By Diana’s account, she told Camilla that she “wasn’t born yesterday” and was well aware of the affair. Diana said she realized she was “in the way,” but she resented that Charles and Camilla treated her like an unknowing “idiot.” Her approach to Camilla that evening wasn’t aggressive, Diana recalled, but “calm, deathly calm.” Shortly afterward, Charles and several others returned to find Diana and Camilla sitting at the table together. “There was not a ripple,” one guest said. Diana and Charles left shortly afterward, and according to Diana, Charles reprimanded her in the car.
“It was … seven years’ pent-up anger,” she recalled. “I cried and cried and cried.” After a sleepless night, Diana still felt anger and jealousy, but not as intensely as the previous evening. Several days later, Diana told Charles that, in the conversation with Camilla, “I just said I loved you.”
When one of Diana’s friends asked her about the encounter soon after the party, she related a less dramatic but more poignant version. “Diana said that not much happened,” her friend said. “She said she more or less said humbly to Camilla, ‘What am I doing wrong? What is wrong with me? What makes him want to be with you and not me?’ ” Said Diana’s friend, “She was desperate to get him back, and she didn’t know how to do it.”
It didn’t seem to occur to Diana that her anger at Camilla might be inconsistent with her own romance with James Hewitt, to whom she gave a detailed account of the Goldsmith party the following day. After more than two years, Diana’s affair with Hewitt had settled into its own rhythm that depended entirely on Diana’s emotional state: “For a few weeks she would feel better, exhilarated, with newfound health,” wrote Pasternak, “and then it was as if she had pushed herself too far too soon, and suddenly her reserves were depleted,” and “she would sink back into what seemed a deeper trough than before.”
The principal difference between Charles’s romance with Camilla and Diana’s with Hewitt was that Diana kept Hewitt tightly under wraps. Diana could preserve secrecy because he was not from her world, while Camilla was part of Charles’s social set. Still, it was remarkable that Hewitt repeatedly visited Kensington Palace and Highgrove, and dined with Diana at the San Lorenzo restaurant, without being detected. Diana did flirt with danger, however, when she invited Hewitt to Raine Spencer’s sixtieth birthday party at Althorp in May 1989.
With five hundred guests, the dance was large enough for Hewitt to get lost, and Prince Charles didn’t come. But Diana was considerably more reckless than she had been at Charles’s fortieth. She took Hewitt for a guided tour of Althorp, and then danced, talked, and drank champagne with him. At the end of the evening, she led him out to the pool house, where they made love. Once again, nothing appeared in the press, and their romance remained sub-rosa.
Toward the end of 1989, Hewitt was posted to Germany for a two-year hitch. When he broke the news to Diana, she was upset, and begged him not to leave. He explained that he had to follow his career, but Diana viewed it as abandonment. She stopped returning his phone calls, although after he went to Germany, she resumed calling him.
Historian Paul Johnson, a friend and fan of Diana’s, once compared her to a seventeenth-century beauty named Madame de Chevreuse, paraphrasing a description in the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz: “She loved with an everlasting love but was always changing its object.” With James Hewitt off in Germany, Diana was ready to change objects when she was reunited with a car dealer from the Gilbey gin family, whom she had originally known when she first came to London. At age thirty, James Gilbey was slender and handsome, his dark brown hair starting to recede from his forehead.
In the summer of 1989, Diana and Gilbey were guests at a thirtieth-birthday party in Berkshire for their mutual friend Julia Samuel. According to one of her friends, Diana was disconcertingly out of sorts that night. “She was miserable,” her friend said. “Gilbey was just coming on the scene, and Diana was very edgy. You’d have thought she’d be dancing. All her friends were there, and Charles was not. But she sat at a table with her sister Jane.” According to Andrew Morton, who enlisted Gilbey’s cooperation for his book with Diana’s permission, Diana and Gilbey eventually got together during the Samuel party and talked about “their respective love lives … he about a failed romance, she about her fading marriage.”
Diana and Gilbey started to see each other over the following months. They often met at San Lorenzo as Diana had with Hewitt, assisted by the restaurant’s owner Mara Berni. In late October, the Sunday People blew Diana’s cover by reporting that she had been seen on a “secret late date,” ducking into Gilbey’s apartment building in London’s tony Lennox Gardens. A flustered Gilbey acknowledged that Diana had visited him but insisted that she was part of a bridge group. “It’s very hard for the Princess to keep up any of her old friendships,” he said. “It’s given me a lot of grief.” After besieging him for several days, the hacks backed off, and the relationship went underground.
In December 1989, under circumstances that remain unclear, telephone conversations between Diana and Gilbey, as well as Charles and Camilla, were tape-recorded and later passed along to several London newspapers. Both conversations are filled with embarrassing sexual innuendo, and both offer snapshots of the state of the Wales marriage. Gilbey was speaking on a mobile phone to Diana on New Year’s Eve at Sandringham, where she was spending yet another unhappy holiday with the royal family. They gossiped about mutual friends, compared horoscope readings, and spoke irreverently of the royal family. Most strikingly, they conversed with easy intimacy as he repeatedly called her “darling,” “honey,” and “Squidgy.” They blew kisses into the phone, said they missed each other, and at one point lapsed into phone sex when they each referred to “playing with yourself.”
Gilbey took the lead in making suggestive remarks, and Diana concurred (“I love it” to Gilbey’s “This sort of feeling. Don’t you like it?”) or briefly commented. “I had the most amazing dream about us last night. Not physical, nothing to do with that,” said Gilbey. Cracked Diana, “That makes a change.” When Gilbey said, “I’m wrapping you up, protecting you,” Diana responded “Yes, please.” As they discussed meeting two days later, both said they wanted to “fast-forward” to the moment when he would be “just holding you so close to me.” Diana, who by all accounts no longer had a physical relationship with Charles, also told Gilbey, “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and mentioned an episode of the soap opera Eastenders in which one of the main characters “had a baby. They thought it was by her husband. It was by another man.”
The tone of their banter was affectionate (she told him he was “the nicest person in the whole wide world”) and flippant (he called her “old Bossy Boots” and complimented her on the “shit-hot” pink top she wore in a tabloid picture) more than seriously passionate. Even Diana’s “all the love in the world” before hanging up had the lighthearted note of the “lots of love” sign-off commonly used among friends in England. Not surprisingly, Diana maintained control as Gilbey reflexively reassured and complimented her: “You don’t need to encourage me to think about you. I have done nothing else for the last three months.… That smile comes on and the charm comes out…. Underneath there is such a beautiful person in you.… You make people happy. It’s what you give them.”
The conversation opened a few small windows into Diana’s character. She showed her skill at deception, concocting various cover stories: To explain her phone calls, she told Gilbey, “Say one of your relations is not very well, and your mother is just ringing in to give you progress.” To justify her trip to London to see Gilbey, she said, “I shall tell people I’m going for acupuncture and my back being done.” She just as casually dissembled to Gilbey when he asked, “You don’t mind it, darling, when I want to talk to you so much?” and she replied, “No, I love it. Never had it before.” She also revealed her preoccupation with her newspaper image after Gilbey pointed out the day’s tabloid photos and she replied, “I’m always smiling, aren’t I? I
thought that today.”
She was especially revealing when she displayed the extent of her bitterness toward the royal family. Christmas at Sandringham that year had been typically fractious. Diana told Gilbey that she had nearly broken down at lunch when feelings of sadness overtook her: “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.’ ” She spoke of wanting to do “something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage,” and she recounted a drive in the car with Charles in which they barely spoke to each other. “It’s just so difficult,” she said, “so complicated. He makes my life real torture, I’ve decided.”
Clearly Diana and Gilbey were on intimate terms, although two people who were close to her said that it wasn’t a full-blown love affair. One called it a “flirtatious relationship,” and the other said, “I know it sounded bad on the tape, but they were very good friends.” Diana confirmed the authenticity of the conversation in her Panorama interview, but she denied an “adulterous relationship” with Gilbey, while admitting her affair with Hewitt. “Of course they had a romance,” another close friend of Diana’s said. “Gilbey was attractive to her. Why she admitted [her relationship with] Hewitt was bizarre. He was the most sacrificial one, from outside the circle. Also, he had already spilled in his own book.”
Charles’s tape-recorded phone conversation with Camilla, which had taken place several weeks earlier on December 18, 1989, was only a third as long as what became known as the “Squidgy” tape. It had none of Diana’s rancor, some of Gilbey’s goofy sexual playfulness, and considerably more sexual passion. Aside from Charles’s infamous musings about living in Camilla’s trousers or spending his life as a tampon, he and Camilla spoke in more explicitly sexual terms: of filling her up, and of pressing her “tit.” “God, I wish I was,” Charles said, “harder and harder.”
Their expressions of longing were anguished, and they frequently voiced their abiding love for each other. Camilla took care to prop up Charles’s ego (“Those sort of people do feel very strongly about you”) and Charles to express gratitude for Camilla’s love and loyalty (“You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies”). Like Diana and Gilbey, Charles and Camilla spoke almost clinically about ways to organize their subterfuges: which homes of friends they should use for rendezvous, how long they needed to travel, whom they could and could not trust.
Around the time of these conversations, the tabloids elevated the Princess of Wales to “Saint Diana.” She and Charles had recently been to Indonesia, where Diana had visited her first leprosy mission. “Faced with the horror of leprosy,” wrote the Sunday Mirror, Diana “shook a little girl’s hand” and showed “no hesitation as she grasped the gnarled, bent fingers of the patients,” “touched the bloody bandages of an old man,” and “stroked a woman’s arm.”
In one respect, the following year was “fulfilling” for Diana, as she told Gilbey her astrologer had predicted. The tabloids continued to gush about her at Charles’s expense. Diana, noted the Daily Express in July 1990, “turns a blind eye to … how incredibly selfish Prince Charles is.” They wrote extravagantly of her “star quality” and good deeds. The few criticisms of Diana tended to be trivial: a flurry of comment over her new short “heat-wave hairstyle” (though only the Daily Star called it a “disaster”), and Andrew Morton’s report that she spent £100,000 (about $150,000) a year on clothing, which she dismissed as “ill-informed.” Otherwise, Diana had little to complain about.
The Buckingham Palace staff had even begun to relax somewhat about the Wales marriage. As one said, “We all felt things were not well, but that it would either get better, or they would develop a modus vivendi, make compromises.” But in June 1990, circumstances changed for the worse after Charles suffered a serious accident playing polo. He fractured his right arm in two places, which left him in such agony that he required a second operation in September to pin the bones and prevent crippling.
During his four-month convalescence at Highgrove and Balmoral, Charles was frustrated by his inactivity and worn down by his pain. Diana sat by his bedside during his hospital stays, but she spent little time with him at Highgrove and none in Scotland. According to Penny Thornton, Diana felt that Charles had “brushed aside” her efforts to offer him affection and care, and she knew Camilla was filling that role. Camilla was a frequent visitor to Highgrove, as were his other close friends, including Nicholas Soames, the Palmer-Tomkinsons, van Cutsems, and Romseys, who spent hours cheering up Charles.
For the most part, Camilla was mentioned as just one of many friends who rallied around to help Charles “snap out of the gloom.” A long excerpt in The Sunday Times that September from a new Andrew Morton book called Diana’s Diary even put a positive gloss on the Wales marriage. According to Morton, Diana had found “an affectionate accommodation within her marriage.… Divorce is not an option.… The royal couple have reached a friendly alliance.… Understanding companionship has supplanted mutual indifference.… Their marriage is based on trust.”
Yet newspaper editors were aware of Charles’s affair with Camilla. Early in 1990, the News of the World had received “blackmail-style notes” containing details of alleged meetings between Prince Charles and Camilla. The notes, always hand-delivered, were either stenciled or made with letters and words cut out of newspapers. Partly for legal reasons, partly out of restraint, the tabloid declined to pursue these mysterious leads, as did the mainstream Telegraph when it was given information about the affair in a more straightforward fashion.
“I knew about Charles and Camilla,” said Max Hastings, then editor of The Daily Telegraph, despite “a concerted effort by the Prince of Wales’s people to deny it. At one point, a friend of the Prince’s said to me, ‘You have to get your mind around the fact that there is only one woman in the Prince’s life, and that is Camilla.’ This was in 1990, when everyone knew there was trouble, but there was still no idea of a divorce.”
In November 1990, the Waleses traveled to Japan for what a former Palace official termed a “brilliant visit. Diana was back on top, and she was radiant.” But her private torment continued. Over the Christmas holidays she wept frequently and screamed at Charles, to the point that their staff worried she might be suicidal.
As it turned out, Diana had a lot on her mind. One immediate worry resulted from some alarming news she had recently heard about her New Year’s Eve chat with Gilbey. Earlier in 1990, The Sun had been handed a tape-recording of the conversation. Stuart Higgins, then an editor at the paper, oversaw the verification of the tape. “We went through the various people mentioned,” Higgins said, “and at some point we confronted Gilbey. We were never one hundred percent confirmed, but the circumstantial evidence made it inconceivable that it was not Diana and Gilbey.” Fearful of the damage that disclosure of the conversation could do, Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants decided to keep the tape in a safe. “I was convinced it was authentic,” Higgins said. “Other powers were at work to ensure we kept it under wraps”—which is where it would remain for more than two-and-a-half years.
Murdoch’s top executive, Andrew Knight, chairman of News International, was primarily responsible for keeping the lid on the Gilbey tape and other stories about the Wales marriage that had come over the transom. Besides the Camilla blackmail notes, News of the World had a story about Diana’s affair with James Hewitt based on revelations by Lance Corporal Malcolm Leete, Hewitt’s disaffected valet. “Patsy Chapman, the editor, wanted to publish the Hewitt story on at least a half-dozen occasions,” Knight recalled. “I said absolutely not. I didn’t believe it. Patsy told me she had the story that Hewitt had been Diana’s lover, and she could stand it up. I said, ‘I don’t like the sound of it, and we are not publishing it.’ As time went by, it became harder to resist, and on the last occasion we didn’t publish, I had to get Rupert Murdoch’s help in stopping the story.”
There is no indication that Diana caught wind of the Leete tale, but she did hear of the Gilbey tape. “
Diana certainly knew the contents and had seen a transcription, but I cannot say how,” Stuart Higgins said. “It was probably sometime in late 1990 or early 1991 that she learned about it, as we were corroborating the authenticity.” By then, another copy of the tape had made its way to Richard Kay of the Daily Mail. Kay had contacted “someone very close” to Diana, who authenticated her voice. Kay then consulted his editors, who agreed they shouldn’t disclose it. Kay “put it away, thinking it would never appear in a British paper.” Still, Diana knew that the Gilbey tape couldn’t stay hidden forever, and she wanted the story of Charles and Camilla to come out first, but she couldn’t quite figure out how to accomplish her goal.
James Gilbey was still in the picture for Diana, but James Hewitt was very much in her thoughts. Since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the previous August, she had become overwrought about the situation in the Persian Gulf, mostly for fear that Hewitt might be sent into battle. By January 1991, as the United States, Britain, and other allies prepared for war with Iraq, Diana was tuning in to news bulletins on radio and television whenever she had a chance. Throughout the autumn, she had been calling Hewitt in Germany, and when he returned to England briefly before Christmas, they resumed their intimacy during a reunion at Highgrove, when he gave her a pair of emerald-and-diamond earrings.
After Hewitt flew to the Gulf, Diana began writing letters to him, addressed to “Dearest James,” “Darling James,” or “My darling James,” and signed “Diana,” “D,” “Julia,” or “Susie.” Diana wrote once or twice a day, sometimes four times: “long, flowing letters over endless sheets of paper,” according to Pasternak, who saw them. “Every thought that flooded into her mind poured onto the pages. She held nothing back.” It was the same kind of unbridled outpouring with which she had responded to stress in childhood and adolescence.
Diana in Search of Herself Page 29