Diana in Search of Herself (54 page)

Diana felt she should reach writers she considered unfriendly as well. “
She wanted to win them over,” Richard Kay said. “Her line was, ‘These people write about me but they don’t know me. Maybe if they knew me they wouldn’t write those things.’ I thought it was a dangerous strategy.”

Still, she made some impressive conversions, especially among men of a certain age. She won over the crotchety
Daily Telegraph
columnist Auberon Waugh during a lunch at Kensington Palace. “
I’ve been walking on air ever since,” he declared. She further endeared herself to Waugh when she read a self-deprecating limerick at his annual
Literary Review
lunch, after apologizing for being a “
notorious illiterate” who “made time between therapy sessions and secret trysts” to compose her verse. Waugh henceforth “
took Diana’s side unreservedly because he fancied her,” said Richard Ingrams, former editor of
Private Eye
. “That is the crude explanation. But he was touched.”

Max Hastings, editor of
The Daily Telegraph
until 1995, when he moved to the
Evening Standard
, offered an especially daunting challenge to Diana. The
Telegraph
had taken a pro-Charles line, and Hastings himself had a number of friends in the Prince’s sporting set. Physically imposing at six foot five, Hastings had become a Fleet Street legend for his derring-do in covering eleven wars, including India-Pakistan, Vietnam, and the Falklands. Diana decided in 1995 to approach Hastings through a good friend who was his neighbor. “
Come to dinner Friday night in the country,” the friend said to Hastings. “Diana wants to see you.” While his host and hostess sat in the corner, “Diana talked her game,” Hastings recalled. Like Andrew Neil, Hastings saw “a bitter woman speaking, but she was witty, and it was skillfully done. She had my undivided attention.”

Diana appealed to journalists in part because she dealt with them on a human level. She was scrupulous about thanking them for favors, and made thoughtful gestures—such as
the letter she wrote to Richard Kay’s mother after his father died, followed by tickets to the ballet. Prince Charles, on the other hand, could sail through a long meeting with a journalist without inquiring about his children or even his sporting interests. “
The Prince felt too ill at ease with anyone in the media to play the game as she did,” Hastings said. “She asked the right questions, took an interest in your affairs. I would lap up Diana, who knew how to make people feel good.”

“
She was the kind of person you could feel on intimate terms with quickly,” said columnist and historian Paul Johnson, another prickly character who came to lunch at Kensington Palace and was enchanted by Diana. Johnson hadn’t been one of her consistent fans, but he took an even more jaundiced view of Charles, which interested Diana. Johnson produced several memos advising her about the press. “Don’t think you can manipulate them, because they will manipulate you,” he told her. “Don’t tell them a confidence because down the line they will break it.” Conceded Johnson, “She didn’t listen to me.”

Diana’s ability to ingratiate involved what TV talk-show host Clive James described as a “
tacit bargain”: “You tell me what you don’t tell anyone else, and I’ll tell you what I can’t tell anyone else, and then neither of us can tell anyone else what we said.… I suppose it was a mind game. There must have been dozens of people that she played it with.… She would make each of her platonic cavaliers believe, or at any rate want to believe, that he was the only one.”

Diana began to take pride in her techniques of influencing coverage. During a luncheon at the Goldsmiths’, she described one ploy to journalist and historian Andrew Roberts. Although he was a Diana skeptic, he couldn’t help admiring her “
native cunning about the press.” He recalled,
“She said one good way of scotching a rumor about to come out is to tell a slightly different version of the same story to the opposition. So if the
Express
was coming out with something, she would call Richard Kay and give him a version with the facts altered, not necessarily honestly, so neither newspaper would know what the truth was. The real story would slip through the cracks. That was very clever, and she did it repeatedly.”

Sometimes Diana went too far and her efforts backfired.
In May 1994, representatives of a displeased Prince of Wales told the press (including Kay at the
Daily Mail
) about Diana’s extravagant annual expenditure of £160,000 ($250,000) for “grooming,” which included some £91,330 ($150,000) for clothing, £9,350 ($15,000) for hairdressing, and £7,306 ($12,000) for alternative therapies. That day, Diana had a previously scheduled lunch with Peter Stothard, editor of
The Times
, as part of her outreach campaign. The moment they sat down, Diana began venting about the coverage. “
My husband said it at a dinner party last week, where it got to Ross Benson and to Nigel Dempster, and now there’s all this stuff,” she told Stothard, who later wrote, “
To my horror, she began to set out a complicated story about how she had helped a tramp who had fallen into Regent’s Park Canal.”

Puzzled by her account, Stothard failed to take the bait.
Later that afternoon, Diana’s chauffeur called Richard Kay with the story of the rescue.
The next day’s
Daily Mail
ran Kay’s page-one feature under the headline
DIANA RESCUES DROWNING MAN
, which goaded other papers to knock down its inflated claims of Diana’s heroism. Kay later insisted that he trusted Diana’s chauffeur and that Diana “
played a role and got her feet wet,” although he acknowledged that the headline was a stretch.

Richard Kay’s role as Diana’s Boswell became public knowledge in early May. Diana had just returned from a weekend holiday in Spain with her friends Kate Menzies and Catherine Soames. They had been besieged by paparazzi, one of whom took five pictures of Diana sunbathing topless and put them on sale for £1 million (more than $1.5 million). Back in London, Diana contacted Kay, who interviewed her in her car behind Harrods.

The next day, quoting a “friend,” Kay reported in the
Daily Mail
that Diana considered the paparazzi invasion of her privacy “
like a rape.” Unknown to either Kay or Diana, a photographer had snapped them conferring in her Audi and sold the picture to
The Sun
, which ran its second headline about the “
two faces” of Diana.
The Sun
blasted Diana for her “hypocrisy and double standards … supposedly speaking through a ‘friend,’ ” and for sunbathing topless, adding, “You can’t marry a prince and then expect to live like a typist.”

Diana’s favoritism with Kay often worked against her in unexpected ways. “
She didn’t understand what happens when you give an exclusive
story,” explained Kay’s
Daily Mail
colleague Peter McKay. “This causes the others to rip the exclusive story apart. This is partly rage that someone has been given something exclusive, and also you have to take a different view. Diana never understood that she caused envy and hatred at the other papers if she was cooperating with one.”

According to Richard Kay, Diana “
hated” being described as “manipulative,” as she often was in later years. In her view, manipulation was management by another name, and she had a right to do whatever it took to shape her coverage. “
It was manipulation,” said Clive James, “but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling the strings?”

Chapter 21

N
o matter how much the tabloids criticized Diana’s private life, they kept pressing her to take on a larger public role. “
It was always push push push,” said Jane Atkinson, an adviser on press relations toward the end of Diana’s life. “The media always wanted to know, ‘What did she mean by wanting to be an ambassador?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see she doesn’t know?’ ”

In her “retirement” speech, Diana had promised that after several months she would articulate “a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life.” In 1994, she sharply reduced her official duties,
turning up at only ten royal events compared with 198 the year before.
But in 1995, she was back on the royal calendar, appearing at 127 official engagements, ensuring that she would be on display for photographers and reporters roughly two times a week.

Whatever her official schedule, Diana had achieved a level of celebrity that kept her constantly in the public eye. The quotidian events of her life—going to her health club, meeting friends for lunch, taking a vacation—would turn up in one newspaper or another, often on page one. While she professed dismay at the press coverage, Diana was also drawn to it. In the space of eighteen months, she appeared on the cover of both British
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
, and cooperated with two television documentaries. In the first of these programs, in March 1994, about a shelter for battered women, Diana participated in a group therapy session and made a tantalizing reference to her inability to come up with “
something positive” she had done the previous week: “If you’d asked … what the negative aspects of the week had been, you would have been flooded.” Throughout the two years after announcing her “retirement,” Diana also took frequent trips, often on the spur of the moment. Her most common
destination was the United States, which she visited more than a half-dozen times, mostly to see her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima.

Diana later characterized her activities during this time as “
a lot of work … underground, without any media attention,” but in fact Diana courted publicity. When she made a “
hush-hush” visit to Ulster in April 1994, the tabloids contained photographs and accounts of her meeting with British troops. As Richard Addis, editor in chief of the
Express
newspapers, recalled, “
There were phone calls to our picture editors when someone would say, ‘If you want a picture, go to this address at such and such a time, and you will find Diana coming out.’ She would always be there.”

Richard Kay and other followers reminded their readers at regular intervals of Diana’s “secret” charity activities. That April, for example, Kay wrote that although Diana had made only one official appearance to date, “
she has been attending many other events in a private capacity.” In a later report on the “
hidden life” of Diana, he recounted the specifics of “dozens of visits” to the ill and dying. Charles Rae reported in
Today
that Diana carried out this work “
without the trumpet blowing.” Even in the din of the tabloid brass band, Diana could be heard tooting her own horn, the most dramatic example being her attempt to publicize her role in the “drowning tramp” rescue, which left her open to mockery as “
Super Di.”

Diana’s mixed signals only encouraged the paparazzi. Most of the time, the photographers would wait outside the gates of Kensington Palace to follow her to her destination, where they would capture the day’s quota of pictures. “
A normal day [I] would be followed by four cars, a normal day [I] would come back to my car and find six freelance photographers jumping around me,” she said. Yet Diana wanted their attention when she wished to make a point, as she did the night of the Dimbleby documentary in her knockout dress.

Diana dispensed with her security guards at the beginning of 1994: She found the guards’ constant presence oppressive, and longed to lead a “normal” life. Instead, she got constant surveillance from the paparazzi, who considered stalking Diana an exciting game. Two of the most aggressive “snappers,” Glenn Harvey and Mark Saunders, published a book called
Dicing with Di
in which they gleefully boasted of reducing her to tearful “
wobblies” and mocked her as “The Loon” when she lashed out at their intrusiveness. “
Sometimes a Loon attack would entail Diana sprinting towards a photographer, forcing him to leap out of her way,” Harvey wrote. “At other times she would run at full pelt away from snappers.… But a worse kind of Loon attack was when Diana just stood dead still, eyes welling with tears, head down, giving the silent treatment. Invariably, these happened after she had visited one of her many therapists.”

In September 1994, Diana announced a “
relaunch” of her public life—primarily
to counter her bad publicity—with a series of high-profile events, including the opening of a new clinic affiliated with the National AIDS Trust, one of her charities. When trust chairman Michael Adler first asked her to participate, he was surprised by her response: “
I said, ‘I know you retired, but as a personal favor would you open our new outpatient department? I guarantee there will be no press. It will be a private visit.’ She said, ‘I’d like the media, the more the better.’ ”

A TV documentary several weeks later about her “
new role as a behind-the-scenes charity worker” included “affectionate scenes with her sons” and chats with the homeless in what the tabloids described as a “secret solo visit.” Her last—and splashiest—appearance of the year came at Versailles, where she “
dressed to thrill” in a low-cut, figure-hugging, sequined gown with a skirt split up to her thigh. The dinner was a fund-raiser for a Parisian children’s charity, which, with Diana as the main attraction, pulled in some $800,000. Commentators couldn’t help comparing her dazzling step-out with her “
tearful retreat” only a year earlier.