Imagining Diana

by Diane Clehane

  After the two-hour dinner ended around midnight, a stunning display of fireworks lit up the sky over Buckingham Palace. As Diana stood at one of the windows looking out at the beautiful streaks of color against the night sky, she felt the full weight of the day hit her all at once. She was never much of a night owl, and she wanted her son and his new wife to enjoy a few parent-free, blissful hours of celebration before they belonged to Britain again. When the last great flourish of fireworks trailed off into blackness and the guests broke into applause, Diana took off her Manolos and padded barefoot across the floor in search of William and Catherine to say her goodnights.

  Everyone had returned to the Throne Room where the music had gotten louder and the crowd more raucous. Even Charles and Camilla were doing their best to keep up on the dance floor. Diana spotted the newlyweds dancing in a circle with some friends from St. Andrews. She caught William’s eye and blew him a kiss. Harry was playing deejay and cracking jokes into the microphone. She waved to him. Then, before turning to leave, Diana stood for a moment and watched her sons. She closed her eyes and softly said thank you. She would see them in the morning.

  July 1, 2017

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  A tangle of muffled sounds echoed at the surface. She bobbed her head above the water and the sounds became suddenly clear: laughter, music, conversation. She cupped her hands over her eyes and surveyed the pristine white sands, deserted except for a small group of people gathered under a cluster of boldly striped beach umbrellas. She emerged from the crystalline sea, shook the water from her hair, and strode toward the shore. The sun felt good against her wet, sun-kissed flesh. It was her birthday, and this holiday on a private island—beyond the reach of the frenzied media and hungry paparazzi, to which they were all accustomed—had been a most welcome surprise.

  At 56, she had never felt physically stronger or more emotionally secure in herself. She could hardly believe that nearly two decades had passed since she had come dangerously close to losing the chance of this moment, of any moment, in one terrifying instant. Now, it was as if she had been reborn, with each day of this new life a reminder of the fragility of time, the power of love, and the keen responsibility she felt toward the people and the world around her.

  She had worn some of the most exquisite pieces of jewelry in the world, but this simple cord strewn with colored beads in a tribal design, now wet with the sea against her wrist, had become a treasured favorite. It had been given to her by an international human rights attorney she’d met several months back at a conference on AIDS. They subsequently traveled to Kenya together for the opening of a pediatric hospital bearing her name.

  On that trip, she had admired the bracelet among other handmade trinkets being sold by a young girl on the side of a dirt road. When they returned to their hotel, he pulled it out of his shirt pocket and tied it around her wrist, where it remained ever since. Her heart had been captured by the man with the kindest eyes she’d ever seen and the gentlest soul she’d ever known.

  The kind of love she yearned for, prayed for, had made itself known to her and would be waiting for her upon her return to London.

  She wrapped herself in a towel, approached the sleeping baby who was nestled in her mother’s arms beneath the cool shade of the umbrella, and bent down to gaze at the child’s precious face. She lightly stroked the baby’s mother’s arm, conveying admiration, approval and affection with a single touch. She then turned her attention to the red-haired man and brunette woman playing paddle ball in the sand, their athletic bodies glistening in the sun. How young and free and beautiful they are, she thought. She felt a kick of sand and heard a familiar little laugh when the little blonde boy ran up to her from behind. She scooped him up into her arms and put her index finger to her lips to remind him that his baby sister was sleeping and they mustn’t wake her. His eyes went wide, and he did the same, mimicking her. The boy’s father watched the exchange and smiled at both of them. She looked first at the man and then the boy whom she loved so much and who would both one day reign as king. But on this day, they were merely her son and grandson. Anyone who observed this tableau would have seen a perfect family—unaware of the pain they had experienced, the suffering they had endured, and the tragedy from which they had been mercifully spared.

  She set the towel down, slipped on an oversized white tunic and said that she was going to take a walk, by herself, along the beach. She strolled along the bleached sands, the gauzy material billowing around her in the breeze. She faded from view and finally disappeared into the hazy white horizon. It was as if an angel had been with them, and now was gone.

  Author’s Note

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  No mourners lined the sidewalk that day, but I could still see them. A year earlier, they’d stood three deep on this very road tossing flowers at the Rolls-Royce that carried Princess Diana’s coffin to Althorp. I remember watching the funeral on television and being struck by the deafening silence as the crowd watched the hearse drive by. The only sound you heard was a military helicopter overhead. As I looked out the window of the bus that I’d boarded that morning along with scores of other admirers of Diana’s from around the world, my mind wandered back to that day when the whole world seemed to stand still and when the clusters of people by the side of this road were representative of a global mourning that had stunned the British Establishment.

  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, shook me to my core. I’d woken up early that glorious first morning of September 1997, turned on the television and settled in with my coffee. I’d gotten up to watch Martha Stewart’s gardening show as I’d done every Sunday for the past year. Had I turned to the wrong channel? Why was there a white-haired British man reading the news? I turned up the volume.

  No.

  No.

  No. That can’t be. Princess Diana isn’t dead. She can’t be dead.

  At first, I thought there had been some terrible mistake. Hadn’t we just seen Diana with her beloved boys, looking carefree and happy in St. Tropez, on a jet ski with Harry, his arms wrapped tightly around his mother’s waist?

  Hadn’t the newspapers just run a photo of Diana standing on a beach in Sardinia? She couldn’t possibly have been in the mangled Mercedes in that tunnel they were showing on the screen.

  We’d grown so accustomed to seeing her image in the press almost daily—especially in the last, headline-making year of her life—and now she was gone.

  As the morning wore on, there was Tony Blair with genuine anguish in his voice calling Diana, “The People’s Princess.” A downcast Bill Clinton speaking to reporters in Nantucket, where he had been vacationing, said “how very sad Hillary and I are about the terrible accident that took the life of Princess Diana and the others who were with her . . . We liked her very much and admired her for her work with children, for people with AIDS, for ending the scourge of landmines in the world and for the love of her children, William and Harry.” But it was Diana’s brother, Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer, standing in front of his home in South Africa, who turned my shock into grief. “I always believed the press would kill her in the end,” he said. “But even I could not imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.” His barely controlled fury foreshadowed the stunning rebuke he would deliver at his sister’s funeral in six days.

  All these years later, the images and events of that week remain etched in my mind: the ocean of flowers outside Kensington Palace; Prince Charles and his young sons in their grown-up suits and ties trying their best to console the crowds that had gathered outside Kensington Palace as they walked among personal messages and cards left outside the palace; the Queen delivering a belated, unprecedented and highly orchestrated televised address the day before the funeral. Every conversation I had that week became about Diana. No one could quite believe it. I watched every minute of the coverage, inexplicably finding some comfort in seeing the same images of Diana shown over and over.
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br />   On the day of the funeral, the sight of Diana’s sons with their father, grandfather and uncle walking with their heads bowed behind the casket made the stunning reality of her death inescapable. But it was the close-up shot of a card atop her coffin nestled in a circle of white roses with ‘Mummy’ written in a child’s spidery scrawl that broke my heart.

  I was among the millions of women who had followed her journey from blushing kindergarten teacher to Her Royal Highness to global icon and humanitarian, and wanted to tell some part of her story that wasn’t mired in sadness. But I had no idea how. Then, while standing in line to sign the book of condolences at the British Consulate in New York City, my reporter’s instincts kicked in.

  I decided I would write a book about her role as a fashion icon, because I believed it was a gift she had used wisely. In Diana: The Secrets of Her Style, I wrote:

  “Diana, Princess of Wales . . . made us believe in transformation and reinvention and she did that through the clothes she wore.

  Many of us saw our own reflection in Diana. When she exchanged ball gowns and tiaras for simple suits and straight hair, we recognized ourselves—the idealized version of ourselves—in her. We wanted to be like her, and she, it seemed, wanted to be like us.

  Diana offered hope that one could emerge from personal struggles intact and look more beautiful than ever. Now, in the years after her death, she taught us it is often the scars that we cannot see that are often the deepest.”

  I spent the year after Diana’s death interviewing many of the people who knew her best. I traveled to London to meet the designers she worked with in those early years when she was desperately trying to find her place in the British royal family. I also spoke to people she worked with in the last years of her life who knew a very different Diana, a woman who was ready to forge a new path unencumbered by the past.

  Jacques Azagury, who designed some of Diana’s sexiest dresses, gave me a glimpse of the Diana we would have come to know had she lived. Just days before her death, he had delivered a “movie star dress” to Kensington Palace. She had been planning to wear it to a premiere in London in October. “It was a full-length black bugle-beaded gown, very low cut in the front with a high slit. It had a long train. She looked fantastic in it,” he told me.

  In the last year of her life, Diana had freed herself from the shackles of royal life, auctioning her dresses and making a complete break from a life defined by royal duty. She was paring down and starting over.

  It was that Diana who was fresh in my mind as I arrived at the gates of Althorp in August 1998, just a few weeks before my first book on her was to be published. This was the last chapter in my journey, a pilgrimage of sorts, to pay my respects to the woman who had consumed my thoughts for so much of the preceding year.

  Traveling by train from central London to Northamptonshire and now on a bus making its way to Althorp, my mind wandered back to the images I’d seen on television of Diana’s final return to her ancestral home. Not even a year earlier, the streets of Long Buckby had been lined by mourners who were there to witness the arrival of Diana’s coffin escorted by a fleet of Rolls-Royce cars carrying members of the royal family and the Spencers.

  Some people tossed flowers at the hearse; others politely applauded as the cars drove by. On that day, no one was standing outside Althorp. Charles Spencer had asked the public to stay away from the gates of the estate so as not to crowd the family arriving for the private burial.

  But on the August day I visited, the gates of Diana’s ancestral home were swung open for the tour buses filled with visitors who were there to see where Diana’s life had begun and where her body was laid to rest. As the bus made its way up the long drive, the only sound I heard was the gravel crunching beneath the wheels as everyone fell silent at the sight of the stately home against the backdrop of a cloudless blue sky.

  I was most interested in viewing the exhibition of her dresses whose backstories I’d come to know so well in researching my book. Viewing the dresses at Althorp was a far different experience from seeing the ones Diana had chosen to auction off at Christie’s.

  Diana’s wedding gown, with its 25-foot train, was in its own glass case. As I stood in front of it, I felt only sadness for the young girl who we now know walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey on the arm of her father, thinking she was “a lamb to the slaughter”—and how she proved to be right.

  Then I saw them. Hundreds of books of condolences were stacked in a glass case—a mere sampling of the collection of messages people from all over the world had stood in line for hours to write. I wondered if mine was among them.

  I emerged from the building and headed down to see the island where Diana was buried in the center of Round Oval lake. A small wooden rowboat was nestled between patches of high grass at the shore. It reminded me of the photographs I’d seen of Charles Spencer tending to the carpet of flowers on Diana’s grave. Looking out across the water at the small, circular island, I expected to be moved but instead felt strangely empty of emotion. There were two women from Scotland standing beside me. “She’s not there,” one said to the other. “I don’t think she’s there because I just don’t feel her presence.” It was a tranquil spot that felt strangely intimate amid the vastness of the 13,000-acre estate.

  When I walked back to the Great House, I saw a familiar figure in the distance. Charles Spencer, clad in a light blue oxford shirt and khaki pants, was striding across the lawn on his way to the gift shop. Inside, he graciously chatted with tourists—including me. After a momentary exchange of pleasantries, he was gone.

  Seventeen years later, I interviewed him when he came to New York City to promote his book, Killers of the King, for my weekly “Lunch” column for Adweek.com, where I sit with a celebrity at Michael’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan and afterward write about our conversation.

  During our two-hour lunch, I told Charles Spencer the story of my pilgrimage to Althorp, my passion for Diana, and how, in preparation for our interview, I’d rewatched a video of his eulogy. He told me he’d never seen it. “My children learned about it in school,” he said. When I asked him how he got through delivering what was one of the most memorable eulogies of the twentieth century, Charles told me, “By the end I was punching out the words from my stomach muscles. I could feel myself breaking down and I just collapsed into my seat afterwards.” Then he added, “Walking behind Diana’s coffin was far worse. Walking alongside my nephews through a wall of grief with them was terribly traumatic.”

  That lunch set the wheels in motion for what became Imagining Diana. I had been thinking about writing another book on Diana, but I wasn’t sure there was anything that hadn’t already been exhaustively covered. I truly believed that for all the miles of column inches and hours of film devoted to her, the woman who transformed the British monarchy in life had remained largely a mystery in death.

  In Imagining Diana, I have taken the clues she left behind to envision how she might have lived her post-royal life. This book is a fictional account based on real events, that attempts to answer a host of what ifs.

  Diana’s life was a work in progress, and her extraordinary gifts as a mother, humanitarian—and yes—style icon, kept me fascinated throughout her all-too-short life. Creating scenarios where she became even closer to her grown sons and found peace and satisfaction in her personal life was a deeply rewarding and oftentimes emotional experience for me. The passage of time has only strengthened my respect and admiration for Diana. I know she would have continued to inspire me. One thing is clear: even in death, she remains the single most captivating figure of the modern British monarchy.

  Source Notes

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  I have been writing about Diana for two decades and have spoken to dozens of people over the years who knew her well. Those conversations went into shaping the future I imagined for a Diana who survived the crash. I am deeply grateful to everyone who shared
their recollections with me—particularly those of a sensitive nature, which helped me better understand Diana’s complex personality.

  To create the most realistic world in which Diana would have lived, I extensively researched the events and lives of the British royal family since her death. I also relied on many books and articles about Diana’s life in the years leading up to the crash. The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown, Diana: Her Last Love by Kate Snell, Diana In Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith, The Queen & Di by Ingrid Seward, The Way We Were: Remembering Diana and A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell, Shadows of a Princess by P.D. Jephson, William and Kate: A Royal Love Story and Game of Crowns by Christopher Andersen, Diana: Her True Story and Diana in Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton were all extremely helpful.

  Requiem: Diana Princess of Wales 1961–1997, edited by Brian MacArthur, offered a comprehensive overview of the coverage, tributes and recollections of Diana’s life and death. I am grateful to the authors of these works.

  In addition, many magazines provided valuable insight and detail about the lives of Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, and their engagement and wedding, as well as the lives of Prince Harry, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall—all of which helped me in the writing of this novel. People magazine’s and Vanity Fair’s extensive coverage of the royals in multiple issues were very useful. In addition, the commemorative issues on the royal wedding from Time and Vanity Fair were invaluable. I relied on the article “The Ghost in the Gulfstream” by Rich Cohen, which appeared in Vanity Fair in 2013, and Mr. Forstmann’s appearances on Charlie Rose, as well as the tribute broadcast of the show after his death, for background information and biographical detail. The New York Times article “Charles and Diana Agree on Divorce Terms,” which ran on July 13, 1996, provided useful information on their divorce settlement. I watched endless hours of news coverage on the lives of Diana, Charles, William, Kate and Harry from the BBC (and read stories on its website), ITV and Channel 4 in Britain as well as ABC News in the United States, all of which was illuminating.