DR. HASNAT KHAN was an imposing figure, broad-shouldered, handsome, with intense eyes. Diana had met the Pakistani heart surgeon through mutual friends in 1995 while he was in Britain studying new operating techniques. A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor, Dr. Khan was dedicated to his work and to his wish to bring to his poorest compatriots the best modern medicine. Diana was in awe of him yet his company gave her a sense of inner peace. They became friends, and Diana soon realized she was in love. Dr. Khan, however, had higher priorities than satisfying his own romantic emotions and would not abandon them easily.
When Dr. Khan, whom Diana called Natty, managed some free time, they had quiet dinners together at Kensington Palace. “At first, I wasn’t sure this was a romance,” one of her friends says. “Diana was searching madly for psychological help at the time, attempting to define what her role, with the divorce pending, would be. Dr. Khan had a tremendous impact on her. She had never known another man so dedicated to helping people and able to do so. She told me that he had the gift of touch—something she always believed she had as well.”
She was certainly acting like a woman in love. At the invitation of her young, newly married friend Jemima Goldsmith, daughter of multi-millionaire Sir James Goldsmith, and her husband, the Pakistani cricketer turned politician and humanitarian Imran Khan—no relation to the doctor—she travelled to their home on the Ravi River in Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, where Dr. Khan’s family also lived. Lahore is one of the most romantic yet tragic cities in Pakistan. The great palace and mausoleum of the Moghul Emperor Jahangir and the Shalimar Gardens are just outside the city, which according to legend was founded by Lava, son of Rama, the hero of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana.
Imran and Jemima Khan lived in comparable splendour as a large segment of Lahore’s population suffered unimaginable poverty and, as Hasnat Khan had told Diana, a shocking shortage of physicians and medical equipment. Echoes remained of the pomp and luxury of the lost land of the Raj, the panoply of imperial power once wielded by the British Empire. The great palaces and government buildings of that era remained, but they often seemed like a luminous mirage that disappeared into crumbling disarray upon close inspection.
One afternoon Diana sought out Dr. Khan’s parents, who lived in a middle-class area reasonably near her friends. It was a pleasant enough visit but his family were strict Muslims and Diana sensed that they would put up great resistance to their son becoming seriously involved with a divorced Christian woman.
Still, she was happy in Pakistan. Hasnat Khan had given her reason to hope that they could somehow find a way to be together. In view of this she sent a letter to Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the famous South African heart surgeon who had performed the first heart transplant in 1963, asking if they could meet when she reached Cape Town, the next stop on her journey. Dr. Barnard agreed. Diana planned to ask him to sponsor Dr. Khan in a hospital in South Africa.
Hasnat Khan had not yet committed himself to Diana. Her attempt to find a place where they could live useful lives, yet be distanced from their cultural baggage, was made on a strictly private basis. She had wanted to have something concrete to offer him before she made the suggestion to him. This proved a serious miscalculation.
However, her desire to help Imran Khan raise funds for a cancer centre he had established had been her main purpose in coming to Pakistan, and she set to work almost upon her arrival in Lahore. Wherever Diana went the paparazzi followed, and this trip to Pakistan was no exception. As she often did when she wanted a cause to gain public exposure, she encouraged press coverage and often manipulated the photo shoots. The images the photographers caught of Diana in Pakistan were heart-wrenching, but she found most rewarding the private time she shared with the cancer patients.
“There was a young boy,” recalled the hospital’s medical director, Dr. G. M. Shah, “who had a tumour on his face. That tumour was festering. It smelled, it really smelled. I was sitting four feet away, and I could smell it. And she picked him up. She held him, completely oblivious to everything. The boy could not open his mouth; one eye was closed. It was not a happy scene. But she held that child on her lap throughout a party we had. She was happy to keep that child with her through the whole function.”
There was no doubting that Diana had a talent for love. “She felt she could inspire it, transmit it, increase its general sum,” British author Martin Amis recalled. “There is no question that she made a difference in the homosexual community in England, and perhaps elsewhere. Her support came at a crucial time, in defiance of tabloid opinion as well as royal prudence.”
Having seen the impact of her association with Aids patients, Diana now saw herself carrying the torch for others who suffered. She believed she could heal—perhaps this was delusionary, but her touch, her calming presence had a strong effect on the sick—and she felt that with Natty she could achieve even more. Shortly after her divorce, Diana had told New Yorker editor Tina Brown, “[Charles and I] could have been a great team, he giving his speeches and me shaking hands and helping where I could.” Now, though, her vision was to raise the world’s consciousness of the plight of the afflicted.
After six days in Pakistan she flew to Cape Town where Charles Spencer, his wife Victoria and their children had established a second home. It was to be a reparative visit to mend the schism in their relationship caused when her brother refused to give her the cottage at Althorp. While she was there, she had her meeting with Christiaan Barnard, who has said that she thought she might be able to start a new life in South Africa with Dr. Khan.
Besides her brother’s presence, Cape Town offered other inducements. Because of its historic ties to Great Britain it seemed unlikely that the Queen would veto any plan for the princes to spend school holidays there with their mother. The city enjoyed a good climate, contained many educational and cultural opportunities, and had a large Muslim community, which might have appealed to Dr. Khan. Dr. Barnard could promise nothing, but he agreed to be helpful if her friend should approach him.
By the time Diana returned to London, the tabloids had wind of her new romance. She was quoted as saying, “I want to marry [Dr. Khan] and have his babies,” but Diana disavowed having made such a statement The doctor did not welcome the publicity and refused to comment to the press. With Diana he was gentle, caring and apologetic, but they began to see less of each other.
“Diana was greatly disturbed,” a friend said. “She realized she had jumped the gun and been too forward. She had the glums for weeks after her return from Pakistan. I think she had this whole fantasy going and now it had burst and she thought she had been responsible. I don’t believe she saw Dr. Khan’s decision to distance himself from her as a rejection, rather as an admission that she meant too much to him and would therefore stand in the way of what he considered—and in the end, she did, too—his main objective: to help his people.” Soon after, Dr. Khan returned to Pakistan. His influence, however, was a key turning point in Diana’s life and in her deepening dedication to her favoured causes and in her philosophical views.
Dr. Khan was Muslim. Diana had close friends of that faith and had become familiar with it during the years of her marriage, for Charles, a regular communicant of the Church of England, felt it important to understand Islam. He and Diana had often discussed the religion’s guiding tenets. Diana had never been as strongly religious as Charles. It was faith coupled with dedication to helping others that appealed to her. She had found those qualities in Mother Teresa, a Catholic, and in Hasnat Khan, a Muslim. Caring for people crossed the boundaries of race and religion, and she was growing more certain that this was where her future lay.
She plunged deeper into introspective study. Staff noticed that her bedside table now contained biographies of the great, Tchaikovsky (“He killed himself because of his homosexuality,” she told a friend. “He was only fifty-three. All that glorious music he could have written lost because of the intolerance of the world”), Gandhi and Dr. Barnard among them, although she still took the latest Danielle Steele or Jeffrey Archer novel with her when she travelled.
Diana was a great contradiction. She loved the glitz her position engendered, the exciting power-people she met, and the glamorous clothes that were designed for her. Yet she was a needy woman who hungered for love and was often happiest in simple clothes and with the dispossessed and the afflicted whom others have found repugnant. This duality of personality was the most fascinating aspect of this woman who had caught the attention of the world and held it with awesome regard.
Long ago she had shed the persona of the dim Sloane Ranger, whom Camilla and Kanga had thought they could manipulate, and whom Charles believed was “rather absent upstairs in the brain department.” Diana had her full wits about her now and she was proving cleverer than anyone could have supposed. She was fond of saying, “I got it all wrong.” But it was Charles and his acolytes who had been misled.
“They have a class uneasiness about everything that smacks of intensity,” a close observer comments. “What few people understood is that Diana’s love for Charles, like everything else about her [was] embarrassingly intense. If she had been a chilly opportunist, she might have accommodated the marital arrangement favoured by so many of her former husband’s friends. But her love was tenacious, desperate, uncompromising. Her temperament was not the sort to take a husband’s infidelity in her stride. Charles thought he had married a demure deb, but Diana harboured a cache of emotions straight out of Emily Bronte.”
Now, severed from the bonds of her restrictive marriage, Diana was able to follow the inner logic of her heart. Her overwhelming need to love and be loved made friends feel she was hell-bent on finding the right man with whom to achieve this. Both William and Harry were rugby mad, and Diana developed a friendship with rugby star Will Carling, who arranged for the boys to spend time with the England team during a training session. Within a short time, Diana and Carling, who was married, began meeting for breakfast. Rumours flew and although Diana denied there had been a romance, Julia Carling threatened a divorce suit naming Diana as co-respondent. The couple did divorce, but without implicating Diana.
Certainly there were men in Diana’s life. Her beauty and fame drew them to her. Also she was not timid in making it known to a particular man that she found him attractive. In any other recently divorced woman, none of this would have seemed unusual or scandalous. But Diana was the mother of a future king, and still the Princess of Wales, which changed the equation considerably. The media exploited her supposed “affairs,” which distressed her, but she remained determined to have a life of her own.
In August 1996, she had received a telephone call from Hollywood film star Kevin Costner. Diana had always loved socializing with the stars and suspected that he might be asking her to appear at a gala benefit of some sort. Instead, Costner told her that he was in the process of developing a script as a sequel to his recently successful movie, The Bodyguard, in which he had co-starred with Whitney Houston. The story was to be about a princess who has to be rescued by her bodyguard from kidnappers. He was planning to reprise his role and he hoped she might consider the possibility of playing the princess. Diana told Costner that she didn’t know if she could act and wouldn’t want to make a fool of herself. She spoke with him “about the level of sophistication and dignity that the part would have to have.”
Costner says she told him, “Look, my life is maybe going to become my own at some point. Go ahead and do this script and when it’s ready I’ll be in a really good spot.” She joked about the call to her staff. It seemed an unlikely project to come to fruition and she did not expect to hear from Costner again. But he called her a second time to tell her that the script was being written. Still she pushed the whole idea out of her head.*
In early October 1996, Diana was a privileged spectator at a life-saving heart-transplant operation on a seven-year-old child from Cameroon, the medical team led by Sir Magdi Yacoub, a well-known surgeon and a friend of Dr. Khan. “All that blood. I’m sure I would keel over. How can you stand watching those things?” Anthony Holden asked her a week later, when he interviewed her at Kensington Palace.
“If I am to care for people in hospital,” Diana replied, “I need to know every aspect of the long treatment they have been through.” This was after the affair with Dr. Khan had ended, but her prerogatives had not changed. When Holden enquired if she was considering marrying again she was pensive for a moment Then she said, “I’m in no hurry to get married. I’m looking for a man who knows what I’m about.”
“And what is that?”
“Caring. I’m about caring. I thought I’d married a man that understood that first time around, but I got it wrong. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.” She still retained remnants of bitterness. “They can’t get me now,” she said, referring to the Royal Family. “In fact, I think they’re frightened of what I can do to them.”
The Palace, if not yet “frightened” of her, was alert to the danger she represented to its well-being. “It wasn’t just the divorce, the tell-all boyfriend, the married rugby star,” British author Martin Amis reflected. “She introduced an informality, a candid modernity, into a system that could offer no resistance to it; she had a beauty in her life that made [the Royals] seem ugly.” She could easily be seen as a potential saboteur of the monarchy. For she was real. People could and did touch her. She combined youth, caring and beauty, where the Royal Family were cold, distant and, on the whole, rather graceless.
A fortnight after her return from Pakistan and South Africa, she had arrived at Harrods for a charity book launch honouring Sir Magdi on the arm of her father’s old friend, Mohamed al Fayed. Although he was controversial Diana liked him: he had treated her with kindly warmth and he respected her need to work. He shared with her the experience of having been turned away by the Royal Family, in al Fayed’s case at great financial expense.
He had sponsored the Royal Windsor Horse Show to prove his loyalty to the Queen and to support her interests. He had bought Harrods department store, and placed Raine Spencer on the board, when it was in serious difficulties, believing he was saving a British landmark. Then he acquired the quintessential British magazine Punch, Fulham Football Club and the historic Balnagown Castle in Scotland, all in a failed effort to break into the establishment. His brother Ali became the owner of the prestigious Turnbull & Asser gentlemen’s outfitters and was similarly ignored. The Fayeds never understood that no matter how rich one was, the British aristocracy did not welcome merchants easily into their ranks. Many among them called al Fayed an “Arab” in a most pejorative manner. He countered that he was Egyptian. Accusations were made that his entire background as told by him was a lie, and that the huge sum (£656 million) he had paid for Harrods and its affiliated stores in the House of Fraser, had been given him by his former brother-in-law, the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. A1 Fayed’s friendship with Diana, however casual, was interpreted as social climbing, and the Queen considered his lavish presents to the boys ostentatious.
Harry, “the impish one,” had one more year at Ludgrove before joining William at Eton. William now towered over his father. “Finding jeans to fit him is a problem,” Diana confessed, with an edge of pride. To Tina Brown on a trip to New York, she said, “I would like him to grow up as press savvy as John F. Kennedy, Jr. I try to din into him all the time about the media, the danger, and how he must understand and handle it” She was grooming Harry to be “a huge support to his brother. The boys will be properly prepared. I am making sure of this,” she added. “I don’t want them to suffer the way I did.”
William was already being groomed elsewhere for his future role. On most Sunday afternoons he had tea with the Queen and she had begun her tutelage of his royal heritage and duties. “Relationships with grandchildren are always easier than those with your own children,” says one of the Queen’s courtiers. “She may have stressed duty over spontaneity with her son, but she may have learned her lesson. Her Majesty has mellowed quite a bit.”
“Not to any noticeable degree,” said another courtier. “The Queen is playing her hand carefully. Her objective is to win Prince William over to the Windsors from the Spencers’ influence, to make him aware of his duty and his future. Her Majesty is applying a different spin to this message than she did to Prince Charles. However, with her grandsons, she does not feel committed to answer to Prince Philip. Her relationship to her grandsons, and especially to Prince William, is entirely of her own making. But the Queen still finds it difficult to touch or be touched. A normal show of affection, like a hug or an arm about a child’s shoulder, is hard, if not impossible, for her. She is always aware of her oneness. Except perhaps when she is out walking with her beloved corgis. I’ve seen her take them up in her arms and hold them to her. In the very expansive way in which she makes this gesture you can see the shocking need she has to be able to grasp life to her. When one of her dogs dies she grieves for months and visits their graves for years.”
Diana understood this in the Queen for she had been subject to the rule that members of the Royal Family must not be touched. One of her ladies-in-waiting confessed to a moment of torment when “the Princess was crying most poignantly. It was when she had just learned of her father’s death and I was alone with her. I wanted desperately to put my arms around her. It was what any decent person would have done in ordinary circumstances. But it would have been unpardonable to have done so with the Princess of Wales. An important code would have been broken. No, no, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I slipped quietly out of the room. I’ve never forgiven myself for that. I think it will haunt me to my grave.”
On the other hand, Diana was quick to hug and kiss her children. She called William “the deep thinker,” and she worried more about Harry, because as the younger brother to the heir to the throne, he would not receive the same attention as William. But it was William with whom she shared a greater affinity. Since his parents’ divorce he had taken on the role of his mother’s protector. Shy by nature, he was attuned to her moods. Once, when he heard her crying in her room, he had slipped an affectionate note beneath the door. Diana encouraged his sensitivity. During school breaks when he was at Kensington Palace, they spent as much time as possible together. He had inherited her height, good looks and crusading spirit.
It was William who, on seeing her go through her vast wardrobe to store some of it away, suggested that she auction her old gowns to raise money for charity. “Yes! Why not?” she replied and set this into action immediately. A sale of seventy-nine gowns would be held in New York six months hence, in late June 1997. One evening, in the spring of that year, Diana and William were watching television together in her sitting room, as they often did. Tears formed in his eyes as haunting images, from Angola, Somalia, Cambodia and Afghanistan, flashed on the screen of landmine amputees. Many of the victims were children. “Maybe you could do something to help,” he said.
She spoke to her friend Lord Attenborough, a dedicated anti-landmine activist, who encouraged her to become involved in Red Cross efforts to rid the world of the more than 100 million landmines planted in over sixty countries, and where up to one in 350 people had been injured by them. Two months later, Diana was in Angola with a camera crew shooting a segment for the popular BBC programme Heart of the Matter, this edition directed by Attenborough. Dressed simply in a cotton shirt and capri pants, her hair brushed back from her face, she seemed impervious to the heat as she took child amputees on her lap and hugged them to her. Then she was seen in protective clothing walking behind an expert bomb-disposal team as they worked cautiously to remove the mines.
To the world she was the humanitarian princess, but in conservative circles in Britain she was chastised for being what Tory MPs called “a loose cannon, whose landmine campaign had drawn her into the political arena in the run-up to a general election.” In 1996 Labour took power with Tony Blair as prime minister. Diana concentrated on establishing a rapport with him.
Blair was young and handsome, with boundless vitality. Labour pledged to work for a world-wide ban on landmines and Diana continued her efforts. In June, as scheduled, she went to New York for a preview of the sale of her gowns. She had begun her eight-day visit to the States in Washington where she had breakfast with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and attended the venerable Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s eightieth birthday celebration. In New York she had already appeared at a Red Cross benefit in Manhattan and visited an Aids hospice with Mother Teresa in the Bronx. Pictures of the tall Princess and the diminutive nun in her grey and white habit circled the globe. Though no two women ever seemed so disparate, there was a firm bond between them. Before they parted, Mother Teresa placed a rosary in Diana’s hand as a gift. Diana was moved and when she returned to England she hung it over the silver frame of a signed photograph of the Pope, which had a prominent place on her desk.
In New York she lunched at the Four Seasons with Tina Brown and Anna Wintour of Vogue. They discussed the auction, and Diana’s new friendship with Tony Blair. “I think at last I have someone who will know how to use me,” she confided. “He’s told me he wants me to go on some missions.”
Tina Brown queried what she meant.
“I’d really like to go to China,” she replied.
And where would she like eventually to live? She was drawn to America, she confessed, the options, the openness. She thought she would be happy there. After all, she had American blood. To her knowledge no one from the Work side remained in Chìllicothe, Ohio, but she had distant cousins in Florida, whom she had met and liked. However, it seemed impossible that she could move to the USA. Neither the Queen nor Charles would ever allow the boys to leave Britain for the United States.
She returned to England glowing. The tension between Charles and her had eased. They had travelled together to and from William’s confirmation in the spring, and for the first time ever, it seemed, they had not had to be told to be pleasant to each other before the cameras. Diana would never forgive Camilla or Charles for their deception, but she now felt less animosity. Her sons and her mission meant everything to her. She had told friends in New York that she imagined one day she might fall in love and get married again and hoped that it would happen sooner rather than later as her biological clock was ticking away and she wanted a daughter. Right now, though, she was thinking only about the near future. Her plans for the summer were already set: she would spend time with the boys in the South of France aboard Mohamed al Fayed’s super-luxurious yacht, then she would take a cruise with her friend Rosa Monckton around the Greek islands. There would be a short interruption when she visited Bosnia for the landmine campaign.
At the end of June she was in London. The park beyond Kensington Palace was filled with people sunning themselves, couples walking hand in hand, children running along the edge of the Serpentine feeding bread to the ducks. Such normal, everyday joys were for ever out of her grasp, at least in public places. But in a few hours she would be in the South of France where, on Mohamed al Fayed’s estate and on his yacht she could soak up the sun in privacy and swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Best of all, William and Harry would be with her.
*Kevin Costner received the finished script of The Bodyguard II on 3 September 1997, three days after her death. “I picked it up and the first thirty pages were totally her,” he said. “It was dignified, sexy, smart, funny … and I couldn’t finish it I stopped. It broke my heart.” He had not spoken to Diana during the intervening year, and she is not known to have mentioned the idea to any member of her staff.