Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  While Charles envisioned a loving partnership in which he called the shots, Diana longed for a selfless man to fill her emptiness and offer continuous devotion. Her expectation was particularly unrealistic given Charles’s busy public life and time-consuming hobbies, as well as the nature and restraints of the royal family. Women had “never dominated” Charles’s life, according to Stephen Barry. “The only thing that dominates Prince Charles is his work, and then his sporting activities. Girls come third.”

  Diana’s detractors have accused her of manipulating Prince Charles during their courtship and fooling him into thinking she was something she was not. Diana proceeded “with great cunning,” wrote Penny Junor in her 1998 book about Prince Charles. She “professed great interest in everything he said and did, and manifested great sympathy and understanding for the trials and tribulations of his life…. She talked about her love of the country and of shooting and of her interest in taking up horse-riding, and she liked his friends…. But it was all a sham. Diana didn’t like any of these things. She hated the countryside, had no interest in shooting, or horses, or dogs, and she didn’t even really like his friends. She found them old, boring and sycophantic.”

  Like so much written about Charles and Diana, this judgment seems unduly harsh. Diana’s disillusionment with Charles’s friends—“oiling up, basically, kissing his feet,” she said—was fairly predictable. She often started out enthusiastic, then readily found grounds for criticism and suspicion. Similarly, her embrace of Charles’s interests seemed to reflect her intense feelings, rather than calculated maneuvering. “When you fall in love, you often suddenly say you like things when you may not really like them,” explained Charles’s former aide Michael Colborne.

  Diana failed to comprehend—or even give much thought to—the range of duties she would have to take on. As she said years later, on her wedding day “[she] realized [she] had taken on an enormous role but had no idea what [she] was going into—but no idea.” During the courtship, she seemed enchanted mainly by the idea of becoming a princess. “She had a romantic view of life,” said a childhood friend, “but Barbara Cartland books didn’t prepare you. They were cloud cuckooland, all very romantic escapism, and she was very impressionable.” Even Diana’s employer Mary Robertson worried that the infatuation was “based on her romantic image of him, combined with his lofty position.” Diana struck one unsettling note early on, during her visit to Balmoral in July 1980. A friend recalled that Diana had been dazzled by the perfection of a royal picnic lunch complete with linen, silver, and a menu card. “Oh! This is the life for me!” she exclaimed. “Where is the footman?” Diana’s reaction was endearingly refreshing, yet ominously childish.

  For all the talking Charles had done about the nature of marriage, he seemed unable to apply his high-minded principles to Diana with a clear eye. If anything, he wasn’t calculating enough in choosing her. If he had been, he would have found that she passed muster in only half of his basic marital requirements: she was indeed “pretty special” in her appealing combination of noble birth, natural dignity, refreshing informality, and a virginal image; her love of children showed she could be a good mother in a “secure family unit”; and she had the sort of affectionate nature he wanted from a nurturing wife.

  Yet in other crucial ways she fell short. Charles indulged in wishful thinking when he believed that the proximity of their families had prepared Diana for understanding his world or the role she would play in it. He seemed to have forgotten the concern he had voiced six years earlier about the “risky” consequences if a young woman “didn’t have a clue” about the royal role. Nor did he recognize that beyond Diana’s apparent enjoyment of rural life, her engaging sense of humor, and appreciation for classical music, they had few interests or ideas in common. He also seemed oblivious to Diana’s history of willfulness, which showed she might well be reluctant to live in his shadow. Had Charles given the relationship more time or probed into Diana’s past in a meaningful way, he would surely have found evidence of psychological fragility that might well have given him pause.

  According to one Palace aide who knew him for a number of years, Charles’s emotional reaction clouded his judgment. Diana arrived at the right time, and as an older man, Charles found the adoration of a pretty and superficially eligible young woman irresistible. “He accepted her infatuation and saw it as a charming part of her approach and character,” said the aide. “She had a sweet and affectionate and amusing side to her, so he let that carry him along and didn’t examine it.” In short, although Charles said he wouldn’t let his heart rule his head when it came to marriage, he did precisely that.

  Chapter 7

  HE’S IN LOVE AGAIN! LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL FOR CHARLES blared The Sun’s headline on September 8, 1980. The story, by Harry Arnold, described Lady Diana Spencer as “a perfect English rose,” and asked “Is it the real thing for Charles at last?” The answer left no doubts, and Arnold offered one surprisingly shrewd hunch: “Some observers believe the Prince will follow a pattern set by several royals of marrying a friend he can learn to love.”

  Arnold, it turns out, hadn’t even been at Balmoral for the all-important sighting. It was Arnold’s chief rival, James Whitaker, who spotted her with his binoculars. She was slipping behind a tree while Prince Charles fished in the River Dee, and Whitaker didn’t immediately identify Diana, but he could see that she was watching him in the mirror of her compact. “ ‘What a cunning lady,’ I thought,” Whitaker later wrote. “This one was clearly going to give us a lot of trouble.… You had to be a real professional to think of using a mirror to watch us watching her.”

  As a courtesy to Arnold, who was 200 miles away, Whitaker picked up the telephone and gave him a briefing once he had discovered Diana’s identity. Whitaker’s own paper at the time, the Daily Star, buried his story inside, but The Sun went all out on page one. “They exaggerated it,” grumbled Whitaker. “ ‘He’s in love’ was based on nothing except there was this woman.” Indeed, Stephen Barry, Prince Charles’s longtime valet, would later write that “there was certainly no obvious romance” during that Balmoral visit. “The Prince and Diana seemed to like each other, but there were no clues to a budding love affair.”

  The Sun claimed the scoop the tabloids had been hungering for since 1976. Its bold words typified Fleet Street’s increasingly aggressive approach toward the royal family. What had once been a cozy relationship shifted largely because of the influence of Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, owner of two of the most popular tabloids, The Sun and News of the World, as well as The Times and The Sunday Times. The News of the World, published on Sundays, was the lowest of the downmarket papers, specializing in tawdry stories of sex and violence. The Sun’s trademark was a picture of a bare-breasted woman on its third page.

  Murdoch was an admitted antimonarchist, and his recipe for tabloid journalism included generous servings of royal gossip. After a decade in English journalism, Murdoch turned his attention in the late seventies to America, where he was buying up newspapers and magazines. “Because we had a foreign proprietor with Murdoch’s attitudes, it allowed us freedom,” said Andrew Neil, who edited The Sunday Times in the eighties and early nineties.

  The most important beneficiary of Murdoch’s latitude was Kelvin MacKenzie (variously nicknamed MacFrenzy and MacNasty), who moved up to editor of The Sun in June 1981. “Kelvin is a natural troublemaker,” said Neil. “Under Kelvin, The Sun started giving the royal family a degree of scrutiny and irreverence that permeated all newspapers.” Roy Greenslade, who worked for MacKenzie at The Sun and later competed against him as editor of the Daily Mirror, recalled, “Kelvin would adopt at a conference in the morning a mock-and-shock look and say, ‘I’m afraid we’ve upset the Palace. How can we do it today?’ ”

  Terrifying adversaries, the tabloids routinely turned tiny incidents into sensational page-one stories that were picked up around the world. The tabloids happily ignored prevailing standards of accuracy, i
n large part because the royal family declined to acknowledge—much less comment on—the manner in which they were covered. Most important, in those years the royal family did not sue, although they would later on.

  Having watched the press destroy her sister Sarah’s chances with Charles, Diana was attracted and repelled by the hacks. The Fleet Street pack pursued Diana relentlessly in the fall of 1980. Although she had little sense of her own worth, she did have the confidence of her upper-class background, combined with the down-to-earth openness she inherited from her father. Unlike the royal family, Diana paid attention to the reporters. When they camped out on the doorstep of her London apartment building, she was invariably polite, addressing her stalkers by name and taking their phone calls in the middle of the night, even when she had nothing to say. “She made a decision that they were going to be around, so she had to tolerate them,” said one of her relatives. “She took a pragmatic view.” When tabloid photographers embarrassed her by snapping pictures with sunlight silhouetting her legs beneath a sheer skirt, she wept privately but assured them, “I understand all your problems, and there are no hard feelings.”

  The tabloid men (and they were, with a few exceptions, male) fell in love with Diana. They were smitten by her drop-dead looks, gleaming smile, infectious giggle, and natural manner. To Harry Arnold, Diana “had a way … of taking scalps. She used to collect men … in the old-fashioned romantic way. She would give you a look with lowered eyes.… You knew deep down it was a game she played, and a very clever one in a way, not cynical, but by doing this, she won everybody over.” The hacks decided almost immediately, as Whitaker later wrote, that Diana “fitted perfectly … She was the most likely candidate to be future queen that I had seen in years.”

  Like Charles, the hacks were content to skim Diana’s lovely surface, judging her by the most obvious selling points: her beauty, her venerable family, and her pristine image. Captivated by the effusive press coverage, the public fell in love with Diana, too. As the courtship developed, Whitaker and other reporters became Diana’s fierce advocates, and she began looking to them for approval.

  The leaders of the tabloid pack were Whitaker and Arnold. Others included Ross Benson of the Daily Express and Andrew Morton, who would take over at the Daily Star following Whitaker’s move to the Daily Mirror in 1982. Also in the mix was the bombastic Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster.

  “James and Harry,” said Morton, “were like the Labrador and the Jack Russell.” Whitaker was thirty-nine and had been a royal hack for thirteen years when he first spotted Diana. Florid and heavyset, with a nimbus of curly hair, Whitaker was the son of an executive at the Sperry Rand Corporation. “People talk about me as if I’d come from nowhere,” he once told a reporter. “But my father owned race horses. We’ve always had good cars.” After graduating from The Elms at Colwall, a boarding school, Whitaker touched down briefly at Cheltenham College and did a stint as an accountant before landing in journalism.

  Whitaker’s flamboyance was legendary, both in his columns and his frequent television appearances. He spoke loudly and emphatically, but he redeemed his pomposity with a measure of self-deprecation, describing himself as a “master of trivia.” He admitted to joining the royal beat after tasting the high life while covering a polo match where champagne and smoked salmon were being served.

  Whitaker once followed Diana and Charles to Ascot with his Daily Star editor Peter McKay. Both men were in morning dress, but Whitaker had enlivened his formal attire with a shirt that he described as “absolutely scarlet, with a white collar.” “His face was beet-red,” said McKay, “which went very well with the shirt.” The two men sneaked into the tent reserved for White’s, the exclusive men’s club, where the aristocratic members were not wearing red shirts. “We were just about to be chucked out,” said McKay, “when Charles and Diana came in, and Diana walked straight up to us, smiling. She called us by our first names, so the people in the tent figured we were okay.”

  From the beginning, said McKay, “Whitaker both proclaimed himself a royalist and reserved for himself the right to expose everything he could.” Whitaker would lie for hours on a rock overlooking Balmoral, a picnic lunch nestled at his side as he trained his binoculars on the royal residence. Whether Diana was at a polo match or the opera, or even just across the room at a reception, Whitaker would invariably peer at her through his high-powered Nikons. “I know binoculars are intrusive,” said Whitaker, “but I could see all sorts of things.”

  To win Diana’s confidence, Whitaker wooed her with blandishments, bouquets of roses, and even homeopathic remedies, claiming later that he had “a bond” with Diana resulting from “several intimate chats.” She nicknamed him the “Big Red Tomato.”

  Equally competitive but somewhat less blatant was Harry Arnold, the terrier of the two. He was a year younger than Whitaker, with a “resemblance to a London taxi driver,” wrote Douglas Keay in his book, Royal Pursuit: The Palace, the Press and the People. Arnold was a natty dresser, with such flashy touches as gold rings and gray-tinted lenses in his glasses. Having reported on murder trials before covering Diana for The Sun and then the Mirror, Arnold considered himself more of a probing reporter than Whitaker. Although he professed to support the monarchy, he was known to be politically liberal and to take a dim view of the upper class.

  Andrew Morton grew up in Yorkshire and earned a degree in history from Sussex University. When the Daily Star appointed him royal correspondent at twenty-eight, it was assumed his six-foot-four height clinched the position, since he could see well in crowds. Square-jawed and bespectacled, he was mocked for his resemblance to Clark Kent, which once prompted him to wear a Superman costume on assignment. From the beginning, he was starstruck by Diana: “Her blue eyes gaze straight into yours with a look that is frank, friendly,… and sexy,” he once reported.

  Ross Benson of the Daily Express secured his bona fides by attending Gordonstoun, where he was in the same class as Prince Charles. Benson liked “to think they were friends, but I’m not sure they were,” said his wife, Ingrid Seward. Handsome and impeccably attired, Benson was the most ardent royalist of the bunch. Seward was the editor of Majesty, the premier fantasy magazine about royal life. Observed Benson, “If they do a feature about Prince Charles’s cuff links, it will be the most authoritative article that you have ever read about the royal family’s cuff links.”

  Even more riveting than Benson’s coverage of the royal family was his long-running feud with Daily Mail gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. Not only did they expose errors in each other’s columns, they lashed out with personal insults. To Dempster, Benson was “the Pompadoured Poltroon,” and to Benson, Dempster was “the Tonsured Traducer.” An Australian who immigrated to Britain at age six, Dempster left Sherborne, a boarding school, when he was sixteen. He married a daughter of the 11th Duke of Leeds, which gave Dempster the best aristocratic connections of the tabloid crowd. Yet he made his mark with sharp-edged gossip about the aristocracy—not the “old established” grandees he admired, but those who would “abuse that privilege—the ones who are unkind to waiters.”

  Although technically Dempster didn’t follow the royal beat, his Daily Mail column became a magnet for nuggets about the royal family. With his customary immodesty, Dempster condemned the entire tabloid pack. “[They] knew no one,” he said. “No one in journalism, apart from my good self in those days, had input from the royal family. [Princess Margaret] had been a very good friend of mine, so I had great input. Prince Charles’s office was also in my pocket.”

  It was Dempster who broke the story in September 1980 that Prince Charles’s “new choice of girlfriend” had been approved by “the two happily married women who influence [him] most on personal matters, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles.” Diana confessed that she had read the column, but she withheld comment. From September onward, the tabloids filled their front pages with descriptions of every glimpse they could get of Charles and Diana: a horse race in Shrop
shire, a fiftieth birthday party for Princess Margaret (“back in each other’s arms,” wrote Whitaker, Charles and Diana “danced the night away”), and riding on the Berkshire downs.

  They trailed Diana to her job at the kindergarten and even to a Knightsbridge shop owned by a “romantic underwear expert.” “If I go to a restaurant or just out shopping in the supermarket, they’re trying to take photographs,” she complained to Danae Brook, a Daily Mail reporter who lived in her apartment building. On the weekend of Charles’s November 14 birthday, the pack followed Diana to Sandringham, forcing her to remain indoors the entire time and ultimately to leave early. Stephen Barry said she was “very depressed” as a result.

  Diana learned to evade the hacks, and she and Charles managed to slip away for a series of weekend meetings that would be reported by the tabloids only after the fact—thanks to tips from low-level staff. Beginning with his use of Broadlands as a “safe house” in the seventies, it had been Prince Charles’s custom to conduct his courtships at the homes of friends. He took Diana several times to Broadlands and to the home of the Parker Bowleses in Wiltshire, and Camilla “encouraged the romance,” wrote Stephen Barry. Observed Whitaker in November 1980, “It’s almost as if the Parker Bowleses must ensure that the path of true love runs as smoothly as possible.”

  It is unclear precisely when Charles and Camilla ended their intimacy. Jonathan Dimbleby, the most authoritative source, wrote that “from the moment of [Charles’s] engagement in February [1981], he saw Camilla Parker Bowles on only one occasion and that was more than four months later to say farewell. His feelings for [her] had not changed, but they had both accepted that their intimacy could no longer be maintained.” Dimbleby was silent on whether the couple had remained intimate once Charles began his romance with Diana in July 1980. In her 1998 book on Charles, however, Penny Junor asserted that the affair had stopped when Charles started seriously courting Diana, although Camilla remained “his best friend.”