Diana in Search of Herself (39 page)

When Diana and Charles made an official visit to France in November, they put on an adroit performance of public amicability. Diana showed her seriousness about AIDS research by visiting the Pasteur Institute, and her
beauty and style enchanted the French. “
You have seduced every man in France,” said Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris. Diana delighted the tabloid hacks by performing an impromptu “
sexy dance” for Charles after dinner in a French chateau, when she started “wiggling her hips and shimmying until both she and her husband dissolved with laughter.” Still, for a change, it was Charles’s statesmanship that dominated the headlines. “
We got the balance right,” a staff member said. The tabloids were upbeat about what one paper called a “
triumphant tour” that included a “romantic” candlelit dinner cruise on the Seine. Three years after the fact, the
Mirror
’s James Whitaker finally reported that the riverboat cruise had actually been a “
disaster.” There had been a “sourness in the air,” he wrote, and Charles and Diana had “never once looked at one another all evening.”

In mid-November, 1988, the Waleses were together again for Charles’s fortieth birthday ball at Buckingham Palace. Diana managed to include James Hewitt among the three hundred guests, and he spent the evening stewing because he couldn’t get near her. He thought she put up a “
valiant front,” and he felt jealous every time he saw her dancing or laughing with friends. Finally, Hewitt captured her for one dance, which they carried off by feigning indifference.

TV personality Clive James met Diana that evening for the second time and noticed a change from their first encounter at Cannes, eighteen months earlier. James was well aware that Charles and Diana “
were sticking together for the sake of the monarchy and the children, but were otherwise going their separate ways.” Although Diana was cordial enough, James saw that “the lights in her face were dimmed down to about three-quarter strength.… She was still there physically, but her soul had gone AWOL, and without that soul, the party had no life.”

The following month, masseur Stephen Twigg began trying to help Diana deal with her “
painful emotions and thoughts.” By then, Diana had redoubled her fixation on Camilla. With no discernible provocation, Diana had become vocal about her rival, speaking openly about her to friends and staff. Diana’s initial consultation with astrologer Debbie Frank early in 1989 was primarily to deal with the “
presence of Camilla,” Frank said. “It became a complete obsession,” a former Palace official said. “It was all anger against Camilla. ‘How dare she do this?’ ” If that anger happened to flare up before a public engagement, Diana’s aides had to work fast. “She would get into the car all steamed up,” a former Palace adviser said. “I would try to calm her down. You just absorbed it. You would listen, sympathize, you would agree, or disagree, and she would eventually calm down.”

Diana decided to meet the enemy face-to-face that February when she and Charles were invited to a fortieth birthday party for Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot at the home of billionaire tycoon James Goldsmith and his
wife, Annabel. The invitation had been sent with the expectation that only Charles would come, but at the last minute, Diana opted to join him because “
a voice inside me said, ‘Go for the hell of it.’ ” Perhaps she was emboldened by the trip she had recently made to New York City, her first official solo visit overseas. Before her arrival, the
New York Post
had called her “
the most famous welfare mother in the world,” and
Women’s Wear Daily
had pronounced the visit “out.” Three days later, Diana overcame the skepticism by balancing a charity gala with tours of a Bowery homeless shelter and Harlem Hospital, where she hugged a toddler dying of AIDS. At the end, the New York tabloids were calling
her
DI-VINE
.

Before making her final decision about the Goldsmith party, Diana consulted James Hewitt, who urged her to go, on the grounds that she should “
hold her head high.” Diana later said she concluded that she would “come away having done her bit.” In the car, en route to the party, Diana recalled, Charles “
needled me the whole way … needle needle needle.” The Goldsmiths’ house on Ham Common in Richmond was filled with friends of Charles and Camilla, and Diana felt instantly out of place. Still, Diana “looked ravishing, and charmed everyone. She was full of energy,” one guest said. After dinner, Diana noticed that Charles and Camilla had disappeared. She sat for a while with two of Charles’s friends, Christopher Balfour, chairman of Christie’s Europe, and Rick Beckett, whose wife was the sister of David Waterhouse. After more than an hour, Diana decided to go to the downstairs dining room to locate Charles.

When she spotted Charles, Camilla, and another friend, Diana joined the conversation “
as if we were all best friends.” Diana recalled asking the two men if she could speak privately to Camilla. Charles and his friend headed upstairs, where Annabel Goldsmith intercepted Charles and took him on a tour of paintings by her daughter Jane Birley. Charles politely followed, but it was clear that he was edgy and eager to return downstairs.

By Diana’s account, she told Camilla that she “wasn’t born yesterday” and was well aware of the affair. Diana said she realized she was “
in the way,” but she resented that Charles and Camilla treated her like an unknowing “idiot.” Her approach to Camilla that evening wasn’t aggressive, Diana recalled, but “calm, deathly calm.” Shortly afterward, Charles and several others returned to find Diana and Camilla sitting at the table together. “There was not a ripple,” one guest said. Diana and Charles left shortly afterward, and according to Diana, Charles reprimanded her in the car.

“
It was … seven years’ pent-up anger,” she recalled. “I cried and cried and cried.” After a sleepless night, Diana still felt anger and jealousy, but not as intensely as the previous evening. Several days later, Diana told Charles that, in the conversation with Camilla, “I just said I loved you.”

When one of Diana’s friends asked her about the encounter soon after the party, she related a less dramatic but more poignant version. “Diana said that not much happened,” her friend said. “She said she more or less said humbly to Camilla, ‘What am I doing wrong? What is wrong with me? What makes him want to be with you and not me?’ ” Said Diana’s friend, “She was desperate to get him back, and she didn’t know how to do it.”

It didn’t seem to occur to Diana that her anger at Camilla might be inconsistent with her own romance with James Hewitt, to whom she gave a detailed account of the Goldsmith party the following day. After more than two years, Diana’s affair with Hewitt had settled into its own rhythm that depended entirely on Diana’s emotional state: “
For a few weeks she would feel better, exhilarated, with newfound health,” wrote Pasternak, “and then it was as if she had pushed herself too far too soon, and suddenly her reserves were depleted,” and “she would sink back into what seemed a deeper trough than before.”

The principal difference between Charles’s romance with Camilla and Diana’s with Hewitt was that Diana kept Hewitt tightly under wraps. Diana could preserve secrecy because he was not from her world, while Camilla was part of Charles’s social set. Still, it was remarkable that Hewitt repeatedly visited Kensington Palace and Highgrove, and dined with Diana at the San Lorenzo restaurant, without being detected. Diana did flirt with danger, however, when she invited Hewitt to Raine Spencer’s sixtieth birthday party at Althorp in May 1989.

With five hundred guests, the dance was large enough for Hewitt to get lost, and Prince Charles didn’t come. But Diana was considerably more reckless than she had been at Charles’s fortieth.
She took Hewitt for a guided tour of Althorp, and then danced, talked, and drank champagne with him. At the end of the evening, she led him out to the pool house, where they made love. Once again, nothing appeared in the press, and their romance remained sub-rosa.

Toward the end of 1989, Hewitt was posted to Germany for a two-year hitch. When he broke the news to Diana, she was upset, and begged him not to leave. He explained that he had to follow his career, but
Diana viewed it as abandonment. She stopped returning his phone calls, although after he went to Germany, she resumed calling him.

Historian Paul Johnson, a friend and fan of Diana’s, once compared her to a seventeenth-century beauty named Madame de Chevreuse, paraphrasing a description in the
Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz:
“
She loved with an everlasting love but was always changing its object.” With James Hewitt off in
Germany, Diana was ready to change objects when she was reunited with a car dealer from the Gilbey gin family, whom she had originally known when she first came to London. At age thirty, James Gilbey was slender and handsome, his dark brown hair starting to recede from his forehead.

In the summer of 1989, Diana and Gilbey were guests at a thirtieth-birthday party in Berkshire for their mutual friend Julia Samuel. According to one of her friends, Diana was disconcertingly out of sorts that night. “She was miserable,” her friend said. “Gilbey was just coming on the scene, and Diana was very edgy. You’d have thought she’d be dancing. All her friends were there, and Charles was not. But she sat at a table with her sister Jane.” According to Andrew Morton, who enlisted Gilbey’s cooperation for his book with Diana’s permission, Diana and Gilbey eventually got together during the Samuel party and talked about “
their respective love lives … he about a failed romance, she about her fading marriage.”

Diana and Gilbey started to see each other over the following months. They often met at San Lorenzo as Diana had with Hewitt, assisted by the restaurant’s owner Mara Berni. In late October, the
Sunday People
blew Diana’s cover by reporting that she had been seen on a “
secret late date,” ducking into Gilbey’s apartment building in London’s tony Lennox Gardens. A flustered Gilbey acknowledged that Diana had visited him but insisted that she was part of a bridge group. “
It’s very hard for the Princess to keep up any of her old friendships,” he said. “It’s given me a lot of grief.” After besieging him for several days, the hacks backed off, and the relationship went underground.

In December 1989, under circumstances that remain unclear, telephone conversations between Diana and Gilbey, as well as Charles and Camilla, were tape-recorded and later passed along to several London newspapers. Both conversations are filled with embarrassing sexual innuendo, and both offer snapshots of the state of the Wales marriage. Gilbey was speaking on a mobile phone to Diana on New Year’s Eve at Sandringham, where she was spending yet another unhappy holiday with the royal family. They gossiped about mutual friends, compared horoscope readings, and spoke irreverently of the royal family. Most strikingly, they conversed with easy intimacy as he repeatedly called her “
darling,” “honey,” and “Squidgy.” They blew kisses into the phone, said they missed each other, and at one point lapsed into phone sex when they each referred to “playing with yourself.”

Gilbey took the lead in making suggestive remarks, and Diana concurred (“I love it” to Gilbey’s “This sort of feeling. Don’t you like it?”) or briefly commented. “I had the most amazing dream about us last night. Not physical, nothing to do with that,” said Gilbey. Cracked Diana, “That makes a change.” When Gilbey said, “I’m wrapping you up, protecting
you,” Diana responded “Yes, please.” As they discussed meeting two days later, both said they wanted to “fast-forward” to the moment when he would be “just holding you so close to me.” Diana, who by all accounts no longer had a physical relationship with Charles, also told Gilbey, “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and mentioned an episode of the soap opera
Eastenders
in which one of the main characters “had a baby. They thought it was by her husband. It was by another man.”

The tone of their banter was affectionate (she told him he was “the nicest person in the whole wide world”) and flippant (he called her “old Bossy Boots” and complimented her on the “shit-hot” pink top she wore in a tabloid picture) more than seriously passionate. Even Diana’s “all the love in the world” before hanging up had the lighthearted note of the “lots of love” sign-off commonly used among friends in England. Not surprisingly, Diana maintained control as Gilbey reflexively reassured and complimented her: “You don’t need to encourage me to think about you. I have done nothing else for the last three months.… That smile comes on and the charm comes out…. Underneath there is such a beautiful person in you
.… You
make people happy. It’s what you give them.”

The conversation opened a few small windows into Diana’s character. She showed her skill at deception, concocting various cover stories: To explain her phone calls, she told Gilbey, “Say one of your relations is not very well, and your mother is just ringing in to give you progress.” To justify her trip to London to see Gilbey, she said, “I shall tell people I’m going for acupuncture and my back being done.” She just as casually dissembled to Gilbey when he asked, “You don’t mind it, darling, when I want to talk to you so much?” and she replied, “No, I
love
it. Never had it before.” She also revealed her preoccupation with her newspaper image after Gilbey pointed out the day’s tabloid photos and she replied, “I’m always smiling, aren’t I? I thought that today.”