Diana in Search of Herself (62 page)

Besides her sons, Diana looked to a dwindling number of friends she felt she could count on. Most of the castoffs didn’t know why she let them go, but the trigger was some kind of slight or betrayal, usually illusory. Those who remained trod carefully and yielded to Diana’s impulses for fear of disrupting the friendship.

She still depended on Annabel Goldsmith, Elsa Bowker, and Lucia Flecha de Lima as maternal figures, but had fallen out with Hayat Palumbo. While Lucia may have lived an ocean away, she continued to make time for Diana on the phone, adjusting her habits to accommodate their different time zones. Lucia would frequently stay up past midnight, reading and waiting for Diana to call when she awakened early.

Rosa Monckton and Marguerite Littman made themselves available as well, although Diana occasionally got perturbed when she sensed that Rosa “
had other priorities.” Diana picked up a new friend in Cosima Somerset, a niece of Annabel Goldsmith’s, and for nearly a year they were extremely close, until Diana inexplicably dropped her. Since Diana’s 1993 reconciliation with her stepmother, Raine Spencer had occupied a unique niche, keeping company with Diana at lunches in Mayfair restaurants, providing entertainment and advice.

Several alternative therapists—energy healer Simone Simmons, psychic Rita Rogers, astrologer Debbie Frank, and two acupuncturists, Oonagh Toffolo and Dr. Lily Hua Yu—remained important to Diana, but she told friends that she had stopped seeing psychotherapist Susie Orbach in the spring of 1996. According to reporter Richard Kay, Diana said she ended the therapy “
because she found herself analyzing the therapist’s problems rather than her own.” Media adviser Jane Atkinson recalled that Diana “
talked about wanting to leave Susie Orbach, but she was terrified to reach her because Susie Orbach would have said, ‘Come and see me,’ and Diana didn’t want to. Then [Diana] did go to see her and was proud of the fact that she had finished. Whether she had finished, I don’t know, but she wanted everyone to think she had finished.” In fact, Diana did continue seeing Orbach at irregular intervals.

The autumn of 1996 also brought Diana’s final rupture with Sarah Ferguson. Diana and Sarah had formed a tight bond in the years leading up to their divorces, and Diana had become a regular Sunday visitor at Sarah’s home. “
Sarah Ferguson was a very, very useful friend to the Princess during the months before the divorce,” said Jane Atkinson. “The Princess was very fond of her. If she hadn’t had her house to go to, she would have gone mad.
‘Sarah makes me laugh,’ she said.”
Diana and Fergie had been together the day before the
Panorama
interview, and they had vacationed in France following the July announcement of Diana’s divorce.

But Sarah overstepped the bounds of friendship when she published her autobiography in November, and
Diana cut her off without a word. The book’s references to Diana were mostly positive, although one passage patronizingly pointed out Diana’s “teary and reclusive” manner around the royal family at a time when Fergie was in their good graces.
Fergie also tastelessly revealed that she had contracted warts from wearing Diana’s shoes, a story Diana considered “
unkind.” During her book tour in the United States, Fergie answered personal questions about Diana—
after Diana had specifically asked her not to. Not only did Diana stop speaking to Fergie, she wouldn’t permit Fergie’s name to be mentioned in her presence, and
she refused to answer Fergie’s letters or take her phone calls. Nine months after the start of what their mutual friend David Tang called the “arctic freeze,” he tried to get them together at a dinner in Diana’s honor. “
The Duchess of York is the one person who would not be welcome,” Diana replied.

Diana saw little of her immediate Spencer family after her separation. “
She wasn’t as close,” said Richard Kay. “She was moving away from her own family, and from the royal family. She was looking for something else. She was very restless, even until the end.” Diana’s brother, Charles, had relocated to South Africa; her mother seldom ventured from her remote redoubt in Scotland; and the estrangement from her sister Jane persisted. When Diana told one of her friends that she wasn’t speaking to Jane, he said, “This is an absurd situation,” and quoted the biblical admonition: “You mustn’t let the sun go down upon your wrath.” Diana replied, “I know. I know,” but her friend didn’t feel she had taken in his advice. Sarah remained the closest of the siblings, still joining Diana on occasional trips as a lady-in-waiting. But Sarah had her life in the country, although
she tried to maintain contact with Diana by phone most days.

Professionally, Diana suffered from the lack of an adviser experienced in politics and public relations. After Jane Atkinson’s departure,
Diana hired Michael Gibbins, a fifty-three-year-old former accountant, as her private secretary. While Gibbins had the financial expertise Diana needed to manage her divorce settlement, he was less experienced in negotiating with government bureaucrats and Palace courtiers, nor did he have the public relations savvy to deal with the tabloids.

For help in fielding press inquiries, Diana turned to her junior assistant Victoria Mendham, and Paul Burrell, her butler. As Diana’s staff diminished, Burrell had become a jack-of-all-trades, and Diana took to calling him “my rock,” as she had with her former private secretary Patrick
Jephson. Burrell had been fiercely loyal since siding with Diana in the breakup of her marriage. He was skilled at assessing her moods, and he continued to call her “Your Royal Highness.” In the year after the divorce, he found himself conveying messages to certain members of the press when Diana couldn’t do it herself. “
I was a go-between,” said Burrell. “I dealt with Clive Goodman [of the
News of the World
], and in general with people whenever she needed me.”

Outwardly, Diana’s single status did not affect her relationship with Hasnat Khan. Because of his aversion to publicity, they remained underground. It was during her romance with Khan that
Diana took to wearing disguises, including an array of custom-made wigs and glasses with nonoptical lenses. They went undetected to jazz clubs and restaurants in Soho or Camden Town,
but they spent most of their time together at Kensington Palace. Since Diana’s Pakistan trip in February, the tabloids had left Khan alone—with the exception of one sighting by the
News of the World
in August, when a photographer caught Diana and Khan in a “
furtive roadside rendezvous” near Royal Brompton Hospital, which Khan had left several months earlier to work at Harefield Hospital thirteen miles outside London.

The relationship between Diana and Khan deepened after her divorce, and she considered him a vital anchor in her life. “She was emotionally more stable when she was with him,” said a friend of Diana’s. “He taught her that she could be loved.” Diana told friends she was especially pleased that Khan admired her empathy with the sick. As Diana confessed to Elsa Bowker, “
I found my peace. He has given me all the things I need.”

But as was so often the case with Diana, love was accompanied by possessiveness. This time, she tried to advance Khan’s career and, in the process, the prospects for their life together. When Diana went to Rimini, Italy, in October 1996 to accept a humanitarian award, she befriended South African heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard, another award recipient. Diana told Barnard about Khan and asked if the surgeon could help find him a position in South Africa. Diana revealed to Barnard that she wanted to marry Khan and “
have a pair of girls. There was no doubt in my mind that she was very much in love with Khan and would’ve wed him if he’d agreed,” Barnard recalled. “She said she wanted to move away from London with him. South Africa was her first choice because her brother was here.”

On Diana’s return to London, she telephoned, faxed, and wrote to Barnard about job possibilities for Khan. Barnard came to Kensington
Palace twice to talk further with Diana, and he met Khan at London’s Grosvenor House hotel. “
In the meeting I had with him I could not work out whether he loved her in the same way, but he clearly knew she loved him very much,” Barnard recalled. “He just told me he couldn’t handle the publicity.”

As with Charles and other lovers, Diana tried to control Khan, fearing he would reject her. Energy healer Simone Simmons remembered when Diana “
was so impatient to have Hasnat’s undivided attention that if he used the Kensington Palace telephones to speak to his family or friends in Pakistan for more than ten minutes, Diana would turn her music up or dance before him to distract his attention.” Diana also frequently phoned Khan at the hospital and “was often upset if he was in the operating theater and couldn’t talk to her,” Simmons said.

Diana even traveled halfway around the world to demonstrate her dedication to his work. She announced her planned trip to Australia the day after her divorce became final.
She was to be the guest of honor at a dinner to raise money for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney on October 31, 1996. The charity was hardly a household name in Britain, and Diana’s choice prompted some head-scratching. She didn’t mention that Chang, a cardiac specialist, had been Hasnat Khan’s mentor during his early surgical training in Australia.
In a bungled kidnapping attempt, Chang had been murdered, a traumatic experience for Khan.

Buckingham Palace officials raised no objections to Diana’s trip, although
privately they were displeased that it would coincide with the Queen’s state visit to Thailand that had been scheduled for more than a year. Diana acquitted herself well on her four-day trip, with the usual round of hospital visits and charity engagements—“
from triumph to triumph … she was magnificent,” said James Whitaker in the
Daily Mirror
. But the trip was poorly organized, and
Diana was perturbed that some sponsors of fund-raising events had sought to financially exploit her name through commercial endorsements. Even worse, the
Sunday Mirror
burst into print with a “world exclusive” that Diana was in love with “
shy caring heart surgeon” Hasnat Khan and wanted to “have his babies.” The tabloid revealed that Diana had even entertained Khan’s grandmother at Kensington Palace.

Knowing how much Khan hated publicity, Diana vehemently denied the report, but in an unintentionally cruel manner. Not only did she tell Richard Kay that she and Khan were “
friends … in an entirely professional way,” but she characterized the notion of being in love with Khan as “bullshit” and said she and her aides were “laughing ourselves silly” over the idea. That comment injured Khan, and afterward, Simone Simmons asked of Diana, “
Why didn’t she just tell Richard the truth? … Her reply
was sad…. How, she asked, could she start telling the truth
now
, when to do so would expose all the lies of the past?” The tabloids backed off, and the romance survived, propelled by Diana’s fantasy about making a new life with a simple middle-class Pakistani who only wanted to get on with his work.

During the remainder of 1996, Diana popped up unpredictably in various places around the world. One day she was darting off to Greece on a Learjet to attend the funeral of a twenty-seven-year-old man who had died of cystic fibrosis; she had often visited him at Royal Brompton Hospital, and she described him as a “
dear friend.” Another day she was in Italy receiving her humanitarian award with Dr. Christiaan Barnard and making a short speech on the need to appreciate the elderly for their “
wisdom and experience” and to reject the definition of old age “as a disease.”

She visited the United States twice, first to raise money at a Washington gala for the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research, a charity named for
The Washington Post
’s late fashion editor and backed by Diana’s new friend Katharine Graham. Before a sellout crowd of 800 luminaries from society and fashion, Diana read a favorite verse, as she had the previous December in New York: “
Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand in stone: kindness in another’s trouble, courage in your own.” Graham also honored Diana at a luncheon, and Hillary Clinton did the same at a White House breakfast for 110, where Diana received a standing ovation.

Three months later, Diana was back in the United States as the guest of honor at a benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tribute to designer Christian Dior chaired by editor Liz Tilberis of
Harper’s Bazaar
.
Tilberis had first met Diana ten years earlier when she became editor of British
Vogue
and subsequently supervised several photo shoots of the Princess for the magazine. The two women became friends at the end of 1993, when Tilberis was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and Diana provided moral support with frequent phone calls. As a favor to Tilberis, Diana had traveled to New York in early 1995 to give the editor an award at the Council of Fashion Designers of America dinner. When Tilberis requested her presence again at the Costume Institute, several friends advised Diana to decline because another such event might make her seem frivolous when Diana was trying to appear more serious.