Diana in Search of Herself (51 page)

In 1974, he met Diane de Waldner, a beautiful and elegant heiress to a vast French oil fortune. Diane’s mother, Louise de Waldner, counted the Queen Mother among her friends, and she owned an estate in southern France where Prince Charles came to paint. Diane and Oliver were married in 1976, the same year he left Christie’s to open his own London gallery dealing in Islamic art. In the art trade, many thought him overly awed by money and glamour. “
Oliver is half child and half old man,” his mentor Hamoush once said. “Like a child, he is very impressed by unimpressive things.”

From 1985 to 1989, Oliver had an affair with Ayesha Nadir, a wealthy Turkish beauty with a house in London and a villa near Istanbul. The romance ended when Hoare refused to leave his wife and family, and Ayesha moved to Turkey. The Hoare marriage stabilized, thanks largely to Diane’s patience and discretion.

It was Diane’s family connection to the Queen Mother that brought the couple to Windsor Castle during Ascot week in 1984, where Charles and Oliver, who was three years older than the Prince, struck up a friendship based on their love of art and fascination with mystical Eastern religions.
Hoare was also close to Camilla Parker Bowles, and he and his wife entertained Charles and Camilla in their home. Hoare and the Princess of Wales had a kinship as well,
sharing an interest in ballet and a number of mutual friends, among them Adrian Ward-Jackson.

When the Wales marriage began to rupture in 1991, Hoare offered his services as an intermediary. “Oliver tried to help Diana to understand Prince Charles—his passion for architecture, his sense of history, and that he was a hardworking man,” said a friend who knew Diana and Hoare well. “He wanted to keep her with Prince Charles.” But in 1992, as the rift between the Waleses proved irreparable, Hoare abandoned his efforts. “He is not a man to insist,” their mutual friend said. “He is a bit of a sybarite, not in the bad sense, but he likes to live well and not make a huge effort.”

It had also become obvious that Diana, then thirty-one, was infatuated with the forty-seven-year-old Hoare, who was in turn fascinated by Diana. “He was flattered that Diana had a crush on him, and he encouraged her without knowing it,” said the mutual friend. “To some extent, she misread
his signals, but he genuinely liked her. The motivation for Diana was partly that he was Prince Charles’s friend, and she was intrigued. She wanted to have something that belonged to Prince Charles. There were mixed motivations and mixed signals.” Another friend took a less benign view: “Oliver was naughty. He led her on. She was besotted with him because he is very attractive.”

Diana and Hoare spent increasing amounts of time together at Kensington Palace and the homes of friends.
Diana began visiting Hoare’s mother as well, much as she had befriended James Hewitt’s mother. She spoke to friends of the new interest in Islamic philosophy that she had picked up from Hoare. As she did with others close to her, Diana frequently called Hoare on the telephone. “
Sometimes she could phone more than twenty times a day when we were in the car driving around London,” said Hoare’s former chauffeur Barry Hodge. “If she only called five or six times, we thought of it as a quiet day. The sheer number of calls she made used to get Mr. Hoare down. Whenever his wife was in the car, he’d carefully pull the plug out just a fraction to break the connection.”

Diana first met Elsa Bowker, a friend of Hoare’s through Middle Eastern connections, one evening in 1993 when Hoare brought her to dinner at Elsa’s Belgravia apartment. The next morning, a royal courier delivered a thank-you note filled with affection; as Elsa recalled, “
She wrote the letter at midnight, saying, ‘I can’t go to sleep. I want to tell you that you had such an impact on me, you are someone who understands me. I want you to be my friend.’ ”

In Elsa’s view, “
there was great love on both sides” between Diana and Hoare. Diana told Elsa she wanted to marry Hoare, and to buy a house with him in Italy. “She was willing to leave England with him,” Elsa recalled. Hoare told Elsa he thought Diana was “radiant inside, and he loved that.… He did a lot for her. He helped to give her confidence, but it was never enough. Diana had wonderful qualities of heart, but she was terribly possessive. If she loved someone, he had to leave everything, including children. Her possessiveness frightened men. Everything became drama.”

The Hoare marriage had already become strained due to anonymous telephone calls to their home.
The calls began in September 1992 and numbered as many as twenty a week, some as late as midnight. Each time, the caller remained silent, lingering until Oliver Hoare asked, “Who’s there? Who’s there?” and hung up. “
Whoever it is just wants to hear the sound of my voice,” Hoare said later. Finally, in October 1993, Diane Hoare demanded that her husband ask the police to trace the calls. He did, and the police equipped their phone with a computerized code that could activate tracers.

The relationship between Diana and Hoare eventually precipitated a crisis in his marriage. “
It was like a war zone,” chauffeur Barry Hodge recalled. “Diane Hoare is no fool, and she can smell another woman a mile off.” Toward the end of 1993—when Diana was on the verge of making her “time and space” speech—Hoare moved into a friend’s apartment in Pimlico to “cool off.”

After Hoare had made the move, he confronted the magnitude of Diana’s insecurities one evening when his wife was out of town. For Hoare, it was an alarming moment consistent with the experiences of Prince Charles and James Hewitt. “
Oliver told Diana he had to see his daughter, who had a fever,” Elsa Bowker recalled. “She suspected he was really going to see his wife, and nothing he said could convince her otherwise. She was very suspicious and mistrustful. They were in the car, and he was taking her home. At one point she was so upset that she opened the door as if to jump out. He pulled her back, and a little while later they were in a traffic jam in Sloane Square. Suddenly Diana did jump out, leaving behind her bag and her money and everything. Oliver was so distraught he never saw his daughter. He drove all over London for three hours and finally found Diana weeping in the park next to Kensington Palace.”

Diana was repeating other destructive patterns from her relationship with Charles. In late 1993, energy healer Simone Simmons concluded that the marks of self-injury she had seen on Diana “
had been made essentially to call Hoare’s attention to her … need for him.” Later, Simmons warned Diana that she was “
asking for trouble” by continuing with Hoare, and that she couldn’t expect him to leave his family for her. Diana took exception to what Simmons described as her “sharp words of warning,” and stopped calling her for a time.

The anonymous phone calls ceased during Hoare’s two-month absence from home, but they resumed on January 13, 1994, after he returned to his wife.
Over the next six days, the police tracked a dozen silent calls ranging from before 8:00
A.M
. to nearly midnight. To the astonishment of the police and the Hoares, all the calls originated from four lines, three in Kensington Palace (as the police report described them, “
rented by the Office of HRH Prince of Wales”) along with Diana’s mobile telephone. “Mr. Hoare believes that the calls are being made by Princess Diana,” noted the police report. When Hoare told police he wanted to call Diana, they advised instead that he wait for the next silent call and then “ask her by calling her first name.” According to a later account of the episode, Hoare took the advice, and when Diana heard her name, she began crying and said, “
Yes, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

The phone calls stopped for several days but then started up again.
This time they were traced to phone booths in Kensington and Notting
Hill, both neighborhoods in the vicinity of Kensington Palace, as well as Sarah McCorquodale’s home. Scotland Yard alerted the head of the Royalty Protection Squad, who called a top official in the government. He in turn spoke to a senior official at the Palace who transmitted a message to Diana’s office: The phone calls had to stop because the police were involved, and prosecution under nuisance call laws was being considered. At that point, the calls ended.

Hoare’s relationship with Diana weathered the incident, and they became even more visible around London. In December 1993, a reporter for
Today
had already seen them sitting together in her car for nearly an hour, “
her head rested trustingly on Mr. Hoare’s shoulder.” They were also spotted having breakfast together at 7:00
A.M
. at the Chelsea Harbour Club where Diana worked out each day—“
enough to start speculation about their relationship,” noted the
Telegraph Magazine
. When photographers finally caught them in March 1994 driving into Kensington Palace, reports appeared in the next day’s tabloids about their evening out with Beatrice Flecha de Lima at a Chinese restaurant. “
The Princess has been a regular visitor” to Hoare’s art gallery, reported
Today
, adding, “she has tearfully poured out her heart to her loyal friend.”

Five months later, on Sunday, August 21, 1994, speculation about the nature of their relationship splashed across the tabloids with the
News of the World
’s “world exclusive” headlined
DI’S CRANKY PHONE CALLS TO MARRIED TYCOON
. Over five pages, the tabloid recounted in detail, with times and dates, the results of the police investigation into Hoare’s silent calls the previous January. The story implicitly questioned Diana’s stability and suggested that she and Hoare were having an affair.

Both Hoare and Diana had learned of the impending story on Saturday. They conferred by telephone, and Diana asked Richard Kay for help.
Kay spoke to Clive Goodman, the royal reporter for the
News of the World
, telling him that the phone calls had probably been made by “
some very loyal, and perhaps misguided people working for her, [who] took the matter into their own hands.” Diana’s employees were concerned, according to Kay, because Diana had so often been tearful after Hoare’s efforts to broker a reconciliation in her marriage. “Anger can make people do strange things,” Kay told Goodman. In his
News of the World
story, Goodman attributed Kay’s statements to “a close friend and adviser to Princess Diana,” and in a fascinating effort to shield Kay’s identity, used the pronoun “she” instead of “he.”

On Saturday afternoon, Diana arranged a clandestine meeting with Kay in London’s Talbot Square. After Diana hopped into Kay’s car, he drove her around for several hours as she “
poured out her anger and unhappiness” over the accusations the Sunday tabloid was about to publish. Her intention
was to have Kay attribute her comments, as usual, to a “friend” of the Princess of Wales. But when they returned to Talbot Square, two photographers lay in the square’s garden, cameras poised. They had been tipped by someone who had identified Diana’s parked car, and when they saw her with Kay, they clicked off a series of pictures. An elderly man spotted the photographers, shouting to Diana and Kay, “
Do you know you’re being photographed?”

Recognizing that he couldn’t use his conventional disguise, Kay told Diana he would have to quote her directly. That Monday’s
Daily Mail
billed its “
unprecedented interview” with the page-one headline
WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?
Diana did herself damage by overreacting—“They are trying to make out I was having an affair with this man or had some sort of fatal attraction. It is simply untrue and so unfair”—and telling one transparent lie. When asked whether she had called Hoare from telephone booths in her neighborhood she said, “You can’t be serious. I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”

The Observer
pointed out the “
neurotic nonsense” of such claims, and
The Times
observed that this “
thoroughly modern princess” had known how to use the “last-number redial button” on her husband’s phone to track his phone calls to Camilla. The
Telegraph Magazine
recalled a photo taken earlier in the year showing her “
hunting for change for a parking meter in Knightsbridge,” and
The Sun
printed a diagram instructing her how to use a public phone by inserting a shiny coin “
with a picture of your mother-in-law on it.”

Diana fell back on her customary defense, suggesting to Kay that Palace enemies were behind the tabloid leak. “
I feel I am being destroyed,” she said. “Someone is going to make out that I am mad, that I am guilty by association, that the mud will stick … I know there are those whose wish is apparently to grind my face in it.” At the same time, she abandoned her earlier effort to blame her own employees for the dozen calls that clearly came from her telephone. Instead, she denied making six calls by producing alibis ranging from a dinner with “an elderly titled lady in Eaton Square” and lunch at a Mayfair restaurant to massages and hairdressing appointments.
These claims later proved to be shaky: The Mayfair restaurant was closed on the day in question, and no witnesses came forward to publicly back Diana’s assertions.

Kay covered himself by acknowledging that Diana had been “
in the habit of ringing Mr. Hoare around the time the tapping was being carried out. It is possible that she would have replaced the receiver if his wife answered.”
The Sunday Times
called this admission “
bizarre.” Such a confession of furtive behavior seemed to suggest an illicit relationship between Hoare and Diana instead of putting the idea to rest.
The Sunday Times
pointed out previous examples of Diana’s silent phone calls, including James Hewitt’s admission that he had received ten silent calls over three weeks the previous summer. “
I reckon she has phoned other people the same way,” Hewitt said. “I feel very sorry for her.”

By early September, the tabloids began misstating the nature of the allegations as “
300 silent nuisance calls,” although the original report had not estimated the number of calls made in the sixteen months before the tracing began. In October, Richard Kay also weighed in with
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CRANK CALLS
. According to Kay, the calls traced to telephone booths had probably been made by a teenage boy who knew one of Hoare’s sons. Kay reiterated Diana’s belief in the “
whiff of conspiracy” against her and further muddied the evidence of the traced calls by dismissing them as “a mere 12 calls over a three-month period”—although, in fact, they had been made over six days.