Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  One guest at those dinners was Charles Moore, editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose cerebral manner and sympathy for Charles unnerved Diana. In the aftermath of Panorama, Moore tried to impress on Diana that the Telegraph couldn’t look favorably on her unless she affirmed Charles’s fitness to be king. Instead, Diana insisted that Charles didn’t want to rule, saying, “He wants to live in Italy and look at beautiful things”—a refrain she repeated to a number of journalists. “She was careful not to say, ‘I don’t want him to be king,’ ” Moore said, “but it was difficult to see what else it could be other than revenge, and it was linked to her promotion of Prince William to be king.”

  Diana achieved mixed results in her continuing campaign to win over the press. “She gave us more information, and we understood her thoughts, but our coverage didn’t change in the sense that she offered a revelation that made us see her differently,” Moore said. For her part, Diana persisted in complaining about her coverage. “She couldn’t understand when we ran stories that were not on her side, so she would go out of her way to deny them,” said Stuart Higgins of The Sun. She had more success with Piers Morgan of the Mirror, who used his Kensington Palace luncheon to establish an amicable relationship that benefited both of them.

  “I would deal every day with her office, and she would usually be in the background,” Morgan said. “It was an ongoing working relationship, and for that, we gave her a more sympathetic hearing. I would speak to her in the early morning, and she would be well informed about what everyone had done. We had pretty good relations, although you would write a headline she didn’t like and you would be frozen out. Then you would do something nice, and there would be a thaw. As long as you were broadly sympathetic, you had a good relationship.”

  In one respect, “Diana held all the cards because she knew what was coming up,” said Daily Mail columnist Peter McKay. But Diana’s ability to shape her coverage was limited by competition, commerce, and the kinds of stories she generated. “If a story concerned what she was doing and thinking, and it was in her control, she could be effective,” Stuart Higgins said. “But when other factors were at work, with loose cannons like James Hewitt or the Oliver Hoare matter ending up with the police, it was beyond her control.” Max Hastings, editor of the Evening Standard, admitted to being a “sucker” for Diana’s “Bambi eyes,” but only up to a point. “We sympathized with her as a woman,” Hastings said, “but she still did silly things, and we reported that.”

  Chapter 23

  On February 18, 1996, word leaked in the tabloids that Diana was planning a “secret trip” to Pakistan the following week to visit a cancer hospital run by Imran Khan, the forty-three-year-old former Pakistani cricket star married to Jimmy and Annabel Goldsmith’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Jemima. Through Annabel, Diana had become friendly with Jemima, who had shocked English society the previous year by converting to Islam and moving to Lahore.

  Diana wanted to see the hospital and its patients, but another important reason underlay her interest. Since the previous September, Diana had been in love with a Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan—“Natty” to his friends, no relation to Imran—who worked at the Royal Brompton Hospital where Diana had been paying mystifying midnight mercy visits to patients. Khan was five years older than Diana and several inches taller; he was described in the press as “Doctor Dishy,” “a dark-skinned Tom Selleck look-alike,” and the “dashing medic whose looks echo movie heartthrob Omar Sharif.” Diana herself said he was “drop-dead gorgeous.”

  In truth, Khan didn’t quite measure up to the superlatives. Although he was mustachioed and dark-eyed, he had a visible paunch and “enjoyed many of the ‘wrong’ foods,” in the words of energy healer Simone Simmons. Diana and Khan had met at Royal Brompton when Diana was visiting her friend Joseph Toffolo, whose triple bypass operation Khan had assisted. Khan was so absorbed in his patient that he didn’t even recognize Diana, who was instantly smitten. Turning to Joseph’s wife Oonagh, her acupuncturist at the time, Diana said, “His name is Hasnat Khan. It’s written on his shoes.” Commented Oonagh, “Those eyes of hers had not missed a thing.”

  For the next eighteen days, Diana sat at Joseph Toffolo’s bedside and got to know Khan. She asked the surgeon to introduce her to other patients needing comfort, and in the following months, he accompanied her on her visits throughout the hospital late at night when he was on duty. “She was very well known there,” said press relations adviser Jane Atkinson. Diana sometimes stayed long into the night to shadow Khan at work, and she watched him perform open-heart surgery at least a half-dozen times.

  To Diana, Hasnat Khan represented the idealized nurturing man of her dreams. She was captivated by “his wit, his intelligence, and his dedication to work which she knew to be truly important,” said Simone Simmons. “He was a male version of what she wanted to do—save lives and give to people,” said one of her close friends. Diana also “relished the … sense of ‘forbiddenness’ that surrounded their affair,” said Simmons. Diana’s fascination with Eastern cultures had begun with Oliver Hoare, and after a string of bad experiences with Englishmen, she was open to a more exotic friendship with a man she felt she could trust.

  Mostly, Diana was drawn to Khan’s kind, down-to-earth manner. The surgeon was “the first man who was completely unimpressed by her glamour,” said her friend Cosima Somerset. “He liked her for herself.” With her customary intensity, Diana threw herself into the relationship. She took to studying Gray’s Anatomy and reading surgical reports as well as books on the Muslim faith. She bought a custom-made wardrobe of brightly colored silk shalwar kameez, the tunic and trouser ensembles worn by Pakistani women, and she burned scented joss sticks at Kensington Palace. All the while, Diana’s friendship with Jemima Khan intensified as Diana focused on finding out everything she could about marriage to a Pakistani man.

  The tabloids had caught up to Hasnat Khan in mid-December 1995 when the News of the World identified him as the “inspiration” for Diana’s nighttime hospital visits. But the tabloid discounted any notion of romance, emphasizing that Diana’s relationship was purely professional and that she even called him “Mr. Khan.” One reason for the unusual reticence might have been their preoccupation with speculating about Diana’s “new hunk,” real estate developer Christopher Whalley, who was actually a casual friend from the Harbour Club.

  When the Whalley relationship proved too insubstantial to pursue, the tabloids began tracking Khan. By the end of January 1996, they had confirmed Diana’s dinner dates with the surgeon in Stratford-upon-Avon—where the couple visited Khan’s uncle Omar and Omar’s British wife, Jane—as well as a lunch at Kensington Palace. The further disclosure of Diana’s planned trip to Pakistan—DIANA’S LOVE TRIP SECRET—reported that Hasnat Khan would be joining her, which proved untrue. Diana declined to give Jane Atkinson any details about her connection to Hasnat, but she didn’t ask her media adviser to categorically deny the relationship, either.

  Diana’s plans upset the Foreign Office, but not because of Hasnat Khan. Rather, they were disturbed by the link to Imran Khan, who was laying plans to form a new political party that would run against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on an anticorruption platform. Diana informed Buckingham Palace and government officials only a few days before her departure, and she asked for no formal assistance, since she was flying on Jimmy Goldsmith’s plane and would be staying at the Lahore home of a friend of Jemima and Imran’s. Palace courtiers were so fearful of being portrayed as conspiring against Diana that they lodged no objections, but diplomats were concerned that the visit could harm Anglo-Pakistani relations. That concern deepened when Diana rebuffed an invitation from Bhutto to stay in her guest house, and it turned out that the Prime Minister would be excluded from Imran Khan’s fund-raising dinner.

  The trip was noteworthy for its photographs of Diana in striking native garb, embracing cancer-stricken children. “Her mission to reach out to the poor and suffering achieved almost Bi
blical proportions,” wrote James Whitaker in the Daily Mirror. “Never once did she falter as wave after wave of children came up to her for comfort.”

  On February 15, several days before her departure for Pakistan, Diana had met with the Queen at Buckingham Palace to discuss progress toward divorce. The Queen’s deputy private secretary, Robin Janvrin, had attended the meeting as well, and had taken notes. In the two months since receiving the Queen’s letter, Diana had kept silent, until tabloid reports surfaced in early February about various “demands” Diana would make. The most important concerned her desire to retain “Her Royal Highness” in her title as a condition of divorce. The “HRH” designation, as well as the question of custody of William and Harry and Diana’s residence in Kensington Palace, were ultimately the purview of the Queen.

  Diana did not say explicitly what had passed between her and the Queen, but she indicated to Jane Atkinson that her mother-in-law had been noncommittal about “HRH” and had urged her to sort out that matter and others in a meeting with Prince Charles. “The Princess never expressed to me that she didn’t want to keep the title,” Atkinson recalled. Yet in conversations with friends, Diana said that in the Buckingham Palace meeting she had offered to give up “HRH” because she assumed the Queen would wish her to.

  At Charles’s request, Diana agreed to meet in St. James’s Palace late in the afternoon on February 28—just the two of them, with no one taking notes. As she entered the meeting, “she wanted to have things sorted, that was her mood,” Atkinson said. “She wanted to resolve things so they would move forward.” The estranged couple talked for forty-five minutes. “It was as difficult a meeting about divorce as one can be,” Atkinson recalled. “There were a lot of things to resolve.”

  Diana received Charles’s assurance that their discussion would be private, and they agreed on a few points. Diana then went to her office where Jane Atkinson and Diana’s lead lawyer, Anthony Julius, awaited her. Diana said she wanted to make an announcement immediately because she was convinced that Charles’s side would leak. Atkinson agreed that “if [Diana] wanted to write the agenda, she should issue the information on her own terms rather than having to respond.” Diana’s statement indicated that she had consented to Charles’s request for a divorce, and they had agreed that she would continue to be involved with all decisions regarding the children, that she would live at Kensington Palace and keep her offices at St. James’s Palace, but that she would give up “Her Royal Highness” and be known as Diana, Princess of Wales.

  Just as Atkinson was releasing the statement to the press, Diana was calling the Queen to agree to a divorce. When the Queen, Prince Charles, and Buckingham Palace officials learned of Diana’s unilateral announcement, they were incensed by her breach of confidentiality. The Palace swiftly issued its own statement, insisting that what Diana had characterized as “decisions” were merely “requests,” and details about the divorce “remain to be discussed and settled.” Diana instantly shot back on the grounds that her release of the information “cultivate[d] the image of a strong woman and wanting to be in control of the message.” The language was entirely Diana’s; Atkinson considered the term “strong woman” to be “protesting too much.”

  As with Panorama, Diana initially felt elated that she had the upper hand. But again she went too far, using Richard Kay to transmit her accusation that the Queen and Prince Charles had pressured her to drop “HRH”—a direct contradiction of what she had told Jane Atkinson earlier. Diana also leaked to the Daily Mail that in their discussion she had told Charles, “I loved you and I will always love you because you are the father of my children.”

  The Palace strenuously denied Diana’s account, even allowing the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, to be quoted by name rather than as a “royal spokesman.” “The decision to drop the title is the Princess’s and the Princess’s alone,” Anson said. “It is wrong that the Queen or the Prince asked her. I am saying categorically that is not true. The Palace does not say something specific on a point like this unless we are absolutely sure of the facts.” The Times noted pointedly that the Queen was irritated that the “Princess’s camp” had been providing “carefully selected insights” about the meeting with Charles.

  As the public disagreements escalated, Diana dropped out as the guest of honor at the final gala for the 125th birthday of the British Red Cross. The lavish event on February 29 had been billed as Diana’s “first step in building herself a new role as an ambassador for humanitarian causes,” but Diana was too emotionally fragile to play her assigned role. “She felt she would meet people who would express sympathy, and she said to me, ‘I’ll just cry,’ ” said Jane Atkinson. “She could see what would happen, and what pictures would be in the papers. She needed space to function in public again.”

  In an atmosphere of ill will, negotiations between Charles’s and Diana’s lawyers proceeded slowly. There was general agreement about joint custody of William and Harry, as well as Diana’s continued residence at Kensington Palace. The sticking points involved money (Diana initially asked for a lump sum of $70 million), the location of her office, her future role, and her title, which Diana had seemed ready to give up, but belatedly recognized its vital role in her identity and special status. Without it, she would be required, among other things, to curtsy to such “minor” royals as Princess Michael of Kent.

  The question of her role as goodwill ambassador confounded everyone, including Diana. At times, she wasn’t even certain she wanted to travel the globe on behalf of good causes. She told some of her friends that she would be happy working with Hasnat Khan in some capacity. She had an equally impassioned conversation with journalist Paul Johnson about wanting to be a therapist.

  The roving ambassador notion “was put into her head,” Johnson said. “She had no idea what an ambassador did, and it wouldn’t have suited her. She said to me, ‘I would like to be a therapist, a psychological counselor.’ I said, ‘It is very hard work. You have to knuckle down. You wouldn’t be able to go off on trips.’ She said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind.’ But she never got down to it. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. She would have been very very good, but she was never brought up to discipline herself.”

  After her February trip to Pakistan, Diana made few public appearances until June, when she took a three-day trip to Chicago to raise money for cancer charities. After Lucia Flecha de Lima’s move to Washington at the end of 1993, Diana’s regular visits to the United States had offered a refuge. While Diana had a growing number of detractors in Britain, her popularity was undimmed in the United States, and she often spoke of her fondness for American informality—as Richard Kay put it in the Daily Mail, “that engagingly enthusiastic way Americans have.”

  Diana even talked about moving to the United States, but had developed several misconceived notions of what life would be like for her in America. She believed that she would have a “chance to prove herself,” to be judged as a person rather than by her position, and she figured that there were so many celebrities she would be able to “disappear.” She didn’t fully appreciate that, in America, she would be lionized as a celebrity even more than in Britain.

  Everywhere she went in Chicago, Diana attracted large, enthusiastic crowds that recalled the earliest days of “Di-Mania.” She spoke briefly at Northwestern University about cancer, “the dreaded C-word” that “seems to strike out of nowhere, destroying lives at will, leaving devastation in its wake.” She toured hospitals, attended a symposium on breast cancer, and was the guest of honor at fund-raising lunches and dinners.

  Seated between Today show cohost Katie Couric and novelist Anna Quindlen at the luncheon for 500 women, Diana seemed out of her element. “I have never seen this many women in one room in my life,” Diana said. “She was disconcerted by it,” said Quindlen, who was surprised that Diana appeared “incredibly young. I could see a bell-jar effect. It seemed as if she had stopped growing once she married the Prince of Wales.” When Q
uindlen thanked Diana for helping the cancer charities and observed that “probably no one else could have raised the money you have raised in two days,” Diana “ducked her head and shrugged and made a face,” Quindlen recalled. “It was the way a thirteen-year-old would respond to a compliment. By age thirty-five, you assume someone would say something like, ‘Thank you very much. I was glad to be able to do it.’ ”

  Chicago’s embrace boosted Diana, but she couldn’t shake her gloomy moods. On the evening of her arrival, Diana and her entourage were tackling the mountain of presents that had been delivered to the hotel. “It was a very funny twenty minutes,” Jane Atkinson said. “Lighthearted and girlie and laughing about the notes and trying on hats. Suddenly she switched off and left for her room. It was the only time I saw anything that abrupt. She was outgoing, and then she completely shut down.”

  Upon Diana’s return to London, the press declared her trip a major success, and the Daily Express singled out Atkinson for her organizational skills. Knowing that Diana disliked sharing the spotlight, Atkinson asked the Express reporter not to write the article, and finally cooperated only to verify facts and give one statement emphasizing the trip’s “team effort.”

  Diana called Atkinson the next morning to express her displeasure. Later that day, Daily Express editor Richard Addis came for a previously scheduled lunch with Diana. He reassured Diana that Atkinson had nothing to do with the article. But Diana had made up her mind that Atkinson had betrayed her, and even told friends that Atkinson had been leaking negative stories about her to The Sun, which was untrue. From that point on, Diana stopped consulting Atkinson, and used her only as a mouthpiece.

  At the end of June 1996, Diana made a final bid to preserve “HRH” by leaking to Richard Kay that Buckingham Palace now insisted she keep the title. Kay characterized the turnabout as an “odd twist” predicated on the Queen’s belief that as the mother of the future king, Diana “must have appropriate status.” The leak was simply Diana’s wishful thinking. The Queen had already decided that Diana was unworthy of the title because of the Morton book, the Panorama interview, and her dalliances with the tabloid press.