken seriously, he gets really hurt by it and I now understand.’ She herself was so furious when a speech she made to the Red Cross in 1993 was only lightly reported that she tore up a note of explanation from Dickie Arbiter. Even though Arbiter was suspected of being a double agent by both sides because until December 1993 he was working as press secretary for both the Prince and the Princess, he later felt that the relentless war between what Diana called the A team (her side) and the B team (Charles’s side) did scale down after the separation: ‘I think she grew up. The Princess felt a weight had been taken off her shoulders. She was able to lead a life without living a lie, and could do her own thing.’
It was something of an illusion. If not quite all-out war, their armistice had the complexity of an armed truce, mutual suspicion punctuated by sporadic outbreaks of fighting. Both sides had their offices swept for listening devices, the Prince and his acolytes convinced that ‘her side’ were listening to their telephone conversations. Every move was watched with a doubtful beady eye. In November 1993, a month before she announced her decision to retire from public life, for example, Diana had an uncomfortable meeting with her husband who was irritated and fearful that he would catch the flak for her decision. He had, after all, told his circle that he wanted her ‘completely removed from public life’. ‘Charles has been whingeing that he wants the stage for his own; now he’s got it. I’m going to find my own,’ Diana told James Colthurst.
Prince Charles’s decision, early in 1992, to allow the television broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to write his biography, and to make a two-hour ITV television documentary to accompany it, revealed the intricacy of the couple’s relationship. Diana at once began fretting that he was making a ‘huge mistake’, worried that the programme would seriously undermine her position and concerned about the possible effect on the boys. This was somewhat disingenuous given her collaboration in Diana: Her True Story. But while her involvement with my book was still effectively camouflaged, she believed the documentary would carry greater weight as Prince Charles was very publicly involved. For two years the documentary loomed large in her life, her conversations with friends peppered with references to Dimbleby. She was worried that the film, ostensibly to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of her husband’s investiture as the Prince of Wales, would tarnish her reputation and would somehow be to the Prince’s advantage in any negotiations surrounding their marriage.
Before the broadcast Patrick Jephson organized a lunch between the broadcaster and the Princess in the ‘mischievous’ hope that Dimbleby would see the ‘real’ Diana as opposed to the Diana in the stories relayed to him by Charles’s circle. ‘It was my intention to show him that large parts of it were demonstrably false or at least incomplete,’ Jephson wrote in Shadows of a Princess. After the lunch Dimbleby wore the dazed look of so many middle-aged men, from newspaper editors to senior politicians, upon whom the Princess had turned her charm. Her magic had worked. Dimbleby departed saying to her private secretary something to the effect that he now doubted the stories he’d been told by the Prince’s side (a contention that Dimbleby has since denied).
While the Princess was often accused of manipulating the media, during this entire episode she deliberately kept a low profile so as to leave the field open for her husband. At the time she was being courted assiduously by the veteran American broadcaster Barbara Walters, as well as by the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, both of whom Diana eventually invited to lunch at Kensington Palace. She turned down their requests for face-to-face interviews as she did, reluctantly, when ITV producer Mike Brennan discussed an hour-long documentary about her charity work. ‘It was the right pitch at the wrong time,’ commented Brennan. ‘It didn’t help that the Palace continually tried to shunt the project into a siding.’ That year, 1994, the Princess argued, was Charles’s year.
On the night of the historic broadcast, 29 June 1994, the Princess, far from thinking of scoring points over her husband, was a bundle of nerves. She had a long-standing engagement to attend a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery of which she was patron, but would have
much preferred to spend the evening on her own inside the four walls of Kensington Palace. ‘How am I going to get through tonight?’ she asked James Colthurst plaintively. Everything seemed to conspire against her. To her irritation the couturiers Valentino prematurely announced to the world that she would be wearing one of their gowns, so at the last minute she decided to wear something else and picked a flirty little number by Christina Stambolian. (This dress led to accusations from some commentators that she was seeking to upstage the programme about her husband.)
As the Princess strode confidently across the courtyard to shake the hand of her friend Lord Palumbo, few realized the effort of will she was making. In the event, the TV documentary, which in fact focused on the Prince’s working life, was to be remembered only for his confession that he committed adultery and, subsequently, for initiating a debate about his fitness to be king. According to Dickie Arbiter, ‘The programme was a complete whinge, a terrible own goal that not just affected relations between the Prince and Princess, but between St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace.’
Even though the media praised Diana’s poise while heaping opprobrium on the Prince’s head, there was little satisfaction in her triumph. She witnessed the fallout the very next day when she visited her boys at Ludgrove School and William, referring to the lurid headlines, asked her, ‘Is it true that Daddy never loved you?’ While she explained the statement away as best she could, she felt sufficiently aggrieved to write to Prince Charles’s solicitors complaining about the programme’s effect on the children.
It was noticeable that while Diana had a golden opportunity to drive home her advantage, she chose to blame the Prince’s advisers, notably his private secretary Richard Aylard, for the débâcle rather than her estranged husband. Her magnanimous behaviour was part of a wider perception of a rapprochement between them, sustained by the mixed signals she gave out. She began to speak more favourably about his role as a father – although she and the boys were distinctly unimpressed when he kept them waiting two hours for a family picnic on Sports Day at Ludgrove School in June 1995. One of her friends, the motherly restaurateur Mara Berni, sincerely believed that Diana remained passionate about the Prince and wanted to effect a reconciliation, dreaming of the day he would come back on bended knee. And on several occasions James Colthurst asked her how she would react if Prince Charles threw his arms around her and told her how well she had done. ‘I would be absolutely shaken and would forgive him,’ was her reply.
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