Unsurprisingly, the very fact that the information came through Diana served to devalue the currency of Smith’s claims. Inevitably, Smith was pitied rather than believed; the Prince, his staff – and even Hounslow police, to whom he also reported the alleged offence, in October 1996 – giving no credence to his account. As the Prince’s press secretary, Sandra Henney, observed, ‘All we had was one poor, sad individual making an allegation of assault some years before to the Princess, who, at that time, quite frankly wanted to find ways of embarrassing her husband.’ Indeed, the Prince’s senior protection officer, Chief Inspector Colin Trimming later admitted that he had dismissed the allegations out of hand mainly because Smith’s cause was being championed by the Princess.
Eventually, it was decided that the only sensible course of action was that Smith, who continued to have treatment for his personal problems at a private clinic, should be let go. In December 1996 he was given a £38,000 settlement. Fiona Shackleton, then the Prince’s solicitor, told an internal household meeting that she had been ordered to make the problem ‘go away’ and confessed that an encounter with the distressed orderly was ‘one of the lowest points in my professional career’.
By the end of the divorce negotiations, the Princess had become a very rich woman in her own right. She might have lost the title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ but she had found £17 million as compensation. As for the title . . . ‘Don’t worry, Mummy. I will give it back to you one day, when I am king,’ William told her.
While Diana now faced the prospect of curtsying to junior royals like her neighbour, Princess Michael of Kent, whom she dubbed ‘The U-Boat Commander’, she was buoyed by a supportive letter from that lady telling her that it would cause her ‘great embarrassment’ if Diana even considered curtsying.
Diana used the loss of her title as a convenient excuse to relinquish her patronage of nearly a hundred charities – although she had in fact written her letters of resignation weeks earlier and kept them in the safe in her offices at St James’s Palace before the decision was finalized in July 1996. She did, however, keep formal affiliations with six charities that reflected her current interests in AIDS, the homeless, sick children, leprosy and, thanks to the last-minute suggestion of her media consultant, the ballet. ‘It will give you something light-hearted to do,’ Jane Atkinson told her.
While this move came as a considerable blow to a number of very deserving charities, realistically it was no great surprise. The Princess had stepped back from her charity work at the end of 1993, and as she was trying to define her new style and life, it was as well that she should make a clean break with the past. What she failed to mention was the fact that she now resented working on behalf of a family she had little sympathy for and even less in common with. It says much about her residual bitterness towards the institution which made her, tried to break her in and finally released her, that while watching a phone-in television debate on the monarchy, one evening in early 1997, Diana made several anonymous phone votes in favour of Britain abolishing the monarchy and becoming a republic – with her eldest son, heir to the throne, stretched out on the rug beside her.
That said, whatever she thought in private, in public she was scrupulously supportive. She infuriated her friends, the fashion designer Gianni Versace and the singer Elton John, when she belatedly withdrew a foreword she had written in July 1996, just as her divorce was being finalized, for a book of photographs to raise money for the singer’s AIDS Foundation. The book, Rock and Royalty, juxtaposed suggestive images with pictures of the royal family, which she felt would offend the Queen.
Doubtless she was concerned too that it could affect the detail of her divorce settlement, which was finalized a few weeks later on 28 August 1996. ‘It’s a tragic end to a wonderful story,’ her brother-in-law, Sir Robert Fellowes, said to her in a phone call of support. Diana was resolutely upbeat. ‘Oh no, it’s the beginning of a new chapter,’ she replied.
It was her son William who helped her write the first page of that new chapter in her life. While the Princess was, by force of circumstance and design, reshaping her office to reflect her distance from the Palace machine, her older son suggested a scheme that practically and symbolically signalled a long goodbye to her old life. In July 1996, just after her divorce settlement was agreed, Prince William had the brainwave that she should sell her royal gowns for charity as a way of saying a farewell to her royal life at the same time as doing some good. It was an inspired idea, capturing his mother’s imagination, and very much in the spirit of her desire to free herself from the ghosts of the past. She chose seventy-nine of her favourite dresses, including the gown she wore at the White House when she danced with John Travolta, and joined in enthusiastically in the seven-month process of cataloguing, photographing and eventually auctioning her eventful royal history, appropriately, in New York, which she considered to be her second home. The auction, conducted by Christie’s, raised $5.7 million for the Royal Marsden Hospital, which specializes in the treatment of cancer, and the AIDS Crisis Trust – much to the outrage of the virtually bankrupt National AIDS Trust, of which she was still patron.
The whole process was a joyous release, and the Princess responded with the kind of energy and eagerness that summed up the essence of her personality. During that time Christie’s creative director Meredith Etherington-Smith watched the new Diana emerging from the shackles of her royal past. ‘The Princess is very energetic. She doesn’t amble, she swoops and she’s fast,’ she noted. ‘It became quickly apparent that she was very funny.’ As she got to know Diana she began to ‘glimpse the down-to-earth person behind the princessly chimera’, a woman who was not exactly larger than life but ‘somehow brighter, more luminous’. When the Princess suggested that a fresh set of photographs should be taken of her by a new fashion photographer, Etherington-Smith had the idea of using the Peruvian cameraman, Mario Testino. ‘I want you to photograph her as a person, not as a princess, and I want you to capture her fun and her huge energy,’ she told him, an editorial direction that, given how tragically soon the Princess’s life would end, was unwittingly inspired. The photo shoot, in a disused schoolhouse in Battersea, was a memorably creative day, the highlight being an impromptu sashay down a make-believe catwalk by a barefoot Princess and her new best friend, the photographer from Peru. When she looked at the finished work, which eventually went on show at the National Portrait Gallery, Diana said, ‘But these are me. Really me.’
It had been a long hard road. For the first time since she was a teenager sharing a bachelor apartment with three girlfriends, the Princess was free to be herself. In the winter of 1996 she went to a dinner party with her friend Lady Cosima Somerset, who had also weathered a high-profile divorce. ‘As we drove there, I felt a sense of two women who had finally broken free of other people’s rules,’ recalled Cosima. ‘Diana showed everyone, and especially women, that freedom has its rewards.’
CHAPTER TEN
The Crowning of the Queen of Hearts
LIKE A SCENE from a romantic Hollywood movie, a young well-heeled couple stood arm-in-arm on the deck of their luxury yacht watching the blood-red sun sink slowly into the Mediterranean. In the background the haunting refrain from the hit movie The English Patient played, the lush soundtrack interrupted only by the sound of popping champagne corks. The young woman, lithe, beautiful and carefree, raised her champagne glass in a toast. ‘This is a special occasion; it’s the anniversary of my divorce!’
It was 28 August 1997, exactly a year after the decree nisi of Diana, Princess of Wales was agreed and announced. On that day in 1996 she had been so overwhelmed with sadness and loss that Lucia Flecha de Lima had flown in from Washington just to be by her side. ‘She was in need of comfort,’ Lucia recalled. Later Diana had lunch at the home of her other surrogate mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, where she had a tearful encounter with her friend Lady Cosima Somerset. ‘I put my arms around her and held her. We did not say anything,’ Cosima Somerset remembered.
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Now, twelve months later, she was in the arms of her host and new lover, Dodi Fayed, the son of the Harrods owner Mohamed. She was, she told her friends, ‘blissfully happy’. Talk of marriage was in the air. When she saw pictures of the two of them together, Diana’s former astrologer, Penny Thornton, observed, ‘You could see quite clearly that she was not only in love but in lust. Every woman in the world could see that she was having great sex.’
In celebration of her anniversary, Dodi handed out twenty-dollar Cohiba cigars to the crew on board the 180-foot Jonikal. Then they headed for the beach on Sardinia’s stunning Costa Smeralda, where the couple enjoyed a romantic barbecue and drank vintage wine in the shimmering moonlight, and the yacht’s captain, Luigi, serenaded them with a Gipsy Kings song.
It was an appropriate choice given the seemingly peripatetic and restless nature of Diana’s life. In her first year of freedom she had made more than twenty overseas trips and spent twelve weeks away from London. It seemed that she was roaming from country to country in search of her personal Holy Grail – peace of mind. While few begrudged her a taste of happiness, many questioned the price she was paying, feeling that she had too readily exchanged the majestic pools of monarchy for the shallow springs of international celebrity, leaving herself open to dismissal, ridicule and vilification. For a woman trying to cultivate a serious global persona, she appeared to be indulging in incongruous frivolity.
Just a few days before, she and Dodi had used the green and gold Harrods helicopter to fly to the modest Derbyshire home of her psychic, Rita Rogers, for a reading. Even Dodi’s indulgent father, Mohamed Fayed was bemused. ‘I couldn’t understand it,’ he said.
At first glance it seemed that the self-styled queen of hearts had abdicated her throne. She survived with just a skeleton staff, her charitable commitments were pared to the bone, while what passed for her court had become the caricature of a Ruritanian folly, reduced to butler, cook, a couple of faith healers and an ever-diminishing circle of friends, many of whom were outsiders from overseas who had little appreciation of English society.
Like Edward VIII, who gave up his throne in 1936 for the woman he loved, Diana increasingly faced social if not physical exile from high society. As one of her closest friends explained, ‘It was difficult for the Princess. Everyone says that she was the one who fell out with people. That is not entirely true. After the separation and certainly after the divorce, she was rejected by that tightly knit group, the English aristocracy. They were afraid of Prince Charles and the royal family and were uncomfortable having her around. The only place for her to go was abroad.’
Cast out, like her own mother, from British polite society, she was now dating a Muslim millionaire whose father, for all his wealth, could not buy himself a British passport. Her dislocation from the life she once led was symbolized by the fact that as she stretched out on the deck of the £15 million yacht, Prince William was spending his day crawling through the heather at Balmoral, doing what his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had done for more than a century – stalking deer. Or, as his mother said bluntly, ‘killing things’.
As with so much of Diana’s life, first appearances were deceptive. In the last year she seemed to have come into her own, a woman who had glimpsed light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. She had proved to the world that it was possible to combine glamour with integrity, happiness with compassion, without the necessity of sacrificing her life on the altar of duty and propriety.
The Princess was determined to make something of herself, and her position, that would have a real impact on the world. As Debbie Frank observed, ‘She could have ended up doing nothing with her life, she could have been so beaten down by the system that she gave up. Instead she really found a purpose in life and you have to admire her spirit.’
Far from abdicating, Diana had enjoyed her coronation just a couple of months before. The woman who had her own personal trainer and therapist – and did not conceal the fact – was crowned, appropriately enough, at the hairdresser’s, where she was watching television. ‘Yes,’ she cried, punching the air in delight as, on 22 May 1997, she watched the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announce on the news that Britain would enforce a ban on landmines.
That was a moment of great triumph for the woman now lounging on the deck of a playboy’s yacht. A fashionable icon embracing an unfashionable cause, she had produced some of the most powerful images of the decade when she consoled the victims of landmines in Bosnia and nervously walked through a recently cleared minefield in Angola, a powerful juxtaposition of beauty with the beastliness of war. ‘Her crusade has captured public attention over a weapon that strikes hardest at civilians,’ wrote Robin Cook in the Daily Mirror at the time.
Diana’s interest in landmines, kindled in 1991, was later reignited by personal contacts. As early as March 1995 Mike Whitlam, then CEO of the British Red Cross, was sending her material – videos, books, briefing papers – about the issue of landmines. Her interest was further whetted by her conversations with Simone Simmons who, in the early summer of 1996, had visited Bosnia. She returned with horrific accounts and photographs showing the devastating effects of anti-personnel landmines, which kill and maim indiscriminately. The Princess was shocked by the terrible effects of these weapons on civilians, particularly women and children, and wanted to do something to help. At the time in the middle of helping to organize the sale of her royal dress collection, in the autumn of 1996 Diana invited Mike Whitlam to tea at Kensington Palace to consider the matter further, the couple discussing possible visits to Angola, Afghanistan and other lands scarred by the curse of landmines.
It was not until December of that year, however, that she formally agreed to visit the African country. In the same month, too, she accepted an invitation to attend the première of Lord Attenborough’s movie, In Love and War, based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the folly of conflict. The evening was in aid of a British Red Cross appeal to help the victims of landmines.
For the last few years Diana had had an ambivalent relationship with this venerable charity. When she and Charles first separated in 1992, courtiers felt that the Red Cross was an ideal umbrella organization to shelter her from the storms she would inevitably face as she strode out on her own. Diana was never wholly convinced, feeling that because of its long-established links with the royal family – the Queen Mother and the Queen had for decades been associated with the charity, and the Queen has been patron and president of the British Red Cross since 1952 – it was the monarchy under an assumed name.
Yet, even after her Time and Space speech in December 1993, Diana maintained her links with the Red Cross, agreeing to become vice-president and then joining a special Geneva-based commission to discuss refugee problems in Rwanda. It quickly became apparent that, while she aspired towards a more serious image as a working royal, sitting in rooms discussing strategy was not her forte. Her view was that as a frontline figurehead her image and personal skills could illuminate an issue more brightly than any number of worthy reports. The landmine campaign then was the right issue at the right time.
Once Diana was committed she made it clear that this was no passing fancy, as the landmine campaigner, Chris Moon, himself a landmine victim, observed after meeting her at Kensington Palace: ‘She was genuinely committed from the humanitarian point of view. She thought landmines were simply wrong and knew she had the profile to bring the issue to world attention.’ Diana’s South African friend, Jenni Rivett, remembered how ‘passionately’ she spoke about the issue. ‘The Princess felt very strongly about getting involved in something that wasn’t a ballet charity,’ Jenni said. ‘She believed that landmines were a subject simply being ignored by people.’
After some discussion with Mike Whitlam and much soul-searching, the Princess decided that her first visit would be to Angola. She realized that this campaign marked a change in her approach to humanitarian issues. Not only was it an international movement but
the issue was high-profile, highly charged and highly political. It was, as she would say, ‘very grown-up’, the Princess impressing even hardened journalists by her obvious commitment and hard work, and not just her charisma. The Sunday Times Africa correspondent Christina Lamb admitted that she had been cynical about Diana’s motives before the tour but became deeply moved as she watched her at work, Diana never flinching from the gruesome sights she witnessed in the hospitals and clinics she visited. ‘She had something I had only ever seen before – from Nelson Mandela – a kind of aura that made people want to be with her, and a completely natural, straight-from-the-heart sense of how to bring hope to those who seem to us to have little to live for.’
Diana agreed to be photographed walking through a recently cleared minefield, knowing that the image would be more powerful than any number of petitions, though she was acutely aware of the possible physical risks, and was genuinely scared. Millions of television viewers saw the Princess’s walk, which, as she had recognized, did more than anything else to draw the public’s attention to the issue. Once again she was pushing back the boundaries in her life, testing herself physically and emotionally.
While Diana had finally found ‘a role’, as Lord Deedes, her companion on several of her visits, noted, she had had to tiptoe gingerly through her own personal minefield, not only confronting her doubts and qualms but also in avoiding booby traps set by the Palace, politicians and diplomats. When during her four-day visit to Angola in January 1997 she was informed that Lord Howe, who had been a junior defence minister in the Conservative government, had labelled her a ‘loose cannon’ because of her naive interference in a complex matter, she was bewildered and reduced almost to the point of tears. David Puttnam dismissed Howe as a ‘Prince Charles groupie’, but the Princess was clearly flustered, protesting her innocence in a remark filmed by TV cameras: ‘I only want to help. I am a humanitarian. I always have been and I always will be.’
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