by Kitty Kelley
Whenever the Princess appeared in a spectacular new gown, the photographer hollered approvingly, “You look lovely tonight, ma’am.” When she wore something she had worn before, he complained. “Oh, not that one again.”
She shot back, “Arthur, I suppose you’d prefer it if I turned up naked.”
He countered, “Well, at least I could get a picture of you in the paper that way.”
“I’ll tell the jokes, Arthur,” she said reprovingly.
He later used her retort as the title for his book of royal reminiscences. Diana let him know that she did not appreciate the exploitation. Withholding her usual smile, she asked, “How many books have you sold, Arthur?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I think you are wonderful, ma’am. I would never do anything to harm you.”
Diana’s father, the late Earl Spencer, once called her “pure steel inside,” and Arthur Edwards occasionally felt her jabs. Commenting on a new hairstyle, he said if her hair got any shorter, she would look like Sinead O’Connor, the Irish pop star who shaves her head.
“At least I’ve got some hair,” said Diana, looking at the photographer’s bald head.
When she felt offended, reporters felt her sting. One young woman was pointedly ignored by the Princess when she wrote that Diana had worn comfortable but dowdy clothes on a royal tour. On the return flight home, Diana eyed the writer’s ankle-length skirt and said, “She won’t last long.” Hearing the Princess discuss plans for making other overseas visits, the young reporter inquired, “Oh, more trips?” Without smiling, Diana said, “More trips and more dowdy clothes.”
Usually Diana courted the media, especially after her separation, when she and her husband competed for coverage and used the press to take a poke at each other. Both had recruited national newspapers to carry his and her versions of their marital rifts. She received more sympathetic coverage because she befriended reporters: she gave cocktail parties for those who covered her royal tours, sent them notes when she was especially pleased by their stories, and remembered their birthdays. She regularly briefed the Daily Mail’s royal correspondent Richard Kay, who was photographed whispering with her in a car. She invited media baron Rupert Murdoch to lunch at Kensington Palace and sent similar invitations to television personalities Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. They all accepted. She ingratiated herself with Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company, by visiting her in Martha’s Vineyard and Washington, D.C. Diana also attended parties sponsored by People magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. She posed for Vogue. She was so accommodating to the photographers who accompanied her on ski vacations with her children that supporters of Prince Charles accused her of using the boys to look motherly at his expense. He countered with more exotic vacations for the children in Italy and on the Greek islands. She topped him by taking the boys to Disney World in Florida. Charles was determined not to be outdone. When he went with his sons to Balmoral for Easter, he gave them a set of soccer goalposts, a garden badminton set, two mountain bikes, a trampoline, guns for shooting rabbits and crows, and two minimotorbikes that cost $3,000 apiece. But even his staged photo opportunities with his sons could not overcome the popularity gap.
“The big trouble with some of the royals is that they treat the press like telegraph poles,” said Arthur Edwards. “They just walk round them and totally ignore them. That has been one of the reasons for the bad publicity they get…. Diana has gone more than halfway to stop that.”
She became the most photographed woman in the world, and photographers made thousands of dollars taking her picture. She was reminded what a valuable commodity she had become after receiving a call from Lady Elizabeth Johnston, a friend of the royal family, who lived near Great Windsor Park. She had heard from her hairdresser that Diana was being secretly photographed during her weekly workouts at the gym. Lady Johnston warned the Princess that the owner of the gym was the Peeping Tom.
“Oh, God,” said Diana. “Am I decent?”
“As far as I know, you are.”
“That’s a relief. My mother-in-law would die.”
The next day Diana asked her detective, Ken Wharfe, to check out the story. He talked to the owner of L.A. Fitness, Bryce Taylor, who denied taking pictures of the Princess.
“For chrissakes,” said Taylor. “She’s been coming here almost three years now. You’re always with her. Have you ever seen a security problem?”
The detective satisfied himself by walking around the club. He did not inspect the premises thoroughly, but even if he had, he might not have noticed the hole cut in the ceiling panel.
Six months later a sneak shot of Diana appeared on the front page of the Sunday Mirror in spandex cycling shorts and a snug turquoise leotard. The newspaper had agreed to pay $250,000 for photos that showed her pushing a shoulder press with her legs spread wide apart. The poses were unflattering, even for a young woman as beautiful as the Princess, and the harsh angles emphasized her pelvis, revealing every bulge and fold and crease around her hips.
Looking at the voyeuristic photos made some people feel as if a dirty trick had been played on an unsuspecting maiden. Although Diana had borne children and taken lovers, she still retained an aura of demure innocence. People had seen photos of her plunging cleavage and her high kicks across a stage in a slinky satin slip; they had even seen her pregnant in a bikini. But they had never seen her looking coarse.
“It was a crotch shot, plain and simple,” said one magazine editor. “Undignified and disgusting.”
The royal biographer Brian Hoey said the pictures would never have been published in Britain if Diana had not been separated from Prince Charles. “She is now treated by the media with the same sort of disdain and contempt as film stars or… Fergie.”
Diana felt bruised and abused. “I burst into tears when I saw that photograph,” she said. “I felt insulted and humiliated and violated….”
The Palace and Parliament rallied to her side, deploring the invasion of her privacy. Her husband felt she got no more than an exhibitionist deserved, but her father-in-law urged her to sue. The furor over the pictures dominated the media for days, with politicians demanding press curbs and publishers protesting. The Mirror Group, the owner of the offending paper, withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission, and the editor admitted he was a “ratbag.” But the gym owner was unapologetic.
“What I did was sneaky, surreptitious, and preplanned,” said Bryce Taylor. “I don’t make excuses…. It was underhand…. But if I told you I had an absolutely legal scam which didn’t hurt anyone and would make you a million pounds, wouldn’t you say yes?”
He hired a publicist and contracted with a photo agency to syndicate the eighty-two pictures of Diana he had taken. The Princess’s lawyers obtained an injunction that froze the money Taylor was supposed to receive. With the full support of the Queen, Diana sued the newspaper and the photographer. She declared in sealed court documents:
I was shocked when I saw photographs of myself exercising at the club as published in The Sunday Mirror on 7th November 1993 and The Daily Mirror on 8th November 1993. I was unaware that any such photographs had been taken and had at no time given my consent to being photographed at the club in any circumstances. I considered Mr. Taylor’s conduct to be a betrayal of the trust I had vested in him.
The Princess intended to create a privacy law in England that did not exist and she was prepared to testify in court. “I will do whatever it takes to achieve justice,” she said. She issued a statement, expressing her gratitude to everyone who had condemned the actions of the Mirror newspapers. Within weeks the disgraced gym owner went broke trying to defend himself. But under Britain’s legal aid system, he now qualified for expert counsel, because he was an indigent defendant in a case that sought to establish a new law. So he petitioned the court, and the presiding judge appointed one of the country’s best-known lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson QC (Queen’s Counsel), to represent him.
Suddenly, what had loo
ked like a case weighted in favor of the Princess now became even odds. Robertson was well matched to the skills of Diana’s lawyer, Anthony Julius of the law firm Mischon de Reya. The gym owner felt especially fortunate because Robertson was an Australian, known to be a republican, and not impressed by royalty. To Robertson, the Princess of Wales was merely a rich plaintiff named Diana Windsor. The sealed court documents show that he referred to her as Mrs. Windsor; Anthony Julius referred to her as HRH the Princess of Wales.
Within days Robertson’s defense team had deposed employees who swore that the Princess actively encouraged attention in the gym by exercising in front of a window so the public could see her better. Several employees said she flirted openly with male club members and wore provocative, skintight clothes to show off her body. To them the Princess looked like a pickup.
Diana’s lawyers countered that she wore appropriate exercise attire every time she went to the gym, but no matter what she wore, she was entitled to privacy. They produced a letter from Bryce Taylor dated September 25, 1990, promising to protect her from publicity.
His lawyers responded that by accepting a three-year membership as a gift, Diana was not entitled to the privileges of someone who had paid. They argued that by freeloading, she had forfeited her rights to privacy, especially when she agreed to be weighed and measured. They produced the personal data form she herself had filled out using the name of Sally Hughes, her former secretary:
Blood Pressure: 120/60
Height centimeters: 183
BMI (Body Mass Index) 60.5
Girth measurements:
Shoulder: 40"
Chest: 35"
Right arm: 9 1/7"
Waist: 27"
Rt. thigh: 22"
Calf: 13½"
The Palace became dismayed when they learned that some of Diana’s sworn statements did not jibe with those of her personal detective. When Ken Wharfe was scheduled as a defense witness, the detective was swiftly transferred out of her service. Then Diana’s chauffeur decided he wanted to work for Prince Charles. Diana had not been consulted about either move. Losing both men, who had been in her service for several years, left her shaken. Hours after being informed of the transfers, she arrived at a theater gala with red, puffy eyes. She stayed less than an hour before she ran out sobbing. The Palace said she was suffering from a migraine.
The next day’s newspapers carried stories about “the tormented mind of a princess” and speculated she was suffering from a recurrence of bulimia. The employees’ transfers were interpreted in the press as Palace plots to undermine her stability.
She tried to put the matter to rest three days later in a speech to charity workers: “Ladies and gentlemen, you are very lucky to have your patron here today,” she said. “I am supposed to have my head down the loo for most of the day…. I am supposed to be dragged off the minute I leave here by men in white coats.”
Her audience applauded her good humor. “If it is all right with you,” she concluded, “I thought I would postpone my nervous breakdown to a more appropriate moment.” Smiling, she added, “It is amazing what a migraine can bring on.”
By then the Queen had reconsidered her support for Diana’s lawsuit. She questioned whether the emotional Princess could stand up to tough cross-examination. Further, she was troubled to learn that Diana’s former lover James Hewitt was a houseguest of Geoffrey Robertson. The lawyer indicated he might subpoena Hewitt to establish just how averse the Princess really was to invasions of her privacy. The Queen was disconcerted to read Hewitt’s comment to Robertson’s wife, Kathy Lette, who asked him what the Princess was really like: “She’s got bad breath,” said Hewitt, “and she wants sex all the time.”
The press was salivating over the prospect of a trial, and more than nine hundred reporters had applied for credentials in a courtroom with seventy-five seats. The Queen was concerned about the international media hoopla and did not want to see a member of the royal family take the witness stand. She recommended the case be settled out of court.
An overture was made to Bryce Taylor, but without a trial he would no longer be eligible for legal aid and would have to pay his own legal fees. So he had no incentive to settle. Now bankrupt, he was relying on a sensational trial to sell world rights to his story. The press agent he had hired said, “For him, it was always a matter of money—only money.”
The Queen’s private secretary contacted Peter, Lord Palumbo, a close friend of Diana’s, to say that the Queen wanted to spare the Princess the ordeal of taking the stand. Lord Palumbo understood. Although Diana wanted to proceed, the Queen did not. So Lord Palumbo negotiated with a few of the lawyers involved and worked out a confidential arrangement that benefited everyone: the Princess looked victorious; the newspapers avoided regulation; the Peeping Tom escaped poverty. The basic terms:
1. The Mirror Newspaper Group agreed to issue a public apology, pay $40,000 in damages to charity in Diana’s name, and not to write about the case.
2. Bryce Taylor agreed to give Diana the photographs and negatives and issue a public apology. In exchange for agreeing never to discuss the case, he was to receive secret monthly payments totaling $450,000 from a blind trust. He did not know who provided the money but speculated on King Juan Carlos because the blind trust was incorporated in Spain. The final payment was made in June 1996. The trust also was to pay Taylor’s taxes and his legal fees.
3. Part of Diana’s legal fees were to be paid by the money that had been frozen by the court’s injunction; the fees not covered by that money were waived by Lord Mischon’s law firm.
4. All parties signed confidentiality agreements not to divulge the details.
When the settlement agreement was announced, the News of the World sighed in relief: “The Royal Family Is Safe.” A rash of stories in London’s other newspapers crowed mistakenly about “Di’s smashing victory.”
“I suppose we could’ve won,” said a Mirror editor, “but it would’ve cost too much. Not in terms of cash, but in hatred from the public, especially from our downmarket readership, which adores Diana.”
Although she looked like a winner in the media, the Princess knew she had been defeated. Most of her staff had resigned—her chef, her equerry, her dresser, her chauffeur, her detective. She struck back by firing her butler, Harold Brown, who had been with her since her marriage to Charles and stayed with her after the separation. Now she insisted he leave “as soon as possible” and give up his grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace. When Princess Michael of Kent offered to hire the tall, courtly butler, who had spent his adult life in royal service, Diana said no.
Disturbed by her behavior, the Prince of Wales sent for the man. “I’m so sorry for what she’s done to you,” he said, “but I can’t interfere… I can’t even take you on myself. But I want you to know that I know what has been done. And the Queen has been informed about what the Princess has done.”
The butler was eventually hired by Princess Margaret, who told him to keep his rent-free apartment. “The Princess of Wales dare not tell Princess Margaret whom she can employ,” said a member of Margaret’s staff. “After all, Princess Margaret is royal by birth. Diana is royal by marriage. There’s a big difference. Even though Diana is senior to Margaret in terms of protocol, that’s just on paper. That isn’t the way it is. Princess Margaret is the Queen’s sister, and Diana can’t pull rank on someone who’s really royal, like she can on Princess Michael of Kent.”
By then Diana’s royal duties had been curtailed and her husband had rejected her offer to reconcile. He said he would rather immolate himself than live with her again. She felt ostracized by the royal family and hounded by the press. So she decided to withdraw from public life. On December 3, 1993, again in tears, she publicly announced that she wanted privacy.
“When I started my public life twelve years ago,” she told workers for the Headway National Head Injuries Association in a luncheon speech, “I understood that the media might be interested
in what I did… but I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become, nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner that has been hard to bear.” Then she dropped her bomb: “I will be reducing the extent of the public life I have led so far.”
The next day a tabloid screamed: “Ab-Di-Cation.”
Her admirers bemoaned her withdrawal from public life as a tragedy for the country; her detractors disparaged her as a cunning actress who had milked the public’s sympathy. Her royal retreat created reams of editorial commentary. Even the Irish Times sounded wistful. In the United States, writer Calvin Trillin begged her to reconsider in an amusing bit of doggerel:
“Oh, Di,” repentant tabloids cry,
“Don’t leave the role you occupy.
For we can quickly rectify
The misbehavior you decry.
We need you, Di. We’ll tell you why:
The Prince is not the sort of guy
Who causes lots of folks to buy
Our papers. So we all must try
To get along together, Di.
So come now, be a sweetie-pie,
We promise we’ll no longer pry,
Nor pay some sleazeball on the sly
To photograph your upper thigh.
So promise us it’s not goodbye.
Di?”
TWENTY-ONE
Members of the British royal family were starting to look like impostors: they wore jewels, dressed up in gold braid, and rode in carriages. But they did not behave like royalty.
They tried to appear brave and true, but they were not even good-hearted. They did not understand royalty’s obligation to behave with probity, to bestow kindness, to set a good example. The traditions of royalty passed on by literature and by art seemed to have bypassed them. They had forgotten the legends of King Arthur and his shining Knights of the Round Table.
Many of their loyal subjects, once enthralled by royalty, became disenchanted. Some became indifferent, some turned faintly negative, some were decidedly hostile. The public’s respect, even reverence, for the Crown had eroded severely. Obeisance was no longer automatic. Only the Queen Mother, bobbing along in her feathers and veils, seemed capable of inspiring genuine affection.
