Diana in Search of Herself (65 page)

Diana’s misguided visit to Pakistan seemed to be a turning point. She became more jittery and unpredictable with her staff, friends, and family.
She broke off with her longtime acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo after Toffolo made comments about the Princess in the press, and she came close to ending her relationship with Richard Kay over an article she told Simone Simmons she considered “
traitorous.” Only when Simmons read the offending article aloud to Diana on the telephone, assuring her that it was fair, did Diana relent and call Kay several days later “as if nothing had happened.” Not long afterward, Diana turned around and dropped Simmons,
whom Richard Kay regarded as one of Diana’s key close friends since the separation. Diana “
wasn’t willing to let me help her deal with … a little of her old damage,” Simmons said later.

Diana’s private secretary Michael Gibbins also felt Diana’s lash, though he remained in place. Toward the end of May, when Diana and Charles were prevented by their schedules from attending a picnic at Eton with William, Tiggy Legge-Bourke had joined the boy instead.
Legge-Bourke was photographed pouring champagne, which made Diana “hit the roof,”
recalled
Mirror
editor Piers Morgan. “She arranged briefings from her office.” Diana instructed Gibbins to convey her withering criticism through the press, saying Legge-Bourke had “
harmed” fourteen-year-old William, had been “thoughtless” and “foolish,” and “made an idiot of herself.” “
I could hear Diana dictating in the background,” Morgan said.

After the comments appeared in several tabloids, Diana reversed course and “
put out a statement saying it was untrue, that she admired Tiggy,” Morgan recalled. “She named
The Sun
in particular, because they had gone the furthest [in criticizing Legge-Bourke].” According to Richard Kay, Diana’s denial had been based on her fear that “
her son might believe the attack on Tiggy originated with her.”
The Sun
fought back, saying “they would publish the name of who had told them,” Morgan recalled. Doubtless with the memory of Diana’s earlier slur on Legge-Bourke in mind, “Diana’s lawyers and
The Sun
issued a joint statement saying that she had formally reprimanded a senior member of her staff for making unauthorized remarks,” Morgan said.

The senior staff member was Gibbins, and the public scolding included her edict, reported by the tabloids, that he “never again … speak to the media on her behalf.” Diana had humiliated Gibbins, but Kay reflected her spin in a
Daily Mail
report that the loyal aide had been “
naive” and had “genuinely had her best interests at heart.” According to Kay, Diana had actually been “more than pleased” that Tiggy had attended the picnic in her stead.

Diana’s most heartbreaking dispute during her last months was with her mother. On the eve of Diana’s trip to Pakistan in May,
Hello!
magazine published the first of a two-part interview with Frances Shand Kydd. Frances spoke at length about her own life, but also offered comments on Diana’s childhood, her eating disorders, and her marriage. Much of what Frances said was harmless, and some of her views were sensible, although her comments betrayed how little she understood the deep emotional crosscurrents that prevented Diana from acting reasonably when she was emotionally overwrought.

Frances thought the
Panorama
and Dimbleby interviews were both a mistake. “
I felt strongly [Diana and Charles] were going to have to live with those interviews and knew somehow that they were only going to hurt even more,” she said. “I think one’s dignity is lost if you ever give out blame which becomes gossip. Gossip becomes distorted. If a marriage fails, you should never fall into the temptation of explaining why. Silence is the only course.”

Frances also considered it “absolutely wonderful” that Diana had lost her title “HRH” because “at last she was able to be herself, use her own name, and find her own identity.” Frances disclosed as well that she remained
happily in touch with Prince Charles: “He was my son-in-law for fourteen years, and he will always be the father of two of my grandchildren.”

At the time of the
Hello!
interviews, Diana’s relationship with her mother was already more precarious than usual, as Frances’s exclusion from William’s confirmation had indicated. “Diana said her mother was impossible,” recalled one of Diana’s close friends. “She felt her mother was not able to sort herself out.” The previous November Frances had been arrested on a drunk-driving charge and lost her driver’s license. According to James Whitaker, writing in
The Mirror
, Diana was aware that her mother was “
prone to giving colorful and unguarded interviews and comments after a good lunch.” Around this time, a man named Peter Scott claimed to have recently had a “
friendly romance” with Frances and told the
Daily Express
that she was “very unhappy and mixed up.… She has an obsession, the Catholic church.… She rings me late at night on a mobile [phone] when she has had a drink.”

The
Hello!
interviews came as a “
complete shock” to Diana. She briefly considered legal action, and she punished the magazine by canceling some “exclusive arrangements” at two of her charity events. She was “
appalled and bewildered” by her mother’s remarks, and “bitterly disappointed and let down” that the magazine would publish them.
When it emerged that
Hello!
had paid Frances $50,000, Diana was even more upset, though Frances earmarked all the money for a Catholic charity. Diana stopped speaking to her mother altogether.

After Diana’s death, Frances would not acknowledge the rift, insisting, quite oddly, that she and her daughter could only be close in secrecy. Frances told the
Daily Express
that her “
special relationship” with Diana “was built on nobody knowing when we spoke and saw each other, but we did and often.” She disclosed to the
Daily Mail
that she and Diana “
shared such a sense of joy that we often met in many different places without anyone ever knowing,” without saying why secrecy was necessary.

In her comments at Roehampton Priory in May 1997, Diana gave some indication of her recent struggle to maintain equilibrium. Using language similar to that she had used with Andrew Morton six years earlier, Diana insisted she had finally “beaten” her bulimia after “
[she] suddenly woke up one day and thought, ‘I’ve had enough of everyone treating me like absolute rubbish; I must stick up for myself.’ ” Diana claimed she hadn’t binged for three years—although her effort to find a new treatment for her bulimia in 1995 had indicated otherwise—and emphasized her use of strenuous exercise as a substitute for bingeing. “My workouts are definitely a great benefit in controlling my anger and emotions,” she said. “You just get rid of all the stress and rages building up inside you. It’s like a huge release.”

Although speaking at an institution where psychiatric therapy was widely used, she took the occasion to denounce psychiatry. “I found in the end that therapy was pointless for me,” she said, “because the people trying to help me hadn’t been through what I had been through”—ignoring the fact that Susie Orbach had suffered from eating disorders for a decade. “In some cases, I ended up thinking it was they who needed help, not me,” Diana continued. “Everyone knows how to treat you when you are vulnerable. But if you show any sign of strength, then it is they who end up feeling intimidated. And they try to squash you back to where you were.” Yet Diana did confess that she remained haunted by the possibility of a relapse, which she said would “always be in the back of my head.”

On June 3, only days after cutting off relations with her mother and publicly rebuking her chief aide, Diana went to a benefit performance of
Swan Lake
by the English National Ballet at Royal Albert Hall.
Since Harrods had sponsored the company’s
Nutcracker
production, Mohamed Fayed joined Diana in the royal box and sat next to her at the postperformance dinner at the Churchill Inter-Continental Hotel.

During dinner, Diana bemoaned that she had nowhere to take her sons for a summer holiday; wherever she went, photographers pursued her. Fayed, whose hospitality Diana had turned down many times before, saw an opening. His “
instant solution” was a vacation at his home in Saint-Tropez, and he promised it could be “as private as they wished.” Diana thanked Fayed and said she would get back to him. She queried several friends, among them Rosa Monckton, who “
strongly advised” her not to accept Fayed’s hospitality because it might “
arouse concern.” Diana then turned to Raine Spencer, hardly a disinterested party, given her position on Fayed’s board. Raine urged her to accept the invitation,
which Diana did on June 11.

June was Diana’s busiest month since her divorce. She attended preview parties for her dress sale in London and New York, where she was mobbed by a crowd of Manhattan socialites. The tabloids carried photographs of Christie’s chairman Charles Hindlip guiding her through the crowd with his hand on her bottom, prompting the
Daily Express
to wonder if he had become “
rather unnecessarily tactile.” Diana later told a friend that the event made her rue the loss of her title “HRH.” Recalled the friend, “She was telling me, ‘People were saying, “Di, Di, sign this.” It was awful, so familiar.’ ”

After years of pointedly asking people to “call me Diana,” she didn’t show her pique in public. “
She knocked herself out, talked to everyone, gave so much of herself,” said her friend Marguerite Littman, who helped her navigate the Christie’s throng. Noted Jane Warren in the
Daily Express
, “
Surrounded by drooling middle-aged Manhattan men, Diana pouted, fluttered and peered wide-eyed.” Her enchanting performance got results: The auction pulled in $3.26 million, exceeding expectations.

As part of her publicity campaign for the auction, she appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
, with eight pages of pictures alongside a two-and-a-half-page article titled “
Diana Reborn.” Once again, she offered a new look, her hair tousled, her expression come-hither, her partly revealed bosom “
apparently unsupported,” as
The Daily Telegraph
delicately observed. “
Whatever Diana’s inward state,” noted
Vanity Fair
, “outwardly, she appears to be approaching contentment.” Richard Kay couldn’t resist asking in the
Daily Mail
, “
Is this at last the
real
Diana, the woman she always wanted to be?” He seemed to think so, based on “her cool self-assurance … displayed in those cleavage-baring dresses” she had been wearing to the ballet and other events, as well as her insistence that she was “free from stress, her life [was] going well, her children [were] happy, and she [was] getting fulfillment from her work.”

Diana was also busy with the land mine crusade, which represented an earnest commitment as well as a diversion from her personal problems. In mid-June, she made speeches days apart in London and Washington, advocating efforts to “
quicken the de-miners’ work” and help injured victims rebuild their lives. After her Washington speech on behalf of Red Cross assistance to land mine survivors, she flew by private jet to New York to see an ailing Mother Teresa, who left her wheelchair to stroll hand in hand with Diana in the Bronx—“
her most amazing walkabout ever.” At the end of the month, Diana announced that she would go to Bosnia in August with the Red Cross to visit the “
killing fields.”

Diana’s land mine work was warmly endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had been swept into office by the landslide Labor victory in the May 1 general election. After the Labor party took over, Diana met with the new foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who announced only three weeks after taking his post that Britain would destroy its stock of land mines by 2005 and redouble its efforts for a worldwide ban. Diana was among the “
anti-mines campaigners” credited with shaping Labor’s move—a “significant shift from that of the former Conservative government which never made any undertaking to destroy all stocks by a fixed date.”

Around the same time,
Tony Blair invited Diana and Prince William to lunch at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence. She and Blair discussed ideas for her role as a goodwill ambassador, much as she had done any number of times with John Major and his foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, both of whom had encouraged her. This time, Diana was dealing with a man she found “
very charismatic.” “
At last,” she said afterward, “I will have someone who will know how to
use
me.”

In the following weeks, Diana shared her perceptions of a possible role. According to her friend Gulu Lalvani, she said she saw herself as a “
peacemaker.… She seriously felt she could have helped with the Northern Ireland
situation.” In a luncheon conversation with Tina Brown, then editor of
The New Yorker
, Diana said she was thinking about traveling to China because Blair “
wants me to go on some missions.… I’m very good at sorting people’s heads out.” Brown noted in
The New Yorker
that Diana’s manner was “devoid of irony.”

Such talk showed that Diana was having difficulty seeing herself in a realistic way; she almost seemed to view her purpose as a global therapist. Lacking any reliable advisers, Diana was trying to get by on intuition alone, and her naïveté was breathtaking. The idea that she could “sort out” the likes of Chinese president Jiang Zemin would have been comic were it not so sad.

Chapter 26