On July 4, three days after Diana’s thirty-fifth birthday, Prince Charles presented her with his settlement offer. Diana would receive a lump sum of $28 million—much of which would be underwritten by the Queen, since the Prince was forbidden by Parliament to sell any of his nearly $150 million in Duchy of Cornwall assets—plus more than $600,000 a year to underwrite Diana’s office. Charles would partly finance that expenditure with a loan, and his $2.5 million annual income after taxes and staff expenses would pay for the rest. Diana’s title would be “Diana, Princess of Wales,” and a statement issued by the Palace emphasized that she would be “regarded as a member of the royal family.”
As a semi-royal, Diana would be invited to state and national occasions, and in those circumstances would be treated as if she still had the “HRH.” She would live in Kensington Palace, where her office would also be located. Her public role would be “for her to decide,” although any working trips overseas—representing charities, for example—would require consultation with the Foreign Office and the Queen’s permission, which was standard practice for members of the royal family. (For private holidays, no permission was necessary.) Diana would keep several important perks—access to royal aircraft and the state apartments at St. James’s Palace for entertaining—and she would have the use of all her royal jewelry, eventually to be passed on to the wives of her sons. As part of the settlement, both Diana and Charles would sign a confidentiality agreement precluding them from discussing divorce terms or any details of their life together.
The terms were generous, and Diana formally agreed to them just four days later. Besides her lawyers, Anthony Julius and Maggie Rea, Diana had received behind-the-scenes help from her friend Jimmy Goldsmith. “He told her to hang tough, don’t settle” until she got the money she wanted, according to John Tigrett, Goldsmith’s business partner for more than three decades. The evening she received the settlement terms, Diana joined the Goldsmith family at the Dorchester Hotel for a gala to raise money for Imran Khan’s hospital. “We made the deal today,” Goldsmith told Tigrett.
The last stumbling block was losing “HRH,” which Diana had resisted until the end. She may have been justified in doing so, because the solution imposed by the divorce was complicated and ambiguous. Diana was in a unique position as mother of the heir to the throne, and for that reason alone was probably entitled to full royal status. She finally decided to give up the “HRH” after she asked Prince William whether he would mind if she no longer had it. When he said it made no difference, she told her lawyers to agree to the terms.
Coverage of the final agreement on July 12 was mixed. The Daily Mail called it HER ROYAL HUMILIATION, and the Daily Mirror termed it THE FINAL BETRAYAL, accompanied by a photograph of Diana looking haggard. “It is the face of a woman utterly destroyed,” said the tabloid. Other papers were less judgmental, with The Daily Telegraph announcing PRINCESS TO GIVE UP HRH STYLE and The Times declaring GO-AHEAD FOR 15 M POUND SETTLEMENT. Diana spent much of the day with Lucia Flecha de Lima, who had flown from Washington to console her.
On July 15, Charles and Diana filed their “decree nisi,” the document declaring that the marriage would be officially dissolved in six weeks on August 28. For all her transgressions, Diana still held the public’s sympathy. The sentiments expressed in the Mirror caught the popular mood: Diana may have been well compensated, but she had been mistreated—and ultimately humiliated and punished—by the icy royal family.
Scarcely twenty-four hours later, Diana managed to squander some of that goodwill when she unexpectedly announced that she had given up nearly one hundred of her charities and would keep formal affiliations with only six: the homeless charity Centrepoint; the Leprosy Mission; the National AIDS Trust; the English National Ballet; Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children; and Royal Marsden Hospital. The announcement created a furor because her actions seemed precipitous and unfeeling. Some charities even had to read about her decision in the press.
Diana’s decision had not actually been sudden. She had made up her mind in mid-June to maintain ties with charities that reflected her own emotional needs. Atkinson had urged her to keep the English National Ballet to “give her something lighthearted to do,” which Diana readily agreed to because of her lifelong love of ballet. The National AIDS Trust had special significance because AIDS had given Diana her first meaningful public role. When a friend questioned her choice of the Leprosy Mission, Diana joked, “It’s the travel, stupid.” The rejoinder was typical of Diana, and her interest in the disfiguring disease did take her to exotic locales. But according to Atkinson, Diana felt the leprosy charity needed her prominence to remain in the public eye. Both the Great Ormond Street and Royal Marsden hospitals kept her in touch with the sick and dying, and Centrepoint gave her a link to the dispossessed.
The most glaring omission from the list was the Red Cross. That relationship had gone through its ups and downs, and in the end, Diana decided that the charity had a high enough profile without her. As newspaper articles tallied the financial toll on the charities she had “ditched,” Diana told Atkinson to issue a clarifying statement that was illogical as well as false: “The move is entirely because of her loss of royal status…. The loss in her standing will not be beneficial to those charities, and her pulling power must be diminished. She can no longer give them the strong position they are entitled to.” Atkinson told Diana the statement made no sense because it implied that the remaining six charities would be similarly harmed by her reduced status, but Diana insisted she release it anyway.
The announcement did not get the kind of press coverage that Diana expected. “It was all bad, and she accused me of saying the wrong things,” Atkinson recalled. Within a few days, it became clear that the relationship between Diana and Atkinson had broken down, and a week later, Atkinson resigned.
Diana nearly cut loose Richard Kay around the same time. The divorce negotiations had made Diana more sensitive than ever to her image. Energy healer Simone Simmons, who had become friendly with Kay through Diana, said that Diana “decided that Richard’s draft speeches were too long and complicated.” Diana decided to use Martin Bashir, the Panorama interviewer, who had offered his services. Diana had stayed in touch with Bashir much as she had maintained a link to Andrew Morton following his 1992 book. “Martin Bashir is a humble man, and he would turn on quite a bit of charm,” explained Diana’s butler Paul Burrell. “He is a flattering person.” Richard Kay was “dreadfully upset” to be displaced by Bashir, according to Simmons, but he swallowed his pride and didn’t protest, which ensured the continuation of his friendship with Diana, and his role as her conduit to the Daily Mail.
The press speculated that Diana would emerge in the autumn with an ambitious plan for her six charities. According to one account, she would fulfill three charity engagements a week compared with her once-monthly commitment during the previous year. As before, these expectations proved mistaken. In the final year of her life, Diana was associated primarily with causes outside her chosen half dozen. Her promotion of a ban on antipersonnel land mines was the most publicized, but her affiliations also included an Australian research center associated with Hasnat Khan, and American charities supported by two relatively new friends, Katharine Graham, the influential head of The Washington Post, and Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis.
Whenever Diana shifted her attention, she left those behind feeling puzzled and wounded. “In [her] last two years, she was totally unpredictable in terms of her professional relationship with the organizations of which she was patron,” said Michael Adler, chairman of the National AIDS Trust. “When she reduced from one hundred to six organizations, on the whole she didn’t do much even for the six. She did less and less for us. We couldn’t get her to do something. We would write to her, try to talk with her. But she was interested in other things, which is fair enough. That is life. But if you are a patron, you have responsibilities that go with patronage that you must fulfill. Diana had very spec
ial qualities, but she was totally reactive.”
Chapter 24
During the last year of her life, Diana presented herself in public as a strong single woman advancing worthy causes. In private, it was a different story. Caught in her desperate love affair with Hasnat Khan, she behaved erratically, even to the point of wearing disguises. Her final downward trajectory began two months before her death, when she accepted the hospitality of Egyptian businessman Mohamed Fayed and his family.
In the late summer of 1996, just after her divorce became official, Diana decided to make a dramatic public gesture to break with her past. She called her American friend Marguerite Littman, head of the AIDS Crisis Trust, and said, “I have decided to give you my clothes.” “I didn’t think I dressed that badly,” cracked Marguerite. Diana explained that she and Prince William had been talking about what she might do with her life, and he had suggested she auction the clothes she no longer wanted and donate the proceeds to charity. “Don’t you think this would be a good idea for your charity?” asked Diana. “Come to lunch if you want them, tomorrow or the next day.”
Diana’s choice of beneficiary was significant: Marguerite Littman’s AIDS Crisis Trust, with which Diana had no affiliation, instead of the National AIDS Trust, which, only weeks earlier, Diana had endorsed as one of her six remaining patronages. The rationale for her decision remained mysterious. She had made a publicized visit to a National AIDS Trust clinic the previous June, and Michael Adler had praised Diana for her dedication to the AIDS cause. The visit had attracted some negative publicity because Diana was accompanied by AIDS victim Aileen Getty, an American crusader for the dangers of the disease to heterosexuals. “We’d love Di more if she didn’t let herself be used,” The Sun complained. Diana had been knocked more harshly many times, so media criticism seemed an unlikely cause for her defection. Still, Diana’s June visit turned out to be her last contact with the National AIDS Trust.
The most likely explanation was Diana’s affection for Marguerite Littman, along with her organization’s more glamorous profile. AIDS Crisis Trust raised funds primarily through film premieres, and its patrons were more social than Adler’s group. The social aspect interested Diana, who suggested to Marguerite that they take the dresses to Los Angeles and New York for a “road show, something fun that would make money.” “Diana had a childlike love of celebrities,” said one of her friends, noting how much the Princess enjoyed meeting film stars like Tom Hanks. Diana and Marguerite selected Christie’s auction house because its chairman, Christopher Balfour, was a mutual friend, and they chose June 1997 for the sale in New York City.
Michael Adler did not learn about the auction of seventy-nine evening dresses until it was announced in the press six months later. By then, he had even greater reason for dismay over Diana’s rebuff: “The National AIDS Trust was nearly bankrupt,” Adler said. “Not only was she sending the wrong sort of message to our community, that she was giving her dresses to an organization that had film premieres, but the organization of which she was a patron was about to go into liquidation.”
As Diana planned her gala charity auction, she made another important decision about her public role in the first months after her divorce: joining the movement to ban antipersonnel land mines. She later told reporters that she had been alerted to the problem when “a lot of information started arriving on my desk about land mines, and the pictures were so horrific that I felt it would help if I could be part of the team raising the profile around the world.” Left unsaid was the role another friend played in alerting Diana to the issue: Her energy healer Simone Simmons had visited a Red Cross worker in Bosnia during the summer of 1996. When Simmons returned from her ten days in Tuzla, she brought back photographs of mine victims to show Diana. “Do you think I could make a difference?” Diana asked.
Having dropped the Red Cross so dramatically in mid-July, Diana reversed course and returned to the organization because it was conducting a worldwide campaign to eradicate land mines. When Diana asked if the Red Cross would sponsor her on an overseas trip to raise awareness of land mine victims, director-general of the British Red Cross Mike Whitlam offered to be her official escort. At the same time, filmmaker Richard Attenborough, who had known Diana off and on for more than a decade, invited her to be the guest of honor at the premiere of his new film, In Love and War, to raise money for the British Red Cross Land Mines Appeal.
With Attenborough’s encouragement, Diana decided to make her own documentary on the subject, and he helped her negotiate a deal with the BBC that would enable camera crews to film her overseas trip. The Red Cross first suggested that Diana go to Cambodia, but the Foreign Office said her presence could interfere with delicate negotiations over a British hostage there. The British government vetoed Afghanistan as too dangerous, so Diana settled on war-ravaged Angola, where the grim statistics included one land mine for each of its 12 million inhabitants. The Foreign Office approved Diana’s trip in January 1997. “In a sense, the land mine issue was a dead lucky pick,” said Daily Telegraph columnist William Deedes, an eighty-three-year-old anti–land mine campaigner with whom Diana consulted. “She hit the subject, and the fact that all the victims die or are crippled singly meant there was never any public indignation.”
As indicated by Diana’s reliance on Prince William’s idea for the dress sale, along with his role in breaking the “HRH” logjam, she had come to lean on her sons more than ever—both as confidants and as supports when she was lonely and perplexed. By the fall of 1996, William and Harry were fourteen and twelve; William had been away at boarding school for six years, and Harry for four. William was intelligent and self-possessed, and like his mother, sensitive and instinctive. Diana considered him a “deep thinker.” He had begun showing signs of adolescent moodiness as well, and was clearly mature beyond his years. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” said one friend of Diana’s. Harry, by contrast, was more high-spirited and mischievous. Both boys had learned to be “respectful but not ridiculous,” and had “natural manners,” in the view of one Palace official.
Diana had been living in an empty nest since the autumn of 1992, when Harry left to join William at Ludgrove, but Diana’s sons were often in her thoughts and conversation. When Nelson Shanks painted her portrait in 1994, he recalled that she talked of her sons “incessantly,” an observation shared by many of her friends. “Her world was illuminated by the boys, and her life revolved around them,” her friend Peter Palumbo said. Even at the peak of her royal duties, Diana made certain to carve out private time with her sons, and she frequently arranged her schedule to accommodate their activities. “She was always dashing down to Ludgrove to see if the boys were all right, to watch them perform in a drama,” recalled one of her friends.
Diana was probably no more devoted to her boys than any good mother, but she had a special gift for connecting with them. “She was attuned to what William and Harry felt, and she kept in close touch with them,” said her friend Cosima Somerset. “She really listened to her children and would value their opinions.” In the view of her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, Diana was “very responsible and responsive to their individual natures, and aware of their character differences.”
Above all, Diana wanted her sons to feel loved. “I hug my children to death,” she told Andrew Morton. “I always feed them love and affection.” Some critics accused Diana of smothering, but her friends felt her demonstrative ways were laudable given her background. “No one was the parent to her that she was trying to be to the boys,” said David Puttnam. Indeed, having her sons reciprocate her affection was vital to Diana. “The constant bear hugs and showerings of kisses were mutually beneficial,” in James Hewitt’s view. “She needed pure unconditional love as much as they did.… [It] reassured her that no matter what, she was fulfilling her role as a mother to the very best of her abilities.”
At times, Diana could be quite childlike, reveling in thrill rides at amusement parks in a way Prince Charles
could not have managed. “She loved being with children,” said one of her friends. “In a way, she was very simple.” Once, on a visit with William at Ludgrove, she was so excited she jumped from one bed to another in his dormitory. After the mortification of the Gilbey tapes, her sons took to calling her Squidgy, “and she roared with laughter,” recalled a friend. Sometimes her enthusiasm exceeded good judgment, most notably when she exhorted William and Harry to race go-carts around Highgrove during a downpour.
Most of the time, Diana handled her boys in a responsible way. When Puttnam invited her to bring them to the Pinewood Film Studio, he noticed how “attentive and smart” she was. “She wanted them to be like well-behaved, normal kids, to line up in a queue for lunch, not to be served.” Another time, when she took Harry to the movies, he ordered a glass of mineral water at the concession stand. When the saleswoman handed him carbonated water, he asked for flat water instead. Afterward, Diana rebuked him, telling him “he should simply have thanked her for what he had been given,” because she didn’t want him to engage in behavior “that gave the royal family a bad name for being difficult.”
Diana was determined that her sons grow up in a more “normal” fashion than was customary for members of the royal family. She took them to McDonald’s and local movie theaters, and she introduced them to people from all walks of life. “I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams,” she said in her Panorama interview. To that end, she took the boys to homeless shelters, and to see dying AIDS patients. Although William was developing a full-blown antipathy toward the press, Diana recognized that he needed to understand the tabloid mentality, so she introduced him to Piers Morgan of the Mirror. “She was trying so hard to teach her sons how to cope with media attention, how to accept that it was something they were going to have to live with,” said Liz Tilberis of Harper’s Bazaar. “William understood her fury with them, and he also understood that she courted them from time to time.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 44