Diana in Search of Herself (41 page)

Publicly, Diana kept playing the royal game. On a tour of Brazil that spring, the Waleses offered what the
Sunday Express
called a “
glimpse of the old magic” and the
Sunday Mirror
described as “
a united front to the world.… Their closeness sent a shiver of excitement around the massed ranks of media men and women.” This impression came as no surprise to a veteran Palace adviser. “Sometimes the Prince and Princess were relaxed with each other even when things were not going well,” the aide said. “It was by no means the case when they were together that they were always tense. They were often relaxed.”

Both Charles and Diana were pleased and engaged by the agenda for the Brazilian trip. Charles had worked hard to convene a group of important environmentalists, including Environmental Protection Administration chief William Reilly and Senator Al Gore, for an international seminar to prepare for the Rio Environmental Summit the following year. The seminar was a big success, as were Diana’s visits with AIDS babies and orphaned children.

On the flight back to England, Reilly was struck by Diana’s ebullience and the rapport she seemed to have with Charles. “
I walked in, and Diana and Prince Charles were laughing together,” Reilly said. “I had never seen him laugh like that. Diana was describing various things she had done that day, and he seemed genuinely amused. Maybe they were putting on a show, but they seemed to enjoy each other’s company.” Yet Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Britain, came away with a different
view after her first encounter with Diana. Lucia, who subsequently became one of Diana’s closest friends, said that Diana had been “
very tense. The marriage was difficult, and there were other problems. She was not well and did not give the impression of being very well.”

Such contradictory views were nothing new, but they showed how much one’s impression turned on Diana’s mood of the moment. “Not all public events would lead to [tears],” a former Palace official said. “It was a time in her life when all sorts of things would trigger her unhappiness, and our role was to help. She was a real professional, and she had a lot of fun doing a big visit like Brazil. But after prolonged public exposure and even a period of a good time, often a downer would follow. It was not automatic, but after the strain of keeping up—not a false appearance but of being expected to be in public and apparently happy—even if she was having a good time, she would need to unwind. That was a sad unwinding for her most of the time.”

Behind Diana’s public compliance, she increasingly competed with Charles, in almost passive-aggressive fashion, by trying to outdo him in their everyday official roles. “In 1991, she suddenly increased her patronage,” a former Palace official recalled. “She had sixty [charities] and suddenly it zoomed to over one hundred. To her it was a competition, the more charities the better, because she wanted attention. And so she planned more engagements, figuring, ‘I’ll come out topping the league and maybe someone might thank me.’ ” As a result, Diana’s effectiveness decreased. “We wanted her to stay with some things,” the Palace aide said. “We were concerned that she was not getting in-depth experience. But Diana didn’t want that. We tried to impose that, but she needed a flash of publicity that she could give and then move on.”

Diana frequently employed that publicity to upstage Charles. “
If Charles was off to see an African leader, she would be at a big ball and wipe him off the headlines,” said Andrew Neil, then editor of
The Sunday Times
. More troubling was the way Diana manipulated publicity to create the impression that she was an affectionate, devoted mother and he a cold, distant father. Charles played into her hands with his obliviousness to appearances and dogged devotion to duty.

In April, for instance, Diana took her sons on an outing to Thorpe Park, a British amusement park.
CHARLES THE ABSENT ROYAL FATHER: WHY THE PRINCE SHOULD SPEND MORE TIME WITH HIS SONS
, said the
Daily Mail
the next day, pointing out that Diana “
often has to act as surrogate father.… Why do we not see from him the demonstrations of warmth, affection or closeness Diana so freely displays toward her sons in public?”

James Whitaker, in the
Daily Mirror
, was equally pointed several weeks later when he reported on Diana’s ski trip with her sons to Lech, Austria, in
a story headlined
WISH YOU WERE HERE PAPA
. “
Charles insists that his royal duties come before everything else—even his young sons,” Whitaker wrote. “Sadly, his absences from the family scene have become a habit.”

After such pounding coverage, it is difficult to fathom why the Prince’s aides weren’t more alert to the implications of a decision he made two months later. On June 3, 1991, Diana was interrupted at lunch in London, and Charles was alerted at Highgrove, that William had been struck in the head with a golf club at Ludgrove, his boarding school. Both parents were terribly worried when they arrived at Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, but they were relieved to see William sitting up and alert. The doctors found a “
depressed fracture” in his forehead where the golf club left an indentation, so they decided to send William to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London for surgery to “pull those depressed bones out and smooth them off.”

Diana and Charles accompanied William to London, where the surgeons reassured them that the operation carried little risk.
At that point, Charles decided to proceed with his scheduled commitment for the evening, a performance of
Tosca
at Covent Garden, where he had long-standing plans to entertain a group of European and British officials. Afterward, he traveled overnight to Yorkshire for a morning engagement before returning to London to visit William following the successful surgery.

The damage to Charles’s reputation was clear in that day’s tabloids. The
Daily Mirror
contrasted Diana’s “
bedside vigil” with Charles’s “astonishing departure.” In subsequent days, the tabloids piled on:
WHAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU?
asked
The Sun;
noting that “
a fractured skull is not a trivial matter”; the
Daily Express
branded Charles
a
PHANTOM FATHER;
and
Today
described
THE EXHAUSTED FACE OF A LOVING MOTHER
.
Diana later told Morton that Charles blamed her for exaggerating the severity of William’s injury and contributing to the negative coverage.

The morning after the surgery, a friend called Diana, and she actually “made light of it,” the friend recalled. “It is a very English reaction. You wouldn’t make a big thing of it.” But Diana worked up some outrage of her own to match the tabloids’. She complained about Charles to James Gilbey, who later said that Diana’s response to the accident was “
horror and disbelief … [it was] a narrow escape. She can’t understand her husband’s behavior, so as a result, she just blocks it out.” Diana told her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson, “I can’t be with someone who behaves like that.”

In the months leading up to Charles and Diana’s tenth wedding anniversary on July 29, the tabloids put the royal marriage under their murky microscope,

shifting back and forth between indignant defenses and sensational exposés. By May, Andrew Morton had sharpened the focus in
The Sun
, under the provocative headline
CHARLES MAKES IT SO OBVIOUS HE PREFERS TO BE WITH
CAMILLA
. Morton wrote: “
Since the Prince broke his right arm … last summer, he has turned to his own circle of friends.… Prominent among them is Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman he once loved and lost. During Diana’s frequent absences Camilla … acted as hostess at Highgrove dinner parties … and often made daytime visits to comfort the invalid Charles … even sunbathing in her bikini in the Highgrove gardens.… Friends say [Diana] feels humiliated that her husband prefers to spend so much time with Camilla rather than her.” Most telling of all, “What irks [Diana] even more is that while little is said about Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla, every time [Diana] speaks to an unattached male, it causes headlines.”

Morton had aired Diana’s deepest grievance, but it still wasn’t enough. “Diana was bitter, vengeful, at a low ebb,” said a former Palace official who worked with her at that time. Her experience after William’s head injury left her feeling utterly estranged from Charles. “
He ignores me everywhere,” she said later that year. “Ignored everywhere and have been for a long time.… He just dismisses me.”

In late June, Diana made her first overt effort at news management by leaking a story to the
Daily Mail
about plans for her thirtieth birthday on July 1. At that stage, Diana had engaged in few direct dealings with the press, but she knew where her allies were: One of the many oddities of the coverage of Diana and Charles was the complete absence of objectivity. “
It was an open secret that the press was divided into Diana and Charles camps, with the Princess enjoying by far the most support,” wrote tabloid columnist Peter McKay. The large pro-Diana contingent included James Whitaker, Harry Arnold, Anthony Holden, Richard Kay, and Andrew Morton. On Charles’s side were Ross Benson and Nigel Dempster.

Diana understood the importance of the
Daily Mail
, her favorite newspaper. Of all the tabloids, the
Mail
had been the most consistently in her corner—with the exception of Dempster, whose gossip column was often critical. Under the editorship of David English, the
Mail
succeeded in winning over the middle class, particularly women, by emphasizing human-interest features; it also had a substantial following among the aristocracy. “All Diana’s friends read it,” a man close to Diana said. “It was the privileged woman’s tabloid, and it was important for her friends to read the right things about her.”

Unlike the other top editors, David English had managed to develop a relationship with Diana. After having lunch with her in 1990, English “
came back very excited about a story,” said Sue Douglas, then a deputy to
English. “Diana had talked about her problems, and he was sure she was telling him things were going wrong.” The paper couldn’t come up with confirmation, so nothing was published, but Diana knew that English and his paper were sympathetic to her cause, so when she wanted the word out about her birthday, the
Mail
was the obvious conduit.

Headlined
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DARLING, I CAN’T COME TO THE PARTY
, the article on June 28, 1991, by Emma Wilkins, recounted that “
Princess Diana is to spend her 30th birthday apart from her husband. She will be in London on Monday, lunching at the Savoy and hosting a party for close friends. Charles plans to stay at Highgrove.” “
That was straight PR from Diana,” Nigel Dempster said, “and we all swallowed it.”

Two days later, Dempster received a late afternoon call from a friend of Prince Charles’s. “
It was a well-bred lady’s voice,” Dempster recalled, “and she said, ‘It is quite the opposite. Prince Charles has offered her anything for her birthday—lunch, dinner, a ball—whatever she wanted, but she has refused, because she wants to be a martyr.” Dempster came out in another two days with a front-page story in the
Daily Mail
—
CHARLES AND DIANA: CAUSE FOR CONCERN
—describing how Diana had thwarted Charles’s plans and noting the “
growing coolness” in the marriage.

Andrew Morton volleyed back the next day in
The Sun:
“
The sad truth about the royal birthday party that never was … [is that] Princess Diana preferred to spend her 30th birthday alone rather than attend a High Society ball in her honor planned by her husband.” Based on a conversation with “one of her closest confidantes,” Morton wrote that Charles’s “guest list comprised all his stuffy old friends rather than her younger pals, and she simply couldn’t face it.”

After the birthday brouhaha had subsided, the principals and the press tried again to conjure an illusion of harmony. The
Evening Standard
declared that Diana’s “
friendship with Hewitt has been innocuous,” and the
Daily Mail
concluded that Charles “
finds Mrs. Parker Bowles a mature, pleasant, understanding companion, but no threat [to Charles] intellectually or emotionally. She has hosted dinner parties for the Prince at Highgrove. The Princess has often found these occasions tedious and a shade too earnest.”

The end of July brought reports of the Wales’s anniversary “
supper for two” and hopeful mutterings about their future together. The retreat was best summed up by
TRUCE
, the headline in
The Sunday Times
on a Morton article that proclaimed, “
Charles and Diana’s summer of discontent erupted into a storm … but now the air has cleared.”

Eighteen months after the furor, Lord McGregor of Durris, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, unequivocally blamed Diana for manipulating the press reports. “
I was told that both the Prince and
Princess had been involved in making statements about their marriage,” he said. “I did not at any time, nor have I subsequently received any evidence for any involvement by the Prince in leaking to the press anything of that nature. I made inquiries to the editors of newspapers and was satisfied the intrusions were contrived by the Princess herself.”