Diana in Search of Herself (64 page)

In a further effort to craft a fresh public profile, Diana considered authorizing a book about her charity work. The idea came from Martin Bashir, who continued to moonlight as a paid speechwriter for Diana. She seemed curiously ambivalent about the project. “
She was an anxiety-ridden young woman,” said Vivienne Schuster, Bashir’s agent. “She felt everything she said and did was subject to misinterpretation by those who watched her.”

Schuster found an eager publisher, Random House UK, whose chairman and CEO, Gail Rebuck, met with Diana. They made a preliminary seven-figure deal and came up with a title,
In Faith and Hope
. But Diana
soon cooled on the idea, deciding “
it was too complicated to deal with,” according to Rebuck. The unstated reason was that Diana had broken with Bashir, as she had with so many others, in part because she had been feeling pressure from Bashir to sign the book deal, which would have required permission from the Queen. However, the relationship’s end came that spring when Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, who mistrusted the
Panorama
man, asked Diana to listen to Burrell’s conversation with Bashir on the speakerphone, and Diana felt insulted and betrayed by some of Bashir’s comments.

Bashir was the second aide to leave Diana early in 1997. Her personal assistant for the previous seven years, twenty-seven-year-old Victoria Mendham, left abruptly at the end of January over a money dispute. On Christmas Eve, Diana had again taken Mendham to Barbuda, as she had the previous year. The Christmas trip was the fourth vacation on which Mendham had accompanied Diana. For the first two trips, Diana had paid all the costs. After the Barbuda trip at Easter the previous year, however, Diana had asked that Mendham, who made $40,000 a year, split the bill. Instead, Mendham’s half had been paid by royal household accounts—a customary practice for employees, although Diana was furious that she had not been informed. When Diana asked Mendham for her share of the most recent bill, totaling nearly $14,000, the assistant said she couldn’t afford it but would pay her airfare. Richard Kay called the resulting altercation over the current and previous bills “
the final straw in a deteriorating relationship between the two.”

Mendham’s departure left Diana with Michael Gibbins, her private secretary; Paul Burrell, her butler; and Caroline MacMillan, another personal assistant who assumed Mendham’s duties, to manage her personal and professional affairs. With grim predictability, small aspects of Diana’s everyday life kept blowing up in tabloid headlines. In early February, she unexpectedly withdrew a foreword she had written the previous July for a book of photographs,
Rock and Royalty
, which was assembled by fashion designer Gianni Versace to raise money for Elton John’s AIDS Foundation. Diana had written the fulsome tribute (“
From the optimism that shines from the pages of this book, one can tell that [Versace] loves mankind”) without seeing the book, and when she received a copy, she was distressed to see photographs of the royal family juxtaposed with suggestive pictures of naked men. Diana said she was “
extremely concerned” that the pictures would offend the Queen, and pulled out of a gala book launch as well. Versace was so mortified he canceled the party, and Elton John was reported to be “
devastated.” As a result of the incident, Diana cut contact with the singer and the designer.

One rare bright spot that spring was William’s confirmation at Windsor. It was the second public reunion for Charles and Diana since the divorce;
the first had been in December 1996, for the Christmas carol service at Eton, where William had been enrolled since 1995. Tension between Charles and Diana had diminished noticeably in the months following their divorce. Charles had taken to dropping in from time to time at Kensington Palace, when he had to use the nearby helicopter landing pad. On his first visit, Diana called energy healer Simone Simmons to exclaim, “
You’ll never guess who just came to see me: my ex!” The Waleses now cooperated well on issues regarding their sons, and she occasionally called to solicit his advice. “Things were better on a basic level,” said one of Diana’s friends. “The hurt was deep on both sides, but they did a better job at public events together.”

Unfortunately, arrangements for the confirmation ceremony dredged up some old acrimony when Diana learned that Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who helped with the logistics, would be among the guests. Diana had not invited members of her own immediate family because she assumed the ceremony would be “
brief and straightforward.” Still, when she saw the proposed list, she was miffed, and at her insistence, Legge-Bourke stayed away.

Diana’s mother seemed rankled by her exclusion as well. When queried about her absence, Frances said she was “
not the person to ask…. You should ask the offices of William’s parents.” She pointedly placed a notice in the newsletter of the Oban Cathedral, where she had recently converted to Catholicism: “
For my grandson William on his confirmation day, love from Granny Frances.”

The ceremony came off without incident. Charles and Diana even arrived and left together with their sons, instead of taking separate cars, which had been their habit during the long estrangement. Posing for the official photograph, Diana and Charles did not converse, although they laughed and appeared relaxed. William, however, “
showed few signs of mirth,” according to one observer.

With the departures of so many key aides, Diana now handled most press inquiries herself, or directed them from the background, so her views often appeared in papers such as the
Mirror
in addition to the dependable
Daily Mail
. Some editors found her mercurial ways exasperating. “
The confusion was there all the time,” said Sue Douglas, editor of the
Sunday Express
. “She was going out with the boys wearing her shorts and a baseball cap, but it would be designer stuff and she would be immaculately made up because she never thought there would not be a photographer waiting.”

Nor could Diana restrain herself from reading everything written about her. Said a man who knew her from childhood: “She
had
to read it. There was always an element of insecurity for Diana. She wanted to know
that what she was doing was being approved of, and I think she found it mesmerizing.” Having witnessed her sensitivity for too many years, her butler Paul Burrell finally began hiding the most unpleasant articles. “
I took a strong line when something was personal and upsetting, and thought it best for her not to see it,” he said. “I always got a strange look when certain papers weren’t there. She would ask for them, but I wouldn’t let her see them.”

Diana and those close to her believed she had to wage a constant battle for survival with the press, to avoid being swallowed by her own celebrity. At the same time, Diana enjoyed playing games with the press and public. One of her more peculiar practices was what Diana’s energy healer Simone Simmons described as “
‘hiding’ in plain sight”—a surreal exercise for a woman whose identity was already confused. As Simmons explained, “I coached Diana in the art of pretending to be someone who bore a strong passing resemblance to the Princess.” The trick was to engage in such mundane activities—hailing a cab, taking money from a cash machine—that observers couldn’t believe she was the real Diana. “
So confident had Diana become as an impersonator of herself,” said Simmons, “that if someone … gave her a wide-eyed and puzzled stare, she would smile and wave at them, as if daring them to challenge her.”

Diana was now “
telling pointless lies more and more frequently,” Simmons recalled. “She retained a crazy conviction that since she’d compartmentalized her life and had scattered about different versions of the same story, she would be safe and somehow protected.” Diana’s deceptions defined her relationships with editors and reporters in her last year.

Not all her lies were pointless, however, as could be seen in May 1997 after a visit she made to Roehampton Priory, a private psychiatric clinic specializing in eating disorders.
Diana had been secretly visiting Roehampton and other psychiatric treatment centers since 1994 as a sort of Trojan patient, which allowed her to talk to the residents and get information from professionals without discussing her own problems. This time, however, she spoke frankly about the roots of her eating disorders, and someone tipped the
Mirror
.

When editor Piers Morgan called Diana’s office to alert her to the story, Diana immediately got on the line. “
I persuaded her that, in order to get it right, she should tell me,” Morgan recalled. Diana gave him a detailed forty-minute briefing with “the understanding that I would not quote her directly but do it as reported speech.” After publication of the
Mirror
’s five-page report disclosing that she had suffered from bulimia as a teenager, Diana issued a statement to the other newspapers saying she was “
deeply disappointed” that a patient had leaked her comments. “The benefits to patients depend enormously on privacy being respected,” she said.

Diana’s manipulation of the truth had several purposes. By not denying her own twenty-year struggle with bulimia, Diana played for public sympathy without ever asking for it. At the same time, she stressed her concern for patients and struck a blow for privacy rights. “
I rang her and congratulated her on a rather slick operation that distanced her from collusion with the dreaded tabloids and made her look rather good,” Morgan said.

For nearly eighteen months, Diana had persistently misled the press about Hasnat Khan. Since her vehement disavowal of a romance during her Australian trip the previous fall,
the tabloids had written some reasonably accurate stories about the relationship based on comments by some of Khan’s relatives. The most revealing account, in the
Sunday Express
in February, quoted his father and mother. According to Hasnat’s father, Rashid Khan, an economist, Diana “
had made all the moves” in the relationship, but Hasnat had said “marriage was not possible.” Hasnat’s mother, Naheed said her son had been “terrorized” by the media spotlight, which was “ruining his life.”

Diana, however, was determined to make their relationship work. “
She would have converted to Islam, she would have done anything,” said Elsa Bowker. Diana miscalculated when she made another spur-of-the-moment visit to Pakistan in May, again billed as a fund-raiser for Imran Khan’s hospital, where Diana attended a lunch with sixty Pakistani VIPs who paid more than $1,000 apiece for the privilege.

But Diana’s covert purpose for the trip was to meet Hasnat Khan’s family and “
convince them that she was a nice girl,” said Elsa Bowker. Wearing a shalwar kameez of pale blue—pastel colors signal respect in Pakistan—
she spent ninety minutes with a dozen of Hasnat’s relatives, including his parents and the grandmother she had entertained at Kensington Palace. “
She was obsessional about families and longed to be embraced by them,” Simone Simmons explained.

When Diana returned to London several days later,
she told friends she had made a good impression, and that marriage was now possible. Inexplicably,
she had not informed Khan beforehand of her visit with his relatives. He was dismayed that she had gone so far, and rebuked her for disclosing details to the press. The following week,
Hello!
magazine quoted Hasnat’s father expressing doubts that Hasnat and Diana would marry: “
There are so many people who meet each other, who respect each other, who love each other, who do not get married.”

One evening after Diana and Khan quarreled, she summoned Simone Simmons to Kensington Palace and greeted her friend with “
swollen panda eyes and mascara-streaked cheeks…. [Diana] was both mortified and panic-stricken because she felt that Hasnat was withdrawing from her.” During this period, Diana also went to see Elsa Bowker, who discovered her
“
weeping in the stairway. She had on no makeup, her hair was not done, she was wearing a baggy sweater and pants. She came into my house and said, ‘I am destroyed inside. They have destroyed me.’ She never said who ‘they’ were, but she wept and wept and went through four boxes of Kleenex. I really thought she might commit suicide.” The next morning, however, a friend called Elsa to say he had seen Diana “smiling and radiant at Turnbull and Asser buying shirts.”

Diana and Khan continued to see each other, though still in secrecy. “Diana was getting frustrated and angry with Hasnat,” said one of her close friends. “He wouldn’t go out in public with her. Even if he did love her, he couldn’t marry her with the press baying at the doorway every time he had to do a heart operation.”

For the first time, Diana began appearing conspicuously in public with single men. She had lunch several times with Christopher Whalley, her friend from the Chelsea Harbour Club, and by one account made “
no attempt to dodge the paparazzi.”
One evening she appeared at Mayfair’s chic Harry’s Bar with an Indian businessman, Gulu Lalvani, a multimillionaire electronics tycoon who was twice divorced. Lalvani, who was fifty-eight at the time, later explained that they were friends through several of her charities, to which he had donated generously. After dinner, Diana danced with Lalvani into the night at Annabel’s, the Berkeley Square nightclub. Lalvani remarked later on her “
air of defiance” that evening: “She pulled me onto the dance floor whenever a song appealed to her.” Her night on the town was duly reported in the press. As Elsa Bowker explained, “
She knew everyone would see her, and the poor doctor [Khan] was shocked.”