Diana (37 page)

“[There is] always … innuendo … that I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.”

“[Charles and I] went out to tea. It’s so difficult, so complicated. He makes my life real torture, I’ve decided.”

On the Queen Mother: “His grandmother is always looking at me with a strange look in her eyes. It’s not hatred. It’s sort of interest and pity mixed in one. I am not quite sure. I don’t understand it. Every time I look up, she’s looking at me and then looks away and smiles.”

“[Fergie] can’t [tag on to my coattails]. If you want to be like me, you have to suffer.”

“The redhead [Fergie] is being actually quite supportive…. I don’t know why.”

After the release of the tape

“The implications of that [Squidgygate] conversation were that we’d had an adulterous relationship, which was not true.”

“I felt very protective about James because he’d been a very good friend to me …, and I couldn’t bear that his life was going to be messed up because he had the connection with me. And that worried me. I’m very protective about my friends.”

Diana said she had no idea how the “Squidgy” tape came to be published in the national press. “But it was done to harm me in a serious manner, and that was the first time I’d experienced what it was like to be outside the net, so to speak, and not be in the family. [The tape was leaked to the press] to make the public change their attitude towards me.”

After the “Squidgy” tape incident Diana said, “I ain’t going anywhere. I haven’t got a single supporter
in this family, but they are not going to break me.”

She told a friend that “Squidgygate was a catharsis, really.”

On June 25, 1997, seventy-nine of Diana’s dresses and gowns were auctioned at Christie’s in New York, raising $3.26 million for AIDS and cancer charities.

“I am extremely happy to have this wonderful opportunity to raise money for charities devoted to the care of cancer and AIDS sufferers both here in the United Kingdom and in America. It goes without saying that I am also delighted that these dresses, which gave me so much pleasure, may be enjoyed by others.”

“Clothes are now not as essential to my work as they used to be.”

“I am amazed and a little concerned at the enormous prices for my dresses which are being quoted because it may deter people. What I would say is do please have a try. There will, I’m sure, be some dresses which will be reasonable: I hope that whoever does acquire them will enjoy them and get as much pleasure from them as I did myself.”