Diana in Search of Herself (57 page)

Diana’s preoccupation with celebrity meant she would not have a moment’s peace. Had she decided to spend every day toiling in a shelter or hospice in East London—much as the disgraced politician John Profumo had done for decades—the photographers and reporters would have quickly disappeared. But Diana needed to alight, spread her magic, and move on. The magic might have withered if she had shed her glamorous mystique to pursue a life of quiet dedication. She also would have lost the ability to see her reflection each day in the press. The camera was kinder than the mirror.

Chapter 22

D
iana swept into Argentina in an ebullient mood. “
If she had regretted
Panorama
she never would show it in front of her friends,” said Roberto Devorik, her Argentine friend who accompanied her on the trip. “She was quite confident in what she had done at that stage. She called London several times, so she was aware of the uproar.”

The decision to visit Argentina had its origins in her friendship with Devorik. The idea had emerged the previous May during a luncheon at Devorik’s London home with Rogelio Pfirter, the Argentine ambassador. “
She wanted to meet my family and friends, and she was interested in seeing the country,” Devorik said. “Her goal was to be an ambassador for the world, so she decided to see the state of charities in Argentina.”

Pfirter relayed Diana’s words to Argentine president Carlos Menem. Relations between Britain and Argentina had ruptured thirteen years earlier when they went to war over the Falkland Islands. Argentina’s resounding defeat led to the end of military rule and restoration of democracy in 1983, and since then, Argentina had worked to rebuild its relations with Britain. The prospect of a high-profile royal visitor gave Carlos Menem a chance to smooth out the Anglo-Argentine relationship before he made an official visit to Britain. The Argentine government found a suitable charity, the Association for the Prevention of Infantile Paralysis, to issue an invitation to Diana and give her visit a plausible pretext.

Although Diana’s schedule focused on hospital and clinic visits, the British Foreign Office worried that Menem would exploit her presence or that she would misspeak and spark a diplomatic incident. No crisis materialized, primarily because Diana kept quiet. But the
Panorama
interview overshadowed her efforts to be taken seriously as an ambassador when she was greeted with Argentine tabloid headlines such as
THE
ADULTERESS DI ARRIVES
ON A MISSION OF CHARITY
and
LADIES
LOOK AFTER YOUR HUSBANDS: THE SEDUCER LADY DI ARRIVES TODAY
. Diana seemed unconcerned about her notoriety as she made her way around Buenos Aires, and in the end, Menem was able to score political points when he entertained Diana at lunch and said, “
Argentina has gradually regained a position in the world it had lost.”

Back home, the Queen initially responded to
Panorama
by sending conciliatory signals when Diana returned from Argentina.
Buckingham Palace advisers met with Diana to discuss her future role and asked for a written description of her ambitions that they could submit to the Queen. But diplomats and politicians remained skeptical that Diana could handle tricky questions of protocol, much less articulate complicated government policies. While Prime Minister John Major said that as mother of the heir to the throne Diana should have a “
dignified” and “worthwhile” public position, Foreign Secretary
Malcolm Rifkind specifically ruled out a formal ambassadorial role.

Diana soon reinforced these misgivings. Ten days after her television appearance, a photographer from the
News of the World
caught her outside Royal Brompton Hospital after midnight. Instead of fleeing, she posed for pictures and then impulsively gave a twenty-minute interview to Clive Goodman, the newspaper’s royal reporter, on the photographer’s mobile phone. She explained to Goodman that she was a regular midnight visitor to the hospital, spending sometimes four hours a night comforting terminally ill patients, often three times a week. “
I try to be there for them,” Diana said. “I seem to draw strength from them. They all need someone. I hold their hands, talk to them, whatever helps.”

Making the midnight interview all the stranger was the fact that only hours earlier she had met with the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, and the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, to discuss her press relations. “
She again demonstrated her willingness to abandon protocol and infuriate Buckingham Palace,” the
Evening Standard
declared. The interview “has led to fears that the Princess could not be relied on to exercise wise judgment in a politically sensitive situation and should remain on a tighter rein.” Her actions, the newspaper added, smacked of a “personal publicity campaign.”

On December 7, four days after her
News of the World
interview, Diana gave an emotional speech—her first public remarks in two years—at a luncheon hosted by Centrepoint, a charity for the homeless that she supported. She spoke about the plight of “
young people who have suffered abuse and have run away from home; young people whose families neither know nor care where they are; young people who have taken far too much upon their shoulders, far too young; young people forced to leave home because of family poverty and overcrowding.”

In its tone, language, and simplicity, Diana’s speech-making hadn’t advanced much in the two years since her retirement announcement. She still couldn’t manage a speech longer than about ten minutes, and despite extensive coaching, her delivery remained stubbornly awkward. Perhaps because of nerves, Diana took in air when she should have been breathing out, and paused at odd moments. “
Her timing was wrong, she sounded false, and it got worse,” said Jane Atkinson, who advised Diana on media relations in 1996. Diana continued to draft most of her own remarks, but the tabloid cadences were no accident. Not only was Richard Kay her principal advocate in the press, he had also started helping her with speeches. As energy healer Simone Simmons explained, “
He knew her so well and understood her natural vocabulary and speaking rhythms so acutely that he was able, with her cooperation, to prepare many a public statement.”

The Centrepoint luncheon caused a furor, but not because of Diana’s remarks or delivery. On the platform with her was Jack Straw, the Labor party’s spokesman for domestic policy, who blistered the Tory government for its homeless policies. Not only was Diana’s presence a tacit endorsement of his position, she conspicuously applauded his remarks. Her actions underscored her political naïveté and embarrassed John Major. “
It is almost unprecedented for a senior royal to be linked so closely to such an attack,” noted the
Evening Standard
.

By that time, the Queen had already talked to Major and her top advisers about the futility of the Wales marriage in light of Diana’s televised attack on Charles and the royal family. If the Morton book had been the beginning of the end,
Panorama
was the end: Diana may have won the hearts and minds of the public, but she had irretrievably lost the support of her in-laws. That much was evident when Diana received a stern letter from Princess Margaret criticizing her behavior.
According to Simone Simmons, the letter hit Diana hard.

Neither Charles nor Diana wanted to make the first move and file for divorce, so the Queen took matters into her own hands. On December 12—three years and three days after John Major had announced Charles and Diana’s formal separation—the Queen told her prime minister that she would write to her son and daughter-in-law to request that they agree to an “
early divorce … in the best interests of the country.” With Diana’s agreement, Charles could file for an uncontested divorce after a two-year separation. If she refused to go along, they could still be divorced after five years. As one possible inducement to Diana’s agreement,
Charles took Major’s suggestion and publicly announced that he would not remarry.

Diana, meanwhile, had just returned from a triumphant trip to New York, where former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had given her the “Humanitarian of the Year Award” at a dinner for 1,000 to benefit the
United Cerebral Palsy Foundation. Kissinger had praised her “
luminous personality” and called her a “princess in her own right [who] aligned herself with the ill, the suffering and the downtrodden.” In her brief remarks, Diana said being humane required a “
sharpness of mind,” “kindness of heart,” and “loving our neighbors as ourselves”; she quoted a two-line verse that concluded, “Just being kind is all the sad world needs.”

The high-powered Manhattan audience, which included Colin Powell and Rupert Murdoch, gave her a standing ovation “
in adoration of its new saint,” wrote Richard Kay in the
Daily Mail
. It didn’t hurt that the saint looked like a star. Since the night of the Dimbleby documentary, Diana had taken to wearing ever more revealing dresses to major events. So it was on this evening, when dinner guests stared slack-jawed at the plunging neckline on Diana’s clinging black velvet gown. The next day, Rupert Murdoch’s
Sun
ran a page-one photo aimed down her cleavage, under the headline
PRINCESS AND HER BIG PAIR WOW ’EM IN BIG APPLE
.

For all Diana’s public radiance, she was showing signs of unraveling in private. One telling outburst took place at the annual Christmas party that Charles and Diana put on for their staff. Diana approached Alexandra “Tiggy” Legge-Bourke, a thirty-year-old member of Charles’s staff who helped care for William and Harry, and said, “
So sorry to hear about your baby,” implying that the unmarried woman had undergone an abortion. The malicious taunt was entirely without foundation, but Legge-Bourke was so shocked she had to be helped to another room, where she broke down and wept.

For two years, Diana had been nursing a grudge against Legge-Bourke,
the daughter of a merchant banker and a Welsh aristocrat who grew up on a 6,000-acre estate in Wales. The Legge-Bourkes had been friendly with the royal family for years; Tiggy’s mother was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne. Charles had known Tiggy since she was six, and he appreciated her enthusiasm for shooting and fishing, which made her an enjoyable companion for the two young princes. She had also briefly run her own nursery school. “
She is the closest thing to a lady-in-waiting [Charles] has,” said his private secretary Richard Aylard. Diana only grew resentful whenever she saw photographs in the tabloids of Legge-Bourke with William and Harry.

The tabloids made mischief with Diana’s jealousy. During 1995, they ran exaggerated stories about a few affectionate pecks Charles gave Legge-Bourke on the cheek, as well as her sudden weight loss and attractive new figure. “
The word is that Tiggy is slimming to please Prince Charles,” wrote Richard Kay in July 1995.
In fact, Tiggy was suffering from celiac disease, a gluten intolerance that causes severe abdominal pain as well as rapid weight loss. Diana somehow became persuaded that Charles and Legge-Bourke were having an affair, and that she had aborted his baby—none of
which was true, but which prompted the Christmas party calumny. Legge-Bourke was so upset by Diana’s remark that she instructed her lawyer to request an apology from the Princess and a withdrawal of her “
false allegations.”

Legge-Bourke’s attorney delivered his letter to Kensington Palace on December 18, the same day Diana received the Queen’s handwritten request for a divorce. While Diana expected Legge-Bourke to seek redress, she was stunned by the Queen’s letter. Diana’s reply to both her mother-in-law and Charles was noncommittal: She would now “
consider her options,” she said. On Christmas Eve, Diana had an appointment with her therapist, Susie Orbach, then spent Christmas day alone in Kensington Palace, and visited Orbach again on the twenty-sixth. When Diana retreated the following day to the exclusive K Club on Barbuda in the Caribbean, her companion was neither friend nor relative but her twenty-six-year-old personal assistant Victoria Mendham—another measure of her growing isolation.

Diana should have foreseen that divorce would be the ultimate consequence of her
Panorama
interview, but
instead she believed the interview would earn her respect and “independence” on her terms while she remained married to Charles. Diana had even consulted with psychics, who assured her that she and Charles would be reunited. “When she had to face the bitter truth from the Queen, Diana fell apart,” energy healer Simone Simmons said. “
She couldn’t sleep at night and started taking very strong sleeping pills. She was constantly in tears.”