Diana in Search of Herself (55 page)

Diana’s accelerated 1995 schedule included three official trips abroad (Japan, Russia, and Argentina) as well as fund-raisers in Hong Kong, Venice, Paris, and New York. Yet she remained ambivalent about her role. In May 1994—five months after the “retirement” speech—Diana had announced she would join the policy and planning committee of the International Red Cross, a “
real working appointment,” that required her to read reports, develop strategy, and attend meetings—none of which was her strong suit.

The Red Cross was the ultimate establishment charity, and for that reason, Diana was initially reluctant to get involved. But Mike Whitlam, the antiestablishment Director-General of the British Red Cross, convinced her that the organization could fulfill her desire to play a substantive role in public life. “
She is more interested in the mechanics of the operation, less in being the fund-raising figurehead,” he said late in 1994.

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it turned out, Diana attended only three meetings of her International Red Cross committee. “She got bored, and who wouldn’t,” said one of her former aides. “We have to do boring things in life, and she had no tolerance for that. Her strength was people. It was a waste for her to sit in a darkened room somewhere.”

Diana had also promised to be a Red Cross ambassador overseas, a commitment she fulfilled only once, making a stop at the Red Cross offices in Tokyo at the end of her visit to Japan in February 1995. Diana’s Japanese visit was a success, but measured only by her popularity, which, the
Evening Standard
noted, had “
rocketed overnight…. Her four-day tour shows every sign of turning into a major step on the road to rehabilitation for the Princess’s public image.”

Subsequent overseas trips did not include Red Cross activities. In fact, her choice of places to visit had more to do with her friendships than anything else. In April 1995, for example, she was unexpectedly back in the Far East on a three-day “fact-finding mission” organized by Hong Kong entrepreneur David Tang, to whom Diana had been introduced by Sarah Ferguson.
Known to his friends as “Tango,” the Chinese millionaire had attended boarding school in Britain and studied philosophy at London University before making his mark as the owner of a fashionable Chinese club and a department store.

In Hong Kong, Diana visited a cancer treatment ward, a shelter for homeless youths, and a drug rehabilitation center; she also appeared as guest of honor at dinners to raise money for leprosy and cancer treatment. Although she was accompanied by Governor Christopher Patten, the trip was David Tang’s show. He hosted the dinner for the Hong Kong Cancer Fund at his China Club, where he introduced her by saying, “
Your presence here today is like winning a lottery.” To secure Diana’s help as a fund-raiser, Tang underwrote most of the costs of her trip, which included a suite at a luxury hotel.
Scarcely six weeks later, Tang was at Diana’s side again, this time in Venice, similarly orchestrating her appearance as a fund-raiser for the Serpentine Gallery. By then, Diana’s association with the International Red Cross was “
in abeyance.”

Because she was so involved with the drama of her own life, Diana had been spending less time focusing on Camilla. But when Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles announced in January 1995 that they would divorce, Diana once again attacked her rival. Richard Kay reported Diana was “
uneasy” that her sons might spend time with Camilla, whom she blamed for “destroying” the Waleses’ marriage. Diana also offered a new version of her own marital breakdown. Contrary to what she had told Andrew Morton, that “something inside me closed off” and “our marriage … went down the drain” after the birth of Harry in 1984, Diana now maintained that in 1986, when Charles said the marriage had “irretrievably broken down,” she had been “
hoping for a third child.” As Diana told Kay, “Getting baby number three on board” could have revived their marriage, which was “in trouble but … far from over,” had it not been for Camilla.

By early 1995, Diana had been in therapy with Susie Orbach for nearly two years, and she was talking a brave game to tabloid reporters, telling them she felt “
stronger than ever.” In fact, her temperament had shifted into one of its more volatile cycles. Energy healer Simone Simmons recalled Diana’s “
grim mood swings and tantrums.… Her despondency
might last for days.” One measure of Diana’s insecurity was her habit of carrying as many as four mobile phones in her pocketbook and according to Simmons, “
spending nearly every free minute of the day on the telephone.”

Diana’s ongoing struggle with bulimia prompted her to contact Peggy Claude-Pierre, a Canadian whose intensive treatments for eating disorders Diana had seen on television. At Diana’s invitation, Claude-Pierre met with her for four hours in Kensington Palace. “
She was hurting because she couldn’t express who she was,” Claude-Pierre recalled. Diana confided her feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, and said she needed human contact to feel stronger. Diana asked countless questions, “imploring as a child does…. She said, ‘I know that the more I know, the more I can deal with myself.’ ”

During this period, Diana broke off her friendships with Catherine Soames and Kate Menzies: On their annual ski trip to Lech, Austria, in March, Diana decided that the two women were disloyal. Neither Catherine nor Kate fully understood what happened, but one reason for the rupture may have been their criticism of Diana’s behavior. In the aftermath of the Hoare and Hewitt scandals, Diana had struck up a friendship with Will Carling, captain of the English rugby team, whom she had met during workouts at the Harbour Club and had started seeing for coffee afterward. At first, he just gave her pointers on her training routine, but soon they began to confide in each other.
Diana found Carling easy to talk to, and she enjoyed his company; he was married, however, and
when he began calling Diana’s suite at Lech, Kate and Catherine took exception.

“Diana was doing things the average person wouldn’t approve of,” recalled another friend who was in Lech at the time. “If you were her friend, it was natural to say ‘Be careful.’ But Diana didn’t like being told what to do. There was a falling-out. Diana started eating in her room. She didn’t come out.” Barely a month later,
one of the tabloids took note of Diana’s failure to attend Kate Menzies’s thirty-fifth-birthday party, and the following February, when Kate married restaurateur Simon Slater, Diana was overseas. Since Diana didn’t tell either Kate or Catherine directly what had bothered her, they could only guess, and like others dropped by Diana, they were reluctant to confront her. When another friend asked Diana for an explanation, “She said she had reached a different point in her life, a different era, a different phase.”

Just as Diana had decided to cooperate with Andrew Morton when she was especially mixed-up in 1991, four years later she began to seriously think about doing her own television interview in response to Charles’s documentary with Dimbleby. Emboldened by her skill at dealing with journalists one-on-one, Diana had come to consider herself more clever
than she was. “
She thought she had a fine analytical mind, but she misled herself,” said her friend David Puttnam. “She mistook her very good intuition for strategic shrewdness. Listening to her chatter at lunch, [it would seem] she had worked out a chess game, but she hadn’t really. She’d had a notion only fifteen minutes before, although she was telling you she had worked this out six months earlier.”

Diana’s confusion was captured eerily by Henry Mee, who painted her final portrait in the summer of 1995. Mee’s image was a shocking contrast to her previous portrait, painted only a year earlier by American artist Nelson Shanks. Her sittings with Shanks had taken place during the Dimbleby and Hoare publicity, and Shanks recalled that “
there was no day when her mood didn’t change. She would be laughing one moment and the next minute in tears.” Shanks’s aim had been “
to acknowledge that she was injured,” but “to paint her beauty and soul.” He dressed her in a romantic ruffled blouse, and conveyed a mood of dewy wistfulness. The Shanks portrait, with its suggestion of martyrdom, had become Diana’s favorite.

The same could not be said for Mee’s interpretation,
which one columnist compared to Myra Hindley, the most infamous inmate at Broadmoor, the maximum-security psychiatric hospital Diana had taken to visiting as part of her private charity work. It is a spooky image, larger-than-life, with gray hair and brown streaks shadowing the left side of Diana’s face, the eyes hinting despair: a fragmented personality on the verge of disintegration. “
Diana was raw,” Mee recalled. “On several occasions her eyes were red, and she had clearly been up all night crying. She was having trouble holding it all together.” Diana told Mee that “
all her portraits had been condemned as an extension of herself, and she was sure that this one would be, too.”

That summer, Diana selectively canvassed media-savvy friends about taking her troubles to the airwaves. The wiser among them tried to impress on her the power of silence. “
She was slightly juvenile,” David Puttnam said. “She would say, ‘I always have surprise on my side because the Palace acts in such predictable ways.’ She said, ‘I have offers to do a long interview on television.’ I said, ‘Don’t even think about it. It will look like tit for tat, which is not attractive. And your only power is your ability to do it. The moment you have done it, you have lost your option. Not only is it a bad idea, it is bad tactics.’ ”

Television interviewer Clive James counseled her against an interview as well. “
I said if that happened, the two-camps thing would go nuclear, and continue until there was nothing left,” he later wrote in
The New Yorker
. “She would be on the run forever…. She seemed convinced, but of course she was pretending. She had already decided.”

At that stage, Diana had been approached by Barbara Walters, whom
she had met during her visits to the united States. Walters had also cultivated Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary. “
He would ask me about various charitable events she was going to attend,” Walters recalled. “When we first met, he was extremely uptight and protective and very fond of her. Over time, he loosened up.”

Jephson had worked for Diana since 1987, first as her equerry, and since 1991 as her private secretary. A graduate of Cambridge and a former lieutenant commander in the navy, Jephson was five years older than Diana. He tended to be enigmatic—“Patrick’s pulling the shutters down again,” friends would say—but he was quick, witty, and efficient. “He knew how to deal with Diana,” said one of Diana’s friends. “He never trespassed, and he was never patronizing. To be patronizing to her was a disaster.”

Jephson was the custodian of Diana’s image. “
He tried to filter out nonsense and get her into a serious position,” said Michael Adler of the National AIDS Trust. “He protected Diana from the outside world and from herself. He could see the elephant traps a long way away.”

Perhaps for that very reason, Diana decided to exclude both Jephson and her press secretary Geoffrey Crawford from her interview plans, taking her advice from those who reinforced her impulses. Chief among them was Sarah Ferguson. Throughout the spring and summer of 1995, Diana and Fergie met for many Sunday afternoon lunches at Fergie’s rented home in Surrey. Fergie told Diana how much she had benefited from a candid television interview she had given in March 1993. “
She encouraged Diana to go ahead,” said reporter Richard Kay.

As she had done with Morton, Diana settled on an interlocutor introduced to her by someone she trusted. At the end of August, her brother Charles had a meeting at Althorp with thirty-two-year-old Martin Bashir, a producer for
Panorama
, the BBC’s preeminent public affairs program.
Bashir was a little-known sportswriter and television reporter who had worked on the program for a few years. He contacted Charles Spencer as part of
an investigation into suspicions that some of Earl Spencer’s former employees had been paid by newspapers for leaks about Diana and her family. In their meeting, Bashir told Spencer that the British intelligence service M.I.5 was carrying out “dirty tricks” on Diana.

Spencer met with Bashir several more times, and
in one of those meetings Bashir allegedly produced a bank statement—later discovered to be fraudulent—that showed a payment from News International (Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate) to Allen Waller, Spencer’s former head of security at Althorp. While Bashir later said he didn’t use the false bank statement to land an interview with Diana, Charles Spencer found the producer’s evidence persuasive at the time—especially since he had heard similar charges from one of his friends.

In late September, Spencer asked Diana to get together with Bashir at a friend’s apartment in London. During that meeting, Bashir laid out his findings and made the absurd allegation to Spencer and Diana that he had statements for a “front company” controlled by employees of both Prince Charles and Diana, showing them to be paid informers, but he didn’t name the source of the funds. Quite apart from those charges, Bashir also told Diana that she shouldn’t trust Catherine Soames, Kate Menzies, and Julia Samuel. He probably figured that all three women were independent-minded as well as discreet, and would have cautioned Diana against cooperating with him. Although Diana hadn’t repaired relations with Kate and Catherine, she was still on speaking terms with their mutual friend Julia. “But that was the death knell,” said another friend of Diana’s.