Diana in Search of Herself (60 page)

Chicago’s embrace boosted Diana, but she couldn’t shake her gloomy moods. On the evening of her arrival, Diana and her entourage were tackling the mountain of presents that had been delivered to the hotel. “
It was a very funny twenty minutes,” Jane Atkinson said. “Lighthearted and girlie and laughing about the notes and trying on hats. Suddenly she switched off and left for her room. It was the only time I saw anything that abrupt. She was outgoing, and then she completely shut down.”

Upon Diana’s return to London, the press declared her trip a major success, and
the
Daily Express
singled out Atkinson for her organizational skills. Knowing that Diana disliked sharing the spotlight, Atkinson asked the
Express
reporter not to write the article, and finally cooperated only to verify facts and give one statement emphasizing the trip’s “
team effort.”

Diana called Atkinson the next morning to express her displeasure. Later that day,
Daily Express
editor Richard Addis came for a previously scheduled lunch with Diana.
He reassured Diana that Atkinson had nothing to do with the article. But Diana had made up her mind that Atkinson had betrayed her, and
even told friends that Atkinson had been leaking negative stories about her to
The Sun
, which was untrue. From that point on, Diana stopped consulting Atkinson, and used her only as a mouthpiece.

At the end of June 1996, Diana made a final bid to preserve “HRH” by leaking to Richard Kay that Buckingham Palace now insisted she keep the title. Kay characterized the turnabout as an “
odd twist” predicated on the Queen’s belief that as the mother of the future king, Diana “must have appropriate status.” The leak was simply Diana’s wishful thinking.
The Queen had already decided that Diana was unworthy of the title because of the Morton book, the
Panorama
interview, and her dalliances with the tabloid press.

On July 4, three days after Diana’s thirty-fifth birthday, Prince Charles presented her with his settlement offer.
Diana would receive a lump sum of $28 million—much of which would be underwritten by the Queen, since the Prince was forbidden by Parliament to sell any of his nearly $150 million in Duchy of Cornwall assets—plus more than $600,000 a year to underwrite Diana’s office. Charles would partly finance that expenditure with a loan, and his $2.5 million annual income after taxes and staff expenses would pay for the rest. Diana’s title would be “Diana, Princess of Wales,” and a statement issued by the Palace emphasized that she would be “
regarded as a member of the royal family.”

As a semi-royal, Diana would be invited to state and national occasions, and in those circumstances would be treated as if she still had the “HRH.” She would live in Kensington Palace, where her office would also be located. Her public role would be “for her to decide,” although any working trips overseas—representing charities, for example—would require consultation with the Foreign Office and the Queen’s permission, which was standard practice for members of the royal family. (For private holidays, no permission was necessary.) Diana would keep several important perks—access to royal aircraft and the state apartments at St. James’s Palace for entertaining—and
she would have the use of all her royal jewelry, eventually to be passed on to the wives of her sons. As part of the settlement, both Diana and Charles would sign a confidentiality agreement precluding them from discussing divorce terms or any details of their life together.

The terms were generous, and Diana formally agreed to them just four days later. Besides her lawyers, Anthony Julius and Maggie Rea, Diana had received behind-the-scenes help from her friend Jimmy Goldsmith. “
He told her to hang tough, don’t settle” until she got the money she wanted, according to John Tigrett, Goldsmith’s business partner for more than three decades. The evening she received the settlement terms, Diana joined the Goldsmith family at the Dorchester Hotel for a gala to raise money for Imran Khan’s hospital. “We made the deal today,” Goldsmith told Tigrett.

The last stumbling block was losing “HRH,” which Diana had resisted until the end. She may have been justified in doing so, because the solution imposed by the divorce was complicated and ambiguous. Diana was in a
unique position as mother of the heir to the throne, and for that reason alone was probably entitled to full royal status. She finally decided to give up the “HRH” after she asked Prince William whether he would mind if she no longer had it.
When he said it made no difference, she told her lawyers to agree to the terms.

Coverage of the final agreement on July 12 was mixed. The
Daily Mail
called it
HER ROYAL HUMILIATION
, and the
Daily Mirror
termed it
THE FINAL BETRAYAL
, accompanied by a photograph of Diana looking haggard. “
It is the face of a woman utterly destroyed,” said the tabloid. Other papers were less judgmental, with
The Daily Telegraph
announcing
PRINCESS TO GIVE UP HRH STYLE
and
The Times
declaring
GO-AHEAD FOR 15 M POUND SETTLEMENT
. Diana spent much of the day with Lucia Flecha de Lima, who had flown from Washington to console her.

On July 15, Charles and Diana filed their “decree nisi,” the document declaring that the marriage would be officially dissolved in six weeks on August 28. For all her transgressions, Diana still held the public’s sympathy. The sentiments expressed in the
Mirror
caught the popular mood: Diana may have been well compensated, but she had been mistreated—and ultimately humiliated and punished—by the icy royal family.

Scarcely twenty-four hours later, Diana managed to squander some of that goodwill when she unexpectedly announced that she had given up nearly one hundred of her charities and would keep formal affiliations with only six: the homeless charity Centrepoint; the Leprosy Mission; the National AIDS Trust; the English National Ballet; Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children; and Royal Marsden Hospital. The announcement created a furor because her actions seemed precipitous and unfeeling. Some charities even had to read about her decision in the press.

Diana’s decision had not actually been sudden. She had made up her mind in mid-June to maintain ties with charities that reflected her own emotional needs. Atkinson had urged her to keep the English National Ballet to “
give her something lighthearted to do,” which Diana readily agreed to because of her lifelong love of ballet. The National AIDS Trust had special significance because AIDS had given Diana her first meaningful public role. When a friend questioned her choice of the Leprosy Mission, Diana joked, “It’s the travel, stupid.” The rejoinder was typical of Diana, and her interest in the disfiguring disease did take her to exotic locales. But according to Atkinson,
Diana felt the leprosy charity needed her prominence to remain in the public eye. Both the Great Ormond Street and Royal Marsden hospitals kept her in touch with the sick and dying, and Centrepoint gave her a link to the dispossessed.

The most glaring omission from the list was the Red Cross. That relationship had gone through its ups and downs, and in the end, Diana decided
that the charity had a high enough profile without her. As newspaper articles tallied the financial toll on the charities she had “
ditched,” Diana told Atkinson to issue a clarifying statement that was illogical as well as false: “
The move is entirely because of her loss of royal status…. The loss in her standing will not be beneficial to those charities, and her pulling power must be diminished. She can no longer give them the strong position they are entitled to.”
Atkinson told Diana the statement made no sense because it implied that the remaining six charities would be similarly harmed by her reduced status, but Diana insisted she release it anyway.

The announcement did not get the kind of press coverage that Diana expected. “
It was all bad, and she accused me of saying the wrong things,” Atkinson recalled. Within a few days, it became clear that the relationship between Diana and Atkinson had broken down, and a week later, Atkinson resigned.

Diana nearly cut loose Richard Kay around the same time. The divorce negotiations had made Diana more sensitive than ever to her image. Energy healer Simone Simmons, who had become friendly with Kay through Diana, said that Diana “
decided that Richard’s draft speeches were too long and complicated.” Diana decided to use Martin Bashir, the
Panorama
interviewer, who had offered his services. Diana had stayed in touch with Bashir much as she had maintained a link to Andrew Morton following his 1992 book. “
Martin Bashir is a humble man, and he would turn on quite a bit of charm,” explained Diana’s butler Paul Burrell. “He is a flattering person.” Richard Kay was “
dreadfully upset” to be displaced by Bashir, according to Simmons, but he swallowed his pride and didn’t protest, which ensured the continuation of his friendship with Diana, and his role as her conduit to the
Daily Mail
.

The press speculated that Diana would emerge in the autumn with an ambitious plan for her six charities. According to one account,
she would fulfill three charity engagements a week compared with her once-monthly commitment during the previous year. As before, these expectations proved mistaken. In the final year of her life, Diana was associated primarily with causes outside her chosen half dozen. Her promotion of a ban on antipersonnel land mines was the most publicized, but her affiliations also included an Australian research center associated with Hasnat Khan, and American charities supported by two relatively new friends, Katharine Graham, the influential head of
The Washington Post
, and
Harper’s Bazaar
editor Liz Tilberis.

Whenever Diana shifted her attention, she left those behind feeling puzzled and wounded. “
In [her] last two years, she was totally unpredictable in terms of her professional relationship with the organizations of which she was patron,” said Michael Adler, chairman of the National AIDS
Trust. “When she reduced from one hundred to six organizations, on the whole she didn’t do much even for the six. She did less and less for us. We couldn’t get her to do something. We would write to her, try to talk with her. But she was interested in other things, which is fair enough. That is life. But if you are a patron, you have responsibilities that go with patronage that you must fulfill. Diana had very special qualities, but she was totally reactive.”

Chapter 24

D
uring the last year of her life, Diana presented herself in public as a strong single woman advancing worthy causes. In private, it was a different story. Caught in her desperate love affair with Hasnat Khan, she behaved erratically, even to the point of wearing disguises. Her final downward trajectory began two months before her death, when she accepted the hospitality of Egyptian businessman Mohamed Fayed and his family.

In the late summer of 1996, just after her divorce became official, Diana decided to make a dramatic public gesture to break with her past. She called her American friend Marguerite Littman, head of the AIDS Crisis Trust, and said, “
I have decided to give you my clothes.” “I didn’t think I dressed that badly,” cracked Marguerite. Diana explained that she and Prince William had been talking about what she might do with her life, and he had suggested she auction the clothes she no longer wanted and donate the proceeds to charity. “Don’t you think this would be a good idea for your charity?” asked Diana. “Come to lunch if you want them, tomorrow or the next day.”

Diana’s choice of beneficiary was significant: Marguerite Littman’s AIDS Crisis Trust, with which Diana had no affiliation, instead of the National AIDS Trust, which, only weeks earlier, Diana had endorsed as one of her six remaining patronages. The rationale for her decision remained mysterious. She had made a publicized visit to a National AIDS Trust clinic the previous June, and Michael Adler had praised Diana for her dedication to the AIDS cause. The visit had attracted some negative publicity because Diana was accompanied by AIDS victim Aileen Getty, an American crusader for the dangers of the disease to heterosexuals. “
We’d love Di more if she didn’t let herself be used,”
The Sun
complained. Diana had been
knocked more harshly many times, so media criticism seemed an unlikely cause for her defection. Still, Diana’s June visit turned out to be her last contact with the National AIDS Trust.

The most likely explanation was Diana’s affection for Marguerite Littman, along with her organization’s more glamorous profile. AIDS Crisis Trust raised funds primarily through film premieres, and its patrons were more social than Adler’s group. The social aspect interested Diana, who suggested to Marguerite that they take the dresses to Los Angeles and New York for a “
road show, something fun that would make money.” “Diana had a childlike love of celebrities,” said one of her friends, noting how much the Princess enjoyed meeting film stars like Tom Hanks. Diana and Marguerite selected Christie’s auction house because its chairman, Christopher Balfour, was a mutual friend, and they chose June 1997 for the sale in New York City.