Ever after, p.23
Ever After, page 23
The Spencers, of course, were not royal, and the plan soon collapsed when the would-be developer, Matasaka Takahashi, was arrested on suspicion of illegally obtaining £500 million in loans. Then Raine decided to market copies of Diana’s wedding dress in Japan and engineered a deal whereby a replica would be available to hire for display at department stores at £1,100 a day (orders were taken for the actual gown so that it was made to the bride’s measurements, as Japanese women were generally much smaller in build than Diana). Several hundred facsimiles of the ivory gown were sold (“Japanese ladies dream of being Princess Di,” one store manager averred), for over £9,000 each, 30 per cent of which was paid to the Spencers. This was the last straw for the Queen, who from then on never invited Johnnie and Raine to her homes.
Diana’s love for her father did not waver despite her stepmother’s ill-chosen schemes, which he had apparently approved, and that Raine had not asked permission to copy and sell Diana’s wedding gown. It was about this time that Johnnie got to know Mohamed al Fayed, who had recently bought Harrods and had considered marketing Raine’s replica wedding dresses but had quickly abandoned the idea. Al Fayed advised the Spencers on investments and in return Raine invited him and his wife to the lavish balls she loved to throw with important and influential families as guests, contacts al Fayed hoped would gain him entry into the British establishment
Her father and stepmother’s crass behaviour was another source of unhappiness for Diana, who increasingly found herself living a double life. A recent poll had revealed that she and the Pope were the two most popular people in the world. This seemed absurd to her and she could not understand it Although she was not religious, Diana revered the Pope and the goodwill he symbolized. In 1985, she made an official visit with Charles to the Vatican. The pontiff met them in an enormous, high-ceilinged room. During their forty-minute private audience Diana held her hand to her stomach when asking if he had recovered from the gunshot wound he had sustained in an assassination attempt two years earlier. He misunderstood what she had said and thought she had told him she was pregnant. He replied that she was “the creator of life,” and when the audience was over, he rose, blessed their marriage and then, his hand gently touching her stomach, the child she would soon bear.
Neither Diana nor Charles corrected his false impression. Diana was especially moved by their audience with the Pope and it had a great impact on her.
No matter how foolish the media made her appear, the public adored Diana. Yet she remained plagued by insecurity. Although apparently it was never discussed between them, Charles was aware of her close friendship with Hewitt Diana had the impression that he was glad she was occupied and less likely to make things difficult for him.
In November 1986, Charles and Diana made an official ten-day tour of the Gulf States. The desert rulers in this region had enjoyed a special affinity with the British Royal Family for generations, and Charles was warmly welcomed “by the ritual audiences in their air-conditioned palaces.” But it was Diana who visited the hospitals, schools and orphanages, and won the hearts of the people. When they returned, Charles’s staff tried to sharpen his image—a task, Jonathan Dimbleby wrote, that “was doomed to failure. The Prince was a man for all seasons and for none, a man for his time but not of his time. Any attempt to hone his image or to strait-jacket his role to the vagaries of a shifting market would be … impossible in practice.”
However, for the next twelve months Charles made a concerted effort to change the government’s and the media’s perception of him. He had private meetings with government ministers. He wrote more than a thousand personal letters to ministers, to charities and organizations: a schizophrenia helpline, a centre for Islamic studies, an architectural summer school in Italy. No gift, however small, was received without a personal note of thanks, and he smiled more in public. Still he was perceived as an oddball. This was curious because, privately, Charles has tremendous charisma. He could also be sharp-tongued and slow to praise, but he would reveal deep compassion for his close friends at times of illness, loss or hard times. Charles was perhaps as desperate for love and acceptance as Diana. Their tragedy was that they could neither give it to nor receive it from each other.
During 1987 they spent a total of thirty-eight days together. Diana made appearances for charities, schools, hospitals and a boat christening, mostly in or around London, and infrequently abroad. Charles spent time with Laurens van der Post viewing “the intangible wonder of the Kalahari Desert.” He made an official visit to Swaziland, Malawi and Kenya. He launched the publication of his Visions of Britain, the book that accompanied his television assault on modern British architecture. He went to Hungary and lectured at Budapest University on the evils of Communism, and made other official visits to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Nigeria and Cameroon. He skied in Switzerland, went shooting at Sandringham, stalked deer at Balmoral, hunted in the Midlands, painted in Italy and played polo in June and July at home. Whenever it was possible, Camilla joined him. And when he was free of outside commitments, he was to be found at Highgrove, while Diana remained in London. It was no way to conduct a marriage, but by this time only the boys and duty held them together.
With Charles away so much, Diana’s affair with Hewitt intensified. They spoke once or twice a day, saw each other on one or two nights a week, and the riding lessons continued close to Windsor, where Hewitt had been transferred to Combermere Barracks.
Diana had told Hewitt about her struggle with bulimia. The disease revolted him, but once he had accepted it, he supported her efforts to overcome it. He confessed later that he had always felt she was still in love with Charles and that in her heart she wanted Charles to see how attractive she could be to a man. In other words, he sensed he was being used.
The risks that Diana and Hewitt took were enormous. The affair might have cost Hewitt his career, but Diana stood to lose much more. For her there was always the fear that Barry Mannakee had been right in warning her of certain dangers. Charles would survive the revealing of his affair with Camilla, but if her liaison was discovered there would be a terrible scandal, which might lead to her disgrace, separation from her children, and perhaps the threat of mortal danger. But Hewitt’s passion for her and his tender regard were impossible for her to sacrifice. And so many good things had come out of it. Although she was overtaken with panic when they were apart for more than a few days, her bulimia was less frequent. And when she and Charles were together, their hostility towards each other had diminished.
Diana and Hewitt’s affair carried on into 1988, when on several weekends she joined him at his mother’s small, comfortable home in Devon. She drove there with either of her current detectives, Ken Wharf or Allan Peters, and four policemen in a back-up car. The security team kept a low profile while the lovers relaxed with the gregarious Shirley Hewitt, who was probably less than ecstatic about her son’s liaison with the future queen. He was playing a dangerous game. Diana’s security team were well aware of the reason for these bucolic visits to the English countryside where Diana and Hewitt took long walks along the rocky coast, the detectives a few paces behind. They remained at a discreet distance when the pair picnicked. Two men took posts at the front and rear doors at night The claustrophobic nature of all this finally got to Hewitt, and towards the end of one of these weekends he became silent and aloof.
Diana began to doubt the depth of his love, but she was incapable of breaking off the relationship. On Charles’s fortieth birthday a ball took place in his honour at Buckingham Palace. Diana was given a dozen or so invitations for her friends, and she sent one to Hewitt. In May 1989, she invited him to a gala evening at Althorp to celebrate Raine’s sixtieth birthday, at which they danced in the long picture gallery beneath the portraits of her Spencer ancestors. Hewitt got on well with Charles Spencer and his new bride, the lovely but too-thin Victoria Lockwood, whom Diana sensed instantly was also suffering from an eating disorder. Johnnie was gracious, but Raine was withdrawn. She sensed Hewitt’s role in her stepdaughter’s life and strongly disapproved, although she too, had been an adulteress. The difference was that Raine had not been married to the future King of England. The royal connection through her husband’s daughter meant a great deal to Raine, and she was now seriously concerned that Hewitt, a virtual nobody, was placing the entire family, and especially her own social standing, in jeopardy.
*Rupert Murdoch’s communication empire at this time included three of Britain’s most powerful papers: the News of the World, the Sun, and the prestigious Times. In the United States he owned the tabloid Star, the New York Post, the Village Voice and New York and New West magazines. He had recently purchased Twentieth Century Fox film studios, as well as six television stations. Robert Maxwell’s career was not this stable. A Czechoslovakian by birth, he became a British citizen after fleeing the Nazis in 1939. Elected to Parliament in 1964 as a Labour member, a financial scandal cost him his political career. Heavily in debt, he still managed to raise money to repurchase his former publishing company Pergamon Press as well as the Mirror Newspaper Group, Macmillan Books, and the New York Daily News. He drowned mysteriously in 1991 while on a Mediterranean cruise on his lavish yacht (suicide was suspected). After his death it was found that he had misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars from his companies and their employee pension plans.
PART FOUR
A STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE
18
BY 1989 DIANA’S affair with Hewitt had begun to wane, although the following year the flame would flare up briefly again when he went off to join the British forces in Kuwait for the Gulf War. Shortly after he returned, the affair ended: he had fallen in love with another married woman “whose husband did not understand her.” Diana refused to speak ill of him and, to a large extent, blamed herself for the parting; their meetings had always been cloaked in secrecy, in the presence of her security staff, at her convenience not his, and their relationship had been a threat to his career. All this was true, but Diana had matured in the years of their affair. She no longer needed to prove to herself that she was a desirable woman. Rather, she had to prove that she was a worthwhile person.
The young woman who, when cautioned by Charles to mind her head as she went under a low archway and had replied, “Why? there’s nothing in it,” now found it packed with opinions and ideas on how she, as a member of the Royal Family, could make a difference to the lives of ordinary people.
Her visits to the sick, disabled and elderly became more frequent. When she was unable to sleep at night, she would alert the detective on duty and make a late-night unofficial visit to the wards of the seriously sick who no longer knew night from day. She wrote hundreds of letters to patients she had talked to at their bedsides. She went to see some when they were able to return to their homes. She always came with small, thoughtful presents—nail polish for a youngster who had commented on how pretty the colour on her nails was, a box of pastels for a talented boy who had shown her his drawings. Above all, she tried to make patients laugh. “Being a princess is not all it’s cracked up to be,” she confided to one awestruck, bedridden teenager. “The trouble is it’s so hard to have a pee.”
Despite advice to the contrary from the Palace, Diana centred her energy on Aids patients, addiction, abused and battered women. And always children. She retained her patronage of such organizations as the Royal Ballet, but she made it clear that there were more important things than dance: “People are dying on the streets,” she replied, when asked to give more time to her patronage of the company. Hostels for the homeless took her attention, and she spent hours, sometimes accompanied by Cardinal Basil Hume, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, talking to the destitute, listening intently to their stories, shedding tears when she was moved. She did not hesitate to put her arms round someone, whether they were suffering from Aids or living and sleeping rough.
“She seemed not to smell the decay and the dirt,” one hospital attendant noted. “She did not pull back or turn aside when faced with a horrific injury or the results of a ravaging disease. There was something noble about her in the truest sense. I just could not put it together with the image drawn of her in the press, the glamour that her life entailed, all those gala affairs and the clothes. My God—the health care that could have been bought with the cost of her wardrobe.”
Diana was torn by a great duality of purpose. She wanted to serve mankind and to represent the monarchy properly, and she was convinced that she could achieve both. Her life had taken a major turn: her bulimia was now infrequent, and this—and the knowledge that she could win a man’s love—had empowered her. The emotional rows with Charles had tempered but there were times when her depression returned and she made fairly hysterical, late-night calls to Highgrove.
Charles was not in an enviable position. His overwrought wife threatened his one sanctuary: his relationship with Camilla. His mistress, however, used this to her advantage. Camilla remained collected, no matter what the onslaught. If it was at all possible, Diana’s outbursts brought the lovers closer together. Sides had been taken: it was Charles and Camilla with Charles’s dedicated, well-trained militia of courtiers and camp followers, against a fearful Diana and her few close friends.
The boys were not unaware of the War of the Waleses, although Harry was now at Wetherby, a day school in London which William had previously attended, and since September 1990, William had been at Ludgrove, a boarding-school near Wokingham, Berkshire. Wills was viewed by his peers with a mixture of jealousy, resentment and discomfort His personal bodyguard came with him and he had to wear a device to alert his detective if anything was wrong. Diana had argued against this, but there had been no alternative.
Will’s first term at Ludgrove was traumatic. Before then, although he had often been separated from his parents for days and weeks at a time, he had been left in the care of the nursery staff who had spoiled him—to Charles’s displeasure. At Ludgrove, he was subjected to the same discipline as the other boys. Also, he was self-conscious and his classmates regarded him as untouchable. He was unhappy at the school and could not wait for the holidays. “I know how he feels,” Charles told a close staff member, when the family reunited at Highgrove for Christmas 1990. “I felt the same way as a child. It’s difficult for him.” But even more stressful for William and Harry was the drama being played out by their parents. With Hewitt gone from her life several months now a terrible loneliness took hold. She dissolved into floods of tears if Charles became confrontational, and equally if he ignored her. William had always been close to his mother, and seeing her cry upset him. “William had elected himself his mother’s protector,” a staff member says. “It was very touching to see them together. They were openly affectionate. Much hugging and kissing. The Princess was in a wretched state at about the time he went off to school. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, or for the Prince [of Wales]. It was a tough call. It must have been absolute hell for both of them. I’ve seen tears in Prince Charles’s eyes on more than one occasion. He is only human and he truly loves his children.”
One day, over Christmas, William found his mother crying on the stairs at Highgrove. He ran up to sit in front of her, put his hands on her shoulders and asked her what was wrong. Diana tried to compose herself but could not control her tears and told him she would explain when he was older. Suddenly Charles appeared. William was close to tears himself. He turned to his father and shouted, “I hate you, Papa! I hate you so much! Why do you make Mummy cry all the time?” Then, according to embarrassed staff who were witnessing this family crisis, the little boy ran down the stairs and into the garden, followed by Charles, then Diana shouting, “Now look what you’ve done, Charles!”
“[From that point] when they were at Highgrove together, Prince Charles spent the days in the garden and his evenings going over his papers, and the Princess remained mostly sequestered in her room or with the boys in the nursery. The night before William was to return to school, she called down to the kitchen to order their dinners to be sent up with hers on trays. When Prince Charles came down at seven he was shocked to hear this. He had planned for the family to dine together on this particular evening. He immediately rang the Princess, but was unable to reverse her orders and so he ate alone, also on a tray, in his study, but went upstairs to say goodnight to the boys later, before going out. The next morning, a Sunday, there was a repeat of this wilful attempt to keep the boys separated from their father. Breakfast was served to them and their mother on trays in her room. Lunch was ghastly. No one interacting really. The boys talked to their mother or to their father, but there was no real conversation between them. When William was leaving a short time later everyone trooped out to the car. He clung to both his parents and by the time he was seated and the car was ready to leave, he had lost control and was crying quite bitterly.
“Without the children,” the staff member said of Prince Charles, “he seemed to prefer to be anywhere but with her—and who could blame him?”
Her deep self-disgust, her terror that she might be injuring her children by her emotional behaviour, set off an alarm inside Diana. She knew she was drowning and dragging others down with her and that she had to fight her way to the surface, face her fears.
The spiritual side of her had been reawakened by consultations with the respected astrologer Penny Thornton, who with her husband, Simon Best, was a friend of the Duke and Duchess of York, whose marriage was also at breaking-point. Diana saw Thornton several times a week. The sessions pressed Diana into a process of self-empowerment.
