Chapter Seventeen

Saint and Sinner

Stand by for a mood swing, boys.

—Diana to her private secretary, Patrick Jephson

NEWLY SEPARATED FROM her husband, the Princess of Wales set about administering her celebrity like a global brand. Her life was now devoted to tending, promoting, and conserving the Diana franchise.

Her office at St. James’s Palace was like the vestibule of an ad agency, with two huge clip frames filled with magazine photo spreads, all of them showing her triumphs as a princess. Her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, managed her portfolio of charities with an eye to mixing the contemporary with the traditional, the cultural with the humanitarian. A former lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, five years older than the Princess, Jephson had been moved from equerry to private secretary in 1991. He was astute and unflappable, and he thought about her commitments strategically, aiming to expunge any lingering perceptions of the Sloane Princess or Dynasty Di or Fergie’s gal pal. His admiration for his new boss was not untinged with skepticism. He recognized how canny Diana had become at using philan-thropy to enhance her standing with the public and thus her power over the rest of The Firm. “Royalty is the most amazing conjunction of the idealistic and the self-indulgent,” he told me. “But I still think Diana represented the better side of the equation.” Sometimes he found himself heading off her more indulgent bids to make an image statement, but if you could get past Jephson into eye contact with the Princess, she rarely said no. She was naturally responsive if her heartstrings were tugged and the asker had a link to someone or something she needed. The dowager Duchess of Norfolk, chairman of the Hospice Movement, said that Diana was so involved with patients that when they eventually died, she would often privately invite their mourning relatives to Kensington Palace. Jephson described the “mission statement” of the Princess’s office as being “like Disney—to bring happiness to people.”

Diana’s lean team of four eager beavers coexisted uneasily in the same suite at St. James’s Palace as the Prince’s voluminous entourage of thirty-five. For privacy, she received her high-powered supplicants at her unofficial HQ at Kensington Palace. A cavalcade of show business personalities, heads of philanthropic trusts, media leaders, and politicians filed in and out of her sunny, flower-filled sitting room. Luminaries like Elton John, Gianni Versace, and Hillary Clinton were her peer group now. If she was to meet a foreign dignitary and needed a briefing, she could call Henry Kissinger rather than James Colthurst. For financial advice it was not the Comptroller of the Royal Household but banker and taste baron Lord Rothschild. The Princess ran her schedule of public appearances like a brisk CEO whose distinctive marketing concept is the personal touch. Unlike many top people who’ve been directly lobbied, she did not deploy her private secretary to politely renege a week later with a “remembered” clashing commitment. A former Palace official remarked how she was “very quick on the uptake. She was very practical when planning something. She would ask realistic questions, like ‘Where can I change?’ She’d remember details and do it well. In stark contrast to her husband, a deal was a deal. She’d ask practical questions, then she’d say ‘O.K.,’ and she’d remember it. We all adored working for her. Very professional.”

The inspiration for her going global can be traced to an epiphany. After that first visit alone to Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta in February 1992, Paul Burrell tells us, she wrote a note to herself on blue-embossed Kensington Palace writing paper: “Today…[I] found the direction I’ve been searching for all these years. The sisters sang to me on arrival, a deeply spiritual experience, and I soared to such great heights in spirit…The emotion running through that hospice was very strong and the effect it had on me was how much I wanted and longed to be part of all this on a global scale.” When she eventually met Mother Teresa herself in Rome a few days later, the saintly nun showed her pragmatic side, telling Diana, “You couldn’t do what I do, and I couldn’t do what you do.”

What Diana did do paved the way for the galvanizing celebrity philanthropists of recent years—big-tent humanitarians like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and George Clooney. Celebrities who work these particular veins are always having to prove something to their beneficiaries: that they’re not merely pretty faces yearning to spruce up their images on the backs of downtrodden Africans and Asians. Diana had no such problem. Her princesshood had given her that right from the moment she made her vows at St. Paul’s Cathedral. What better explanation could there be for her charity than the most obvious one: that she meant it?

She brought something else to her efforts: her own story. “It wouldn’t have worked if she’d just been a grand woman going round doing good works” was the way her lawyer Anthony Julius put it. “The pathos of her own position added to it: the extraordinary paradox of this very beautiful woman who had at the same time been rejected.” Diana instinctively understood that in the media age invading your own privacy is a rite of passage.

Sharing = caring: the Diana equation. With the Morton revelations she had forged a visceral connection with millions. She had a fan base, a sisterhood. She had become the Oprah Princess without ever appearing on the rising electronic diva’s show. “Well, ladies, we all know what men can be like, don’t we?” That was how she kicked off a discussion group with a circle of battered wives in March of 1993 at a Family Refuge in London. Her talk in April at Britain’s first conference on eating disorders, at Kensington Town Hall, did something revolutionary in royal terms: it drew on the speaker’s personal experience. Diana did not actually say she suffered from bulimia, but everyone understood that it was why she was there. When she spoke of the eating disorder as a “shameful friend” and talked of how feelings of “guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem” could create “a compulsion to dissolve and disappear,” a dry medical meeting became a sensation. Her experiences as a mother brought new potency to the cause of postnatal depression. At a London conference on women and mental health organized by Turning Point, she acknowledged the “terrible torment” of women who are “continually disabled by the belief that they should exist only for the benefit of others.” The public—acquainted, through Morton, with her troughs of despair after the birth of William—knew that here, too, was something their Princess had endured.

Travel overseas was critical to her strategy of creating an identity not dependent on The Firm. To the chagrin of the Prince of Wales’s office, foreign leaders and heads of state all wanted to meet the solo Diana. When she had visited Cairo in May 1992 without Charles, President Hosni Mubarak was eating out of her hand. In Paris six months later, she captivated not only the French public but also the discerning President François Mitterrand and his wife, Danielle, obliterating differences of age and language in an animated, laughing tea party at the Élysée Palace. The Diana team was not wholly displeased that when Prince Charles followed his estranged wife to Paris two weeks later, he made a speech that flopped at home. Sensitive trade talks happened to be going on at the time, and Charles, innocently extolling the merits of French farming methods, was deemed to be siding with the froggy foreigner.

To help her own overseas push, Diana was shrewd in her courtesies to government ministers who could help. Arriving a few days after the Princess in Cairo, Prime Minister John Major’s Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was charmed to find on his dressing table at the embassy a long letter in the Princess’s hand telling him what she’d been up to. The rectitudinous Hurd offered a gushing account in his memoirs of the Princess at a banquet two days after the announcement of her separation in December 1992. She bestowed, he wrote, “that special mixture of beauty and charm which melted men’s bones. Presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers as they dined could make no sense of what was happening in our Royal Family but were content to bask for an hour or two in an extraordinary radiance.” The smitten minister had no inclination to cut off his own or the Foreign Office’s links with Her Royal Radiance. He found the Princess not the least interested in politics but “almost painfully anxious to continue overseas visits with our blessing…. I was glad, or more accurately, enchanted to give it.”

And help her he did. In March 1993, while the press was relaying images of Prince Charles skiing at Klosters, Diana was on her way to the poverty-stricken mountain kingdom of Nepal, accompanied by Baroness Chalker, Britain’s Overseas Development Minister. John Major’s Tory government was clearly acknowledging the pulling power of the Diana brand, which was forging helpful new coalitions between charities. As well as visiting lepers and families in remote ramshackle huts, Diana was to join policy discussions with the Nepalese Prime Minister! (She had an especially charming guide, too: the Eton-educated, twenty-two-year-old Crown Prince Dipendra, who in 2001 would express his dissatisfaction with court protocol by killing nine members of his Royal Family and himself at a state banquet.)

In July, she took off for Zimbabwe for the Red Cross. The Queen blessed the trip in return for Diana’s agreeing to put on a show of unity with Charles at a memorial service for World War II veterans at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Diana was happy to make the trade. Zimbabwe was another triumph. President Robert Mugabe, monster in training, was so elated on meeting her that he announced, “She brings a little light into your life.” The ever-intuitive Diana told Ken Wharfe that she found Mugabe “a frightening little man” who had not stopped sweating throughout their entire meeting. What made the front pages back home were pictures of the Princess in the bush doling out food to children from an iron pot at the Mazerera Feeding Center. “Di the Dinner Lady,” applauded the Daily Mail. Even the cynical Ken Wharfe was touched: “Those who believe that Diana’s work is nothing more than a series of photo opportunities in glamorous locations around the world should have seen this drained, exhausted woman sitting in the back of the helicopter that day and heard her speak of the heart-breaking scenes she had just witnessed.”

Jephson’s efforts steadily airbrushed the airhead out of Diana’s public persona. The serious broadsheets were beginning to come around. The Daily Telegraph hailed the trip as a triumph: “Africa, until now the undisputed realm of the Princess Royal, has a new champion.” To Lord Rees-Mogg, the former editor of The Times, Diana’s emergence as a power in her own right was expressed in her features. She was no longer just a beautiful woman. Her nose, he suggested, was “expressive of powerful will, commanding eyes in strong sockets—a face like Margaret Thatcher’s, not of prettiness, but of command.” Diana’s magic, of course, was that she looked nothing like Mrs. Thatcher, nor any of the cardiganned do-gooders who toiled without notice on the same charitable causes. Her thirties were her most seductive years. Lord Rothschild, for one, stood ready to educate her on more than her financial portfolio. “I wish I could have some luck there,” Rothschild told Woodrow Wyatt. “Well, you try hard enough,” replied Wyatt, “but she doesn’t like sex.” (Wyatt couldn’t have been more wrong about that.)

Diana’s charisma and her renewed relevance to the British people scared her estranged husband and her in-laws to death all over again. Without Charles, Diana was supposed to deflate, downsize, and turn back into a pumpkin. She was dropped from the Court Circular listing the day’s royal engagements and no longer invited to Royal Ascot. The Prince’s private secretary, Richard Aylard, told Patrick Jephson that “ways have to be found” to “put her in a safe box in which she could dash around doing what she wanted.”

The blond descendant of those bolshy red-haired Whigs had no intention of obliging him. Still, she was finding it more challenging than she had imagined in her pre-separation bravado. The reality was that for all her global acclaim Diana was frighteningly exposed. She felt the chill winds of disapproval in old-guard court circles and spiteful gossip wafting through the shires. She brooded that bad vibes emanated from Sir Robert Fellowes as well as from Charles’s people. The Prince’s team was committed to sabotaging anything that might upstage him. Patrick Jephson spent much of his time making lemonade out of lemons. When Diana lost her access for overseas trips to the Queen’s Flight (Her Majesty’s call on a Royal Air Force jet), he brokered a deal with Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, for the Princess to become Virgin Atlantic’s first royal customer and get the PR bang of naming their first Airbus “Lady in Red.”

The opposition never gave up trying to “put her in a box.” The BBC saw the Princess of Wales as a strong candidate to deliver that year’s prestigious Dimbleby Lecture, but the project suddenly evaporated, in Jephson’s words, “to the accompaniment of suitably scathing and suspiciously well-placed comment in Establishment newspapers.” Talk of a tour to follow up on the success in Zimbabwe was summarily quashed, along with a projected Red Cross trip to Bangladesh. “Someone, somewhere was determined that the Princess of Wales would no longer outshine ‘the rest of the Royals,’” the photographer Arthur Edwards noted darkly. In March 1993, the IRA killed two children in a bomb attack in the Lancashire town of Warrington. Diana was eager to leave immediately to reinforce her sympathetic connections with the suffering on all sides of the Irish imbroglio, first established on her acclaimed walkabout in 1992 in the war zone of Belfast’s Falls Road. Buckingham Palace vetoed it. The Prince of Wales was sent instead. The pattern was to continue. In May 1994, Diana wanted to go to the funeral service of the leader of the opposition Labour Party in Parliament, John Smith, who had died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five. The Palace said no.

None of this should have been surprising. The Morton book had been a Molotov cocktail hurled at the House of Windsor. Now the Palace was taking its revenge with a thousand cuts of quotidian smallness. Diana started to understand what it was she had lost along with the automatic protection and respect of the well-oiled Palace machine; whatever its shortcomings, she saw how nasty it could be when turned against her. It stoked her anger with Prince Charles. His failure to love her had not only ruined her private happiness, it was threatening her job satisfaction. Damn it, she would have been a wonderful Queen. Now she was a Princess without a realm, as toilsome a job as running an Internet start-up when you were once cochairman of IBM.

Her own family couldn’t help, or that’s how Diana saw it anyway. She had been looking forward to doing up the four-bedroom Garden House on the Althorp estate as a weekend retreat; her decorator Dudley Poplak had chosen a color scheme. The boys loved their rural weekends shooting and riding with their father. Until the Althorp idea occurred to her, it made her uneasy that she couldn’t offer them the same country pursuits. The Garden House would have had the added advantage of exposing William and Harry to their Spencer heritage. But in April 1993, her baby brother, now rejoicing in the title of the ninth Earl Spencer of Althorp and the rights of primogeniture that went with it, reneged on the arrangement. He had his reasons. The Garden House was too exposed to provide the right security and he had no desire for his young family to be disturbed by invasive gawkers. He offered her other houses on the estate but her heart was set on the Garden House, a Palladian jewel that had been rented for a time to Peter O’Toole. “If you are interested in renting a farmhouse” (outside the park), he wrote to his beleaguered sister, “then that would be wonderful.” She dispatched a furiously hurt reply. It was returned unopened. Later, when relations did not improve, her brother asked her to return the Spencer tiara she had worn at the wedding.

Ranks had begun to close among the creepie-crawlies who vied for the favor of the Crown. Her husband had something more durable than media stardom: he was the next King of England.

“You were either in one camp or you were in the other,” said Lord Palumbo. “You couldn’t really be in both…And the tendency clearly was to drive the two people at the very center of the drama apart…and the warfare is total, in such circumstances—very nasty and very deep and very bitter.” Palumbo, a cultural powerhouse and real estate developer, had been a polo-playing pal of the Prince until, in one of Charles’s more forthright architectural salvos, the Prince called Palumbo’s prized postmodern City of London building “a great glass stump.” Palumbo’s wife, Hayat, elegant and Audrey Hepburnish, was a friend of the Princess in her own right, inviting her to cruise on their yacht, Drumbeat, and spend country weekends at their estate in Newbury. “Diana was definitely ostracized by a great many social people after the marriage went publicly wrong,” she told me. “One morning we were window shopping in Walton Street and bumped into a female friend of Prince Charles’s. We were both face to face at the window of a shop and the woman had to curtsey and say hallo, and Diana said, ‘That was good. She hasn’t spoken to me for seven months.’”

Women who have had to crack London society from the outset are less mired in Establishment loyalties. Lady Palumbo is the daughter of a Lebanese newspaper publisher and educated at the American University in Beirut and the Sorbonne. She was only one of a clutch of sophisticated friends and mother substitutes, all with one distinction: they were not British-born. The most durable of these was their mutual friend Lucia Flecha de Lima, the petite, raven-haired wife of the Brazilian ambassador in London whom Diana had met during the royal tour of Brazil in 1991—warm, social, loyal, a grandmother of three. She had the time and the patience to listen to Diana’s long laments.

There was greater color to these foreign-born women of the world than the pinched female courtiers who inhabited Palace circles. Diana was a woman of the world herself now, a veteran of at least three extramarital affairs, traveled, seasoned, a mother of two. Hayat Palumbo and Lucia Flecha de Lima were always pushing Diana to get more of an education. Like Jephson, they felt that she could have summoned any brain in academia to help furnish her with intellectual self-confidence. “She was an intelligent girl, but it was a raw intelligence,” Palumbo said. “Lucia was always suggesting she get more schooling. Diana would say, ‘I will, I will.’ But she never wanted to give it the time.”

It was a pity. With no intellectual resources to fall back on, Diana was lonely. Ladies who lunch were no replacement for love. She was tired of affording trophy lust to her many male admirers. “She used to play tennis at Richard Branson’s house, but he was always trying to have sex with her,” commented her financial adviser, Joseph Sanders, to a friend in the late nineties before he died. Even Prince Charles’s camp acknowledged her allure. The Queen’s press spokesman, Dickie Arbiter, told me with wistful candor, “We would all have loved to rip her knickers off.” To keep her company there was always what she called “Le Gaget,” the tiny vibrator one of the staff bought for her in Paris as a joke.

Diana would come home high from one of her glittering galas or saddened by a draining exchange with the terminally ill and there would be no one to share it with. When she did not have an official invitation she was often spinning her wheels, as the American socialite and fund-raiser Marguerite Littman came to recognize. “One night Diana called me and said ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I am doing a screening of Philadelphia for a few close friends.’ She said, ‘You didn’t ask me.’ I said, ‘It’s just a tiny screening at a Soho screening room.’” Diana jumped at the chance to join her. Ken Wharfe reinforced the point: “People have this image of Kensington Palace that there are flunkies and court jesters all over the place and it’s buzzing all the time,” he said. “But at 5:30 the butler, the cleaner, and the dresser go home. It’s the most lonely place in the world.”

It was especially lonely now. Prince Harry had joined William as a boarder at Ludgrove in Berkshire in 1992, and Diana was a preposterously young empty-nester. She missed the solace of her children’s daily news and unconditional love. For years her schedule had been built around theirs; without them, she was horribly free. “I hate the silence of this home,” she told Paul Burrell, now transplanted from Highgrove as her butler. Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge, remembers Diana bursting into tears when a child at the shelter gave her a card for Harry’s birthday. “She would sometimes break off a visit to rush up to Ludgrove—‘an excuse to see them,’ she said.” When Diana had to hand over William and Harry to Charles on Christmas Day 1993 and leave them at Sandringham with the assembled Royal Family, the parting brought home the reality that her boys first and foremost would always be Windsors. Their mother went back to Kensington Palace and had Christmas lunch alone. Then she cried in the plane all the way to Washington to stay at the Brazilian embassy with the Flecha de Limas. “I felt so sorry for myself,” she said later. “She lived and breathed for those children,” said Mrs. Horley. “They meant everything to her. They were her life.”

But what if she lost them? Her mother’s fate haunted her. Sharing weekend access when the boys were home from boarding school meant she saw even less of them than before. It gave her a taste of the emptiness Frances had endured. Despite everything, Diana remained tenaciously in love with Charles—more precisely, in love with the idea of being in love with Charles. The old unfulfilled dream haunted her. She saw it more clearly now that she had grown up. She understood better the pressures of his ceremonial life. She had learned to care about their country, not just about their country houses. She had more appreciation of what he had achieved with his Prince’s Trust. Most of all, there was the love they shared for William and Harry. Diana desperately wanted more children—with him. Patrick Jephson believes that but for Camilla’s refusal to back off, the marriage could have been saved by a workable truce that might have eventually become a permanent negotiated peace. When the Prince and Princess put on that show of unity in Liverpool to please the Queen, Diana made a genuine effort and Charles cautiously responded. The sight of the royal couple smiling and laughing in the blustery wind and rain was an affecting glimpse of a civilized cease-fire.

Diana now realized, however, that by outing Camilla to Morton she had unwittingly done her rival a favor. The revelation locked Camilla further into the Prince’s life. The two felt free to be less furtive about a known relationship. As the Camillagate tapes showed, many years of practice had made Charles and his mistress ruthlessly efficient in organizing a network of friends who could be trusted to provide them cover. In theory, Diana could do the same, but she was under remorseless scrutiny. And there was the age-old double standard: as a woman, she was even now expected to maintain her aura of virtue.

In a conversation with the Princess, the historian Paul Johnson offered her a Dutch uncle list of do’s and don’ts for her postseparation life. Second on Johnson’s list, after “Stop talking to the press,” was “No sex.” That, Johnson told her, was something she needed to come to terms with: “Other women kept their legs together, she owed it to her public.” However much he sympathized with her view that she had been treated badly, he said, sex was not good for her. “And it’s not good for her image and so forth, and I told her if she thought that was deprivation—well, hard cheese.” Diana, says Johnson, replied gloomily, “I have to get used to hard cheese.”

But why should she? It was a big issue for the Queen Mother’s buttoned-up generation, but wasn’t it different for a stunning, soon-to-be-divorced blonde of the 1990s? Not entirely, alas. “Her celebrity was such baggage,” said Lady Palumbo. “She could never look at problems evenly as we might. She had to think about them from every angle: what the Royals might think, how it affected her fame, her press, her war with Charles. You and I just decide to do things. She had to weigh the consequences with the Queen, with Charles, all of it.” Under the prying eyes of her husband’s court and the glare of press coverage, there was little likelihood of Diana finding a Prince redux. As usual, she turned to the wrong guy.

         

IT WAS INSANELY SELF-DESTRUCTIVE. Diana had begun to fall for the forty-seven-year-old, very married Oliver Hoare in the autumn of 1992. Six feet tall, sexually alert, and tousle-haired, he was a dealer in Islamic art and intellectually a cut above the other Dianamen, a graduate of the Sorbonne as well as Eton. Some of his transgressive appeal was that he was a good friend of the Prince of Wales. The romance started when Hoare offered to act as a go-between for a possible Wales reconciliation, but in a sly rewrite of Der Rosenkavalier he himself ended up in bed with the Princess. The complication was not just that Hoare was married with two children but that his wife was rich. Diane de Waldner Hoare, a French aristocrat and heiress to an oil fortune, helped underwrite Oliver’s art gallery. This meant that, despite regular dalliances and many promises to the contrary, Hoare was never going to leave home. “Oliver was naughty,” another friend said. “He led her on.”

Hoare’s chauffeur, Barry Hodge, claimed that the Princess would phone her married lover as often as twenty times a day in his car, with Hoare furtively switching off the phone whenever Mrs. Hoare joined him in the back seat. “It was like a war zone. Diane Hoare is no fool, and she can smell another woman a mile off.” The Princess was dreaming of marrying Hoare, moving to Italy, and raising a second family. Her determination to make him leave his wife was as intense as the campaigns she waged against Raine and Camilla. “Diana had wonderful qualities of heart, but she was terribly possessive,” said Lady Bowker. “If she loved someone he had to leave everything, including children. Her possessiveness frightened men. Everything became drama.”

You can say that again. The Hoare household began to be plagued by scores of phone calls, some as late as midnight, which, when answered, yielded a long, yearning silence and then the dial tone. Mrs. Hoare worried (or pretended she did) that the calls were coming from Islamist terrorists who had found Oliver through his gallery. To his supreme discomfort, she insisted he report them to the police. In January 1994, a Scotland Yard call tracer duly tracked the “terrorist” to four landlines, three from Kensington Palace “rented by the office of HRH the Prince of Wales” and one from the home of Diana’s sister, Sarah McCorquodale; to Diana’s mobile phone; and to public pay phones in Kensington and Notting Hill. Scotland Yard privately alerted the head of the Royal Protection Squad. Diana was warned to stop. The Princess admitted to her confidant Joseph Sanders that she had been going out at night to make the pay phone calls, wearing various disguises and gloves to cover her fingerprints. Sanders exploded. “You know you’re a very silly girl to behave like this and you shouldn’t think you can get away with it,” he told her. He called the next day to apologize for his impertinence. Diana laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, the Palace are shouting at me the whole time.” But she did think she had got away with it.

Diana was living in a world of secrets again. Perhaps they were the necessary corollary to her life in a strobe light show. Her disregard for her own security appalled Ken Wharfe. On a March 1993 ski holiday with her boys at the Arlberg Hotel, in Lech, she evaded the night’s bodyguard by jumping into a snowbank from her twenty-foot-high balcony. Undetected, she stayed out all night, most likely with Hoare, though Ken Wharfe was never quite certain. It was scary stuff. Diana was becoming physically—and sexually—reckless.

Thanks to her daily workout with Carolan Brown, her figure had never looked better, the vestigial tall-girl slouch replaced by a sculpted, broad-shouldered pride. She loved showing off her new shape. At the Chelsea Harbour Club, where she worked out every morning, she flirted outrageously with England’s macho rugby captain, Will Carling, even though in three months he was due to marry TV presenter Julia Smith. After Carling and Julia married in June 1994, the Princess continued to seek his advice about her workout regime. It was take two of Hewitt and the riding lessons, except Diana was a big girl now and wasted less time. William and Harry were toted along to Twickenham, the headquarters of English rugby, to watch Carling train, just as they had been dressed up in Army uniforms to visit Hewitt at Kensington Barracks. In 1994, Carling was happily nonplussed to be invited for a drink at Kensington Palace that ended in more than cocktails. “I kept looking up and seeing all the family photographs,” he told a friend. “It was mind-blowing.” To avoid detection by the press and Carling’s wife, they sometimes adjourned for the afternoon to Eleven Cadogan Gardens, a small private hotel tucked behind Sloane Street in Chelsea, where Diana arrived through the kitchen entrance and was shown upstairs to find Carling awaiting her.

To take such risks when she knew she was under intense scrutiny amounted to a game of truth or dare with the media. Her relationship with the image-makers who had helped create her had become a love affair in its nasty death throes, a cycle of dependency and combat. On one hand, she was a master at providing striking images to dramatize the success of her philanthropic missions or to make a point to (and frequently against) Charles. Photographers would be tipped off when there was a prospect of heartwarming pictures of Diana with the kids at Disney World in Florida or at the amusement parks of Thorpe Park and Alton Towers, showing what a great mother she was.

On the other hand, she could not accept the repercussions of exposure. Diana wanted to dictate boundaries to photographers who recognized none. From the moment she was separated from Charles, the nearly all-male corps of paparazzi began to treat her as disrespectfully as any starlet. The “paps,” as the British representatives of this new breed of freelancers called themselves, were ready to do things that horrified even the old Rat Pack: ambush, abuse, bribe, heckle, lie, and speed through red lights at eighty miles an hour in car chases reminiscent of The French Connection. The more you look at the reality of what she had to put up with from the paps, the more their argument—“she asked for it”—looks like the shopworn rationale for rape.

That reality is well represented in a little-noticed picture book, Dicing with Di, by two in-your-face British paparazzi, Mark Saunders and Glenn Harvey. They show a shocking reflexive cruelty toward the Princess they stalked, branding the Princess’s futile counteraggressions as Di’s “‘Loon’ attacks.”

“Sometimes a Loon attack would entail Diana sprinting towards a photographer, forcing him to leap out of her way. At other times she would run at full pelt away from snappers, creating a mad charge as they desperately tried to catch up with her. But a worse kind of Loon attack was when Diana just stood dead still, eyes welling with tears, head down, giving the silent treatment.”

The heroes of Dicing with Di gleefully describe the afternoon they ambushed Diana in August 1993, when she had taken her boys to see Jurassic Park at the Odeon Leicester Square Theatre. They had no care for the fact that Diana had only recently attended with Prince Charles the funeral of her grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, at St. Margaret’s Church, King’s Lynn, an event full of emotion and painful memories. Ruth had never really recovered from the Morton book or spoken to Diana since, but in the weeks before she died, Diana made her peace with the woman she had so bitterly disappointed and asked for her forgiveness. On a day of melancholy summer rain, the Queen Mother walked slowly and steadily to her seat in the church to mourn the passing of a woman who had been one of her oldest friends. Now Diana’s daily existence was losing all the accordance of royal dignity that Ruth had striven so hard to attain. The contrast must have been unendurable to Diana when the paparazzi got in her face as she tried to relax with her sons at the movies. She turned on the photographers with wild anger, says Glenn Harvey. “Her eyes were fixed on us and then she let out a scream like a wild animal…‘You make my life hell,’ she screamed. ‘You make my life hell’…the veins on her neck protruding and her face contorted with anger…She then ran to the waiting car still crying with rage.” The Daily Mirror joined in the fun the next day with a cartoon of Diana as a Jurassic dinosaur, bearing down with extended talons on two cowering lensmen, watched by her supposedly amused sons. “Wow, mum,” read the caption. “You’re better than the movie.”

Di in distress was always a big seller. The paps waited like hyenas outside the Hampstead house of the American feminist and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of a fashionable tract titled Fat Is a Feminist Issue, who had begun to see Diana in the spring of 1993 for a recurrence of bulimia. If the Princess kept her head down on coming out, they’d yell “Bitch!” to make her cry and get a newsier shot. When she covered her head getting into a taxi, a Spanish photographer shouted: “Why don’t you put your head up and start acting like a fucking Princess?”

The paps are unapologetic in their admissions that they treated her entreaties and protests as a joke. Glenn Harvey recounts how Diana appealed for privacy for William and Henry: “Your lenses are very daunting, very daunting…the children find them so daunting.” Then he sniggers: “Daunting. Diana had learnt a new word that day.” Harvey and Saunders preface all this by saying: “We do not accept any accusation of harassment, intrusion, or invasion of privacy,” but their book is full of proud descriptions of precisely that. Harvey notes that he had no idea that Diana had just learned of her father’s death on the day in 1992 when he photographed her coming out on her hotel balcony in Lech. She ran out distraught, sobbing, “NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NOT NOW!” Harvey admits to “pangs of guilt” when told why Diana was so upset. He dealt with the “pangs” by selling every single frame.

If the paps’ conduct was inexcusable, some of Diana’s behavior was inexplicable in someone who cherished her personal privacy. The paradox was that the privacy she sought was also imprisoning. Whenever she wasn’t out being the People’s Princess, she was inside her cage, wondering what to do with all that energy and charisma, which could find outlet only in the adulation of others. This may explain why she would sometimes do things that seemed to court disaster—such as changing the venue of her daily workout from the discreet and handy Chelsea Harbour Club to a gym called LA Fitness, located all the way out in West London and described by Time Out magazine as “the least private gym in London.” Its slogan was “No hiding place.” Perhaps what drew her there was its boast that patrons could “get down and cardio funk,” whatever that might mean. Diana could have had any number of exercise machines installed in Kensington Palace, or she could have worked out in the gym at Buckingham Palace, which was rarely used except by a handful of sweating footmen. Geoffrey Robertson, the counsel who represented the gym in the subsequent lawsuit, believes Diana wanted to “wow the ordinary people—the dream of kings. Also, there was a palpable frisson when she was there.” The Cybex leg-press machine the Princess favored was not tucked away in the back of the gym; it was in front of a vast glass wall exposed to a forecourt. Kids who pressed their noses against it like a shop window could gaze on HRH the Princess of Wales working out in a vibrant array of crop tops, thong knickers, hot pants, and cut-out leotards.

Nobody bothered her for a time, but the owner of LA Fitness, a dubious New Zealander named Bryce Taylor, soon put paid to that. Pictures of Diana arriving and departing were not enough. Like any sleazy bit player of the celebrity servant class, he saw in the Princess’s patronage the opportunity to turn frisson into cash. With a little help from the Sunday Mirror and the promise of a check for a quarter of a million pounds, Taylor bought a Leica camera with a nonclicking shutter, hid it behind the false ceiling above the leg press Diana used, then sat in his office pressing a rubber bulb to send a charge of air through an eighty-foot pneumatic cable to get the crotch shot of the century.

How things had changed. Once upon a time, a young kindergarten teacher had gazed with a burning face at photos of herself caught with the light behind a cotton skirt that showed off the outline of her legs. Now she—and 2.7 million readers of the Sunday Mirror—saw images of the Princess of Wales with thighs akimbo splashed over nine pages with the headline “DI SPY SENSATION.” Diana was so appalled, she immediately took the rare royal step of suing for invasion of privacy, an area of English law whose opacity was designed to enrich the legal profession. If she was reckless, her folly was always redeemed by the coolness of her courage when things went awry. In this instance, she was making a smart gamble. Just by suing she would win points with the Queen and with Prince Philip, who was especially gung ho about punishing “the scum,” as he called the yellow press. And if she lost, she would have given momentum to the calls for Parliament to remedy the loopholes in the law. She now saw herself as the La Pasionaria of a privacy bill.

Diana’s lawyer Anthony Julius won a “Peeping Tom” injunction in the High Court against further publication. Editors feared such an egregious incident would indeed be the trigger for the long-resisted privacy law. But when Bryce Taylor, under legal aid, was given the services of the redoubtable Geoffrey Robertson, Queen’s Counsel, Diana was exposed to the risks of a cross-examination that threatened to be discomfiting about the role she had played in enabling Andrew Morton to thoroughly invade her husband’s privacy. The Queen herself became concerned at the developing media frenzy over a member of the Royal Family standing in the witness box. In a deft maneuver a group of friends reportedly headed by Lord Palumbo arranged to pay Taylor £ 600,000 on condition that he hand over the negatives, apologize, and keep quiet about the payment. It was spun as a Di victory, although it was the first time in legal history that a defendant left court with more money than the plaintiff. No matter, the headlines were good.

When she was staying on Martha’s Vineyard in August 1994, a friend of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham asked Diana if she had ever gambled. “Not with cards,” she answered, “but with life.” She raised the stakes every day. She thought that separating with Charles would return her to some romantic notion of normalcy. Now she could see she had swapped the isolation of the Princess in the Tower for the gated community of fame. The dissonance between her private and her public life was destabilizing in the extreme. To be as famous for being famous as Diana was invites an uneasy grip on identity. While the world applauded her fabulousness, she still felt “thick as a plank,” with no particular aptitudes, and unable to attract her own husband.

The American dealmaker Teddy Forstmann, founding partner of the private equity fund Forstmann Little and Company, was one who was always ready to offer reassurance. She was seated next to him at a black-tie dinner hosted by Lord Rothschild during Wimbledon week in 1994. At fifty-seven, he was unmarried and self-assured, with an athletic build, a baritone voice, and an impressive pompadour of tweed hair, attributes that landed him in the “Hopeless, but Hey You Never Know” section of a list of bachelors compiled by Quest magazine in 1995. He sent Diana flowers every week for three years.

“She was so unhappy,” says Forstmann. “I can tell you this. Diana definitely wanted a guy in her life. She really did. She was still very emotionally involved with the Royal Family. She lived with such a sense of rejection that when it came to guys she would add up two and two and make six. Oliver Hoare was such a bad guy. Didn’t treat her well…These jerk guys, smooth guys, used her. If I had to give a one sentence summary I’d say, she was a great mother and very bad to herself.”

For their first date, Forstmann drove Diana to Marlow, near Windsor, for an intimate dinner at the Compleat Angler overlooking the River Thames. “We were sitting looking out at the water, and I said, ‘What would you like to eat?’ She said, ‘You choose.’ So I have to pick a dish for her, and I reach into my pocket for my glasses, and there are no glasses. So I’m looking to my right and holding the menu way out, and she’s talking and I’m looking, and she said, ‘Can we order?’ I said, ‘You hungry?’ She said, ‘No, I’m afraid you are going to set fire to the restaurant.’ I was so mesmerized by her beauty, the menu was in the candle.” Diana built an escape narrative around Forstmann for a time. “It’s a true story,” he told me, “that Diana had the idea that we should get married, that I should run for president and she would be First Lady.” But dreams of being Queen in another country ignored the fact that a man like Forstmann could never be her Captain Wonderful. Diana was looking for a husband who would be confident, affluent, and powerful enough to protect her from the press and the Palace, but men like Forstmann are looking for the female version in a wife—a gorgeous, brilliant, sexually gifted, high-achieving woman who is pliant, undemanding, and entirely available for foreign travel. “The romance never really got off the ground,” he told me. “We ended up in the right place—friends—for three years.” Even so, Forstmann got a whiff of what it was like to be around Diana’s singeing fame the very first weekend he took her out. He was closing one of his biggest deals, the acquisition of the Ziff Davis computer magazine empire for $1.4 billion, and was immediately plagued by unwelcome publicity. “I work my ass off all week and what does the Evening Standard say about me but ‘Friend of Di Has a Busy Week,’” he told Marie Brenner at the time. “How do I get this gossip to stop?”

Forstmann found Diana obsessed with being watched and listened to. “She had all kinds of theories about who was trying to do the tapping and who was listening to her. There were few people she could trust.” She became increasingly paranoid. She even began to suspect the loyalty of the devoted Ken Wharfe. Their relations soured after the LA Fitness episode. Wharfe had always been opposed to her going there and suspected that Diana had colluded in the pictures to contrive a high-profile confrontation with the press. “Why,” he asked me, “was Diana wearing full makeup at 6:50 in the morning for a workout?” He had found the way she jeopardized her own safety more and more vexing. He had learned to live with her volatility. “Stand by for a mood swing, boys,” she’d say. But Wharfe was not standing by anymore. She had let fly at him on a shopping expedition when he protested that she had illegally parked in Kensington High Street. “You’re a policeman. You sort it out,” she told him, heading off to buy some CDs. Wharfe adored Diana, but he had seen too many of his colleagues put in the deep freeze. He resigned in November 1993 and was moved to other duties. The Princess, as so often when she was called to account, was deeply upset. But as Jephson writes, “Once gone, always gone” was her motto.

She exiled everyone associated with helping her produce the Morton book. So rattled was she by the controversy, she now denied her participation even to herself. First to be cut off was Andrew Morton himself. To replace him as a conduit for spin, she befriended a journalist who was part of the Rat Pack on the trip to Nepal and had the boyish good looks of a standard Dianaman—the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay. Per Diana’s briefing, Kay wrote that she had dropped her old friends James Gilbey, Carolyn Bartholomew, and Angela Serota because she was “incensed…at what she perceived as a massive show of disloyalty” for their having cooperated with Andrew Morton. Diana’s castaways grew more numerous by the day. “Never has the phrase ‘strike someone off the Christmas card list’ had more pertinence,” said one exiled acquaintance.

Vivienne Parry, who had worked closely with her at Birthright, confirms: “There wasn’t one friend that she hadn’t fallen out with at one time or another. I think part of it was that she felt rather difficult in the company of people who were very close to her, particularly if they started to criticize.” James Colthurst survived till late 1995, finally throwing in the towel after a row with Diana about William, who had enrolled at Eton in September. He told Diana she was showing up at the school too much and embarrassing her thirteen-year-old son, a tough thing for a mother to hear. “Unless a mother was a widow, it wasn’t done for them to go up without fathers or instead of fathers,” Colthurst told me. “I was at Eton myself, and I told her she shouldn’t be going up there as much as three times a week. She got very angry with me and hung up. And then I thought that’s it, that’s enough. I had been swamped with calls for three years and it was too much.”

Diana’s reliance on her friends’ perennial availability on the phone was a kind of addiction in itself. She carried around as many as four mobiles at a time, allocating new numbers to the people she wanted to reach her. She was an addict of those multiple ring tones. Friendships were terminated by the sudden switching to a new number. Forstmann became one of her telephonic wailing walls. “I used to get calls from her on Christmas Eve and she was alone,” he says. “Whenever we talked it was all about tactics. What to do next. She was unhappy about Camilla. There was this war with the Royal Family, and she had to do this or that about it. She hated Prince Philip.”

When friends were not available, there was always the menagerie of New Age therapists and professional soothers. A garrulous procession of astrologers, psychics, palm readers, and graphologists toted their charts and crystal balls into Kensington Palace. “Diana was in the thrall of all these mad psychics,” Ken Wharfe told me. “Mara Berni would look at her dolefully and say—in her Italian accent—‘Oh, Diana, my dear, I had this strange dream about you last night. You must be careful today.’”

It all made for great lyrics for the Loony Princess theme song played by the Prince’s camp, but the irony of their ridicule was captured by a tabloid cartoon that showed the Prince of Wales solemnly saying to his potted plants, “I need hardly tell you how worried I am about my wife’s state of mind.” Old school royalty just goes bonkers in quieter, more decorous ways. A member of Prince Charles’s staff said they dreaded Charles’s annual cruise to talk with the Catholic monks of Mount Athos in northern Greece. He was liable to come back opposed to stem-cell research or nanotechnology because they “interfere with the natural order of things.” (Having been born on top, Charles has a soft spot for the natural order of things.)

The Princess was at least as promiscuous a spiritual seeker as her husband, except in her case it wasn’t the monks of Mount Athos, Carl Jung, and Laurens van der Post. It was Simone Simmons, the raspy-voiced, chain-smoking electromagnetic-energy healer who lived above a supermarket in Hendon. Or it was Stephen Twigg, the former tax accountant and used-car salesman who claimed to have cured her of bulimia and now offered “holistic therapy” and deep massage. Or, later in the nineties, it was Jack Temple, self-styled homeopathic “dowser healer.” (Dowsing consisted of swinging a pendulum over the body to detect “energy blockages.”) Temple’s contribution to princessly peace of mind was to take Diana out of the twentieth century and back in time through fossils taped to her body, or make her sit and renew her energy in a stone circle.

“Was she always nutty or nutty because of the situation?” David Puttnam asked rhetorically. “She became nutty because Prince Charles didn’t love her, simple as that.”

By December, for all the therapy—or, some would say, because of it—Diana made one of those emotional decisions she believed would be a transformative act. Still feeling betrayed by the gym photographs, and egged on by Peter Settelen, who wanted to see his drama student in action, she proposed to Jephson that she make a grand speech announcing her withdrawal from much of her public life. She fancied she could go dark like a theater until she was ready for the next show. The fact that she wanted to announce it publicly was in itself a contradiction, one that the Queen herself, when apprised of Diana’s intention, was said to have found ridiculous. It was proof positive to Her Majesty that Diana had never absorbed Royalty 101, that you get out there and wield your handbag to the day you die. Could the Princess not just take her commitments down a notch with a little carefully choreographed diary shuffling? Was it really necessary to put on some weepy swan song? But the truth was Diana really was burned out, overextended with engagements, exhausted by trying to keep her end up in the face of the obstructions from Charles’s office, distraught about her miserable affair with Oliver Hoare, upset about the parting with Ken Wharfe, and at her wit’s end not just with the deadly duel she fought with the media but her own addiction to it—as strong a negative force as her recurring bulimia.

Jephson wanted Diana’s grand speech to be a Truth and Reconciliation aria that would secure the moral advantage by forgiving her husband. But Diana’s reservoirs of hurt were too full for that. On the contrary, half the fun of her “retirement” speech would be, as she later admitted, that “I am a great believer that you should always confuse the enemy…The enemy was my husband’s department.” She plunged ahead on December 3, 1993, at a luncheon at the Hilton Hotel to benefit the Headway National Injuries Association: “Over the next few months, I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with, hopefully, a more private life. I hope you can find it in your hearts to understand and to give me the time and space that has been lacking in recent years…” She wept copiously when she sat down.

In this year of turmoil, Charles had the consoling embraces of Camilla. Diana found solace in the kindness of her girlfriends and the support of strangers. Even as her own problems multiplied, people did not forget her many acts of compassion and continued to see her as the answer to problems of their own. In May 1994—at the height of her painful romance with Hoare—she went on a private trip to Paris that would end up encouraging her to reenter public life more fully. Her companions were her two close friends Lucia Flecha de Lima and Hayat Palumbo. It was a Sunday morning, Lady Palumbo told me, and Diana, who was returning to London after a diverting Paris weekend, was not in a good mood. She had a depressing evening ahead: on the drive in to London from the airport she was going to visit a friend in hospital, and then, in the evening, she would arrive at her empty apartment in Kensington Palace (the children were with Charles at Highgrove). To cheer up Diana before she left, the two women friends had planned an interesting morning—a day of sightseeing and a late lunch at Dalloyou in the Rue de Faubourg St. Honoré. On the way, however, Lucia decided she wanted to stop and make a vow at the Santa Rita Church on the Left Bank in the 15th arrondissement. “Diana didn’t want to do that and neither did I,” said Lady Palumbo, “but Lucia was desperate to do it. So we said ‘OK, we will sit in the car while you go in.’ But Lucia was in there forever, so we decided to sneak in and pull her out. It was packed with Filipinos and Spanish concierges taking their vows. Lucia was right at the front, oblivious, deep in prayer. Diana said, ‘Let’s get out,’ but then as she left, the women suddenly caught on to who she was and flooded out onto the sidewalk. It was the first Sunday in May and the women all rushed to Diana saying, ‘Madame, Madame we support you.’ And what was amazing was the way she changed. This girl who had been in a foul mood a few minutes before suddenly projected total empathy. And she was so charming to the women with her little bit of French. She was just shining, as she was surrounded by the old women of the church. Outside the gates, we stood by the car with the bodyguard. She was wearing very simple clothes, a pair of pants, very simple jewelry. I was first surprised and then moved by the welling up of love for her, the way the women tried to touch her as if she was the Virgin Mary. She slipped into this natural communication with them. It took about fifteen minutes. She held their hands, and looked into their eyes very carefully, and tried to reply in French. They started to hand her flowers and she gathered them all up. In the car, she was very quiet, very pensive.”

When the three friends moved on to Notre Dame, once again Diana was spotted and mobbed. But this was a different crowd—not humble women seeking sustenance but gawking tourists whose cameras objectified her as celebrity prey. “It was a scary experience,” said Lady Palumbo, “and we got out fast.” The serenity of Diana’s mood was shattered.