by Tim Clayton
It came as a bit of a shock when I had a phone call from her private secretary to say could we just talk about some concerns he had. And then the issue of her pulling out of public life came up. I hadn’t any inkling that this was even on the agenda. So we talked briefly about it and then I talked with the Princess about what might be involved. My concern was here was someone who had a very active involvement in a number of charities who was thinking of doing something quite extreme that would perhaps harm her and the charities about which she was so concerned.
The phone call took place three weeks before Diana was due to give a speech to a conference for Headway, the spinal injuries organisation. Jephson was worried that Diana would not let him see the text. He did not get his hands on it until a few days before she was due to deliver it. Believing that whatever she said she would not retire from public life for long, Jephson secretly briefed the Queen and 10 Downing Street to this effect. As soon as he could, he showed the Queen’s office the speech. They were alarmed, believing that the Royal Family would be blamed again. At the last minute Jephson and the Queen’s deputy press secretary, Geoffrey Crawford, persuaded Diana to change the text ‘to excise the more histrionic references to a self-imposed and irreversible exile’. Nevertheless, all involved knew that the speech was going to cause another huge row.
On 3 December 1993, at the end of a year of consistent success, Diana bade her public farewell.
I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and to give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years . . . When I started my public life twelve years ago I understood that the media might be interested in what I did. I realised then that their attention would inevitably focus on . . . our private lives . . . 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’s been hard to bear.
Most of the charities had received no warning and were shocked at the loss of their patron. Some of the Mirror’s rivals blamed the gym photos, but most accused the Prince and the Palace of driving her out. Diana’s decision to declare her retirement on a public stage was directed primarily against the tabloid media. But the conclusion the Palace had jumped to was partly correct as well. Diana herself briefed the Daily Mail, which declared ‘Charles Drove Her To It’. Even the sober Times demanded to know ‘Did Diana Go or Was She Pushed?’
Diana was handed her diary sheets for the following year. They were blank.
* * *
The faction fighting was getting ever nastier. Lord Palumbo had once been able to describe himself as a good friend of both the Prince and the Princess, but not any more.
You were either in one camp or you were in the other. You couldn’t really be in both. I can think of very few examples of those who were in both. And the tendency clearly was to drive the two people at the very centre of the drama apart . . . And the warfare is total, in such circumstances. The warfare is very nasty and very deep and very bitter.
‘The Princess was unbalanced’, ‘the Princess was this’, ‘the Princess was that’, ‘she was unstable’, she was so on and so forth. And similarly damaging things [were being said] about the Prince of Wales and his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
And all these things should have remained private if humanly possible, but it was not possible because things get out of hand. Once those lorries start to roll downhill without any brakes there’s no stopping them.
The Princess talked to me on occasion about what might have been. And that prompted me to feel, perhaps wrongly, that there was some hope . . . maybe it was not too late to find some sort of formula. But the two camps had become so entrenched and so deeply divided and the feelings so bitter . . . the constant sniping and the press briefing . . . that it was not possible to find any common ground.
* * *
On 29 June 1994, fourteen million British television viewers watched Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary about Prince Charles. On it he admitted to adultery, after ‘it [the marriage] became irretrievably broken down’. Next day Richard Aylard confirmed in a press conference that Camilla Parker Bowles had been the woman involved. The immediate tabloid reaction was very hostile. ‘Not Fit to Reign,’ the Mirror proclaimed, supporting its headline with the results of a poll taken in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast. ‘So Cruel and So Selfish: That’s your verdict on the Prince,’ it announced. In its enthusiasm the Mirror was somewhat cavalier with its own poll results. In fact a relatively modest 32 per cent of those polled had said Charles was unfit to reign and 46 per cent that Diana should divorce him for his adultery; 55 per cent said that his confession made no difference to the monarchy, 54 per cent that he was right to admit to the affair, and 61 per cent that he was fit to be King. Nevertheless, the loyal monarchism of the British people was wavering.
And the tabloids had made their minds up. Both the Mirror and its arch-rival the Sun were on the side of the elegant woman in the black dress pictured down the side of their front pages. ‘Revenge is Chic,’ commented the Sun.
On the night of the Dimbleby broadcast Diana had made one of her now rare public appearances, wearing a bejewelled black dress designed by Christina Stambolian to a Vanity Fair party at London’s Serpentine Gallery, escorted by Lord Palumbo.
Vanity Fair had a strange attitude towards Diana. It couldn’t print enough photographs of her, especially when she bestowed what the magazine called her ‘gala charm’ on American high society. Yet the magazine’s star cultural columnist was Christopher Hitchens, still Diana’s number-one public critic. Editor Graydon Carter was Diana’s host for the evening ahead.
She showed up and she looked fabulous and I don’t think anybody knew what Charles was going to say on TV that night – at least I didn’t. And it was a very nice night and if she felt any signs of distress or betrayal, she didn’t show it.
Soon it was Hitchens’s turn to be introduced.
She looked terrific – she was drop-dead gorgeous, in a beautifully cut dress and very daring. But it occurred to me that what she was thinking was, If I do this right, my ghastly hubby’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby will not be on page one tomorrow and instead it will be ‘Di Knocks ’em Dead at Serpentine Bash’ . . .
And I thought I’ll have to wing it, so I said, ‘It’s delightful to meet you, we republicans must stick together,’ and she laughed prettily. The men around her sort of reared back and whinnied and snorted a bit, and there was a bit of ‘I say, what d’you mean by that?’ And I said, ‘Well, she’s done rather more to subvert the monarchy by accident than I have been able to accomplish on purpose’ . . .she seemed to get the joke.
14
Not Easy Being Me
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‘What is a Princess for? A Princess is for looking at.’ Jayne Fincher remembers the good days.
Whenever we went on a trip we’d always have a cocktail party with her. She loved getting together with us. She wanted to know who was getting married to who, who was having an affair with who, who’d got a new car, who had a new suit or a new haircut. She knew everybody’s nicknames. She loved it. The first thing she’d say when she came in was, ‘What’s the latest gossip?’
By the winter of 1993/4 the relationship was very different. As a newly single woman, Diana was determined to lead as normal a life as possible. But press attention grew ever more intense, and the woman who had courted the media grew increasingly to hate and fear it, or at least the part of it that pursued her through the streets of London. She had freed herself from her protection team. The police were uncertain what to do, and maintained a group of four officers for her to use if she wanted. She rarely did.
London’s freelance photographers could not believe their luck when Diana started to walk the streets without police protection. In November 1993 Glenn Harvey was staking out her colonic irrigation clinic in Beauchamp Place when Diana came out alone. He ambushed her from a shop doorway, got his photos, and rang the Sun.
Ken Lennox, new boss of the picture desk, was intrigued to find that the rumours that Diana had dropped her police protection were true. Harvey’s partner, Mark Saunders, recalls the ensuing frenzy:
It then became common knowledge, and there was just a tremendous excitement among the paparazzi based in London, who kind of thought, Well, this is not gonna last. And so it was approached in the same way that now, if Jack Nicholson’s in town for a week or if Brad Pitt is in town for a week, the paparazzi get excited and they’ll do that person for a whole week. And that was the initial approach – that was how it was done. How long are we gonna get this for? Probably a week, maybe two, and then obviously common sense is going to prevail and she’ll have to have protection.
If there had been police protection for the Princess, whenever she came out of one of these restaurants they would come out first and they would say, ‘There’s the line, don’t cross it.’ And you wouldn’t have crossed it. It’s in your interests not to.
A bad-tempered game began. Diana would be out shopping or on her way back from the gym. Men with cameras and mobile phones would appear. She might stop and pose or she might cover her face and run. The photographers would chase after her ‘like puppies after something that moves’, says Ken Lennox. ‘The older heads would have said, “Oh my God,” and drawn in; the younger ones just ran, still trying to take pictures.’ There were no reassuringly bulky detectives around to say, ‘Stand back, boys, that’s enough,’ or ‘You don’t want me to step on that fancy camera by accident now, do you, mate?’
Fincher had been photographing Diana for thirteen years. She was horrified by the behaviour of the new breed of self-styled ‘paps’ that now dogged her.
They would be right up close in front, so that she couldn’t walk one step, so she’s got to keep dodging. It’s physically oppressive. It would be like being hunted in a pack. And they would be verbally aggressive to her, they would say, ‘Take your clothes off because we need to earn some money.’ They’d use foul language at her and be completely abusive and horrible.
Judy Wade witnessed similar scenes.
And they used language that was aggressive – they’d say, ‘I’ve whacked her,’ meaning I’ve done a picture of her; or ‘I’ve hosed her up and down,’ that meant doing a full-length picture; and ‘I’ve blitzed her’ – that was, you know, firing off the flashgun at her non-stop.
Mark Saunders explains the terminology of his trade:
To take pictures rapidly – whether you are taking pictures of a starving baby in Somalia or the Princess of Wales in Beauchamp Place – in our business to take pictures rapidly is to ‘blitz’, to ‘hose’, to ‘whack’, to ‘hit’ . . . I mean it does sound aggressive when you read it – I was banging, blitzing, hosing – yeah, it can read quite bad, but it wasn’t done like that.
Speed was ever more important as photographers raced to be first to get a shot to the picture desks. Market forces were at work. Diana’s empty official diary had reduced the supply, and so raised the price, of her photograph. Moreover, the shots that they now got of Diana using a parking meter or getting a parking ticket were more interesting to the tabloids than shots of her opening a school or launching a ship. For Mark Saunders it was a bonanza that he was constantly expecting to come to an abrupt end.
But it didn’t. It just went on and on. You’d have Princess Diana in a newsagent’s, Princess Diana in a restaurant, Princess Diana parking her car, Princess Diana at the Chelsea Harbour Club, it was just snowballing all the time. The prices of the pictures were going through the roof. So suddenly sitting on Princess Diana’s tail for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, became very much worth it. And they weren’t doing it with any bad attitudes, they were doing it purely because the chance had arrived for them to make a lot of money from a person who was becoming more famous than ever.
A routine set of Princess Diana shopping, looking at some gowns, possibly buying a gown, coming out with the gown packaged? Maybe fifteen hundred pounds, maybe two thousand. Swimming-costume stuff was picking up ten thousand, ten thousand pounds for a set of pictures, and then remember you would be selling that abroad as well, so you’d be picking up money on the foreign rights. As a rule of thumb a good internationally selling picture should make three times as much money abroad as it does in London.
By the early 1990s the same products were selling in every market, and the same stories were playing on every one of the new cable and satellite television channels. It was called ‘globalisation’. But universal sales were only possible where everyone was interested in the same subject, and so the range of news contracted to a small number of widely appreciated topics. International celebrities were ever more a staple, and Diana was the princess of international celebrities, one of a very select few whose photograph was valuable almost everywhere. As Mark Saunders’ accountant was to discover.
I look at my sales reports sometimes from those days and there are some countries there I didn’t even know existed – I think they probably grew out of Russia or something like that. It wasn’t an amazing amount of money in that everybody was making millions and millions of dollars, but the people that were making money were making enough money to earn a good living. And it was also a good lifestyle.
Most of Fleet Street was making it quite clear to the paparazzi that they did not want the paparazzi pursuing the Princess of Wales, but if the paparazzi were insisting on pursuing the Princess of Wales, they certainly would be prepared to buy the pictures that they did not want taken.
The lure was difficult to resist. The Sun’s sale might jump by 60,000 copies on even a minor Diana story. The editors of Hello! found that Diana on the cover would increase sales by 10 per cent. A compromising photograph was an enormous temptation. In May 1994 Eduardo Junco, proprietor of Hello!’s Spanish parent Hola!, phoned Jephson to tell him that a paparazzo had a photo of the Princess adjusting her bikini while on holiday in Malaga. At Jephson’s request the chivalrous proprietor bought the offending picture and suppressed it.
Diana’s reaction to the attention of the paparazzi could be unpredictable. Sometimes she would be friendly and smile for their cameras. More often she was frowning. This puzzled them:
What have we done wrong? What are we doing today that we weren’t doing yesterday? You could never understand it until you read the press reports and then you would see either that picture was taken to negate some bad publicity that was coming in from another angle, or else there would have been a lovely picture of Camilla Parker Bowles in the paper the day before which Diana would hate.
Such observations made them cynical and reduced their sympathy for her when she was distressed or angry. Mark Saunders, who followed her for months, confirms that ‘the stuff about Diana making secret trips to see sick children and stuff like that – it’s not a myth, it’s actually true. She really did things like that.’ The photographers were impressed by such occasional ‘private’ mercy missions but noted that they invariably appeared, with accompanying photographs, under Richard Kay’s name in the Daily Mail. Jephson recognised whole sentences in Kay’s articles as phrases of Diana’s. Finally, in June 1994, photographs were printed of Diana’s clandestine conversations with the reporter in her car.
When confronted, Diana developed an unnerving habit of challenging her pursuers to justify themselves. As Mark Saunders recalls:
When Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Princess Di, Madonna says, ‘Can you not take my photograph,’ you just ignore it because you expect that. They make their complaint and then they go. But she wouldn’t go. So then there would be . . . a kind of embarrassing silence and then she would say something, ‘Why does this have to go on all the time?’ . . . How do you answer a question like that? When the most famous woman in the world, a woman who is never, ever out of papers, says to you, ‘Why do you have to keep photographing me?’
And then she would say, ‘It’s not easy being me,’ and you would say, ‘Yes, of course, I understand.’ Well, you wouldn’t understand! W
hy would I understand what it’s like to be the Princess of Wales?
I always got the feeling that she wanted to talk, but not necessarily about being photographed or being upset by being photographed. And it’s not just me that had this feeling, the other paparazzi she would talk to always said the same thing. God knows why someone didn’t just say, ‘Why don’t we go and have a cup of tea and try and sort this out?’ Because maybe, just maybe it might’ve worked.
This unpredictable atmosphere around Diana gave rise to an ‘in-joke’.
When you asked, ‘Where is the Princess?’ somebody would say, ‘She’s in Kensington’ and as an in-joke you would say, ‘Is it a loony lunch?’ which would mean ‘What’s the situation? Is it all clear today or is she in a bad mood?’ And if the answer was ‘Yeah, it’s loony tunes,’ that meant keep a low profile.
And obviously ‘loony tunes’, ‘loony time’, ‘loony trip’ evolved [into] ‘the loon’ in reference to her, and from that became the verb to ‘loon’ – I loon, you loon. To ‘loon’ means to shout and scream at someone and tell them to go away, basically. So it became a verb. But it’s not – we always say it was a term of endearment, and everybody laughs at that and says, ‘How, how on earth could it be?’ It was genuinely a term of endearment, a laugh, an in-joke.
There was a demand for pictures of Diana angry or in tears, and so she would be provoked. She said they tried to trip her, and shouted obscenities looking for a reaction – ‘You’re the fucking Princess of Wales, stop carrying on like a fucking tart’; ‘You’re a real fucking loon, aren’t you?’ Mark Saunders does not remember the provocation being quite that bad:
