Chapter Twenty

The Last Picture Show

Is she an angel?

—Helena Ussova, aged seven, land-mine victim in Angola, January 1997

DIANA NEVER LOOKED BETTER than in the days after her divorce. Divestment was the name of the game, in her life and in her looks. The downsizing started with her Kensington Palace staff, which she reduced to cleaner, cook, and dresser. The assiduous Paul Burrell became maître d’ of her private life, combining the roles of P.A., man Friday, driver, delivery boy, confidant, and crying towel. “He used to pad around listening to all,” says a friend of Diana’s mother. “I was quite sure his ear was pressed firmly to the key hole when I went to Kensington Palace for lunch.”

Diana reinforced her break with married life by stuffing a heavy-duty garbage bag with her entire set of Prince of Wales china and then smashing it with a hammer. “Make a list of everything we need,” she told Burrell. “Let’s spend a bit more of his money while we can.”

Diana now used police protection only when she attended a public event. Her favorite officer was Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Royal Squad. He was a tall, fair-haired matinee idol who was also a Class One driver, trained by the SAS. Tebbutt knew that by going to work for Diana he was effectively shutting the door to any future work with the Prince of Wales, but he had a soft spot for Diana. “There was always a buzz when she was at home. I thought she was beginning to enjoy life. She was a different lady, maturing.” Tebbutt says she would always sit in the front of the car, unlike the other Royals, such as Princess Margaret, who called him by his surname and, without looking up from her newspaper, barked, “Wireless!” when she wanted Tebbutt to turn on the radio.

“I drive looking in all three mirrors, so I’d say to Diana ‘I’m not looking at your legs, Ma’am’ and she’d laugh.” The press knew the faces of Diana’s drivers, so to shake them off Tebbutt sometimes wore disguises. “She wanted to go to the hairdresser one day, shortly before she died. I had an old Toyota MRT which she called the ‘tart trap,’ so I drove her in that. I went to the trunk and got out a big baseball hat and glasses. When she came out I was dripping with sweat, and she said ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m in disguise.’ She said, ‘It may have slipped your notice, but I’m the Princess of Wales.’”

Every Tuesday night, the Princess sat at her desk in her study at Kensington Palace, writing her steady stream of heartfelt thank-you letters and listening to a piano playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and—her favorite—Manning Sherwin’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” In the living room, Maureen Stevens, a clerk from the Prince of Wales’s office, who also happened to be a talented concert pianist, gave Diana a weekly private recital as she worked. You can almost hear Stevens’s piano rippling in the background as Diana writes a fulsome note to her close friend, Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis: “Dearest Liz, How proud I was to be at your side on Monday evening…so deeply moved by your personal touch—the presents for the boys, candles at the hotel and flowers to name but few but most of all your beaming smile, your loving heart. I am always here for you, Liz.” Sometimes Diana would stop and telephone the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay—“Ricardo,” she called him—to help her with the phraseology of a letter. KP was her fortress. On warm summer afternoons, she vanished into its walled garden in shorts and T-shirt and her Versace sunglasses, carrying a bag of books and CDs for her Walkman. On weekends, when William and Harry were home, Burrell would see her in a flowing cotton skirt on her bicycle with the basket in front, speeding down the Palace drive with the boys pedaling furiously behind her. On her thirty-sixth birthday, in July, she received ninety bouquets of flowers and Harry gathered a group of classmates to sing “Happy Birthday” to her over the telephone.

Diana’s charity commitments were pared down from around a hundred to the six she most cared about: Centrepoint, the Royal Marsden Hospital, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the English National Ballet, the Leprosy Mission, and the National AIDS Trust. The public announcement she insisted on reaped her unnecessary flak and the resignation of her media adviser, Jane Atkinson. But Diana had a reason for being explicit. She wanted to avoid situations where she was just a letterhead. “If I’m going to talk on behalf of any cause, I want to go and see the problem for myself and learn about it,” she told the chairman of the Washington Post Company, Katharine Graham, at that time.

There was a round of social purging. Lord and Lady Palumbo were excised after Peter’s candid warnings about Martin Bashir. Elton John was in the deep freeze after acting as a go-between with Diana and Gianni Versace for the fashion designer’s coffee-table book Rock and Royalty. (The pictures of the Princess and the boys appeared amid a portfolio of seminude male models, and Diana feared it would further annoy the Queen.) Sir Ronald Grierson was bounced after he made the mistake of offering a job to Victoria Mendham, one of the many secretaries Diana fired. And Fergie was back in Siberia, this time for good. The divorced Duchess had cashed in with an anodyne memoir, which was full of nice comments about her sister-in-law—except for one fatal line. She wrote that when she borrowed a pair of Diana’s shoes she had caught a verrucca—plantar’s wart—from them. Goddesses don’t get warts. Despite Fergie’s pleading apologies, Diana never spoke to her again. In 1997, the Princess gave a birthday party for her friend David Tang and told him he could ask anyone he wanted.

“Anyone?” he asked.

“Anyone.”

“All right, then—Fergie.”

“Absolutely not,” Diana replied, and would not be moved.

A new and unexpected ally was Raine. In 1993, Diana had finally made her peace with her formidable stepmother. The painful years of separation and divorce from Charles made the Princess see her old adversary in a different light. Still grieving for Daddy, her greatest support, Diana was at last able to recognize that Raine had loved him, too. She invited her stepmother for a weepy reconciliation over lunch at Kensington Palace. For moral support, Raine brought along her fiancé, the French Count Jean François de Chambrun. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. Afterward, the Princess and the Countess were often sighted deep in a tête-à-tête at the Connaught Grill. One of Raine’s cautions was to try to stay on friendly terms with Charles for the sake of the children. She told Diana that both she—Raine—and her mother, Barbara Cartland, had maintained warm relations with all their former husbands and lovers.

Diana also made an improbable friend of Katharine “Kay” Graham. They had met in the summer of 1994, when Lucia Flecha de Lima had brought Diana to Kay’s beachfront house on Martha’s Vineyard. Not long after that, Kay gave a luncheon for Diana and Hillary Clinton at her Washington home. At a British Embassy lunch on the same visit, Diana met Colin Powell again. He told her he had been nominated to lead her in the dancing at the gala that night to raise money for the Nina Hyde Breast Cancer Foundation. Scotland Yard had been worried that at a ball in Chicago earlier in the year a stranger had cut in on Diana’s dancing partner. The General was deemed able to handle such an eventuality, but the Princess suggested she do a few practice spins with him in the Embassy drawing room. “She was easy with any melody, and we did all right in our rehearsal,” says Powell. “She told me, ‘there’s only one thing you ought to know. I’ll be wearing a backless dress tonight. Can you cope with that?’” Flirting with the big boys—what bliss!

Diana thrived in America. “There is no ‘Establishment’ there,” she told her fashion friend Roberto Devorik—wrongly, of course, but correct in the sense that America had no Establishment whose rules or members could possibly hurt her feelings. Richard Kay says she thought of America as “a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to disappear.”

Like her life, Diana’s taste in fashion became pared down and emphatic after her divorce. “English style refracted through an un-English sensibility” was how Vogue’s Hamish Bowles defined it. Her new evening dresses were minimalist and sexy, a look that had been taboo when she was an in-house Royal. “She knew she had great legs and she wanted to show them off,” said the designer Jacques Azagury. She wore his stunning red bugle-bead tunic over a short pencil skirt in Venice in 1995 and his blue crystal-beaded cocktail dress six inches above the knee to another Serpentine gallery evening. Diana actually looked her best at her most informal. Jumping rangily out of her car for lunch with Rosa Monckton at the Caprice, wearing stone-washed jeans, a white T-shirt, a beautifully cut navy blue blazer, and bare feet in flats (she was usually shod in Jimmy Choo’s black grosgrain “Diana” loafers), she was spectacular. Vanity Fair assigned the Peruvian-born photographer Mario Testino to capture her as she now wanted to be seen: a modern woman, active on the world stage—“vivid, energetic, and fascinating,” in the words of Meredith Etherington-Smith, the former fashion editor who introduced Diana to Testino. When Meredith first saw Diana at Kensington Palace, she was astonished at how different she was from the formal, public Princess of old. Now she was “a tall, electrifying figure,” wearing no makeup and “revealing the truest English rose complexion. Her hair, no longer a stiff helmet, free of lacquer and back combing, flew around her head like a dandelion in the wind.” With her unerring sense of the dramatic, Diana timed Mario Testino’s stunning shots to come out on the cover of Vanity Fair the same week as her decree absolute.

Diana purged her closets of the past. She hated the sight of the froufrou’d and sequined relics of her roles as Princess Bride and Windsor Wife and Dynasty Di, embalmed in their suit bags. It was William’s brain wave for her to auction off her old gowns for charity in New York, and Diana loved her son’s creative notion. It would be at once a glorious psychic gesture to her new life and a boon to the charities she chose, the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund. A royal rummage sale had never happened before. Most of the Windsor women, including the Queen, consign their old private-occasion items to a discreetly respectable resale shop in London’s West End. Diana’s auction would be a first.

Old clothes are often suffused with the emotions of the wearer. Meredith Etherington-Smith, who also worked as creative marketing director of Christie’s, was assigned by the auction house to help Diana choose and catalog the items. They sorted through Diana’s gowns every morning for a month while Diana relived the occasions when she had worn them. “Out! Out!” she would cry, pointing at some star-spangled throwback, or “No! I can’t bear to give up this one!” In and out of the catalog flew Victor Edelstein’s oyster dinner dress with a strapless bodice encrusted with white bugle beads and matching bolero, which she had worn that elegant night at the Élysée Palace in Paris with President and Madame Mitterrand. “It was such a happy evening,” she dithered. She had been afraid of the French being so chic, but she felt she had really pulled it off. She sighed over another Edelstein gown, an ink blue silk velvet creation. This was the dress in which she had wowed the world with John Travolta at the White House. She relinquished it in the end, knowing it would get the auction’s top dollar. (An anonymous bidder snapped it up for $222,500.) In retrospect, wrote the fashion maven Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, all the high-glamour outfits of Diana’s past looked “like a dress rehearsal for the little black number worn on the evening Prince Charles confessed his adultery on prime-time television.”

But now in the year after her divorce, relations with Prince Charles were on a nicely even keel, starting with that tea in July. The arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland as Charles’s assistant private secretary inaugurated an era of glasnost between the offices of the Princess and the Prince. Bolland was a shrewd go-to guy with a marketing background and a useful four years of experience as director of the Press Complaints Commission. He lived in the real world, not the Palace bubble. He owed his job to Camilla; he had come to Charles at the recommendation of her divorce lawyer, Hilary Browne Wilkinson. In spite of that—or more likely because of it—part of his writ was to end the War between the Waleses. It got in the way, he believed, of the necessary rebuilding of Prince Charles’s image. Bolland’s first act was to persuade Charles to fire his private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, the facilitator of the Dimbleby fiasco, and rid the Prince’s office of holdovers from the bitter years of marital competition. Nor was Bolland a fan of the undislodgeable Tiggy Legge-Bourke, sharing Camilla’s belief that Tiggy spent a lot of her time “winding Charles up.” Another positive augury, surely.

Better than all of the above, however, was that Diana’s love life had simplified in a wonderful way. In the fall of 1995, she had at last fallen for a man who was worthy of her affections, who wasn’t married, and who reciprocated her feelings: the thirty-six-year-old Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan.

“The One,” as she called him, was the oldest of four children from an affluent, closely knit, upper-middle-class family in Jhelum, north of Lahore. Diana first met him at the Royal Brompton Hospital, where she had gone to visit the husband of her soother-in-chief, the Irish nurse cum acupuncturist Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo. Joseph Toffolo had suffered a massive hemorrhage during a triple-bypass operation. Dr. Khan, the Senior Registrar working with the distinguished surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, was in attendance. Khan, a young Omar Sharif figure in a white coat, arrived with his retinue of assistants when Diana was at the patient’s bedside. The doctor was entirely absorbed in Toffolo’s condition and took no notice of the Princess—which, for a woman used to everyone fawning over her, was almost unbearably sexy. So was the blood on his tennis shoes, and so were his caring, expressive eyes. “Oonagh, isn’t he drop-dead gorgeous!” Diana hissed at Mrs. Shanley-Toffolo after Khan left the room. So gorgeous, in fact, that the bemused Joseph had Diana fussing over him at his bedside for eighteen days straight. In no time, the Kensington Palace apartment was fragrant with the scent of burning joss sticks. The Princess became as keen a student of cardiology as she had been of horse riding and Islamic art. Her night table groaned under a fat copy of Gray’s Anatomy and piles of surgical reports. She watched Casualty, a hospital soap opera, every Saturday night. Her closet filled up with a colorful selection of shawal kameez, the bright silk tunic and trousers worn by Pakistani women. She considered converting to Islam. It impressed her that Khan, on religious grounds, refused to fully consummate their affair with her until the evening of her decree absolute.

Diana took to spending nights with Dr. Khan in his small overnight room at the Royal Brompton Hospital and sneaking home to the Palace at dawn. She asked if she could watch him perform open-heart surgery. “Anybody with courage enough to watch a heart operation can come in,” Khan told her. He couldn’t keep her away after that. Sky TV had arranged to film Sir Magdi Yacoub operate at the Hare-field Hospital on a seven-year-old African boy, flown to the UK by the Chain of Hope charity. The organization asked Diana if she would attend to boost the viewership. The footage of her Bambi eyes in black eyeliner peering over the top of a white surgical mask in the operating theater was the focus of much satiric commentary. Awkwardly, in late November 1995, a photographer from the News of the World caught Diana arriving at the hospital at midnight. She was due to meet Khan coming off his shift, but borrowing the photographer’s mobile phone, she promptly dialed through to the paper’s Royal Correspondent, Clive Goodman (nicknamed “The Eternal Light” by his colleagues because he never left the office—not anymore, alas, since he was sent to jail in 2007 for tapping into the Clarence House voice mail). She told Goodman that yes, it was true, she was at the hospital comforting terminally ill patients. She did it, she told him, up to four hours a night three times a week. “I try to be there for them. I seem to draw strength from them. They all need someone, I hold their hands, talk to them, whatever helps.”

Goodman bit. “My Secret Nights as an Angel” was the News of the World’s headline three days later. The story gave birth to an eerie new image of Diana as a compulsive ambulance chaser and death groupie. Private Eye suggested patients should wear medical disks inscribed with the words “In the event of loss of consciousness, do not allow me to be visited by the Princess of Wales.” But better to be the butt of jokes than to be busted for sexy sleepovers with a young Muslim doctor.

It was worth it. The relationship with Hasnat Khan was the most fulfilling she had ever had. “I found my peace!” she confessed to Lady Bowker. “He has given me all the things I need!” The doctor didn’t want anything from her. She offered to buy him a new car and he proudly refused. He had a dread of personal publicity. He was not interested in high life or fashionability. His one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea was a mess and there was a bit of a paunch under the old T-shirts he wore when he was off duty. He loved what was best about Diana—her compassionate nature, her desire to embrace humanitarian causes. Diana turned the former equerries’ room in her apartment at Kensington Palace into a basement den for “Natty,” as he was known, so he could pop open a can of Heineken and sit around watching football. At weekends when the staff was off, she would try her hand at cooking him dinner. “Marks and Spencer have got these very clever little meals that you just put in the microwave and you put the timer on and press the button and it’s done for you!” she marveled to Simone Simmons.

She sometimes disappeared for a whole day to Khan’s apartment, where she contentedly vacuumed, did the dishes, and ironed his shirts—a reprise of her old days with the Jiffy Dusters. On the night of her birthday, she went out to meet Khan wearing her best sapphire-and-diamond earrings, a fur coat, and, underneath, nothing. Burrell helped run the affair behind the scenes. If there was a lovers’ quarrel, he would deliver a message to the pub near the hospital where Khan hung out. Diana was practiced at keeping things secret. The press rarely found out about the men she was seeing if she didn’t want them to.

She made trips to Pakistan whenever she could to bone up on Hasnat’s heritage. Her new best friend was Jemima Khan, the beautiful twenty-two-year-old daughter of Annabel and Jimmy Goldsmith. Jemima was married to the Pakistani cricket legend Imran Khan. The two women sat up talking late into the night about how to handle marriage to a traditional-minded Muslim. Diana asked Paul Burrell to talk to a priest about the possibility of a secret marriage to Hasnat. The butler had a meeting with Father Tony Parsons at the Roman Catholic Carmelite Church in Kensington High Street where Burrell’s son was an altar boy. The priest told him it was impossible to marry a couple without notifying the authorities—or without notifying the fiancé, as it turned out. Hasnat Khan was aghast when he learned of Burrell’s consultation and said to Diana, “Do you honestly think you can just bring a priest here and get married?”

In February 1996, Diana went to Pakistan with Annabel and Annabel’s niece, Cosima Somerset, to stay with Jemima and Imran at their house in Lahore. The ostensible purpose of the visit was to raise funds for the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, founded by Imran in memory of his mother, who had died from the disease. But the real purpose was to flood the zone with images that would wow Hasnat’s family.

Diana’s desire to impress Khan gave her new purpose. He was a serious man for whom she wanted to do serious things. She was looking for a cause that would passionately involve her, something in which her presence could produce a transformative result, as it had done in the mid-eighties with AIDS. “She felt very strongly about getting involved with something that wasn’t a ballet charity,” said a friend. Mike Whitlam, then Director General of the British Red Cross, had the answer. The Red Cross was among the charities Diana had dropped right after the divorce, but Whitlam knew better than to sulk. He understood her value and her temperament. He had seen how effective she was in ladling out soup to children in the Zimbabwe bush, but he had also taken note of why an attempt to recruit her to a special advisory committee of the International Red Cross in 1994 had failed. Diana couldn’t cope with long, detail-oriented briefings on the Rwandan refugee problem. In committee meetings she had the attention span of a fruit fly. Whitlam knew that this skittish thoroughbred had to be led to missions delicately, or she would veer off on some impulsive detour of her own. The Red Cross was in the network of global organizations campaigning for a ban on the use of land mines, their clearance, and help for their victims. He began sending Diana photographs and reports about the devastating effects of mines that had been left uncleared after wars. He saw this as the right cause for Diana at the right time.

On Monday, January 13, 1997, wearing blue denim jeans and a blazer, Diana stepped into the throbbing heat of Luanda, the capital of Angola, after an eleven-hour commercial flight to southern Africa with Whitlam and Lord Deedes, the grand old man of the Daily Telegraph. The country was reeling from a twenty-year civil war. Fifteen million mines had been scattered during that war among a population of 12 million, and clearance had barely begun. The streets were populated with men, women, and children without legs, few of whom had wheelchairs or even crutches. Some 70,000 innocents had stepped on a land mine; every 334th citizen was an amputee, but only a few hundred false limbs were fitted every month. Diana was galvanized by what she saw. In the wreck of Huambo, still a disputed and heavily mined area, she and her party had to walk in single file behind an antimine engineer to reach a small, godforsaken hospital that had no electricity and not enough beds. There was sixteen-year-old Rosaline, who had lost her right leg, and the baby in her womb. And there was seven-year-old Helena, who had gone out to fetch water and stepped on a mine. It had blown out her intestines. A saline drip was keeping her alive. Flies buzzed about her. Arthur Edwards, who was covering the expedition for The Sun, says the child was lying exposed on her back when Diana got to her. “The first thing she did was something instinctive. She made the child decent, covered her up. It was the thing a mother would do. She was concerned for the child’s dignity.” The rightness of her gesture was something he never forgot, nor was the way she talked softly to the child and stroked her hand. After she moved on, Christina Lamb, the Sunday Times foreign correspondent, who speaks Portuguese, stayed with the dying child. “She said to me, ‘Who was that?’ It was quite hard trying to explain Princess Diana to somebody who didn’t know. And I said: ‘She’s a princess from England, from far away.’ And she said to me, ‘Is she an angel?’”

Little Helena died soon afterward. “The last thing she saw,” reflected Lamb, was this “beautiful lady that she thought was an angel.”

Diana had no celestial qualities in the eyes of various Tory MPs and ministers in the government in London. She was a “self-publicist,” a “loose cannon,” briefed Lord Howe, an Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Defence. Howe was offended that Diana’s support for a ban on land mines was out of line with Tory policy, which was to oppose a unilateral ban while working for a worldwide ban that would exempt “smart mines,” which are effective only for a short time. Peter Viggers, a Tory member of the Commons Select Defence Committee, popped a vein. Why, she was just like Brigitte Bardot banging on about saving cats! “It doesn’t add much to the sum of human knowledge. This is an important and sophisticated argument. It doesn’t help…for a very ill-informed Princess to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is.”

Actually, it did help. It helped enormously. The “very ill-informed” Princess was backed by Tony Blair’s Labour Opposition, by the Liberal Democrats, by Lord Deedes, and by military figures no less imposing than the two Gulf War generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Sir Peter de la Billière. She had landed herself in the middle of exactly the kind of controversy Henry Kissinger had warned her to avoid. Well, too bad. Angola was a snapshot of the woman Diana was about to be. “I never saw someone as much a project under construction as Diana,” said one of her friends from this period. “We usually do that stuff in the wings of our personalities, but with Diana you could almost see the plumbing and the wires as she was changing in front of you.”

Diana’s land-mine commitment was not, to use one of the Queen’s favorite pejoratives, a “stunt.” It drew forth everything that was best about her in the service of a cause that was heartrending, underpublicized, and controversial. Chased in Angola by the press the day after the Tory smoke bombs went off in London, Diana did not engage in argument. “It’s an unnecessary distraction…It’s sad…I’m a humanitarian, not a politician.”

And indeed, few politicians would have had the courage to do what she did next. The Red Cross had decided that it was too dangerous to go to Cuito, Africa’s most heavily mined town, laced with booby traps. Seven children had just been killed playing football in an area that was supposed to have been cleared. But Diana would not hear of canceling. She pressed Whitlam, who was anxious for her safety. She lobbied the wife of the President of Angola. And the next day she was in Cuito, in visor, body armor over white cotton shirt, and khaki pants, ready to be delicately guided through another allegedly cleared area—even though exposed and half-extracted mines were visible. The volunteers in the Halo Trust, a British charity clearing mines, warned her to stay close to them. “I think by the end of the briefing she was beginning to wonder if this was a good idea,” says Whitlam. “But she did it.”

Bringing to bear all the reckless bravery she’d once used to defy the Royal Family—but in a much better cause—she walked through a half-cleared minefield. “One or two of the journalists,” said Whitlam, “hadn’t quite got the shot they wanted and jokingly asked her if she’d mind doing it again.” To everyone’s astonishment, she agreed. “She realized that this was one of the shots that was really going to make a big impact around the world,” said Whitlam. “So she did the walk a second time.” This second walk was Diana’s purest synthesis of courage, calculation, and brilliantly directed media power.

The Tory government, having badly lost the public relations battle, smoothed it over as a “misunderstanding” and promised support for “progress towards” a worldwide ban. Too late. It was just another sign they were out of step with popular feeling.

A few months later, the Tories lost the general election by a landslide. Tony Blair, her new supporter, was Prime Minister at the age of forty-four. His victory, on a brilliant day in May after eighteen long years of Tory dominance, was welcomed with the euphoria of a new dawn. A young, modernizing, and empathetic Prime Minister and his independent, high-powered wife were pledging to end the corrupt, uptight ways of the crusty old Establishment. High five! Diana stayed up all night watching the results coming in on TV. She saw New Labour’s England as a place that would have all the best things about America—classlessness, freshness, and freedom from stifling tradition. And above all, of course, an appreciation of her.

“How dare anyone criticize Diana Princess of Wales for taking up this heartrending cause?” wrote Clare Short, who was Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for International Development, in a July 1997 issue of The Spectator, referring to the land-mine campaign. “Diana’s stand on the issue deserves the utmost praise. Her public profile is able to give hope to millions of victims and campaigners that once and for all there may be a global ban on the manufacture and use of anti-personnel land mines.”

I wish we could leave Diana’s story there. I wish we could leave her as I saw her that summer’s day in New York in her mint green suit and early tan when she came for the wildly successful auction of her dresses. Then, she was a woman of substance who had found her future. But Diana was always fragile in her new roles. Love, or the lack of it, always dragged her down. With that descent came an emotion that never bedeviled her pioneer efforts on behalf of land-mine victims or AIDS patients: fear.

         

HASNAT KHAN WAS SLIPPING AWAY. His refusal to go public meant, effectively, that he didn’t want to marry her. He told friends that he couldn’t face the onslaught of becoming Di’s New Guy in every tabloid newspaper. He recoiled from the prospect of his work at the hospital being invaded by reporters. There had been a nasty foretaste when the first story of a rumored affair between the two appeared in the Sunday Mirror. Panicked when she heard that it was about to run, Diana turned to Richard Kay for a red-herring counterstory.

“It”—the Mirror’s story—“is bull——,” Kay quoted Diana in the Mail, which was always happy to trash the competition. The Princess, wrote Kay, “is understood to be deeply upset at the allegations because of the hurt they will do William and Harry. Diana told friends ‘It has given me a lot of laughs. In fact, we are laughing ourselves silly.’” Khan did not share the purported mirth. He was as wounded by Diana’s silly denial as he was irritated by the exposure in the first place. He got on fine with William and Harry—especially William, who had had a long session with him one weekend asking career advice—so that reference annoyed him too. He was starting to receive racist threats in the mail, which he found stressful. For three weeks after Richard Kay’s story, Khan refused all contact with Diana, rendering her predictably hysterical. The secrecy of his affair with Diana actually suited Khan, who had no desire to arouse the wrath of his own relations.

Diana was better qualified than anyone to know that you don’t just marry a man, you marry his family. Hasnat Khan was a Pathan, a group of peoples between Pakistan and Afghanistan, descended from warriors and notable for their fierce attachment to their cultural traditions. His parents had tried twice, in 1987 and then in 1992, to marry him off to a suitable Muslim bride with equivalent social standing, and by 1996 they were impatient to try again. It is one of the ironies of Diana’s life that she was always searching to replace her own dysfunctional family with one that didn’t want her. This time, as usual, the situation was doomed, but for a novel reason. With the Windsors, she was suitable but not desired. With the Khans, she was desired but not suitable. After Diana had spent eighteen months misleading the press, a Daily Express reporter landed an interview with Hasnat’s father, Dr. Rashid Khan, who offered a bruising assessment of Diana as a bridal prospect for his son. “He is not going to marry her,” the elder Khan said. “We are looking for a bride for him. She must belong to a respectable family. She should be rich, belonging to the upper middle class. Preferably to our relations or tribe, which is Pathan. But if we do not find her in our own tribe, we can try outside it. But preferably she should be at least a Pakistani Muslim girl.” This was the first time a Spencer had been disdained as “not quite our tribe,” and it only challenged Diana to try even harder to nail Hasnat down.

It was a hopeless assignment. In May 1997, Diana’s lover was deeply upset when, without forewarning him, she used the cover of a three-day trip to Pakistan to raise funds for Imran Khan’s cancer hospital to descend without notice on Hasnat’s sprawling family in an upscale suburb of Lahore. They clustered around and took her picture and served her English tea until a simultaneous power and water cut drove them outside to sit in a circle in the garden of their walled compound, making pleasant, if stilted, conversation with the charming stranger from the United Kingdom. It was a surreal scene, especially when one considers that Diana pictured herself moving in with them as their new daughter-in-law. The Khans were all perfectly charmed by Diana, who ended the evening lying on the floor watching cartoons with the youngest kids, but charm was irrelevant. Hasnat’s mother had no intention of letting the union happen, and Hasnat had doubts of his own.

He loved Diana, yes. How could he not? This beautiful, radiant creature, adored by the world, had chosen him, an obscure Pakistani doctor, when she could have had the pick of every billionaire on earth. But Khan was troubled that the love he gave her never seemed to be enough. Was anyone’s? “Diana needed more love than any Englishman can give,” observes Diana’s girlhood friend and later Tory MP Hugo Swire. But there may have been no man alive who could have answered the clamorous needs of Diana’s early abandonment. Like Hoare’s, Hasnat’s pager would go off twenty times a day on his medical rounds. For a woman so sensitive to the needs of others, she was strangely blind when it came to those of the people closest to her. She wanted to own his future, arrange his life. With Hewitt, she had wanted to call his superiors and get the order to send him to Germany countermanded. With Khan she wanted to rearrange his surgical schedule so he could travel with her. “Diana believed, against all the evidence,” opined the essayist Clive James, “that there was some kind of enchanted place called Abroad, where she could be understood and where she could lead a more normal life.” James saw this place as a recurring theme in the last years of Diana’s life. Her dream was a marriage between two globe-trotting humanitarians, rushing to trouble spots with her compassion and his doctor’s bag. An overdose of public adoration had made her almost delusional. She told me over lunch that she thought she could resolve the conflicts of Northern Ireland. “I’m very good at sorting people’s heads out.” She wanted to lift Hasnat out of the annoying grind and insane hours of the Brompton Hospital into some medical habitat where they could live together in sunny exile with a swimming pool—in Australia or South Africa. At an international think-tank dinner in Rimini, Italy, she found herself next to Professor Christiaan Barnard, the septuagenarian heart-transplant pioneer. She lobbied him hard to get Hasnat a position in South Africa and twice gave him dinner at Kensington Palace to discuss Hasnat’s future. The proud Dr. Khan went ballistic when, on finally meeting Barnard, he was asked to submit his résumé.

In June, the Khans arrived en masse in Stratford-on-Avon for their annual holiday. Their presence must have deepened Hasnat’s doubts that a superstar Princess could ever be absorbed into his close-knit Muslim family. It was clear to his relations that he was wrestling between his love for Diana and what he knew he had to do if he wished to pursue a serious medical career. A bad augury for Khan was a Sunday Mirror story on June 29 alleging that Diana and Hasnat had become “unofficially engaged after the amazing summit with his family” in Pakistan in May. Unbeknown to Diana, Simone Simmons, her therapist and confidante, had for months been selling stories to the newspaper about her, including details of her affair with Dr. Khan. Sunday Mirror news editor Chris Boffey authorized payments to Simmons of up to about £1,000 a week in cash until he left in February of that year. Over a twelve-month period the paper paid out about £20,000. Is it possible Diana was behind the leak herself? Simmons denied planting the Hasnat story, but Diana did not believe her—and never spoke to her again.

Khan, forced into the open, confided his agony about what to do to a trusted Pakistani confidant. His friend’s advice was unequivocal: “End the affair, and get on with your life.”

Resolved to do that, Hasnat met Diana in an agreed spot in Hyde Park at ten o’clock one hot night in the second week of July. Knowing she was to be rejected, Diana reproached him with scalding words and tears. She could not really accept that it was over. But Khan was not a man who played games. In August, the Khan family, returning to Lahore, gave Hasnat gifts for the beautiful Princess who had visited them. He told them to mail them to her instead. He wouldn’t be seeing Diana anymore.

Diana began to sink. She felt she had nowhere to go, no one to share her miseries. She had cut off Simone Simmons. She was not on speaking terms with her mother. Frances, sadly, had become a drunk. She had lost her driver’s license in 1996 after failing a Breathalyzer test. She told her friend Hannah Gilmour that she bicycled to a friend’s funeral and, when it rained, hitched a ride home in the hearse. She was increasingly indiscreet about the Royal Family, referring to them as “German dwarves,” and said the Queen’s outfits looked like they came from the Red Cross. Frances infuriated Diana by giving a paid interview to Hello magazine in May 1997 in which she had innocently remarked that Diana’s loss of her HRH title was “absolutely wonderful” since it allowed her to find her own identity. More seriously, she angered the Princess with the ferocity of her objection to her daughter’s relationship with Gulu Lalvani and Hasnat Khan—“a Pakistani and a Muslim.” Diana cut her off after that. Frances’s letters apologizing to Diana were returned unopened.

Increasingly lonely, Diana became unhealthily dependent on Paul Burrell. His busybody influence only fueled her various paranoias. “He didn’t like anybody he thought was closer or had more access to her,” says Mervyn Wycherley. Wycherley believes he may have been “stitched up” by Burrell. He was fired in 1995 for allegedly trying to hawk the Kensington Palace menu books to Fleet Street, something, I am told, he denies. (At his exit interview with Diana, a colleague recalls, she told the chef, “You always hurt the one you love” and handed him a carriage clock.) Burrell had hardened her attitude to Fergie, too, whispering to Diana that Fergie, on her book tour in the United States, was using her relationship with the Princess to get publicity. In fairness, it was the TV interviewers, not Fergie herself, who kept bringing Diana’s name up.

In bad periods like this, the insecure Diana felt watched and spied on. She had her rooms at Kensington Palace twice swept for bugs. On a trip to Rome with her Argentinian friend Roberto Devorik, she startled him with her violent suspicions. A portrait of Prince Philip hanging on the wall evoked an outburst: “He hates me. He really hates me and would like to see me disappear.” She would wind up dead in a fake accident, she told Devorik. “I am a threat in their eyes. They only use me when they need me for official functions and then they drop me again in the darkness…they are not going to kill me by poisoning me or in a big plane where others will get hurt. They will do it when I am in a small plane, in a car when I am driving or in a helicopter.” Devorik asked her why anyone should want to kill her. If she was so afraid, why didn’t she travel with a bodyguard, still available to her from the royal protection squad? She told him she thought they spied on her. She was fed up with being followed around.

“She saw the protectors as assailants,” Clive James noted. “It seemed she would rather have gone down in a hail of broken glass than live in fear.” Diana did live in fear, but it wasn’t death she was afraid of. It was the thought of being “dropped again in the darkness,” as she put it to Devorik. She had carried that darkness inside her since she was a child. She had always fought it with her dazzle. Now more than ever, she feared being left alone in the dark.

“Roberto, you are so naive,” she told him. “Don’t you see, they took my HRH title and now they are slowly taking my kids? They are now letting me know when I can have the children.”

Diana’s feeling of being marginalized was most intense as August approached. The boys disappeared into the heathery wilds of Balmoral and they loved it. After her appearance on Panorama and her divorce from the Prince of Wales, invitations to similar secluded aristocratic estates with shooting for the boys did not gush forth, and she was not inclined to ask her brother for help again. With her, William and Harry were stuck in London or harassed at Disney World or having to behave themselves at some nouveau riche billionaire’s country mansion. She told Jasper Conran’s mother, the writer Shirley Conran, that she felt that nothing she could offer William and Harry as a vacation could compete with Balmoral. “They do all those manly, killing things,” she sighed, “and there’s that wonderful go-cart track.”

The propinquity of Eton to Windsor meant William had forged a close bond with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Sometimes in the evenings he went for walks in Windsor Great Park with Prince Philip, responding to his grandfather’s tough code and sense of humor with an eagerness Prince Charles had always scorned. Having failed with his own son, Philip saw William as the boy he always wished he’d had. They shared a passion for military history. It pleased Diana, but it also made her jealous. William was her closest confidant. “She told me she had very private and very profound conversations with him,” Roberto Devorik said, “and he was an extraordinary moral support.” Her son was older than his years, burdened as much by his mother’s confidences as by his future responsibilities; she had taken him through the divorce terms before she agreed to them. She began including him in some of her lunches at Kensington Palace with the press.

“All my hopes are on William now,” she told me. “I am hoping he will grow up to be as smart about handling the media as John Kennedy, Jr.” But William was not John F. Kennedy’s son. He was the heir to the British throne. However much William might look like her and smile like her, he belonged as surely to Prince Charles and the Crown as to Lady Diana Spencer—perhaps more. Inevitably, William would have to become Windsorized. As England’s future King, it was his destiny.

Diana’s fear of exclusion was aggravated by the deterioration of her relationship with Charles. The promising thaw, in which she had invested hopes, did a straight nosedive once she perceived the key issue in Mark Bolland’s agenda. She had not reckoned that Bolland’s rehab plan for her husband’s image would be focused so intently on the selling of Camilla to the public. The Prince’s mistress would not have sponsored Bolland for the job if his agenda had not tallied with hers. Much of Bolland’s day was spent figuring out who was opposed to this agenda and making sure they left the employ of the Prince of Wales. As for Camilla herself, from not wanting to marry Charles because the status quo suited her, she had taken the opposite position. The divorce from Andrew had left her short of money. When a friend went to have lunch with her at her house in Wiltshire after her divorce, he was startled when the doorbell rang and she rushed off to hide. “God, it’s the fishmonger—I haven’t paid him,” she exclaimed. “We have to hide until he’s gone.”

Camilla, however, received good financial counsel to rescue her from the predicament created by Charles. After all, if not for Charles’s confession to Jonathan Dimbleby, Camilla wouldn’t have been divorced in the first place. The crux of the advice was that with her million-pound half-share of the Parker Bowles marital assets, she should buy a house whose upkeep was suitable to her position. Then, on the grounds that the Prince of Wales must be entertained in the style to which he was entitled, the Prince would be prevailed upon to meet the associated costs. Camilla had to be made “cash poor,” said one of her friends, “to trigger in Charles not so much his sympathy as his responsibility towards the woman in his life.”

In May 1995, for £850,000, Camilla purchased Ray Mill House, a seventeen-acre estate on the banks of the River Avon in Wiltshire, and began a campaign of expansion.

The new residence slowly but surely acquired a staff of two housekeepers, two gardeners, a chauffeur and car from Prince Charles’s fleet, a separately built security cottage complete with Scotland Yard protection office, and stabling privileges at Highgrove. Bernie Flannery, the Highgrove butler, was instructed to do Camilla’s grocery shopping at the local Sainsbury’s supermarket whenever she wished—and to charge it to the Prince’s bill. Arguing, truthfully, that a more visible royal mistress has to look good, Camilla was granted an annual dress allowance from the Wales war chest. Eventually, Charles covered her debt of around £130,000 at Coutts bank. Eventually, he granted Camilla her own stipend of £120,000 a year, rising to £180,000. Eventually, Camilla Parker Bowles became HRH the Duchess of Cornwall. Eventually—at least, my money’s on it—HRH the Duchess of Cornwall will be the Queen. Now that Camilla’s image reversal is complete, former St. James’s Palace staffers are amused that the favored story line in the press is of the patience and fortitude of the “woman who waited.” From the inside, it sure didn’t look that way. “It was Bolland who invented that fiction,” said a former colleague of his. “And, I can tell you, it was quite an aggressive campaign.”

Camilla’s rise hit Diana with blunt force when Charles chose Highgrove as the venue for his mistress’s upcoming fiftieth-birthday celebration on July 17, 1997. The flagrant use of their former marital home was an unnecessary blow for Diana. It plunged her more deeply into her “darkness.” She was deeply envious as well as deeply hurt: while Charles had found his love, Diana had lost hers. Salt was rubbed in the wound by a flattering television documentary about Camilla—another plank in Bolland’s relentless campaign. Shirley Conran advised her not to watch it, but Diana couldn’t resist. After all this time, she still wanted one question answered: Why? Why was it this woman who had taken it all—her Prince, her emotional security, her destiny as Queen? After watching the program, Diana called her astrologer, Debbie Frank, in anguish. “All the grief in my past is resurfacing,” Diana told her. “I feel terrible…so frightened and needy.” She sounded, Frank said, “breathy, childlike, again.”

She needed to get out of town. She had toyed for a bit with spending the summer in the United States, and asked Teddy Forstmann to find her a house near his in Southampton. “I found her something but five days later she called back and said the security people had said the openness of the Hamptons wasn’t safe,” said Forstmann. It was a boon when the importunate bullfrog Mohamed Al Fayed asked her to bring the boys to stay at his villa in the South of France. At Al Fayed’s villa she would be fully protected, not just by the royal protection cops who always accompanied the royal boys but by Al Fayed’s own prodigious security. She wanted to nurse her wounds. When her hairdresser, Natalie Symons, arrived on the morning of July 11, after her breakup with Khan, Diana was packing for the villa holiday and sobbing her heart out. Hasnat had spent what would be his last night with her at Kensington Palace and there had been an upsetting scene. “I could tell she was totally distraught because she didn’t have any mascara on, and she always put her mascara on before she did anything else,” Symons recalled.

The spiral had begun. As she used to say to Patrick Jephson: “Stand by for a mood swing, boys.” But her last oscillations spun so fast, the contrasts seem more shocking. Dodi appeared three days into her holiday in the South of France, summoned by his father, and the vulnerable Diana fell for the bait. Within weeks, she was on a cruise alone with Dodi. The woman whose feet disappeared into the green pile carpet covered in Pharaoh’s heads aboard Mohamed Al Fayed’s private plane and squealed over Dodi’s gifts in Bulgari boxes was the same woman who drove in somber silence up Sniper’s Alley in the shattered city of Sarajevo to comfort land-mine victims. The woman who posed for a boatload of French paparazzi in a tiger-striped swimsuit and called the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster at the Daily Mail to cackle, “Nigel, what does everyone expect? That I spend the whole summer cooped up in Kensington Palace?” was the same woman who, only weeks before, had encountered a woman tending her son’s grave in a Sarajevo cemetery and tenderly embraced her.

“God, we heard some terrible stories,” said Lord Deedes, who went with her into Sarajevo. “She very often interviewed somebody without an interpreter and she would take some time over it. There was a widow who had lost her young husband. He had gone fishing and had hit a mine. When we went there the lady was absolutely brain dead but when we left she was revived. I really did think there that Diana had a healing touch. There is really no doubt.”

There is no doubt either that the press really preferred the Princess Di of the past. In Angola, Christina Lamb talked to the royal hacks in the bar of Luanda’s Hotel Presidente and heard them “wistfully recalling previous jaunts to Klosters and Barbuda, and longing for the Diana of old who went to balls and banquets and wore Versace instead of flak jackets.” They found that Diana again only a few months later, when the Jonikal docked in Porto Cervo in Sardinia and Diana and Dodi went shopping. Diana came back to the boat with armfuls of cashmere sweaters, because Dodi bought her every color they had. She told Rosa Monckton she found his conspicuous consumption embarrassing, but that did not prevent her from making herself demeaningly complicit. Her mother became frantic at being unable to communicate her deep feelings of unease at the pictures appearing at home. Frances made repeated calls to the Queen Mother’s page, William Tallon, a favorite of Diana’s, begging him to try to talk her daughter into breaking her silence when she got back. Tallon had no success. Frances told an old family friend at this time, “I cannot see the sun shining on my daughter’s head again.”

The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace in South Beach on July 15, while Diana was afloat on Al Fayed’s yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer. Versace had bridged the gap between fashion and celebrity, just as Diana had bridged the gap between royalty and celebrity. Versace had turned hooker style into high fashion, adopted by movie stars and rock icons in the eighties and nineties. Even a Princess could feel exciting in his clothes. He sent Diana trunkloads of his slinky gowns for nights when she wanted to make a splash. “He was killed,” wrote La Republica, “like a prince laid low in his own blood, with one hand outstretched toward his oil paintings, his tapestries, his gold.” Diana at first assumed that the killing (which turned out to be the work of a gay psychopath) was a terrorist assassination. Dodi’s bodyguard, Lee Sansum, found her on the deck of the Jonikal very early the next morning gazing sadly out to sea. “Do you think they’ll do that to me?” she asked him. She made up with Elton John at Versace’s funeral in Milan, sitting beside him and Sting and patting Elton’s hand comfortingly—a preview of even sadder things to come.

Back and forth she swung that last summer until the pendulum took her to Paris. And yet in the days in between her boat trips with Dodi she seemed to have such a clear new future outlined in London. She plotted with Shirley Conran something she’d never had: a career. “She wanted professional fulfillment,” said Conran. “She wanted to do something herself that would show she wasn’t an idiot.” The something was a great idea—to produce documentaries like the well-received film she had made with the BBC of her trip to Angola. She was all excited about the project—a film every two years, each one the centerpiece of a discrete humanitarian campaign. First, she told Conran, she would raise awareness of the issue, then produce a documentary in partnership with one of the television channels, and ultimately leave a structure in place to maintain her involvement with the cause. It was Diana’s version of a Clinton global initiative—and she had the idea first. The issue she wanted to start with was illiteracy.

“Thick as a plank” Diana was getting herself an education after all. The Red Cross’s Mike Whitlam reminded her during their time in Angola, “Don’t forget there are ten million land mines left by the British in the deserts of North Africa.” She replied, “Mike, I think you’ll find it’s twenty-three million.” And she was right. “We had a public meeting on land mines,” says Lord Deedes, “and she really knew what she was doing. She wasn’t just a royal overseer.”

She wasn’t just a royal anything. That was the beauty of it. Had she lived, losing her HRH might have turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened to her, just as her mother said. Yes, she was losing most of the perks and protections of the royal cocoon. But the power of her magic touch with the media and the public was something no one could take from her. And what she was gaining was freedom—the freedom to act without the constraints and limitations of Palace and political bureaucrats, the freedom to embrace causes of her own choosing regardless of their potential for controversy, the freedom to make a difference to the things that mattered and to see results.

In Ottawa not so long after her walk through the minefields, 122 governments agreed on a treaty banning the use of antipersonnel land mines. The Nobel committee awarded the campaign the Nobel Peace Prize, coupled with the name of the leading American campaigner, Jodie Williams. In the House of Commons, during the Second Reading of the Landmines Bill, 1998, the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, paid handsome tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, for her “immense contribution to bringing home to many of our constituents the human costs of landmines.”

Diana was not there to hear it. She was alone on an island, in her grave at Althorp.