Diana in Search of Herself (50 page)

A meeting on October 20 at Kensington Palace between Diana and John Major to discuss her role, along with an official visit by Diana to Brussels, seemed to belie any concerted campaign to derail her. But Charles was clearly irked by her chronic ability to grab the headlines. Diana later told
Sunday Times
editor Andrew Neil that when she and the Prime Minister talked, he had approved of her proposal to become a humanitarian ambassador for Britain along the lines of actress Audrey Hepburn’s longtime work for UNICEF. “
Diana told me that Prince Charles had gone mad about that, and had gone to the
Financial Times
and said
he
wanted to be the ambassador,” Neil recalled. “She said the Prime Minister had contacted her and said, ‘This is getting too messy.’ ”

Charles did give the
Financial Times
an interview, but not until late November, five weeks after Diana’s meeting with Major, and Diana’s interpretation was a willful misreading of his words. Citing his recent visit to the Middle East as an example, Charles spoke of his efforts to promote British trade and business overseas—a far different role from what Diana envisioned for herself. Charles also said his work on behalf of British commerce reflected his long-standing interests: “
The idea I am searching to redefine my job is rot. It is just that, since the day I got married, people have chosen to ignore the things I continue to do, day in and day out.”

Diana was easily thrown off-balance, and the month of November brought a series of provocations that nearly undid her. As the month began, the Flecha de Limas left for the Brazilian Embassy in Washington; on the same day, Diana’s chauffeur, Simon Solari, told Diana he was moving to Charles’s staff. That evening Diana arrived at a theater benefit red-eyed and distraught, and an hour later she left in tears.

The next day, Diana’s favorite bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, was moved by Scotland Yard to another position. “Diana leaned on Ken a lot for advice, and he lightened things up,” said one of her friends. “But she would draw her staff in too close and then put them in their place. She did that with Ken.” According to another friend, Diana mistreated Wharfe when she suspected him of briefing the press. Nevertheless, Diana was extremely distressed when he left, prompting Barbara Cartland to announce on television that her stepgranddaughter had gone on a “
prolonged eating binge.” This moved Diana to show a “
rare public display of her frustration” by telling a luncheon for the charity WellBeing, a group concerned with the health of mothers and infants, “I was supposed to have my head down the loo for most of the day.… I thought I might postpone my nervous breakdown for a more appropriate moment.”

Energy healer Simone Simmons began working with Diana during this period and found that, behind her friendly manner, the Princess was a “
pathetically damaged creature.… She felt abandoned, rejected, and broken.” Simmons was “
shocked” to see “traces of the scratches and scabs of recent self-mutilation.” In Simmons’s view, some of Diana’s alternative therapies—the osteopathy, reflexology, acupuncture, shiatsu, colonic irrigation, and aromatherapy that she continued even as she was seeing Susie Orbach—“
were counteracting each other, possibly harmfully … She was misreading … confused and conflicting advice she was offered from every quarter.… Diana’s bright but rather manic conversational manner was an expression of tension and panic.”

In that unhappy state, Diana decided to announce at a charity luncheon on December 3 that she was withdrawing from public life. Although she had hinted to Palace officials for several weeks that she might pull back some of her activities, Dimbleby recounted that they found “
it proved impossible to discover exactly why or how the Princess intended to do this.” Once Diana arrived at her decision, “in a gust of emotion,” as a friend of Charles’s described it, she was determined to make a dramatic announcement. The Queen and Prince Philip, after asking her to reconsider, urged her to pull back quietly and gradually instead, which would give her maneuvering room. Charles advocated the same course, to no effect; neither could he determine Diana’s “
real purpose.” “it was an emotional decision,” said an official who worked with her. “That was a low time for her. She was very estranged from Charles.”

Diana offered a few clues several years later. “
The pressure was intolerable,” she said. “I was constantly tired, exhausted.” But she referred again to the “campaign” against her that “was being successful.” Her decision to withdraw “did surprise the people who were causing the grief—it did surprise them when I took myself out of the game. They hadn’t expected that. And I’m a great believer that you should always confuse the enemy … the enemy was my husband’s department because I always got more publicity.” Diana felt she needed to declare her intentions rather than quietly withdraw, she said, “because I owed it to the public.”

Diana’s remarks at the luncheon to benefit the Headway National Head Injuries Association took less than five minutes. The first half sounded like a valedictory, reviewing the benefits of her public service for the previous twelve years. She did not close the door, as she had originally intended, leaving a “
little light,” as several friends and advisers suggested. “
I will be reducing the extent of the public life I have led so far,” she said. “I intend to focus on a smaller range of areas in the future. Over the next few months I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life.” Her “first priority” would
be William and Harry, “who deserve as much love, care and attention as I am able to give”—although her intentions didn’t entirely make sense, since the boys were at boarding school and Diana’s vacation time with them had been mapped out months earlier.

The reason for her departure, she said unequivocally, was the “overwhelming” media attention, especially to her personal life, which was “hard to bear.” In that spirit, she asked to be given the “time and space that has been lacking in recent years.” She emphasized that her decision had the backing of the Queen and Prince Philip, “who have always shown me kindness and support,” but she conspicuously omitted reference to Prince Charles.

Diana’s manner magnified the melodrama of the moment. After finishing her remarks, she sat down, and “
the tears started to flow. The Princess sat with her head down, biting her lip and blinking furiously,” according to the
Evening Standard
. Even if her words indicated she would return to the public stage sooner rather than later, she acted as if she was in fact leaving—and with enormous sadness. The pages of tabloid coverage contained all the shock and sorrow appropriate to a final farewell.

The tabloids again made Prince Charles the scapegoat, using Diana’s failure to mention him as proof he was at fault.
CHARLES FORCED DIANA TO GO: SAD PRINCESS QUITS PUBLIC LIFE
, announced
The Sun
, capturing the coverage’s general drift: that the “
campaign to downgrade” Diana by Charles and his “sophisticated propaganda machine” had “driven her out and left her no choice but to step into the shadows.”

But the decision had been Diana’s, and it had as much to do with her backbreaking schedule as with pressure from the media and her desire to “confuse” her enemies in the Palace. In one sense, she was trying to assume some control over her life by removing herself from the royal regimen. But losing the structure of royal routine also removed the discipline and constant distractions of a busy life. For Diana, “time and space” brought the dread and anxieties that overtook her when she was alone.

Diana was fed up as well with being the fund-raising magnet at endless charity engagements. Although she would have better served the charities by admitting she had assumed too much responsibility and was now scaling back her obligations to a realistic number,
she left her 118 charities hanging by writing to each with an offer to resign or continue in a nominal way. Hoping to be among those she would pick up again, charity officials declined her resignation and jockeyed to stay in her good graces.
Indeed, Mike Whitlam, the Director-General of the British Red Cross, had met with her the day before she made the announcement. Only weeks earlier, Diana had become a vice president of the British Red Cross, and Whitlam, like other charity officials, was determined to maintain a working relationship with her.

Some commentators accused Diana of hypocrisy in blaming the media. “
Carping newspaper columnists and even intrusive newspaper editors have proved … to be Diana’s closest allies,” wrote Anne Robinson in
Today;
when Diana wanted to expose the rift in her marriage, “it was a journalist she turned to.” Other critics expressed skepticism about Diana’s ability to lead a genuinely private life, even for a few months. Ninety-two-year-old Barbara Cartland predicted that Diana would be “
bored stiff” outside the public eye. “The only books she ever read were mine,” Cartland said, “and they weren’t awfully good for her.” As
The Times
pointed out, Diana “
does not know what her role should be, and no one seems able to tell her.… Watching her … one had the overwhelming impression that she was making this announcement to her only real friends … the ordinary and extraordinary people she has met on her walkabouts and in her charity work.… What this is all about is a love affair with the public.”

Diana was ready for the critics within two days. “
We can reveal today that one proposal of pivotal significance has quietly emerged about her future,” wrote Richard Kay in the
Daily Mail
. Because of Kay’s special relationship, his report carried Diana’s imprimatur. The plan called for the establishment of a Princess’s Trust that would fund programs and research around the world to help the disadvantaged. According to Kay, Diana would
not
want a “film-star photo opportunity role” similar to Audrey Hepburn’s—of the sort she had described to John Major—instead, she wanted to be a “chief executive, chairing policy and planning meetings, making decisions and guiding philosophy.”

Aside from the unsuitability of such a role for someone like Diana, who thrived on contact with ordinary people and hated the dreariness of boardrooms, the proposal was an exercise in wishful thinking that had come up before and would emerge again. Earlier in the year, David Puttnam had organized a lunch for Diana at Claridge’s with “
the great and good of TV and movies” to discuss setting up a Princess of Wales Trust. “She loved the idea,” Puttnam recalled, as she did each time it was presented to her over the years. Nothing ever came of it because it didn’t fit Diana’s style of operating: Find a cause, bring it to light, and let someone else carry it forward.

Diana was thirty-two at the end of her first year of separation from Charles. As unsure of her purpose as she had been at the outset, she clearly hadn’t thought through the implications of her “retirement.” “
I don’t think she knew her own mind about it,” said Michael Adler, Chairman of the National AIDS Trust, one of Diana’s patronages. “When she retired, she didn’t know whether or why she needed to do it, and the moment she did it, she regretted it and missed the limelight.”

Chapter 20

E
ven when Diana’s stated reason for doing something was perfectly valid, any number of hidden factors were often involved. In the case of her retirement from public life, the unacknowledged factor was her entanglement with a married man. Some tabloids had caught the scent. “
There is one man at the moment who has been seeing Diana for some time,” reported the
Daily Mirror
only days after the announcement—although the tabloid did not name him.

The man was Oliver Hoare, a wealthy dealer in Islamic art who had met the Waleses in the mid-eighties during a house party at Windsor.
Hoare was distantly related to the prosperous Hoare banking family but had come from modest circumstances. His mother, Irina, had emigrated from Czechoslovakia, and his father, Reginald, had been a career British civil servant who left only $2,000 when he died in 1964. Irina and Reginald scraped enough money together to send their son to Eton, where he was captain of the boxing team, and then to the Sorbonne.

After college, Hoare met an Iranian princess named Hamoush Azodi-Bowler, who took him on as
her “protégé,” inviting him to live in her home in Tehran so he could “study and excavate and read Arabic and Persian script.” In Tehran, Hoare mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd that included David Sulzberger, from the American publishing family, who would later become Hoare’s business partner. Sulzberger introduced him to a number of figures in the world of ballet, including Rudolf Nureyev. In Iran, Hoare began collecting Middle Eastern art and antiquities, and
he embraced Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes the quest for divine love and knowledge through ecstatic dancing and other meditative rituals. On returning to London, he joined Christie’s auction house, where he headed the Islamic art department.

Hoare was known as a ladies’ man. He was handsome—with eyes of “
deep velvet-brown … fixed on the spellbound object of his conversation”—and his manner combined what
Sunday Times
columnist Taki Theodoracopulos called “an
old-fashioned politesse” with a hint of the bohemian. A
S
a struggling college student, Hoare had grown his hair long and played guitar in Parisian cafés.
A
S
a figure in the London art world, he was known for wearing mismatched colored socks and discussing the spirituality of Iranian mosques. A
S
a sideline, Hoare advised wealthy clients on their collections.