Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana felt “bitterly let down” and “stitched up” (double-crossed). As Rosa Monckton later explained, “The … reaction in the British press was disproportionate and fiercely critical of Diana. Her response was cold fury. She postponed her return to England.” Instead of flying directly home on Saturday, August 30, Diana agreed to instead spend that night with Dodi in Paris. Monckton last spoke to the Princess on August 28, and as she recounted later, Diana’s recurring theme was “betrayal, and being misunderstood.”

  Diana and Dodi left for Paris at midday on August 30, a change in plans that was approved by Fayed himself. Their jittery comings and goings the rest of that day and evening were relayed to Fayed in England by his Ritz managers as well. Diana and Dodi moved around Paris in rapid bursts, followed always by a large pack of paparazzi. From the airport they went to the Villa Windsor, where they stayed less than a half hour. A Fayed employee took their luggage to Dodi’s apartment, where they planned to spend the night, while the couple headed for the Ritz to rest in the Imperial Suite.

  That day, according to Fayed spokesman Michael Cole, Diana gave Dodi a gold cigar clipper, inscribed “From Diana with love,” and her father’s gold cuff links—the same pair she had earlier given to Oliver Hoare. “They were her most precious possession,” said Elsa Bowker. “I couldn’t believe she gave them to Dodi so quickly.” Dodi intended to give Diana a garish diamond-encrusted ring that he purchased for $200,000 from the Repossi Jewelers on the Place Vendôme late in the afternoon. Alberto Repossi said Diana helped choose the ring when they twice visited the jeweler’s Monaco store during their Jonikal cruises, although her friends protested that it wasn’t her taste. Richard Kay called it “vulgar.”

  In the early evening, Dodi and Diana left via the Ritz’s rear door to drive to his apartment. As usual, they rode in a Mercedes limousine driven by Dodi’s personal chauffeur Philippe Dourneau, followed by Dodi’s Range Rover bearing two security guards, Trevor Rees-Jones and Kes Wingfield. When they arrived at the apartment building, Dodi and Diana had to struggle through a paparazzi mob to reach the front door. Two hours later, the couple left the apartment, intending to have dinner at the fashionable Chez Benoit restaurant. En route, Dodi was so exasperated by the crush of photographers shadowing the car that he abruptly changed plans. Instead of Chez Benoit, they would dine at the Ritz. On their arrival at the hotel, they were again thronged by the paparazzi, some pressing within inches of Diana’s face—an indignity she had suffered many times, although such pressure was new to Dodi, who was visibly rattled.

  They started out in the main dining room at the Ritz, but when Dodi became agitated by the unabashed stares of other diners, they left after placing their order and ate in their suite upstairs instead. Dodi couldn’t face the photographers again, so he devised a subterfuge to avoid them. His Mercedes and Range Rover would act as decoys, revving up at the front door as if readying for Dodi and Diana’s departure, while the couple would escape by the back door into another car. Shortly before midnight, Dodi called his father, who approved the plan. Hotel officials alerted the paparazzi at the front to expect Dodi and Diana shortly, as the couple waited inside the rear exit for a rented Mercedes to pull up. A small group of paparazzi lingered in the street behind the Ritz as well. Before Dodi and Diana hopped into the backseat, Henri Paul, their new driver, shouted to the paparazzi, “Don’t bother following—you won’t catch us.” The car sped off at 12:20 A.M. as photographers gave chase on motorbikes and in cars. Five minutes later, the Mercedes slammed into the wall of the Alma Tunnel, killing Dodi, Diana, and Henri Paul, and severely injuring security man Trevor Rees-Jones, who was riding shotgun.

  Subsequent investigations showed that Paul, the acting security chief at the Ritz—who was not a licensed chauffeur—had been drinking heavily: An autopsy revealed a blood-alcohol level three times the legal driving limit in France, plus the presence of the antidepressant Prozac and the tranquilizer tiapride. The two drugs were prescribed to treat Paul’s alcoholism; taken in combination with alcohol, they could severely impair judgment and reflexes. When Paul zoomed into the Alma Tunnel at high speed, he was incapable of controlling a car. Dodi had insisted on Paul as his driver because he was a security specialist, who could best protect them against the swarm of photographers.

  Why hadn’t Diana and Dodi simply spent the night in the safety of the Ritz? Dodi had been determined to return to the apartment, he reportedly told his father, because their belongings were there. According to Dodi’s valet Rene Delorm, Dodi had said earlier he wanted iced champagne ready for their return because he planned to propose to Diana. These reasons overlook the sensible solution of sending someone to retrieve their luggage and bring it to the Ritz, where iced champagne could have been produced within minutes.

  Diana’s contribution to Dodi’s misguided decisions is unknown, although in the Ritz security video of the couple waiting in the hotel’s rear corridor, she appears quiet and withdrawn as Dodi encircles her with one arm. Dodi’s habit when faced with a perceived threat was to overcompensate, partly to impress and partly to feel secure. According to Thomas Sancton and Scott MacLeod, Time magazine correspondents who wrote a book with the cooperation of Mohamed Fayed about the investigation into the deaths of Dodi and Diana, Dodi “seemed to get more and more excited about his plan” as he and Diana prepared for their supposedly secret exit. “When you were with him, you felt protected,” said Dodi’s friend Nona Summers. “Ironically, it was overprotective zealousness that was the paradox that led to the disaster. He was trying to protect her from the press. But the reaction was over-the-top. If he hadn’t been so overprotective, they would just have been photographed, and nothing would have happened.”

  Indeed, Diana probably felt she was safe. Since she had taken up with Dodi six weeks earlier, she had lived inside the private world of the Fayeds, with its own security details, stores, restaurants, hotels, homes, yachts, planes, and helicopters—an even more elaborate setup than that of the royal family Diana had so recently shed. But had Diana been traveling with a Scotland Yard bodyguard—the royal privilege she had dropped three years earlier—it seems probable he would have applied some common sense to the events of August 30.

  In the months after the tragedy, Mohamed Fayed insisted that Dodi and Diana planned to marry, and that the ring from Repossi was meant to seal their engagement. As further proof, Fayed claimed that on the Saturday afternoon before they died, Dodi and Diana had spent two hours at the Villa Windsor “examining every part” of the house that would be their future home. However, photographs published in The Sun from a security camera at the villa proved that Dodi and Diana’s visit had lasted less than twenty-eight minutes. What’s more, Diana disliked the Windsor house, saying “it has a history and ghosts all of its own, and I have no wish to follow that.”

  Diana’s friends heatedly disputed the notion that Diana would have married Dodi. The day after Diana died, Richard Kay initially wrote in the Daily Mail that he had felt marriage was “likely.” He had been the last friend to talk to her when she called him from the Ritz six hours before she died. It was during this conversation that Diana declared her decision to retire from public life, telling Kay that Mohamed Fayed had offered to finance a charity for land mine victims, and that she and Dodi had discussed a plan to open hospices around the world—arrangements that would have brought Diana more deeply within the control of Mohamed Fayed. When Diana spoke of feeling a new strength, Kay found her neither strong nor certain, although he sensed that Dodi and Diana were “in love” and that she was “as happy as I have ever known her.”

  In the following days, Kay “rapidly changed” his view, he later said. After talking with a number of Diana’s friends, he concluded that he had been wrong to think Diana would marry Dodi. According to Kay, Diana had not discussed marriage plans with anyone close to her—including her butler Paul Burrell, her immediate family, her sons, or confidantes such as Lucia Flecha de Lima and Rosa Monckton. Even factoring in Diana’
s fondness for secrecy, she most likely would have confided in at least one person—and certainly would have talked with her sons. As Elsa Bowker observed, “She called William about everything.”

  Friends who watched the videos taken by Ritz security cameras on Diana’s last day were bothered by her demeanor. “I don’t like what I saw,” said one close friend who had encountered paparazzi with Diana on a number of occasions. “I saw a lot of tension. Why did they go in and out of the Ritz so many times? When Diana was unhappy, she was restless, and she seemed restless. If you are in love and staying at a safe place, why leave it? In the tape, her expression didn’t seem right. By her body language, her comings and goings, it didn’t make sense.”

  Diana’s friend Annabel Goldsmith also had serious doubts about Diana’s commitment to Dodi. Both she and her daughter Jemima had spoken to Diana on the twenty-ninth, the last day of the Jonikal cruise. In both conversations, Diana said she was having fun, that she had never been treated so well by a man, and was enjoying it. When Annabel said, “You’re not doing anything silly, like getting married?” Diana replied, “Don’t worry. I need another marriage like a bad rash on my face”—an expression she also used in her conversation with Jemima.

  In Death of a Princess, their book published in February 1998, Sancton and MacLeod raised the possibility that Diana was pregnant when she died. The theory caused Rosa Monckton and Richard Kay to write blistering replies in The Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Rosa’s evidence was the most persuasive: Pregnancy, she said, was “biologically impossible” because Diana was menstruating when she and Rosa were in Greece “ten days before her fatal accident.” Kay discounted the possibility because Diana “was obsessive about not having a child out of wedlock” and “could not run any risk of embarrassing or hurting her sons William and Harry.”

  Diana and Dodi had known each other for only six weeks. They were together on thirty-two of those days, and the days they spent alone were a mere twenty-five. They floated along in an existence that was intense and unreal, detached from the world of everyday decisions as well as their respective friends. The only person from Diana’s life who met Dodi was her psychic Rita Rogers. Yet they acted out their romance in view of the cameras, and died trying to escape the men who had tormented and celebrated them. “Diana’s life should not be frozen into those last six weeks,” Rosa Monckton later said. “It is simply neither fair nor accurate. Diana’s legacy is so much greater.”

  But Diana’s final summer was highly revealing. As she gave off numerous conflicting signals, she was publicly playing out her shifting moods, doubts, and insecurities in exaggerated form, for all to see. Diana’s willingness to entangle herself with the Fayeds showed how alone she was. Her romance with Dodi was perhaps the clearest evidence that she had made little progress in dealing with her demons. “Diana was a fifteen-year-old, emotionally, where men were concerned,” said one of her close friends. In all likelihood, even as a teenager Diana would not have given a second look to a man whose reputation and character were as tarnished as Dodi’s. In her neediness, Diana had regressed. “No one can tell me what to do,” Diana told Le Monde three months before she died. “I work by instinct. It’s my best adviser.” Given the number of times Diana’s instinct failed her, it was a stark admission that she remained sadly out of touch with herself to the very end.

  Chapter 28

  During Diana’s lifetime, few were willing to confront directly the extent of her emotional problems. “She clearly should have had a lot more professional help,” said Dr. Michael Adler, chairman of the National AIDS Trust. “I think she needed rather intense professional counseling and psychological support, and I was never certain that she ever had that in a manner that I would have thought was totally helpful.”

  For the first half of her life, when she was usually in a protected environment, Diana managed to keep her problems in check, except for occasional flare-ups when she was in stressful situations. But after the age of nineteen, Diana was often out of control, her fragile psyche cracking under the strain of public life.

  Prince Charles, who witnessed her extreme behavior longer than anyone, lacked the knowledge and temperament to help her deal with her torment. He probably deserves more credit than he has received for trying to get Diana into therapy on several occasions. But his standard responses to her—pleading, giving in, retreating in anger—only seemed to feed her volatility. Diana needed constant expressions of love and reassurance combined with firm reminders that she was expected to behave in a responsible way and that her actions had consequences. Perhaps Charles gave up on Diana too quickly, but he did so out of frustration and ignorance, not for lack of concern.

  Her friends and family tended to minimize her problems or focus on Diana at her best—her wit, warmth, spontaneity, and generosity—while recognizing, as her friend Rosa Monckton wrote, that she had “an enormous capacity for unhappiness.” Even her persistent depression was dismissed by many as postpartum “baby blues” when it actually had plagued her through her adult life. By denying the extent of her difficulties, everyone around Diana “enabled” her to stay on a self-destructive path.

  The press played an especially damaging role by building her up one minute and knocking her down the next. Reporters on the royal beat saw Diana’s crack-up at close range but chose to perpetuate her fairy-tale myth; for once, the charge seems valid that the press ignored the truth in order to sell newspapers. The relentless coverage gave Diana two selves to deal with: the one in the newspapers and the one she struggled with every day.

  Diana presented two versions of herself to friends as well, shifting between Her Royal Highness and old pal Diana. Friends shied away from offering help for fear of seeming presumptuous or patronizing. “What was most difficult about Diana was her dropping friends,” said one. “It was hard to understand how lonely she was and how much help she needed.” As Cosima Somerset said: “She could open up at the drop of a hat, almost to her detriment. Then on the other side was a wall. She was completely defended. It wasn’t very balanced. She would meet someone for the first time and be very open. But basically she was very secretive. There were lots of things she didn’t talk about that were quite important.”

  Diana’s genius at playing princess made it hard for people to appreciate the severity of her problems. Yet the telltales were there for all to see. From the days before her wedding to the end of her life, she wept in public to an unusual degree. Sometimes, as when she was assaulted by the paparazzi, her tears were understandable, but more often than not her obvious sadness was unprovoked. Her habit of crying before and after official events showed how hard she had to work to hold herself together. Her media adviser, Jane Atkinson, believed that the “real” Diana was “withdrawn and detached.” “The effort she made to come out of that state of mind was considerable,” Atkinson said. “The real Diana was a more brooding person.” When Diana dazzled in public, she was also “real,” in Atkinson’s view, “but she couldn’t maintain it.”

  It didn’t help that most Britons, especially those in the upper class, have little sympathy for emotional distress. The much-caricatured stiff upper lip remains an esteemed trait. Therapy, by contrast, is often regarded as self-indulgent whining. “In this culture we haven’t used psychology,” said a man close to Prince Charles. “Until recently it was inconceivable for most people. Today there is more acceptance, and Diana ironically played a part in legitimizing it.”

  Whenever the subject of Diana’s emotional disturbances came up in the British press, she was invariably derided as “loony,” “potty,” a “basket case,” or “barking mad.” Time and again, journalists and their sources implied Diana was to blame for her behavior, refusing to accept that mental illness is neither a moral failing nor a character defect. “Diana should not get help,” wrote Lesley White of The Sunday Times in November 1995. “She should simply get over it.”

  The harshness of these characterizations prompted allies of Diana to issue misguided d
enials that she needed any professional help. Stephen Twigg, the massage therapist whom Diana relied on for several years in the early 1990s, told the Sunday Express in 1992 that Diana’s suicide attempts “could happen to anyone … the idea that she is ill, unstable in some way, emotionally unbalanced, is nonsense.” Such statements reinforced Diana’s aversion to being labeled and must have pushed her further from seeking proper care.

  Diana herself had an ambivalent attitude toward psychiatry. She turned to alternative therapists largely because she could control them. She initially resisted psychotherapy and was deeply mistrustful of antidepressants and tranquilizers—although she depended on prescription sleeping pills for many years. Even after discussing her self-mutilation and bulimic bingeing on television, she derided the royal family and Charles’s friends for stigmatizing her as mentally ill. Diana also claimed at various times to be “finished” with her bulimia. But the underlying causes persisted, as evidenced by her reliance on colonic irrigation and obsessive exercise.

  Even when her symptoms were acute—and dangerous—her position as Princess of Wales precluded her checking into a clinic, as her sister Sarah and her brother’s wife Victoria had done to treat their eating disorders. “In a sense, she was finished on the day of the royal wedding,” said Michael Colborne, former aide to Prince Charles. “Nobody saw the basics with her, that she had to be looked after.” As a result, Diana’s psychological problems festered and grew.

  Diana underwent psychotherapy on several occasions and mastered psychological jargon along the way. But Diana’s treatments were short-lived until she enlisted the help of Susie Orbach, a fellow sufferer as well as a therapist who kept Diana engaged for several years. The treatment did not seem to have lasting effects. As her friend Richard Kay wrote, Diana “was as unsure of herself at her death as when I first talked with her [in the spring of 1993].” Her behavior grew more chaotic, not less, and she repeated her mistakes rather than learning from them. She ultimately denigrated Orbach in particular and psychotherapy in general, telling the patients at Roehampton Priory they were unlikely to find much help from “some psychotherapist or someone just reading from a book.” The press, which Diana looked to for approval, applauded these remarks. Writing in the Evening Standard, Melanie McDonagh saw a hopeful “backlash against therapy … this very modern infantilism.”