Diana in Search of Herself (40 page)

She was especially revealing when she displayed the extent of her bitterness toward the royal family. Christmas at Sandringham that year had been typically fractious. Diana told Gilbey that she had nearly broken down at lunch when feelings of sadness overtook her: “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.’ ” She spoke of wanting to do “something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage,” and she recounted a drive in the car with Charles in which they barely spoke to each other. “It’s just so difficult,” she said, “so complicated. He makes my life real torture, I’ve decided.”

Clearly Diana and Gilbey were on intimate terms, although two people who were close to her said that it wasn’t a full-blown love affair. One called it a “flirtatious relationship,” and the other said, “I know it sounded bad on the tape, but they were very good friends.” Diana confirmed the authenticity
of the conversation in her
Panorama
interview, but she denied an “
adulterous relationship” with Gilbey, while admitting her affair with Hewitt. “Of course they had a romance,” another close friend of Diana’s said. “Gilbey was attractive to her. Why she admitted [her relationship with] Hewitt was bizarre. He was the most sacrificial one, from outside the circle. Also, he had already spilled in his own book.”

Charles’s tape-recorded phone conversation with Camilla, which had taken place several weeks earlier on December 18, 1989, was only a third as long as what became known as the “Squidgy” tape.
It had none of Diana’s rancor, some of Gilbey’s goofy sexual playfulness, and considerably more sexual passion. Aside from Charles’s infamous musings about living in Camilla’s trousers or spending his life as a tampon, he and Camilla spoke in more explicitly sexual terms: of filling her up, and of pressing her “tit.” “God, I wish I was,” Charles said, “harder and harder.”

Their expressions of longing were anguished, and they frequently voiced their abiding love for each other. Camilla took care to prop up Charles’s ego (“Those sort of people do feel very strongly about you”) and Charles to express gratitude for Camilla’s love and loyalty (“You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies”). Like Diana and Gilbey, Charles and Camilla spoke almost clinically about ways to organize their subterfuges: which homes of friends they should use for rendezvous, how long they needed to travel, whom they could and could not trust.

Around the time of these conversations, the tabloids elevated the Princess of Wales to “
Saint Diana.” She and Charles had recently been to Indonesia, where Diana had visited her first leprosy mission. “
Faced with the horror of leprosy,” wrote the
Sunday Mirror
, Diana “shook a little girl’s hand” and showed “no hesitation as she grasped the gnarled, bent fingers of the patients,” “touched the bloody bandages of an old man,” and “stroked a woman’s arm.”

In one respect, the following year was “fulfilling” for Diana, as she told Gilbey her astrologer had predicted. The tabloids continued to gush about her at Charles’s expense. Diana, noted the
Daily Express
in July 1990, “
turns a blind eye to … how incredibly selfish Prince Charles is.” They wrote extravagantly of her “star quality” and good deeds. The few criticisms of Diana tended to be trivial: a flurry of comment over her new short “
heat-wave hairstyle” (though only the
Daily Star
called it a “disaster”), and
Andrew Morton’s report that she spent £100,000 (about $150,000) a year on clothing, which she dismissed as “
ill-informed.” Otherwise, Diana had little to complain about.

The Buckingham Palace staff had even begun to relax somewhat about the Wales marriage. As one said, “We all felt things were not well, but that
it would either get better, or they would develop a modus vivendi, make compromises.” But in June 1990, circumstances changed for the worse after Charles suffered a serious accident playing polo. He fractured his right arm in two places, which left him in such agony that he required a second operation in September to pin the bones and prevent crippling.

During his four-month convalescence at Highgrove and Balmoral, Charles was frustrated by his inactivity and worn down by his pain.
Diana sat by his bedside during his hospital stays, but she spent little time with him at Highgrove and none in Scotland. According to Penny Thornton, Diana felt that Charles had “
brushed aside” her efforts to offer him affection and care, and she knew Camilla was filling that role.
Camilla was a frequent visitor to Highgrove, as were his other close friends, including Nicholas Soames, the Palmer-Tomkinsons, van Cutsems, and Romseys, who spent hours cheering up Charles.

For the most part, Camilla was mentioned as just one of many friends who rallied around to help Charles “
snap out of the gloom.” A long excerpt in
The Sunday Times
that September from a new Andrew Morton book called
Diana’s Diary
even put a positive gloss on the Wales marriage. According to Morton, Diana had found “
an affectionate accommodation within her marriage.… Divorce is not an option.… The royal couple have reached a friendly alliance.… Understanding companionship has supplanted mutual indifference.… Their marriage is based on trust.”

Yet newspaper editors were aware of Charles’s affair with Camilla. Early in 1990, the
News of the World
had received “
blackmail-style notes” containing details of alleged meetings between Prince Charles and Camilla. The notes, always hand-delivered, were either stenciled or made with letters and words cut out of newspapers. Partly for legal reasons, partly out of restraint, the tabloid declined to pursue these mysterious leads, as did the mainstream
Telegraph
when it was given information about the affair in a more straightforward fashion.

“
I knew about Charles and Camilla,” said Max Hastings, then editor of
The Daily Telegraph
, despite “a concerted effort by the Prince of Wales’s people to deny it. At one point, a friend of the Prince’s said to me, ‘You have to get your mind around the fact that there is only one woman in the Prince’s life, and that is Camilla.’ This was in 1990, when everyone knew there was trouble, but there was still no idea of a divorce.”

In November 1990, the Waleses traveled to Japan for what a former Palace official termed a “brilliant visit. Diana was back on top, and she was radiant.” But her private torment continued.
Over the Christmas holidays she wept frequently and screamed at Charles, to the point that their staff worried she might be suicidal.

As it turned out, Diana had a lot on her mind. One immediate worry resulted from some alarming news she had recently heard about her New Year’s Eve chat with Gilbey. Earlier in 1990,
The Sun
had been handed a tape-recording of the conversation. Stuart Higgins, then an editor at the paper, oversaw the verification of the tape. “
We went through the various people mentioned,” Higgins said, “and at some point we confronted Gilbey. We were never one hundred percent confirmed, but the circumstantial evidence made it inconceivable that it was not Diana and Gilbey.” Fearful of the damage that disclosure of the conversation could do, Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants decided to keep the tape in a safe. “I was convinced it was authentic,” Higgins said. “Other powers were at work to ensure we kept it under wraps”—which is where it would remain for more than two-and-a-half years.

Murdoch’s top executive, Andrew Knight, chairman of News International, was primarily responsible for keeping the lid on the Gilbey tape and other stories about the Wales marriage that had come over the transom. Besides the Camilla blackmail notes,
News of the World
had a story about Diana’s affair with James Hewitt based on revelations by Lance Corporal Malcolm Leete, Hewitt’s disaffected valet. “
Patsy Chapman, the editor, wanted to publish the Hewitt story on at least a half-dozen occasions,” Knight recalled. “I said absolutely not. I didn’t believe it. Patsy told me she had the story that Hewitt had been Diana’s lover, and she could stand it up. I said, ‘I don’t like the sound of it, and we are not publishing it.’ As time went by, it became harder to resist, and on the last occasion we didn’t publish, I had to get Rupert Murdoch’s help in stopping the story.”

There is no indication that Diana caught wind of the Leete tale, but she did hear of the Gilbey tape. “
Diana certainly knew the contents and had seen a transcription, but I cannot say how,” Stuart Higgins said. “It was probably sometime in late 1990 or early 1991 that she learned about it, as we were corroborating the authenticity.” By then, another copy of the tape had made its way to Richard Kay of the
Daily Mail
. Kay had contacted “
someone very close” to Diana, who authenticated her voice. Kay then consulted his editors, who agreed they shouldn’t disclose it. Kay “put it away, thinking it would never appear in a British paper.” Still, Diana knew that the Gilbey tape couldn’t stay hidden forever, and she wanted the story of Charles and Camilla to come out first, but she couldn’t quite figure out how to accomplish her goal.

James Gilbey was still in the picture for Diana, but James Hewitt was very much in her thoughts.
Since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the previous
August, she had become overwrought about the situation in the Persian Gulf, mostly for fear that Hewitt might be sent into battle. By January 1991, as the United States, Britain, and other allies prepared for war with Iraq, Diana was tuning in to news bulletins on radio and television whenever she had a chance.
Throughout the autumn, she had been calling Hewitt in Germany, and when he returned to England briefly before Christmas, they resumed their intimacy during a reunion at Highgrove, when he gave her a pair of emerald-and-diamond earrings.

After Hewitt flew to the Gulf,
Diana began writing letters to him, addressed to “Dearest James,” “Darling James,” or “My darling James,” and signed “Diana,” “D,” “Julia,” or “Susie.” Diana wrote once or twice a day, sometimes four times: “
long, flowing letters over endless sheets of paper,” according to Pasternak, who saw them. “Every thought that flooded into her mind poured onto the pages. She held nothing back.” It was the same kind of unbridled outpouring with which she had responded to stress in childhood and adolescence.

During the bombing of Iraq and the subsequent ground war, Diana was glued to the television coverage, staying up all night to catch news about Hewitt’s unit. She read about military strategy, spent many evenings by herself at Kensington Palace, prayed in church, and even visited Hewitt’s mother in Devon. In her letters to Hewitt, Diana described the despair brought on by her solitude, but assured him that she was “
finally trying to understand herself.” Somewhat more ominously, she said she felt frantic that “
the truth about Charles and Camilla … had not become public knowledge.” If it did, she said, she believed people might understand her better.
Diana constantly vacillated in her thinking about her marriage, from saying she hated Charles and could not bear being in the same room with him to wanting him to beg her forgiveness and start over.

Diana no longer seemed willing to acquiesce to the truce she had struck with Charles three years earlier. She told Hewitt that she could not stand the deception and that she had given Charles an ultimatum: “
Something had to be done about their marriage.” Indeed, according to Fergie, to whom Diana had again grown close as they both struggled with marital problems in 1991, “
we first put the words to the unspeakable idea … that one or both of us might leave the royal family. We burned the phone wires into the night trading secrets … that no one else would understand.”

Diana’s affair with James Hewitt was seriously compromised that February when Nigel Dempster disclosed that she had “
cause for concern” because her “good friend” James Hewitt was stationed in the Gulf—the first public mention of Hewitt. Dempster revealed that Hewitt had not only taught Diana how to ride, he had joined her “on picnics or for tea while at Windsor Castle when the Prince of Wales was away.” The scent for Hewitt
had been laid down, and
when he reached Diana by telephone, he was nervous, even after Diana reassured him that the tabloids had lost interest.

It took only a month for Hewitt to be exposed when
his estranged girlfriend Emma Stewardson sold her story to the
News of the World
, revealing that Diana had been sending letters and gifts to Hewitt in the Gulf and that Hewitt was so besotted with Diana he had once broken a lunch date with Emma so he could spend the day at Highgrove—though Emma stopped short of saying that Hewitt and Diana were lovers. The
Daily Mirror
blamed Hewitt for these unflattering disclosures, saying “
Diana cannot afford to be the subject of any rumors, however false.”

When Hewitt returned to England several months later, following the liberation of Kuwait, Diana invited him to Highgrove. Hewitt was now a target of press surveillance, so he had to hide in the trunk of a car driven by one of the Highgrove staff. With his exposure in the press, Diana had effectively lost control of their relationship. After a tearful reunion, she grew cool toward him, and finally ended the relationship, leaving Hewitt feeling “
rejected” and “used.” “
She simply stopped ringing and taking my calls,” Hewitt said years later. “There was no cutoff. I never had a chance to say good-bye.”