Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Bashir also benefited from the consequences of a News of the World report in early August that Diana was having “secret trysts” with English rugby captain Will Carling at Kensington Palace. The source of this information was Carling’s former personal assistant Hilary Ryan, who had no evidence of any intimacy between Diana and Carling, but said, “he’s been running around after her like a puppy.”

  The implication was that Diana had another affair with a married man. “I have done nothing wrong,” Diana said. “We were never alone together.” But comments by Carling and his wife, Julia, to several tabloids undercut her denial. Julia said that her marriage was strong, “however much someone is trying to destroy what you have.” She added: “This has happened to [Diana] before, and you hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does.” Will Carling publicly pledged not to see Diana again and said, “It was flattering that the Princess of Wales was interested in me—and that is probably where I made my mistake.” Admitting he had hurt Julia, he said, “That is unforgivable.”

  On September 24, the News of the World asserted that Diana and Carling were still seeing each other. The evidence was trumped-up—a visit Carling made to Kensington Palace to deliver rugby shirts for William and Harry when Diana wasn’t even at home, and a chance encounter in a London health club. But less than a week later, the Carlings announced their separation, and once again, Julia pointed the finger at Diana, saying, “Recent pressure and tensions have produced this situation.… It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control.”

  The press lambasted Diana. Today asked, “Is Will Carling merely another trophy for a bored, manipulative and selfish princess?” The Sun called her a “homewrecker,” and the Daily Express wondered, “Is no marriage and no man safe from the wife of the heir to the throne?”

  Several years after the fact, Carling said in his memoir, My Autobiography, that Diana had started their friendship by inviting him for coffee at the Harbour Club, then regaling him with gossip about famous people: “She said she found President Bill Clinton impressive in private, but she considered Hillary, his wife, to be overambitious.” “Out of the blue” in mid-1995, Carling said, “she asked me about my marriage to Julia,” and he confessed he was unhappy. “Her remark broke the ice.… That was her gift: Inoffensively and humorously, she had shown her concern.” While Carling admitted he had been “very attracted to [Diana],” he said, “I never made a pass at her,” which left open the possibility that Diana had taken the initiative as she had with Hewitt. Carling deepened the ambiguity by adding, “If I had a sexual relationship with her, I wouldn’t say I had.”

  Diana insisted to close friends that she did not have a physical relationship with Carling. “She always denied an affair,” said one friend. “I believed her because she admitted to others.” Clearly Diana didn’t have the same strong attachment for Carling she had felt for Hewitt and Hoare. “She made a lot of jokes about Carling,” recalled a friend who spoke to Diana frequently at the time. “She would answer the phone, ‘Mrs. Carling.’ But then she realized it was getting out of control.” Within weeks of the first tabloid disclosure, Diana had dropped Carling “like a hot brick,” in the words of Today. Afterward, Diana gave no sign of missing him.

  The Carling scandal reinforced Diana’s desire to show herself in a good light on television. Toward the end of October, Diana and Martin Bashir had agreed on an interview plan—ironically enough, only days after public relations adviser Gordon Reece gave a dinner party to introduce her to Lord Wakeham, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. Diana told Wakeham that she favored a privacy law to protect people from media intrusions, even as she was secretly plotting her own invasion of the royal family’s privacy.

  Diana and Bashir agreed to tape on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, a national holiday when her staff would be away from Kensington Palace. The program was scheduled to air November 20—the forty-eighth wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip. For Diana’s purpose—to demonstrate her strength and her independence—the timing seemed perfect. She even had an idealized new image to show the world, her first Harper’s Bazaar cover. The magazine’s editor, Liz Tilberis, said she had originally been unaware that Diana had arranged the cover to coincide with Panorama, but then realized that Diana “knew exactly what she was doing.” Indeed, the shoot with Diana’s favorite photographer, Patrick Demarchelier, was on October 13, far along in Diana’s scheme with Bashir. Diana had planned another symbolic event two days after the airdate: her arrival in Argentina for a four-day “working visit.”

  Diana told neither her close aides nor her close friends about the interview; no one in her family knew, either, not even Charles Spencer. She did consult her psychic Rita Rogers, however. “I supported her choice,” Rogers later said. On November 5, Diana opened the door at Kensington Palace herself, further proof of the project’s secrecy. The four-man crew took two hours to set up and spent three hours filming the interview, which was edited down to fifty-five minutes.

  “Diana was a very unusual interviewee,” one of the BBC filmmakers told the Sunday Express. “She was behaving like she was an extra producer.” Diana insisted to one close friend that she had not rehearsed, although she said she had known all the questions in advance. But according to Barbara Walters, who discussed the interview with Diana after ABC paid $642,000 for the U.S. broadcast rights, “Panorama was very well planned. All the questions were submitted in advance, and she rehearsed. I thought it was a superb performance.”

  Signs of her preparation were evident in contrived lines such as “three of us in the marriage” and her unattributed quotation of a passage from An Evil Cradling, a book by Brian Keenan, a former hostage: “There’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.”

  At one point during the interview, a member of the BBC crew joked, “It’s a different kind of birthday present for Charles,” to which Diana replied, “That is exactly when I want you to announce it in public.” On the morning of November 14, Charles’s forty-seventh birthday, just after she opened a new patient center at Broadmoor, Diana called a senior Buckingham Palace official to inform him of the interview.

  The royal family was stunned that Diana would conduct a television interview behind the back of the Queen and her top advisers. Since they still didn’t know the full extent of her cooperation with Andrew Morton, this was her first overt breach of trust, and the royal family viewed her actions as unforgivable.

  In the days before the November 20 broadcast, Diana tried to reassure various friends, telling them over and over, “You will be proud of me,” and “There is nothing controversial.” Palace officials noted Diana’s apparent sincerity. As Richard Kay explained to his Mail readers, Diana believed the film would “counter hostile media portrayals of her by showing a patient, rational woman.” She defended her secrecy by telling Kay, “If the Queen knew, then the Palace would know and … the program’s very idea would have been crushed.”

  The interview was more devastating than anyone imagined. Before an audience of 15 million in Britain and many millions more around the world, Diana discussed the misery of her marriage, excruciating details of her bulimia, Charles’s infidelity with Camilla, her doubts about his fitness to be king, and her adultery with James Hewitt. She confirmed the legitimacy of the Squidgy tape, although she went out of her way to deny adultery with James Gilbey. While she admitted she had allowed her friends to talk to Andrew Morton, she denied giving him any “personal help,” saying “I never met him.” She specified that she did not want a divorce, and she emphasized her wish to be “a queen of people’s hearts” and an ambassador for Britain who would “give affection” and “help other people in distress.” She used the word “strong” to characterize herself four times, and she defiantly proclaimed, “She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem. I’ll fight to the end.” When Bashir asked if Diana would rather see William succeed the Queen than Charles, s
he said simply, “My wish is that my husband finds peace of mind, and from that follows other things.”

  Diana spoke calmly, but she looked haunted, her eyes rimmed with dark makeup. People who knew her were thunderstruck. One friend was mystified by Diana’s “psychobabble.” “When I heard her talking, it wasn’t Diana talking,” he said. He also considered it “her suicide note: brilliant and terrifying.” Rosa Monckton, one of Diana’s closest friends, later wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that Panorama “was born of some basic desire to hurt those whom she felt had betrayed her…. It was Diana at her worst.”

  Most of her friends interpreted her comments about Hewitt as pure revenge against Charles. “I said, ‘You said you adored Hewitt. How could you say that so openly?’ ” recalled Diana’s friend Elsa Bowker. “She said, ‘I have to vindicate myself.’ ” According to another friend of Diana’s, “She said she loved Hewitt because she thought love would make things seem better.” Yet another friend said that Diana made the comment about Hewitt “only to annoy Oliver Hoare.”

  The only member of Charles’s set to speak out was Nicholas Soames, who said on television after the broadcast that Diana showed “the advanced stages of paranoia.” He also characterized parts of the interview as “toe-curlingly dreadful.” Since Soames was Minister of Defense in the Conservative government, Downing Street hastily pointed out that he was speaking “in a personal capacity”; Soames then retreated from his harshness, saying he was “not questioning the Princess of Wales’s state of mind.”

  Press reaction was nearly as forceful. Even Richard Kay was moved to write, “Everywhere was the stench of revenge. She laid waste her husband and her love rival with the skill of a woman betrayed.” Andrew Neil said in the Daily Mail that Diana “must now expect the wrath of the Establishment to come down on her head.” Paul Johnson sprang to her defense in the same newspaper, declaring that “manipulative she may be, but she is in no way nuts.” But The Daily Telegraph’s venerable columnist William Deedes wrote that “some part of her performance appeared to confirm … her reputation for being unstable.… virtually the entire programme was devoted to her analysis of a broken marriage. It was not so much an interview as an inquest.” Pondering her statement that she would “not go quietly,” Deedes wondered, “How in the world could she believe that expressing herself in that way would enhance her stature?”

  The public reacted quite differently. Three-quarters of the respondents in a Gallup survey said she was right to appear on television, and forty-six percent had a better opinion of Diana than before. Eighty-five percent believed she should be given an ambassadorial role for Britain. Only fourteen percent saw revenge as her motive, while seventy-seven percent thought she just wanted to present her side of the story. Eighty-four percent regarded her as truthful, seventy-four percent found her strong, nearly a third found her manipulative, and a quarter thought she was unstable. Diana’s comments about Charles did him significant damage. In the summer of 1993, only thirty-three percent of Gallup respondents considered him unfit to be king, but after Panorama, that number had risen to forty-six percent.

  Diana was jubilant over her popular support. Richard Kay reported that she had “no regrets” over “any element” of the interview, and that she believed she had “finally won the independence she has craved.” As the interview was broadcast, Diana appeared at a glamorous fund-raising gala for cancer research looking “radiant and unfazed,” in the words of one guest. Yet all was not right with Diana. The next morning, she went to her colonic irrigation clinic, where she spent two hours having her bowels purged.

  When Martin Bashir asked Diana why she decided to speak out on television, she gave her most revealing—and disturbing—answer. She said she was concerned that the public perception of her had become “very confusing” and “turbulent,” and she feared that “many people doubt me.… I want to reassure all those people who have loved me and supported me throughout the last fifteen years that I’ve never let them down.… The man on the street, yup, because that’s what matters to me more than anything else.” This connection strengthened when Diana received 6,000 letters from “desperately unhappy” women in the first week after the TV broadcast. “I’m overwhelmed by their response,” Diana said. “I’m trying to respond to or meet as many as I can.”

  She had crossed a line. Diana Spencer was long gone, and so was the traditional royal princess. Diana had been carried away by her celebrity. She couldn’t sustain relationships with friends or lovers, and her sons were pushing toward adolescence and its accompanying separation. Like an aging, isolated Hollywood star, she sought the love of an amorphous “public,” and no one around her seemed capable of restraining her growing need for popular adulation. Not only did Diana believe in her celebrity, she had grown accustomed to using it, as both a weapon and a palliative.

  By describing herself in Panorama as the “queen of people’s hearts,” Diana didn’t know quite what she meant beyond providing love to people in need: the ultimate global nurturer. In a sense, she was assuming her traditional childhood role—first comforting her father and brother, then other children. She had intended to take care of Prince Charles as well, but her instability had prevented her from carrying that out. She had immediately been thrown into motherhood, which brought her great satisfaction, but it wasn’t enough. So she had taken to ministering to the sick and needy, first in Britain, then throughout the world.

  Diana’s preoccupation with celebrity meant she would not have a moment’s peace. Had she decided to spend every day toiling in a shelter or hospice in East London—much as the disgraced politician John Profumo had done for decades—the photographers and reporters would have quickly disappeared. But Diana needed to alight, spread her magic, and move on. The magic might have withered if she had shed her glamorous mystique to pursue a life of quiet dedication. She also would have lost the ability to see her reflection each day in the press. The camera was kinder than the mirror.

  Chapter 22

  Diana swept into Argentina in an ebullient mood. “If she had regretted Panorama she never would show it in front of her friends,” said Roberto Devorik, her Argentine friend who accompanied her on the trip. “She was quite confident in what she had done at that stage. She called London several times, so she was aware of the uproar.”

  The decision to visit Argentina had its origins in her friendship with Devorik. The idea had emerged the previous May during a luncheon at Devorik’s London home with Rogelio Pfirter, the Argentine ambassador. “She wanted to meet my family and friends, and she was interested in seeing the country,” Devorik said. “Her goal was to be an ambassador for the world, so she decided to see the state of charities in Argentina.”

  Pfirter relayed Diana’s words to Argentine president Carlos Menem. Relations between Britain and Argentina had ruptured thirteen years earlier when they went to war over the Falkland Islands. Argentina’s resounding defeat led to the end of military rule and restoration of democracy in 1983, and since then, Argentina had worked to rebuild its relations with Britain. The prospect of a high-profile royal visitor gave Carlos Menem a chance to smooth out the Anglo-Argentine relationship before he made an official visit to Britain. The Argentine government found a suitable charity, the Association for the Prevention of Infantile Paralysis, to issue an invitation to Diana and give her visit a plausible pretext.

  Although Diana’s schedule focused on hospital and clinic visits, the British Foreign Office worried that Menem would exploit her presence or that she would misspeak and spark a diplomatic incident. No crisis materialized, primarily because Diana kept quiet. But the Panorama interview overshadowed her efforts to be taken seriously as an ambassador when she was greeted with Argentine tabloid headlines such as THE ADULTERESS DI ARRIVES ON A MISSION OF CHARITY and LADIES LOOK AFTER YOUR HUSBANDS: THE SEDUCER LADY DI ARRIVES TODAY. Diana seemed unconcerned about her notoriety as she made her way around Buenos Aires, and in the end, Menem was able to score political points when he entertained
Diana at lunch and said, “Argentina has gradually regained a position in the world it had lost.”

  Back home, the Queen initially responded to Panorama by sending conciliatory signals when Diana returned from Argentina. Buckingham Palace advisers met with Diana to discuss her future role and asked for a written description of her ambitions that they could submit to the Queen. But diplomats and politicians remained skeptical that Diana could handle tricky questions of protocol, much less articulate complicated government policies. While Prime Minister John Major said that as mother of the heir to the throne Diana should have a “dignified” and “worthwhile” public position, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind specifically ruled out a formal ambassadorial role.

  Diana soon reinforced these misgivings. Ten days after her television appearance, a photographer from the News of the World caught her outside Royal Brompton Hospital after midnight. Instead of fleeing, she posed for pictures and then impulsively gave a twenty-minute interview to Clive Goodman, the newspaper’s royal reporter, on the photographer’s mobile phone. She explained to Goodman that she was a regular midnight visitor to the hospital, spending sometimes four hours a night comforting terminally ill patients, often three times a week. “I try to be there for them,” Diana said. “I seem to draw strength from them. They all need someone. I hold their hands, talk to them, whatever helps.”

  Making the midnight interview all the stranger was the fact that only hours earlier she had met with the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, and the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, to discuss her press relations. “She again demonstrated her willingness to abandon protocol and infuriate Buckingham Palace,” the Evening Standard declared. The interview “has led to fears that the Princess could not be relied on to exercise wise judgment in a politically sensitive situation and should remain on a tighter rein.” Her actions, the newspaper added, smacked of a “personal publicity campaign.”