Diana in Search of Herself (43 page)

Diana controlled Morton’s access to her friends, who would not sit for interviews without her permission. She included just one member of her family, her brother Charles, whose innate wariness she could count on. In fact, Charles agreed to be questioned only about her life until the age of eighteen.
As the project advanced, Diana brought in her father to give Morton his choice of photographs from the family albums Johnnie had compiled over the years, but she excluded the women in her family. Her sister Jane was off-bounds for the obvious reason that her marriage to the Queen’s private secretary required her to be kept in the dark. Both Sarah and Frances Shand Kydd had a history of making unhelpful comments to the press.

These arrangements yet again pointed up the absence of a solid family foundation that might have prevented Diana from risking the Morton book. Her father lacked the subtlety to fathom the extent of her problems and could do little more than say, “
Just remember we always love you”—an important and heartfelt reassurance, but insufficient when she needed crucial guidance. In his public comments, Johnnie perpetuated the myth of a happy royal marriage, calling stories of marital discord “
trivial, like mosquitoes.” At one point, Johnnie expressed his concern that Diana was working too hard, but he couldn’t help admiring her celebrity. “
Someone said to me recently that the two most famous people in the world are the Pope and my daughter,” Johnnie said in 1989. “I am so proud.”

In September 1991, Diana and her father had one of their few public spats when she and her siblings objected to the way Raine Spencer was orchestrating the sale of art and heirlooms to finance their lifestyle at Althorp. Asked for comment, Johnnie angrily denounced his children for “
ingratitude,” saying pointedly, “
Diana doesn’t understand about money. She has no experience of money. She’s too young.”

Such disagreements were more common in Diana’s uneven relationship with her mother. Though Frances was not the recluse that the tabloid press often described, she relished her independent existence far from sophisticated society, befriending nuns, fishermen, and plainspoken Scots who respected her privacy. “
I love people for what they are,” she once said. “You won’t find me at the smart dinner parties.… I have nothing to do with London society.… I don’t mix.”

At times, Frances and Diana giggled together like sisters, but
they might not communicate for extended periods. “
It was not an easy relationship,” tabloid reporter Richard Kay said. Frances had managed to help
Diana and Charles in the fall of 1987, but from 1988 through 1992—the years when Diana’s marriage was fracturing—Frances was despondent about the breakup of her own marriage, so neither woman could offer much support to the other. One friend of Diana’s remembered when Frances “would call three times a day, and Diana would talk a lot to her. Diana tried on the phone to be caring, but then she would blow up. She thought her mother would only call with her own problems.” The nub of Diana’s predicament, according to this friend, was that “with her own mother, Diana was afraid to give her love and be rejected. That is why it was such a difficult relationship.”

Diana also feared her mother’s volatility. “Diana’s mother would get too emotionally involved,” one of Diana’s friends said. “Frances is not a woman who worries about speaking her mind.” That impetuous streak was evident when Frances periodically popped up to make disconcerting, sometimes incoherent statements to the press that embarrassed Diana. “
I don’t understand why I have to be attacked all the time,” Frances said in an outburst to the
Sunday Express
. “They say I turned my son Charles and Diana against their stepmother. That is very damning stuff.… I am well versed in being crucified. Why can I just not be me? I am well aware that if I was caught speeding, Myra Hindley [a notorious convicted mass murderer] would look like a Girl Guide.”

Part of Morton’s bargain with Diana was her right to read and comment on his manuscript. To disguise her role, he altered some quotes to the third person, attributing them to “
a close friend,” or he used her direct quotes that “she told friends.” “
There were 4,000 of her words in the book,” Morton said. “She approved it, including her first-person speech.” According to Morton, she also “
made a number of alterations of fact and emphasis.” One odd request changed a significant fact in the staircase incident at Sandringham in January 1982: It was the Queen who found Diana at the foot of the stairs, but Diana asked Morton to substitute the Queen Mother’s name, “
presumably out of deference” to her mother-in-law. Otherwise, Diana’s marginal comments were minor, and sometimes touching. When Morton referred to Charles as “
the man she longed to marry,” Diana wrote “was in love with.” The book was “to all intents and purposes her autobiography,” Morton said.

For the first two months of the Morton project, Diana was in a state of considerable agitation over the condition of Adrian Ward-Jackson, who was declining fast. Angela Serota tightly coordinated his visiting schedule, and Diana came three or four times a week. Diana was attentive and compassionate,
but also excited by the scene in the Mount Street apartment. “It was a frenzied atmosphere,” another visitor said. “Once Diana was visiting, everyone more assiduously visited as well. It became an event.” A friend of Ward-Jackson’s recalled that Diana “kept saying in a girlish way that it was the first time she monitored someone dying. There was a kind of morbid interest for everyone. She saw it as a part of growing up, and an interesting experience.”

By August, it became too difficult to administer a morphine drip at home, so Ward-Jackson was moved to St. Mary’s Hospital. At that point, Diana’s visits became public knowledge. Ward-Jackson had secured her promise to be at his deathbed, but he hadn’t counted on the media circus that surrounded her visits. His brother arranged a private route into the hospital for Diana, but she declined to take it. “She said, ‘I am not going to be intimidated,’ ” a friend said, “Then she would change her outfit every day and enjoy it. She was like a young girl who wanted to avoid the paparazzi but flirt[ed] with them.”

When Angela Serota called Balmoral to say Ward-Jackson was dying, Diana rushed to London, arriving at four
A.M.
Over the next four days, Diana spent hours at his bedside, but she was en route to the hospital when he died. The tabloids splashed the deathwatch story on page one, calling her compassion “
extraordinary” and marveling that she spent six and a half hours “consoling his grieving family.” (Actually, she didn’t meet his parents until the funeral, several days later.) The funeral turned into a media spectacle when Diana arrived in defiance of protocol, which held that senior members of the royal family didn’t attend funerals of commoners. “
Diana’s tears flowed during the service,” wrote
The Sun
, as they did two months later at Ward-Jackson’s memorial service.

Diana’s overwrought behavior hampered her work for AIDS when she drew fire from reactionary columnists such as John Junor (the father of Penny), who wrote in
The Mail on Sunday
, “
What do you suppose can explain her preoccupation with the disease? Could she really want to go down in history as the patron saint of sodomy?” She also alienated members of the establishment, including some of her friends discomfited by what they viewed as her theatrics. “The whole episode was very bizarre,” a longtime friend said. “She adopted Adrian like a sick dog. It did her great damage in the establishment. She went sort of mad, and she lost some allies because she was too over the top.”

Afterward, Diana wrote to Angela Serota that caring for Ward-Jackson gave her a “
more positive and balanced” view of life, although her subsequent actions didn’t indicate a new level of maturity. She had come to similarly optimistic conclusions before, but lost sight of them during periods of personal adversity. “Afterward she didn’t rather mention Adrian,” said a
woman who knew her well. “For her, that was not odd. It was intense and current, and then when it was over, that was it: out of sight, out of mind.” “She was extraordinarily affected at the time,” one of Ward-Jackson’s friends said. “But she absorbed pretty superficially. I don’t think she learned long-term lessons.”

Diana carried on with her duties, living with the subterfuge of the Morton book. By then, deception had become second nature. In August, she joined Charles and the boys for a Mediterranean cruise on a yacht owned by John Latsis, a wealthy Greek friend. The tabloids were appropriately moonstruck, pronouncing it a “
second honeymoon,” and the Waleses “two lovebirds” who were “
happier and closer than for ages … scotching rumors of a big freeze.” Charles and Diana were also reasonably successful maintaining appearances on an official visit to Canada with William and Harry in October, immortalized by one of Diana’s favorite photographs of herself: smiling with arms outstretched as she ran up the gangplank of the
Britannia
to greet her two sons.

Meanwhile, the Waleses were navigating their daily life through their private secretaries. As James Gilbey summed up their existence at the time, “
Their lives are spent in total isolation.” Diana had a successful four-day solo tour of Pakistan that fall, giving the tabloids another opportunity to draw pointed contrasts. “
While the caring princess meets crippled Afghan child refugees,” Ashley Walton wrote in the
Daily Express
, “Charles will be fishing and stalking deer with friends.”

A month later, Penny Junor, who earlier in the year had authored a book saying the Wales marriage was “
actually very healthy,” wrote a magazine article on Diana pronouncing 1991 “
the greatest year of her life,” when she became “the new Diana, the complete woman.” Charles and Diana, Junor wrote, “are together far more than you would believe from reading the reports in the tabloid press.”

Diana was eager to send the opposite message the following February during the couple’s tour of India. A memorable image of Diana sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal, the tomb built by a Mogul emperor for his wife, was the most vivid example up to then of her use of photographs to make a point. On a visit many years earlier, Charles had vowed to bring his future wife to the romantic monument. Palace officials planning the schedule for the Indian trip had no knowledge of the Prince’s pledge and didn’t give a second thought to Diana’s solo visit. It was only the day before, when they saw the tabloid pack’s excitement, that they realized the photographers wanted a picture to fit the story they planned. Diana understood, too, and obligingly posed in “
wistful solitude” (
Daily Mail
) as a “
poignant reminder of the royal wish that did not come true” (
Daily Mirror
). Her message, Dimbleby wrote: “
The marriage was indeed on the rocks.”

As it turned out, the photograph was the first in a run of potent images crafted by Diana that spring. The next day in India, when Charles tried to kiss her after a polo match, she turned her head so the cameras would catch him awkwardly pecking her neck.
Diana was well aware the tabloids were hoping for a proper smooch; she and her aides even discussed the photo opportunity beforehand, and the
Evening Standard
set the stage by saying “
all eyes will be on them.”
OH COME ON YOU CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT CHARLES!
blared the
Daily Mirror
’s front-page headline,
placing the blame for the botched kiss on the hapless Prince. But the
Mirror
’s man James Whitaker later admitted, “
It was she who seemed to make sure it didn’t work. She knew that there would be a lot of judgment on it.” On a solo visit to Egypt several months later, Diana echoed her Taj Mahal shot by posing in solitude in front of the Pyramids. “
Here she was again, the innocent victim,”
The Sunday Times
noted. “And once again, the image was carefully created.”

In March 1992, Johnnie Spencer died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age sixty-eight while the Waleses were skiing in Lech, Austria. Even in her grief, Diana wished to cut a lone figure, agreeing to travel home with Charles only after their staff argued at length that if they went separately they would suffer a “
tabloid mauling.” For her father’s funeral, however,
they arrived and departed on their own, at Diana’s request. The press showed some restraint in its interpretation this time. Charles had a meeting in London afterward, “
leaving Diana to attend her father’s cremation without him,” noted the
Daily Mail
.

As Diana put distance between herself and Charles, she was already worrying about the consequences of the Morton book, which was due to be published on June 16. Some Palace officials were aware of the project, but not the extent of Diana’s involvement. The previous November, Diana’s friend Roberto Devorik had met with Patrick Jephson, Diana’s recently appointed private secretary, over lunch at Mark’s Club in London. Devorik had heard Diana was cooperating with a book and that she had sanctioned a previously unpublished photograph by French photographer Patrick Demarchelier for the cover. Devorik recalled, “
I asked, ‘Are you aware of this book?’ Patrick [Jephson] said, ‘This is my nightmare.’ ” By January, Robert Fellowes and other top Palace aides were poking around to figure out what line they should take. They got nothing from Diana because she could truthfully say she had no contact with Andrew Morton, but she was unnerved by the inquiry.