Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  For Mike Whitlam the change of government made an immediate difference:

  [It] enabled me to discuss with at least three government ministers why the British government were not first to ratify the landmines convention, even though they’d signed it. And so people like Robin Cook [the new Foreign Secretary] and others quickly came together and we managed to make it happen.

  Labour brought other new possibilities for Diana. She told Lalvani that she got on well with Tony and Cherie Blair and had given Cherie some advice on how to dress in public. She was invited to Chequers, where Blair said he was going to offer her the long-dreamed-of ‘ambassadorial role’. He had, he said, already discussed it with Bill Clinton, a man Diana also admired. By July nothing had been arranged, but Diana was optimistic. She wanted some kind of peacemaker’s role and was confident that she could achieve something by mediating in Ireland.

  * * *

  ’You’ll never guess who just dropped by. My ex!’

  Diana’s relationship with Charles had improved, as her trainer Jenny Rivett recalls:

  I remember one time that he had popped into Kensington Palace and I was there for some training, and she came bounding in and said, ‘Oh, Charles says I’ve got great legs,’ and was just kind of really happy and pleased. And I just thought, That’s great, they obviously have got some form of a relationship that’s working.

  Charles visited Diana several times at Kensington Palace in the spring, dropping in for tea when he used the nearby helipad. They appeared comfortable together at William’s confirmation and Harry’s school sports day. Charles offered to take her and William with him to Hong Kong, where he was due to hand over control to the Chinese. She said she’d think about it.

  In March, Vanity Fair commissioned New York photographer Mario Testino to shoot a special set of portrait pictures for their July cover. They were among the best ever taken. Under the headline ‘Diana Reborn’, she looked confident, fresh and relaxed.

  But thoughout this period personal relations remained stormy. Diana argued with her acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo and her energy healer Simone Simmons, both of whom had become friends and had done much to comfort her throughout her relationship with Hasnat Khan. She pursued her vendetta against Tiggy Legge-Bourke, her office issuing hostile statements about the nanny after she was seen pouring champagne at an Eton picnic. When she was criticised for this, Diana blamed Michael Gibbons, her new secretary. She also blamed Stuart Higgins editor of the Sun.

  We ran the story about what the Princess had said about Tiggy Legge-Bourke, which came from the Princess’s office . . . [Later] her aides ring up and say, ‘How could you do that? It’s totally untrue.’ They had clearly been told by the Princess, ‘Get on the phone and give that Higgins bloke a bollocking, now!’ And I said, ‘But you know it’s true. You told me!’

  * * *

  Diana’s relationship with Hasnat Khan remained difficult, as she confided to Joseph Sanders:

  She hoped they would be married and have a family. One of the problems was that Hasnat Khan’s family were Moslems and they didn’t really want Hasnat to marry anyone who wasn’t a Moslem. She went from great joy to great despair. Sometimes she said, ‘Oh God, it’s never going to work. He doesn’t want to see me any more.’ Sometimes she said, ‘Oh, it’s fantastic, you know, I am so happy.’

  In May, Diana revisited Pakistan for a two-day visit, including lunch with sixty Pakistani MPs, each paying a thousand dollars towards Imran Khan’s hospital. She also visited Hasnat Khan’s family once again. She did not tell Khan that she was going, and the visit forced their relationship into crisis. After a series of newspaper articles the previous autumn, Khan suspected that a press campaign was being orchestrated to push him into marriage. To find that Diana had visited his family behind his back, and that this visit had also been leaked to the press, was too much. On her return, Diana said that the doctor was withdrawing from her and she was very distressed according to Simone Simmons and Elsa Bowker. In June, Diana was photographed leaving Annabel’s nightclub with Gulu Lalvani at 2 a.m. Khan was further angered and would not take her calls for several days.

  * * *

  Le Monde is a heavyweight Parisian newspaper covering political and economic stories in great detail. Annick Cojean worked mostly on foreign reports. The paper followed British politics very closely, but found Royal Family stories of little interest. When they heard that Cojean wanted to interview ‘Princess Di’, her colleagues laughed and said, ‘She’ll say “no”, that’s obvious, and anyway it’s ridiculous, Le Monde doesn’t deal with princesses.’ But Cojean was persistent. She had been commissioned to write a series of articles for the summer, each based on an influential photograph: the little girl in Vietnam, burned by napalm; Gorbachev saved by Yeltsin; Arafat signing the peace deal with Rabin. And among the images that most struck her were several of Diana. She called Kensington Palace and described the idea.

  I said that I wanted to interview the Princess in the same way as I was going to interview Gorbachev, Arafat and Lech Walesa. I spoke to someone very friendly, who said, ‘But you must write to her.’ I said, ‘She must get five hundred letters a day!’ And then the secretary laughed and said, ‘The Princess reads all the letters!’ I think that the very day she received it, we got a phone call saying, ‘The Princess is delighted. When do you want to come?’

  When Cojean arrived at Kensington Palace, she showed Diana the other photographs. She was interested in the little girl from Vietnam and said, ‘But she’s alive! That’s incredible! Where is she? What country does she live in?’ Then they turned to the fifteen pictures of Diana that the Frenchwoman had brought.

  Each time she looked at a photo she’d say, ‘Oh yes, I remember, that was at the hospital in London. Ah, that was with Nelson Mandela, that was wonderful.’ And then suddenly she saw a photo of the little boy and said: ‘That was in Lahore in 1996. I’ll always remember, I held him in my arms and I found out later that he had died very soon afterwards. He had cancer.’

  Diana reminisced about the tenderness she had felt while holding the boy.

  I asked her, ‘Why did you pick this little child up?’ And she said, ‘I knew that he was going to die, I spoke to his parents. I asked if I could take him in my arms and I held him like that for a long time.’ The little boy, who was blind, lifted his eyes towards her at one point. He heard them laughing and he said, ‘Please don’t make fun of me!’

  Then Diana came up with some harsh remarks about British newspapers. ‘The press is ferocious. Whatever I do, wherever I go, it waits for me, it tracks me down. Whatever I do, whatever I say, it will always look for controversy and contradiction. It will always criticise me.’

  They talked about the Angola trip, and Diana explained how important the landmine campaign was to her, and that she hoped the convention would be signed by the United States. Cojean said, ‘But there is a new British government that has just made a very important announcement to ban landmines.’ Diana replied, ‘Yes, it’s terrific. It’s what he promised and he’s doing a terrific job. The last government was hopeless!’

  That day I met a Princess who seemed to be happy, who was very relaxed and had a cheerful sparkle in her eye. She spoke with such warmth and conviction about what she did and about her life. She said that she had a very strong and special contact with people and that she had to be close and tender. This was the impulse which would propel her towards other things. She said, ‘Wherever it is in the world that someone calls me in distress, I will run to them.’

  * * *

  Mike Whitlam had organised a trip to Washington to launch the American Red Cross’s anti-landmine campaign. Diana flew there on 16 June in time to attend Katherine Graham’s eightieth birthday party. The Washington Post publisher had recently become one of Diana’s expanding number of American friends. The next day she gave a press conference with Elizabeth Dole, president of the American Red Cross. That night there was a gala dinner for five hundred at the Museum of Women in t
he Arts. Mike Whitlam remembers what a difference her presence made:

  We raised six hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the one evening, which for Washington was a very good result.

  We stayed with Lucia Flecha da Lima and were very well looked after. I’d been out at a series of meetings and then I came in and one of the staff said would I like to join the Princess for tea in her suite? So I said, ‘Yes, I would be very happy to’ and went into the lounge to find her not quite how I’d imagined, but with Lucia Flecha da Lima, relaxing before the evening event with a face pack on! I blushed, and she commented that I’d blushed, which made me blush even more. I turned to leave, saying, ‘I thought we were having tea?’ And she said, ‘No, no, come and join us and have some girl talk.’

  And so we had a cup of tea and talked about the day, and then I left her. That evening we were due to be at the event at seven or eight o’clock and I was waiting in the lobby. She came down the stairs in this stunning red dress. She really did look good. She walked down the stairs and spotted me, and I must have looked absolutely ridiculous because she just came up to me and pushed my chin up to close my dropping jaw.

  Diana wanted to speak to the President about her future. Instead she got a breakfast meeting with Hillary Clinton. She flew to New York to visit Mother Teresa, saturating the Bronx with TV crews and security, and then returned to Washington to complete her Red Cross commitments. She returned to New York on 24 June for the preview party of a charity sale of her dresses, an idea suggested by Prince William. The party, hosted by Lord Hindlip of Christie’s, was also for charity, and eight hundred guests each paid over £100 to attend. Kate Moss, Zandra Rhodes and Barbara Walters were there, amid rumours that Walters was about to record another confessional interview with Diana.

  Americans loved Diana, not least, as Graydon Carter explains, because they saw her as a rebel:

  I think it may have reflected a love-hate relationship with England. Americans don’t really like royal families. They only like the ‘theme park’ aspect of a royal family, the amusement park icons of this little fantasy kingdom across the ocean. She represented both a connection to that and somebody who was rebellious against it. And I think America was founded out of rebellion and they like rebels by and large. And here’s one who looked fabulous in an evening gown too.

  The sale raised $3.26 million. It was split between several charities, with the bulk going to the Aids Crisis Trust.

  Back in London, Hasnat Khan was still agonising about his relationship with Diana.

  * * *

  New York was a second home now. In July, Diana had lunch with two of the city’s most influential women – Tina Brown, editor of the New Yorker, and Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue. They met at the Four Seasons restaurant, the epitome of understated Manhattan chic. Behind the shimmering gold-chain curtains, and alongside the cherry trees, mahogany and Picassos, Diana told a slightly incredulous Brown that Tony Blair was about to send her on ‘missions’, and that she was looking forward to spreading peace and love and ‘sorting people’s heads out’. Perhaps, as Brown had once predicted, Diana had now reached ‘Graceland’. But if so, she still ventured out. She spoke of secret visits to hospices, to comfort the dying, and of how such moments brought her release. Brown thought her strangely intense, but mature too, ‘a woman in earnest’.

  * * *

  POV stands for Point of View. It’s a film-making term for the moment when you cut to the world as seen through a particular character’s eyes. We thought hard about the best way to render Diana’s POV in our television series, or whether we should even try. With a video camera set to record three or six frames a second, the perspectives lurch and then settle, a face in a crowd emerges from a blurry background, the lights of passing cars smear across the screen. Is this how she saw her world – her worlds? For by now she was moving quickly through so many of them. Thinking of Angola at the Four Seasons, thinking of Manhattan in Luanda. Absorbing the taste and refinement of one, the amputations and shantytowns of the other, her internal camera lurching first one way then another. And all the time, the montage speeding up.

  * * *

  Mohamed Al Fayed had cultivated royalty for years. Harrods, the famous London department store that he owned, prominently displayed its many ‘by royal appointment’ crests, and he sponsored the annual Windsor Horse Show. He was even closer to Raine Spencer, a non-executive director of Harrods. Diana was a regular visitor to the store, and Fayed gave generously to her favourite charities. Hearing that she had no firm summer plans, he invited Diana and her sons to join his family on a holiday in St Tropez.

  Diana wanted her sons to have a great summer holiday, their first since the divorce was finalised, and she thought it would be good for them to have Fayed’s four youngest children around. After letters were sent from Harrods to Kensington Palace promising total privacy, Diana decided to ignore the negative advice she received, saying that Fayed was an old family friend and she trusted him to take great care of her and her sons. The day after Diana said yes, Fayed completed the purchase of a new £20 million luxury yacht, the Jonikal.

  Within twenty-four hours of the arrival of Diana and her sons, the St Tropez photographers were tipped off. Jean-Louis Macault usually worked the summer season, taking pictures of visiting celebrities:

  It was about seven o’clock in the evening when I received a phone call from the chief editor of my agency in Paris saying, ‘Diana’s in St Tropez!’ My reaction was this is going to be very difficult because this girl keeps herself hidden the whole time. She’ll be in some villa that will be impossible to find, or on a boat. Then they told me she’s staying with someone called Al Fayed, who had a villa in the park area, plus a boat and a private landing jetty, just after Brigitte Bardot’s place.

  Then, for the first time in my life, I saw Diana. She was being taken towards a huge yacht. This, the woman who ran away, who stole the keys of photographers’ motorbikes. One had always had the impression that it would be impossible to get a photo like this of her. And now I could see her wearing a swimming costume! I waited there for the best part of the day. There weren’t many of us, only the five or six who were usually in St Tropez. I saw her come back again that evening wearing the same costume, walking along quite calmly. She climbed out of the motor-boat, stopped for a moment to say something to the boatman, and then she went back into Al Fayed’s house, glancing right at us towards her right, she looked at us. Zap! I thought that she would run or that bodyguards would put a towel in front of her, but no. This seemed incredible!

  The next day I returned. At about eleven o’clock in the morning we saw William and Harry arrive, at which point we said to ourselves that all we needed now was Prince Charles, the Queen of England and the Pope.

  Diana was playing, joking with her children, grabbing them by the neck, kissing Harry. We took vertical shots, wide shots, shots of William, who was on jet-skis. It was like Christmas! William went past and sprayed her all over. He went round and round her, spraying her, she was laughing.

  * * *

  While most of the world enjoyed Macault’s images of family fun, the coverage in Britain made much of Diana’s choice of holiday companion. The News of the World led with ‘Di and Sleaze Row Tycoon’; the Sunday Mirror chastised royal free-loading with ‘Di’s Freebie’.

  On Monday, 14 July Diana set off in a boat to meet the press. Arthur Edwards, who had arrived with a posse of British journalists, photographed the approach of an agitated Princess:

  The first thing she said was, ‘How long are you going to be here?’ And I told her and she said, ‘I don’t know why I don’t live abroad like my boys want me to.’ You’d say, ‘All right, I’ll speak to the editor and we’ll pull off.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want that. I just want to know how long you’re going to stay.’

  She was saying things like, ‘I’m not here as a guest of Mr Fayed. I’m here as a guest of his wife.’ And then she said, ‘You’ll be surprised what I’m going to do in the n
ext two weeks.’ And to this day I do not know what she was talking about. The only thing I can say is that as she left our boat she was close to tears. And then she did an amazing thing, she went back to the villa and jumped on the back of one of the jet-skis and roared round our boat several times, making fabulous pictures. She jumped off, went to the edge of the jetty and did a most beautiful dive into the sea and swam around laughing and as though she was having a wonderful time. It was the most amazing thing. One minute she was saying, ‘When are you leaving? You’re upsetting the boys!’ And the next minute she was giving us the most fantastic photo call.

  Edwards and his colleagues left the Fayed party alone during the evenings, as Macault explains:

  You shouldn’t imagine that she was shut up in a huge villa with Al Fayed’s bodyguards. She went out every evening, to restaurants, to nightclubs, and no photographer ever went into St Tropez during the evening to photograph her – there was a tacit understanding.

  The photographers were saying to themselves that if they wanted to have the same thing the next morning, it was better to stay quiet and let her lead her life as a woman at night-time. Then the following morning was for us again: she arrived, she put on her show, because, you know, it was a bit of a show. It was a real fashion parade, really rather enjoyable.

  The bodyguards would tell us that Diana was leaving by boat and that she would be back at around four in the afternoon; they didn’t hide anything from us. Sometimes one of Al Fayed’s men would come down and say to us: ‘That’s enough for today, there won’t be anything more today.’ They would only have had to make a telephone call and the police would have made us leave.