Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana made no remarks at the museum gala, but she created a stir with a $15,000 Dior gown of midnight-blue satin trimmed with lace that resembled a close-fitting nightgown. Diana later told an acquaintance that the John Galliano–designed dress had initially been too tight, but that she had easily lost three pounds in three days so it would “fit like a glove.” She didn’t mention how she shed the weight, but such a sudden loss was commonplace for victims of eating disorders. Diana sat through the dinner for 900 (ticket price: $1,000) and then slipped out a side door at 11:00 P.M., disappointing an additional 2,000 guests who had paid $150 each to see her at the after-dinner dance. I’M OUT THE DIOR, said the headline in the next morning’s Daily Star.

  By year’s end, Diana had appeared at just three events in five months for her chosen charities: a conference for Centrepoint, where she talked about homeless runaways; the annual meeting of the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations, where she cautioned against complacency about the disease; and a benefit dinner and performance by the English National Ballet at St. James’s Palace, the first time she used the state apartments for a charity function.

  The ballet fund-raiser was especially significant, but not for Diana’s commitment to her charity. During the dinner, she announced that the company’s new production of The Nutcracker would be sponsored by Harrods. Mohamed Fayed, owner of the famous department store, beamed with pleasure. He had underwritten other causes that were important to her—Royal Brompton Hospital and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, for example. The previous March, Diana had attended a fund-raising dinner at Harrods that Fayed gave to support the work of Hasnat Khan’s supervisor, the heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub. But this was the first time Fayed had played such a public role as her benefactor. Two weeks later, at Fayed’s invitation, Diana hosted her annual staff Christmas party in the Georgian Restaurant at Harrods.

  By 1996, Mohamed Fayed was one of the more notorious figures on the British scene. He had a famously foul mouth, and he was known to make outrageously insulting statements. (“They’re all fuggers, these politicians,” he once exclaimed.) The Egyptian-born son of an Alexandria schoolteacher, Fayed started his career at a furniture-importing company owned by Adnan Khashoggi, his Saudi Arabian brother-in-law who would later become a multimillionaire arms dealer. After falling out with Khashoggi, Fayed built an international business by investing in ships, hotels, and real estate, and he made his fortune by constructing a commercial port in Dubai to handle the country’s burgeoning oil business.

  In 1979, he bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and in 1985, took over Harrods after a bruising fight with R. W. “Tiny” Rowland, a rival tycoon. At Rowland’s urging, the government’s Department of Trade and Industry investigated the circumstances of Fayed’s purchase. In 1988, the DTI issued a devastating 752-page report concluding that Fayed had significantly misrepresented his background and business practices. Among the findings was Fayed’s false claim to have been born into an old Egyptian family enriched by shipping, land, and industry, and his phony aristocratic affectation, calling himself “Mohamed al Fayed.”

  Fayed was subsequently denied his application for British citizenship, and he sought revenge on the Tory government by revealing that he had paid prominent Conservative members of Parliament to raise questions in the House of Commons relating to his business interests. This “cash for questions” scandal sullied Fayed as much as it did Prime Minister John Major’s government. A subsequent Vanity Fair profile of Fayed published in 1995 described his racism, sexual harassment of women, telephone bugging, and mistreatment of staff.

  Yet Fayed’s unsavory reputation didn’t seem to faze Diana, who had been acquainted with him for some years. He had cultivated her father and Raine from the time he bought the Ritz. The couple stayed at the hotel frequently, and Fayed always made certain they received red-carpet treatment. Harrods also happened to be Johnnie’s favorite store, where he was a cosseted customer. The Spencers entertained the Harrods board for lunch at Althorp, and in 1991, when Fayed produced a book about the history of the store, Johnnie made the introductory speech at the publishing party. According to Tom Bower’s book Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography, Fayed “showered gifts” on Johnnie and Raine, who was especially enamored of Fayed’s generosity and hospitality. In 1996, Raine became a paid director of Harrods International, which supervises the store’s duty-free shops as well as outlets in Japan.

  Diana had not known Fayed directly through her father and Raine; she had actually met the Egyptian businessman during the eighties at polo matches sponsored by Harrods. But Fayed often said that before Johnnie Spencer died in 1992, he had asked Fayed to “keep an eye” on Diana and her siblings. Fayed frequently took liberties with the truth, and there was no way to verify what he said. Still, around the time of the Wales separation, Diana became friendly enough with Fayed to visit him from time to time when she shopped at Harrods. Through their conversations, Fayed claimed to have engineered Raine’s rapprochement with Diana in 1993. “He helped bring them together,” said former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, who worked as a consultant for Fayed. “He wanted to build a new environment for Diana, and he helped facilitate the reconciliation.”

  “Diana liked Mohamed’s outrageousness,” said Mark Hollingsworth, who collaborated with Fayed on a proposed memoir in 1998. “I don’t think he cleaned up his language at all for her. She would go and pour out her heart to him.” Andrew Neil believed that Fayed “made friends with Diana by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.” Fayed further ingratiated himself with Diana by supporting her causes, and after her divorce, he began regularly inviting her to tea on the Harrods terrace to “talk about their common interest in various charities.”

  Fayed misstepped once that September when he asked Diana to join the Harrods board. She politely turned him down, explaining that she couldn’t be involved in any commercial enterprise. At that point, Fayed tapped Raine instead. Fayed also frequently proffered invitations to Diana to take vacations at his homes in Gstaad, Scotland, and the south of France, all of which she declined. Yet when she was later asked about their relationship, she defiantly proclaimed Mohamed Fayed a “close friend.”

  Chapter 25

  As 1997 began, Diana seemed no closer to finding herself or her place in British life. Yet again, the tabloid press spun stories of her apparent new confidence, independence, and maturity. She was still a royal of sorts, an international celebrity, and a magnetic fund-raiser. But she didn’t quite resemble an aspiring ambassador, and her self-described role as “queen of people’s hearts” required little more than shows of empathy. After her string of overseas appearances to raise money for cancer and heart research, The Daily Telegraph had even tried out an ungainly new label: “roving health educationalist.”

  Then Diana announced in early January her plan to visit Angola to publicize the campaign against antipersonnel land mines—under the aegis of the Red Cross, no less. Although Diana had planned her campaign months earlier, her sudden announcement took the public by surprise. “Her dramatic return to the world charity stage left officials in Prince Charles’s office astonished,” noted the News of the World. In the months to come, land mines would provide the most sustained focus for Diana’s public life since she left the royal family.

  The land mine crusade gave a big lift to her image, which The Times had declared “tarnished” only months earlier. It also gave her a sense of mission, at least for the moment; she had not been able to engage exclusively with one cause for long, and there was no reason to believe that land mines would be different. (Indeed, in her conversation with Richard Kay only hours before her death, Diana would once again announce her intention to retire from public life.) As Daily Telegraph columnist William Deedes, an admirer and fellow activist in the land mines cause, had to admit, “We are trying to give serious purpose to someone who was erratic.”

  In the meantime, Deedes and others who cared abou
t the issue were quick to capitalize on Diana’s ability to generate publicity. Deedes accompanied her on the four-day mission to Angola, where, according to Richard Kay, she wanted “to get her hands dirty” and “find a new level of seriousness for herself.” Before leaving, Diana had been briefed by the Foreign Office on the basics of government policy: participation in a worldwide effort to clear mines, to which Britain already had contributed £21 million ($35 million); and a commitment to an eventual global ban, while in the short term retaining the right, in exceptional circumstances, to use new high-tech “smart mines” that would self-destruct after a period of time.

  The minute Diana touched down on African soil, she ignited a controversy with a brief statement that she was pleased “to assist the Red Cross in its campaign to ban, once and for all, antipersonnel land mines.” This amounted to a call for an immediate worldwide ban, which ran counter to government policy and riled Tory leaders in London. One junior defense minister, the 7th Earl Howe, called Diana a “loose cannon.”

  Howe’s comments threatened to derail Diana’s trip and nearly reduced her to tears, but she effectively countered them by going into a minefield wearing a flak jacket and face visor. “I am only trying to help,” she told reporters. “This is a distraction that we don’t need.” She was backed by John Major—in no mood to pick a fight with the popular Princess only months before a national election—who indicated that her comments lined up with the government’s ultimate objective. When, on the morning of her second day in Angola, she first heard Howe’s accusation, Diana muttered, “idiot minister,” but William Deedes, the only journalist within earshot, kept her comments to himself to protect her.

  During her tour, Diana wore a microphone and choreographed a series of memorable appearances: walking through minefields in her antimine gear, cheering soldiers engaged in dangerous mine-clearing, comforting dismembered victims of mine detonations. The BBC documentary about the trip caught her struggling to control her emotions after visiting victims, especially a young girl named Helena who had been virtually disemboweled by an explosion. Diana’s description to reporters of her encounter with Helena offered an insight into her ability to empathize: “I remember looking at her and thinking that what was going on inside her head and her heart was very disturbing.”

  In a briefing for the press, Diana announced that she would make further Red Cross visits to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Cambodia, calling her work on land mines a “long-term commitment.” “The fact is, I am a humanitarian figure—always have been and always will be,” she said. The Daily Express exuberantly proclaimed her “an international angel of mercy.”

  Writing in the Daily Telegraph afterward, Deedes called the Angola trip a “watershed” for Diana; privately, he counseled her to shift her emphasis away from an immediate ban, which neither Britain nor the United States was prepared to advocate. U.S. policy was especially complicated by its position in Korea, where land mines serve a strategic purpose in protecting the border between north and south.

  Diana had been asked to give a speech to the Royal Geographical Society in June, and Deedes urged her to focus on the need to remove mines from the earth and care for victims, which would “take her out of controversy.” He wrote a speech, and she agreed to deliver it because “she understood she needed to be on neutral ground.” In a first step toward this more modulated approach, she appeared at a luncheon in March, where she gave an award to a former army captain named Chris Moon who had lost a leg while clearing mines in Mozambique.

  Overall, Diana’s new issue played well in the press, as did the announcement in late January of her June dress sale. The auction came off as an ingenious way to make money, as well as a powerful statement that Diana was putting her royal life behind her. In addition to the AIDS Crisis Trust, Diana announced that the Cancer Research Fund for the Royal Marsden Hospital, one of her six charities, would share in the proceeds. The one sour note was struck by the Sunday Express, which published an erroneous story that Diana would make a personal profit of more than $2.5 million from the dress sales. Infuriated by the report, Diana took unusually aggressive action by suing the newspaper and its editor in chief Richard Addis.

  It turned out that the newspaper had been hoaxed, and Diana won $125,000 in damages and a front-page apology. Addis offered to donate the settlement directly to charity, but Diana’s lawyer Anthony Julius told him, “She wants it for herself.” Recalled Addis, “She did that to punish us, because if we had said we were giving it to charity it would have looked better for the Express.” Diana subsequently announced she would personally donate the funds to charity, although she did not name the recipients.

  In a further effort to craft a fresh public profile, Diana considered authorizing a book about her charity work. The idea came from Martin Bashir, who continued to moonlight as a paid speechwriter for Diana. She seemed curiously ambivalent about the project. “She was an anxiety-ridden young woman,” said Vivienne Schuster, Bashir’s agent. “She felt everything she said and did was subject to misinterpretation by those who watched her.”

  Schuster found an eager publisher, Random House UK, whose chairman and CEO, Gail Rebuck, met with Diana. They made a preliminary seven-figure deal and came up with a title, In Faith and Hope. But Diana soon cooled on the idea, deciding “it was too complicated to deal with,” according to Rebuck. The unstated reason was that Diana had broken with Bashir, as she had with so many others, in part because she had been feeling pressure from Bashir to sign the book deal, which would have required permission from the Queen. However, the relationship’s end came that spring when Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, who mistrusted the Panorama man, asked Diana to listen to Burrell’s conversation with Bashir on the speakerphone, and Diana felt insulted and betrayed by some of Bashir’s comments.

  Bashir was the second aide to leave Diana early in 1997. Her personal assistant for the previous seven years, twenty-seven-year-old Victoria Mendham, left abruptly at the end of January over a money dispute. On Christmas Eve, Diana had again taken Mendham to Barbuda, as she had the previous year. The Christmas trip was the fourth vacation on which Mendham had accompanied Diana. For the first two trips, Diana had paid all the costs. After the Barbuda trip at Easter the previous year, however, Diana had asked that Mendham, who made $40,000 a year, split the bill. Instead, Mendham’s half had been paid by royal household accounts—a customary practice for employees, although Diana was furious that she had not been informed. When Diana asked Mendham for her share of the most recent bill, totaling nearly $14,000, the assistant said she couldn’t afford it but would pay her airfare. Richard Kay called the resulting altercation over the current and previous bills “the final straw in a deteriorating relationship between the two.”

  Mendham’s departure left Diana with Michael Gibbins, her private secretary; Paul Burrell, her butler; and Caroline MacMillan, another personal assistant who assumed Mendham’s duties, to manage her personal and professional affairs. With grim predictability, small aspects of Diana’s everyday life kept blowing up in tabloid headlines. In early February, she unexpectedly withdrew a foreword she had written the previous July for a book of photographs, Rock and Royalty, which was assembled by fashion designer Gianni Versace to raise money for Elton John’s AIDS Foundation. Diana had written the fulsome tribute (“From the optimism that shines from the pages of this book, one can tell that [Versace] loves mankind”) without seeing the book, and when she received a copy, she was distressed to see photographs of the royal family juxtaposed with suggestive pictures of naked men. Diana said she was “extremely concerned” that the pictures would offend the Queen, and pulled out of a gala book launch as well. Versace was so mortified he canceled the party, and Elton John was reported to be “devastated.” As a result of the incident, Diana cut contact with the singer and the designer.

  One rare bright spot that spring was William’s confirmation at Windsor. It was the second public reunion for Charles and Diana since the divorce; the first had been in
December 1996, for the Christmas carol service at Eton, where William had been enrolled since 1995. Tension between Charles and Diana had diminished noticeably in the months following their divorce. Charles had taken to dropping in from time to time at Kensington Palace, when he had to use the nearby helicopter landing pad. On his first visit, Diana called energy healer Simone Simmons to exclaim, “You’ll never guess who just came to see me: my ex!” The Waleses now cooperated well on issues regarding their sons, and she occasionally called to solicit his advice. “Things were better on a basic level,” said one of Diana’s friends. “The hurt was deep on both sides, but they did a better job at public events together.”

  Unfortunately, arrangements for the confirmation ceremony dredged up some old acrimony when Diana learned that Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who helped with the logistics, would be among the guests. Diana had not invited members of her own immediate family because she assumed the ceremony would be “brief and straightforward.” Still, when she saw the proposed list, she was miffed, and at her insistence, Legge-Bourke stayed away.

  Diana’s mother seemed rankled by her exclusion as well. When queried about her absence, Frances said she was “not the person to ask…. You should ask the offices of William’s parents.” She pointedly placed a notice in the newsletter of the Oban Cathedral, where she had recently converted to Catholicism: “For my grandson William on his confirmation day, love from Granny Frances.”

  The ceremony came off without incident. Charles and Diana even arrived and left together with their sons, instead of taking separate cars, which had been their habit during the long estrangement. Posing for the official photograph, Diana and Charles did not converse, although they laughed and appeared relaxed. William, however, “showed few signs of mirth,” according to one observer.