Diana in Search of Herself (46 page)

Diana had also been conferring with her lawyer, Paul Butner, but in her usual cloak-and-dagger fashion. She used a code name—“
Mrs. Walsh”—and met him secretly at friends’ apartments and obscure restaurants before inviting him to Kensington Palace. Her principal concern, as it had been for a while, was losing custody of her sons and being “
exiled” by the royal family.

While Diana vacillated and Charles hesitated, events forced decisive action. For some months, Diana and Charles had been committed to an official visit to Korea in November, but
during the Balmoral holiday in August, Diana had suddenly withdrawn from the trip. Only after the Queen intervened did Diana agree to travel with Charles. Before they departed in early November, Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard tried to set a
positive tone by telling the editor of the
Express
that the trip showed a new harmony between the Waleses. The newspaper obediently ran an article
headlined
WHY CHARLES AND DIANA ARE BACK TOGETHER
.

But as soon as the Waleses arrived in Seoul, Diana made it clear she was there under duress. Her expressions ranged from indifferent to miserable, and according to Dimbleby, she was “
often distraught … in a state of desperation, overcome by nausea and tears.” According to one of her former aides, “Diana felt she no longer needed to disguise what she felt.” Charles did his best to deflect attention from her obvious anguish, but he was at times visibly uncomfortable. The tabloids nicknamed them “
The Glums.” As Charles wrote to a friend at the end of the trip, “
The strain is immense…. I feel so unsuited to the ghastly business of human intrigue and general nastiness.… I don’t know what will happen from
now
on but I
dread
it.”

While they were away, the tabloids had published stories about Morton’s updated book, including his revelations about Prince Philip’s “stinging” letters.
Diana had been on the phone with friends about the reports, and on her return to London, she felt compelled to distance herself from Morton’s account with a brief statement denouncing the “
recent wave of misleading reports about the royal family.… The suggestion that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have been anything other than sympathetic and supportive is untrue and particularly hurtful.”

Within days, the tabloids were filled with still another tape scandal when the
Daily Mirror
, quickly followed by
The Sun
, published abbreviated extracts of the intimate telephone conversation in December 1989 between Camilla and Charles that became known as “Camillagate.” (Unlike the Squidgy tape, which had been in tabloid hands for nearly three years before publication,
the tape of this conversation had only landed at the
Mirror
a few weeks earlier.) The Palace remained silent, as it had after the Squidgy tape came to light, but the snippets (“
I’ll just live inside your trousers”) left no doubt about Charles and Camilla’s intimacy, and
prompted questions about Charles’s fitness to be king.

Prince Charles finally “
snapped” that week when Diana tried once again to stymie plans he had made for William and Harry. The family had been slated to gather on November 19 at Sandringham for Charles’s annual three-day shooting party when Diana abruptly told him that she would be taking the boys to Windsor or Highgrove that weekend. Her decision evidently was not sudden; she had told her butler Paul Burrell weeks earlier that she couldn’t face a weekend with her husband. Charles felt her actions, only days before the weekend, underlined the impracticability of their situation. “
Unable to see any future in a relationship conducted on these
terms,” biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote, “[Charles] decided he had no choice but to ask his wife for a legal separation.”

Once Charles had made up his mind, events moved swiftly. On November 25, less than a week later, Charles sat down with Diana at Kensington Palace to tell her of his decision. Despite all her provocations, Diana later said it was “
not at all” her idea to separate because, as she said, “I come from a divorced background, and I didn’t want to get into that one again.” But Diana readily agreed, their lawyers exchanged documents, and Diana went to Ludgrove, the boarding school that William and Harry attended,
to tell them the news. On December 9, Prime Minister John Major announced the separation to the House of Commons. Diana, who was out on a round of official duties, “
heard it on the radio, and it was just very very sad.” In public, Diana looked “
carefree, glossy and utterly content,” wrote Lynda Lee-Potter in the
Daily Mail
. She spent the evening at the home of some close friends, where she was sad and subdued. She expressed no relief, but said she hoped that somehow her life could change for the better. When James Hewitt phoned to bolster her, he said later, “
Diana sounded flat and low.… She did not think that it would ever be possible for her to have what she really wanted.”

The newspapers—broadsheets as well as tabloids—devoted pages to analyzing the causes and implications of the separation. Not surprisingly, they absolved themselves of responsibility. Forgetting the obsessive and often reckless coverage of Diana over the years, the
Daily Mail
observed, “
The media did not mismatch the royal pair nor split them asunder. This marriage has died from within as marriages do.” The
Evening Standard
explained that the media were only trying to “
report the truth about the royal marriage” when “every difficulty was put in their way.… The newspapers were right to say that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were an unhappy couple.… This turn of events is a vindication of the press.”

In assigning blame, the tabloids pointed to Charles. Historian Paul Johnson, writing in the
Daily Mail
, best reflected the prevailing sentiment: Diana, he wrote, had the “
royal magic” and “could have proved to be the biggest asset.” For Charles to “throw away this treasure … reflects very badly on his judgment.”

Chapter 18

A
s Diana considered what to do after the separation, she turned to her diverse collection of friends for solace and advice. Her friends later talked about how Diana kept her friendships exclusive. She would rarely see two or three friends together, and then only if they already knew one another. This practice was unusual in the British upper class, in which social life typically revolved around group activities such as house parties. Indeed, Prince Charles socialized with a tightly knit clique widely known as the “Highgrove Set.”

Some of Diana’s relationships were well known, but when Diana died, many of her friends were stunned to discover who else she had been close to. “
She lived her life in so many tight compartments,” her friend Rosa Monckton said. “She didn’t introduce her friends very often. You know she was just so scared of losing people or of people rejecting her.”

Diana’s attitude toward friends reflected her complicated temperament—her mistrust, insecurity, and penchant for secrecy, as well as her warmth, humor, and impetuous generosity. By keeping her friends apart, she always maintained the upper hand. Fashion entrepreneur Roberto Devorik once suggested that she gather a half-dozen friends for a weekly lunch “
to discuss the things you’re not sure about and directions you might take.” Diana would have none of it, because “by dividing you rule,” said Devorik. She said different things to different friends—yet another reason she preferred that they not compare notes. “Everyone knew a piece of her,” a close friend said. “But no one knew the whole. I think it started because she couldn’t afford to trust one person completely, and then it became a way to be.”

Diana had an aversion to pushy people. “
She liked to be the one who offered rather than hav[ing] people offer to her,” said Marguerite Littman,
an American expatriate living in London who knew Diana well in the nineties. “I watched her watch people stand back, and she would go to them. She didn’t like it when people came to her.” Although Diana was susceptible to flattery, she often befriended people facing tough times; after they had recovered she sometimes drifted away, although one friend recalled that Diana stopped speaking to her “when I was at my lowest and could not have been more vulnerable. She may not have known it.”

Diana idealized each new friend as someone who could do no wrong. She gave large bouquets of roses, scented candles, Herend animal figurines, and enamel boxes as tokens of her affection. (One box in the shape of a shopping bag said “Shop ’Til You Drop.”) When the boyfriend of one of Diana’s friends had to leave England for several months, Diana sent flowers to her friend, with a note that read, “Hang in there.” “
She needed to be liked and she wanted to please, to get feedback,” said businessman Mark Lloyd, a friend during her last few years.

People were attracted to Diana initially by her beauty, charm, and celebrity, and they remained attached because of her vulnerability, spontaneous affection, and ebullient sense of humor. “The mistake people made,” said one friend who lasted over the years, “was to get deeply involved. They got obsessed by her and she did by them, and then when it went wrong, it did [so] big-time. She had a paranoid side.”

Diana expected her friends to be instantly available, and to listen to her long, emotional phone calls. “She couldn’t relax,” one of her friends said. “If something was bothering her, she would talk about it over and over and over with her friends. She really valued relationships, but her intensity would cause problems that disrupted the relationships: her torment, her interpreting and reinterpreting another’s act. She lived her life trying to be one step ahead, always on her guard.”

Some friends resisted the temptation to “get inside her net,” as one man put it, and give her total devotion. In doing so, these friends endured far longer. With selected friends she gossiped, with others she didn’t even whisper another friend’s name. “
It was totally one-to-one,” said Cosima Somerset, who had an intense friendship with Diana a year before she died. “We didn’t talk about other people, only what was going on in her life and my life.”

Diana was easily wounded and quick to feel patronized. “If something happened and it was her fault, she would not accept blame,” a friend said. “And if you said something critical, she would think you disapproved of her.” The unpredictability of her reactions made her friends fearful of saying anything that might offend, although this injunction didn’t extend to witty irreverence, which she enjoyed, mostly from men. She had one male friend who teased her continually, making her laugh by calling her other
friends impudent nicknames (Lucia Flecha de Lima was “Pressa de Flesha,”) and mocking her choice of lovers (red-haired Hewitt was “Ginger”).

As swiftly as Diana took up with people, she would drop them, usually without explanation or even obvious provocation. “She would be disappointed, not over big things, but little things,” one of her friends said.
She retreated if she sensed a friend was trying to take control, or if she felt too dependent and feared someone might reject her. Diana also was especially quick to see—or imagine—disloyalty. Although Diana occasionally got into heated arguments with friends, the end was usually marked by silence—unreturned and uninitiated phone calls, averted eyes at social gatherings. “She had difficulty solving her own problems,” one of her friends explained. “She wanted to please, but for her it was easier to cut off a problem than to solve it.”

Most of the time, people withdrew if Diana dropped them. “Because of who she was, people were reluctant to get in touch,” a friend explained. In some cases, as if on a whim, Diana would call an exiled friend after a period of months and resume as if nothing had happened. However, when friends made her face the consequences of her actions, she would lower her defenses and relent. After Diana’s
Panorama
interview, film producer David Puttnam wrote a letter advising her how to pick up the pieces. His criticism was gentle, and his advice sound, but she didn’t reply and cut him from her Christmas card list. A year later, they met at a luncheon. Puttnam bluntly told her how her rudeness had hurt him, and when she “made up a story” as an excuse, he wouldn’t accept it. He told her that if she had any questions about his loyalty, she should simply call him: “
I said, ‘When you do things like that, you are not like other people. I couldn’t call you. You have a peculiar ability to call me.’ ” Like a father with a remorseful daughter, he then made her repeat several times, “David, I am very sorry. If ever I have a worry in the future I will pick up the phone.” Recalled Puttnam, “
She charmed me. Having absorbed being told off, she behaved like a child.”

Interior designer Nicholas Haslam took a more direct approach. After five years of friendship, Diana had dropped him after he displayed her lighthearted thank-you note for a pair of Turkish slippers (“They are the perfect size for my giant clodhopping feet”) in the window of his shop. When he saw her at a cocktail party and she ignored him, he spent the rest of the evening glaring at her. Finally, she sent a mutual friend over to ask, “
Why are you sending daggers at Diana?” “The bitch is cutting me,” Haslam replied. The friend scurried away to confer with Diana, and soon afterward, the Princess “flew across the room and said, ‘I wasn’t cutting you. I was just saving you till last.’ ”