Diana in Search of Herself (58 page)

As 1996 began, Diana turned her attention to achieving the best possible divorce settlement. She was tense and suspicious, “
aggressive and defensive all at once,” said Simone Simmons. Leaving a session with Susie Orbach in early January, Diana collapsed in sobs against her car for a full minute as photographers surrounded her to take pictures. “
Is she indeed perilously close to a complete breakdown?” asked columnist John Junor, one of her sharpest critics, in
The Mail on Sunday
. Two weeks later, she offered her answer at a luncheon in her honor given by the Association of American Correspondents, telling them she was “
very stable.” The following month, Diana sought out Dr. Lily Hua Yu for acupuncture to treat her bulimia and depression. “
Diana’s life was in turmoil,” Dr. Hua Yu recalled.

After the initial exhilaration over
Panorama
, Diana realized she had lost more than she had gained. As she had done after the Morton book, she began to tell certain friends that she regretted much of what she had said. “She felt it hurt the boys, very much so,” said one of Diana’s close friends.
“
The
Panorama
interview left her deeply depressed,” said
Daily Telegraph
columnist William Deedes, who came to know her in the following year.

From a practical standpoint,
Panorama
exposed Diana to even greater press intrusion. “
All bets were off, because she had bared her innermost thoughts in the most amazing way,” said Piers Morgan, editor of the
Mirror
. “She had no right to claim privacy after what she had said. You can’t dance with the devil and not expect to be pricked by the horns.” She also opened herself up to satire, especially with her “queen of people’s hearts” comment. Television comedian Rory Bremner did a wicked imitation of her, and
when she later appeared on television wearing a surgical mask to watch an open-heart operation, she drew not only harsh criticism from the medical establishment, but derisive laughter from columnists for the image’s ghoulishness.

As a result of
Panorama
, Diana lost the support of two loyal, knowledgeable professionals: first her press secretary Geoffrey Crawford, who had been so mortified he had resigned immediately after the interview aired, and then her private secretary Patrick Jephson—nicknamed “
my rock” by Diana—who left in January 1996 after eight years of service.
His departure coincided with the public disclosure of Diana’s slur against Tiggy Legge-Bourke, which was widely misinterpreted as the precipitating factor; in fact, it was
Panorama
. Jephson had stayed on after the broadcast because he felt Diana needed him, although he was upset and “diminished” because she had kept him in the dark.

In January, Jephson told Diana he wanted out. “She was shocked,” said one of Diana’s friends. “She never expected him to leave. They had a big argument and said hurtful things to each other. She trusted Patrick, and he was devoted to her. After Patrick left, she was alone.” One indicator of Diana’s faith in Jephson had been her appointment of him as an executor three years earlier when she made out her will; after his resignation, she replaced him with her sister Sarah.

Two days after Jephson departed, Diana appointed her new media adviser, Jane Atkinson, who came aboard as a consultant rather than a Palace employee. At forty-eight, Atkinson was a seasoned public relations professional who had worked for clients that included Gillette and Duracell. Atkinson had been “bemused” by Diana in their interview, and considered her a challenge. “
She was almost the same as she had been on
Panorama
,” Atkinson recalled. “She sat with her head cocked, and she was very fey and breathless. She was mostly interested in talking about herself. She told me how she was canny with the media, and she had a strong sense of self-preservation, a sixth sense of what was right for her.”

Although Atkinson saw room for improvement in Diana’s public speaking, she was impressed by her other skills on the public stage. “If she
could have held on to her professionalism in her work, she would have been incredible,” Atkinson said. “She could work a room or a lunch or an audience.” Diana’s unwillingness to study diligently for her appearances remained a problem, however. “Unless you gave her what she wanted, she would not pay attention,” said Atkinson. “She worked to her own agenda whether it was right or wrong. Maybe she couldn’t deal with abstractions or new ideas. Someone as lovely as that, and with a powerful image, you wanted to have the intelligence to go with it. Was she dim and didn’t get things, or was she dealing with so much in her private life that she couldn’t pay attention? I didn’t know. I was dealing with her at a difficult time of her life. In my dismissive moments I would say she was dim, and in my generous moments I would say she was depressed.”

Atkinson prudently avoided being drawn in too deeply by Diana, speaking to the Princess about professional matters and confining herself to what she needed to know to deal with the press. Atkinson would call Diana each morning to discuss what was in the papers; they generally spoke four or five times more in a day. “I said to her the best thing is not to read the papers,” Atkinson recalled. “I will be your outside ears and decide what to respond to.” Atkinson soon realized that Diana read everything anyway.

Diana turned out to be a more unusual client than Atkinson could have predicted. “She was quite secretive,” Atkinson said. “She would get advice from someone, but she wouldn’t say from where. She wouldn’t say what a normal person would, which is, ‘I spoke to Alan and his view was this.’ Rather, she would talk to Alan and present what he said as her idea. In my view, this was an insecurity. She felt she couldn’t trust anyone, and she needed to have control.”

Atkinson viewed her role as guarding Diana’s image during the difficult divorce negotiations for a fair settlement. To that end, Atkinson set up a series of luncheon meetings with newspaper editors, but with Jephson gone and Diana keeping her cards close to the chest, Atkinson was operating in a vacuum. “I thought this was the first time she met a lot of these people,” Atkinson recalled.

From her original involvement with Morton back in 1991, Diana had been dealing directly with journalists for some five years. She benefited from a lack of distinction between downmarket tabloid reporters and the more prestigious broadsheet journalists, as her impromptu interview with
News of the World
’s Clive Goodman had shown. Beyond her early appreciation of the
Daily Mail
’s ability to reach “Middle England” as well as her aristocratic friends, Diana now grasped the importance of the red top tabloids for getting the word out to her “public.” “
She was keen to keep the
Sun
and
Mirror
at bay,” recalled
Mirror
editor Piers Morgan. “She knew
twenty million people read those two papers every day. If she wanted to appeal to the masses she needed a level of tolerance from the red tops.”

The Sun
and the
Mirror
covered Diana in sensational fashion. Originally, both papers had been on her side, but
The Sun
had become critical, so Diana arranged a lunch with its editor Stuart Higgins. Diana let Higgins know that “
she considered the
Sun
readers her friends that she could reach out to.” At the same time, Diana gave Higgins personal background information. “It was understood that things you had been told would come back in some way,” said Higgins, “but not as harmfully as if they were in the newspaper the next day.”

Aside from the
Daily Mail
, the
Mirror
had been the most consistently sympathetic to Diana, so she was eager to solidify a relationship with editor Piers Morgan, who at age thirty was four years younger than she. When Morgan arrived at Kensington Palace in early 1996, he found Prince William at the table with Diana and Atkinson. Diana “
was keen to know what I thought of [her son],” Morgan said. “She was thinking that I was a young editor and might well be covering William when he was beginning to get the sharp end of press attention.” Morgan could see that Diana’s relationship with William “was extremely close, not unnaturally, but he knew everything about her life, which was surprising.” Morgan got along with Diana, he later said, because he “treated her less than reverentially, and she liked it.”

Diana was less successful with the editors of the midmarket
Daily Express
and
Sunday Express
. Richard Addis of the
Daily Express
was the sort of man who might have intimidated her—a Cambridge graduate with supreme confidence. Addis felt that she “
manipulated through her looks and the way she talked.” Still, he confessed to admiring how she “talked directly and bravely to me. She had the courage of a cornered rabbit.” He was perplexed when Diana invited him several more times to Kensington Palace for coffee. Each time, she reeled off a list of statements about her in his newspaper that she claimed were untrue. “Her manner would be on the verge of bursting into tears and getting nasty at the same time,” Addis recalled. Once, when Diana’s assistant Victoria Mendham phoned to complain, Addis replied that Diana was just a “whinger”—a chronic complainer. “I am not a whinger,” said Diana, who had been silently listening on another extension.

Sue Douglas, the former
Sunday Times
deputy who had become editor of the
Sunday Express
, was the only woman among the editors invited to Kensington Palace. “
For me it was a difficult conversation,” Douglas said. “If you were male, she would be flirty and interested, but being female made it difficult. It was hard work.” In the end, Douglas was unmoved by
Diana’s lament: “She talked a lot of crap about being the princess in the gilded cage, how she couldn’t go out because the Charles camp made it so difficult for her. But then she would contradict herself and talk about having been to the theater or having taken a walk around Kensington. She had a clear notion of being a tragic heroine, but she was inconsistent.”

Diana was so determined to shape her coverage that she even agreed to meet journalists in groups—the sort of encounters with clever people that so often filled her with terror. During a luncheon at the
Evening Standard
, the novelist and columnist A. N. Wilson told Diana about a picture he had seen of a royal from an earlier century wearing only his underwear. As the rest of the group wondered if Wilson had offended her, she smiled and said, “
Did it turn you on, Mr. Wilson?,” prompting what columnist Peter McKay described as a “great roar of laughter.”

Diana worked on the press in an ad hoc way as well. Taki Theodoracopulos, the “High Life” columnist for
The Spectator
, had written harshly about Diana before they met at a party given by Jimmy and Annabel Goldsmith in 1995. “
‘Do you think I’m mad?’ ” Diana asked. “I was drunk and said, ‘All I know is I’m mad about you,’ ” Taki recalled. “She turned me like that.” Taki wrote glowingly about her, and beginning in 1996, invited her to dinner parties with other journalists.

One guest at those dinners was Charles Moore, editor of
The Daily Telegraph
, whose cerebral manner and sympathy for Charles unnerved Diana. In the aftermath of
Panorama
, Moore tried to impress on Diana that the
Telegraph
couldn’t look favorably on her unless she affirmed Charles’s fitness to be king. Instead, Diana insisted that Charles didn’t want to rule, saying, “
He wants to live in Italy and look at beautiful things”—
a refrain she repeated to a number of journalists. “
She was careful not to say, ‘I don’t want him to be king,’ ” Moore said, “but it was difficult to see what else it could be other than revenge, and it was linked to her promotion of Prince William to be king.”

Diana achieved mixed results in her continuing campaign to win over the press. “
She gave us more information, and we understood her thoughts, but our coverage didn’t change in the sense that she offered a revelation that made us see her differently,” Moore said. For her part, Diana persisted in complaining about her coverage. “
She couldn’t understand when we ran stories that were not on her side, so she would go out of her way to deny them,” said Stuart Higgins of
The Sun
. She had more success with Piers Morgan of the
Mirror
, who used his Kensington Palace luncheon to establish an amicable relationship that benefited both of them.

“
I would deal every day with her office, and she would usually be in the background,” Morgan said. “It was an ongoing working relationship, and for that, we gave her a more sympathetic hearing. I would speak to her in
the early morning, and she would be well informed about what everyone had done. We had pretty good relations, although you would write a headline she didn’t like and you would be frozen out. Then you would do something nice, and there would be a thaw. As long as you were broadly sympathetic, you had a good relationship.”

In one respect, “
Diana held all the cards because she knew what was coming up,” said
Daily Mail
columnist Peter McKay. But Diana’s ability to shape her coverage was limited by competition, commerce, and the kinds of stories she generated. “
If a story concerned what she was doing and thinking, and it was in her control, she could be effective,” Stuart Higgins said. “But when other factors were at work, with loose cannons like James Hewitt or the Oliver Hoare matter ending up with the police, it was beyond her control.” Max Hastings, editor of the
Evening Standard
, admitted to being a “
sucker” for Diana’s “Bambi eyes,” but only up to a point. “We sympathized with her as a woman,” Hastings said, “but she still did silly things, and we reported that.”

Chapter 23