Diana in Search of Herself (53 page)

Less than two months later, the tabloids were running with the Hoare phone story, and by now the troubles in the royal marriage were so well known that the broadsheets joined in as well. Only a month into their coverage, they got wind of even bigger revelations coming in
Princess in Love
, by Anna Pasternak, James Hewitt’s amanuensis. Diana had known about the book since mid-August, when the news ruined her Martha’s Vineyard vacation with the Flecha de Limas, prompting her return to London three days later. By then, Diana was estranged from Hewitt and was powerless to derail the book. When she called him, he told her, “
I don’t regard myself as a friend anymore.”

Hewitt felt bitter about Diana on two counts: She had “
dumped him,” and she had double-crossed him. After leaving the army the previous March, he had sold the
Express
a sanitized version of his relationship with Diana for more than £100,000 ($150,000). He claimed that Diana had backed this untruthful effort to portray their affair as an innocent friendship. “
It was a preemptive strike,” Hewitt said, but “the rumors grew stronger than they were before.” Despite the account’s sugar coating, Hewitt was widely criticized for cashing in on his connection to Diana. “
Diana was happy for it to go out,” Hewitt said, “but once it backfired, the support I got from her was nonexistent.… Diana told me she was sorry that it turned out that way, but when it got too hot … she decided to drop it.”

Anna Pasternak had written the “
anodyne”
Express
account, but she knew from numerous conversations that the story of Hewitt and Diana was far more explosive. She later said that Charles’s televised adultery confession had left her so indignant she was determined to tell what she characterized as a love story “
too beautiful … to remain a secret.”
By late July, Pasternak had signed a deal with Bloomsbury Publishing, a highbrow London house, to be Hewitt’s ghostwriter. She resigned from the
Express
and disappeared to the country to turn out 80,000 words by early September so Hewitt could beat Andrew Morton’s sequel to the bookstores. While Hewitt insisted that he had not profited financially from the
book,
The Mirror
later published bank statements showing he had received £130,000 (more than $200,000).
At the time of publication, Hewitt was suddenly able to pay £245,000 ($400,000) for a Georgian mansion in Dartmoor.

Pasternak found Hewitt’s story thoroughly convincing. The “
proof” that he and Diana slept together was in Diana’s letters, which Hewitt
shared with her. Hewitt also gave the publisher a sworn affidavit “
affirming the truth” of the events described by Pasternak. The writer’s intent was to “
set the record straight” in a “thoughtful, dignified,” and “sophisticated” fashion—three adjectives that failed to emerge in any of the reviews of
Princess in Love
when it was published on October 3. The book was roundly ridiculed, with perhaps the most pungent comment coming from Lord St. John of Fawsley, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a longtime friend of Johnnie Spencer’s. He called the writing “
clogging, nauseating and overblown … It makes Barbara Cartland sound like George Eliot. Once you put it down, you cannot pick it up again.”

The tabloids condemned Hewitt with every imaginable pejorative they could stuff into two-inch-high headlines:
TRAITOR
(the
Daily Express
),
LOVE RAT
and
CAD
(The Sun),
BRITAIN’S BIGGEST BOUNDER
(the
Daily Mail
). “
He is a revolting creep,” the
Mirror
editorialized. “Horse-whipping would be too good for him.” Yet the tabloids slavered over Pasternak’s prose, reprinting extensive excerpts. The
Daily Mirror
ran five pages, and
The Sun
seventeen, including an “
Eight-Page Special on the Book That Betrayed Diana,” with such stories as “They Did It at Althorp”; “They Did It in the Bathroom”; “She Begged to Do It on Dartmoor”; and “Page-by-Page Guide to the Juiciest Bits.” With no evident irony,
The Sun
explained its coverage with, “Our distaste at Hewitt’s hustling is tempered by concern for Diana’s well-being. That is why we print his story at length. The truth may be painful and unpleasant, but closing our eyes to it helps no one.” For good measure,
The Sun
went on to indict the royal family for failing to provide Diana with a “shoulder of theirs to cry on.”

Princess in Love
profoundly embarrassed Diana, Charles, and the entire royal family. Buckingham Palace dismissed it as “
grubby and worthless,” and Diana’s lawyer Lord Mishcon called it “
wretched,” but the Palace refrained from challenging the book’s claims. Significantly, Diana did not step forward with a public denial. Instead, she resorted to her habit of letting “friends” speak for her. Richard Kay dutifully reported that she was “
bitterly hurt” by Hewitt’s “invasion of her private life,” and “despite the flowery descriptive passages … Diana firmly maintains that she and Hewitt were never lovers.” In the
Daily Express
, a “friend” described the book as the product of Hewitt’s “
fevered imagination.”

Barely a year later, Diana contradicted these disavowals by admitting on
Panorama
that her relationship with Hewitt had indeed been adulterous. She also said Hewitt had assured her ten days before publication that “
there was nothing to worry about,” and that when the book arrived, “the first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children, and William produced a box of chocolates and said, ‘Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt. These are to make you smile again.’ ”

Diana had still more explaining to do when excerpts from Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography of Charles appeared in
The Sunday Times
on October 16, 1994. Charles had told Diana what to expect in the book, which on the whole was restrained and sober. Dimbleby described Diana’s bulimia and mercurial behavior by way of explaining the marriage’s breakdown, but Charles offered no negative judgments of his wife, directly or indirectly. One rigid ground rule for the project had been Dimbleby’s pledge to exclude anything critical of Diana.

It was the
News of the World’
s headline,
CHARLES:
I’VE NEVER LOVED DIANA
, that wounded Diana. Charles had said no such thing to Dimbleby, who wrote guardedly about the Prince’s feelings for Diana: He found her “
lovable” and “warmhearted” and “was sure he could fall in love with her.”
Dimbleby also acknowledged that Charles had proposed under pressure from the media and his father and had approached his marriage feeling uneasy about Diana’s shifting moods. Dimbleby emphasized that even as the marriage was collapsing, Charles tried to make the relationship work, and when Diana remained inconsolable, he would “
insist he was to blame, that if it were not for him she would not be in such a state of misery…. It was too much to expect anyone to be the wife of the heir to the throne.”

The day after the
Sunday Times
excerpt,
Diana went to see William at Ludgrove. When William asked why the marriage had broken up, she recalled telling him, “
Well, there were three of us in the marriage, and the pressure of the media was another factor, so the two together were very difficult. But although I still loved Papa, I couldn’t live under the same roof as him, and likewise with him.” By blaming Charles, Diana seemed unlikely to reassure her twelve-year-old son, but she insisted that she had “put it in gently, without resentment or any anger.”

Diana was indeed angry about what she saw as a “
picture portrayed in the book … of a wife who was both unreasonable and unstable.” Perhaps more than the television interview, Diana viewed the book as a “revenge attack.” Of course, Diana herself had graphically described her eating disorders, depressions, and self-injury to Morton, but she was upset by Dimbleby’s portrait of her volatile behavior. “
She feels the furor over the biography has wrecked her chances of building a new private life,” reported
The Sun
.

Andrew Morton’s sequel, which appeared on the heels of Dimbleby’s book, seemed almost anticlimactic. A
S
early as August, Diana had distanced herself from the project, saying that she “
had not had any contact with Morton for more than three years.” Left unmentioned was her friend James Colthurst’s continuing role as a middleman for Morton. When the book came out in November, she dismissed it as a “
mishmash of tedious secondhand gossip assembled by Morton for his own benefit.” No wonder,
since
The Times
characterized the sequel’s portrait of Diana as “
bitter, jealous, and lonely … obsessed with … alternative therapies … and increasingly isolated.”

The sequel sparked a run of tabloid stories on Morton’s most sensational assertions:
another self-mutilation—a gruesome account of Diana slashing her arms while traveling on the Queen’s airplane and smearing her blood on the seats and walls—and her use of Prozac, which he said had controlled her bulimia. In fact, Diana’s experiment with Prozac had been short-lived, and the bulimia symptoms persisted. After publication, James Colthurst’s status as an “unpaid adviser” to Diana came to an end.

Nearly a year after Diana’s “retirement,” some of the British press were taking a more jaundiced view of her than they had before. Even die-hard supporters such as
The Sun
had begun to carp, with headlines like
TWO FACES OF TORMENTED DI
, over a story about her “
Jekyll and Hyde” personality. In its April 1994 issue,
Tatler
magazine had pronounced her wardrobe “
dead common,” and other publications had begun to mock her, even when she showed signs of emotional fragility. “
She has been given of late to frequent bouts of weeping: the Princess of Wails,” wrote
The Observer
.

Until she became tangled in her own evasions and deceptions with the Hoare and Hewitt stories, Diana’s principal sin had been snubbing and sometimes snarling at photographers, who had grown more aggressive after she dropped her security detail early in 1994 along with her schedule of royal obligations. Once she was on her own, she became unpredictable with the royal hacks as well. “
She was schizophrenic, which caused problems,” said Robert Hardman of
The Daily Telegraph
. “People didn’t know where the goalposts were. One minute she was jokey, then she made anguished pleas for privacy. You didn’t know if she did, if she didn’t, if she was pretending or what.”

When Diana’s coverage started turning sour, she began a methodical campaign to get the press back on her side, working from the top down. She dined regularly with newspaper proprietors such as Lord Rothermere of the
Mail
and his top lieutenant David English,
Telegraph
owner Conrad Black, and News International’s Rupert Murdoch. Most of the time, Diana didn’t tell Buckingham Palace officials about these get-togethers with owners and editors until the last minute, or after the fact.

She continued to feed information to Richard Kay, but she began establishing contacts with other reporters and editors who might be useful to her. One was Anthony Holden, Kay’s colleague at the
Daily Mail
, who intrigued Diana because he was a critical biographer of Charles as well as
an outspoken republican. Since the Morton book, Holden had written especially supportive articles about Diana for the
Daily Mail
and other publications. “
I got a call from a mutual friend, a male, saying ‘come to San Lorenzo at twelve-forty,’ ” Holden recalled. “The table next to mine was the only one with flowers, and pretty soon in came Diana with the boys and their nanny.” A
S
she did with Kay, Diana suggested that Holden join her. “This was the first in a series of lunches in public places,” Holden said. “There was always subterfuge, and always, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you.’ ” Her off-the-record remarks “informed the stuff I wrote,” Holden said.

At her friend Peter Palumbo’s suggestion, Diana also consulted with Andrew Neil, whose
Sunday Times
had published the original Morton excerpts in 1992. They met in February 1994 during a luncheon at Palumbo’s country house. Palumbo had asked Neil to help give Diana some direction. “
She wanted me to touch base,” Neil recalled, “and Peter was worried about her, almost to the extent he was afraid he would wake up and find she had killed herself. He never quite voiced that, but I would say it, and he would nod grimly and never dissent. Peter said to me, ‘How can we help this woman get a more normal life and not spend all her time working out,’ which was an indication of a bulimic personality.”

Neil found Diana changed from their meeting a decade earlier when Charles had dominated the conversation. “She was talking about the royal family with a bitter sense of humor,” Neil said. “What surprised me was that despite her limited brainpower and lack of education, she had developed street smarts. She was talking about the future of the royal family, and she was making sense.” Neil tried to impress on her that she should find a full-time job. “You need to get up and get out and do something and then come home,” Neil said, but he suspected she wasn’t interested.