Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  But Diana did not mourn her bodyguard for long. In 1986 at a party celebrating Sarah Ferguson’s forthcoming wedding to Prince Andrew, the princess wrapped herself around a handsome financier, Charlie Carter. Shortly after midnight, according to author Lady Colin Campbell, a friend of hers went outside for a cigarette and made a shocking discovery. “I heard sounds coming from the bushes,” he reportedly told Lady Campbell. “I nearly choked with astonishment when I looked over and saw Charlie Carter with the Princess of Wales. I moved away, finished my cigarette quietly, and went back inside. They didn’t return for ages.”11

  Diana’s most notorious love affair—the only one she admitted publicly—was with the charming Captain James Hewitt who met her at a London party in August 1986. When she heard he was a staff captain in the household division and helped run the royal stables, she confided her fear of horses after a childhood riding accident, and her wish to get back in the saddle. Hewitt gallantly offered to give her riding lessons.

  During her first riding lessons Diana had her detectives in tow riding alongside her. She then began to make them ride behind her and Hewitt, and finally told them not to come along at all. Her lessons were invariably followed by coffee with her instructor. Through tears she told him of her painful marriage, her husband’s neglect of her and his love for another woman. “I am surrounded by people but so alone,” she cried, that ancient lament of royalty.12 “You are not alone. You have me,” he gulped, that ancient reply of a valiant knight to a damsel in distress.13

  Diana began to phone Hewitt several times a day. Awed by her beauty and position, and unfettered by a wife and children of his own, he was flattered. She invited him to a private dinner at Kensington Palace, where she served Hewitt from the buffet with her own slender hands. Afterward, according to Hewitt, she seduced him and, lying in his arms, cried for joy and sorrow.

  Diana often visited Hewitt’s family in the county of Devon, accompanied by two palace detectives and watched by police in four counties as they traveled. Palace officials and members of the royal family—including Charles and the queen—must have been well aware of the love affair.

  But still Diana could not find happiness. Her insecurities ran deep; when Hewitt didn’t respond exactly the way she wanted, she would throw a royal tantrum, flinging bitter accusations. These emotional outbursts frightened and repelled him. “She needed constant attention and reassurance,” he said. “Ten minutes after I’d left, having spent most of the time making love to her, she’d be on the phone needing to be told how much I loved her. She’d phone five, six, ten times a day, always needing to hear the same thing.”14

  Oddly, for all the tantric sex and breathless promises of eternal devotion, neither Hewitt nor Diana was sexually faithful. For much of the five-year love affair with Diana, Hewitt was involved with Emma Stewardson, whom he lamely claimed in his book was a decoy from his affair with the princess, a very convincing decoy indeed. For her part, Diana, still as needy as ever, had a series of love affairs unbeknownst to Hewitt.

  Shortly after her love affair began with Hewitt, she took up with the wealthy banker Philip Dunne. Tall, virile, and witty, Dunne was darkly handsome with polished manners. The princess and the banker were seen in trendy restaurants flirting and laughing. One society lady reported having seen them playing footsie under the table. Charles, grateful for any man who could distract Diana, seemed to stamp the seal of approval on their relationship by inviting Dunne to join the royal skiing party at Klosters, Switzerland.

  But the princess made a huge faux pas in June 1987 at a society wedding reception. Dancing with Dunne, Diana ran her hand through his hair and pushed her tongue down his ear. She danced wildly with him, bold sexual undulations, pressing her body against his, as an awestruck crowd looked on with mouths agape. Charles quietly left the party without her at two A.M., and Diana and Dunne danced until dawn.

  The story was the sensation of the moment and made the newspapers. Philip Dunne received a call from Buckingham Palace instructing him to stop seeing the Princess of Wales. With journalists hunting him down like a pack of ravenous wolves, he went into hiding.

  Having learned her lesson with Dunne, Diana was far more discreet with her next lover, David Waterhouse. A distant cousin of hers, Waterhouse was tall, dark, and handsome, and a grandson of the duke of Marlborough. He never spoke about the relationship, and little is known about it.

  In the summer of 1989 Diana reconnected with a man she had flirted with as a teenager, car dealer James Gilbey, tall, handsome, and muscular. Diana visited him in his apartment building while members of the press waited in the street counting the hours until she reappeared. With time she became reckless. One morning the police stopped her for speeding at 6:45 A.M. coming back to the palace from Gilbey’s apartment. Trying to keep a straight face, the palace spokesperson asserted that the princess had, in fact, been going for an early morning swim. When the story broke, a red-faced Gilbey claimed they had been playing bridge, just the two of them—but bridge requires at least three players. Unwisely, Diana had phone sex with Gilbey on a cell phone call in December of that year in which he called her Squidgey, and Diana, who had stopped sleeping with her husband, admitted her fear of getting pregnant.

  The tabloid the Sun was given a copy of the cell phone recording, and a reporter accosted Gilbey about his voice being on it. He blanched and started to shake, confirming the reporter’s suspicions. When Gilbey told Diana, she dumped him as too hot to handle for her public image. The tabloid kept the recording in a safe for three years before releasing it. When it was released in August 1992, the newspaper carefully edited out segments of the conversation in which the lovers apparently had phone sex.

  As embarrassed as Diana was about the recording, she was delighted when, in January 1993, an equally damning recording of a cell phone conversation between Charles and Camilla was released. In the recording the Prince of Wales expressed the desire to be reincarnated in his next life as Camilla’s tampon. Surely that was worse than phone sex and made the Squidgey tapes look positively boring in comparison.

  Serving in the Gulf War in 1991, James Hewitt received Diana’s impassioned letters accompanied by presents. But an old girlfriend of Hewitt’s, jealous of his passion for Diana, contacted the press. Newspaper reporters swooped down like vultures on the Princess of Wales for sending the army captain gifts and steamy missives.

  An adulterous love affair, like mold, grows in dark and humid places. Confronted with fresh air and the clear light of day, it often shrinks back into nothingness. Hewitt’s affair with Diana was over. He was drummed out of the army for having failed his exams by 1 percent, and, worst of all, invitations to parties stopped coming. When Hewitt’s story Princess in Love was published in 1994, he became public enemy number one in Britain, the quintessential cad. To kiss was fine, but to kiss and tell was unforgivable. “Sometimes it seems that serial killers get a better press,” he lamented, as he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars for his titillating revelations.15

  When Hewitt’s book first came out in 1994, Diana denied their love affair. But by then she was having her own problems with the press. In 1992, the same year she and Prince Charles officially separated, she began seeing married Islamic art dealer Oliver Hoare. The affair sometimes raced, sometimes limped, until 1994. At the start of her affair with Hoare, Diana dispensed with her personal protection—a move that certainly contributed to her accidental death in 1997—in order to enjoy her romantic adventures unencumbered by detectives watching her every move.

  At forty-seven Hoare was Diana’s type—handsome with melting dark eyes, flirtatious, and suave. She often had sex with Hoare at the home of her best friend, Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United Kingdom, and at the home of restaurateur Mara Berni. Sometimes she smuggled him into the Kensington Palace compound hidden in the trunk of her car. Diana would park in the courtyard next to her own, which happened to be owned by Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margar
et; there Hoare would climb out of the trunk and sneak into the rear entrance of Diana’s apartment. Peering through the lace curtains of her drawing room, Princess Margaret was not amused.

  Hoare’s chauffeur reported that Diana would call Hoare up to twenty times a day while he was driving around London. “If she only called five or six times, we thought of it as a quiet day,” the chauffeur reported. “The sheer number of calls she made used to get Mr. Hoare down. Whenever his wife was in the car, he’d carefully pull the plug out just a fraction to break the connection.”16 Unable to reach him, Diana would become frantic and start calling him at his home.

  Anonymous telephone calls began in September 1992 and continued until October 1993, when Hoare’s wife, Diane, asked the police to trace the calls. In January 1994 the police tracked the anonymous phone calls to Kensington Palace and Diana’s cell phone.

  According to the police report, “Mr. Hoare believes that the calls are being made by Princess Diana.”17 Hoare followed the police advice and, next time a call came, called Diana by name. She began to cry and said, “Yes, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”18 But a few days later the calls started again, this time traced to phone booths in the vicinity of Kensington Palace. Still, he did not dump his possessive lover. In March 1994 a photographer caught them driving into Kensington Palace. By August 1994 the January police report leaked to the press, who had a field day.

  Diana’s obsession with Hoare did not preclude other lovers. She started working out regularly at the Harbour Club where her objective was not only keeping her body toned and trim. “She was definitely on the lookout for men…,” said a former palace adviser. “The fact that they were in shorts and vests left little to the imagination. If she saw someone she liked, she’d go right up to him, introduce herself, and ask him when he was going to ask her for coffee. She met many, many men there and had several flings. Believe me, Diana had more men than anyone will ever be able to figure out.”19 One of her Harbour Club conquests was Christopher Whalley, a tall, muscular property developer she saw for several years until shortly before her death in 1997.

  In 1994 Diana met American billionaire businessman Teddy Forstmann, who flew her to the United States to wine and dine her and play tennis. Forstmann remained a friend of Diana’s until her death, though details of the relationship are unclear.

  Another of her conquests was Will Carling, captain of the English rugby team. Carling was easygoing, confident, and athletic. He was also very married. Tabloids reported that the princess was enjoying secret trysts with Carling at Kensington Palace. Speaking to the press, Julia Carling insisted that her marriage was strong “however much someone is trying to destroy what you have. This has happened to [Diana] before, and you hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does.”20

  Carling promised his wife never to see Diana again. “If I had a sexual relationship with her,” he remarked, “I wouldn’t say I had.”21 Considering that the press had countless photographs of Carling entering and leaving Kensington Palace for late-night visits with Diana, he didn’t have to say a word. “She struck me as an incredibly lonely person,” he later said.22

  The press tore Diana to shreds for having an affair with yet another married man. “Is Will Carling merely another trophy for a bored, manipulative and selfish princess?” asked Today. The Sun called her a home wrecker. The Daily Express asked, “Is no marriage and no man safe from the wife of the heir to the throne?”23 Soon after the unfavorable coverage, Diana dumped Carling. She had not been in love with him and felt she was paying a high price for merely having a bit of fun. “Why can’t they leave me alone?” she wailed, the innocent victim of an evil press.24

  Why so many affairs? Diana’s fitness counselor, Carolan Brown, explained, “She was the sort of person who didn’t like being out of a relationship. She didn’t like being on her own because she needed constant reassurance that she was loved. That was her ultimate dream—to find the perfect husband. Have more children and settle down. She was looking for the right man.”25

  Diana’s public adventure with telephone harassment resulted in even greater rumblings about her precarious mental state. “Friends, on my husband’s side, were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort,” she said.26Sun photographer Ken Lennox agreed: “The courtiers were saying she was a mad woman, they were putting out stories at dinner parties that she was a mad woman.”27

  To vindicate herself in the eyes of the world, to present herself as a sane woman victimized by a cruel palace, in 1992 Diana authorized Andrew Morton to write a book about her travails. Diana, Her True Story was supposedly the product of interviews with Diana’s friends who spoke with the author about the princess’s atrocious treatment by the royal family. In fact, Diana herself delivered audiotapes to Morton, tapes which surfaced after her death.

  In November 1995, bolder than ever, Diana agreed to a television interview with journalist Martin Bashir. She intended to vilify Charles and Camilla in the public eye and draw admiration from the public for her silent suffering. The press lambasted her performance, but according to surveys, Diana achieved her goal of winning public sympathy among her audience of fifteen million Britons, and tens of millions of viewers around the world. Treated so despicably by her philandering husband, Diana was forgiven for her love affair with James Hewitt.

  But soon after the interview aired, Diana visited Argentina and was met by headlines such as “The adulteress Di arrives on a mission of charity” and “Ladies look after your husbands: the seducer Lady Di Arrives Today.”28

  After finally obtaining a divorce from Charles in August 1996, Diana remained in the headlines more than ever. She fell in love with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon devoted to his work. Khan was not her usual type. Highly intelligent but somewhat rumpled, he was no tall, dark, and scintillating swain to sweep the glamorous Diana off her feet. Moreover, he hated publicity.

  Costumed as a Pakistani woman in a traditional ankle-length dress over flowing trousers, a silken shawl covering her hair, Diana visited Pakistan. She helped publicize Khan’s hospital and watched him perform open heart surgery. Yet the saintly martyr, who had so often had herself photographed oozing compassion by the side of a dying person, took to berating Khan for spending too much time operating on sick patients at his hospital and not enough time with her. When visiting her in Kensington Palace, Khan would sometimes call his family in Pakistan. After several minutes, Diana, impatient and aching to be the focus of his attention, would distract him by turning up her music or dancing in front of him.

  Trying to force Khan’s hand, Diana leaked stories about their romance to the press in November 1996. The surgeon was livid. Moreover, the same problems kept cropping up that she had had with her husband and her many lovers. Khan refused to be at the princess’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day. “He saves so many lives,” Diana moaned to a friend. “He makes such a difference in people’s lives. It’s wonderful. But he has so little time for me. It’s become a problem. We’re always arguing over it. He puts his work before me. If he really loved me, he’d put me first.”29

  Khan, unable to take many things about Diana, broke up with her in June 1997. The princess, once again rejected and abandoned, was devastated. She had been willing to convert to Islam and move to Pakistan to marry him. “No one wants me,” she opined to a former adviser. “I come with too much baggage. Why can’t I find a nice guy who loves me and wants me to love him?”30

  But within days of losing Hasnat Khan, Diana finally found a man who could devote twenty-four hours a day to making her feel loved, another Muslim who would help her embarrass the stodgy Church of England royal family. A man with no job, a playboy living the life of a prince. He had much in common with Diana. Both suffered from borderline personality disorder—they teetered precariously on the edge of life even as their periodic brilliance won them the admiration of many. Both were narcissistic, volatile, and self-des
tructive. The name of her new lover was Dodi Fayed.

  A friend of Diana’s in London recalled, “I didn’t think he was good-looking. But he was nicely dressed, wore lovely cashmere, nice shoes, very soigné. And he smelt nice. He loved to laugh.”31 At five foot nine, Dodi was two inches shorter than Diana and at forty-one, five years older. Charming, fun-loving Dodi was a spoiled boy who had never grown up and felt no shame at accepting a $100,000-a-month allowance from his aging father. As insecure as Diana, Dodi was outrageously generous to friends and girlfriends and went out of his way to impress, often substantially overspending his $100,000 monthly allowance. His distraught father sometimes refused to pay the balances, leaving Dodi to be sued by American Express for $106,000. But despite his generosity, Dodi couldn’t keep a girlfriend for very long; he was always looking for a woman who was prettier or more famous than his current one. Diana, Princess of Wales, was the big fish. For no other woman on earth combined her beauty and fame.

  When he met Diana, Dodi was engaged to a model named Kelly Fisher. After flirting with Diana on his father’s yacht in July 1997, he would sneak off and make love to his fiancée, who was waiting for him on another yacht, according to Fisher, who at the time had no idea he was coming fresh from the embraces of Princess Diana. When journalists got wind of Diana’s latest love affair, they were flabbergasted by her choice. On August 18 one paper wrote that Dodi was “so cynical, shallow and spoilt you feel nostalgic for James Hewitt.”32