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Copyright © Tina Brown 2007
Introduction © Andrew Marr 2017
Cover photograph © Getty images
Cover design by Lauren Wakefield
Tina Brown has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Century
First published in paperback in 2008 by Arrow Books
This edition published by Arrow Books in 2017
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ISBN 9781784758868
Tina Brown was twenty-five when she became editor-in-chief of Tatler, reviving the nearly defunct 270-year-old magazine. She went on to become editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and in 1992 she became the first female editor of The New Yorker. In 2000, Tina Brown was awarded a C.B.E. She is married to Sir Harold Evans and has two children. They reside in New York.
Diana, Princess of Wales electrified the world with her charm, beauty and humanitarian work. But there is much more to the People’s Princess than her coy smile and alluring eyes.
In this 20th anniversary edition, Tina Brown, journalist and former Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, uncovers the glamour and mystery of Diana’s world as she reveals the Princess as you have never seen her before.
For Harry, always
One of the nice things for me about writing this book has been the chance to spend so much time in London, after twenty-two years of living in New York and only visiting my mother country as what Diana used to call a July American. It allowed me to reactivate friendships from my years at Tatler magazine in the early 1980s, when we covered the rise of the nineteen-year-old Lady Diana Spencer with obsessive interest, and also to make numerous new friends among people who, over the years, were either involved with the Princess or wrote interestingly about her, or both.
In the last eighteen months, I have interviewed over 250 men and women – members of Diana’s intimate circle, associates in her public life and partners in her philanthropy – and I am indebted to them all for their recollections and insights. I name and acknowledge these individuals separately below, with the regrettable exception of those who spoke on the basis of anonymity. They know who they are and they have my appreciation.
It was gracious of Prime Minister Tony Blair to see me and share his reflections on Diana. I thank, too, his associates Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell. I was fortunate in that the timing of my enquiries into the controversies surrounding Diana’s death coincided with the formal investigations by Lord Stevens, former Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, culminating in the publication of the Operation Paget Inquiry report at the end of 2006. I am grateful to Lord Stevens for his enlightening interview and his colleague Mike Hargadon for staying in touch throughout. The Operation Paget Inquiry report is a formidable piece of work to which all future Diana chroniclers will be likewise indebted.
No document, however detailed, can substitute for seeing things for yourself. One of the most fruitful days of research I spent was an excursion to Paris on a detailed walk-through of the crash in the Pont d’Alma tunnel with Jean-Michel Caradec’h, formerly a senior reporter and a war reporter with Paris Match and L’Express. M. Caradec’h’s 2006 book about the last hours of the Princess, Lady Diana: L’enquête criminelle, is a superb analysis of the French investigation which ended in 1999. I am indebted to him for many points he helped illuminate, as I am to the punctilious reporting of Martyn Gregory’s Diana: The Last Days.
I struck gold when Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote an authoritative biography, Diana: In Search of Herself, in 1999, steered me to Jacqueline Williams. Ms Williams, a British researcher of outstanding quality and an associate producer of television documentaries, has worked with such distinguished authors as Robert Lacey, Ted Morgan and Peter Evans. She combines intellectual rigour with journalistic tenacity and an editor’s eye for the telling detail. She is also an organisational powerhouse. Working with me on what was my maiden foray into long-form non-fiction, she set a standard of excellence it was inspiring to try to keep up with. Jackie, I am forever grateful for your contributions to this book, for all you have taught me, and for the pleasure of your company.
I struck gold again when Brian Hitchen, the former editor of the Daily Star and the Sunday Express, introduced me to Philippa Kennedy. As an experienced newspaper reporter and the former editor of the Press Gazette in London from December 1999 to November 2002, she was indispensable to my understanding of the Diana years of British journalism especially after I no longer worked in the UK. I was fortunate again to be able to raid Mr Hitchen’s voluminous Rolodex of talent for the royal expertise of the former Daily Express journalist Ashley Walton. His email answers to my questions were usually back before I’d had a chance to get my morning cappuccino from Starbucks. At various times along the way I received interesting research from Sallyann Kleibel, Robert Pursley, Rosie Atkinson and the indefatigable Andrew Kirk. The investigative labours of journalist and researcher Garrick Alder on the Web about the Squidgygate tapes stimulated me to look more into this bizarre episode in royal snooping. I thank him for giving me access to the longer unpublished version of his findings. As I delved into the mysteries, communications expert John Nelson, the managing director of Crew Green Consulting Ltd, was extremely forbearing with my technical illiteracy.
More generous leads: Jacqueline Williams’s second career as a documentary researcher for Atlantic Productions led me to Atlantic’s CEO and Executive Producer, Anthony Geffen, whose prior work on a Diana project guided me to many interesting avenues. Another talented documentary maker, Phil Craig, producer of Diana: Story of a Princess, was generous with his contacts and transcripts. The book Mr Craig co-authored with Tim Clayton, based on the TV series, is full of excellent material.
My favourite excursion after Paris was a visit to Scotland’s Blairquhan Castle in Ayrshire to observe Stephen Frears, who was in the process of directing the memorable movie The Queen, as he worked with his cast and production team to bring to life Peter Morgan’s brilliant screenplay about the aftermath of the death of the Princess of Wales. During the course of their research for the film, they had garnered many unusual insights they shared with me. Watching Dame Helen Mirren morphing back and forth between takes from the irreverent contemporary actress to the emotionally veiled monarch only increased my awe of her Oscar-winning gifts. ‘England was built on shoes like these,’ she commented as she slid her feet into some monarchical walking brogues.
Our knowledge of Diana owes much to the writings of Andrew Morton, whose Diana: Her True Story – and the verbatim version, Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words remains one of the great publishing scoops ever. He has been most helpful to me. So has Patrick Jephson. Shadows of a Princess, his memoir of his eight years as Diana’s equerry and then private secretary, is replete with intriguing observations as well as an insider’s perspective on what it takes to run a princess who becomes a global phenomenon. Ken Wharfe MVO, Diana’s former personal protection officer, was generous with his time, and I referred often to his robust memoir, Diana: A Closely Guarded Secret. Paul Burrell’s two memoirs, too, have much touching detail to commend them.
Royal biographers seem to be an extremely collegial breed. I had help and encouragement from such titans of the genre as Robert Lacey, Anthony Holden, Kenneth Rose CBE, Hugo Vickers, Jonathan Dimbleby and Ingrid Seward. Gyles Brandreth’s biography, Charles & Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair, was valuable as much for its humour as for the store of information it provides. There have been so many books about Diana that it was a relief towards the end of my research to turn to the sound judgements of Sarah Bradford’s biography, Diana. I thoroughly recommend Charles Spencer’s The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family and Althorp: The Story of an English House which combine his personal knowledge of the Spencer family’s history with a historian’s scholarship and a felicitous style. For a sympathetic portrait of Frances Shand Kydd there is none more informative than Frances: The Remarkable Story of Princess Diana’s Mother by Max Riddington and Gavan Naden. A full list of the books that have enriched this one can be found on here.
I am grateful to India Hicks for allowing me to quote from a private letter written to her uncle Lord Brabourne recalling the awful day her grandfather Earl Mountbatten was murdered. Lady Sarah Berry was generous with her help on the period before Diana was born. Andrew Tilberis kindly allowed me to quote from a letter Diana wrote to his late wife, Harper’s Bazaar’s legendary editor Liz Tilberis. Some of the material in The Diana Chronicles has appeared in columns about the royals written for the Washington Post Style section (2003–5). I thank my editor there, Deborah Heard, and the Washington Post for permission to include it.
I was greatly helped by having been a Condé Nast editor for eighteen years in London and New York. I warmly thank former colleagues Stephen Schiff, Bob Colacello, John Lahr, Brenda Phipps, Caroline Graham, Adam Gopnik, Simon Schama, Christina Garrett, Jane Sarkin and Wayne Lawson. My former Tatler colleague, Nicholas Coleridge, who has become both a bestselling novelist and managing director of Condé Nast UK, and Geordie Greig, the current editor of Tatler, were wonderfully forthcoming with phone numbers and email addresses it would have otherwise taken for ever to find, as well as with their observations. Some of the material for Chapter 12 first appeared in Vanity Fair in the article I wrote in October 1985 ‘The Mouse That Roared’, and I appreciate the permission to quote it here. My former Vanity Fair partner in crime, the gifted photographer Annie Leibovitz, with her usual generosity insisted on taking the portrait the publisher required for my book jacket. I thank her for her time and her talent.
A non-fiction book that is researched mainly in another country is an expensive and awkward proposition, and my trips to London would not have been half as comfortable, centrally located and fashionably cool if Ian Schrager had not made a room available every time I hit town at his fabulous Sanderson Hotel in Berners Street. The young staff there operates with New York energy and London manners, a helpful combination for a demanding writer with a moody computer. Speaking of which, I lost count of the number of times that my computer gurus Chris and Ryan Cuddihy showed up at the Evans-Brown ménage in Quogue, Long Island, at unusual hours of the night to perform some miracle to a frozen machine. I thank them both profusely.
I would like to thank the librarians and staff of the British Library, the New York Public Library and the British Library Newspapers on Colindale Avenue. I drew constantly on that jewel of a resource, the Hans Tasiemka Archives, assembled by Edda Tasiemka (aka the Human Google) and her late husband Hans. Edda is helped now by her assiduous assistant Heidi Raj.
Throughout the conception and writing of The Diana Chronicles, I received much valuable counsel from my dear friend and literary agent Ed Victor. His support of a writer does not stop when contracts have been exchanged. I am grateful to Gail Rebuck, Chief Executive of Random House, for her immediate enthusiasm, and to Publishing Director Mark Booth so ably supported by Charlotte Haycock, Assistant Editor. It has been a pleasure, too, to work with them and with the fastidious copy-editing of Katherine Fry.
It’s pathetic how much writers depend on encouragement. At moments when I was especially racked with misgivings I was grateful to my friend the British biographer Julie Kavanagh for her supportive critique, to Gabé Doppelt, LA Bureau chief of W magazine, and to Sir Peter Stothard, who was editor of The Times during the nineties, Craig Raine, the literary editor and poet, and Hendrik Hertzberg, my old (but surprisingly youthful!) New Yorker consigliere. My brother, Chris Brown, chose exactly the right moment to show up from Australia and give the manuscript a reading that helped me lick an earlier draft into shape. The legendary former Simon & Schuster editor and author Michael Korda was kind enough to offer his experienced critique at a time when I needed an objective eye, and I am indebted to his kindness at a time when he was on deadline himself.
I seem to be blessed with an incomparable claque of supportive girlfriends who provided pep talks whenever I was flagging and I thank here each and every one. I humbly salute my two children, George and Izzy, not only for their merry boosterism but also for their forbearance. I promise never again to lock myself in a hotel room for an entire family vacation.
I cannot be effusive enough in my gratitude to Kara Simonetti, my dedicated, tireless and superbly organised executive assistant, who slaved over every page of this manuscript in its many vexing incarnations and subjected each fact and detail to perfectionist scrutiny.
Lastly – no, firstly – no, from first to last and back again – this book would never have got past word one without the help, sustenance, affection, and Christlike patience of my husband, Harry Evans. If only poor Princess Diana could have experienced such love at home.
With thanks and appreciation to: Professor Michael Adler, Barry Allsop, Charles Anson, Lady Elizabeth Anson, Dickie Arbiter LVO, Joe Armstrong, Harry Arnold, Margaret Aro, Jacques Azagury, Ann Barr, Andrew Barrow, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tony Benn, Edward Berry, Lord Birt, Michael Birt, Manolo Blahnik, Sir Ian Blair and Lady Blair, Amy Bloom, Chris Boffey, Mark Bolland, Noel Botham, Hamish Bowles, Lord Bragg, Stephen Brasher, Pat Breen, Marie Brenner, Tom Brokaw, Danae Brook, Joan Juliet Buck, William F. Buckley, Major Colin Burgess, Charlie Campbell, Duncan Campbell, Professor David Cannadine, Cindy Cathcart, Miles Chapman, Jimmy Choo, Mary Clarke, Wensley Clarkson, Max Clifford, Michael Cole, Dr James Colthurst, Richard Compton Miller, Chris Connelly, Jasper Conran, Shirley Conran, Alison Croose, Tessa Dahl, Phil Dampier, the Earl of Dartmouth, Alain de Botton, Maxine de Brunner, Anne de Courcy, The Rt Hon. Lord Deedes, Nigel Dempster, Lord Donoughue, Diana Donovan, Sue Douglas, Ervin Duggan, Mike Dunlea, Nell Dunn, Dominick Dunne, Victor Edelstein, Arthur Edwards, Robert Edwards, Michael Eisner, Elizabeth Emanuel, Sally Emerson, Nikki English, Robin Esser, Meredith Etherington-Smith, Joanna Farrell, Mohamed Al Fayed, Anna Fels, Bert Fields, Oliver Foot, Amanda Foreman, Teddy Forstmann, Chris Fortunato, Grainne Fox, James Fox, Debbie Frank, Sarah Frank, Lady Antonia Fraser, Lady Fiona Fraser, Jason Fraser, Sir David Frost OBE, Stephen Fry, Charlotte Gerard, Garth Gibbs, Emma Gilbey, Sarah Giles, Barbara Gilmour, Lady Anne Glenconner, Lord Glenconner, Clive Goodman, Lord Gould, Eileen Graham, John Graham, Tim Graham, Roy Greenslade, Sir Jeremy Greenstock KCMG, Betty Greif, Sir Ronald Grierson, David Griffin RVM, Pamela Gross, Jennifer Guerini-Maraldi, Barbara Guggenheim, Sabrina Guinness, Ali Gunn, Graeme Hall, Tony Hall, Alan Hamilton, Belinda Harley, Colleen Harris, Robert Harris, Paddy Harverson, Nicky Haslam, Selina Hastings, Veronica Hearst, Marie Helvin, Reinaldo Herrera, Nicola Hewitt, Robert Higdon, John Hockenberry, Warren Hoge, Sandra Horley, The Rt Hon. Sir Robin Janvrin KCVO CB, the Rt Hon. Lady Jay, Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, Dafydd Jones, Tessa Jowell, Dmitri Kasterine, Sean Kavanagh-Dowset, Richard Kay, Douglas Keay, Sara Keene, Alan Keyes, Mary Killen, Jeremy King, Dr Henry Kissinger, Andrew Knight, Phillip Knightley, Cynthia Knights, Steve Kroft, Dominic Lawson, Leon LeCash, Jeffrey Leeds, Ken Lennox, the 5th Earl of Lichfield, Marguerite Littman, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, Brian MacArthur, Ross MacGibbon, Colonel Allan Mallinson, Karyn Marcus, Jon Marder, Aretha Marinzeck, Candice Marks, Bob Marshall, Frederic Martel, Victoria Mather, Ghislaine Maxwell, Cynthia McFadden, Peter McKay, Susan Mercandetti, Jon Michaud, George Milburn, Edward Mirzoeff, the Hon Rosa Monckton, Derry Moore, Patrea More Nesbitt, Peter Morgan, Piers Morgan, Susan Nagel, Andrew Neil, Louise Nicholson, Jamie Niven, John Norman, Katherine O’Hearn, Bruce Oldfield, Susie Orbach, John Overton, Harry Page, Lord and Lady Palumbo, Vivienne Parry, Nicky Perry, Holly Peterson, Tom Petrie, Maggie Phillips, Erin Pizzey, Amanda Platell, Shaun Plunket, David Pogson, Eve Pollard, Gerald Posner, General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret), Lord and Lady Puttnam, Cindy Quillinan, Maggie Ray, Lord Rees-Mogg, James Reginato, Lynda Resnick, Sebastian Rich, Andrew Roberts, Edward Roberts, Geoffrey Robertson QC, Mary Robertson, Ruth Rogers, Dr Isadore Rosenfeld, Lord Rothschild OM GBE FBA, Penny Russell-Smith, Marcus Rutherford, Carol Ryan, Zoe Sallis, Hitesh Shah, William Shand Kydd, Alice Shaw, Michael Shea CVO, Beverly Sills, Simone Simmons, Sir Roger Singleton CBE, Wayne Sleep, Liz Smith, Jon Snow, Emma Soames, Jesper Soeresen, Raine, Countess Spencer, Robert Spencer, Lady Stevens, Sir Jocelyn Stevens CVO, Richard Stott, Alice Straw, Chris Sullivan, Ben Summerskill, Janice Sutherland, Mimi Swartz, Camilla Swift, Hugo Swire, Andre Leon Talley, William Tallon RVM, David Tang, Colin Tebbutt MVO, Ian Telford, Mario Testino, Barbara Timms, Steve Torrington, John Travolta, Professor Donald Trelford, Brittany Trevenen, Linda Van, Marjatta van Boeschoten, Lucia van der Post, Kate Waddington, Judy Wade, Simon Walker, Christine Ward, Lord Weidenfeld, Lady Weinberg, the Earl of Westmorland, James Whitaker, Michael White, John Whitehead, Kim Willsher, Steve Wood, Mervyn Wycherley, Hassan Yassin, Lucy Yeomans, Peter York, the Biography Channel, Christie’s Auction House, ITN Factual, ITV, Metropolitan Police Public Access Office, Vintage Magazine Shop and Women’s Entertainment Network.
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales undoubtedly shook the British in a way no other royal event in modern times has done. Equally certainly, she was the first genuine royal celebrity. Her divorce and then her violent death were among the worst events the House of Windsor has ever faced. So twenty years on, what does she mean?
Diana’s Britain already seems a lost, different country. Tony Blair was only a few months into his first premiership – young, brightly smiling, charismatic and relatively untarnished. The country was getting used to unfamiliar politicians such as Gordon Brown and David Blunkett. Enthusiasm for the EU was widespread across most of the political spectrum; New Labour cabinet ministers would tell anyone prepared to listen that Britain would shortly join the euro.
The first generation of the iPhone was still a decade in the future. Victoria Adams had just been dubbed ‘Posh Spice’ and her group were at their zenith; she would not marry a certain well-known footballer for another two years. Two Californian geeks were about to register a strange name for their proposed search engine – Google. But Internet use was still relatively uncommon in Britain – just 7.5% of people were merrily clicking away, compared to more than 90% now.
By contrast, the newspapers were much more powerful – well before the forced closure of the News of the World and rising public worries about entrapment and eavesdropping, this was the last roar of tabloid Britain. If anything epitomised this last hurrah it was Diana’s tumultuous love affair with the camera and the tabloids. Briefly a victim, she was drawn into a vortex of exploitation before blossoming from puppet into puppeteer.
One of Tina Brown’s advantages as a biographer is that she also inhabited this fame-hungry, fast-moving world of 1980s and 1990s journalism that Diana basked in. If we want to relive that strange era at the end of the twentieth century, when hair was big and shoulders were padded, and the celebrity stories were gigantic and multicoloured, then we need a guide who was there at the time and remembers it clearly. Tina’s status in New York also turns out to be useful; had Diana lived, then it’s a reasonable assumption that she would have ended up living in the United States, a place where she found rather more air to breathe than in class-bound, tabloid-stalked London.
Still, twenty years on we are such different people. I think we were more innocent, naive then, like oddly youthful family members in old video footage. We had bought into the Diana story in ways that wouldn’t be repeated by any other figure later on. The shock of Diana’s death was so sharp because so many of us had lived our lives by proxy through her. We had talked about class and Peter York’s ‘Sloane Rangers’ because of that demure, embarrassed, gawky young aristo first pursued by snappers through West London. Royalists celebrated her marriage as a great moment of rejuvenation for the Windsors; republicans scurried off abroad and bristled with despair about the state of the national debate. The ups and downs of Diana’s marriage, its miseries and triumphs, were discussed and refracted back in our own relationships. We learned about bulimia because of her. Our jaws dropped at those salacious tape revelations. We sat at home transfixed by the Panorama interview and for days talked about nothing else. We debated the propriety or otherwise of her later boyfriends and we divided across dinner tables about Prince Charles’s behaviour.
So by the time she died, Diana had become truly nestled inside the imaginations of most of us. We felt she represented something we British were becoming in general – more open about our emotions, more liberal, perhaps even kinder. She hugged and kissed her sons in public. She took up righteous if unpopular causes, from Aids to landmines, an unapologetically political (small p) campaigner we hadn’t seen in royal circles before. Her death was felt not just as the shocking death of a young mother in a motor accident, but as a punch to the solar plexus of tens of millions of people she had never met – something meaningful in the national story.
This was why, no doubt, so many people were desperate to believe that there was a sinister conspiracy behind her death, with senior members of the royal family and/or the security services pulling the strings to prevent an embarrassing second marriage. This was why, also, there was that strange mutinous mood in central London when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh declined to hurry straight down from Balmoral and join the exhibition of public grief, leaving only the sinister sound of the wind rustling through the plastic wrapping of thousands of bundles of decaying flowers at the gates of the palace.
Back in the present, it seems so long ago, and so hysterical. Because of the royal connection and her own high-wattage charisma, Diana came to mean something to millions of people that was – to be blunt – silly and unreasonable. No fallible human being should ever have been the glossy receptacle of so much panting expectation. Any real person subjected to the hot adoration of tens of millions, and the frantic insistence that ‘you understand me’ would melt into a puddle of exhaustion or a cloud of hysterical laughter. Some of what happened was the fault of the public. We treated her as a Botticelli heroine, as a painted representative of ideal womanhood – mocked, rejected, damaged and yet rising from the waves to forgive us. Or even, perhaps, like a secular Virgin Mary, eternally loving and innocent, walking through the evil and corruption of everyday life. The midsummer hysteria of 1997 had very little to do with the woman who loved and lost, who became a cunning user of others, who learned to be an excellent mother, and who was then killed in a random, meaningless accident in a Paris underpass. We had projected onto her our hopes and our anger, so that when she died we felt properly bereaved. How childish we were.
For the royal family, her death was a crisis, yes – but they got through it quickly and relatively easily in contrast to the public. After making her public acknowledgement of Diana’s power, the Queen herself became more popular than ever. So far as the royal establishment is concerned, individuals learned to be Diana-like – to express their emotions and to smile more, and to play the newspaper game bravely – but beyond that, nothing really changed. In fact, soon that sunlit, naively enthusiastically pro-European and leftish Britain of 1997 would be buried itself – by the Iraq War, by the 2008 financial crash, and because of its own ageing and exhaustion.
After Diana’s death, memorialists came up with books – this one being the best – as well as walks, fountains, playgrounds, statues and innumerable domestic objects. The clever, damaged, haunted young woman behind the photographs emerged and became truly immortalised in the people’s hearts. Ten years later, her sons raised money with a huge pop concert, and today, Diana’s name and face continue to be used by many charities, hospitals and other public concerns.
Yet her most potent and impressive memorial is the behaviour of her two sons, then the teenagers Wills and Harry, now the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Henry of Wales. When we saw them, aged fifteen and twelve, walking white-faced and shocked behind their mother’s coffin, they looked like ultimate victims. The offspring of a ruined marriage, surrounded and snapped at by a piously intrusive media, and without their devoted mother – how could they possibly grow up to be happy and useful people?
But they did. Both sons, growing up, put the occasional foot wrong and fell foul of censorious newspaper editors. But each of them seemed to emerge as emotionally mature, serious-minded and attractive men in whose hands the Windsor dynasty seems, for the moment, pretty safe.
Much of the credit must go to the warm way that Diana brought them up, but much must also go to the much less popular figure of Prince Charles. He was seen in the aftermath of his divorce as chilly to the point of cruelty. Having been sent unhappily away to school himself, detesting much of his own upbringing, how could he learn the modern empathetic parenting skills we are taught to admire? Well, his evident success as a parent suggests that the public view of him was wide of the mark; for he is a father adored by his children – and there can be no greater happiness than that.
In the end, the life and death of Diana was a family story – the story of the Windsor family – and families (most of them, not all) are remarkably resilient. Again and again, despite the pessimism of Philip Larkin, one generation learns from the mistakes of the previous one. Feuds are forgotten; hatchets are buried. Parents leave you with the strengths they had. Again and again, the damaged and the angry discover for themselves the necessity of forgiveness and love. Every day, individuals die, and every day their families go on; and this is also the Windsor story.
But perhaps the legacy that Diana has given us is that we as a nation have become, since her life and death, a little less hysterical. When Kate Middleton married Diana’s older son, there seemed a danger that she would suffer just the same intolerable burden of projection. Indeed, she’s popular. People talk about what she wears, and seem to like pictures of her toddlers too. She takes her charity work admirably seriously.
Yet she isn’t Diana. Partly, of course, she isn’t tortured by the experience of becoming a leading member of the royal household, as Diana was. She is calmer and more level-headed. And while the younger royals still face a self-righteous and aggressive media – Prince Harry above all at the moment – things aren’t quite as overheated as they used to be. Could it be that, back in the strange summer of 1997, we exhausted some of our frantic over-enthusiasm and projected emotion? That we, as it were, were bled out?
If so, then the legacy of that extraordinary year is unexpectedly positive: the royal family survived and became more popular, and the rest of us – well, we grew up.
Andrew Marr
March 2017
In June 2006, nearly nine years after Diana’s death, I attended a ball – hosted, improbably, by Tatler magazine and Mikhail Gorbachev – at Althorp, the ancestral home of the Spencer family in Northamptonshire. I looked up at the glowing windows from which Diana, during an unhappy visit with Prince Charles soon after their marriage, had gazed moodily at the rolling, moonlit grounds. The crowd partying in the tent that night was her crowd – the London demi-monde of fashion and café society and media. She would have lit up the gathering with her radiance and charm. It seemed all wrong for her to lie buried on that lonely island in the lake. All wrong for the laughter and the voices not to include hers. As the band played on and the summer night dwindled, I kept waiting for her to come down and join us and the last nine years to disappear.
Diana would have been fifty in July 2011.What would she have been like? Still great-looking: that’s a given. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, with her cornflower-blue eyes and well-turned legs, was a handsome woman to the very end. Fashion-wise, Diana would have gone the J. Crew and Galliano route in the same vein as Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.
Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Fayed’s hopeless unpunctuality (though staying on good terms with his father, Mohamed, who could still be relied on to cough up for a table or two at a charity dinner). After the break-up with Dodi she would have probably moved to New York, where I picture her spending a few cocooned years married to a super-rich hedge fund guy. Eventually, having wearied of the boredom of weekends in his big tasteless house in upstate New York, she would have shed him too, and might have drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting – a former American president with a country place nearby, for example, or a globetrotting French finance wizard destined for the Elysée. Gliding sleekly into her forties, she’d have developed a taste for men of power over boys of play, international movers and shakers who’d invite her not just on extended trips floating off the Côte d’Azur but to brainy summits at Ditchley or private sessions at Davos. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general rumoured to have links to the ISI would have been a particular headache for the Foreign Office.)
Diana would have been well pleased with the scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World – the one that revealed that for years the British tabloids had been hacking into the phones of celebrities and royals and publishing the illicit skimmings. She would have sued for sure, and her collected damages would have broken all records. Is it possible that even Squidgygate, the embarrassingly steamy phone call between Diana and her lover James Gilbey in December of 1989, was really one of the earliest examples of press malfeasance? I never believed the bizarre explanation, investigated at length here in The Diana Chronicles, that a radio ham named Cyril Reenan had picked up this call and offered it to the Sun. Was Reenan, who later spoke of ‘being set up by a sinister conspiracy’ and died in 2004, really a cover for a nefarious phone hacker? If so, Diana’s obsession about eavesdroppers in the last days of her life – often mocked as paranoia – was simply the sound intuition of a careful student of the folkways of Fleet Street.
Politically, Diana would have soon parted company with Tony Blair, stung by his failure to use her, as she had hoped, for big peacemaking missions overseas. He would have tried to woo her back each election cycle, but Diana was shrewd when it came to the conducting of feuds. While I suspect she would have been reconciled with her mother, I doubt she would have ever forgiven her brother, Earl Spencer, for abruptly withdrawing the refuge of a house on Althorp’s grounds at the time she needed it most. Diana was too wounded in childhood and in marriage to forgive the people who let her down. Perhaps the Earl understood that, and guilt was the impetus for his fiery repudiation of the royals at her funeral (and also for his insistence that she should be enshrined at Althorp for ever). I believe her best male friend in later years would have been, poignantly, her reviled first husband. She and Charles had begun to reach a delicate understanding towards the end of her life. She would no longer have been impatient of Charles’s causes. Rather she would have empathised and asked his advice about hers. After so many loves and losses she might have even given up hating Camilla. The Duchess’s galleon-sized Lady Bracknell hat at William’s wedding would have offered satisfaction enough.
And Kate, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge? How would Diana have handled her son’s steadfast affection for a woman other than herself? The rising public adoration of Kate would have afforded Diana some tricky moments. Pleased, yes. But, like Frances Shand Kydd – who, days before Diana’s wedding, suddenly burst out, ‘I have good long legs – like my daughter’ – Diana would have had to adjust to a broadening of the limelight. Her edge over Kate, of course, was the epic of her princessly suffering, which would always make Diana’s story more interesting. (‘Happily ever after’ will never have the same allure to the press as ‘It all went wrong’) But she would have loved being a firm defender of the Middletons against the Palace snobs and ostentatiously made Kate’s dynamic mother, Carole Middleton, her new BFF. To William’s slight irritation she would also have begun to see his in-laws’ comfortable, relaxed house in Berkshire as a haven for herself, casting Kate’s solid, dependable father, Michael, as yet another shoulder to lean on. Diana was always searching for the kind of supportive family that she never had.
Would our heroine by now have found peace? Yes, I believe she would. Sustained by the two things she cared about most: her children and her work.
In July 1997, Diana told me she’d been discussing the idea of making television films to further promote her work on behalf of the victims of landmines, leprosy, and HIV/Aids. As the years rolled by, her foundation would have become one of the most prestigious in the world. For a woman whose private life was so ruled by her heart, Diana was a surprisingly good executive. She knew how to make things happen. She knew how to run a team. She had a galvanic focus when her compassionate feelings were stirred. Her Princess Diana Foundation, fuelled by a steady pipeline of Fayed and Forstman millions (her ex-boyfriend, billionaire Theodore Forstman, stayed in close touch), might have rivalled the Clinton Global Initiative by now. In the world disasters of the last few years – 9/11, the tsunamis, the Pakistan earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese nuclear catastrophe – you know Diana would have been first at the scene in a hard hat with a camera crew (and, by now, ten million followers on Twitter). She would have kept her spotlight trained on individual sufferers whom she’d continued to visit and care for and touch. At a time when the world has disaster fatigue, I miss the generosity of her star power and what it could accomplish.
‘One day I will get you back your HRH,’ fourteen-year-old William told his mother at the time of her divorce. And in many ways he already has. He made considerable efforts to include the memory of his mother in the most important day of his life. The engagement ring he placed on Kate’s finger belonged to his mother. In the days before the ceremony there was a sacred trip with his fiancée to Diana’s grave on the island in the lake. The opening hymn at the wedding, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’, was one of Diana’s favourites, chosen by William and Harry to close her funeral service and the memorial service to mark the tenth anniversary of her death.
The way William has matured has reflected so much of Diana’s tender messaging to him as a child. It made him sure and steady in his choice of the woman he loved after years of considered courtship. Like his scampish heart-throb younger brother, William is relaxed with the media and informal in his presentation to the public. When the couple drove out of Buckingham Palace in his father’s 41-year-old open-topped Aston Martin DB6 Volante, the gesture showed all his mother’s theatrical flair. Those huge blue eyes of Diana’s, gazing out from under an elegant but fashion-forward ‘fascinator’, in the front row of Westminister Abbey, would have shone with pride.
Indeed, so much of William’s current happiness could not have happened without the mother who fought for a different way of royal life. Thanks to the discreet Palace self-examination after the turbulent scenes before Diana’s funeral, the Queen, too, has profoundly changed. She is far more available to her people. Her advisers today are much more media-savvy, much less ‘top drawer’ than the crusty enforcers of tradition who cramped the life of the Princess of Wales. At Easter this year, the Queen was photographed riding in the woods at Windsor with her two youngest grandchildren, one of whom was attached to her by a leading rein. When she saw the picture, the Queen liked it so much she told the Palace to release it to the press. That would never have happened ten years ago, let alone twenty. It was a private moment that told a story: the Queen as Granny.
The picture, like the wedding, was a pure Diana moment.
‘If I had Diana with me I would take her to the jungle, not the Ritz.’
– Dodi Fayed’s uncle, Hassan Yassin, 2006
Paris, 31 August 1997. The car that sped into the Pont d’Alma tunnel at twenty-three minutes past midnight was carrying the most famous woman in the world. The icon of blondeness whose long legs were crossed in the back seat of the black Mercedes was at the end of a chaotic night out and her mood was sour. You could see her displeasure in the tight expression caught by the closed-circuit security camera as she pushed quickly through the revolving doors of the Ritz hotel’s front entrance on the Place Vendôme.
Arthur Edwards, the dean of royal photographers, knew that look well. It still bothers him when he thinks of it. For sixteen years there hadn’t been a mood of the Princess that wasn’t caught, logged, pored over, blown up and flashed to every news desk on the planet, and Edwards, the rumpled, balding cockney from the Sun had been witness to most of them. He had taken the very first stolen picture of Lady Diana Spencer at a polo match in Sussex one year before she married Prince Charles and he was one of the first of the British royal photographers to arrive at the gates of Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris where she died. He says the last time he had seen that troubled expression was during a visit to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in February 1992. Her downcast mood had had a sad result for the waiting rat pack: she refused to look at the camera on her way out. Edwards and his colleagues were rewarded only when a construction worker gave the Princess a wolf whistle and she couldn’t help responding and lifting her head. Snap. Like every other photographer in Fleet Street throughout the eighties and nineties, Edwards lived for – and on – Diana’s smile.
On that last night in Paris with Dodi Fayed the Princess knew things were out of control. So Edwards recalls today in a bar in London. He was a genuine favourite of Diana’s. His avuncular face is creased with regret, as if had he been there he could have done something about it. ‘She wanted to get home. She wanted to see the boys. She wasn’t a pop star. She was a princess. She was used to the front door, a red carpet. That whole Dodi thing – decoy cars, back entrances – that wasn’t Diana’s style.’1
Edwards is wrong about that. The chaos of her last night was increasingly Diana’s style ever since the divorce which had transformed her from a protected royal princess into a free-floating global celebrity. The fact that she was rattling around Paris with a haphazard playboy like Dodi at the end of August was proof of it. The British Ambassador didn’t even know she was in town. Nor did the French authorities. In August most upscale Parisians head north to Deauville for the polo and the racing or to the cool woods of their country estates in the Loire or Bordeaux. Dodi had use of a lavish apartment in a building belonging to his father on the Rue Arsène-Houssaye overlooking the Champs-Elysées, so what need did they have of a hotel suite? They were at the Ritz that night only because Dodi was intent on showing off his father’s wealth, dispatching hotel flunkeys on yet more shopping expeditions. No one pursued by paparazzi would otherwise choose this venue as a hideout. Paris’s most prestigious hotel at that time of the year is crawling with camera-toting tourists and rubber-neckers. At the end of the seasonal exit from town even the more exclusive areas of the hotel – such as its restaurant, L’Espadon – have a louche air of rootless extravagance. South American call girls with hirsute operators from emerging markets and rich old ladies with predatory nephews can be seen poring over the wine list under the trompe d’oeil of its opulent ceiling. Dinner for two sets you back £400.
The ambience this place typifies was exactly the kind Diana couldn’t stand. She had just auctioned off all the grand and glittering dresses of her old life for charity at Christie’s in New York to prove it. When she crossed the Atlantic for the opening preview in July 1997, Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, and I had lunch with her at the Four Seasons, the Park Avenue restaurant that served as an unofficial canteen for Condé Nast executives. ‘I’ve kept a few things,’ Diana said about the upcoming auction, ‘but you know that Catherine Walker with all the bugle beads? People in England don’t wear those kind of clothes any more.’2
What struck me at lunch was how much celebrity itself had transformed Diana’s appearance. I have come to think that being looked at obsessively by people you don’t know actually changes the way your face and body are assembled – not just in the obvious ways of enhanced fashion sense or tricks of charm and self-possession but in the illusion of size. The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton’s, for instance, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the Governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you like a balloon float in a Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflated the circumference of Jackie O’s cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes you could see her in there somewhere, screaming.
In the case of Diana, it was as if everything had been elongated and hand-coloured. The tall, soft-cheeked English rose I first met at the American Embassy in 1981, when she was a new bride, had become as phosphorescent as a cartoon. Striding on three-inch heels across the high-ceilinged grill room of the Four Seasons, she towered like Barbarella. Her Chanel suit was a sharp, animated green, her tan as flawless as if it had been airbrushed on. The gently flushed skin of her face wasn’t just peachy; it was softer than a child’s velveteen rabbit. No wonder she made such an impact at the bedsides of sick children. Arriving in a flashing cone of artificial light, she must have seemed to them like a glowing angel come to soothe the sorrows of our world below. Her instinct to move to America was spot on. She would only ever feel at home now in the culture that invented fame the size of hers. ‘You can feel the energy go up when the Americans arrive in July for Wimbledon,’ she told me wistfully.
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