Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

At Diana’s direction, the tabloids had been alerted that in the evening she would be visiting her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, one of the named sources in the book. “This was Diana’s elaborate way of authenticating the source,” Knight said. Knight relayed this information to McGregor: “What would you say if in tomorrow’s newspapers there are photos of the Princess of Wales visiting Carolyn Bartholomew in an orchestrated way?” McGregor “was absolutely amazed,” Knight recalled.

  While trying to protect herself with repeated denials, Diana had exposed everyone else who helped Morton. “She was under huge pressure from her friends, including Carolyn Bartholomew, to show a public display of support,” Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil said. “Gilbey and Carolyn in particular were getting a terrible pounding from their other friends, who said, ‘How could you do that to Diana?’ They were becoming social outcasts. They said, ‘You have to help us,’ and that is why she went to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house.”

  Thursday’s tabloids splashed the photographs of Diana greeting Carolyn at her doorstep. McGregor reached Fellowes in Paris, where the Queen was on a state visit, to blister him for misleading the Press Complaints Commission. Fellowes knew at once how profoundly Diana had deceived him, and not only apologized to McGregor, but offered his resignation to the Queen as well. McGregor understood that Fellowes had behaved honorably, and the Queen refused to let him resign. But Diana had mortified her brother-in-law and, as McGregor wrote later in a letter, “embarrassed the commission and undermined the purpose” of its statement to the press. Although Diana and her brother-in-law remained on speaking terms, their relationship was irreparably damaged, and Diana and Jane grew more distant.

  Until then, according to Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography, Charles had believed the marriage could survive. Like Fellowes, Charles had continued to cling to “the thought that the Princess might be innocent of involvement in such malice.” He changed his mind after Diana refused to sign a statement prepared by Richard Aylard, his private secretary, that condemned the book for its inaccuracies and distortions. When Charles learned of Fellowes’s apology to Lord McGregor, he understood that Diana was deeply implicated in the book.

  After the Carolyn Bartholomew pictures appeared, Diana received a stern message from Prime Minister John Major saying he couldn’t help her “if she tried to manipulate the press.” That afternoon, Diana burst into tears while visiting a hospice; her tangled cover story was coming apart, and she was beginning to crack. After tacitly approving her friends’ cooperation and refusing to sign the Aylard statement, she kept just a small fig leaf of personal deniability; her direct role would be revealed by Morton only after her death.

  While the Queen was in Paris, she discussed the Morton book with her top advisers. Although the material was devastating, the Queen could also see that Diana was desperately troubled. The Queen’s first impulse, backed by Prince Philip, was to focus on salvaging the marriage—for the sake of William and Harry, but also because it was a royal union with constitutional and succession questions at stake. According to Dimbleby, Charles and his parents had not discussed his marriage until the Morton book, and only then after the Romseys, van Cutsems, and several other friends had revealed to the Queen and Prince Philip, presumably in a way Charles himself could not, the details of his marital ordeal. At that point, Charles’s parents abandoned their neutrality and “rallied to the Prince.”

  As Diana later admitted, the royal family was “shocked and horrified and very disappointed.” Among those most dismayed was Diana’s staunchest royal friend, Princess Margaret. “Until the Morton book, she liked Diana,” one of her friends said. “But [with] any attack on the Queen Princess Margaret reacts violently. She has not said enough bad things since then about Diana.” The rest of the royal family quickly shifted from shock to outrage. “The Morton book was something everyone thought was a despicable way of airing dirty linen in public,” a relative of the royal family said. “After that, the wheels began to turn. The book was the most public thing that had happened in the royal family since the abdication, and the fact that it was in print for anybody to read made it even worse.”

  As the second Morton excerpt rolled out on June 14, the Queen and her family were at Windsor for the races at Ascot. Two days earlier, Charles had first discussed with his mother the pros and cons of seeking a separation. At a meeting in Windsor Castle on the fifteenth, the Queen and Prince Philip talked to Charles and Diana. The idea of divorce came up but was rejected, and the Queen “was led to believe that the Princess would stand by the Prince and suggested a six-month ‘cooling-off period.’ ”

  Diana gave an emotional account of this meeting to Colthurst, who wrote in his diary: “Left her shaken rigid. They accused her of having done the book.” Diana said they asked if she had helped, and again she lied, with “a lot of tears.” Philip, she said, was “angry, raging, and unpleasant,” and Charles wouldn’t raise his earlier conversation with Diana about a “parting of the ways,” even when she urged him to: “He stood there absolutely stum [British slang for quiet].… He couldn’t speak for himself when his parents were present. His physical proximity leaves her cold.” Diana also told friends that Philip said if she divorced Charles she would lose her title. Recalled her friend Elsa Bowker, “Diana said, ‘When I came here, I had my title. I don’t need your title.’ The meaning was, though she didn’t say this, ‘I am from a better family than you are.’ ”

  Prince Philip took his own “tough love” approach by writing Diana a series of four letters that were part reprimand, part entreaty. Without knowing the truth about Diana’s role in the Morton book, he rebuked her for cooperating with the author and permitting her friends to talk, but he also admitted his disappointment in his son’s behavior, and he made an appeal to her sense of duty.

  “He tried to bring the sides together in his own way,” said a close friend of Diana’s who discussed the letters at length with her. “He wrote about duty to the family, how he felt when George VI died and [Philip] had a career he loved that he had to give up for duty. Diana had her ups and downs with Prince Philip, but she recognized his role in the family. Some of the letters were hurtful about the Morton book, and at first I thought he was outrageous to blame her, but then I realized she was behind the book much more than I thought, and I realized he was correct. The trouble was, he never touched Diana’s heart. He couldn’t, because he argued in terms of duty and not love.”

  Diana reacted defensively to her father-in-law’s letters, hiring a lawyer to help her draft replies explaining her mistreatment by the royal family. Her interpretation of Prince Philip’s letters—“stinging,” “wounding,” “irate”—along with details of the contents, surfaced in an updated paperback of Morton’s book that was published later in the year. It seemed unlikely that the leak had come from Prince Philip.

  Charles had given his friends strict instructions not to return Diana’s fire. Some couldn’t help themselves. David Frost, who had been friendly with both Charles and Diana, defended Charles on his morning television program, Frost on Sunday, as “caring and compassionate” and denounced the Morton book as “one-sided and infuriating…. The real picture of the Prince has been lacking.”

  After the considerable heat The Sunday Times had taken for publishing such a tendentious version of the Wales marriage, editor Andrew Neil assigned several reporters to present Charles’s side. They made little progress because of Charles’s injunction against speaking out—until Andrew Knight happened to meet Charles’s close friend and cousin Norton Romsey at a cricket match. Romsey “was very upset and outraged,” Knight recalled, but said he was powerless to say anything publicly. Knight called King Constantine of Greece, a longtime friend also close to Charles, who seconded Romsey’s views (“You should have seen them when they were together; she would talk to him like a fishwife”) but said he had pledged silence as well. Nevertheless, Knight alerted Sue Douglas, the editor in charge of the article, who called both Romsey and Constantine. Although their vi
ews informed the article and they were listed as sources “spoken to” by the newspaper, they weren’t quoted directly.

  THE CASE FOR CHARLES appeared in The Sunday Times on June 28 and offered little to redress the imbalance. It mostly recounted how unfairly Charles’s friends felt he had been depicted, noting that he had requested a “dignified silence … because he fears that to deepen the crisis would hurt his children.” The Sunday Times offered a few illustrations of Diana’s difficult behavior, including her efforts to organize William’s first trip to Wales without her husband’s knowledge, and her unwillingness to stay with Charles while he recuperated from his broken arm in 1990. The most revealing insight, however, was a quote from a “close friend of the Prince” that showed a possible way out for Diana: “He is annoyed that the Princess is half-denying she cooperated with the book. He wants her to admit her involvement, and admit it was a mistake.”

  Instead, Diana viewed the Sunday Times article as evidence of a larger conspiracy, a “campaign of derision and disdain” by Charles’s friends and aides. Her paranoia only increased at the end of August when transcripts of the Squidgy tapes were finally published—first in the American supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer, then in the Sunday Express, and finally in The Sun on Monday, August 24, under the headline MY LIFE IS TORTURE. Diana, who was at Balmoral when the Squidgy story broke, later said the publication “was done to harm me in a serious manner … to make the public change their attitude towards me.”

  Barely a week later, Diana’s conspiratorial suspicions surfaced again when The Sun ran an article alleging that Diana and James Hewitt “had enjoyed a ‘physical relationship.’ ” Photographs of them together were analyzed for intimacy in their body language. Hewitt immediately sued the paper for libel, and while he never took the case to court, his indignant denials took some of the sting out of The Sun’s allegations. Still, now that Hewitt had been named along with Gilbey, the possibility of adultery by Diana was harder to dismiss, and friends reported she felt “destroyed” by the coverage.

  The one potential benefit of the Morton book was that it publicized Diana’s severe symptoms of psychological distress. Unfortunately, the book said that Diana had come through the “dark ages” to vanquish her problems; as a result, Diana didn’t seek help, and no one offered her any. By Morton’s account, she had achieved the “flowering of [her] true nature” through her display of “courage and determination,” and she was steadied by her “growing sense of self-belief.” In fact, Diana was in despair, on an “emotional roller coaster,” as Morton well knew—and her behavior in public became ever more erratic.

  Initially, Diana had regarded the book as a public relations coup, but by the autumn she came to see it as “the beginning of the end,” said one of her close friends. She told friends of her regrets and constructed a new version of the book’s origin. “She said to me that things went out of her control,” one close friend recalled, “that Andrew Morton talked to people she didn’t want him to talk to, and that they told him things she didn’t want to get out. She had a little control in the beginning, and then she lost it.”

  This disavowal extended to the friends she had recruited to help with the book. According to journalist Richard Kay, who became Diana’s confidant some months after the Morton book, “She dropped most of the people who cooperated with Andrew Morton. She went into denial and had to distance herself from everyone involved. Gilbey was cast to the outer darkness, and Angela Serota, too. Carolyn Bartholomew endured, but they weren’t terribly close.” At the time, Kay reported in the Daily Mail that Diana had dropped these friends because she was “incensed … at what she perceived as a massive show of disloyalty” by cooperating with Morton’s “inflammatory book.”

  Yet Diana made one fascinating exception in James Colthurst, who remained her “unpaid adviser,” according to Morton’s publisher, Michael O’Mara, until 1994. Through Colthurst, Diana kept secretly feeding information to Morton. “James Colthurst was still my intermediary,” Morton admitted, citing a long article about Diana he wrote late in 1993 for The Sunday Times: “She called James Colthurst, and I did that piece based on her spin.”

  Palace officials couldn’t begin to grasp the labyrinthine way Diana operated, though they now knew she was capable of treachery when she felt cornered. They were constantly wary, because they recognized she was at once highly visible and utterly unpredictable. One moment she would be contrite, the next she would be furious. Because she didn’t operate logically, she remained beyond their control. Much of the time, they couldn’t fathom whether she wanted in or out of the Wales marriage, and they feared the consequences of crossing her.

  Three years later, Diana spoke of this period in a curiously passive fashion—as if someone else had been responsible for the Morton book and its aftermath. “What had been hidden, or rather, what we thought had been hidden, then became out in the open and was spoken about on a daily basis,” she said. “The pressure was for us to sort ourselves out in some way. Were we going to stay together or were we going to separate? And the word[s] ‘separation’ and ‘divorce’ kept coming up in the media on a daily basis. We struggled along. We did our engagements together. And in our private life it was obviously turbulent. My husband and I, we discussed it very calmly. We could see what the public were requiring. They wanted clarity of a situation that was obviously becoming intolerable.”

  By the autumn of 1992, Charles and Diana were each consulting lawyers; according to several accounts, their face-to-face discussions often ended in tears and anger. Dimbleby recounted that after Diana began “openly talking about a separation,” Charles contacted Arnold Goodman, a longtime legal adviser to prominent members of the British establishment. Yet Charles was unwilling to initiate formal proceedings. “He was struggling on, but in despair. I don’t think either wanted a separation,” said a relative who talked with him that fall.

  Diana had also been conferring with her lawyer, Paul Butner, but in her usual cloak-and-dagger fashion. She used a code name—“Mrs. Walsh”—and met him secretly at friends’ apartments and obscure restaurants before inviting him to Kensington Palace. Her principal concern, as it had been for a while, was losing custody of her sons and being “exiled” by the royal family.

  While Diana vacillated and Charles hesitated, events forced decisive action. For some months, Diana and Charles had been committed to an official visit to Korea in November, but during the Balmoral holiday in August, Diana had suddenly withdrawn from the trip. Only after the Queen intervened did Diana agree to travel with Charles. Before they departed in early November, Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard tried to set a positive tone by telling the editor of the Express that the trip showed a new harmony between the Waleses. The newspaper obediently ran an article headlined WHY CHARLES AND DIANA ARE BACK TOGETHER.

  But as soon as the Waleses arrived in Seoul, Diana made it clear she was there under duress. Her expressions ranged from indifferent to miserable, and according to Dimbleby, she was “often distraught … in a state of desperation, overcome by nausea and tears.” According to one of her former aides, “Diana felt she no longer needed to disguise what she felt.” Charles did his best to deflect attention from her obvious anguish, but he was at times visibly uncomfortable. The tabloids nicknamed them “The Glums.” As Charles wrote to a friend at the end of the trip, “The strain is immense…. I feel so unsuited to the ghastly business of human intrigue and general nastiness.… I don’t know what will happen from now on but I dread it.”

  While they were away, the tabloids had published stories about Morton’s updated book, including his revelations about Prince Philip’s “stinging” letters. Diana had been on the phone with friends about the reports, and on her return to London, she felt compelled to distance herself from Morton’s account with a brief statement denouncing the “recent wave of misleading reports about the royal family.… The suggestion that the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have been anything other than sympathetic
and supportive is untrue and particularly hurtful.”

  Within days, the tabloids were filled with still another tape scandal when the Daily Mirror, quickly followed by The Sun, published abbreviated extracts of the intimate telephone conversation in December 1989 between Camilla and Charles that became known as “Camillagate.” (Unlike the Squidgy tape, which had been in tabloid hands for nearly three years before publication, the tape of this conversation had only landed at the Mirror a few weeks earlier.) The Palace remained silent, as it had after the Squidgy tape came to light, but the snippets (“I’ll just live inside your trousers”) left no doubt about Charles and Camilla’s intimacy, and prompted questions about Charles’s fitness to be king.

  Prince Charles finally “snapped” that week when Diana tried once again to stymie plans he had made for William and Harry. The family had been slated to gather on November 19 at Sandringham for Charles’s annual three-day shooting party when Diana abruptly told him that she would be taking the boys to Windsor or Highgrove that weekend. Her decision evidently was not sudden; she had told her butler Paul Burrell weeks earlier that she couldn’t face a weekend with her husband. Charles felt her actions, only days before the weekend, underlined the impracticability of their situation. “Unable to see any future in a relationship conducted on these terms,” biographer Jonathan Dimbleby wrote, “[Charles] decided he had no choice but to ask his wife for a legal separation.”

  Once Charles had made up his mind, events moved swiftly. On November 25, less than a week later, Charles sat down with Diana at Kensington Palace to tell her of his decision. Despite all her provocations, Diana later said it was “not at all” her idea to separate because, as she said, “I come from a divorced background, and I didn’t want to get into that one again.” But Diana readily agreed, their lawyers exchanged documents, and Diana went to Ludgrove, the boarding school that William and Harry attended, to tell them the news. On December 9, Prime Minister John Major announced the separation to the House of Commons. Diana, who was out on a round of official duties, “heard it on the radio, and it was just very very sad.” In public, Diana looked “carefree, glossy and utterly content,” wrote Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail. She spent the evening at the home of some close friends, where she was sad and subdued. She expressed no relief, but said she hoped that somehow her life could change for the better. When James Hewitt phoned to bolster her, he said later, “Diana sounded flat and low.… She did not think that it would ever be possible for her to have what she really wanted.”