Imagining Diana

by Diane Clehane

  The Jackie O parallels only intensified as editors immediately dug up Diana’s quote about her hopes for William’s future when she had said, “I’m hoping he’ll grow up to be as smart about it as John Kennedy, Jr. I want William to be able to handle things as well as John does” to support their claims that it was, in fact, Diana’s master plan. She was mortified that something she’d said quite innocently had made its way into this terribly tragic story, and dragged William into it as well.

  Frequently when Diana spoke to William, she could tell that his deep mistrust of the press had turned into downright contempt. When she came home after her stay in the hospital, he told his mother he would never forgive “the vultures” who nearly killed her in the endless pursuit of photographs of her. “Can’t we do anything about this?” he asked.

  William was digging in his heels about appearing for scheduled photo calls whenever he felt he was put on display unnecessarily. Although Buckingham Palace and the tabloid press reached an agreement that William and Harry would be free of paparazzi intrusions while they were in school in exchange for regularly scheduled updates on the princes’ lives, Diana’s eldest son was resentful about having to strike such a bargain. Just two days ago, she’d had a tense phone call with Charles over William’s perceived stubbornness regarding requests made of him by the Palace.

  The Queen had scheduled a massive celebration at Windsor Castle to mark the year’s milestones, which included the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, turning seventy and the Queen Mother’s one-hundredth birthday.

  Even though the affair was held on June 21, William’s birthday, he opted to stay away. Harry had gone with Papa, but William had refused to join his family for the party.

  “He gets that from you, Diana,” an exasperated sounding Charles had told her.

  “He knows his own mind. I don’t see what the problem is,” countered Diana, who was secretly beaming that her son was standing up to the men in gray.

  “He has to understand he has a duty, and upholding the traditions of the monarchy is part of the job.”

  “Skipping a family party isn’t a sin, Charles. William knows what his responsibilities are, but sometimes we need to let him just be a teenager.”

  “He’ll never be ‘just a teenager,’ Diana. He is the future King of England.”

  “All the more reason to let him have as much freedom as he can now.”

  Freedom was something very much on Diana’s mind now that she’d had a taste of it since arriving in New York. While there were many things she missed about her life in London, the British press was not one of them.

  After becoming a semi-recluse in the months after the crash, she’d inadvertently made photographs of herself more valuable. The bounty on pictures of a post-crash Diana had tripled. A close-up of her face was worth 50,000 pounds.

  The paparazzi finally got those shots when Diana met with Tony Blair in the spring of 1998 to discuss her newly created role as a roving ambassador for Britain. There were over a hundred cameras pointed at the door of 10 Downing Street when she and the prime minister emerged from their meeting. It was her first “official” post-crash appearance, and while the newspapers dutifully covered the story, every article was overshadowed by close-up shots of Diana’s face and speculation about what she’d already done to it and planned to do to it in the future. “Well at least now they’ve got the picture they’ve all been panting for,” she told the prime minister as they said their goodbyes. “I’m sure I’ve just paid for a few island holidays.”

  In the years following the crash, she remained the paparazzi’s number one target. She was hounded anytime she stepped out of her car to go shopping or to the gym. Now that she was no longer an HRH and member of the royal family, the photographers (nearly all of them men) began treating her as if she were a B-list celebrity fresh out of rehab. They frequently harassed her, taunting her about her divorce, even cursing at her calling out “Bitch!” in hopes of getting a reaction that they could capture on film for a tidy profit. Incredibly, there had been more high-speed chases through the streets of London. One night, a car carrying two photographers closely followed hers through the narrow, rain-slicked streets of Knightsbridge, causing her to nearly skid off the road. When she pulled over and wept, the “paps” who had been in pursuit of her fired off a few shots through her car window before taking off.

  The suffocating attention Diana received from the press in England after the crash upset her for another reason. She knew it displeased the Queen. Having learned the hard lessons from overshadowing her mother-in-law in the media for many years, Diana now had no desire to upstage her, now that she had the Queen firmly on her side.

  Diana was grateful to the Queen for her support during her recovery. Her mother-in-law had long been the sole sympathetic ear in the royal family in those years when Diana and Charles’s marriage was imploding (although she stopped short of intervening in Charles and Camilla’s affair). When Diana and Charles separated, the Queen refused to banish Diana from the Court, urging family members to show the mother of the future king the understanding she needed, which perhaps might lead to a reconciliation.

  But the Queen had come to see why the other members of her family had tired of Diana when the divorce negotiations dragged on and turned acrimonious. When Diana made her own announcement about the settlement before Buckingham Palace issued its statement, the relationship between the two women was effectively over. The crash changed all that.

  Diana knew the backing she received from the royals after she left the hospital was a direct result of the Queen’s directive for the family to show compassion, not condemnation. Her Majesty was also well aware of how difficult all of this had been on William and Harry and wanted to do everything she could to make her grandsons feel safe and secure. Mindful of all of that, Diana had nervously accepted the Queen’s invitation to Sandringham the first Christmas after the crash as a sign of thanks. While it was hardly a lovefest, Charles and the boys fawned over Diana and she was greatly moved by the gesture. Afterward, she wrote a heartfelt letter thanking the Queen for her kindness. Diana was also grateful that the Queen had advised Charles to keep his relationship with Camilla out of the papers for the foreseeable future. The Queen, it seemed, was not in favor of Charles’s remarrying, given the current situation with his ex-wife.

  Diana hated the endless stories about her post-crash appearance, and she knew the Queen felt it had all gone on for too long. The only way she knew to minimize the stories was to stay largely out of sight. She had grown weary of all the ‘before and after’ stories that plagued her in London. Diana needed a complete break from the past to make a fresh start, and she believed the only way to do that was to leave England. The Queen understood, agreeing that this might be the best solution for all concerned, but she let Diana keep her apartment at Kensington Palace for the time being. (She was convinced Diana would likely return to England when the novelty of America had worn off.) The boys would now stay with Charles at York House at St. James’s Palace during school breaks.

  Diana had spent only a few days at Kensington Palace this year when she traveled back last month to attend the funeral of Barbara Cartland, the mother of Diana’s stepmother, Raine Spencer. After years spent hating the woman whom Diana had perceived as taking her beloved father away from her, she came to the realization Raine truly loved her father and had had nothing to do with the breakup of the Spencer family. Diana invited Raine to lunch at Claridge’s and reconciled with her before the crash. The two women now had a warm, although somewhat tenuous friendship. Raine was grateful that Diana had made the trip to attend the funeral and told her she was rooting for her “to make a real go of it in New York.”

  Diana wanted to be as unencumbered as possible for the move. Before she went to America, she pared down her already winnowed wardrobe (thanks to the Christie’s auction) even further. She sent off the last few frou-frou dresses to storage an
d donated her wedding dress to the National Dress Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She did, however, keep one important totem from her former life. Diana still wore her dazzling sapphire and diamond engagement ring. In the years since the world had gotten its first glimpse of the ever-present totem she wore on the ring finger of her left hand, it had taken on greater significance beyond a symbol of her betrothal to Charles; it had become a symbol of her.

  With her sons away at school and spending more time enjoying royal pursuits with their father and grandfather at Balmoral, Diana knew she would gradually get less and less time with them. Now that she had moved to America, she worried about losing them completely to the royal family—particularly William, who was already enmeshed in all the traditions of the House of Windsor. Charles had arranged for William to have weekly private teas with Granny where they discussed one of their mutual interests, the history of the British military. Diana’s greatest fear, she told her therapist, was suffering the same fate as her mother, losing her children in her divorce. Diana had joint custody, but she felt William and Harry slipping away. Both boys preferred picnics with their father and grandparents at Balmoral to beach holidays with her on foreign shores. Now divorced, she was forced to come up with destinations for holidays with the boys outside the circle of the royal family, which generally limited her to accepting the invitations extended by her millionaire and, in Teddy’s case, billionaire friends. The only reason Diana stayed in England for as long as she had was to be close to her sons, but since they were no longer living with her and she was spending so much of her time holed up in Kensington Palace, she had come to feel like an exile in her own home. Diana wanted to escape the ghosts of her failed relationships and unfulfilled dreams that haunted her in England. She yearned for a fresh start and even a chance at love—one that would last.

  h

  While Diana had grown less concerned about the physical effects of the accident, and vowed not to endure any further surgeries to minimize her facial scarring, she was willing to try far-less invasive injections to plump up the area around the scar. Her renowned Park Avenue plastic surgeon, Dr. Gerald Imber, told her that with the injections, there was the potential for continued improvement. “But,” he said, “there is no such thing as making the scars invisible.”

  With her fortieth birthday a year away, the injections around her scar were not the only shots she received at Dr. Imber’s office. She religiously kept up with Botox shots every three months to keep her complexion smooth. “Touch-ups” was how she referred to them. Diana was adamant that any cosmetic or dermatological adjustments be completely undetectable. Dr. Imber employed a gentle hand when he administered Botox to Diana’s forehead, around her eyes and above her lips, which kept her looking natural, and a far cry from the women she’d noticed around her Upper East Side neighborhood who had begun to look expressionless, and worse, embalmed.

  Dr. Imber was always impeccably dressed and had a relaxed self-assurance that put his patients at ease. Most important of all, especially to Diana, he was exceedingly discreet. She’d joked with him that while he was at it, perhaps he could shorten her nose. “It’s always been my worst feature!” she told him.

  Each time she slipped into the private entrance of the doctor’s office on Park Avenue at 76th Street, she prayed there wouldn’t be photographers lurking and there hadn’t been—until last week. On that day, Diana spotted a young man sitting on a red Vespa directly across the street. His long, wavy brown hair fell over his face as he looked down at his phone. Then, as if he sensed he was being watched, he lifted his head and fixed his gaze on her.

  John, Diana said to herself. With his pretty face and rangy body, he bore more than a passing resemblance to a young John Travolta, and she flashed back to their dance at the White House in 1985. She had been smitten with the movie star from the moment she felt his arm around her.

  The photographer, realizing that Diana had taken note of his presence, smiled and gave her a slight wave. Diana started to walk away, but turned back to look over her shoulder and saw the mystery man was smiling at her. He was sitting astride the scooter with his arms crossed in front of him. This is madness, Diana thought to herself, but I have to know who he is.

  She waited for a yellow cab to pass, then approached him from across the street.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  He was even better looking up close. His blue eyes were full of mischief as he hung over the handlebars of his scooter.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?” she fibbed. But what else could she say? You remind me of John Travolta?

  “I’ve seen you everywhere.”

  Diana found herself amused by the young man, who was clearly enjoying this guessing game.

  “Do you live nearby?” asked Diana. “Perhaps that’s it.”

  “Here? The Upper East Side is a little fancy for me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Diana playfully. “That’s a very nice motor bike. Looks expensive.”

  “Thanks, it’s a business investment.”

  “Are you working for one of those concierge companies that promises to deliver anything anywhere at any time?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you do?”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “I see,” said Diana, her mood changing in an instant. “So let me guess, you’re following me?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not it. I mean, I’ve seen you around town and taken your picture at the ballet and some fashion events. But I wasn’t following you. I was sent up here to try to get some shots of this guy.” He showed Diana a picture of a politician who was rumored to be cheating on his wife. “He’s supposed to be hooking up with some chick at The Carlyle today, but I’ve been here all afternoon and I haven’t seen him.”

  “How unfortunate,” said Diana who’d turned her back to him and was standing at the curb looking both ways, waiting for an opening so she could escape.

  “Look, I wasn’t going to take your picture. I swear.”

  “But you said you have.”

  “Yes, on the red carpet. At events. Not when you’re walking around on the street.”

  “Until today.” She turned and faced him straight on. “You people have made my life hell for so long and you’re never going to stop, are you? I thought I wasn’t going to be stalked in New York. Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “I didn’t even have my camera out. It’s in my backpack. Look. I promise you, I’m not like those guys . . . ”

  “Like the ones that almost killed me?” Diana could feel her anger rising. This was a terrible idea.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said. Practically all the color had drained from his face. “Those guys were animals.”

  “Yes, they were.” Diana couldn’t believe she actually felt bad for going after him and realized he was far too young to have been doing this kind of work for more than a few years.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Is this what you plan on doing with your life?”

  “Actually, I want to be a fashion photographer and work for the magazines.”

  “And meet supermodels,” Diana laughed in spite of herself.

  “That wouldn’t be too bad.”

  “Are you in school?”

  “I graduated from Parsons last year.”

  “So why are you doing this?”

  “I’m still waiting for Vogue to call so in the meantime, I’m doing this to pay off my loans.”

  “How much do you owe?”

  “About thirty thousand.”

  “What’s the going rate for a photo of me?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, clearly confused by where this conversation was going.

  “Well, I would imagine a good photo of
me on the street might fetch a decent price.”

  “Yeah.”

  Diana took her sunglasses off and put them on the top of her head. She felt pretty and fit in her DVF wrap dress and Manolo slingbacks. Diana checked her reflection in the window behind them.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kevin.”

  “Okay then, Kevin,” said Diana. “Get out your camera.”

  The young man quickly took his camera out of his backpack and hopped off the bike.

  Diana looked around and miraculously, East 76th Street was quiet for the moment. “I’m going to walk across the street and when I get to the middle of the road, I’ll turn around and you’re going to get your picture.”

  Incredulous at this stroke of good fortune, Kevin stood at the curb with his camera pointed at Diana.

  “Count to ten,” she said, as she removed the sunglasses from her head and shook her hair. “Out loud.”

  Diana began to cross the street. When he called out “ten,” she stopped, turned her body toward him and her hair blew forward—conveniently covering her scar. He got off a few shots just in time before the light changed. She finished crossing the street and didn’t look back.

  The next morning, Kevin’s photograph took up the entire front page of the New York Post with the headline “A Look to Di For.” Teddy called her and said, ‘You look great. What a shot! It reminds me of that famous photo of Jackie Onassis.”

  “Really?” said Diana. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

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  Diana didn’t know whether she could see herself in a long-term relationship with Teddy, but she knew she felt better about herself than she had in a long time when she was with him. Having given up any hope of reuniting with Hasnat, Diana had gradually allowed herself to feel something other than friendship for Teddy. She didn’t know whether she was in love with him, but she did love him. It was a more mature relationship than anything she had experienced in the arms of Dodi, or Hasnat, or any of the lovers she’d had during her marriage. The sex was satisfying. Teddy made Diana feel sexy, beautiful and, most of all, treasured. He possessed both an easy masculinity and an undeniable swagger, which Diana found very much a turn-on. She also loved how Teddy embodied the plain-speaking, very direct manner that was both quintessentially American and very New York, of which Diana found herself growing increasingly fond.