Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  The tabloids condemned Hewitt with every imaginable pejorative they could stuff into two-inch-high headlines: TRAITOR (the Daily Express), LOVE RAT and CAD (The Sun), BRITAIN’S BIGGEST BOUNDER (the Daily Mail). “He is a revolting creep,” the Mirror editorialized. “Horse-whipping would be too good for him.” Yet the tabloids slavered over Pasternak’s prose, reprinting extensive excerpts. The Daily Mirror ran five pages, and The Sun seventeen, including an “Eight-Page Special on the Book That Betrayed Diana,” with such stories as “They Did It at Althorp”; “They Did It in the Bathroom”; “She Begged to Do It on Dartmoor”; and “Page-by-Page Guide to the Juiciest Bits.” With no evident irony, The Sun explained its coverage with, “Our distaste at Hewitt’s hustling is tempered by concern for Diana’s well-being. That is why we print his story at length. The truth may be painful and unpleasant, but closing our eyes to it helps no one.” For good measure, The Sun went on to indict the royal family for failing to provide Diana with a “shoulder of theirs to cry on.”

  Princess in Love profoundly embarrassed Diana, Charles, and the entire royal family. Buckingham Palace dismissed it as “grubby and worthless,” and Diana’s lawyer Lord Mishcon called it “wretched,” but the Palace refrained from challenging the book’s claims. Significantly, Diana did not step forward with a public denial. Instead, she resorted to her habit of letting “friends” speak for her. Richard Kay dutifully reported that she was “bitterly hurt” by Hewitt’s “invasion of her private life,” and “despite the flowery descriptive passages … Diana firmly maintains that she and Hewitt were never lovers.” In the Daily Express, a “friend” described the book as the product of Hewitt’s “fevered imagination.”

  Barely a year later, Diana contradicted these disavowals by admitting on Panorama that her relationship with Hewitt had indeed been adulterous. She also said Hewitt had assured her ten days before publication that “there was nothing to worry about,” and that when the book arrived, “the first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children, and William produced a box of chocolates and said, ‘Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt. These are to make you smile again.’ ”

  Diana had still more explaining to do when excerpts from Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Charles appeared in The Sunday Times on October 16, 1994. Charles had told Diana what to expect in the book, which on the whole was restrained and sober. Dimbleby described Diana’s bulimia and mercurial behavior by way of explaining the marriage’s breakdown, but Charles offered no negative judgments of his wife, directly or indirectly. One rigid ground rule for the project had been Dimbleby’s pledge to exclude anything critical of Diana.

  It was the News of the World’s headline, CHARLES: I’VE NEVER LOVED DIANA, that wounded Diana. Charles had said no such thing to Dimbleby, who wrote guardedly about the Prince’s feelings for Diana: He found her “lovable” and “warmhearted” and “was sure he could fall in love with her.” Dimbleby also acknowledged that Charles had proposed under pressure from the media and his father and had approached his marriage feeling uneasy about Diana’s shifting moods. Dimbleby emphasized that even as the marriage was collapsing, Charles tried to make the relationship work, and when Diana remained inconsolable, he would “insist he was to blame, that if it were not for him she would not be in such a state of misery…. It was too much to expect anyone to be the wife of the heir to the throne.”

  The day after the Sunday Times excerpt, Diana went to see William at Ludgrove. When William asked why the marriage had broken up, she recalled telling him, “Well, there were three of us in the marriage, and the pressure of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult. But although I still loved Papa, I couldn’t live under the same roof as him, and likewise with him.” By blaming Charles, Diana seemed unlikely to reassure her twelve-year-old son, but she insisted that she had “put it in gently, without resentment or any anger.”

  Diana was indeed angry about what she saw as a “picture portrayed in the book … of a wife who was both unreasonable and unstable.” Perhaps more than the television interview, Diana viewed the book as a “revenge attack.” Of course, Diana herself had graphically described her eating disorders, depressions, and self-injury to Morton, but she was upset by Dimbleby’s portrait of her volatile behavior. “She feels the furor over the biography has wrecked her chances of building a new private life,” reported The Sun.

  Andrew Morton’s sequel, which appeared on the heels of Dimbleby’s book, seemed almost anticlimactic. AS early as August, Diana had distanced herself from the project, saying that she “had not had any contact with Morton for more than three years.” Left unmentioned was her friend James Colthurst’s continuing role as a middleman for Morton. When the book came out in November, she dismissed it as a “mishmash of tedious secondhand gossip assembled by Morton for his own benefit.” No wonder, since The Times characterized the sequel’s portrait of Diana as “bitter, jealous, and lonely … obsessed with … alternative therapies … and increasingly isolated.”

  The sequel sparked a run of tabloid stories on Morton’s most sensational assertions: another self-mutilation—a gruesome account of Diana slashing her arms while traveling on the Queen’s airplane and smearing her blood on the seats and walls—and her use of Prozac, which he said had controlled her bulimia. In fact, Diana’s experiment with Prozac had been short-lived, and the bulimia symptoms persisted. After publication, James Colthurst’s status as an “unpaid adviser” to Diana came to an end.

  Nearly a year after Diana’s “retirement,” some of the British press were taking a more jaundiced view of her than they had before. Even die-hard supporters such as The Sun had begun to carp, with headlines like TWO FACES OF TORMENTED DI, over a story about her “Jekyll and Hyde” personality. In its April 1994 issue, Tatler magazine had pronounced her wardrobe “dead common,” and other publications had begun to mock her, even when she showed signs of emotional fragility. “She has been given of late to frequent bouts of weeping: the Princess of Wails,” wrote The Observer.

  Until she became tangled in her own evasions and deceptions with the Hoare and Hewitt stories, Diana’s principal sin had been snubbing and sometimes snarling at photographers, who had grown more aggressive after she dropped her security detail early in 1994 along with her schedule of royal obligations. Once she was on her own, she became unpredictable with the royal hacks as well. “She was schizophrenic, which caused problems,” said Robert Hardman of The Daily Telegraph. “People didn’t know where the goalposts were. One minute she was jokey, then she made anguished pleas for privacy. You didn’t know if she did, if she didn’t, if she was pretending or what.”

  When Diana’s coverage started turning sour, she began a methodical campaign to get the press back on her side, working from the top down. She dined regularly with newspaper proprietors such as Lord Rothermere of the Mail and his top lieutenant David English, Telegraph owner Conrad Black, and News International’s Rupert Murdoch. Most of the time, Diana didn’t tell Buckingham Palace officials about these get-togethers with owners and editors until the last minute, or after the fact.

  She continued to feed information to Richard Kay, but she began establishing contacts with other reporters and editors who might be useful to her. One was Anthony Holden, Kay’s colleague at the Daily Mail, who intrigued Diana because he was a critical biographer of Charles as well as an outspoken republican. Since the Morton book, Holden had written especially supportive articles about Diana for the Daily Mail and other publications. “I got a call from a mutual friend, a male, saying ‘come to San Lorenzo at twelve-forty,’ ” Holden recalled. “The table next to mine was the only one with flowers, and pretty soon in came Diana with the boys and their nanny.” AS she did with Kay, Diana suggested that Holden join her. “This was the first in a series of lunches in public places,” Holden said. “There was always subterfuge, and always, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you.’ ” Her off-the-record remarks “informed the stuff I wrote,” Holden said.

  At h
er friend Peter Palumbo’s suggestion, Diana also consulted with Andrew Neil, whose Sunday Times had published the original Morton excerpts in 1992. They met in February 1994 during a luncheon at Palumbo’s country house. Palumbo had asked Neil to help give Diana some direction. “She wanted me to touch base,” Neil recalled, “and Peter was worried about her, almost to the extent he was afraid he would wake up and find she had killed herself. He never quite voiced that, but I would say it, and he would nod grimly and never dissent. Peter said to me, ‘How can we help this woman get a more normal life and not spend all her time working out,’ which was an indication of a bulimic personality.”

  Neil found Diana changed from their meeting a decade earlier when Charles had dominated the conversation. “She was talking about the royal family with a bitter sense of humor,” Neil said. “What surprised me was that despite her limited brainpower and lack of education, she had developed street smarts. She was talking about the future of the royal family, and she was making sense.” Neil tried to impress on her that she should find a full-time job. “You need to get up and get out and do something and then come home,” Neil said, but he suspected she wasn’t interested.

  Diana felt she should reach writers she considered unfriendly as well. “She wanted to win them over,” Richard Kay said. “Her line was, ‘These people write about me but they don’t know me. Maybe if they knew me they wouldn’t write those things.’ I thought it was a dangerous strategy.”

  Still, she made some impressive conversions, especially among men of a certain age. She won over the crotchety Daily Telegraph columnist Auberon Waugh during a lunch at Kensington Palace. “I’ve been walking on air ever since,” he declared. She further endeared herself to Waugh when she read a self-deprecating limerick at his annual Literary Review lunch, after apologizing for being a “notorious illiterate” who “made time between therapy sessions and secret trysts” to compose her verse. Waugh henceforth “took Diana’s side unreservedly because he fancied her,” said Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye. “That is the crude explanation. But he was touched.”

  Max Hastings, editor of The Daily Telegraph until 1995, when he moved to the Evening Standard, offered an especially daunting challenge to Diana. The Telegraph had taken a pro-Charles line, and Hastings himself had a number of friends in the Prince’s sporting set. Physically imposing at six foot five, Hastings had become a Fleet Street legend for his derring-do in covering eleven wars, including India-Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Falklands. Diana decided in 1995 to approach Hastings through a good friend who was his neighbor. “Come to dinner Friday night in the country,” the friend said to Hastings. “Diana wants to see you.” While his host and hostess sat in the corner, “Diana talked her game,” Hastings recalled. Like Andrew Neil, Hastings saw “a bitter woman speaking, but she was witty, and it was skillfully done. She had my undivided attention.”

  Diana appealed to journalists in part because she dealt with them on a human level. She was scrupulous about thanking them for favors, and made thoughtful gestures—such as the letter she wrote to Richard Kay’s mother after his father died, followed by tickets to the ballet. Prince Charles, on the other hand, could sail through a long meeting with a journalist without inquiring about his children or even his sporting interests. “The Prince felt too ill at ease with anyone in the media to play the game as she did,” Hastings said. “She asked the right questions, took an interest in your affairs. I would lap up Diana, who knew how to make people feel good.”

  “She was the kind of person you could feel on intimate terms with quickly,” said columnist and historian Paul Johnson, another prickly character who came to lunch at Kensington Palace and was enchanted by Diana. Johnson hadn’t been one of her consistent fans, but he took an even more jaundiced view of Charles, which interested Diana. Johnson produced several memos advising her about the press. “Don’t think you can manipulate them, because they will manipulate you,” he told her. “Don’t tell them a confidence because down the line they will break it.” Conceded Johnson, “She didn’t listen to me.”

  Diana’s ability to ingratiate involved what TV talk-show host Clive James described as a “tacit bargain”: “You tell me what you don’t tell anyone else, and I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else, and then neither of us can tell anyone else what we said.… I suppose it was a mind game. There must have been dozens of people that she played it with.… She would make each of her platonic cavaliers believe, or at any rate want to believe, that he was the only one.”

  Diana began to take pride in her techniques of influencing coverage. During a luncheon at the Goldsmiths’, she described one ploy to journalist and historian Andrew Roberts. Although he was a Diana skeptic, he couldn’t help admiring her “native cunning about the press.” He recalled, “She said one good way of scotching a rumor about to come out is to tell a slightly different version of the same story to the opposition. So if the Express was coming out with something, she would call Richard Kay and give him a version with the facts altered, not necessarily honestly, so neither newspaper would know what the truth was. The real story would slip through the cracks. That was very clever, and she did it repeatedly.”

  Sometimes Diana went too far and her efforts backfired. In May 1994, representatives of a displeased Prince of Wales told the press (including Kay at the Daily Mail) about Diana’s extravagant annual expenditure of £160,000 ($250,000) for “grooming,” which included some £91,330 ($150,000) for clothing, £9,350 ($15,000) for hairdressing, and £7,306 ($12,000) for alternative therapies. That day, Diana had a previously scheduled lunch with Peter Stothard, editor of The Times, as part of her outreach campaign. The moment they sat down, Diana began venting about the coverage. “My husband said it at a dinner party last week, where it got to Ross Benson and to Nigel Dempster, and now there’s all this stuff,” she told Stothard, who later wrote, “To my horror, she began to set out a complicated story about how she had helped a tramp who had fallen into Regent’s Park Canal.”

  Puzzled by her account, Stothard failed to take the bait. Later that afternoon, Diana’s chauffeur called Richard Kay with the story of the rescue. The next day’s Daily Mail ran Kay’s page-one feature under the headline DIANA RESCUES DROWNING MAN, which goaded other papers to knock down its inflated claims of Diana’s heroism. Kay later insisted that he trusted Diana’s chauffeur and that Diana “played a role and got her feet wet,” although he acknowledged that the headline was a stretch.

  Richard Kay’s role as Diana’s Boswell became public knowledge in early May. Diana had just returned from a weekend holiday in Spain with her friends Kate Menzies and Catherine Soames. They had been besieged by paparazzi, one of whom took five pictures of Diana sunbathing topless and put them on sale for £1 million (more than $1.5 million). Back in London, Diana contacted Kay, who interviewed her in her car behind Harrods.

  The next day, quoting a “friend,” Kay reported in the Daily Mail that Diana considered the paparazzi invasion of her privacy “like a rape.” Unknown to either Kay or Diana, a photographer had snapped them conferring in her Audi and sold the picture to The Sun, which ran its second headline about the “two faces” of Diana. The Sun blasted Diana for her “hypocrisy and double standards … supposedly speaking through a ‘friend,’ ” and for sunbathing topless, adding, “You can’t marry a prince and then expect to live like a typist.”

  Diana’s favoritism with Kay often worked against her in unexpected ways. “She didn’t understand what happens when you give an exclusive story,” explained Kay’s Daily Mail colleague Peter McKay. “This causes the others to rip the exclusive story apart. This is partly rage that someone has been given something exclusive, and also you have to take a different view. Diana never understood that she caused envy and hatred at the other papers if she was cooperating with one.”

  According to Richard Kay, Diana “hated” being described as “manipulative,” as she often was in later years. In her view, manipulation was management by anothe
r name, and she had a right to do whatever it took to shape her coverage. “It was manipulation,” said Clive James, “but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling the strings?”

  Chapter 21

  No matter how much the tabloids criticized Diana’s private life, they kept pressing her to take on a larger public role. “It was always push push push,” said Jane Atkinson, an adviser on press relations toward the end of Diana’s life. “The media always wanted to know, ‘What did she mean by wanting to be an ambassador?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see she doesn’t know?’ ”

  In her “retirement” speech, Diana had promised that after several months she would articulate “a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life.” In 1994, she sharply reduced her official duties, turning up at only ten royal events compared with 198 the year before. But in 1995, she was back on the royal calendar, appearing at 127 official engagements, ensuring that she would be on display for photographers and reporters roughly two times a week.

  Whatever her official schedule, Diana had achieved a level of celebrity that kept her constantly in the public eye. The quotidian events of her life—going to her health club, meeting friends for lunch, taking a vacation—would turn up in one newspaper or another, often on page one. While she professed dismay at the press coverage, Diana was also drawn to it. In the space of eighteen months, she appeared on the cover of both British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and cooperated with two television documentaries. In the first of these programs, in March 1994, about a shelter for battered women, Diana participated in a group therapy session and made a tantalizing reference to her inability to come up with “something positive” she had done the previous week: “If you’d asked … what the negative aspects of the week had been, you would have been flooded.” Throughout the two years after announcing her “retirement,” Diana also took frequent trips, often on the spur of the moment. Her most common destination was the United States, which she visited more than a half-dozen times, mostly to see her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima.