Diana (31 page)

On duty in the Bahamas, Arthur Edwards complained to Diana that he got the same rate no matter where he photographed. She replied, “Oh, pass me the Kleenex.”

When Charles tried to ban all contact with the media, she told Edwards: “I do enjoy our chats. My husband refuses to have these parties with the press, but I think they are a good idea. After all, you only need to tell people what they want to know.”

“There is too much about me in the newspapers. Far too much. It horrifies me, when there’s more important things, like what goes on in the hospices, or when there’s been a bomb or something.”

Responding to allegations that she and Fergie had been swigging too much champagne at a luncheon, Diana said, “Contrary to recent reports in some of our more sensational Sunday newspapers, I have not been drinking. And I am not, I assure you, about to become an alcoholic.”

In the affidavit she submitted to obtain a restraining order against a photographer who had bumped her car with his motorcycle during a pursuit, she wrote that she was “too distraught to leave my home.”

She shouted at more than one photographer: “You make my life hell.”

A
Vanity Fair
photographer found Diana so engagingly open that he jokingly said he felt he couldn’t call her “ma’am.” “Then by all means, call me Diana,” she said.

“You’re harassing me! Do you know what it is like? Every time I leave my house you follow me. I know where you sit and watch me. I know where you get your information.”

To Glenn Harvey, who was trying to take a picture of her getting into her new Audi: “I’m just a mother taking my children out for the day. Can’t you understand that?” (Harvey had said, “We were told to get a picture of your car.” Diana retorted, “But you got it last week. I had fifteen of you following me on a daily basis last week.”)

More comments for the persistent Harvey

“Do you know what it’s like for me? I have to sit in darkness with the curtains drawn all day. I even had GMTV outside my balcony this morning. Why can’t you people just go away?”

“I just want to be left alone.”

“But you
do
bother me. Why don’t you go away?”

By 1994, she had come to the very end of her tether with the invasive and ubiquitous photographers. “Why, why, why?” she shrieked at them.

When photographer Mark Saunders called her “Your Royal Highness,” she snapped, “Don’t call me that! It’s a sign of respect and you have none for me.”