Diana (40 page)

There were rumors that she’d had her nose done. Her response: “Honestly, if I had my nose done, do you think I would have chosen this one?”

“I don’t like this awful mole above my top lip. I think my legs below the knee are far too thin. I would love a fuller figure, particularly up top.”

She told photographer Gemma Levine: “I hate my hands. My hands are awful.”

Tom Konig Oppenheimer, a friend from the Earls Court Gym, recalls that his workouts alongside Diana began at 8
A.M.,
though they went to great lengths never to arrive at the same time, to avoid the relentless attentions of the paparazzi. One morning, Tom and Diana arrived at the same time, and she said, “Oh, my God, now they’ll think we’re sleeping together!” Having said this, she didn’t mind teasing people about the nature of her relationship with Tom. When they ran into each other at a large party, she gave him a huge kiss and said, in front of the entire room, “Oh, Tom, I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!”

While Diana inspected the race car that had won a world championship, journalist Arthur Edwards commented that the police “would never catch you on the M4 motorway in that, ma’am.” (She’d been pulled over for speeding a few weeks before.) “I’ll tell the jokes, Arthur, thank you,” she quipped.

Diana had wanted and gotten a Mercedes 500L, but she decided to give it up. She told Edwards why: “I’m glad I’ve got rid of it, Arthur. It was like a red beacon, standing out in the traffic. It was nice while I had it, but I don’t miss it one bit.”

On a funeral floral wreath to her father was a card Diana had personally inscribed: “I miss you dreadfully, Darling Daddy, but will love you forever…. Diana.”

On the effects of her perceived isolation: “There’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.”

“Wherever you are, come to me,” she joked after one of many astrological readings at which a possible suitor was forecast.

“If you find someone you love in life, you must hang on to it.”

“I sit in London all the time, and I am abused and followed wherever I go…. There is an obsessive interest in me and the children. The constant attention really freaks William out…. I was hoping to keep this visit all covered up and quiet. I just want to spend a holiday with my sons, I can’t win. What can I do?”

“My sons are always urging me to live abroad and to be less in the public eye. They say it is the only way. Maybe that is what I should do—live abroad.”

She took her sons to see the movie
The Devil’s Own,
which some feel is sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army. “I didn’t know what it was about when I took them. We just wanted to see a
movie, and we picked it out of the paper because William likes Harrison Ford. I issued a statement right away, and I called Prince Charles and left a message. I didn’t want him to think I was deliberately making trouble.”