Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The newspapers—broadsheets as well as tabloids—devoted pages to analyzing the causes and implications of the separation. Not surprisingly, they absolved themselves of responsibility. Forgetting the obsessive and often reckless coverage of Diana over the years, the Daily Mail observed, “The media did not mismatch the royal pair nor split them asunder. This marriage has died from within as marriages do.” The Evening Standard explained that the media were only trying to “report the truth about the royal marriage” when “every difficulty was put in their way.… The newspapers were right to say that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were an unhappy couple.… This turn of events is a vindication of the press.”

  In assigning blame, the tabloids pointed to Charles. Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the Daily Mail, best reflected the prevailing sentiment: Diana, he wrote, had the “royal magic” and “could have proved to be the biggest asset.” For Charles to “throw away this treasure … reflects very badly on his judgment.”

  Chapter 18

  As Diana considered what to do after the separation, she turned to her diverse collection of friends for solace and advice. Her friends later talked about how Diana kept her friendships exclusive. She would rarely see two or three friends together, and then only if they already knew one another. This practice was unusual in the British upper class, in which social life typically revolved around group activities such as house parties. Indeed, Prince Charles socialized with a tightly knit clique widely known as the “Highgrove Set.”

  Some of Diana’s relationships were well known, but when Diana died, many of her friends were stunned to discover who else she had been close to. “She lived her life in so many tight compartments,” her friend Rosa Monckton said. “She didn’t introduce her friends very often. You know she was just so scared of losing people or of people rejecting her.”

  Diana’s attitude toward friends reflected her complicated temperament—her mistrust, insecurity, and penchant for secrecy, as well as her warmth, humor, and impetuous generosity. By keeping her friends apart, she always maintained the upper hand. Fashion entrepreneur Roberto Devorik once suggested that she gather a half-dozen friends for a weekly lunch “to discuss the things you’re not sure about and directions you might take.” Diana would have none of it, because “by dividing you rule,” said Devorik. She said different things to different friends—yet another reason she preferred that they not compare notes. “Everyone knew a piece of her,” a close friend said. “But no one knew the whole. I think it started because she couldn’t afford to trust one person completely, and then it became a way to be.”

  Diana had an aversion to pushy people. “She liked to be the one who offered rather than hav[ing] people offer to her,” said Marguerite Littman, an American expatriate living in London who knew Diana well in the nineties. “I watched her watch people stand back, and she would go to them. She didn’t like it when people came to her.” Although Diana was susceptible to flattery, she often befriended people facing tough times; after they had recovered she sometimes drifted away, although one friend recalled that Diana stopped speaking to her “when I was at my lowest and could not have been more vulnerable. She may not have known it.”

  Diana idealized each new friend as someone who could do no wrong. She gave large bouquets of roses, scented candles, Herend animal figurines, and enamel boxes as tokens of her affection. (One box in the shape of a shopping bag said “Shop ’Til You Drop.”) When the boyfriend of one of Diana’s friends had to leave England for several months, Diana sent flowers to her friend, with a note that read, “Hang in there.” “She needed to be liked and she wanted to please, to get feedback,” said businessman Mark Lloyd, a friend during her last few years.

  People were attracted to Diana initially by her beauty, charm, and celebrity, and they remained attached because of her vulnerability, spontaneous affection, and ebullient sense of humor. “The mistake people made,” said one friend who lasted over the years, “was to get deeply involved. They got obsessed by her and she did by them, and then when it went wrong, it did [so] big-time. She had a paranoid side.”

  Diana expected her friends to be instantly available, and to listen to her long, emotional phone calls. “She couldn’t relax,” one of her friends said. “If something was bothering her, she would talk about it over and over and over with her friends. She really valued relationships, but her intensity would cause problems that disrupted the relationships: her torment, her interpreting and reinterpreting another’s act. She lived her life trying to be one step ahead, always on her guard.”

  Some friends resisted the temptation to “get inside her net,” as one man put it, and give her total devotion. In doing so, these friends endured far longer. With selected friends she gossiped, with others she didn’t even whisper another friend’s name. “It was totally one-to-one,” said Cosima Somerset, who had an intense friendship with Diana a year before she died. “We didn’t talk about other people, only what was going on in her life and my life.”

  Diana was easily wounded and quick to feel patronized. “If something happened and it was her fault, she would not accept blame,” a friend said. “And if you said something critical, she would think you disapproved of her.” The unpredictability of her reactions made her friends fearful of saying anything that might offend, although this injunction didn’t extend to witty irreverence, which she enjoyed, mostly from men. She had one male friend who teased her continually, making her laugh by calling her other friends impudent nicknames (Lucia Flecha de Lima was “Pressa de Flesha,”) and mocking her choice of lovers (red-haired Hewitt was “Ginger”).

  As swiftly as Diana took up with people, she would drop them, usually without explanation or even obvious provocation. “She would be disappointed, not over big things, but little things,” one of her friends said. She retreated if she sensed a friend was trying to take control, or if she felt too dependent and feared someone might reject her. Diana also was especially quick to see—or imagine—disloyalty. Although Diana occasionally got into heated arguments with friends, the end was usually marked by silence—unreturned and uninitiated phone calls, averted eyes at social gatherings. “She had difficulty solving her own problems,” one of her friends explained. “She wanted to please, but for her it was easier to cut off a problem than to solve it.”

  Most of the time, people withdrew if Diana dropped them. “Because of who she was, people were reluctant to get in touch,” a friend explained. In some cases, as if on a whim, Diana would call an exiled friend after a period of months and resume as if nothing had happened. However, when friends made her face the consequences of her actions, she would lower her defenses and relent. After Diana’s Panorama interview, film producer David Puttnam wrote a letter advising her how to pick up the pieces. His criticism was gentle, and his advice sound, but she didn’t reply and cut him from her Christmas card list. A year later, they met at a luncheon. Puttnam bluntly told her how her rudeness had hurt him, and when she “made up a story” as an excuse, he wouldn’t accept it. He told her that if she had any questions about his loyalty, she should simply call him: “I said, ‘When you do things like that, you are not like other people. I couldn’t call you. You have a peculiar ability to call me.’ ” Like a father with a remorseful daughter, he then made her repeat several times, “David, I am very sorry. If ever I have a worry in the future I will pick up the phone.” Recalled Puttnam, “She charmed me. Having absorbed being told off, she behaved like a child.”

  Interior designer Nicholas Haslam took a more direct approach. After five years of friendship, Diana had dropped him after he displayed her lighthearted thank-you note for a pair of Turkish slippers (“They are the perfect size for my giant clodhopping feet”) in the window of his shop. When he saw her at a cocktail party and she ignored him, he spent the rest of the evening glaring at her. Finally, she sent a mutual friend over to ask, “Why are you sending daggers at Diana?” “The bitch is cutting me,” Haslam replied. The friend scurried away to confer wi
th Diana, and soon afterward, the Princess “flew across the room and said, ‘I wasn’t cutting you. I was just saving you till last.’ ”

  The nature of female friendship—offering emotional support, sharing experiences of children and husbands—was particularly important to Diana. More than most women, Diana fit her friends—male and female—into specific categories. “She was very clever to give roles to us,” Roberto Devorik said. There were holiday friends, companions to share giggles over lunch, friends who broadened her horizons, mothers with children the ages of her sons, soul mate friends, avuncular friends, fraternal friends, maternal figures, and friends outside her upper-class milieu. “I was not on the same social circuit as other friends,” said Diana’s energy healer Simone Simmons. “There was no danger of me blurting out things to people to whom she might have been sending out different messages from her complicated private agenda.… She carved out a very precise box for me in her life.”

  Diana’s maternal figures, who filled the gap created by her inconsistent relationship with her own mother, formed an especially influential group. Having an array of maternal figures was an arrangement that reflected Diana’s neediness as much as her power to command such a lineup. If one woman wasn’t available, Diana could always turn to another, or if one wasn’t listening carefully, Diana could find an alternative. “She was better behaved with the older women, probably because they were more patient with her,” a friend said. “It was more difficult with her contemporaries because they couldn’t give her that kind of attention.”

  Diana’s collection of surrogate mothers emerged in the late eighties and early nineties, and included Annabel Goldsmith, Lucia Flecha de Lima, Hayat Palumbo, and Elsa Bowker—formidable women in their own right, but all living outside the conventional world in which Diana had been raised. They eclipsed Diana’s original maternal friend, Mara Berni, owner of the San Lorenzo restaurant. During the eighties, Mara had functioned as a spiritual counselor, giving Diana “prophecies,” advice on her love life, and guidance about astrology and clairvoyance. Diana’s mother figures were anywhere from twenty to fifty years her senior; even within the maternal category, they occupied different niches.

  Lucia Flecha de Lima was foremost among these maternal figures. The two women met during the Waleses’ tour of Brazil in April 1991, when Lucia was forty-nine and Diana twenty-nine. Afterward, Diana became a regular visitor at the Brazilian ambassador’s residence on Mount Street in London. One of nine children, Lucia was the beautiful, privileged daughter of an heiress and a doctor who specialized in tropical disease research. Diana once described Lucia as “the mother I would have liked to have had.”

  A mother of five and grandmother, Lucia pulled Diana into her lively family life; on a number of occasions, Diana joined them for Easter, Christmas, and Boxing Day when her sons were with Charles. One of Lucia’s daughters, Beatrice, became a close friend as well. “Diana loved going to their house and feeling the warmth of a close-knit family,” one of Diana’s friends said. Lucia was down-to-earth and nurturing, always a willing listener. Since her own children were grown, she had the time to dedicate to Diana. “It required her to be there when Diana called, and to go to lunch when Diana called,” a friend said. The two women spoke at least once a day, even after the Flecha de Limas moved to the United States in November 1993.

  As a Latin American, Lucia had a different sensibility from the British upper class that Diana found refreshing; for example, she was less judgmental about openly expressed emotion. Diana appreciated that Lucia was an outsider with no strong feelings for or against the royal family, but because Lucia didn’t completely understand the British mentality, her advice was sometimes limited. What Lucia gave Diana above all was unconditional love: Lucia voiced her opinions but didn’t press them; the two women argued from time to time, but Diana didn’t drop Lucia as she dropped so many others.

  Annabel Goldsmith had solid credentials in the British establishment. The daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry, she had known both Frances and Johnnie in her youth. (In the hereditary peerage, a marquess ranks just below a duke, and one rung above Diana’s father, Earl Spencer.) Annabel’s friendship with Diana began the night of her party in 1989, when Diana confronted Camilla. Initially, Diana tried to pump Annabel about Camilla, but when Annabel offered scant information, Diana gave up. Although their relationship had a mother-daughter quality, it was more lighthearted than Diana’s friendship with Lucia. Annabel and Diana often met over lunch, and laughter was “the essential ingredient in our relationship,” Annabel wrote in the Daily Mail after Diana’s death.

  Once or twice a month, Diana went to the Goldsmith home on the outskirts of London for Sunday lunch. She would call on Saturday and inquire, “Is the madhouse on?” Like the Flecha de Limas, the Goldsmiths offered Diana a family atmosphere. Diana frequently brought her sons, who enjoyed the Goldsmith children.

  Although Annabel came from Diana’s aristocratic milieu, she was not establishment in her outlook, and her husband, Jimmy, the iconoclastic billionaire businessman, was profoundly antiestablishment. The family was also decidedly unconventional: Jimmy and Annabel shared a life in England, and he openly lived with a mistress (by whom he had two children) in France. On the other side of Goldsmith’s Parisian house lived his first wife. This combination of familiar and daring enabled Diana to unwind at the Goldsmiths’ more completely than anywhere else.

  “At lunch at Annabel’s, Diana was at her most relaxed and giggly,” said Cosima Somerset. The Princess would tell stories, joke with the staff, swim in the pool, and help wash the dishes. In quieter moments, Annabel listened to Diana’s laments, yet Diana was reluctant to admit her deepest insecurities to Annabel. “She minded what Annabel thought of her,” a friend said. “She was like a child who wanted to be seen at her best, without a flaw.”

  Elsa Bowker was the oldest of Diana’s surrogate mothers—into her eighties when they met in 1993. Her cosmopolitan background appealed to Diana much as Lucia’s did. Elsa was born in Egypt to a French mother and Lebanese father. After World War II, she married Christopher Bowker, a British diplomat, and they lived in Burma, France, Germany, and Spain before returning to Britain. “She liked my way of living, my experience, and she could tell me everything,” Elsa said. “She became more and more affectionate. She treated me as a mother that she did not have. She told me she didn’t understand her mother.” A friend of Elsa’s called her a “wise old bird,” and added, “She gave Diana a lot of advice, although I’m not sure she took any of it.”

  Elsa did her best to reassure Diana, but felt powerless when Diana was distraught. “To be her friend was difficult,” Elsa recalled. “In my case, when she wanted to see me eagerly, I had to abandon everything. Once I put my foot down, and she came three hours later.” While Elsa felt great affection for Diana, she considered her “unbalanced” after witnessing her extremes of mood, and she was uncertain what to believe. “Sometimes I would see her face when she was telling me this or that, and I would say, ‘Is that the truth?’ It wasn’t always. She was frightened of what one would do to her if she told the truth. You could tell when she wasn’t [telling the truth] by the way she looked and the way she remained silent.”

  Diana came to know Hayat Palumbo through her husband, Peter, the multimillionaire chairman of the Arts Council of England. Like Elsa, Hayat was from the Middle East, a Lebanese whose father was a Shiite Moslem and owned a newspaper in Beirut. When Hayat was sixteen, her father was assassinated by terrorists. Before meeting the widowed Palumbo in the 1980s, Hayat had been unhappily married to a wealthy Lebanese businessman. Although Hayat was only a decade older than Diana, she assumed a maternal role, and her husband took a paternal interest. “Hayat is very clever, full of experience, very artistic,” a friend said of her. “She is strong, but her life has made her harder.”

  The Palumbos shared the trappings of their wealth with Diana, flying her in their private jet, entertaining her on their yacht Drumbeat, and at their ho
mes in England and France. Peter Palumbo put Diana in contact with the prestigious lawyer Lord Mishcon, whose firm took over her divorce negotiations, as well as Gordon Reece, a public relations adviser who tried to help Diana. Not incidentally, Palumbo was an erstwhile friend of Prince Charles, who had sabotaged one of Palumbo’s ambitious development projects with his savage architectural criticism, calling it a “glass stump.” “Peter took the approach, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ and went straight to Diana,” said gossip columnist Nigel Dempster.

  It was Lucia Flecha de Lima who introduced Diana to Rosa Monckton, the managing director of Tiffany’s in London. Lucia’s daughter Beatrice worked for Tiffany’s, and the Flecha de Limas shared with Rosa a devout Catholicism. This religious connection was enough to set off a wave of press speculation (PALACE DENIES SPIRITUAL CRISIS) in 1993 that Diana might convert to the Catholic faith. Close friends said that Diana didn’t consider conversion, but she was attracted to the good works of Catholic humanitarians such as Mother Teresa and Britain’s Cardinal Basil Hume, both of whom she met with on a number of occasions.

  The daughter of Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Rosa had a unique perspective on royal crises. Her grandfather, Walter Monckton, had been a close friend and legal adviser to King Edward VIII. When the King abdicated in 1936 to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson, Monckton helped write the King’s famous speech renouncing the throne for “the woman I love.” Rosa was also married to Dominic Lawson, editor of The Spectator and later The Sunday Telegraph, a relationship that sometimes circumscribed Diana’s conversations with Rosa, but that proved an advantage at other times. Strong and articulate, Rosa served as a sounding board for Diana, who occasionally took offense at Rosa’s advice. After the disastrous Korea trip in November 1992, Rosa rebuked Diana for “her sulky public behavior,” and Diana didn’t call her for four months. Like other friends, Rosa was someone Diana could call and “simply cry [until she was] totally drained and completely exhausted.” As a friend of Prince Charles said, “Rosa was tough-minded and analytical about Diana, but entirely devoted to her nevertheless.”