Diana in Search of Herself (17 page)

The tabloid men (and they were, with a few exceptions, male) fell in love with Diana. They were smitten by her drop-dead looks, gleaming smile, infectious giggle, and natural manner. To Harry Arnold, Diana “
had a way … of taking scalps. She used to collect men … in the old-fashioned romantic way. She would give you a look with lowered eyes.… You knew deep down it was a game she played, and a very clever one in a way, not cynical, but by doing this, she won everybody over.” The hacks decided almost immediately, as Whitaker later wrote, that Diana “
fitted perfectly … She was the most likely candidate to be future queen that I had seen in years.”

Like Charles, the hacks were content to skim Diana’s lovely surface, judging her by the most obvious selling points: her beauty, her venerable family, and her pristine image. Captivated by the effusive press coverage, the public fell in love with Diana, too. As the courtship developed, Whitaker and other reporters became Diana’s fierce advocates, and she began looking to them for approval.

The leaders of the tabloid pack were Whitaker and Arnold. Others included Ross Benson of the
Daily Express
and Andrew Morton, who would take over at the
Daily Star
following Whitaker’s move to the
Daily Mirror
in 1982. Also in the mix was the bombastic
Daily Mail
gossip columnist Nigel Dempster.

“
James and Harry,” said Morton, “were like the Labrador and the Jack Russell.” Whitaker was thirty-nine and had been a royal hack for thirteen years when he first spotted Diana. Florid and heavyset, with a nimbus of curly hair, Whitaker was the son of an executive at the Sperry Rand Corporation. “
People talk about me as if I’d come from nowhere,” he once told a reporter. “But my father owned race horses. We’ve always had good cars.”
After graduating from The Elms at Colwall, a boarding school, Whitaker touched down briefly at Cheltenham College and did a stint as an accountant before landing in journalism.

Whitaker’s flamboyance was legendary, both in his columns and his frequent television appearances. He spoke loudly and emphatically, but he redeemed his pomposity with a measure of self-deprecation, describing himself as a “
master of trivia.” He admitted to joining the royal beat after tasting the high life while covering a polo match where champagne and smoked salmon were being served.

Whitaker once followed Diana and Charles to Ascot with his
Daily Star
editor Peter McKay. Both men were in morning dress, but Whitaker had
enlivened his formal attire with a shirt that he described as “
absolutely scarlet, with a white collar.” “
His face was beet-red,” said McKay, “which went very well with the shirt.” The two men sneaked into the tent reserved for White’s, the exclusive men’s club, where the aristocratic members were
not
wearing red shirts. “We were just about to be chucked out,” said McKay, “when Charles and Diana came in, and Diana walked straight up to us, smiling. She called us by our first names, so the people in the tent figured we were okay.”

From the beginning, said McKay, “
Whitaker both proclaimed himself a royalist and reserved for himself the right to expose everything he could.” Whitaker would lie for hours on a rock overlooking Balmoral, a picnic lunch nestled at his side as he trained his binoculars on the royal residence. Whether Diana was at a polo match or the opera, or even just across the room at a reception, Whitaker would invariably peer at her through his high-powered Nikons. “
I know binoculars are intrusive,” said Whitaker, “but I could see all sorts of things.”

To win Diana’s confidence, Whitaker wooed her with blandishments, bouquets of roses, and even homeopathic remedies, claiming later that he had “a bond” with Diana resulting from “
several intimate chats.” She nicknamed him the “Big Red Tomato.”

Equally competitive but somewhat less blatant was Harry Arnold, the terrier of the two. He was a year younger than Whitaker, with a “
resemblance to a London taxi driver,” wrote Douglas Keay in his book,
Royal Pursuit: The Palace, the Press and the People
. Arnold was a natty dresser, with such flashy touches as gold rings and gray-tinted lenses in his glasses. Having reported on murder trials before covering Diana for
The Sun
and then the
Mirror
, Arnold considered himself more of a probing reporter than Whitaker. Although he professed to support the monarchy, he was known to be politically liberal and to take a dim view of the upper class.

Andrew Morton grew up in Yorkshire and earned a degree in history from Sussex University. When the
Daily Star
appointed him royal correspondent at twenty-eight, it was assumed his six-foot-four height clinched the position, since he could see well in crowds. Square-jawed and bespectacled, he was mocked for his resemblance to Clark Kent, which once prompted him to wear a Superman costume on assignment. From the beginning, he was starstruck by Diana: “
Her blue eyes gaze straight into yours with a look that is frank, friendly,… and sexy,” he once reported.

Ross Benson of the
Daily Express
secured his bona fides by attending Gordonstoun, where he was in the same class as Prince Charles. Benson liked “
to think they were friends, but I’m not sure they were,” said his wife, Ingrid Seward. Handsome and impeccably attired, Benson was the most ardent royalist of the bunch. Seward was the editor of
Majesty
, the premier
fantasy magazine about royal life. Observed Benson, “
If they do a feature about Prince Charles’s cuff links, it will be the most authoritative article that you have ever read about the royal family’s cuff links.”

Even more riveting than Benson’s coverage of the royal family was his long-running feud with
Daily Mail
gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. Not only did they expose errors in each other’s columns, they lashed out with personal insults. To Dempster, Benson was “
the Pompadoured Poltroon,” and to Benson, Dempster was “the Tonsured Traducer.” An Australian who immigrated to Britain at age six, Dempster left Sherborne, a boarding school, when he was sixteen. He married a daughter of the 11th Duke of Leeds, which gave Dempster the best aristocratic connections of the tabloid crowd. Yet he made his mark with sharp-edged gossip about the aristocracy—not the “
old established” grandees he admired, but those who would “abuse that privilege—the ones who are unkind to waiters.”

Although technically Dempster didn’t follow the royal beat, his
Daily Mail
column became a magnet for nuggets about the royal family. With his customary immodesty, Dempster condemned the entire tabloid pack. “
[They] knew no one,” he said. “No one in journalism, apart from my good self in those days, had input from the royal family. [Princess Margaret] had been a very good friend of mine, so I had great input. Prince Charles’s office was also in my pocket.”

It was Dempster who broke the story in September 1980 that Prince Charles’s “
new choice of girlfriend” had been approved by “the two happily married women who influence [him] most on personal matters, Lady Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles.” Diana confessed that she had read the column, but she withheld comment. From September onward, the tabloids filled their front pages with descriptions of every glimpse they could get of Charles and Diana: a horse race in Shropshire, a fiftieth birthday party for Princess Margaret (“
back in each other’s arms,” wrote Whitaker, Charles and Diana “danced the night away”), and riding on the Berkshire downs.

They trailed Diana to her job at the kindergarten and even to a Knightsbridge shop owned by a “
romantic underwear expert.” “
If I go to a restaurant or just out shopping in the supermarket, they’re trying to take photographs,” she complained to Danae Brook, a
Daily Mail
reporter who lived in her apartment building. On the weekend of Charles’s November 14 birthday, the pack followed Diana to Sandringham, forcing her to remain indoors the entire time and ultimately to leave early. Stephen Barry said she was “
very depressed” as a result.

Diana learned to evade the hacks, and she and Charles managed to slip away for a series of weekend meetings that would be reported by the tabloids only after the fact—thanks to tips from low-level staff. Beginning with his use of Broadlands as a “
safe house” in the seventies, it had been Prince Charles’s custom to conduct his courtships at the homes of friends. He took Diana several times to Broadlands and to the home of the Parker Bowleses in Wiltshire, and Camilla “
encouraged the romance,” wrote Stephen Barry. Observed Whitaker in November 1980, “
It’s almost as if the Parker Bowleses must ensure that the path of true love runs as smoothly as possible.”

It is unclear precisely when Charles and Camilla ended their intimacy. Jonathan Dimbleby, the most authoritative source, wrote that “
from the moment of [Charles’s] engagement in February [1981], he saw Camilla Parker Bowles on only one occasion and that was more than four months later to say farewell. His feelings for [her] had not changed, but they had both accepted that their intimacy could no longer be maintained.” Dimbleby was silent on whether the couple had remained intimate once Charles began his romance with Diana in July 1980. In her 1998 book on Charles, however, Penny Junor asserted that the affair
had stopped when Charles started seriously courting Diana, although Camilla remained “his best friend.”

Charles had essentially made up his mind during the summer of 1980 that he wanted Diana as his wife, and the courtship became an exercise in reassuring himself that he had made the right choice. With the press so avidly embracing Diana’s cause, Charles had no room for second thoughts. “
The pressures on the prince began to seem like a tidal wave sweeping towards an inevitable destiny,” wrote Dimbleby.

Diana came across as mature and levelheaded during this period, and she made no secret of her devotion to him. “
She was most certainly in love with her prince,” said Stephen Barry. “She was always available when he called, and she always fitted in with his plans.” When Charles proudly showed her Highgrove, the country home eleven miles from the Parker Bowleses’ that he had purchased the previous June,
Barry sensed her disappointment that the house didn’t live up to the grandeur she was used to at Althorp, but Diana hid such feelings from Charles.
Somewhat primly, she was offended by Charles’s request that she help decorate the house although they weren’t engaged; she felt that Charles was acting improperly.

After a month or so, the tabloid reporters began to describe Diana’s character with growing authority. In one of the more evenhanded early assessments,
Mirror
reporter Paul Callan described her as “
quietly captivating … modest … not a great conversationalist, a trifle nervous, seemingly cool … a great laugher … she can look intensely serious one moment, then if someone cracks even a mild joke, her face lights up … she is quietly
spoken, not particularly posh even …[with] a pleasant, even classless accent.” A more speculative but provocatively intuitive appraisal came from an astrologer’s reading in the
Daily Star
around the same time: Diana tended to “
rely on instinct … to ‘feel’ what is right,” and was naturally inconsistent, wrote astrologer Lena Leon. “Every morning will be different—giddy or giggly, sulky or silky … coldness will suddenly be followed by warmth … trust is … terribly important.”

Yet much of the tabloid reporting about Diana consisted of distortions and outright inventions, which set the template for the emerging portrait of Diana that included traits she couldn’t recognize and overstated her familiarity with the royal way of life.

James Whitaker, for example, described Diana’s “
reputation as a demon driver … scooting around London at a surprisingly nippy speed,” omitting the fact that she was speeding to avoid the pursuit of Whitaker and other hacks. (Whitaker even boasted later about “
an 80-mph car caper in which he drove alongside the car she was driving while a photographer snapped her picture.”) Within days, other reporters picked up on Diana’s “
erratic driving record.” Harry Arnold contributed to the misimpressions by exaggerating “
the friendship which Charles and Diana have shared for years.” Arnold likewise incorrectly asserted that Diana “
has been groomed from childhood to join the Balmoral set.”

The tabloids also distorted the role of the Queen Mother and Diana’s grandmother Ruth Fermoy, presenting them as the conspiratorial architects of an arranged marriage. Charles’s “
choice of bride,” wrote Andrew Morton in one representative account, “was engineered by the machinations of the grandmother he reveres and of Diana’s grandmother.” While both the Queen Mother and Ruth Fermoy strongly endorsed the marriage,
the two women chipped in only after the relationship was already on track. Lady Fermoy signaled her approval that autumn when she accompanied Diana and Charles to a performance of Verdi’s
Requiem
, with dinner afterward at Buckingham Palace.

The speculation about the cabal of the grandmothers began shortly after Diana’s October 1980 visit to Birkhall, the Balmoral residence of the Queen Mother, where Lady Fermoy was in attendance. “
Both grandmothers know each other well,” wrote Anne DeCourcy several weeks later. “It is tempting to think that there has been a certain amount of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, if.’ ” In the British press, it was but a short leap from “It is tempting” to the unshakable notion that the two elderly women orchestrated the marriage, which became a pillar of the Diana myth.