by Kitty Kelley
$25,000: manicures and pedicures
$24,000: hair, including color, cuts, and daily styling
$ 7,000: fitness instructor
$ 4,400: chiropractor
$ 4,300: colonic irrigation
$ 4,290: reflexology
$ 3,800: osteopathy
$ 2,200: holistic massage
$ 3,800: aromatherapy, plus home visits
$ 1,000: acupuncture
$ 2,000: hypnotherapy
$65,000: astrologers, psychics, and holistic counselors
$20,000: psychotherapy
Again Diana rang up Richard Kay in dismay. “This is a deliberate attempt to discredit me,” she said. She did not deny the therapies or their costs. Rather, she said that “someone” in the Palace wanted to make her look like a New Age flake who had her colon flushed every week because she was obsessed with being thin and didn’t have anything better to do with her time or her husband’s money. The reporter quoted “a friend of the Princess” as saying: “If the Prince had not treated her so shabbily, she would not have needed to turn to expensive therapists.”
Her estranged sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, phoned to commiserate. She, too, felt persecuted by the Palace machine.
“They are out to get us—especially Bellowes,” Fergie said, using her nickname for the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, who was Diana’s brother-in-law. “First me, now you…. We’re the bad girls and we must be punished.”
During her protracted divorce negotiations, Fergie had been accused by the Palace of “insane extravagance” for running up expenses of $3 million. Details of her expenditures—$6,500 for twenty pairs of shoes and $85,000 for twelve dresses—were leaked to the press. After they were published, the Palace announced that the Queen would not pay the Duchess’s bills. A spokesman said, “She lives beyond her means—and ours.”
Fergie admitted she was “paranoid” about the courtiers. She started carrying a shredder with her wherever she traveled. And she stopped keeping a diary because she was afraid someone might expose her private life. “Andrew used to write me wonderful letters from the ship, but I haven’t kept them,” she told her friend David Frost, the television interviewer. “I did for a bit, in the bank, but then I thought the bank would be robbed.”
Diana, who also used shredders for mail and scramblers on her telephones, subscribed to Fergie’s conspiracy theory. She, too, distrusted the courtiers, including her brother-in-law, and believed they were trying to destabilize her. “They think we were crazy to start with,” she joked to Fergie, “but we didn’t get crazy until we married into this family….”
During their marital separation, both young women consulted psychiatrists, and both were put on antidepressants. Straining under the restrictions of being royal wives, both had taken lovers, who betrayed them for money. Now emotionally fragile and frightened about their future, the two women turned to their astrologers, numerologists, and spiritualists for help. But many of these celebrity-by-association gurus also sold them out. After Diana learned her beautician, her palmist, and her zone therapist were writing books, she stopped seeing them and told friends she could not rely on anyone around her. “She’s alone, and she’s so lonely,” said fifty-three-year-old Lucia Flecha de Lima, who had become close to Diana after her 1991 tour of Brazil. “She doesn’t know whom she can trust.”
Fergie hired lawyers to stop publication of books by her former chef, her former psychic, and her former lover’s business partner. But she was unable to prevent her former butler from selling his recollections of her and John Bryan splashing in the tub together. “Their lovemaking in the bath was always very noisy,” the butler said. “Fergie would squeal her head off.”
The Duchess and the Princess later joined forces to fend off the press. No longer members of the royal family or receiving public money, they fought for their privacy. They filed a criminal complaint and sought an injunction against photographers who trespassed on private property in the French Riviera to take pictures of them on vacation. They hired lawyers to notify Britain’s Press Complaints Commission that they would not tolerate further invasions of their privacy, and Diana obtained an injunction against a freelance paparazzo she claimed was stalking her. She filed an affidavit with the court, saying: “He seems to know my every move. I shall suffer undue psychological pressure and become ill.”
Feeling betrayed by everyone around them, both women kept track of insults in the press and made lists of reporters who could be trusted—short lists. They phoned each other when negative stories appeared and discussed what to do. Fergie usually chose the direct approach and called the offending writer.
“She rang me from London,” said New York Post columnist Cindy Adams, “to bitch about my saying she’d been late for people her last visit.”
In that case, the phone call was effective. On her next trip to New York City, the Duchess invited Cindy Adams to tea, and the columnist was elated. She told her readers: “I adored… Her Skinny Highness.”
Still, the list of trustworthy reporters was shrinking. Diana, who had once complimented the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter for her perceptive feature stories, dismissed her as a hack when she said the Princess was addicted to praise.
“She’s off the list,” said Diana. She also scratched Chrissy Iley of the Manchester Evening News for carping about her secret midnight visits to hospitals to comfort the sick and dying. The writer offended Diana by calling her “the super martyr” and “the husband stealer.” When Noreen Taylor wrote an essay entitled, “Diana: A Princess in Love… with Herself,” she, too, was dropped from the list of trustworthy reporters. Noreen Taylor had asked readers why, since the breakup of Diana’s marriage, she allowed it to be known that she spent most of her Christmas alone. Noting that Diana had a mother, two sisters, a brother, and countless friends, the writer asked, “Is this another cry for attention from a public she believes is besotted by her?”
Diana called Fergie to complain.
“The women are the worst,” moaned Fergie. “They’re so bitchy.” She made an exception for Ingrid Seward, the editor of Majesty magazine. “Ingie is okay, and her husband [columnist Ross Benson] is divine looking.” Diana did not share Fergie’s enthusiasm for Ross Benson because the columnist had declared himself firmly on the side of Charles in the war of the Waleses. She and Fergie agreed that they were much better treated by male writers than the females, except for gossip columnists such as Nigel Dempster. But both Diana and Fergie dismissed him as “an old woman.”
When Daily Telegraph journalist Victoria Mather described Fergie in one of her “famous rump-straining sad floral prints,” Fergie again picked up the phone and protested.
“This is the Duchess of York,” she announced grandly, “and I’d like to talk about your sweeping judgments.”
“Good afternoon, Your Highness,” said the journalist, switching on her tape recorder.
Fergie asked, “Why did you write such a scathing article?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued: “I understand that journalism—that you have to do your job—but to talk about people’s weight… and the size of their backsides and floral dresses… is so below the belt… so pathetic…. I still do so much good work… so much good work…. Nobody knows the good work I do….”
The reporter listened respectfully as the Duchess sounded ready to duke it out. She carried on for twenty minutes: “In this day and age, when the whole of Bosnia [is filled] with blind children and blind adults and you lower yourself to pull someone apart and [say] she’s got a big bottom. I mean it’s absolutely farcical… maybe you should come with me to Bosnia… and see then what is the real world and what real life is about. I mean, who cares whether someone is a size fourteen or size eighteen? Absolutely pathetic….”
Fergie cared desperately. She tried everything to lose weight—pills, diets, hypnotism. “I’ve even switched from white wine to red wine,” she told a friend, “so I could cut down on drinking.” Finally
she sought out an “alternative healer” who gave her a nutritional plan and helped break her addiction to diet pills. After losing forty-two pounds, she emerged from his clinic—a hut in a field in Surrey—and announced her intention to become a professional model. “When I’m thin like this, my legs are better than the Princess of Wales’s,” she said gleefully. She hired a public relations agency and posed for photographers. Her picture, showing a newly slim and glamorously made up Fergie, appeared on the cover of Paris-Match. But London’s Sunday Times was not impressed: “A little more mascara around the eyes,” sniped the paper, “and the Chinese will be sending pandas to London for mating.”
The pounding Fergie took in the press made her defensive and defiant. “They might hate us here,” she told Diana, “but they love us in America.” Both women enjoyed their trips to the States, where they were treated like royalty, not royal discards. Diana, who appeared regularly in the United Kingdom wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with “U.S.A.,” skied in Colorado, shopped in New York City, and vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard. But Fergie came to the States to prospect for gold.
After selling her Budgie rights to a consortium in New Jersey for $3 million, she set up a nonprofit charity in Manhattan. With Chances for Children, Inc., she tried to re-create herself as a humanitarian. She said the foundation was designed to give her a philanthropic presence in America. In one year it paid out $89,384 on expenses while disbursing $62,295 to needy children. The bare-bones operation, with its small budget, rented room, and part-time secretary, did not seem designed for substantial fund-raising. But the nonprofit corporation gave Fergie a way—legally—to raise money in the places where she liked to socialize: New York, Connecticut, Florida, and California. She said she enjoyed doing good while doing well.
During one of her visits to Greenwich, Connecticut, she appeared at a Champagne reception and dinner for which guests had paid $500. As she worked the room, her three assistants followed in her wake, toting copies of her book Victoria and Albert: A Family Life at Osborne House. They asked: “Would you like to buy the Duchess’s book? It’s $100. She’ll sign it for you!”
Fergie insisted that she needed the money to support herself and her children. As she told the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., “It’s rubbish to say that I’m rich…. I can’t afford to buy a house…. I rent a pile in Surrey and have to be out with a month’s notice…. My husband pays only the school fees. I have to pay everything else…. I’m Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York, but I’m not a millionairess.”
She challenged critics who questioned her moneymaking schemes, including her $2 million advance from a U.S. publisher to write a manual for single working mothers. “The facts are that I’m a separated mother of two children and responsible for the finances of my family,” she said. “Therefore, a great deal of my time has to be, has to be, occupied with commercial work. Believe it or not, that is the truth.”
The unquestionable truth was that Fergie accepted the largesse of rich friends and eager admirers. Her rationale: She said she couldn’t pay her own way. So she charged for personal appearances at benefits and theme parks. She picked up $75,000 for flying to Sydney, Australia, to launch Rupert Murdoch’s pay-TV network. She flew to Beijing, China, for the opening of an $8 million restaurant because the owner paid her. Diana was more discreet, but she, too, freely accepted the gratuities that came her way as royalty. Both women were friends of the flamboyant founder of the Virgin empire, Richard Branson, and enjoyed free trips on Virgin Atlantic Airways and free holidays at Virgin Hotels, preferring Necker Island in the Caribbean, which cost paying guests $15,000 a week. Fergie and Diana reciprocated by giving Branson their royal endorsements. They appeared at his openings, posed with him for pictures, and appeared in public wearing his company T-shirts.
Diana’s friends, who preferred her association with the saintly Mother Teresa, warned her about the errant Duchess. “Free-loading Fergie is the worst friend you could have,” wrote John Junor, but Diana decided that her sister-in-law was her only ally. “She’s been over the same course,” Diana said of Fergie.
In the past, the two young women had experienced edgy relations. Separated by competition and envy, they had avoided each other and sniped to friends about each other. During her taped conversation with James Gilbey, Diana dismissed Fergie as “the redhead” who was trying to cash in on her good image. For her part, Fergie thought Diana’s good image was manipulated and undeserved. During her Mt. Everest expedition, the Duchess asked photographers who wanted to take her picture at a marker: “This doesn’t look posed, does it? It doesn’t look like those Taj Mahal pictures?”
When their marriages broke up, the two young women grabbed on to each other like the only survivors of a shipwreck. Ostracized by the royal family and “outside the net,” as Diana put it, they took refuge in each other. They felt that no one else understood their problems as well as they understood each other. They talked constantly about the Palace machine that was grinding them down. They supported each other in standing up to the courtiers who had become their enemies.
After two years of legal separation, both of them could file for divorce, but neither wanted to look like the aggressor in ending her marriage.
“No mileage in it,” said Diana, who clung fiercely to her position as a wronged wife.
“Especially without a signed financial,” said the pragmatic Duchess, who was calling for a settlement of $10 million. She was also hoping to keep her status as Her Royal Highness. Fergie with no title was like Saudi Arabia with no oil.
Diana, too, was determined to hang on to her position, but her lawyers advised her to let Fergie lead the way through the divorce maze. They called the Duchess “the yellow canary” (referring to the bird that miners take underground to check for deadly gas; if the canary keels over, the miners back out of the pit).
Although both women were privately exploring financial settlements, they maintained publicly that they were very much married. “The subject of divorce has never come up between myself and my husband,” Diana assured Richard Kay in the fall of 1995. By then the Princess was struggling to appear virtuous. Branded a home wrecker by Will Carling’s wife, she was accused of breaking up the Carlings’ marriage of less than a year. “This has happened to her before,” said Julia Carling, who looked like a younger, blonder version of Diana, “and you only hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does. She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger.”
But within days the Carlings separated, with Julia Carling blaming the Princess. Reacting to reports that her husband had had an affair with Diana, Julia Carling told reporters: “I have always valued my marriage as the most important and sacred part of my life,” she said. “It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control.”
Diana’s relationship with the rugby captain was headlined in the News of the World as “Di’s Secret Trysts with Carling.” So she called Richard Kay. She assured him that her “innocent friendship” with Carling had started only because of her rugby-mad sons. She summoned the News of the World’s managing editor to Kensington Palace and begged him to lay off. She also contacted the Daily Mirror and insisted her friendship with Carling was platonic. The paper quoted her as saying, “I don’t need a lover.” In distress, she phoned her friends—“endlessly,” recalled one woman, who finally lost patience with the Princess. Diana also consulted her therapist, Suzie Orbach, who began seeing her on a daily basis.
“Through these sessions, Her Royal Highness determined to take control of her life,” explained a friend who spoke with Diana during this time. The words sounded measured, as if they had been written in advance: “Eventually she desired a respectable forum to demonstrate that she was not deranged or mentally incapacitated…. She felt she needed to answer her critics, reclaim her sanity, and prove her strength….”
Having pleaded for privacy two years earlier, Diana now soug
ht the world stage. She decided the only way she could banish the image of herself as deranged was to give a television interview. She was encouraged by Fergie, one of the few people she confided in, who said that she had benefited from going on television and admitting her mistakes. So she urged Diana to do the same. Fergie agreed that Panorama, the award-winning current affairs program, was the proper vehicle to treat her seriously. But she cautioned Diana to keep her plan under wraps, because if the Queen found out, she would put the kibosh on the interview. Diana concurred.
Coached by her therapist and confident of her telegenic skills, the Princess met secretly with the BBC’s Martin Bashir and his camera crew at Kensington Palace on November 5, 1995, to talk about herself, her husband, her marriage, and her life in the royal family. She had not sought permission from the Palace. And she informed the Queen only a few days before the interview was to be aired. The BBC announced its “world exclusive” four hours after playing the National Anthem to celebrate Prince Charles’s forty-seventh birthday. Diana’s press secretary, who had not known of her plans, was so angry that he resigned the next day. Her private secretary, also unalerted and equally angry, waited a few more weeks to resign. And in a small display of spite, the Queen retaliated the following year by ending the BBC’s sixty-year monopoly on carrying her Christmas broadcast. She gave the assignment to the commercial network for two years, after which she said the two networks would alternate the production.
On the night of November 20, 1995, more than twenty-two million Britons gathered in front of their television sets to watch the Princess perform. “And it was a performance,” said the royal biographer Penny Junor. “A brilliant performance—totally plausible. Charming, demure, and vulnerable… but a performance—an acting job.”