Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  Her greatest luxury in life was to sit down with baked beans on toast and watch television. ‘That’s my idea of paradise,’ she told him. The most obvious sign of Diana’s new life was the sight of her Scotland Yard bodyguard who was seated at a nearby table. It took her a long time to come to terms with that presence; the proximity of an armed police officer was the most potent reminder of the gilded cage she had now entered. It was the little things she missed such as those blissful moments of privacy when she could listen to her favourite music on the car stereo at full blast. Now she had to consider another person’s wishes at all times.

  In the early days she would go for an evening ‘burn up’ in her car around Central London, leaving her armed Scotland Yard bodyguard behind. On one occasion she was chased through the streets by a car full of excited young Arabs. Later on she used to drive to a favourite beach on the south coast so that she could enjoy the wind in her hair and the tang of the sea breeze on her face. She loved being by water, be it the river Dee or the sea. It was where she liked to think, to commune with herself.

  The presence of a bodyguard was a constant reminder of the invisible veil which separated her from her family and friends. It was the awareness that she was now a possible target for an anonymous terrorist or an unknown madman. The bloody attempt to kidnap Princess Anne on the Mall, just yards from Buckingham Palace, and the successful break-in to the Queen’s bedroom by an unemployed labourer, Michael Fagan, were ample proof of the constant danger the royal family faced. Diana was typically matter-of-fact in response to this ever-present threat. She went to the headquarters of the Special Air Services in Hereford to take a ‘terrifying’ driving course where she learned the basic techniques in handling a possible terrorist attack or kidnap attempt. Thunderflashes and smoke bombs were thrown at her car by her ‘enemies’ to make sure that the training was as realistic as possible. On another occasion she went to Lippitts Hill in Loughton, Essex, where officers from the Metropolitan Police receive weapons training. There she learned how to handle a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver and a Hechler and Koch machine pistol, which were standard issue to members of the Royal Protection squad.

  She had become reconciled to the idea of an eternal shadow; she discovered that, far from being a threat, her bodyguards were much wiser sounding boards than many of the gentleman courtiers who fluttered around her. Police officers like Sergeant Allan Peters and Inspector Graham Smith became avuncular father figures, defusing tricky situations and deflating overweening subjects alike with a joke or a crisp command. They also brought her mothering instincts to the fore. She remembered their birthdays, sent notes of apology to their wives when they had to accompany her on an overseas tour and ensured that they were ‘fed and watered’ when she went out with them from Kensington Palace. When Graham Smith contracted cancer, she invited him and his wife on holiday to Necker in the Caribbean and also on a Mediterranean cruise on board the yacht owned by Greek tycoon John Latsis.

  When she was dining with friends at San Lorenzo, a favourite restaurant in Knightsbridge, one of her detectives, Inspector Ken Wharfe, would join the Princess’s table at the end of the meal and regale the assembled throng with his jokes. Perhaps she reserved her fondest memories for Sergeant Barry Mannakee who became her bodyguard at a time when she felt lost and alone in the royal world. He sensed her bewilderment and became a shoulder for her to lean on and sometimes to cry on during this painful period. The affectionate bond that built up between them did not go unnoticed either by Prince Charles or by Mannakee’s colleagues. Shortly before the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York in July 1986 he was transferred to other duties, much to Diana’s dismay. In the following spring he was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.

  For much of this unhappy early chapter in Diana’s royal life, she had excluded those who had been near and dear to her, although Prince Charles still saw his former friends, particularly the Parker Bowleses and the Palmer-Tomkinsons. The Prince and Princess attended the Parker Bowleses’ house-warming party when they moved from Bolehyde Manor to Middlewick House, 12 miles from Highgrove, and Charles regularly saw Camilla when he went fox hunting. At Kensington Palace and Highgrove the couple entertained little, so rarely in fact that their butler Allan Fisher described working for the Waleses as ‘boring’. It was a meagre diet: an annual dinner for Charles’s polo-playing friends, a ‘boys only’ evening or the occasional lunch with friends like Catherine Soames, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones and Sarah Ferguson.

  The tours, new homes, new baby and Diana’s illnesses took a heavy toll. In her desperation she consulted Penny Thornton, an astrologer introduced to her by Sarah Ferguson. Diana admitted to Penny that she couldn’t bear the pressure of her position any longer and that she had to leave the system. ‘One day you will be allowed out but you will be allowed out as opposed to divorcing,’ Penny told her, confirming Diana’s existing opinion that she would never become Queen.

  The mood in 1984 was not helped by the fact that she was pregnant with Prince Harry. Once again she suffered badly from morning sickness although it wasn’t as bad as the first time. When she returned from a solo engagement in Norway, Diana was still in the early stages of pregnancy. She and the late Victor Chapman, the Queen’s former assistant press secretary, took turns to use the lavatory on the flight home. Characteristically he was suffering from a hangover, she from morning sickness. It was during those months of waiting that she felt in her heart that her husband was once again seeing Camilla. She felt the signs were there. Late-night telephone calls, unexplained absences and other minor but significant changes in his usual routine. Ironically during that time, Charles and Diana enjoyed the happiest period of their married life. The balmy summer months before Harry’s birth were a time of contentment and mutual devotion. But a storm cloud hovered on the horizon. Diana knew that Charles was desperate for their second child to be a girl. A scan had already shown that her baby was a boy. It was a secret she nursed until the moment he was born at 4.20pm on Saturday, 15 September in the Lindo wing at St Mary’s Hospital. Charles’s reaction finally closed the door on any love Diana may have felt for him. ‘Oh God, it’s a boy,’ he said, ‘and he’s even got red hair’ [a common Spencer trait which eventually sparked inaccurate speculation that Harry was the son of Diana’s lover, ginger-haired army officer James Hewitt]. With these dismissive remarks he left for Kensington Palace. The following day he played polo. From that moment, as Diana told friends: ‘Something inside me died.’ It was a reaction which marked the beginning of the end of their marriage.

  5

  ‘Darling, I’m About To Disappear’

  It was a routine request from the Queen to her daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales. Royal Ascot race week loomed and she was in the process of drawing up a guest list for the traditional house party at Windsor Castle. Would the Princess like to recommend two single girls of good breeding who would be acceptable guests? She duly put forward the names of two friends, Susie Fenwick and Sarah Ferguson, the daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager Major Ronald Ferguson.

  Sarah, a vivacious redhead known by one and all as ‘Fergie’, first met Diana during the early days of her romance with Prince Charles when she watched him play polo at Cowdray Park near the Sussex home of Sarah’s mother, Susie Barrantes. Fourth cousins by marriage, the girls had been aware of each other for much longer and had a number of friends in common. They soon became good friends. Sarah was invited to Diana’s wedding and entertained her royal friend in her apartment near Clapham Junction in South London.

  At one of Sarah’s cocktail parties at her home in Lavender Gardens, Diana met Paddy McNally, a motor racing entrepreneur who enjoyed an uneven and ultimately unhappy romance with Fergie. It was Paddy who, on a June day in 1985, dropped Sarah at Windsor Castle’s private entrance where she was met by a footman and taken to her room by one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. By the side of her bed there was a card, embossed with the Queen’s cipher, giving the times of meal
s and table placements as well as a note saying how the various guests would be conveyed to the racecourse, either in open carriages or in black Daimler saloons. Even though her family had rubbed shoulders with the royal family for years, Sarah was understandably nervous. She arrived promptly in the Green Drawing Room for pre-lunch drinks and then found herself seated next to Prince Andrew, who was on leave from his Royal Navy flying duties.

  They discovered an instant rapport. He teased her by trying to feed her chocolate profiteroles. She refused, playfully punching his shoulder and claiming one of her interminable diets as an excuse. ‘There are always humble beginnings; it’s got to start somewhere,’ said Andrew at their engagement interview eight months later. While Diana was billed as the matchmaker in this royal romance, the truth was that she never noticed the romantic spark between her brother-in-law and one of her best friends. After all, Sarah was involved in a long-term relationship with Paddy McNally while Andrew still had a soft spot for Kathleen ‘Koo’ Stark, an American actress who had excited considerable media interest because of her appearance in soft-porn films.

  Diana had been favourably impressed when she met Koo during her romance with Andrew. The Princess had known Andrew since childhood and had always been aware that beneath the brash, noisy mask was a much shrewder and lonelier character than he or his family would admit. Charles was only ever jealous of him when he served with some distinction as a helicopter pilot during the Falklands War. While he returned from that campaign with greater maturity, even his best friends would never describe him as a man of great ambition. In his free time he was happy to watch cartoons and videos on TV or wander around the various royal apartments, chatting to kitchen staff or watching Diana perform her ballet exercises at Kensington Palace. Diana had seen how Koo Stark, gentle, quiet and utterly devoted, had given this rather lonely man the affection and friendship he was seeking. So when Andrew started seeing Sarah, the Princess took a back seat. She told her friend: ‘I’m there if you need me.’ As their romance developed, Diana was happy to agree to Andrew’s requests that he and Sarah stay at Highgrove for the weekend. As Sarah’s stepmother, Susan Ferguson, said: ‘Things got better and better between them as the weeks passed by. There was never any “Is it on or is it off?” It wasn’t as complicated because they got on so well. That was the nice thing about it, a straightforward love story. Of course, if Sarah hadn’t been a friend of the Princess of Wales the situation would have been far more difficult in the early stages. She made it easier for Sarah to see him. You have to remember that in his position it is very difficult to meet women.’

  As with Diana’s romance, events began to take on a momentum of their own. The Queen invited Sarah to stay at Sandringham in January 1986; soon after, Charles and Diana took her skiing to Klosters in Switzerland. Diana loaned Sarah a black-and-white check coat when they visited Prince Andrew on board his ship, HMS Brazen, which was docked in the Port of London. Diana deftly guided Sarah through her first public appearance with members of the royal family. Compared with the aspiring newcomer, Diana seemed the accomplished performer in front of the cameras. She had blossomed into a sophisticated beauty whose innate sense of style was celebrated the world over.

  The traumas of child-bearing, home-making and marriage-building behind her, it seemed to the outsider that Diana had at last come to terms with her royal role. After all, she was still basking in the plaudits following her first television appearance since her engagement. A few weeks earlier she and Prince Charles had been interviewed at Kensington Palace by the veteran newsreader Sir Alastair Burnet. She was pleased that she had answered his questions clearly and calmly, a fact which did not go unnoticed by other members of the royal family. At the same time High Society was still buzzing about her impromptu performance on the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with the ballet star Wayne Sleep. They had secretly choreographed a routine to Billy Joel’s song ‘Uptown Girl’, using her drawing room at Kensington Palace as their rehearsal studio. Prince Charles watched the Gala performance from the royal box completely oblivious to his wife’s plan.

  Two numbers before the end she left his side and changed into a silver silk dress before Wayne beckoned her on stage. The audience let out a collective gasp of astonishment as they went through their routine. They took eight curtain calls, Diana even dropping a curtsy to the royal box. In public Prince Charles confessed himself ‘absolutely amazed’ by Diana’s display; in private he expressed his strong disapproval of her behaviour. She was undignified, too thin, too showy.

  This totally negative attitude was what she had now come to expect. No matter how hard she tried or what she did, every time she struggled to express something of herself, he crushed her spirit. It wore her down. During the wedding preparations for Sarah and Andrew, there was further evidence of his indifference towards her when they flew to Vancouver to open the mammoth Expo exhibition. Before they went, there were further rumblings about her health and what the tabloids liked to call her ‘pencil slim’ physique. It was rumoured that Diana had used the summer break at Balmoral to have an operation on her nose. Her physical appearance had changed so much during the last four years that plastic surgery seemed to be the only credible explanation. But chronic eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia do produce physiological changes and this was the case with the Princess. Diana was fortunate that she did not suffer from hair loss, skin complaints or dental problems as a result of starving her body of essential vitamins and minerals.

  Discussion about her diet resurfaced when she fainted during a visit to the California stand during the opening of Expo. Throughout her chronic bulimia, Diana had always managed to eat her breakfast. Before this visit she hadn’t eaten for days, only nibbling at a Kit Kat chocolate bar during the flight to Canada’s Pacific coast. She felt ghastly as they looked round the various stands. Finally, she put her arm on her husband’s shoulder, whispered: ‘Darling, I think I’m about to disappear’, and promptly slid down his side. Her lady-in-waiting, Anne Beckwith-Smith, and their deputy private secretary, David Roycroft, helped her to a private room where she recovered her composure.

  When she finally rejoined her husband she found little sympathy. In a mood of irritated exasperation he told her bluntly that if she was going to faint she should have done so in private. When she returned to the penthouse suite they occupied in the Pan Pacific hotel overlooking Vancouver Bay, Diana flopped down and sobbed her eyes out. She was exhausted, hadn’t eaten and was distressed by her husband’s uncaring attitude. It was what she had come to expect but his disapproving tone still hurt.

  While the rest of the party advised that it would sensible if the Princess missed that night’s official dinner and got some sleep, Charles insisted that she must take her place at the top table, arguing that her absence would create an unnecessary sense of drama. By now Diana realized that she needed help for her condition but knew that this was neither the time nor the place to voice those fears. Instead, she allowed the doctor accompanying the tour to prescribe medication to help her through the evening. She managed to finish that leg of the visit but when they arrived in Japan Diana seemed pale, distracted and clearly unwell. Her mood was not helped on their return to Kensington Palace when, shortly before the royal wedding, Barry Mannakee was transferred to other duties. He had been the only one within her immediate circle in whom she could confide her worries about being isolated, about her condition and her position as an outsider within the royal family. With his departure, she felt very lonely indeed.

  In some ways the arrival of the Duchess of York made her life less bearable. The newly created Duchess bounded into her new role like an over-excited labrador. At her first Balmoral, a holiday experience which used to leave Diana drained and dispirited, the Duchess seemed to take it in her stride. She went riding with the Queen, carriage driving with the Duke of Edinburgh and made a point of spending time with the Queen Mother. The Duchess has always had a chameleon personality, readily conforming to the desires
of others. She did it when she mixed with the Verbier set, the well-heeled, sophisticated but savagely sarcastic friends of her former lover, Paddy McNally, and she did it now as she adapted to life within the royal family.

  Slightly older than Diana but infinitely more experienced in the ways of the world, the Duchess displayed enthusiasm where Diana showed dismay, hearty jollity compared with Diana’s droopy silences, and boundless energy against the Princess’s constant illness. Fergie was an immediate hit inside the family; Diana was still seen as an enigmatic stranger who held herself aloof. When Fergie arrived like a breath of fresh air, Prince Charles was not slow to make the comparison. ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie?’ he asked. It made a change from his usual refrain, which was to compare her to his much beloved grandmother, the Queen Mother, but the message was the same.

  Diana was deeply confused. Her face graced the cover of a million magazines and the public sang her praises, yet her husband and his family rarely gave her a word of encouragement, congratulation or advice. Little wonder then that Diana, who at the time had no sense of self-worth or self-esteem, accepted the royal family’s view that she should strive to be more like her sister-in-law. This point was reinforced when the Prince and Princess of Wales went to Majorca as guests of King Juan Carlos of Spain at the Marivent Palace. While the public thought Diana had engineered this ‘bucket and spade holiday’ to escape the rigours of Balmoral, the holiday was Prince Charles’s idea. There was even ridiculous gossip romantically connecting Diana with Juan Carlos. Actually the King was much closer to Charles than the Princess who found him far too much of a playboy for her tastes. On that first holiday Diana had a miserable time. She was sick for much of the week whereas Charles was fêted by their hosts. Word soon reached the rest of the royal family. Once again Diana was the problem; once again her husband asked: ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie?’