Diana in Search of Herself (42 page)

Bitterly displeased that the media had accepted what she viewed as a false rapprochement, Diana decided in the summer of 1991 to cooperate with Andrew Morton. According to several of Diana’s friends, she was equally disappointed that the press had been unwilling to identify Camilla as Charles’s lover. As one of her close friends said, “She was absolutely desperate that people should know what Camilla had done.”

Chapter 16

W
hen Diana and Charles shared a “
cozy supper” at Highgrove to mark their tenth anniversary on July 29, 1991, Diana had already embarked on an enterprise that would have profound consequences for her and her marriage. Two weeks earlier she had begun a series of tape-recorded interviews for Andrew Morton’s book. “
She thought she was a wise soul,” her friend David Puttnam said, “and she thought she was a clever game player … I don’t think she was…. I think it was just pure instinct…. Once or twice she got it horribly, horribly wrong.”

Besides her fixation on exposing Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana was still apprehensive about the Squidgy tape. She had also been hearing reports that some of Charles’s friends were calling her the “mad cow” (after a brain disease causing erratic behavior) at fashionable dinner parties, and she sensed what her friend Vivienne Parry called “
a huge amount of hostility … from those within the Palace … not just the royal family but those in the establishment at the Palace.” Parry said Diana believed there was a “whispering campaign: This woman is a cracked vessel. This woman is potty. This woman is a danger to the royal family.” Diana later told her friend Roberto Devorik that she had even approached the Queen and Prince Philip for help during this time, only to be told that “
everything was in her imagination and she should consult a psychiatrist and maybe go to a psychiatric cure.”

Diana told friends that she believed the Queen should have intervened to end Charles’s affair with Camilla and to help Charles and Diana stay together. Diana’s frustrations were understandable, but her expectations were unrealistic given the nature of the royal family. “I don’t think Camilla was regarded as a big threat in the royal family,” a source close to the family said. “It is easy with hindsight to say, ‘Why not send them away [by arranging
to transfer the couple to a foreign military post]?’ Really, the royal family saw an impossible marriage and figured it was better for Charles to have a shoulder to cry on. But no one thought it would break up the marriage. They thought that for centuries the royal family and the aristocracy had had mistresses, and people went on with their marriages and their duties.”

In the summer of 1991, Diana felt that “
the lid was being put down on her,” Morton said. “She was terrified she would be publicly labeled an impossible lunatic,” one of her friends recalled, “and if so, she could lose a fight over custody. She was terrified of character assassination and angry that some of her own hanky-panky would be released without the extent of Charles’s infidelity revealed.” Still suffering from bulimia and depression, Diana was “
at the end of my tether,” as she said on
Panorama
.

By unhappy coincidence, Diana sat for another portrait—her tenth—during this period, and the artist, Douglas Anderson, could not avoid capturing what he called her “
horrible sadness” on canvas. It was “the very worst time,” he recalled of her five sittings over several weeks. “
She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I painted what I saw. She was on the edge, and it was draining. She was very preoccupied and constantly on the verge of crying. I had the feeling that if she left the room she might be in floods of tears.”

Feeling under siege, Diana decided to launch a preemptive strike against Charles. “
She was a woman scorned,” said historian and journalist Andrew Roberts. “She couldn’t or wouldn’t stop herself. She thought, ‘Oh, God, I’m the story, not the Crown.’ To a great extent she brought everyone down.” She needed to justify herself to the public, which “she regarded … as an extension of her family,” one of Diana’s friends said. “She had to explain her suffering. Deep down, she needed to be understood, and she craved approval. I remember telling her to be like Jackie O., that if she did, people could interpret but there would be no certainty. She agreed with me, but that was before the book.”

Diana shared her grievances with a group of trusted friends, who encouraged her to tell her side of the story. “
Most people who knew her for years figured it couldn’t get any worse for her,” Morton explained. “She was living a lie, and they thought she might as well lance the boil.” Among those she consulted were James Gilbey and Adrian Ward-Jackson, who proved a crucial catalyst.

Ward-Jackson became bedridden with AIDS in April 1991. To honor their pact that she would care for him through his illness, Diana made frequent unpublicized visits to his home to keep him company. “Around the sickbed, a lot happened,” a friend of Ward-Jackson’s said. “Adrian was deeply intrigued by the state of the marriage. She confided in him. What
she projected was confusion, hurt, resentment, and anger. He was sympathetic, and she sought advice. She would talk about these things to pass the time. It was very useful for him. Instead of thinking of himself, he would listen to her problems.”

Through Ward-Jackson, Diana grew close to his friend Angela Serota, a former ballet dancer who was supervising his care. Serota was separating from her husband at the time, and
she and Diana formed a close bond. When Diana poured out her anguish about her marriage, Serota listened. As Diana debated whether to go public, “
Angela was very important,” Morton said. “She could see the pain Diana was in.”

Diana had been confiding as well in Dr. James Colthurst, a radiologist who had been her friend since they met in 1979 on a ski trip. Back in 1986, he had invited her to visit his London hospital, St. Thomas’s. During that visit Colthurst had met Morton, who was there with the royal press pack. The two men struck up a friendship that included a regular squash game. According to a man close to Diana, it was Colthurst who suggested that she entrust Morton with her story.

Still, it is difficult to know precisely why Diana settled on the veteran tabloid man as her “
conduit,” as Morton described himself. It was not in Diana’s nature to conduct a rigorous analysis of Morton’s abilities and his body of work. But she knew that Morton was, as he said, “
nibbling around” the idea of writing a biography about her. He had been on Diana’s radar even after he left the
Daily Mail
in 1988 to write freelance articles and books (
Diana’s Diary: An Intimate Portrait of the Princess of Wales
and
Inside Kensington Palace
).

In fact, Morton was perfect for Diana’s purpose. He had been captivated by her from the moment he joined the royal beat in 1982 and attacked Nigel Dempster as a “
royal sniper.” Although he had shifted back and forth between apologist and alarmist in his coverage, he never wavered in his adoration of Diana. Even when dealing with potentially negative material, he turned it to her advantage, as in a 1986 story on reports that Diana had been insulting Charles: “
It is just another indication of how a strong-willed princess is steadily winning her battle to bring the royal family to heel.”

Most recently, Morton had been Diana’s champion in her undeclared war on Charles, venturing further than any reporter toward unmasking Camilla. He had a slick, commercial writing style and chameleon-like qualities, moving easily from tabloid to broadsheet: His articles on the Wales marriage in
The Sunday Times
had given him a patina of respectability.

Andrew Morton’s biggest advantage was his outsider status. He could disappear from sight, as he did in July 1991, without explaining himself or attracting attention. As a freelancer lacking a formal newspaper affiliation,
he could be trusted to keep Diana’s role a secret, and he would be eternally grateful for her gift of a sensational story. In other words, he could be controlled.

Diana dispatched her friend James Colthurst to sketch out her story for Morton. Over bacon and eggs in a North London cafe, Colthurst told the writer about the unraveling royal marriage, including Diana’s bouts of bulimia and attempts at suicide—all of which, Diana contended, resulted from her problems with Charles and his infidelity with Camilla Parker Bowles. Morton was staggered by the sensational revelations. “
I didn’t know about the bulimia, the suicides,” he recalled. “Who did? It shows how many secrets can be held.” Morton later freely admitted that Diana was in charge. “People make out that I am a tabloid hack who conned her, that she didn’t know what she was getting into, that I teased information out of her, the poor girl who would have lived happily ever after,” Morton said. “That is from the Goebbels book of best-selling stories. The fact is, she sought me out.”

Around this time, Colthurst introduced Diana to a new astrologer, Felix Lyle,
who was also a friend of Morton’s.
By one account, Diana only proceeded with the project after Lyle gave her the green light. But as was so often the case with Diana’s advisers, Lyle simply reinforced what Diana was already determined to do. “
She didn’t see him until late summer, after the project was under way,” Morton said. “She didn’t have second thoughts, and as the project progressed, she became more enthusiastic.”

Morton and Colthurst devised a scheme to give Diana “deniability” about her part in the book; if asked, she could say she and Morton had not even met. Morton submitted lists of questions to her for a series of interviews, which Colthurst tape-recorded. “
James was always with her during the interviews,” Morton said. “She would answer the questions as best as she could. Sometimes she ignored them. It was a ramshackle way to do a book.”

The first interview was a “
confusion,” Morton said. “Everything just tumbled out.” Recognizing the delicacy of broaching such intimate topics as bulimia and suicide, Morton “would send James off with two sets of questions, one if she started being one way, otherwise, go for [the other] line [of inquiry].” Morton later admitted that Diana misled him about James Hewitt, and although Morton interviewed James Gilbey, the still-secret Squidgy tapes never came up.

By definition, the arrangement precluded follow-up questions and the freedom to challenge Diana’s version of events. “
The classic was the suicides,” Morton said. “You are dealing with a very delicate area. I asked questions about when, where, what. Afterwards she said, ‘He’s pretty well written my obit.’ ”

Morton described how her moods slipped between the energy and “
breathless haste” she often showed in the mornings and the deflation at other times. The “hit and miss” aspect was aggravated by Diana’s tendency to schedule interviews on short notice, when Morton would hurriedly assemble his queries and “
hope for the best.” Despite her obvious fragility, and the history of mental illness she described, Morton “
had doubts about her veracity but not about her stability.” He said he tried to cross-check whenever possible by talking to her friends. A conspicuous flaw in this method, later pointed out by friends of Charles, was that Morton had to rely on people who had heard only Diana’s side of the story.

One of the trickiest areas for Morton was Charles’s relationship with Camilla, which for legal reasons he ended up calling a “
secret friendship” rather than adultery, “
much to Diana’s annoyance and in spite of overwhelming evidence.” To help establish that proof, Diana unearthed revealing letters in August 1991. Morton said, “
She procured them because I wanted them. She didn’t know about letters when we started to talk. They were not on the kitchen notice board. She got them because I was hesitant about the Camilla business, and they underpinned what she told me and made me feel happier about using it. The letters I saw were notes from Camilla to Charles, written at that time in 1991. It upset Diana to see them.”

In the early autumn, Diana approached a group of friends to ask them to cooperate with Morton. The first was Angela Serota, who consulted another friend who would become vital to Diana’s project: Andrew Knight, Rupert Murdoch’s chief executive, a close friend of both Serota and Ward-Jackson.
Like Diana, Knight had been a frequent visitor to Ward-Jackson’s bedside during the summer of 1991, although Knight said he and Diana never met there. Diana heard about him from Ward-Jackson and Serota. According to a man close to her, Diana came to regard Knight as “on her side.”

“
Angela rang me and said Diana was asking her and others to cooperate with Andrew Morton on a book,” Knight recalled. “Diana wants to end the fairy tale,” Serota told him. “There are dramatic things that we know,” although Serota declined to say what they were. “
Angela is a very private person,” Morton said. “She wasn’t interested in speaking to me. All these people needed convincing. They didn’t even know how closely Diana was involved in the project, that she was giving interviews.” When Serota asked Andrew Knight if she should help, he said, “
Yes, if [Diana] says so, you should do it.”

Serota also confided to Knight that Diana was “worried” that the book would be serialized in the
Daily Mail
. “
She wants it in
The Sunday Times
,” Serota said. Despite her affinity for the
Mail
, Diana was sufficiently media-savvy
to understand that a
Sunday Times
excerpt would give the book the credibility and authority that even a midmarket tabloid could not. Knight told Serota he would “lobby Andrew Neil about this book and say
The Sunday Times
should take it seriously.”