Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana fell back on her customary defense, suggesting to Kay that Palace enemies were behind the tabloid leak. “I feel I am being destroyed,” she said. “Someone is going to make out that I am mad, that I am guilty by association, that the mud will stick … I know there are those whose wish is apparently to grind my face in it.” At the same time, she abandoned her earlier effort to blame her own employees for the dozen calls that clearly came from her telephone. Instead, she denied making six calls by producing alibis ranging from a dinner with “an elderly titled lady in Eaton Square” and lunch at a Mayfair restaurant to massages and hairdressing appointments. These claims later proved to be shaky: The Mayfair restaurant was closed on the day in question, and no witnesses came forward to publicly back Diana’s assertions.

  Kay covered himself by acknowledging that Diana had been “in the habit of ringing Mr. Hoare around the time the tapping was being carried out. It is possible that she would have replaced the receiver if his wife answered.” The Sunday Times called this admission “bizarre.” Such a confession of furtive behavior seemed to suggest an illicit relationship between Hoare and Diana instead of putting the idea to rest. The Sunday Times pointed out previous examples of Diana’s silent phone calls, including James Hewitt’s admission that he had received ten silent calls over three weeks the previous summer. “I reckon she has phoned other people the same way,” Hewitt said. “I feel very sorry for her.”

  By early September, the tabloids began misstating the nature of the allegations as “300 silent nuisance calls,” although the original report had not estimated the number of calls made in the sixteen months before the tracing began. In October, Richard Kay also weighed in with THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CRANK CALLS. According to Kay, the calls traced to telephone booths had probably been made by a teenage boy who knew one of Hoare’s sons. Kay reiterated Diana’s belief in the “whiff of conspiracy” against her and further muddied the evidence of the traced calls by dismissing them as “a mere 12 calls over a three-month period”—although, in fact, they had been made over six days.

  Diana pulled together these threads of doubt in her Panorama interview a year later to issue a denial that further misstated the facts to deflect attention from her own behavior. “I was reputed to have made three hundred telephone calls in a very short space of time,” she said, “which, bearing [in mind] my lifestyle at that time, made me a very busy lady. No I didn’t, I didn’t. But that again was a huge move to discredit me, and very nearly did me in.” She added that she had done her “own homework on that subject and consequently found out that a young boy had done most of them. But I read that I’d done them all.” She also said that she had phoned Oliver Hoare “over a period of six to nine months, a few times, but certainly not in an obsessive manner.”

  The press jumped on Diana’s accusation and tracked down the “young boy” fingered as “the source of up to 300 nuisance calls.” According to their reports, he was a sixteen-year-old student at Stowe, the boarding school attended by Hoare’s sons. AS Kay had reported a year earlier, these accounts asserted that the boy had “made a lot of calls from phone boxes … the ones some people suspected Diana was using … the calls were … a form of harassment.” It took the boy’s mother, contacted by the Daily Express, to expose the essential flaw in the charge. During late January 1994, when police traced the calls, her son had been away at boarding school.

  By that time, logical explanations were beside the point. What mattered was Diana’s sorrowful denial on television, which turned sympathy toward her and attention away from the facts. She had undeniably made silent phone calls to the Hoare household, behavior that carried serious psychological implications. Diana privately had admitted to Elsa Bowker that “she rang him seventy times.” Elsa believed Diana called Hoare because “she was so highly excited. She couldn’t control herself.” It is impossible to know whether Diana needed to stay connected with Hoare by hearing his voice or whether she succumbed to an urge to invade and disrupt his marriage—perhaps both.

  Immediately after the “phone pest” scandal broke in August 1994, Diana had asked Hoare to make a public statement, but he had opted to say nothing. Diana felt betrayed by Hoare’s failure to back her publicly, even if it would have meant misstating the facts. “She said he was a weak man,” Elsa Bowker recalled. Yet Diana kept up their relationship. According to Simone Simmons, “as late as 1995,” Diana had a habit “of parking her car near his home and waiting for a glimpse of him.” In February, Hoare’s former chauffeur Barry Hodge went to the News of the World with details of the affair, and again Hoare made no public comment. At that point, Diana decided to drop him. The tip-off came via some harsh words in a Richard Kay article. “The truth is, she views Hoare as a pretty spineless creature,” Kay wrote in the Daily Mail, citing the ubiquitous “close friend.” “Ever since his failure to help her over the nuisance calls business, the friendship has been a one-way street. He is very much more besotted with her than she is with him.” Kay misleadingly wrote that allegations that “[Diana] had plagued Hoare with silent phone calls … proved groundless,” pointedly noting, “but Mr. Hoare remained silent.”

  Hoare reacted in gentlemanly fashion. He wrote Diana a letter and enclosed a gift she had given him: a pair of her father’s cuff links. “He put them in a brown envelope and on the front of the envelope he drew a crown with a big ‘D’ in it,” recalled Elsa Bowker, to whom he delivered the envelope with instructions that she pass it along to Diana. When Elsa called, Diana said, “I will send Paul [Burrell, her butler] to take the cuff links, but destroy the letter.” After Burrell had retrieved the cuff links, Diana called back and said, “Have you torn up the letter?” Elsa said, “No, I am going to open it and read it.”

  The one-page letter “thanked Diana for all the happiness she gave him,” Elsa recalled. A friend of Elsa’s who also read it described Hoare’s words as “poetry, so beautifully written. He thanked Diana for giving him the cuff links, but they were such treasures he couldn’t possibly keep them.”

  While Diana was juggling her still-private romance with Oliver Hoare in early 1994, Jonathan Dimbleby, a prominent television interviewer, was working on a documentary about Charles, along with a companion biography. As these projects progressed, Diana was growing increasingly anxious that both would cast her in a bad light. Charles’s chief aides had initiated the film and book at the end of 1992 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his 1969 investiture as Prince of Wales. The primary focus was on Charles’s good works, although the larger purpose, particularly after the Morton book, was to display the complexities of his character so the viewer and reader could judge him fairly. Dimbleby’s crew sat through meetings, trailed Charles on official engagements, and captured him with his sons on the slopes at Klosters and the highlands of Balmoral. The capstone of the film was Dimbleby’s interview with Charles at Highgrove in April 1994.

  Before Dimbleby conducted the interview, he arranged a luncheon meeting with Diana in March at the home of a mutual friend. He tried to ease her worries by assuring her she would be treated respectfully in the film, but Diana remained suspicious. When he asked her what sort of role she planned following her “retirement” speech, she said only, “The important thing is to keep them guessing.”

  Dimbleby’s filmed conversation with Charles touched on the Prince’s views of public service, child-rearing, the monarchy, the Church of England, architecture, the armed services, politics, and the press. Charles was especially caustic on the press, which he said had manufactured much that had been attributed to him. “It’s clearly much easier to invent all this and say it all comes from some close friend or a member of the staff or some person, and it’s all rubbish,” he said. “I’ve learned over the years … you just don’t read it. Otherwise you go bananas.” But it was Charles’s response to Dimbleby’s question about marital fidelity—all of several seconds in a two-and-a-half-hour documentary—that would be the most memorable moment.

  When Dimbleby aske
d about the “damaging charge” that Charles had been “persistently unfaithful” to Diana “from the beginning” of the marriage, Charles replied, “There is no truth in so much of this speculation.” He said Camilla Parker Bowles was “a great friend … she has been a friend for a very long time … and will be a friend for a very long time.” Dimbleby probed further: “Did you try to be faithful and honorable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?” “Yes,” Charles replied. “And you were?” pressed Dimbleby. “Yes,” Charles said, “until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

  Moments later, Charles added, “It’s the last possible thing that I ever wanted to happen…. It’s not as if I went into marriage with the intention of this happening or in any way in a cynical frame of mind. I mean, I’m on the whole not a cynical person. Sorry to sound self-righteous, but I have on the whole tried to get it right … and tried to do the right thing by everybody.” He said the breakdown of his marriage was “deeply regrettable” and “a dreadful thing” that had caused “a certain amount of damage.” Although Charles didn’t specify with whom he was unfaithful, Dimblebly later told reporters, “the clear context was that we were talking about Camilla Parker Bowles,” and the date of the marital breakdown was 1986.

  The documentary was scheduled for broadcast on June 29, 1994, and two days earlier, an evening newscast disclosed that Charles would admit his adultery. By then, Charles had briefed Diana as well as the other members of the royal family on the points that the program would cover. Buckingham Palace officials had advised Charles to duck the matter of adultery by simply saying that his marriage was a private matter. Charles had opted instead for the “let-it-all-hang-out” approach advocated by his private secretary, Richard Aylard. Dimbleby later said he would have been dishonest to omit the question after the Morton book had exposed the affair and the Camillagate tapes had revealed embarrassing intimacies. By answering the question, Charles hoped “to kill off the speculation that he had been unfaithful to the Princess from the moment of their marriage and also scotch the myth that he had never intended to make his marriage work.”

  The night the documentary was broadcast—to an audience of 13.4 million, 63 percent of those watching British television that night—Diana showed up at a fund-raising dinner for 300 at London’s Serpentine Gallery in a stunning black dress: off-the-shoulder, showing significant cleavage, skirt well above the knees, a dramatic pearl choker around her neck. It was an outfit calculated to steal the next morning’s front pages. “She bounded out of the car in that wonderfully athletic way she had … in the ‘I’ll-show-you’ dress, and she was radiant,” recalled Peter Palumbo, chairman of the gallery that Diana had just taken on as a patronage.

  Inside the Serpentine, Diana was seated between Lord Gowrie, chairman of the Arts Council after Peter Palumbo, and Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, sponsor of the evening. Neither Charles nor the documentary came up in Diana’s conversation with Carter. “I didn’t exactly feel like saying to her, ‘Why aren’t you home watching television?’ ” Carter recalled. Diana did have a particular preoccupation she wished to discuss. The most recent issue of Vanity Fair had run a cover story on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had died earlier in the year. “Diana had read it and she wanted to know more about how badly the Kennedy family had treated Jackie after Jack died,” Carter said. “She said to me, ‘I know all about being treated like that.’ ”

  As the evening went on, Lord Gowrie evidently had greater difficulty than Carter conversing with Diana, because his wife approached Christopher Hitchens, the magazine’s British-born columnist, to say, “You have to help us out. She’s not even engaging in small talk. See if you can get her talking.” Hitchens walked up to Diana and said in a deep voice, “Ma’am, we’re all republicans here,” eliciting a burst of appreciative laughter from the Princess.

  The tabloids decorated their coverage of the Dimbleby documentary with archly captioned photographs of Diana. THE THRILLA HE LEFT TO WOO CAMILLA ran in The Sun alongside a less flattering shot of Camilla in a similar dress and necklace. Commenting on Diana’s sunny demeanor as she arrived at the Serpentine, the Daily Mail noted, “Here was a woman at ease with herself, confident in her own attractiveness, and who didn’t really care about her estranged husband’s public soul-searching.” Only The Daily Telegraph injected a note of skepticism about Diana’s behavior: “She could have watched a video … and curled up in bed, but we wouldn’t have known, would we?… She fled her self-imposed purdah … to bury the hatchet—in the back of her estranged husband.”

  While Charles spoke earnestly on camera about his projects and duties, he seemed surprisingly ill at ease. He grimaced, squirmed, and wrung his hands, clearly uncomfortable with intimate topics. His tortured delivery contrasted with the popular portrayal of Charles as a cavalier and indifferent character. Within days it became apparent that the public had sympathized with Charles. One poll showed that eighty percent of respondents supported him, and another conducted by The Sun tracked a rise in popularity from fifty-four percent to sixty-three percent. CHARLES RULES OK, said a subsequent headline in The Sun.

  The commentators overlooked the program’s most striking feature. Even after the ferocity of the accusations leveled by the Morton book, Charles only referred to Diana obliquely. He indicated that he and Diana talked about their two sons without rancor, and he declined to discuss the possibility of divorce, saying, “It is something that I think is very personal and private between my wife and myself.” He even expressed sympathy for the incessant scrutiny Diana had endured in her marriage: “I do think those people who marry into my family find it increasingly difficult … The strains and stress … become in some cases intolerable.… Just look at the level of intrusion, persistent endless carping, pontificating, criticizing, examining, inventing, the soap opera constantly trying to turn everybody into celebrities. If you’re not a celebrity, well, what’s the point?”

  Camilla maintained a discreet silence, although her father told one tabloid that Charles came across as “very fair-minded and sincere” and showed “honesty and courage” in commenting on his marriage. Rosalind Shand said her daughter had done “remarkably well, considering some of the terrible things written about her.”

  Diana was reportedly “crowing” over Charles’s admission, sure that he had badly damaged his image. “I haven’t seen the program, and I never will,” the Daily Express said she told friends. Yet for all her bravado, Diana later said she had been “pretty devastated … but then I admired the honesty, because it takes a lot … to be honest about a relationship with someone else, in his position. That’s quite something.” Charles’s confession actually had the practical effect of removing his relationship with Camilla from the realm of innuendo. “The public was sympathetic, and for the media, it stopped the story,” said a friend of Charles’s. Barely a week after the documentary aired, it had dropped off the media’s radar. From Diana’s standpoint, the story was far from over, although the Dimbleby documentary had done her little damage compared with what she had already inflicted on herself.

  Less than two months later, the tabloids were running with the Hoare phone story, and by now the troubles in the royal marriage were so well known that the broadsheets joined in as well. Only a month into their coverage, they got wind of even bigger revelations coming in Princess in Love, by Anna Pasternak, James Hewitt’s amanuensis. Diana had known about the book since mid-August, when the news ruined her Martha’s Vineyard vacation with the Flecha de Limas, prompting her return to London three days later. By then, Diana was estranged from Hewitt and was powerless to derail the book. When she called him, he told her, “I don’t regard myself as a friend anymore.”

  Hewitt felt bitter about Diana on two counts: She had “dumped him,” and she had double-crossed him. After leaving the army the previous March, he had sold the Express a sanitized version of his relationship with Diana for more than £100,000 ($150,000). He claimed that Diana had backed
this untruthful effort to portray their affair as an innocent friendship. “It was a preemptive strike,” Hewitt said, but “the rumors grew stronger than they were before.” Despite the account’s sugar coating, Hewitt was widely criticized for cashing in on his connection to Diana. “Diana was happy for it to go out,” Hewitt said, “but once it backfired, the support I got from her was nonexistent.… Diana told me she was sorry that it turned out that way, but when it got too hot … she decided to drop it.”

  Anna Pasternak had written the “anodyne” Express account, but she knew from numerous conversations that the story of Hewitt and Diana was far more explosive. She later said that Charles’s televised adultery confession had left her so indignant she was determined to tell what she characterized as a love story “too beautiful … to remain a secret.” By late July, Pasternak had signed a deal with Bloomsbury Publishing, a highbrow London house, to be Hewitt’s ghostwriter. She resigned from the Express and disappeared to the country to turn out 80,000 words by early September so Hewitt could beat Andrew Morton’s sequel to the bookstores. While Hewitt insisted that he had not profited financially from the book, The Mirror later published bank statements showing he had received £130,000 (more than $200,000). At the time of publication, Hewitt was suddenly able to pay £245,000 ($400,000) for a Georgian mansion in Dartmoor.

  Pasternak found Hewitt’s story thoroughly convincing. The “proof” that he and Diana slept together was in Diana’s letters, which Hewitt shared with her. Hewitt also gave the publisher a sworn affidavit “affirming the truth” of the events described by Pasternak. The writer’s intent was to “set the record straight” in a “thoughtful, dignified,” and “sophisticated” fashion—three adjectives that failed to emerge in any of the reviews of Princess in Love when it was published on October 3. The book was roundly ridiculed, with perhaps the most pungent comment coming from Lord St. John of Fawsley, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a longtime friend of Johnnie Spencer’s. He called the writing “clogging, nauseating and overblown … It makes Barbara Cartland sound like George Eliot. Once you put it down, you cannot pick it up again.”