Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  In the summer of 1991, Diana felt that “the lid was being put down on her,” Morton said. “She was terrified she would be publicly labeled an impossible lunatic,” one of her friends recalled, “and if so, she could lose a fight over custody. She was terrified of character assassination and angry that some of her own hanky-panky would be released without the extent of Charles’s infidelity revealed.” Still suffering from bulimia and depression, Diana was “at the end of my tether,” as she said on Panorama.

  By unhappy coincidence, Diana sat for another portrait—her tenth—during this period, and the artist, Douglas Anderson, could not avoid capturing what he called her “horrible sadness” on canvas. It was “the very worst time,” he recalled of her five sittings over several weeks. “She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I painted what I saw. She was on the edge, and it was draining. She was very preoccupied and constantly on the verge of crying. I had the feeling that if she left the room she might be in floods of tears.”

  Feeling under siege, Diana decided to launch a preemptive strike against Charles. “She was a woman scorned,” said historian and journalist Andrew Roberts. “She couldn’t or wouldn’t stop herself. She thought, ‘Oh, God, I’m the story, not the Crown.’ To a great extent she brought everyone down.” She needed to justify herself to the public, which “she regarded … as an extension of her family,” one of Diana’s friends said. “She had to explain her suffering. Deep down, she needed to be understood, and she craved approval. I remember telling her to be like Jackie O., that if she did, people could interpret but there would be no certainty. She agreed with me, but that was before the book.”

  Diana shared her grievances with a group of trusted friends, who encouraged her to tell her side of the story. “Most people who knew her for years figured it couldn’t get any worse for her,” Morton explained. “She was living a lie, and they thought she might as well lance the boil.” Among those she consulted were James Gilbey and Adrian Ward-Jackson, who proved a crucial catalyst.

  Ward-Jackson became bedridden with AIDS in April 1991. To honor their pact that she would care for him through his illness, Diana made frequent unpublicized visits to his home to keep him company. “Around the sickbed, a lot happened,” a friend of Ward-Jackson’s said. “Adrian was deeply intrigued by the state of the marriage. She confided in him. What she projected was confusion, hurt, resentment, and anger. He was sympathetic, and she sought advice. She would talk about these things to pass the time. It was very useful for him. Instead of thinking of himself, he would listen to her problems.”

  Through Ward-Jackson, Diana grew close to his friend Angela Serota, a former ballet dancer who was supervising his care. Serota was separating from her husband at the time, and she and Diana formed a close bond. When Diana poured out her anguish about her marriage, Serota listened. As Diana debated whether to go public, “Angela was very important,” Morton said. “She could see the pain Diana was in.”

  Diana had been confiding as well in Dr. James Colthurst, a radiologist who had been her friend since they met in 1979 on a ski trip. Back in 1986, he had invited her to visit his London hospital, St. Thomas’s. During that visit Colthurst had met Morton, who was there with the royal press pack. The two men struck up a friendship that included a regular squash game. According to a man close to Diana, it was Colthurst who suggested that she entrust Morton with her story.

  Still, it is difficult to know precisely why Diana settled on the veteran tabloid man as her “conduit,” as Morton described himself. It was not in Diana’s nature to conduct a rigorous analysis of Morton’s abilities and his body of work. But she knew that Morton was, as he said, “nibbling around” the idea of writing a biography about her. He had been on Diana’s radar even after he left the Daily Mail in 1988 to write freelance articles and books (Diana’s Diary: An Intimate Portrait of the Princess of Wales and Inside Kensington Palace).

  In fact, Morton was perfect for Diana’s purpose. He had been captivated by her from the moment he joined the royal beat in 1982 and attacked Nigel Dempster as a “royal sniper.” Although he had shifted back and forth between apologist and alarmist in his coverage, he never wavered in his adoration of Diana. Even when dealing with potentially negative material, he turned it to her advantage, as in a 1986 story on reports that Diana had been insulting Charles: “It is just another indication of how a strong-willed princess is steadily winning her battle to bring the royal family to heel.”

  Most recently, Morton had been Diana’s champion in her undeclared war on Charles, venturing further than any reporter toward unmasking Camilla. He had a slick, commercial writing style and chameleon-like qualities, moving easily from tabloid to broadsheet: His articles on the Wales marriage in The Sunday Times had given him a patina of respectability.

  Andrew Morton’s biggest advantage was his outsider status. He could disappear from sight, as he did in July 1991, without explaining himself or attracting attention. As a freelancer lacking a formal newspaper affiliation, he could be trusted to keep Diana’s role a secret, and he would be eternally grateful for her gift of a sensational story. In other words, he could be controlled.

  Diana dispatched her friend James Colthurst to sketch out her story for Morton. Over bacon and eggs in a North London cafe, Colthurst told the writer about the unraveling royal marriage, including Diana’s bouts of bulimia and attempts at suicide—all of which, Diana contended, resulted from her problems with Charles and his infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles. Morton was staggered by the sensational revelations. “I didn’t know about the bulimia, the suicides,” he recalled. “Who did? It shows how many secrets can be held.” Morton later freely admitted that Diana was in charge. “People make out that I am a tabloid hack who conned her, that she didn’t know what she was getting into, that I teased information out of her, the poor girl who would have lived happily ever after,” Morton said. “That is from the Goebbels book of best-selling stories. The fact is, she sought me out.”

  Around this time, Colthurst introduced Diana to a new astrologer, Felix Lyle, who was also a friend of Morton’s. By one account, Diana only proceeded with the project after Lyle gave her the green light. But as was so often the case with Diana’s advisers, Lyle simply reinforced what Diana was already determined to do. “She didn’t see him until late summer, after the project was under way,” Morton said. “She didn’t have second thoughts, and as the project progressed, she became more enthusiastic.”

  Morton and Colthurst devised a scheme to give Diana “deniability” about her part in the book; if asked, she could say she and Morton had not even met. Morton submitted lists of questions to her for a series of interviews, which Colthurst tape-recorded. “James was always with her during the interviews,” Morton said. “She would answer the questions as best as she could. Sometimes she ignored them. It was a ramshackle way to do a book.”

  The first interview was a “confusion,” Morton said. “Everything just tumbled out.” Recognizing the delicacy of broaching such intimate topics as bulimia and suicide, Morton “would send James off with two sets of questions, one if she started being one way, otherwise, go for [the other] line [of inquiry].” Morton later admitted that Diana misled him about James Hewitt, and although Morton interviewed James Gilbey, the still-secret Squidgy tapes never came up.

  By definition, the arrangement precluded follow-up questions and the freedom to challenge Diana’s version of events. “The classic was the suicides,” Morton said. “You are dealing with a very delicate area. I asked questions about when, where, what. Afterwards she said, ‘He’s pretty well written my obit.’ ”

  Morton described how her moods slipped between the energy and “breathless haste” she often showed in the mornings and the deflation at other times. The “hit and miss” aspect was aggravated by Diana’s tendency to schedule interviews on short notice, when Morton would hurriedly assemble his queries and “hope for the best.” Despite her obvious fragility, and the history of mental illness she descr
ibed, Morton “had doubts about her veracity but not about her stability.” He said he tried to cross-check whenever possible by talking to her friends. A conspicuous flaw in this method, later pointed out by friends of Charles, was that Morton had to rely on people who had heard only Diana’s side of the story.

  One of the trickiest areas for Morton was Charles’s relationship with Camilla, which for legal reasons he ended up calling a “secret friendship” rather than adultery, “much to Diana’s annoyance and in spite of overwhelming evidence.” To help establish that proof, Diana unearthed revealing letters in August 1991. Morton said, “She procured them because I wanted them. She didn’t know about letters when we started to talk. They were not on the kitchen notice board. She got them because I was hesitant about the Camilla business, and they underpinned what she told me and made me feel happier about using it. The letters I saw were notes from Camilla to Charles, written at that time in 1991. It upset Diana to see them.”

  In the early autumn, Diana approached a group of friends to ask them to cooperate with Morton. The first was Angela Serota, who consulted another friend who would become vital to Diana’s project: Andrew Knight, Rupert Murdoch’s chief executive, a close friend of both Serota and Ward-Jackson. Like Diana, Knight had been a frequent visitor to Ward-Jackson’s bedside during the summer of 1991, although Knight said he and Diana never met there. Diana heard about him from Ward-Jackson and Serota. According to a man close to her, Diana came to regard Knight as “on her side.”

  “Angela rang me and said Diana was asking her and others to cooperate with Andrew Morton on a book,” Knight recalled. “Diana wants to end the fairy tale,” Serota told him. “There are dramatic things that we know,” although Serota declined to say what they were. “Angela is a very private person,” Morton said. “She wasn’t interested in speaking to me. All these people needed convincing. They didn’t even know how closely Diana was involved in the project, that she was giving interviews.” When Serota asked Andrew Knight if she should help, he said, “Yes, if [Diana] says so, you should do it.”

  Serota also confided to Knight that Diana was “worried” that the book would be serialized in the Daily Mail. “She wants it in The Sunday Times,” Serota said. Despite her affinity for the Mail, Diana was sufficiently media-savvy to understand that a Sunday Times excerpt would give the book the credibility and authority that even a midmarket tabloid could not. Knight told Serota he would “lobby Andrew Neil about this book and say The Sunday Times should take it seriously.”

  Diana controlled Morton’s access to her friends, who would not sit for interviews without her permission. She included just one member of her family, her brother Charles, whose innate wariness she could count on. In fact, Charles agreed to be questioned only about her life until the age of eighteen. As the project advanced, Diana brought in her father to give Morton his choice of photographs from the family albums Johnnie had compiled over the years, but she excluded the women in her family. Her sister Jane was off-bounds for the obvious reason that her marriage to the Queen’s private secretary required her to be kept in the dark. Both Sarah and Frances Shand Kydd had a history of making unhelpful comments to the press.

  These arrangements yet again pointed up the absence of a solid family foundation that might have prevented Diana from risking the Morton book. Her father lacked the subtlety to fathom the extent of her problems and could do little more than say, “Just remember we always love you”—an important and heartfelt reassurance, but insufficient when she needed crucial guidance. In his public comments, Johnnie perpetuated the myth of a happy royal marriage, calling stories of marital discord “trivial, like mosquitoes.” At one point, Johnnie expressed his concern that Diana was working too hard, but he couldn’t help admiring her celebrity. “Someone said to me recently that the two most famous people in the world are the Pope and my daughter,” Johnnie said in 1989. “I am so proud.”

  In September 1991, Diana and her father had one of their few public spats when she and her siblings objected to the way Raine Spencer was orchestrating the sale of art and heirlooms to finance their lifestyle at Althorp. Asked for comment, Johnnie angrily denounced his children for “ingratitude,” saying pointedly, “Diana doesn’t understand about money. She has no experience of money. She’s too young.”

  Such disagreements were more common in Diana’s uneven relationship with her mother. Though Frances was not the recluse that the tabloid press often described, she relished her independent existence far from sophisticated society, befriending nuns, fishermen, and plainspoken Scots who respected her privacy. “I love people for what they are,” she once said. “You won’t find me at the smart dinner parties.… I have nothing to do with London society.… I don’t mix.”

  At times, Frances and Diana giggled together like sisters, but they might not communicate for extended periods. “It was not an easy relationship,” tabloid reporter Richard Kay said. Frances had managed to help Diana and Charles in the fall of 1987, but from 1988 through 1992—the years when Diana’s marriage was fracturing—Frances was despondent about the breakup of her own marriage, so neither woman could offer much support to the other. One friend of Diana’s remembered when Frances “would call three times a day, and Diana would talk a lot to her. Diana tried on the phone to be caring, but then she would blow up. She thought her mother would only call with her own problems.” The nub of Diana’s predicament, according to this friend, was that “with her own mother, Diana was afraid to give her love and be rejected. That is why it was such a difficult relationship.”

  Diana also feared her mother’s volatility. “Diana’s mother would get too emotionally involved,” one of Diana’s friends said. “Frances is not a woman who worries about speaking her mind.” That impetuous streak was evident when Frances periodically popped up to make disconcerting, sometimes incoherent statements to the press that embarrassed Diana. “I don’t understand why I have to be attacked all the time,” Frances said in an outburst to the Sunday Express. “They say I turned my son Charles and Diana against their stepmother. That is very damning stuff.… I am well versed in being crucified. Why can I just not be me? I am well aware that if I was caught speeding, Myra Hindley [a notorious convicted mass murderer] would look like a Girl Guide.”

  Part of Morton’s bargain with Diana was her right to read and comment on his manuscript. To disguise her role, he altered some quotes to the third person, attributing them to “a close friend,” or he used her direct quotes that “she told friends.” “There were 4,000 of her words in the book,” Morton said. “She approved it, including her first-person speech.” According to Morton, she also “made a number of alterations of fact and emphasis.” One odd request changed a significant fact in the staircase incident at Sandringham in January 1982: It was the Queen who found Diana at the foot of the stairs, but Diana asked Morton to substitute the Queen Mother’s name, “presumably out of deference” to her mother-in-law. Otherwise, Diana’s marginal comments were minor, and sometimes touching. When Morton referred to Charles as “the man she longed to marry,” Diana wrote “was in love with.” The book was “to all intents and purposes her autobiography,” Morton said.

  For the first two months of the Morton project, Diana was in a state of considerable agitation over the condition of Adrian Ward-Jackson, who was declining fast. Angela Serota tightly coordinated his visiting schedule, and Diana came three or four times a week. Diana was attentive and compassionate, but also excited by the scene in the Mount Street apartment. “It was a frenzied atmosphere,” another visitor said. “Once Diana was visiting, everyone more assiduously visited as well. It became an event.” A friend of Ward-Jackson’s recalled that Diana “kept saying in a girlish way that it was the first time she monitored someone dying. There was a kind of morbid interest for everyone. She saw it as a part of growing up, and an interesting experience.”

  By August, it became too difficult to administer a morphine drip at home, so Ward-Jackson was moved to St. Mary’
s Hospital. At that point, Diana’s visits became public knowledge. Ward-Jackson had secured her promise to be at his deathbed, but he hadn’t counted on the media circus that surrounded her visits. His brother arranged a private route into the hospital for Diana, but she declined to take it. “She said, ‘I am not going to be intimidated,’ ” a friend said, “Then she would change her outfit every day and enjoy it. She was like a young girl who wanted to avoid the paparazzi but flirt[ed] with them.”

  When Angela Serota called Balmoral to say Ward-Jackson was dying, Diana rushed to London, arriving at four A.M. Over the next four days, Diana spent hours at his bedside, but she was en route to the hospital when he died. The tabloids splashed the deathwatch story on page one, calling her compassion “extraordinary” and marveling that she spent six and a half hours “consoling his grieving family.” (Actually, she didn’t meet his parents until the funeral, several days later.) The funeral turned into a media spectacle when Diana arrived in defiance of protocol, which held that senior members of the royal family didn’t attend funerals of commoners. “Diana’s tears flowed during the service,” wrote The Sun, as they did two months later at Ward-Jackson’s memorial service.

  Diana’s overwrought behavior hampered her work for AIDS when she drew fire from reactionary columnists such as John Junor (the father of Penny), who wrote in The Mail on Sunday, “What do you suppose can explain her preoccupation with the disease? Could she really want to go down in history as the patron saint of sodomy?” She also alienated members of the establishment, including some of her friends discomfited by what they viewed as her theatrics. “The whole episode was very bizarre,” a longtime friend said. “She adopted Adrian like a sick dog. It did her great damage in the establishment. She went sort of mad, and she lost some allies because she was too over the top.”