Diana in Search of Herself Read online

  Copyright © 1999 by Sally Bedell Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82203-1

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  A Note on Sources

  Bibliography

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  In September 1997, when I began my research on Diana, Princess of Wales, I had few preconceived ideas. I felt no partiality toward either Diana or her former husband, Charles, the Prince of Wales, though I had encountered each of them briefly and came away with impressions that seemed at odds with what I had read in the popular press.

  I met Charles in the summer of 1991, as the couple were nearing their tenth wedding anniversary, on July 29. The British newspapers were filled with speculation about the state of their marriage. The Sun created a sensation when it published two articles by Andrew Morton describing Charles’s fondness for Camilla Parker Bowles, a married woman he had known since 1971.

  None of the articles mentioned that Camilla had been his mistress for the previous five years—an open secret in the aristocracy but unknown to the public at large. The tabloids had been similarly circumspect four months earlier when they reported that Diana’s riding instructor, Major James Hewitt, had become infatuated with her after having “misread her friendliness.” At the time, only Hewitt’s family and a few of Diana’s closest friends knew the two had been having an affair since 1986.

  The British press did draw attention to the obvious signs of tension between Charles and Diana. “Set on separate ways in their private lives,” The Sunday Times declared that May, “the Prince and Princess of Wales seem increasingly to be bringing their competition and conflict on to the public stage. It is an insidious process that could spell disaster for the monarchy.”

  On the afternoon of June 15 that year, my husband and I were taken by some English friends to the Guard’s Polo Club in Windsor Park to watch a Pimms Cup match between a team sponsored by Perrier and a Canadian team called the Maple Leafs. Charles was there without Diana, who couldn’t bear watching polo. He wasn’t playing because his back was giving him problems; still, he appeared to be in good spirits, and he looked almost American in a blue blazer and sharply creased tan trousers with his slip-on shoes polished to a glistening mahogany.

  After the match, we took refuge from the rain in a large tent. One member of our party, a woman in her late seventies, was a close friend of the Queen Mother’s. When Charles saw his grandmother’s friend, he kissed her on the cheek and called her by her first name. She made introductions all around, and we engaged in small talk. I noticed immediately how comfortable Charles seemed with older women. He was attentive and sweet to his grandmother’s friend, solicitous of her health problems, inquiring about mutual friends.

  Knowing his interest in holistic medicine, she told him of a practitioner who worked wonders on aching backs, but it turned out the man was a faith healer (much more the province of Diana than Charles), and Charles seemed to lose interest. When my husband made some observations about Charles’s brother Prince Edward, with whom he had played court tennis—a forerunner of lawn tennis—at a club in New York several months earlier, Charles said something charming in response. In this familiar setting, chatting with people he knew and away from the prying eyes of the press, Charles was far more natural than the man shown on television performing his royal duties.

  My only encounter with Diana was equally informal. In the summer of 1994, Diana and Charles had been legally separated for eighteen months, and their relationship had been further strained by his admission in a television documentary, broadcast in June, that he and Camilla Parker Bowles were lovers. That August, Diana was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, the guest of the Brazilian ambassador Paolo Tarso Flecha de Lima, and his wife, Lucia, one of Diana’s closest friends. A friend had invited me to the Vineyard for a visit with her family, and on August 16, I arrived with my children. An hour later, we were on a private beach for a small buffet lunch with Diana and the Flecha de Limas. Diana was mesmerizingly beautiful in a flowered bikini, her skin perfectly bronzed, her long-limbed figure exquisitely proportioned. My two younger children greeted her properly, but I had no time to brief my nineteen-year-old, who arrived late and breathless after sprinting down the hill. When I quickly whispered to him that the Princess of Wales was there, he exclaimed, “No way!” then whirled around to be introduced. He pumped her hand vigorously and said, “Hey, how are you doing?” She seemed genuinely tickled by his Yankee familiarity.

  Otherwise, though, she was strikingly subdued, her high beams shut down. After a few feints at conversation around the buffet, I gave up. She seemed preoccupied, and she soon moved into a chair apart from the group to talk intently to our luncheon hostess, with whom she later took a long walk down the beach. I’ve pondered Diana’s demeanor that day many times since. Here was one of the most charismatic women on the planet, yet she seemed almost without affect. I couldn’t figure out whether she was dim and incurious, or troubled and sad. She had not been with her two sons in weeks, and she was surrounded by families with children about the same age as hers. I also knew she had spent the morning with Elizabeth Glaser, a prominent fund-raiser for pediatric AIDS who was dying of the disease, which perhaps explained her subdued manner.

  Only years later, when I was interviewing one of Diana’s friends, did I hear the words that correctly summed up her manner that day: “At times,” he said, “Diana could be fantastically vacant. She would just switch off. She was unhappy and would let herself give in. Sometimes she would not try a yard.” Yet I also learned that she was often more alert than she seemed. In social settings, according to another of her close friends, “she would perceive small things. She could pick out all the details about a person, both physical and … personality [attributes].” After I met Diana on the Vineyard, she confided to a friend that she felt I was “closely observing” her—which I had been trying to do unobtrusively. Her behavior on the beach offered other glimpses of character traits: her intensity in pursuing a new friendship—in this case with our luncheon hostess—and her preference for taking the initiative in social situations in order to maintain control.

  As I suspected, she had been deeply moved by her visit with Elizabeth Glaser, but I discovered that Diana was suffering for other reasons. The previous day, she had learned that a book about her affair with Hewitt (which had ended in 1991) would be published in the fall—based on their correspondence as well as interviews with him by author Anna Pasternak.
Diana had wept inconsolably and had hardly eaten. She was obviously still preoccupied the following afternoon.

  When Times Books asked me to consider writing a book about Diana shortly after her death in 1997 at thirty-six, I hesitated. Scores of books had already been written, most of them sensational or superficial or both, by turns condescending, prurient, and fawning. Many were simply newspaper accounts strung together by British tabloid reporters whose tone ranged from hagiography to character assassination, sometimes in the same volume: Diana would appear at one point as a self-possessed superwoman, only to be portrayed pages later as a self-loathing, weepy hysteric, with no explanation for such contradictory behavior.

  As I did my own preliminary research, I found myself drawn to her emotional complexity, and I felt frustrated that no one had done enough reporting to make sense of her. The challenge was to separate her essential traits from the mythic personality that had been assigned to her, and then to show how these traits guided her behavior and her relationships. It was the prospect of finding the woman behind the public mask that drew me to the assignment.

  Diana was a celebrity of almost unprecedented magnitude. As if royalty and photogenic beauty were not enough, she sent off wisps of desperate vulnerability—which were then confirmed by her wrenching personal confessions in the controversial 1992 book Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton, and an equally controversial television interview with Martin Bashir on the BBC’s Panorama program in 1995. When “ordinary” people met Diana, or even when they read about her or saw her on television, they often felt that her highs and lows reflected their own. It was this bond that brought out huge crowds of weeping mourners in the days after her death.

  Among those who did know her, whether for years or months, Diana inspired proprietary feelings that grew stronger after her death. Perhaps because Diana had the ability to establish instant intimacy, or perhaps because she could be so intense, she inspired comparable feelings in others. After she died, various friends spoke of her with such assurance that it seemed as if she had confided in them all the secrets of her capacious personality. In fact, her friends supplied only partial and often contradictory views, because she was incapable of fully revealing herself to anyone. “She would tailor the truth about this aspect and that aspect of her life according to whom she was speaking to and what she thought they wanted to hear,” wrote Simone Simmons, an “energy healer” who befriended Diana during the last four years of her life. “You have to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,” one of her close friends told me. “Annabel Goldsmith [a friend in Diana’s latter years] would see her in one light, I would see her in another.”

  Some who knew her had long declined to speak publicly about her, and others have spoken to me with extreme reluctance: Diana’s hold over people—the fear of incurring her displeasure, of losing her friendship—remains even after her death. Another complicating factor is the Prince of Wales and his two sons. Few who knew Diana, even those who vehemently took her side in the marital wars with her husband, dare risk the wrath of the man who will someday be King. Some are genuinely fond of Princes William and Harry, and don’t want to incur their disapproval, either. For these reasons, many of the people who spoke with me demanded strict pledges of confidentiality.

  In addition to interviewing people who knew Diana, I have read thousands of newspaper articles and several dozen books about her. Many of these accounts are filled with conflicting assertions unsupported by evidence, with numerous anonymous quotes. Because I have no knowledge of the sources behind these statements, I decided against using anonymous quotes from secondary sources, unless I cite them for a specific purpose and identify their origin. Any unattributed quotations in this book are from my own interviews with sources I have judged knowledgeable and trustworthy. I have also included a detailed notes section to help guide the reader.

  The British press will doubtless take a dim view of this book—in part because it presents an unflattering view of the role of the tabloid reporters, but also because they feel they “own” Diana. The British tabloids were as much players as observers in Diana’s life; analyzing their impact on her is as important as understanding her relationship with her family, her husband, her lovers, and her friends.

  While others have purported to tell Diana’s “true story,” “secret life,” “real story,” or “untold story,” this book explores the interplay of Diana’s character and temperament. It doesn’t deal with quotidian details of Diana’s life and her surroundings; nor does it attempt to be the final word, which would only be possible if everyone who knew her well agreed to speak unguardedly, on the record. The opening of Diana’s archives would shed further light, although she shredded many sensitive documents, and after her death, friends and relatives destroyed medical records and what one friend called “incriminating” love letters.

  It may ultimately be impossible to fully explain Diana because she was so mercurial. Even those close to her had trouble grasping what was going on in her mind. Her moods were volatile, causing her friends and relatives to walk on eggshells to avoid provoking her. “Sometimes she appeared to change from one moment to the next,” her second cousin Robert Spencer told me. “One time she would be sweet and glad to see you, the next she would be distant.” These frequent shifts in her personality reflected her fragile sense of herself and the turbulence of her emotions.

  Richard Kay, a Daily Mail reporter who became one of Diana’s confidants during the last five years of her life, often wrote about her with great certitude, but admitted to me that he wasn’t sure how much he really knew about her. Only hours before she died on August 31, 1997, Diana called to tell him that “she had decided to radically change her life. She was going to complete her obligations … and then, around November, would completely withdraw from her formal public life.… It was a dream sequence I’d heard from her before, but this time I knew she meant it.” Kay wrote those words the day after Diana’s death, but eight months later, he said, “My feeling was at that time she meant it, but she could have changed the next week.” It may be that recognizing such unpredictability is the beginning of wisdom about Diana, Princess of Wales.

  Chapter 1

  Diana was driving through the English countryside one day in 1984 with Michael Shea, press secretary to the Queen, when they noticed a huge billboard ahead with an enormous photograph of Diana’s face. “Oh no!” Diana exclaimed. “What’s that?” As they came closer, they could see that the billboard was an advertisement for a book that had been written about her. Diana buried her face in her hands, exclaiming that she could no longer tell where her public image stopped and her private self began.

  She spoke those words three years into her marriage to Prince Charles, but her anguished confusion stayed with her to the end. From the moment she stepped into the limelight in September 1980 to her violent death seventeen years later, Diana was swept along in an ever-expanding persona, even as she searched frantically for her own identity. When she first appeared on the world stage, Lady Diana Spencer was a nineteen-year-old who had been raised with limited expectations: that she marry a fellow aristocrat and fulfill her duty as a wife and mother. Her marriage to the future King of England thrust on her a public identity that she could never square with her muddled sense of self.

  The world probably would have heard little of Diana Spencer had she not married the Prince of Wales. “She would either have been a countrywoman, just like her sisters, and dissolved into the atmosphere,” said a male friend who knew her from her teenage years, “or she would have married an achiever who offered more of a challenge but would have gone off and had an affair, and she would have divorced the husband in short order.”

  Diana lived only thirty-six years, all of them amid privilege and wealth: the first half in the rarefied cocoon of the British upper class, the second in the highly visible bubble of royal protocol and pageantry. Her married life was unnatural by any measure—“bizarre,” her brother Charles, Earl Spencer, called it in h
is eulogy of Diana. Much of her royal existence was lonely and regimented, but tabloid headlines invested its large and small events with high drama.

  Simply assuming the title of princess transformed Diana. As Douglas Hurd, the former foreign secretary, put it, “She needed to be royal to succeed.” But others have joined the royal family without becoming larger-than-life celebrities. Diana’s extraordinary impact resulted to a great degree from her physical presence.

  She was endowed with undeniable attributes. Her beauty was singular, especially her big blue eyes, the most expressive of all facial features. “They look so wondering and modest,” a Norwegian photographer once remarked. Her height (five foot ten) and lithe figure allowed her to carry clothing exquisitely. If she had been a haughty ice queen, or even strikingly confident, her appeal would have been limited. What made her so charismatic was the combination of her looks and her air of accessibility. “She has a sympathetic face,” her father once said, “the sort that you can’t help but trust.”

  Diana had a knack for seeming to be open with people—offering the same small glimpses to everyone, while effectively masking what was really going on. “People adore her because whenever she speaks to them she reveals some small nugget of information about herself or her family,” observed Catherine Stott in The Sunday Telegraph in 1984. “Nothing she says is ever embarrassing or indiscreet. People feel that they are getting more than they actually are from her.” As one of Diana’s former aides explained it, Diana knew just how far to go: “People would ask her the most intimate questions, and she knew how to answer them sweetly while actually blowing them off. But because all those intimate details were out there, people felt they knew her.”

  She lacked arrogance, and she connected effortlessly with her social inferiors. “She had the gift of making other people feel very good,” said one of her friends. “She was a princess, but she could step down and make you feel special.” With her informality and easy small talk, she seemed an outsider in her own class. Before marrying Charles she even worked as a housecleaner. “I am much closer to people at the bottom than to people at the top,” she told Le Monde in the last interview before her death. Yet unlike her sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, Diana maintained a regal dignity.