Diana: In Pursuit of Love (35 page)

The subtext was that Dodi was not right for the butler, who saw his position increasingly under threat. During Diana’s last summer, Burrell had sensed the way the wind was blowing and concluded that it was not in his favour. Even before she met Dodi, the Princess was spending less and less time at Kensington Palace. In fact, during her last year, she performed more official engagements abroad than at home – a trip to Leicester in April 1997 was her first home engagement outside London in eighteen months. The successful sale of her royal dresses was an obvious sign of the way she was clearing the decks of her royal life. In reality, Paul Burrell, her ‘rock’, was the only relic from an unhappy time in her life – and their bond was rapidly crumbling. ‘At the time of her death the relationship between Diana and Burrell was at its lowest ebb,’ stated her friend Vivienne Parry, a view endorsed by several Kensington Palace staff, including the chef Darren McGrady. Now, their already highly charged association was further threatened by the presence of the Fayeds, who had their own butlers and domestic staff.

Concerned about his future with the Princess, Burrell had registered with several employment agencies and had made overtures to various Americans, notably Tom Hanks, with whom he had struck up a friendship. Even Donald Trump was interested in ‘Di’s Guy’. As Burrell’s one-time agent, the lawyer Richard Greene commented, ‘He felt that his time was coming to an end and that she no longer needed him. During that last year Paul was looking for work outside. He wanted to take care of himself and his family. Her dalliance with Dodi provoked genuine fears.’

For the last few years, ‘Abroad’ had become a familiar conversational thread, as much psychological as geographical, the Princess seeing America in particular as a place of ‘options, optimism and openness’. During the last year of her life she made around twenty overseas trips and was away from Britain for more than twelve weeks.

Her references to moving to Australia, then to South Africa and finally the States were part of a wider disenchantment with British society, a disillusion fed by her own experiences as well as the commercial success of the Duchess of York, who had reinvented herself to an appreciative American audience. David Puttnam had long conversations with Diana about her buying a home in Martha’s Vineyard where she had enjoyed a summer holiday. ‘She felt that she could recreate her life in America,’ he remembered. ‘She liked the way she was treated by press, liked the people, and the sense of freedom.’ While she had turned down a proposal from Revlon to represent them, and laughingly rejected Kevin Costner’s offer of a part in the sequel to
The Bodyguard
, it was clear that the trajectory of her life was moving away from Britain. ‘She loved Americans and loved America,’ said Richard Greene. ‘She felt a sense of freedom in America and was thinking, Why not America? The whole of life was opening up for her.’ Certainly her brother Earl Spencer believed that one day she would have ended up in the States.

As the Princess wearily told the media during the first days of her holiday in St Tropez, ‘My boys are urging me continually to leave the country. They say it is the only way. They want me to live abroad. I sit in London all the time and I am abused and followed wherever I go. I cannot win.’ It was significant that she mentioned the boys, the anchors of her life, as giving her the go-ahead to look elsewhere. In earlier complaints about harassment she said that it was only the boys who kept her in Britain. Now those ties were loosening.

When the Princess started poring over architect’s plans for Julie Andrews’s former house in Malibu the alarm bells really started ringing. She had even chosen rooms for the boys. The fact that the house was now owned by Dodi made it an even more serious proposition. Before, she had merely dreamed – of opening a riding school with James Hewitt; buying a farm in Tuscany with Oliver Hoare; settling into a home in Cape Town with Hasnat Khan. For the first time she was looking at a place that existed outside her imagination.

Was she going to marry? It is a question that is as intriguing and contradictory as the lady herself. Dodi’s father contended that his
son had proposed, and claimed that he had sent three cases of champagne to Kensington Palace to toast the bride-to-be.

However, his assertions of a dynastic union are diluted by the fact that he also ardently believed that Diana was expecting Dodi’s child, a claim vigorously denied by Rosa Monckton who said that Diana had had her period while she was with her in Greece. The official coroner Dr John Burton was brutally emphatic. ‘I have seen inside her womb. I know she wasn’t pregnant.’

Others, including Burrell, are equally dismissive. Her friend Lana Marks claims that Diana telephoned to say Dodi would soon be ‘a past chapter’ of her life, while another friend, Gulu Lalvani, said he had joked with her about saving up for a wedding present only to be told by Diana that while she was having a lot of fun, no marriage was planned. Other friends were concerned that she may be making the wrong choice – again. Her former boyfriend Teddy Forstmann phoned her on the Fayed boat and asked her ‘what the hell she was playing at’. As a friend of Forstmann explained: ‘He is very protective of those people he cares about and he thought that Diana could do much better for herself than Dodi.’ The Princess placated him by saying that the romance was simply a ‘summer fling’. It appears that the Princess was telling her friends what they wanted to hear, depending on their take on the romance.

The most intriguing testimony comes from her local parish priest Father Gelli, the curate of St Mary Abbott’s Church in Kensington, whom she met after she was criticized for taking William and Harry to see the movie,
The Devil’s Own
, a film about IRA terrorists, in May 1997. He wrote her a letter of support and as a result she invited him for tea where their conversation ranged over many spiritual issues, including exorcism, the Devil and Sufism. She was most concerned to know about marriage between Christians and Muslims and whether they would be allowed to marry in church.

Later she talked to him about another parishioner, Dodi Fayed, sharing with him her hopes and dreams. She felt Dodi could take care of her and offer her the love and security she had never really known. In the last week of her life she called the priest again, this time from the deck of the
Jonikal
. She asked him about marriage
and a church wedding. ‘Diana was so very happy and very much in love,’ Gelli said. ‘I honestly believe if they were alive today, they would be married.’

While the controversy over her feelings for Dodi will never be resolved, one area of agreement is that Diana had made considerable strides, emotionally, physically and spiritually. In the first year of her new life as a free woman she gave full expression to the real Diana, no longer inhibited by or afraid of those who had tried to shackle her during her royal life. ‘I had never seen her so happy, particularly over those last three months,’ recollected designer Jacques Azagury. ‘I was dealing with her a lot, seeing her almost every day. You could tell she was a happy woman.’

Those friends who had seen her wayward, disheartened and, at times, stumbling on her journey of self-discovery sensed that at last she was savouring a true taste of happiness and contentment. The woman who just a few years before was a nail-biting, round-shouldered, diffident creature was now confident in body, mind and heart. ‘I’m so strong now, I fear nothing, nothing,’ she told a friend. Higher heels and shorter skirts were a semaphore of the positive woman she was becoming. Her astrologer, Debbie Frank, who had counselled her since her separation, spoke of the transformation: ‘She was happy all the time – something that was unique. For Diana happiness usually lasted for just a day. I don’t think she’d ever known that before. Her life had never been quite so fulfilled. She was loving her work and she was so proud of her boys.’

The Diana whom Rita Rogers saw in August 1997, just a few days before her death, was, she felt, much more spiritual than at any time she had known her: ‘She was radiantly happy, loving life and full of it. Her conversations were all joy and laughter and full of excitement about everything that was going on.’ For a woman with a religious outlook on life, the most hurtful decision during her divorce had been the decision by the Queen to have her name omitted from public prayers. Until then, Diana, like the other senior members of the royal family, was formally mentioned in Church of England services. Ultimately, however, it was a price she was willing to pay as she viewed the expanse of opportunity before her.

In a way that would have been unthinkable during her royal career, Diana felt more able to act on her own instincts. She spoke at a private therapy session for women suffering from eating disorders at the Priory clinic in May 1997 and made several private visits to the children’s eating disorders unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. A few days after her divorce was finalized, in September 1996 she flew to Limni outside Athens in Greece for the funeral of a young lawyer, Yannis Kaliviotis, a cystic fibrosis sufferer, whom she had befriended during her frequent visits to the Royal Brompton Hospital. At the funeral of the fashion designer, Gianni Versace, in July 1997 she impulsively placed a consoling arm around a sobbing Elton John.

These incidents are illustrative of the natural, spontaneous and human behaviour that was at the heart of the Princess but which had been stifled during her royal career. The girl who got ‘smacked wrists’ from courtiers for wearing leather trousers to a rock concert was also prevented by royal protocol from sitting with Angela Serota at the funeral of Adrian Ward-Jackson whom they had nursed together until his death in 1991. As for attending the funeral of a stranger, six years before that, Prince Charles had privately rebuked her for behaving like a ‘martyr’ for helping a pensioner who had collapsed with an angina attack during her visit to a hospital in Marlow.

During her royal career Diana had recognized that she was an outsider, wearing her difference like a secret badge of honour. Now she accepted and welcomed that role, her self-knowledge reflected in the certainty of her chosen path in life. She no longer felt any need for outside advisers – ‘I left because she pretty much felt in control,’ explained Stephen Twigg – and now saw mystics like the spiritual medium Rita Rogers less for sympathy, more to help her understand her work and her life. Rita recognized this, writing of the Princess in
From One World to Another
, ‘She was a very strong person, wilful and capable of making her own mind up about life. The readings I gave her interested her, but she did not come to me to know which path she should take.’

In Diana’s last interview, with the French
Le Monde
newspaper, published in August, she returned to the theme that crowded her
thoughts, talking earnestly about her ‘destiny’ to help ‘vulnerable people’. She had often spoken about her sense of destiny or her ‘spiritual pathway’, as she called it, seeing hers as a life ordained to help the sick, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. That inner spirit, the essence of Diana, was now on permanent display through her passionate embrace of the landmine campaign and her work with the dying, as well as in her symbolic farewell to her royal gowns and hence her royal life. Diana was striding out on her journey.

A beach-front home in Malibu. A union between a Muslim commoner and a Christian princess. A string of Diana, Princess of Wales hospices established across the globe. A successful campaign against landmines. It all seems too far-fetched to be true; almost as ludicrous as the story of a woman destined one day to be queen who walked out of her marriage and away from her royal future. A princess who made her own fairy tale.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

The Final Odyssey

H
E PURSUED HER
, he wooed her, lavishing her with extravagant compliments and expensive jewellery. The wealthy tycoon collected people like others saved stamps and she was a trophy, a social prize of incomparable value. Their wedding shocked the world, the union of a modern-day princess and the buccaneering millionaire meeting with universal disapproval. ‘The reaction here is anger, shock and dismay,’ noted the
New York Times
critically, as the newspaper reported the marriage of America’s former First Lady, Jackie Kennedy-Bouvier, to the Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis, in October 1968. Her neighbour Larry Newman reflected popular incredulity: ‘How in God’s name could she love that guy?’ Their union touched a raw nerve in the national psyche, still living the dream that the First Lady, widowed in tragedy, would remain aloof, chaste and regal, a living symbol of the Camelot ideal. That her new husband was a rough-hewn Greek of coarse tastes and even coarser language was an affront to national pride, ensuring that the backlash was crude and unrelenting.

It was a scenario Diana, Princess of Wales now saw unfolding before her eyes on the last day of her holiday in the sun. ‘I understand why Jackie married Onassis. She felt alone and in need of protection – I often feel like that,’ she said during her romance with Dodi Fayed. Little did they realize how much protection she would need as she and Dodi left the calm waters of the
Mediterranean to face a ferocious storm on dry land. As the
Jonikal
nosed into the berth at the Cala di Volpe Hotel in Sardinia on Saturday 30 August 1997, they knew that their sunshine odyssey was coming to a close. Nothing could have prepared them for what lay ahead. Within a matter of hours they would be transported from the idyllic, pampered repose of his yacht, an island of blissful calm and safety detached from the real world, to a Dantesque frenzy of contorted faces, blazing flashlights and revving engines. They went from a life where their every whim was catered for, to a world where they were the prey, hunted, harassed and hemmed in. The contrast could not have been more violent or distressing.