Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  With the departures of so many key aides, Diana now handled most press inquiries herself, or directed them from the background, so her views often appeared in papers such as the Mirror in addition to the dependable Daily Mail. Some editors found her mercurial ways exasperating. “The confusion was there all the time,” said Sue Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express. “She was going out with the boys wearing her shorts and a baseball cap, but it would be designer stuff and she would be immaculately made up because she never thought there would not be a photographer waiting.”

  Nor could Diana restrain herself from reading everything written about her. Said a man who knew her from childhood: “She had to read it. There was always an element of insecurity for Diana. She wanted to know that what she was doing was being approved of, and I think she found it mesmerizing.” Having witnessed her sensitivity for too many years, her butler Paul Burrell finally began hiding the most unpleasant articles. “I took a strong line when something was personal and upsetting, and thought it best for her not to see it,” he said. “I always got a strange look when certain papers weren’t there. She would ask for them, but I wouldn’t let her see them.”

  Diana and those close to her believed she had to wage a constant battle for survival with the press, to avoid being swallowed by her own celebrity. At the same time, Diana enjoyed playing games with the press and public. One of her more peculiar practices was what Diana’s energy healer Simone Simmons described as “ ‘hiding’ in plain sight”—a surreal exercise for a woman whose identity was already confused. As Simmons explained, “I coached Diana in the art of pretending to be someone who bore a strong passing resemblance to the Princess.” The trick was to engage in such mundane activities—hailing a cab, taking money from a cash machine—that observers couldn’t believe she was the real Diana. “So confident had Diana become as an impersonator of herself,” said Simmons, “that if someone … gave her a wide-eyed and puzzled stare, she would smile and wave at them, as if daring them to challenge her.”

  Diana was now “telling pointless lies more and more frequently,” Simmons recalled. “She retained a crazy conviction that since she’d compartmentalized her life and had scattered about different versions of the same story, she would be safe and somehow protected.” Diana’s deceptions defined her relationships with editors and reporters in her last year.

  Not all her lies were pointless, however, as could be seen in May 1997 after a visit she made to Roehampton Priory, a private psychiatric clinic specializing in eating disorders. Diana had been secretly visiting Roehampton and other psychiatric treatment centers since 1994 as a sort of Trojan patient, which allowed her to talk to the residents and get information from professionals without discussing her own problems. This time, however, she spoke frankly about the roots of her eating disorders, and someone tipped the Mirror.

  When editor Piers Morgan called Diana’s office to alert her to the story, Diana immediately got on the line. “I persuaded her that, in order to get it right, she should tell me,” Morgan recalled. Diana gave him a detailed forty-minute briefing with “the understanding that I would not quote her directly but do it as reported speech.” After publication of the Mirror’s five-page report disclosing that she had suffered from bulimia as a teenager, Diana issued a statement to the other newspapers saying she was “deeply disappointed” that a patient had leaked her comments. “The benefits to patients depend enormously on privacy being respected,” she said.

  Diana’s manipulation of the truth had several purposes. By not denying her own twenty-year struggle with bulimia, Diana played for public sympathy without ever asking for it. At the same time, she stressed her concern for patients and struck a blow for privacy rights. “I rang her and congratulated her on a rather slick operation that distanced her from collusion with the dreaded tabloids and made her look rather good,” Morgan said.

  For nearly eighteen months, Diana had persistently misled the press about Hasnat Khan. Since her vehement disavowal of a romance during her Australian trip the previous fall, the tabloids had written some reasonably accurate stories about the relationship based on comments by some of Khan’s relatives. The most revealing account, in the Sunday Express in February, quoted his father and mother. According to Hasnat’s father, Rashid Khan, an economist, Diana “had made all the moves” in the relationship, but Hasnat had said “marriage was not possible.” Hasnat’s mother, Naheed said her son had been “terrorized” by the media spotlight, which was “ruining his life.”

  Diana, however, was determined to make their relationship work. “She would have converted to Islam, she would have done anything,” said Elsa Bowker. Diana miscalculated when she made another spur-of-the-moment visit to Pakistan in May, again billed as a fund-raiser for Imran Khan’s hospital, where Diana attended a lunch with sixty Pakistani VIPs who paid more than $1,000 apiece for the privilege.

  But Diana’s covert purpose for the trip was to meet Hasnat Khan’s family and “convince them that she was a nice girl,” said Elsa Bowker. Wearing a shalwar kameez of pale blue—pastel colors signal respect in Pakistan—she spent ninety minutes with a dozen of Hasnat’s relatives, including his parents and the grandmother she had entertained at Kensington Palace. “She was obsessional about families and longed to be embraced by them,” Simone Simmons explained.

  When Diana returned to London several days later, she told friends she had made a good impression, and that marriage was now possible. Inexplicably, she had not informed Khan beforehand of her visit with his relatives. He was dismayed that she had gone so far, and rebuked her for disclosing details to the press. The following week, Hello! magazine quoted Hasnat’s father expressing doubts that Hasnat and Diana would marry: “There are so many people who meet each other, who respect each other, who love each other, who do not get married.”

  One evening after Diana and Khan quarreled, she summoned Simone Simmons to Kensington Palace and greeted her friend with “swollen panda eyes and mascara-streaked cheeks…. [Diana] was both mortified and panic-stricken because she felt that Hasnat was withdrawing from her.” During this period, Diana also went to see Elsa Bowker, who discovered her “weeping in the stairway. She had on no makeup, her hair was not done, she was wearing a baggy sweater and pants. She came into my house and said, ‘I am destroyed inside. They have destroyed me.’ She never said who ‘they’ were, but she wept and wept and went through four boxes of Kleenex. I really thought she might commit suicide.” The next morning, however, a friend called Elsa to say he had seen Diana “smiling and radiant at Turnbull and Asser buying shirts.”

  Diana and Khan continued to see each other, though still in secrecy. “Diana was getting frustrated and angry with Hasnat,” said one of her close friends. “He wouldn’t go out in public with her. Even if he did love her, he couldn’t marry her with the press baying at the doorway every time he had to do a heart operation.”

  For the first time, Diana began appearing conspicuously in public with single men. She had lunch several times with Christopher Whalley, her friend from the Chelsea Harbour Club, and by one account made “no attempt to dodge the paparazzi.” One evening she appeared at Mayfair’s chic Harry’s Bar with an Indian businessman, Gulu Lalvani, a multimillionaire electronics tycoon who was twice divorced. Lalvani, who was fifty-eight at the time, later explained that they were friends through several of her charities, to which he had donated generously. After dinner, Diana danced with Lalvani into the night at Annabel’s, the Berkeley Square nightclub. Lalvani remarked later on her “air of defiance” that evening: “She pulled me onto the dance floor whenever a song appealed to her.” Her night on the town was duly reported in the press. As Elsa Bowker explained, “She knew everyone would see her, and the poor doctor [Khan] was shocked.”

  Diana’s misguided visit to Pakistan seemed to be a turning point. She became more jittery and unpredictable with her staff, friends, and family. She broke off with her longtime acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo after Toffolo made comments about the
Princess in the press, and she came close to ending her relationship with Richard Kay over an article she told Simone Simmons she considered “traitorous.” Only when Simmons read the offending article aloud to Diana on the telephone, assuring her that it was fair, did Diana relent and call Kay several days later “as if nothing had happened.” Not long afterward, Diana turned around and dropped Simmons, whom Richard Kay regarded as one of Diana’s key close friends since the separation. Diana “wasn’t willing to let me help her deal with … a little of her old damage,” Simmons said later.

  Diana’s private secretary Michael Gibbins also felt Diana’s lash, though he remained in place. Toward the end of May, when Diana and Charles were prevented by their schedules from attending a picnic at Eton with William, Tiggy Legge-Bourke had joined the boy instead. Legge-Bourke was photographed pouring champagne, which made Diana “hit the roof,” recalled Mirror editor Piers Morgan. “She arranged briefings from her office.” Diana instructed Gibbins to convey her withering criticism through the press, saying Legge-Bourke had “harmed” fourteen-year-old William, had been “thoughtless” and “foolish,” and “made an idiot of herself.” “I could hear Diana dictating in the background,” Morgan said.

  After the comments appeared in several tabloids, Diana reversed course and “put out a statement saying it was untrue, that she admired Tiggy,” Morgan recalled. “She named The Sun in particular, because they had gone the furthest [in criticizing Legge-Bourke].” According to Richard Kay, Diana’s denial had been based on her fear that “her son might believe the attack on Tiggy originated with her.” The Sun fought back, saying “they would publish the name of who had told them,” Morgan recalled. Doubtless with the memory of Diana’s earlier slur on Legge-Bourke in mind, “Diana’s lawyers and The Sun issued a joint statement saying that she had formally reprimanded a senior member of her staff for making unauthorized remarks,” Morgan said.

  The senior staff member was Gibbins, and the public scolding included her edict, reported by the tabloids, that he “never again … speak to the media on her behalf.” Diana had humiliated Gibbins, but Kay reflected her spin in a Daily Mail report that the loyal aide had been “naive” and had “genuinely had her best interests at heart.” According to Kay, Diana had actually been “more than pleased” that Tiggy had attended the picnic in her stead.

  Diana’s most heartbreaking dispute during her last months was with her mother. On the eve of Diana’s trip to Pakistan in May, Hello! magazine published the first of a two-part interview with Frances Shand Kydd. Frances spoke at length about her own life, but also offered comments on Diana’s childhood, her eating disorders, and her marriage. Much of what Frances said was harmless, and some of her views were sensible, although her comments betrayed how little she understood the deep emotional crosscurrents that prevented Diana from acting reasonably when she was emotionally overwrought.

  Frances thought the Panorama and Dimbleby interviews were both a mistake. “I felt strongly [Diana and Charles] were going to have to live with those interviews and knew somehow that they were only going to hurt even more,” she said. “I think one’s dignity is lost if you ever give out blame which becomes gossip. Gossip becomes distorted. If a marriage fails, you should never fall into the temptation of explaining why. Silence is the only course.”

  Frances also considered it “absolutely wonderful” that Diana had lost her title “HRH” because “at last she was able to be herself, use her own name, and find her own identity.” Frances disclosed as well that she remained happily in touch with Prince Charles: “He was my son-in-law for fourteen years, and he will always be the father of two of my grandchildren.”

  At the time of the Hello! interviews, Diana’s relationship with her mother was already more precarious than usual, as Frances’s exclusion from William’s confirmation had indicated. “Diana said her mother was impossible,” recalled one of Diana’s close friends. “She felt her mother was not able to sort herself out.” The previous November Frances had been arrested on a drunk-driving charge and lost her driver’s license. According to James Whitaker, writing in The Mirror, Diana was aware that her mother was “prone to giving colorful and unguarded interviews and comments after a good lunch.” Around this time, a man named Peter Scott claimed to have recently had a “friendly romance” with Frances and told the Daily Express that she was “very unhappy and mixed up.… She has an obsession, the Catholic church.… She rings me late at night on a mobile [phone] when she has had a drink.”

  The Hello! interviews came as a “complete shock” to Diana. She briefly considered legal action, and she punished the magazine by canceling some “exclusive arrangements” at two of her charity events. She was “appalled and bewildered” by her mother’s remarks, and “bitterly disappointed and let down” that the magazine would publish them. When it emerged that Hello! had paid Frances $50,000, Diana was even more upset, though Frances earmarked all the money for a Catholic charity. Diana stopped speaking to her mother altogether.

  After Diana’s death, Frances would not acknowledge the rift, insisting, quite oddly, that she and her daughter could only be close in secrecy. Frances told the Daily Express that her “special relationship” with Diana “was built on nobody knowing when we spoke and saw each other, but we did and often.” She disclosed to the Daily Mail that she and Diana “shared such a sense of joy that we often met in many different places without anyone ever knowing,” without saying why secrecy was necessary.

  In her comments at Roehampton Priory in May 1997, Diana gave some indication of her recent struggle to maintain equilibrium. Using language similar to that she had used with Andrew Morton six years earlier, Diana insisted she had finally “beaten” her bulimia after “[she] suddenly woke up one day and thought, ‘I’ve had enough of everyone treating me like absolute rubbish; I must stick up for myself.’ ” Diana claimed she hadn’t binged for three years—although her effort to find a new treatment for her bulimia in 1995 had indicated otherwise—and emphasized her use of strenuous exercise as a substitute for bingeing. “My workouts are definitely a great benefit in controlling my anger and emotions,” she said. “You just get rid of all the stress and rages building up inside you. It’s like a huge release.”

  Although speaking at an institution where psychiatric therapy was widely used, she took the occasion to denounce psychiatry. “I found in the end that therapy was pointless for me,” she said, “because the people trying to help me hadn’t been through what I had been through”—ignoring the fact that Susie Orbach had suffered from eating disorders for a decade. “In some cases, I ended up thinking it was they who needed help, not me,” Diana continued. “Everyone knows how to treat you when you are vulnerable. But if you show any sign of strength, then it is they who end up feeling intimidated. And they try to squash you back to where you were.” Yet Diana did confess that she remained haunted by the possibility of a relapse, which she said would “always be in the back of my head.”

  On June 3, only days after cutting off relations with her mother and publicly rebuking her chief aide, Diana went to a benefit performance of Swan Lake by the English National Ballet at Royal Albert Hall. Since Harrods had sponsored the company’s Nutcracker production, Mohamed Fayed joined Diana in the royal box and sat next to her at the postperformance dinner at the Churchill Inter-Continental Hotel.

  During dinner, Diana bemoaned that she had nowhere to take her sons for a summer holiday; wherever she went, photographers pursued her. Fayed, whose hospitality Diana had turned down many times before, saw an opening. His “instant solution” was a vacation at his home in Saint-Tropez, and he promised it could be “as private as they wished.” Diana thanked Fayed and said she would get back to him. She queried several friends, among them Rosa Monckton, who “strongly advised” her not to accept Fayed’s hospitality because it might “arouse concern.” Diana then turned to Raine Spencer, hardly a disinterested party, given her position on Fayed’s board. Raine urged her to accept the invita
tion, which Diana did on June 11.

  June was Diana’s busiest month since her divorce. She attended preview parties for her dress sale in London and New York, where she was mobbed by a crowd of Manhattan socialites. The tabloids carried photographs of Christie’s chairman Charles Hindlip guiding her through the crowd with his hand on her bottom, prompting the Daily Express to wonder if he had become “rather unnecessarily tactile.” Diana later told a friend that the event made her rue the loss of her title “HRH.” Recalled the friend, “She was telling me, ‘People were saying, “Di, Di, sign this.” It was awful, so familiar.’ ”

  After years of pointedly asking people to “call me Diana,” she didn’t show her pique in public. “She knocked herself out, talked to everyone, gave so much of herself,” said her friend Marguerite Littman, who helped her navigate the Christie’s throng. Noted Jane Warren in the Daily Express, “Surrounded by drooling middle-aged Manhattan men, Diana pouted, fluttered and peered wide-eyed.” Her enchanting performance got results: The auction pulled in $3.26 million, exceeding expectations.

  As part of her publicity campaign for the auction, she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, with eight pages of pictures alongside a two-and-a-half-page article titled “Diana Reborn.” Once again, she offered a new look, her hair tousled, her expression come-hither, her partly revealed bosom “apparently unsupported,” as The Daily Telegraph delicately observed. “Whatever Diana’s inward state,” noted Vanity Fair, “outwardly, she appears to be approaching contentment.” Richard Kay couldn’t resist asking in the Daily Mail, “Is this at last the real Diana, the woman she always wanted to be?” He seemed to think so, based on “her cool self-assurance … displayed in those cleavage-baring dresses” she had been wearing to the ballet and other events, as well as her insistence that she was “free from stress, her life [was] going well, her children [were] happy, and she [was] getting fulfillment from her work.”