Diana in Search of Herself (61 page)

Michael Adler did not learn about the auction of seventy-nine evening dresses until it was announced in the press six months later. By then, he had even greater reason for dismay over Diana’s rebuff: “
The National AIDS Trust was nearly bankrupt,” Adler said. “Not only was she sending the wrong sort of message to our community, that she was giving her dresses to an organization that had film premieres, but the organization of which she was a patron was about to go into liquidation.”

As Diana planned her gala charity auction, she made another important decision about her public role in the first months after her divorce: joining the movement to ban antipersonnel land mines. She later told reporters that she had been alerted to the problem when “
a lot of information started arriving on my desk about land mines, and the pictures were so horrific that I felt it would help if I could be part of the team raising the profile around the world.” Left unsaid was the role another friend played in alerting Diana to the issue: Her energy healer Simone Simmons had visited a Red Cross worker in Bosnia during the summer of 1996. When Simmons returned from her ten days in Tuzla, she brought back photographs of mine victims to show Diana. “
Do you think I could make a difference?” Diana asked.

Having dropped the Red Cross so dramatically in mid-July, Diana reversed course and returned to the organization because it was conducting a worldwide campaign to eradicate land mines. When Diana asked if the Red Cross would sponsor her on an overseas trip to raise awareness of land mine victims, director-general of the British Red Cross Mike Whitlam
offered to be her official escort. At the same time,
filmmaker Richard Attenborough, who had known Diana off and on for more than a decade, invited her to be the guest of honor at the premiere of his new film,
In Love and War
, to raise money for the British Red Cross Land Mines Appeal.

With Attenborough’s encouragement, Diana decided to make her own documentary on the subject, and he helped her negotiate a deal with the BBC that would enable camera crews to film her overseas trip. The Red Cross first suggested that Diana go to Cambodia, but the Foreign Office said her presence could interfere with delicate negotiations over a British hostage there. The British government vetoed Afghanistan as too dangerous, so Diana settled on war-ravaged Angola, where the grim statistics included one land mine for each of its 12 million inhabitants. The Foreign Office approved Diana’s trip in January 1997. “
In a sense, the land mine issue was a dead lucky pick,” said
Daily Telegraph
columnist William Deedes, an eighty-three-year-old anti–land mine campaigner with whom Diana consulted. “She hit the subject, and the fact that all the victims die or are crippled singly meant there was never any public indignation.”

As indicated by Diana’s reliance on Prince William’s idea for the dress sale, along with his role in breaking the “HRH” logjam, she had come to lean on her sons more than ever—both as confidants and as supports when she was lonely and perplexed. By the fall of 1996, William and Harry were fourteen and twelve; William had been away at boarding school for six years, and Harry for four. William was intelligent and self-possessed, and like his mother, sensitive and instinctive. Diana considered him a “
deep thinker.” He had begun showing signs of adolescent moodiness as well, and was clearly mature beyond his years. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” said one friend of Diana’s. Harry, by contrast, was more high-spirited and mischievous. Both boys had learned to be “respectful but not ridiculous,” and had “natural manners,” in the view of one Palace official.

Diana had been living in an empty nest since the autumn of 1992, when Harry left to join William at Ludgrove, but Diana’s sons were often in her thoughts and conversation. When Nelson Shanks painted her portrait in 1994, he recalled that she talked of her sons “
incessantly,” an observation shared by many of her friends. “
Her world was illuminated by the boys, and her life revolved around them,” her friend Peter Palumbo said. Even at the peak of her royal duties, Diana made certain to carve out private time with her sons, and she frequently arranged her schedule to accommodate their activities. “She was always dashing down to Ludgrove to see if the boys were all right, to watch them perform in a drama,” recalled one of her friends.

Diana was probably no more devoted to her boys than any good mother, but she had a special gift for connecting with them. “
She was attuned to what William and Harry felt, and she kept in close touch with
them,” said her friend Cosima Somerset. “She really listened to her children and would value their opinions.” In the view of her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, Diana was “
very responsible and responsive to their individual natures, and aware of their character differences.”

Above all, Diana wanted her sons to feel loved. “
I hug my children to death,” she told Andrew Morton. “I always feed them love and affection.” Some critics accused Diana of smothering, but her friends felt her demonstrative ways were laudable given her background. “
No one was the parent to her that she was trying to be to the boys,” said David Puttnam. Indeed, having her sons reciprocate her affection was vital to Diana. “
The constant bear hugs and showerings of kisses were mutually beneficial,” in James Hewitt’s view. “She needed pure unconditional love as much as they did.… [It] reassured her that no matter what, she was fulfilling her role as a mother to the very best of her abilities.”

At times, Diana could be quite childlike, reveling in thrill rides at amusement parks in a way Prince Charles could not have managed. “She loved being with children,” said one of her friends. “In a way, she was very simple.”
Once, on a visit with William at Ludgrove, she was so excited she jumped from one bed to another in his dormitory. After the mortification of the Gilbey tapes, her sons took to calling her Squidgy, “and she roared with laughter,” recalled a friend. Sometimes her enthusiasm exceeded good judgment,
most notably when she exhorted William and Harry to race go-carts around Highgrove during a downpour.

Most of the time, Diana handled her boys in a responsible way. When Puttnam invited her to bring them to the Pinewood Film Studio, he noticed how “
attentive and smart” she was. “She wanted them to be like well-behaved, normal kids, to line up in a queue for lunch, not to be served.” Another time, when she took Harry to the movies, he ordered a glass of mineral water at the concession stand. When the saleswoman handed him carbonated water, he asked for flat water instead. Afterward, Diana rebuked him, telling him “
he should simply have thanked her for what he had been given,” because she didn’t want him to engage in behavior “that gave the royal family a bad name for being difficult.”

Diana was determined that her sons grow up in a more “normal” fashion than was customary for members of the royal family. She took them to McDonald’s and local movie theaters, and she introduced them to people from all walks of life. “
I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams,” she said in her
Panorama
interview. To that end, she took the boys to homeless shelters, and to see dying AIDS patients.
Although William was developing a full-blown antipathy toward the press, Diana recognized that he needed to understand the tabloid mentality, so she introduced him
to Piers Morgan of the
Mirror
. “
She was trying so hard to teach her sons how to cope with media attention, how to accept that it was something they were going to have to live with,” said Liz Tilberis of
Harper’s Bazaar
. “William understood her fury with them, and he also understood that she courted them from time to time.”

Yet Diana’s powerful emotions had a profound impact on her sons, who in their formative years
overheard numerous fights between their parents and grew accustomed to the sight of their mother weeping. One of the indelible images of William’s childhood was his reaction when Diana cried after a bitter disagreement with Charles early in 1992. Nine-year-old William followed his tearful mother upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom. Pushing tissues under the door, he said, “
I hate to see you sad.” Beyond what they witnessed, William and Harry also had to cope with the searing Morton and
Panorama
revelations about their mother’s disturbing behavior.

Diana’s insecurities got the better of her when she dealt with various nannies. She grew resentful of Barbara Barnes, who joined them after William’s birth, because
she felt the nanny was trying to usurp her maternal authority. Barbara Barnes’s successors, Ruth Wallace and Jessie Webb, also left after running afoul of Diana’s shifting moods. From the outset Diana mistrusted Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who came aboard after the separation, because Diana imagined that the young woman was trying to supplant her in her sons’ affections. According to Richard Kay, “
[Diana] raged that Tiggy always seemed to be having fun with the boys.”

Diana’s rivalrous behavior with Charles caused the most serious problems for the two boys. Starting in the mid-eighties, Diana had tried to portray Charles in a poor light as a father—a campaign that culminated in her hurtful comments in the Morton book. She competed with Charles directly for the boys’ affection as well.
When she and Charles were going through one of their bad periods, she would take the boys to her room for dinner, leaving Charles to eat alone in the dining room. As she told Andrew Morton, “
I get into bed with them at night, hug them and say, ‘Who loves them most in the whole world?’ and they always say, ‘Mummy.’ ” This rivalry played out increasingly in various excuses and pretexts that prevented Charles from seeing his sons. Indeed, it was Diana’s refusal to allow William and Harry to join their father at Sandringham that triggered Charles’s decision to seek a separation.

After the separation, Diana became more dependent on her eldest son as a confidant. “
Diana had a mother-and-son relationship and a mother-and-husband relationship with Prince William,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She told me she had with her son William very private and very profound conversations, and he was an extraordinary moral support.” Beyond
William’s solace, Diana sought his guidance. “
Diana used to ask William for advice all the time, about what she should do with her life,” said her friend Elsa Bowker. Diana felt compelled to unburden herself, according to her friend Rosa Monckton, because she “
wanted William to hear the truth from her about her life, and the people she was seeing, and what they meant to her, rather than read a distorted, exaggerated, and frequently untrue version in the tabloid press.” But by confiding in William as much as she did, Diana was placing a significant emotional burden on an adolescent boy.

Diana was aware that her status was directly tied to William’s position as heir to the throne, and she didn’t disguise her desire to see Charles bypassed as king in favor of William. She told Andrew Morton as early as 1991, “
William is going to be in his position much earlier than people think now.” Diana added that she hoped Charles would “go away with his lady” and leave her with the two boys “to carry the Wales name through to the time William ascends the throne.”

Between his duties and his urge to escape an unhappy marriage, Charles had probably spent too much time away from his sons from the mid-eighties until the separation in 1992. But in his own way, Charles had been a good father.
When they were younger, the boys had loved playing “Big Bad Wolf” with him, and during Highgrove weekends, he spent hours with them outdoors. They followed him around in the gardens, and he talked to them about plants and animals.
Diana often rebelled at such moments, retreating to her room to listen to music, read magazines, and talk on the phone.

Charles approached children on a more adult level than Diana did, explaining, querying, and drawing out their ideas.
As they grew older, he took the boys to Shakespeare productions at Stratford-upon-Avon. He also showed sensitivity to their moods;
once, when William was apprehensive about returning to Ludgrove after Christmas vacation, Charles spent considerable time boosting his son’s confidence.

As teenagers, both boys clearly preferred their father’s country pursuits—hunting, shooting, and fishing—to Diana’s urban life of movies, shopping, and dining out. “Diana said to me, ‘All William wants to do is have a gun in his hand,’ ” one of her close friends recalled. “She could see that. But I don’t think she would have made them go to an AIDS hospice rather than go shoot with their father. She wouldn’t punish them in that way.”

In her
Panorama
interview, Diana defined the boundaries of her life with “
I’ve got my boys, I’ve got my work.” According to Richard Kay, Diana regarded her sons as “
the only men in her life who had never let her down and never wanted from her anything except for being herself.” That kind of
standard was difficult to sustain, and as William and Harry became more independent, friction seemed inevitable. In the meantime, Diana tried to keep them close,
calling them nearly every day at boarding school and taking them on vacations whenever she could.