Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  On December 7, four days after her News of the World interview, Diana gave an emotional speech—her first public remarks in two years—at a luncheon hosted by Centrepoint, a charity for the homeless that she supported. She spoke about the plight of “young people who have suffered abuse and have run away from home; young people whose families neither know nor care where they are; young people who have taken far too much upon their shoulders, far too young; young people forced to leave home because of family poverty and overcrowding.”

  In its tone, language, and simplicity, Diana’s speech-making hadn’t advanced much in the two years since her retirement announcement. She still couldn’t manage a speech longer than about ten minutes, and despite extensive coaching, her delivery remained stubbornly awkward. Perhaps because of nerves, Diana took in air when she should have been breathing out, and paused at odd moments. “Her timing was wrong, she sounded false, and it got worse,” said Jane Atkinson, who advised Diana on media relations in 1996. Diana continued to draft most of her own remarks, but the tabloid cadences were no accident. Not only was Richard Kay her principal advocate in the press, he had also started helping her with speeches. As energy healer Simone Simmons explained, “He knew her so well and understood her natural vocabulary and speaking rhythms so acutely that he was able, with her cooperation, to prepare many a public statement.”

  The Centrepoint luncheon caused a furor, but not because of Diana’s remarks or delivery. On the platform with her was Jack Straw, the Labor party’s spokesman for domestic policy, who blistered the Tory government for its homeless policies. Not only was Diana’s presence a tacit endorsement of his position, she conspicuously applauded his remarks. Her actions underscored her political naïveté and embarrassed John Major. “It is almost unprecedented for a senior royal to be linked so closely to such an attack,” noted the Evening Standard.

  By that time, the Queen had already talked to Major and her top advisers about the futility of the Wales marriage in light of Diana’s televised attack on Charles and the royal family. If the Morton book had been the beginning of the end, Panorama was the end: Diana may have won the hearts and minds of the public, but she had irretrievably lost the support of her in-laws. That much was evident when Diana received a stern letter from Princess Margaret criticizing her behavior. According to Simone Simmons, the letter hit Diana hard.

  Neither Charles nor Diana wanted to make the first move and file for divorce, so the Queen took matters into her own hands. On December 12—three years and three days after John Major had announced Charles and Diana’s formal separation—the Queen told her prime minister that she would write to her son and daughter-in-law to request that they agree to an “early divorce … in the best interests of the country.” With Diana’s agreement, Charles could file for an uncontested divorce after a two-year separation. If she refused to go along, they could still be divorced after five years. As one possible inducement to Diana’s agreement, Charles took Major’s suggestion and publicly announced that he would not remarry.

  Diana, meanwhile, had just returned from a triumphant trip to New York, where former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given her the “Humanitarian of the Year Award” at a dinner for 1,000 to benefit the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation. Kissinger had praised her “luminous personality” and called her a “princess in her own right [who] aligned herself with the ill, the suffering and the downtrodden.” In her brief remarks, Diana said being humane required a “sharpness of mind,” “kindness of heart,” and “loving our neighbors as ourselves”; she quoted a two-line verse that concluded, “Just being kind is all the sad world needs.”

  The high-powered Manhattan audience, which included Colin Powell and Rupert Murdoch, gave her a standing ovation “in adoration of its new saint,” wrote Richard Kay in the Daily Mail. It didn’t hurt that the saint looked like a star. Since the night of the Dimbleby documentary, Diana had taken to wearing ever more revealing dresses to major events. So it was on this evening, when dinner guests stared slack-jawed at the plunging neckline on Diana’s clinging black velvet gown. The next day, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun ran a page-one photo aimed down her cleavage, under the headline PRINCESS AND HER BIG PAIR WOW ’EM IN BIG APPLE.

  For all Diana’s public radiance, she was showing signs of unraveling in private. One telling outburst took place at the annual Christmas party that Charles and Diana put on for their staff. Diana approached Alexandra “Tiggy” Legge-Bourke, a thirty-year-old member of Charles’s staff who helped care for William and Harry, and said, “So sorry to hear about your baby,” implying that the unmarried woman had undergone an abortion. The malicious taunt was entirely without foundation, but Legge-Bourke was so shocked she had to be helped to another room, where she broke down and wept.

  For two years, Diana had been nursing a grudge against Legge-Bourke, the daughter of a merchant banker and a Welsh aristocrat who grew up on a 6,000-acre estate in Wales. The Legge-Bourkes had been friendly with the royal family for years; Tiggy’s mother was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne. Charles had known Tiggy since she was six, and he appreciated her enthusiasm for shooting and fishing, which made her an enjoyable companion for the two young princes. She had also briefly run her own nursery school. “She is the closest thing to a lady-in-waiting [Charles] has,” said his private secretary Richard Aylard. Diana only grew resentful whenever she saw photographs in the tabloids of Legge-Bourke with William and Harry.

  The tabloids made mischief with Diana’s jealousy. During 1995, they ran exaggerated stories about a few affectionate pecks Charles gave Legge-Bourke on the cheek, as well as her sudden weight loss and attractive new figure. “The word is that Tiggy is slimming to please Prince Charles,” wrote Richard Kay in July 1995. In fact, Tiggy was suffering from celiac disease, a gluten intolerance that causes severe abdominal pain as well as rapid weight loss. Diana somehow became persuaded that Charles and Legge-Bourke were having an affair, and that she had aborted his baby—none of which was true, but which prompted the Christmas party calumny. Legge-Bourke was so upset by Diana’s remark that she instructed her lawyer to request an apology from the Princess and a withdrawal of her “false allegations.”

  Legge-Bourke’s attorney delivered his letter to Kensington Palace on December 18, the same day Diana received the Queen’s handwritten request for a divorce. While Diana expected Legge-Bourke to seek redress, she was stunned by the Queen’s letter. Diana’s reply to both her mother-in-law and Charles was noncommittal: She would now “consider her options,” she said. On Christmas Eve, Diana had an appointment with her therapist, Susie Orbach, then spent Christmas day alone in Kensington Palace, and visited Orbach again on the twenty-sixth. When Diana retreated the following day to the exclusive K Club on Barbuda in the Caribbean, her companion was neither friend nor relative but her twenty-six-year-old personal assistant Victoria Mendham—another measure of her growing isolation.

  Diana should have foreseen that divorce would be the ultimate consequence of her Panorama interview, but instead she believed the interview would earn her respect and “independence” on her terms while she remained married to Charles. Diana had even consulted with psychics, who assured her that she and Charles would be reunited. “When she had to face the bitter truth from the Queen, Diana fell apart,” energy healer Simone Simmons said. “She couldn’t sleep at night and started taking very strong sleeping pills. She was constantly in tears.”

  As 1996 began, Diana turned her attention to achieving the best possible divorce settlement. She was tense and suspicious, “aggressive and defensive all at once,” said Simone Simmons. Leaving a session with Susie Orbach in early January, Diana collapsed in sobs against her car for a full minute as photographers surrounded her to take pictures. “Is she indeed perilously close to a complete breakdown?” asked columnist John Junor, one of her sharpest critics, in The Mail on Sunday. Two weeks later, she offered her answer at a luncheon in her honor given by the Association of American Correspondents, telling them she was
“very stable.” The following month, Diana sought out Dr. Lily Hua Yu for acupuncture to treat her bulimia and depression. “Diana’s life was in turmoil,” Dr. Hua Yu recalled.

  After the initial exhilaration over Panorama, Diana realized she had lost more than she had gained. As she had done after the Morton book, she began to tell certain friends that she regretted much of what she had said. “She felt it hurt the boys, very much so,” said one of Diana’s close friends. “The Panorama interview left her deeply depressed,” said Daily Telegraph columnist William Deedes, who came to know her in the following year.

  From a practical standpoint, Panorama exposed Diana to even greater press intrusion. “All bets were off, because she had bared her innermost thoughts in the most amazing way,” said Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror. “She had no right to claim privacy after what she had said. You can’t dance with the devil and not expect to be pricked by the horns.” She also opened herself up to satire, especially with her “queen of people’s hearts” comment. Television comedian Rory Bremner did a wicked imitation of her, and when she later appeared on television wearing a surgical mask to watch an open-heart operation, she drew not only harsh criticism from the medical establishment, but derisive laughter from columnists for the image’s ghoulishness.

  As a result of Panorama, Diana lost the support of two loyal, knowledgeable professionals: first her press secretary Geoffrey Crawford, who had been so mortified he had resigned immediately after the interview aired, and then her private secretary Patrick Jephson—nicknamed “my rock” by Diana—who left in January 1996 after eight years of service. His departure coincided with the public disclosure of Diana’s slur against Tiggy Legge-Bourke, which was widely misinterpreted as the precipitating factor; in fact, it was Panorama. Jephson had stayed on after the broadcast because he felt Diana needed him, although he was upset and “diminished” because she had kept him in the dark.

  In January, Jephson told Diana he wanted out. “She was shocked,” said one of Diana’s friends. “She never expected him to leave. They had a big argument and said hurtful things to each other. She trusted Patrick, and he was devoted to her. After Patrick left, she was alone.” One indicator of Diana’s faith in Jephson had been her appointment of him as an executor three years earlier when she made out her will; after his resignation, she replaced him with her sister Sarah.

  Two days after Jephson departed, Diana appointed her new media adviser, Jane Atkinson, who came aboard as a consultant rather than a Palace employee. At forty-eight, Atkinson was a seasoned public relations professional who had worked for clients that included Gillette and Duracell. Atkinson had been “bemused” by Diana in their interview, and considered her a challenge. “She was almost the same as she had been on Panorama,” Atkinson recalled. “She sat with her head cocked, and she was very fey and breathless. She was mostly interested in talking about herself. She told me how she was canny with the media, and she had a strong sense of self-preservation, a sixth sense of what was right for her.”

  Although Atkinson saw room for improvement in Diana’s public speaking, she was impressed by her other skills on the public stage. “If she could have held on to her professionalism in her work, she would have been incredible,” Atkinson said. “She could work a room or a lunch or an audience.” Diana’s unwillingness to study diligently for her appearances remained a problem, however. “Unless you gave her what she wanted, she would not pay attention,” said Atkinson. “She worked to her own agenda whether it was right or wrong. Maybe she couldn’t deal with abstractions or new ideas. Someone as lovely as that, and with a powerful image, you wanted to have the intelligence to go with it. Was she dim and didn’t get things, or was she dealing with so much in her private life that she couldn’t pay attention? I didn’t know. I was dealing with her at a difficult time of her life. In my dismissive moments I would say she was dim, and in my generous moments I would say she was depressed.”

  Atkinson prudently avoided being drawn in too deeply by Diana, speaking to the Princess about professional matters and confining herself to what she needed to know to deal with the press. Atkinson would call Diana each morning to discuss what was in the papers; they generally spoke four or five times more in a day. “I said to her the best thing is not to read the papers,” Atkinson recalled. “I will be your outside ears and decide what to respond to.” Atkinson soon realized that Diana read everything anyway.

  Diana turned out to be a more unusual client than Atkinson could have predicted. “She was quite secretive,” Atkinson said. “She would get advice from someone, but she wouldn’t say from where. She wouldn’t say what a normal person would, which is, ‘I spoke to Alan and his view was this.’ Rather, she would talk to Alan and present what he said as her idea. In my view, this was an insecurity. She felt she couldn’t trust anyone, and she needed to have control.”

  Atkinson viewed her role as guarding Diana’s image during the difficult divorce negotiations for a fair settlement. To that end, Atkinson set up a series of luncheon meetings with newspaper editors, but with Jephson gone and Diana keeping her cards close to the chest, Atkinson was operating in a vacuum. “I thought this was the first time she met a lot of these people,” Atkinson recalled.

  From her original involvement with Morton back in 1991, Diana had been dealing directly with journalists for some five years. She benefited from a lack of distinction between downmarket tabloid reporters and the more prestigious broadsheet journalists, as her impromptu interview with News of the World’s Clive Goodman had shown. Beyond her early appreciation of the Daily Mail’s ability to reach “Middle England” as well as her aristocratic friends, Diana now grasped the importance of the red top tabloids for getting the word out to her “public.” “She was keen to keep the Sun and Mirror at bay,” recalled Mirror editor Piers Morgan. “She knew twenty million people read those two papers every day. If she wanted to appeal to the masses she needed a level of tolerance from the red tops.”

  The Sun and the Mirror covered Diana in sensational fashion. Originally, both papers had been on her side, but The Sun had become critical, so Diana arranged a lunch with its editor Stuart Higgins. Diana let Higgins know that “she considered the Sun readers her friends that she could reach out to.” At the same time, Diana gave Higgins personal background information. “It was understood that things you had been told would come back in some way,” said Higgins, “but not as harmfully as if they were in the newspaper the next day.”

  Aside from the Daily Mail, the Mirror had been the most consistently sympathetic to Diana, so she was eager to solidify a relationship with editor Piers Morgan, who at age thirty was four years younger than she. When Morgan arrived at Kensington Palace in early 1996, he found Prince William at the table with Diana and Atkinson. Diana “was keen to know what I thought of [her son],” Morgan said. “She was thinking that I was a young editor and might well be covering William when he was beginning to get the sharp end of press attention.” Morgan could see that Diana’s relationship with William “was extremely close, not unnaturally, but he knew everything about her life, which was surprising.” Morgan got along with Diana, he later said, because he “treated her less than reverentially, and she liked it.”

  Diana was less successful with the editors of the midmarket Daily Express and Sunday Express. Richard Addis of the Daily Express was the sort of man who might have intimidated her—a Cambridge graduate with supreme confidence. Addis felt that she “manipulated through her looks and the way she talked.” Still, he confessed to admiring how she “talked directly and bravely to me. She had the courage of a cornered rabbit.” He was perplexed when Diana invited him several more times to Kensington Palace for coffee. Each time, she reeled off a list of statements about her in his newspaper that she claimed were untrue. “Her manner would be on the verge of bursting into tears and getting nasty at the same time,” Addis recalled. Once, when Diana’s assistant Victoria Mendham phoned to complain, Addis replied that Diana was just a “whinger”
—a chronic complainer. “I am not a whinger,” said Diana, who had been silently listening on another extension.

  Sue Douglas, the former Sunday Times deputy who had become editor of the Sunday Express, was the only woman among the editors invited to Kensington Palace. “For me it was a difficult conversation,” Douglas said. “If you were male, she would be flirty and interested, but being female made it difficult. It was hard work.” In the end, Douglas was unmoved by Diana’s lament: “She talked a lot of crap about being the princess in the gilded cage, how she couldn’t go out because the Charles camp made it so difficult for her. But then she would contradict herself and talk about having been to the theater or having taken a walk around Kensington. She had a clear notion of being a tragic heroine, but she was inconsistent.”

  Diana was so determined to shape her coverage that she even agreed to meet journalists in groups—the sort of encounters with clever people that so often filled her with terror. During a luncheon at the Evening Standard, the novelist and columnist A. N. Wilson told Diana about a picture he had seen of a royal from an earlier century wearing only his underwear. As the rest of the group wondered if Wilson had offended her, she smiled and said, “Did it turn you on, Mr. Wilson?,” prompting what columnist Peter McKay described as a “great roar of laughter.”

  Diana worked on the press in an ad hoc way as well. Taki Theodoracopulos, the “High Life” columnist for The Spectator, had written harshly about Diana before they met at a party given by Jimmy and Annabel Goldsmith in 1995. “ ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ ” Diana asked. “I was drunk and said, ‘All I know is I’m mad about you,’ ” Taki recalled. “She turned me like that.” Taki wrote glowingly about her, and beginning in 1996, invited her to dinner parties with other journalists.