But the decision had been Diana’s, and it had as much to do with her backbreaking schedule as with pressure from the media and her desire to “confuse” her enemies in the Palace. In one sense, she was trying to assume some control over her life by removing herself from the royal regimen. But losing the structure of royal routine also removed the discipline and constant distractions of a busy life. For Diana, “time and space” brought the dread and anxieties that overtook her when she was alone.
Diana was fed up as well with being the fund-raising magnet at endless charity engagements. Although she would have better served the charities by admitting she had assumed too much responsibility and was now scaling back her obligations to a realistic number, she left her 118 charities hanging by writing to each with an offer to resign or continue in a nominal way. Hoping to be among those she would pick up again, charity officials declined her resignation and jockeyed to stay in her good graces. Indeed, Mike Whitlam, the Director-General of the British Red Cross, had met with her the day before she made the announcement. Only weeks earlier, Diana had become a vice president of the British Red Cross, and Whitlam, like other charity officials, was determined to maintain a working relationship with her.
Some commentators accused Diana of hypocrisy in blaming the media. “Carping newspaper columnists and even intrusive newspaper editors have proved … to be Diana’s closest allies,” wrote Anne Robinson in Today; when Diana wanted to expose the rift in her marriage, “it was a journalist she turned to.” Other critics expressed skepticism about Diana’s ability to lead a genuinely private life, even for a few months. Ninety-two-year-old Barbara Cartland predicted that Diana would be “bored stiff” outside the public eye. “The only books she ever read were mine,” Cartland said, “and they weren’t awfully good for her.” As The Times pointed out, Diana “does not know what her role should be, and no one seems able to tell her.… Watching her … one had the overwhelming impression that she was making this announcement to her only real friends … the ordinary and extraordinary people she has met on her walkabouts and in her charity work.… What this is all about is a love affair with the public.”
Diana was ready for the critics within two days. “We can reveal today that one proposal of pivotal significance has quietly emerged about her future,” wrote Richard Kay in the Daily Mail. Because of Kay’s special relationship, his report carried Diana’s imprimatur. The plan called for the establishment of a Princess’s Trust that would fund programs and research around the world to help the disadvantaged. According to Kay, Diana would not want a “film-star photo opportunity role” similar to Audrey Hepburn’s—of the sort she had described to John Major—instead, she wanted to be a “chief executive, chairing policy and planning meetings, making decisions and guiding philosophy.”
Aside from the unsuitability of such a role for someone like Diana, who thrived on contact with ordinary people and hated the dreariness of boardrooms, the proposal was an exercise in wishful thinking that had come up before and would emerge again. Earlier in the year, David Puttnam had organized a lunch for Diana at Claridge’s with “the great and good of TV and movies” to discuss setting up a Princess of Wales Trust. “She loved the idea,” Puttnam recalled, as she did each time it was presented to her over the years. Nothing ever came of it because it didn’t fit Diana’s style of operating: Find a cause, bring it to light, and let someone else carry it forward.
Diana was thirty-two at the end of her first year of separation from Charles. As unsure of her purpose as she had been at the outset, she clearly hadn’t thought through the implications of her “retirement.” “I don’t think she knew her own mind about it,” said Michael Adler, Chairman of the National AIDS Trust, one of Diana’s patronages. “When she retired, she didn’t know whether or why she needed to do it, and the moment she did it, she regretted it and missed the limelight.”
Chapter 20
Even when Diana’s stated reason for doing something was perfectly valid, any number of hidden factors were often involved. In the case of her retirement from public life, the unacknowledged factor was her entanglement with a married man. Some tabloids had caught the scent. “There is one man at the moment who has been seeing Diana for some time,” reported the Daily Mirror only days after the announcement—although the tabloid did not name him.
The man was Oliver Hoare, a wealthy dealer in Islamic art who had met the Waleses in the mid-eighties during a house party at Windsor. Hoare was distantly related to the prosperous Hoare banking family but had come from modest circumstances. His mother, Irina, had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, and his father, Reginald, had been a career British civil servant who left only $2,000 when he died in 1964. Irina and Reginald scraped enough money together to send their son to Eton, where he was captain of the boxing team, and then to the Sorbonne.
After college, Hoare met an Iranian princess named Hamoush Azodi-Bowler, who took him on as her “protégé,” inviting him to live in her home in Tehran so he could “study and excavate and read Arabic and Persian script.” In Tehran, Hoare mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd that included David Sulzberger, from the American publishing family, who would later become Hoare’s business partner. Sulzberger introduced him to a number of figures in the world of ballet, including Rudolf Nureyev. In Iran, Hoare began collecting Middle Eastern art and antiquities, and he embraced Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes the quest for divine love and knowledge through ecstatic dancing and other meditative rituals. On returning to London, he joined Christie’s auction house, where he headed the Islamic art department.
Hoare was known as a ladies’ man. He was handsome—with eyes of “deep velvet-brown … fixed on the spellbound object of his conversation”—and his manner combined what Sunday Times columnist Taki Theodoracopulos called “an old-fashioned politesse” with a hint of the bohemian. AS a struggling college student, Hoare had grown his hair long and played guitar in Parisian cafés. AS a figure in the London art world, he was known for wearing mismatched colored socks and discussing the spirituality of Iranian mosques. AS a sideline, Hoare advised wealthy clients on their collections.
In 1974, he met Diane de Waldner, a beautiful and elegant heiress to a vast French oil fortune. Diane’s mother, Louise de Waldner, counted the Queen Mother among her friends, and she owned an estate in southern France where Prince Charles came to paint. Diane and Oliver were married in 1976, the same year he left Christie’s to open his own London gallery dealing in Islamic art. In the art trade, many thought him overly awed by money and glamour. “Oliver is half child and half old man,” his mentor Hamoush once said. “Like a child, he is very impressed by unimpressive things.”
From 1985 to 1989, Oliver had an affair with Ayesha Nadir, a wealthy Turkish beauty with a house in London and a villa near Istanbul. The romance ended when Hoare refused to leave his wife and family, and Ayesha moved to Turkey. The Hoare marriage stabilized, thanks largely to Diane’s patience and discretion.
It was Diane’s family connection to the Queen Mother that brought the couple to Windsor Castle during Ascot week in 1984, where Charles and Oliver, who was three years older than the Prince, struck up a friendship based on their love of art and fascination with mystical Eastern religions. Hoare was also close to Camilla Parker Bowles, and he and his wife entertained Charles and Camilla in their home. Hoare and the Princess of Wales had a kinship as well, sharing an interest in ballet and a number of mutual friends, among them Adrian Ward-Jackson.
When the Wales marriage began to rupture in 1991, Hoare offered his services as an intermediary. “Oliver tried to help Diana to understand Prince Charles—his passion for architecture, his sense of history, and that he was a hardworking man,” said a friend who knew Diana and Hoare well. “He wanted to keep her with Prince Charles.” But in 1992, as the rift between the Waleses proved irreparable, Hoare abandoned his efforts. “He is not a man to insist,” their mutual friend said. “He is a bit of a sybarite, not in the bad sense, but he likes
to live well and not make a huge effort.”
It had also become obvious that Diana, then thirty-one, was infatuated with the forty-seven-year-old Hoare, who was in turn fascinated by Diana. “He was flattered that Diana had a crush on him, and he encouraged her without knowing it,” said the mutual friend. “To some extent, she misread his signals, but he genuinely liked her. The motivation for Diana was partly that he was Prince Charles’s friend, and she was intrigued. She wanted to have something that belonged to Prince Charles. There were mixed motivations and mixed signals.” Another friend took a less benign view: “Oliver was naughty. He led her on. She was besotted with him because he is very attractive.”
Diana and Hoare spent increasing amounts of time together at Kensington Palace and the homes of friends. Diana began visiting Hoare’s mother as well, much as she had befriended James Hewitt’s mother. She spoke to friends of the new interest in Islamic philosophy that she had picked up from Hoare. As she did with others close to her, Diana frequently called Hoare on the telephone. “Sometimes she could phone more than twenty times a day when we were in the car driving around London,” said Hoare’s former chauffeur Barry Hodge. “If she only called five or six times, we thought of it as a quiet day. The sheer number of calls she made used to get Mr. Hoare down. Whenever his wife was in the car, he’d carefully pull the plug out just a fraction to break the connection.”
Diana first met Elsa Bowker, a friend of Hoare’s through Middle Eastern connections, one evening in 1993 when Hoare brought her to dinner at Elsa’s Belgravia apartment. The next morning, a royal courier delivered a thank-you note filled with affection; as Elsa recalled, “She wrote the letter at midnight, saying, ‘I can’t go to sleep. I want to tell you that you had such an impact on me, you are someone who understands me. I want you to be my friend.’ ”
In Elsa’s view, “there was great love on both sides” between Diana and Hoare. Diana told Elsa she wanted to marry Hoare, and to buy a house with him in Italy. “She was willing to leave England with him,” Elsa recalled. Hoare told Elsa he thought Diana was “radiant inside, and he loved that.… He did a lot for her. He helped to give her confidence, but it was never enough. Diana had wonderful qualities of heart, but she was terribly possessive. If she loved someone, he had to leave everything, including children. Her possessiveness frightened men. Everything became drama.”
The Hoare marriage had already become strained due to anonymous telephone calls to their home. The calls began in September 1992 and numbered as many as twenty a week, some as late as midnight. Each time, the caller remained silent, lingering until Oliver Hoare asked, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” and hung up. “Whoever it is just wants to hear the sound of my voice,” Hoare said later. Finally, in October 1993, Diane Hoare demanded that her husband ask the police to trace the calls. He did, and the police equipped their phone with a computerized code that could activate tracers.
The relationship between Diana and Hoare eventually precipitated a crisis in his marriage. “It was like a war zone,” chauffeur Barry Hodge recalled. “Diane Hoare is no fool, and she can smell another woman a mile off.” Toward the end of 1993—when Diana was on the verge of making her “time and space” speech—Hoare moved into a friend’s apartment in Pimlico to “cool off.”
After Hoare had made the move, he confronted the magnitude of Diana’s insecurities one evening when his wife was out of town. For Hoare, it was an alarming moment consistent with the experiences of Prince Charles and James Hewitt. “Oliver told Diana he had to see his daughter, who had a fever,” Elsa Bowker recalled. “She suspected he was really going to see his wife, and nothing he said could convince her otherwise. She was very suspicious and mistrustful. They were in the car, and he was taking her home. At one point she was so upset that she opened the door as if to jump out. He pulled her back, and a little while later they were in a traffic jam in Sloane Square. Suddenly Diana did jump out, leaving behind her bag and her money and everything. Oliver was so distraught he never saw his daughter. He drove all over London for three hours and finally found Diana weeping in the park next to Kensington Palace.”
Diana was repeating other destructive patterns from her relationship with Charles. In late 1993, energy healer Simone Simmons concluded that the marks of self-injury she had seen on Diana “had been made essentially to call Hoare’s attention to her … need for him.” Later, Simmons warned Diana that she was “asking for trouble” by continuing with Hoare, and that she couldn’t expect him to leave his family for her. Diana took exception to what Simmons described as her “sharp words of warning,” and stopped calling her for a time.
The anonymous phone calls ceased during Hoare’s two-month absence from home, but they resumed on January 13, 1994, after he returned to his wife. Over the next six days, the police tracked a dozen silent calls ranging from before 8:00 A.M. to nearly midnight. To the astonishment of the police and the Hoares, all the calls originated from four lines, three in Kensington Palace (as the police report described them, “rented by the Office of HRH Prince of Wales”) along with Diana’s mobile telephone. “Mr. Hoare believes that the calls are being made by Princess Diana,” noted the police report. When Hoare told police he wanted to call Diana, they advised instead that he wait for the next silent call and then “ask her by calling her first name.” According to a later account of the episode, Hoare took the advice, and when Diana heard her name, she began crying and said, “Yes, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
The phone calls stopped for several days but then started up again. This time they were traced to phone booths in Kensington and Notting Hill, both neighborhoods in the vicinity of Kensington Palace, as well as Sarah McCorquodale’s home. Scotland Yard alerted the head of the Royalty Protection Squad, who called a top official in the government. He in turn spoke to a senior official at the Palace who transmitted a message to Diana’s office: The phone calls had to stop because the police were involved, and prosecution under nuisance call laws was being considered. At that point, the calls ended.
Hoare’s relationship with Diana weathered the incident, and they became even more visible around London. In December 1993, a reporter for Today had already seen them sitting together in her car for nearly an hour, “her head rested trustingly on Mr. Hoare’s shoulder.” They were also spotted having breakfast together at 7:00 A.M. at the Chelsea Harbour Club where Diana worked out each day—“enough to start speculation about their relationship,” noted the Telegraph Magazine. When photographers finally caught them in March 1994 driving into Kensington Palace, reports appeared in the next day’s tabloids about their evening out with Beatrice Flecha de Lima at a Chinese restaurant. “The Princess has been a regular visitor” to Hoare’s art gallery, reported Today, adding, “she has tearfully poured out her heart to her loyal friend.”
Five months later, on Sunday, August 21, 1994, speculation about the nature of their relationship splashed across the tabloids with the News of the World’s “world exclusive” headlined DI’S CRANKY PHONE CALLS TO MARRIED TYCOON. Over five pages, the tabloid recounted in detail, with times and dates, the results of the police investigation into Hoare’s silent calls the previous January. The story implicitly questioned Diana’s stability and suggested that she and Hoare were having an affair.
Both Hoare and Diana had learned of the impending story on Saturday. They conferred by telephone, and Diana asked Richard Kay for help. Kay spoke to Clive Goodman, the royal reporter for the News of the World, telling him that the phone calls had probably been made by “some very loyal, and perhaps misguided people working for her, [who] took the matter into their own hands.” Diana’s employees were concerned, according to Kay, because Diana had so often been tearful after Hoare’s efforts to broker a reconciliation in her marriage. “Anger can make people do strange things,” Kay told Goodman. In his News of the World story, Goodman attributed Kay’s statements to “a close friend and adviser to Princess Diana,” and in a fascinating effort to
shield Kay’s identity, used the pronoun “she” instead of “he.”
On Saturday afternoon, Diana arranged a clandestine meeting with Kay in London’s Talbot Square. After Diana hopped into Kay’s car, he drove her around for several hours as she “poured out her anger and unhappiness” over the accusations the Sunday tabloid was about to publish. Her intention was to have Kay attribute her comments, as usual, to a “friend” of the Princess of Wales. But when they returned to Talbot Square, two photographers lay in the square’s garden, cameras poised. They had been tipped by someone who had identified Diana’s parked car, and when they saw her with Kay, they clicked off a series of pictures. An elderly man spotted the photographers, shouting to Diana and Kay, “Do you know you’re being photographed?”
Recognizing that he couldn’t use his conventional disguise, Kay told Diana he would have to quote her directly. That Monday’s Daily Mail billed its “unprecedented interview” with the page-one headline WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS? Diana did herself damage by overreacting—“They are trying to make out I was having an affair with this man or had some sort of fatal attraction. It is simply untrue and so unfair”—and telling one transparent lie. When asked whether she had called Hoare from telephone booths in her neighborhood she said, “You can’t be serious. I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”
The Observer pointed out the “neurotic nonsense” of such claims, and The Times observed that this “thoroughly modern princess” had known how to use the “last-number redial button” on her husband’s phone to track his phone calls to Camilla. The Telegraph Magazine recalled a photo taken earlier in the year showing her “hunting for change for a parking meter in Knightsbridge,” and The Sun printed a diagram instructing her how to use a public phone by inserting a shiny coin “with a picture of your mother-in-law on it.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 37