Diana: In Pursuit of Love (18 page)

By now they had met for lunch a couple of times – on one occasion he and former Wales captain Ieuan Evans went to Kensington Palace – and Diana, as Carling wrote in his autobiography (imaginatively titled
My Autobiography
), was ‘particularly interested to hear some rugby stories’ and even asked him if he could arrange for her boys to attend an England training session at Twickenham. When the boys went to the headquarters of English rugby in March 1995, Diana came along as well. Besides showing a keen interest in his love of fitness and rugby, the Princess expressed concern about his marriage. Their conversations had progressed from light-hearted banter about astrology, the latest celebrity gossip and observations about world leaders – she considered Bill Clinton sexy but his wife Hillary rather over-ambitious – to affairs of the heart. Carling had not been married for a year and already the cracks were showing. When she asked him and he confirmed that he was very unhappy, the Princess proceeded to give him the benefit of her own experience in the rough and tumble of romance gone wrong.

It was not her abilities as a marriage counsellor that made the headlines, but as a marriage wrecker. Frequent telephone calls, specially installed private phone lines, secret meetings at Kensington Palace and fond nicknames – Diana would jokingly answer the phone as ‘Mrs Carling’ to the man she called ‘captain’ – these all made up some furtive agenda the Princess seemed to be pursuing. And, thanks to allegations made by Carling’s former PA, Hilary Ryan, they were splashed over five pages of a Sunday tabloid, the
Sunday Mirror
, in August 1995. ‘He did run around her like a puppy dog,’ said his former employee. ‘It was pretty pathetic.’

Others like the royal chauffeur Steve Davies, who caddied for Will Carling, took the same view, believing that she was simply toying with the infatuated rugby star. Carling, who had also made a habit of visiting Diana’s office at St James’s Palace, subsequently compounded his folly in early September by delivering rugby shirts for William and Harry to Kensington Palace after the scandal had broken, making himself an easy target for his detractors in the media. At the time the Princess was visiting her friend, Joe Toffolo, who was recovering in hospital after suffering a heart attack, and had become smitten with his surgeon, Hasnat Khan.

While the clandestine nature of the relationship between Carling and Diana bore a remarkable resemblance to her affair with Oliver Hoare, unlike Diane Hoare the media-savvy Mrs Julia Carling, formerly in PR, refused to remain silent. ‘This has happened to her before and you hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does,’ she told the
Mail on Sunday
. ‘She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger from it.’

Within a month, though, in September 1995, the Carlings had separated, the implication being that Diana had broken up the marital home. ‘It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control,’ announced Julia Carling, a standpoint that reinforced the headlines that were describing Diana as a ‘homewrecker’ and a ‘bored, manipulative and selfish princess’. For his part, Will Carling argued that his marriage was effectively over before his friendship with Diana was made public. ‘That assessment of our difficulties seems to me to
be too glib, too much a convenient excuse,’ he wrote later in his autobiography.

In this cat fight, Diana gave as good as she got, letting it be known that she thought Carling had been a ‘fool’ and that the collapse of his marriage had had nothing to do with her. In fact, she told Max Hastings, she saw him mainly for the sake of the boys. While Diana was said to have dropped Carling ‘like a hot brick’ as soon as the scandal erupted, months later she was still going to considerable trouble to maintain their friendship. Days after her groundbreaking TV interview on
Panorama
in November 1995, where the omission of questions about her relationship with Carling was cause for considerable comment, she came close to delaying her trip to Argentina while, as her private secretary Patrick Jephson acerbically observed, ‘she scrabbled to find the right SIM card to go with the special mobile phone she had acquired to take Carling’s calls’. By then, however, she had, for nearly three months, been secretly seeing the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

‘She was the sort of person who didn’t like being out of a relationship,’ says Carolan Brown. ‘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.’

Certainly she had no shortage of suitors – flowers, invitations and gifts for her were arriving all the time at Kensington Palace. ‘Naturally these attentions flattered her and at some level she enjoyed them,’ said Simone Simmons. ‘Sometimes she would spend a cheerful evening with one squire or another but it was to be a long time before she was ready even to consider a whole-hearted relationship.’ More than that, she was intimidated and nauseated if a man became too ardent and began declaring his undying devotion and affection. ‘As soon as they say everyone is madly in love with you, it’s instant rejection. It’s absolutely repulsive,’ she told James Colthurst, referring to one particularly devoted admirer.

Diana tended to put the men in her life into compartments, and she, her hairdressers and Paul Burrell light-heartedly devised a
‘racecourse’, picking out nine admirers, who – besides Hasnat Khan, who was always the front runner – included a musician, a novelist, a politician, a businessman and a lawyer. These they moved up or down the course depending on how she felt about them. For a time the American billionaire Teddy Forstmann was deemed to be well in contention. Their relationship not only had a suitably transatlantic flavour but earned the approval of Patrick Jephson, who felt that his money, kindness and common sense made him an ideal partner. He first met her in 1994 at an Independence Day dinner hosted by her friend Lord Rothschild (on the advisory board of Forstmann’s company, Gulfstream Aerospace) at Spencer House (a magnificent eighteenth-century town house in St James’s, London, built by the first Earl Spencer, and eventually acquired by Jacob Rothschild’s company, which completed its restoration in 1987). Forstmann subsequently took her out to Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons restaurant in Oxfordshire and she reciprocated with an invitation to Kensington Palace. Later that summer they played tennis together, in suitably matching outfits, while she was on holiday with her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima at Martha’s Vineyard in the United States. Tongues really began wagging when Forstmann, who has also been linked to actress Liz Hurley, flew her, in October 1994, in one of his private planes from New York to Washington, where he was her partner at a movers and shakers dinner hosted by the late Katherine Graham, chairman and former publisher of the
Washington Post
. When the Princess returned to Kensington Palace she was on the telephone to her American hostess to discuss a surprise bouquet of fifty long-stemmed red roses – complete with an ‘over-familiar’ message which apparently came from Forstmann.

Besides Forstmann, Diana was linked to property developer Christopher Whalley, Canadian singer Bryan Adams – his Danish actress girlfriend Cecilie Thomsen accused him of having an affair with the Princess after her divorce – as well as the Asian electronics entrepreneur Gulu Lalvani and even an Italian count. There were plenty of other names mentioned, whether she had met them or not. As her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima cautioned when she spoke to TV producer Daphne Barak: ‘She doesn’t know who she can
trust. And all the men they try to link her name to . . .
really
. Don’t forget what this is about. It’s obvious they are trying to connect her name to some man. This is a typical divorce struggle.’

While the thrill of the chase may have provided amusement and diversion, it did not entirely hide the desolation in Diana’s soul, a sadness and isolation arising from her personality and her circumstance. ‘She struck me as an incredibly lonely person,’ Will Carling observed. ‘She was able to alleviate emotional and physical suffering in so many people, yet retained a curious air of sadness herself.’ It was a constant refrain from those who knew her well. ‘She’s alone and she’s so lonely,’ was Lucia Flecha de Lima’s opinion. ‘Everybody criticizes her when she makes a mistake, but these mistakes are the result of her loneliness.’

In her book,
The Impossibility of Sex
, Susie Orbach describes a personality type that she calls the ‘vampire Casanova’ because people of this personality follow a predictable pattern of pursuit, seduction and then indifference. It is the conquest that matters, but only in so far as it alleviates the ‘dreadful emptiness’ within. Vampire Casanovas are figures more to be pitied than judged; frightened and anxious characters who are emotional black holes. The parallels with the Princess and her romantic experiences are unmistakable.

While she could be consumed by her needs and passions, Diana gradually mastered the ability to stand back and examine, often with amusement, her life and position. But, as reported in the
Daily Mail
of 14 July 1997, she commented sadly to the model Cindy Crawford, ‘I have my picture in the paper every single day. Who would want to take me on?’

Following the Waleses’ separation in December 1992, Diana began to see – alongside her idealized vision of living happily ever after, invariably abroad, with the man of her dreams, far removed from the everyday cares and constrictions of her existence – that she could use her position to do something worthwhile. ‘Her head tells her that she would like to be the ambassador to the world, her heart tells her that she would like to be wooed by an adoring billionaire,’ observed James Colthurst. A friend and counsellor of Diana’s agreed with Colthurst’s opinion about her ‘head’, but not
about her ‘heart’: ‘She was on a trajectory where she was going to do something in the world that was really valuable. Her ambition was not to chase every man in her life.’

As for being ‘wooed’, while she no doubt enjoyed it, ‘It was bad enough getting to grips with being “Mrs W” [‘Mrs Windsor’], never mind bringing another one up,’ she said ruefully to James Colthurst.

Much as the Princess strove to come to terms with the past, inevitably the separation cast a long shadow over her life. She had greeted it as a step forward, but it hardly made her life any easier. She lived in a constant state of agitation and uncertainty, not only about the men she was currently involved with, but also about her husband, her fears and anxieties fuelled by speculation among her friends or in the media about what the Prince and his supporters might be plotting and planning. Yet, amid the lurid headlines about silent phone calls and affairs with married men, it is easy to overlook the fact that she and Prince Charles managed their separation in a way that, though understandably edgy, defensive, and suspicious, was reasonably civilized. From a position where Diana could not bear to be in the same room as her husband, there came a time when she felt sufficiently composed to make regular visits to Prince Charles in his rooms at Colour Court in St James’s Palace.

This was no ordinary separation. She had not only to cope with the emotional reality of the continuing place of Camilla Parker Bowles in Charles’s affections, but she had to contend with the attempts to downgrade her royal status, the whispering campaign against her – ‘Quite mad, poor dear,’ one of the Prince’s circle opined – and the ponderous hostility of her husband’s family as a whole. Indeed, if her own experience had taught her anything it was that once women like herself, who had married into powerful families, were considered no longer desirable as family members they risked losing everything. Not only was that borne out by the ruthless despatch of the Duchess of York from the bosom of the royal family, but also by the treatment of other aristocratic friends of her generation. Diana felt an immediate fellowship with Annabel Goldsmith’s niece, Lady Cosima Somerset, who found herself ostracized when she left her husband, the eleventh Duke of
Beaufort’s youngest son, Lord John Somerset. ‘We shared the experience of being separated from our husbands and uncertain about what the future held,’ Cosima Somerset recalled. ‘We had both broken away from large, powerful families and therefore had lost our protection. Both of us were considered “hysterical, unbalanced, paranoid, foolish”.’

In contrast to her behaviour when in pursuit of love, Diana’s conduct in relation to the Prince and his family was in many ways a triumph of restraint and shrewd counselling. She was quite aware that, as legal precedents for a divorced Prince and Princess of Wales were sketchy, the end game of her marriage would be played out in the court of public opinion. This meant, she knew, that the extent of her popularity would ultimately define the verdict, as the Duchess of York – ‘the canary down the mine shaft’ as Diana called her – had found to her cost. The Princess had witnessed the full weight of the Establishment bear down on Fergie in July 1993 when she accepted the post as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and had the offer quickly withdrawn. Diana, a woman now deemed mad, bad and dangerous to know, saw that she had to navigate her path with diplomacy and subtlety. ‘She was very grown up about that part of her life,’ Vivienne Parry noted.

The path she took was neither easy nor consistent. While the days of lurid imaginings that Camilla Parker Bowles was, in her words, ‘a sexual machine’ no longer held the capacity to torture her, she still pondered over her rival’s astrological fortunes, gossiped about the supposed smell in her house, listened with anger and disbelief to the roll-call of those she had once called friends who had played host to the lovers and, on one occasion, laid out an Ordnance Survey map to plot the devious routes the woman she still called ‘the Rottweiler’ took on her journey to meet Prince Charles. So while Diana was upset when Camilla was present at the memorial service for the Earl of Westmorland on 3 November 1993, which she also attended, she was not as emotionally wrung out as she once would have been.