Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana made one more major speech that spring—perhaps her most controversial—to a conference run by Turning Point, a charity devoted to treatment of drug and alcohol abuse. In some ways her remarks were more revealing than her bulimia speech, because they reflected her fears about the treatment of mental illness with prescription medication. Diana had rejected tranquilizers prescribed early in her marriage by psychiatrists, but in subsequent years she had agreed to try several medications to soothe her insomnia and depression.

  By 1993, she had been taking prescription sleeping pills nightly for several years, a dependence that made her uneasy. She had also tried Prozac, the “miracle” antidepressant available since 1988, but she had quickly abandoned the medication. A close friend recalled, “She said she was afraid to keep taking it because she saw herself as an addictive person. So she was afraid, and she quit. I don’t know whether it helped her or not.”

  That ambivalence was the subtext of Diana’s speech in June 1993 on the perils of drugs prescribed to treat women for depression. In strongly feminist language, she described the “haze of loneliness and desperation” that turned too many women into “anxious zombies” hooked on “tranquilizers, sleeping pills and antidepressants,” the “mother’s little helpers” that “doomed” women to a “life of dependence.” Yet Diana declined to reveal her own dependence on prescription sleeping medications. “Perhaps we need to look more closely at the cause of the illness, rather than an attempt to suppress it,” she said—an admirable impulse, but a serious disservice to patients who depended on psychopharmacology, especially during periods of crisis.

  Despite this rather glaring defect, Diana’s speech, like all her public pronouncements, received extensive and mostly positive coverage in the press. In the year following her separation, Diana continued to be portrayed heroically while Charles was either vilified or mocked. When the full text of the Camillagate tape was finally published in January 1993, a poll in Today showed that sixty-eight percent of those surveyed thought Charles’s reputation would be badly damaged, and forty-two percent thought William, not his father, should be the next king.

  Unlike Fergie, whose separation cut her off from official engagements, Diana was free to continue with her royal calendar. (Fergie regarded the move as arbitrary, based only on the courtiers’ view of her as the “Bad Witch” and Diana the “Good Witch,” although the difference probably had more to do with Diana’s special status as mother of the heir to the throne.) Diana was precluded only from representing the Queen on official visits overseas, a logical restriction given Diana’s estrangement from Charles. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd encouraged Diana’s role as unofficial ambassador, and the Foreign Office helped with logistics.

  Diana kept a frenetic schedule. Week after week, she stole headlines from Charles and other royals more than ever, with her well-timed speeches and visits with victims. Diana made successful trips to Nepal and Zimbabwe as a representative of several charities. The press corps trailing her around Nepal included a team from Vogue, along with the usual contingent of hacks. Diana’s celebrity even eclipsed the speeches and meetings of Lynda Chalker, the Overseas Development Minister who accompanied her to Nepal. While Chalker’s mission to oversee the spending of $17 million in foreign aid was ignored, the trip became THE TRIUMPH OF DIANA, as the Express proclaimed. Skiing in Klosters, Switzerland, that week, Charles spotted only one reporter and asked where everyone had gone. “Nepal,” he was told.

  Diana received occasional barbs in the press. Woodrow Wyatt, a colorful News of the World columnist, said Diana was “addicted to the limelight … it’s like a drug”; Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee-Potter wondered if Diana’s “relentless” work with victims had become her escape from dealing with the crucial issues of her life; a Mirror poll showed that eighty-one percent of its readers felt Diana was a “hypocrite” for taking luxurious vacations after doling out gruel to poor people in Africa; and Tatler magazine, a glossy monthly that Diana read avidly, ran a cover story titled DIANA: MONSTER OR MARTYR, with a poll saying forty-four percent thought “monster” and thirty-eight percent “martyr.”

  Those articles were the exceptions in a year of glowing coverage. Even so, Diana insisted that she was the victim of “dirty tricks” by the Palace to “downgrade” her role and “marginalize” her. Palace officials denied operating against her. Even Richard Kay, who promoted Diana’s Palace conspiracy theories on a number of occasions, had to admit by July 1993, “Palace plots against her have been forecast and rumored … yet never materialize.”

  The tabloids kept up the conspiracy line anyway; the continuing marital rift made more compelling reading than an amicable relationship between the Waleses. Thanks to the Morton book, the media also had a limitless license to report on Diana’s private life. Diana still had Palace officials to front for her in dealing with these intrusions, but since she was convinced the “gray men” were operating against her, she sought more direct contact with the press on her own. She was the first member of the royal family to deal with the media without regard for protocol.

  Through James Colthurst she continued her secret connection to Morton, who was writing a sequel scheduled for publication in the fall of 1994. “I acknowledge that she had to keep her distance from me,” Morton said. “But it is a willful misunderstanding to say she didn’t want a second book.” Diana also wanted a hand in day-to-day coverage, a far trickier business. British press critic Stephen Glover once compared the tabloid press to a “many-headed hydra, not a monster with a single will. It is mercurial and fiercely competitive.” Diana “may have thought she could control the beast,” Glover wrote in The Daily Telegraph.

  To exert that control, Diana turned to Richard Kay, the lead royal reporter on her favorite newspaper, the Daily Mail. Like Morton, Kay had clearly staked out his position on Diana’s side against Charles. Kay was thirty-six, only four years older than Diana, which made him more accessible than grizzled reporters like James Whitaker and Harry Arnold. Kay appealed to her personally as well as professionally. Tall and lanky, he had the tousled good looks of the well-born men she had known since childhood. Raised in Kent, he had opted out of college. At eighteen, he began working in newspapers and joined the Daily Mail in 1980 at age twenty-three. He had worked the royal beat since 1986, and Diana’s siblings had gotten to know him five years later when he did a series of articles about their disagreements with Raine Spencer.

  Diana made her move on the return flight from Nepal in March 1993 when she invited Kay to join her for what he later described as “our first serious and lengthy conversation.” Afterward, Kay recalled, “I realized how inadequately I had served my readers in purporting to be an expert on her and on the royal family. We knew bugger-all.” It was the beginning of a relationship that lasted until Diana’s death. “I saw her at her happiest and in her darkest moments,” Kay said. “There were moments of confusion and despair when I believed Diana was being driven … almost to the point of destruction.”

  From the beginning, Diana set the terms of their relationship. “I wanted information,” Kay explained, “but she was not someone I could phone up and say, ‘Give me a story.’ The contacts came from her side.” They spoke frequently on the phone and occasionally saw each other. “When I was at the Mail, Richard Kay and I would have lunch at a restaurant where Diana was,” recalled Richard Addis, who later edited the Express. “She would sit at a different table, and I realized the reason was that she wanted to talk to Richard Kay. If she got the chance, she would go to Richard’s table for a cup of coffee.” The tabloid press mocked Kay for his role as what Andrew Morton called Diana’s “unofficial press officer.”

  Decoding Kay became a new, British form of Kremlinology. One former Palace official called Kay’s Daily Mail reports “Diana’s own dead-letter drop.” “I couldn’t disclose that the information had come from her,” explained Kay. “Her position would have been untenable in the Palace. In the British press we have conveniently used this dev
ice over the years: ‘A friend’ said this. If the information was accurate, it would work for you, and people would know you were talking to someone. I had no problem saying ‘a friend’ when it was Diana.”

  The degree to which Diana had become tethered to her press coverage was evident when she went on vacation with Lucia and Beatrice Flecha de Lima and Rosa Monckton in August 1993. “I want to get away from it all,” Diana told entrepreneur Mark Lloyd, asking his help in finding a haven where she could escape into anonymity. Lloyd had a business partner with a string of hotels in Indonesia, and he made elaborate arrangements for them at Amanwana, a new hotel of “twenty luxury tents” on the remote island of Moyo near Bali. Since the resort hadn’t yet opened, Diana and her friends would have it to themselves. To avoid a commercial flight, Lloyd arranged for a private jet belonging to Saudi Prince Khalid to transport them.

  “It was totally secure,” recalled Lloyd, who gave Diana’s bodyguard a satellite phone as their sole link to the outside world; “it was the first time Diana ever completely disappeared.” But after only a few hours on the island, Diana wanted to move to Bali because she said she was “bored, and hated the isolation.” Whenever Diana was away from England and felt out of touch, she became anxious. “She thought people might do something against her [when] she was not there to protect herself,” one friend explained.

  “Once Diana made up her mind, she was very difficult to change,” Lloyd said. He arranged for the women to go to a villa on Bali and then, as he recalled, “the scales fell from my eyes. This was the first time I realized Diana was in touch with Richard Kay. He called my office and asked if we could have a picture of Amanwana. I said, ‘How in God’s name did you know that?’ The only people Diana called were Fergie and Richard Kay.” The four women went to Bali, where they walked down a public beach, and Diana was immediately recognized and written about. Recalled Lloyd, “When Diana came back she said to me, ‘Wonderful time, Mark…. Such a pity it was in the papers.’ ”

  The tabloids began remarking during the summer of 1993 that Diana’s frantic pace seemed to be wearing her down, reporting that she was “suffering from stress and exhaustion.” When she blew up at an intrusive photographer in early August, shouting, “You make my life hell!,” the tabloids concluded that she was about to crack. Two months later, she showed up at the theater “looking angry and strained,” and the tabloids ran photos of her with droopy eyes headlined PAIN OF A PRINCESS: IS THE STRAIN GETTING TO DI? and DI’S AT BREAKING POINT AS CHARLES WINS THE PR WAR. “This is the face of a woman under extreme pressure,” James Whitaker wrote in the Daily Mirror, and Stuart Higgins noted in The Sun that an “increasingly emotional and unhappy” Diana had been worn down by the “campaign against her by pro-Charles courtiers.”

  A meeting on October 20 at Kensington Palace between Diana and John Major to discuss her role, along with an official visit by Diana to Brussels, seemed to belie any concerted campaign to derail her. But Charles was clearly irked by her chronic ability to grab the headlines. Diana later told Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil that when she and the Prime Minister talked, he had approved of her proposal to become a humanitarian ambassador for Britain along the lines of actress Audrey Hepburn’s longtime work for UNICEF. “Diana told me that Prince Charles had gone mad about that, and had gone to the Financial Times and said he wanted to be the ambassador,” Neil recalled. “She said the Prime Minister had contacted her and said, ‘This is getting too messy.’ ”

  Charles did give the Financial Times an interview, but not until late November, five weeks after Diana’s meeting with Major, and Diana’s interpretation was a willful misreading of his words. Citing his recent visit to the Middle East as an example, Charles spoke of his efforts to promote British trade and business overseas—a far different role from what Diana envisioned for herself. Charles also said his work on behalf of British commerce reflected his long-standing interests: “The idea I am searching to redefine my job is rot. It is just that, since the day I got married, people have chosen to ignore the things I continue to do, day in and day out.”

  Diana was easily thrown off-balance, and the month of November brought a series of provocations that nearly undid her. As the month began, the Flecha de Limas left for the Brazilian Embassy in Washington; on the same day, Diana’s chauffeur, Simon Solari, told Diana he was moving to Charles’s staff. That evening Diana arrived at a theater benefit red-eyed and distraught, and an hour later she left in tears.

  The next day, Diana’s favorite bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, was moved by Scotland Yard to another position. “Diana leaned on Ken a lot for advice, and he lightened things up,” said one of her friends. “But she would draw her staff in too close and then put them in their place. She did that with Ken.” According to another friend, Diana mistreated Wharfe when she suspected him of briefing the press. Nevertheless, Diana was extremely distressed when he left, prompting Barbara Cartland to announce on television that her stepgranddaughter had gone on a “prolonged eating binge.” This moved Diana to show a “rare public display of her frustration” by telling a luncheon for the charity WellBeing, a group concerned with the health of mothers and infants, “I was supposed to have my head down the loo for most of the day.… I thought I might postpone my nervous breakdown for a more appropriate moment.”

  Energy healer Simone Simmons began working with Diana during this period and found that, behind her friendly manner, the Princess was a “pathetically damaged creature.… She felt abandoned, rejected, and broken.” Simmons was “shocked” to see “traces of the scratches and scabs of recent self-mutilation.” In Simmons’s view, some of Diana’s alternative therapies—the osteopathy, reflexology, acupuncture, shiatsu, colonic irrigation, and aromatherapy that she continued even as she was seeing Susie Orbach—“were counteracting each other, possibly harmfully … She was misreading … confused and conflicting advice she was offered from every quarter.… Diana’s bright but rather manic conversational manner was an expression of tension and panic.”

  In that unhappy state, Diana decided to announce at a charity luncheon on December 3 that she was withdrawing from public life. Although she had hinted to Palace officials for several weeks that she might pull back some of her activities, Dimbleby recounted that they found “it proved impossible to discover exactly why or how the Princess intended to do this.” Once Diana arrived at her decision, “in a gust of emotion,” as a friend of Charles’s described it, she was determined to make a dramatic announcement. The Queen and Prince Philip, after asking her to reconsider, urged her to pull back quietly and gradually instead, which would give her maneuvering room. Charles advocated the same course, to no effect; neither could he determine Diana’s “real purpose.” “it was an emotional decision,” said an official who worked with her. “That was a low time for her. She was very estranged from Charles.”

  Diana offered a few clues several years later. “The pressure was intolerable,” she said. “I was constantly tired, exhausted.” But she referred again to the “campaign” against her that “was being successful.” Her decision to withdraw “did surprise the people who were causing the grief—it did surprise them when I took myself out of the game. They hadn’t expected that. And I’m a great believer that you should always confuse the enemy … the enemy was my husband’s department because I always got more publicity.” Diana felt she needed to declare her intentions rather than quietly withdraw, she said, “because I owed it to the public.”

  Diana’s remarks at the luncheon to benefit the Headway National Head Injuries Association took less than five minutes. The first half sounded like a valedictory, reviewing the benefits of her public service for the previous twelve years. She did not close the door, as she had originally intended, leaving a “little light,” as several friends and advisers suggested. “I will be reducing the extent of the public life I have led so far,” she said. “I intend to focus on a smaller range of areas in the future. Over the next few months I will be seeking a more suitable way o
f combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life.” Her “first priority” would be William and Harry, “who deserve as much love, care and attention as I am able to give”—although her intentions didn’t entirely make sense, since the boys were at boarding school and Diana’s vacation time with them had been mapped out months earlier.

  The reason for her departure, she said unequivocally, was the “overwhelming” media attention, especially to her personal life, which was “hard to bear.” In that spirit, she asked to be given the “time and space that has been lacking in recent years.” She emphasized that her decision had the backing of the Queen and Prince Philip, “who have always shown me kindness and support,” but she conspicuously omitted reference to Prince Charles.

  Diana’s manner magnified the melodrama of the moment. After finishing her remarks, she sat down, and “the tears started to flow. The Princess sat with her head down, biting her lip and blinking furiously,” according to the Evening Standard. Even if her words indicated she would return to the public stage sooner rather than later, she acted as if she was in fact leaving—and with enormous sadness. The pages of tabloid coverage contained all the shock and sorrow appropriate to a final farewell.

  The tabloids again made Prince Charles the scapegoat, using Diana’s failure to mention him as proof he was at fault. CHARLES FORCED DIANA TO GO: SAD PRINCESS QUITS PUBLIC LIFE, announced The Sun, capturing the coverage’s general drift: that the “campaign to downgrade” Diana by Charles and his “sophisticated propaganda machine” had “driven her out and left her no choice but to step into the shadows.”