Diana's Nightmare - The Family (3 page)

It was clear from the start of the princes' leave from Ludgrove School that Diana intended to meet the challenge of separation head-on. The holiday agenda was packed with go-kart racing, the European Grand Prix at Donington Park and simulated aerial dogfights at the Flying Aces Virtual Reality Centre. Charles could take his sons fishing for salmon on the banks of the Dee where he had once wooed her, but she had indulged their spirit of adventure.

'I wouldn't say that she is completely devoid of manipulative qualities at all,' said Georgina Howell, one of the most perceptive writers on the royal scene, if you go on manipulating somebody, eventually they will become manipulative as well because they see how it's done.' Diana had learned her manoeuvres from some highly qualified exponents at the very heart of the Royal Family. The danger was that she would not be able to sustain the cracking pace she had set. As one of Charles's advisers had cautioned him: 'This is a marathon, not a sprint.'

NOTHING summed up the new royal era better than attendance at the Easter Sunday service in St George's Chapel, Windsor. Ticking off the arrivals, royal watchers noted that Diana and her princes were not the only regulars to go missing. The Duchess of York and her children, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, had stayed behind at Sunninghill Park House, their former home, while Prince Andrew joined his mother and father for the traditional devotions. He would be joining them for lunch, re-creating the family circle which had been torn apart by the announcement of the Yorks' separation a year earlier. He spent so much time helping his disturbed wife that there was talk of a reconciliation. Any prospect of that was dimmed, however, by Andrew's new posting in the Royal Navy. He would soon be taking command of HMS
Cottesmore
and could expect to serve in the plastic-hulled minehunter, one of Her Majesty's so-called 'Tupperware fleet', for a year at least.

Prince Edward, deliberately the least high-profile of the royals, was absent as well, but he was attending to official family business, presenting awards bearing his father's name at a ceremony in Canada. Onlookers were delighted to see Princess Anne with her new husband Commander Tim Laurence, who was making his first appearance as a royal consort at this annual event. Although no substitute for Diana, or Fergie for that matter, he had some novelty value and a refreshingly boyish grin. Anne, for one, had completely lost patience with her two sisters-in-law, referring to them, it was said, as 'those silly girls'.

Prince Charles arrived with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. His London address was now York House, a large apartment at St James's Palace which held some unfortunate memories of a previous occupant: Edward VIII. After Charles moved in, removal vans took loads of personal belongings, including wedding gifts, from Kensington Palace to Highgrove. There they were smashed up and burned in a bonfire.

Charles would have been distressed to know that, up in Leicester, his wife and sons were watching the Formula One racing from a VIP suite only yards from where James Gilbey worked in the Lotus pit. When Gilbey was tipped off that Diana was so close, he jumped on a motor scooter and disappeared into the crowds. After Squidgy, he needed to distance himself from any fresh scandal. But it didn't stop speculation about his relationship with Diana. Breaking his silence for the first time, James Gilbey told the authors: 'I've done my time, really, in terms of being a sort of punchbag for a lot of the various things that have been happening.'

Despite innumerable headlines and a million words, the real story behind Squidgy remained known only to Diana and a handful of others privy to the secret. The truth formed a big part of her recurring nightmare.

'I think there was a plot, yes,' says Stuart Higgins, the journalist who found Squidgy a place in the
Sun.

The other character central to this drama, Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, stayed close to her two teenage children, Tom and Laura, that Easter. After her love affair with Prince Charles became public, she had remained in seclusion behind the stone walls of Middlewick House, an eighteenth-century manor fifteen miles from Highgrove. When she emerged briefly to prune some shrubs in her garden, a posse of photographers sent her dashing for cover. No royal edict could protect her from the consequences, much as Charles wished to distance her from scandal. As well as the taped telephone call which lead to what was known as Camillagate, there was the eyewitness account of PC Andy Jacques, who claimed he had seen the couple smooching on a sofa at Highgrove. Asked how Camilla was coping, a friend replied: 'How do you think? She's absolutely shattered.'

While she had waited tensely for John Major's announcement, Camilla had been observed pacing up and down her drawing room. As the Prime Minister began to speak, she sat bolt upright in front of her TV set to take in the news. She was, she said later, 'very sorry for the royal couple'. In tweed jacket and blue jeans, her face lined with worry, she cut an unlikely figure as a scarlet woman.

Over Easter, she and her husband, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, known to Army jokers as 'the man who laid down his wife for his country', entertained a small group of friends to lunch. One of them was Lady Tryon, who had rallied to her friend immediately the scandal broke. 'Monarchy is a wonderful institution,' she said. 'The events of the past year have been very, very sad.' Parker Bowles was no longer describing his wife's entanglement with Prince Charles as 'pure fiction'.

Many considered that the House of Windsor was getting a long overdue, and richly deserved, come-uppance. 'The royals are behaving as they've always done,' said a royal historian. 'Jet-set, or the period equivalent, is their normal behaviour. We were lulled into a false sense of security when George VI and Queen Elizabeth did such a good job during World War II. What's happening now is nothing new. Since William the Conqueror, you can practically count the periods of respectability among the royals on the fingers of one hand.' Prince Philip had once declared: 'Only a moral imperative can persuade husbands and wives to be faithful to each other.' If this were meant as a bench mark for royal marriages, it had failed miserably. Somewhere along the line, the moral imperative had been mislaid.

By the time Diana was ready to leave San Lorenzo after the Easter treat, a crowd big enough to warrant police supervision had gathered around her car, which was illegally parked in the street. After a farewell hug from Mara, she stepped out into the sunlight to a sound other royals rarely heard any more: gales of unrestrained cheering. Blue eyes sparkling, the People's Princess waved to the well-wishers and disappeared from sight. She was never really out of the limelight, though. Even in her off-stage moments, her name was on someone's lips in some corner of the globe. The Royal Family had unwittingly made Diana the most famous woman alive.

PATRICK Demarchelier, the ruggedly handsome French photographer, had smiled to himself when he received his second summons from Diana. The first had come in the late summer of 1991 when she had personally telephoned his New York apartment from Kensington Palace. She needed some photographs, she explained, for her Christmas card and one or two other purposes she had in mind. Would he take them? The Frenchman was flattered to be asked and readily agreed to keep the project secret.

Diana knew that she was breaking an important rule of the royal code by making direct contact with an unapproved photographer. If word reached her enemies at the Press Office at Buckingham Palace, she would have to explain her action to the Queen. To make sure she was undetected, she even bypassed her trusted Private Secretary, Patrick Jephson, in setting up the picture session. Like Demarchelier, the hair stylist and make-up artist were sworn to secrecy. The deception had worked amazingly well.

When Diana coyly produced her snaps over lunch with Liz Tilberis, the editor of British
Vogue,
the journalist was instantly hooked. Demarchelier had captured a Diana the world had never seen before. Gone was the heavy makeup and the trademark blue eyeliner; her hair was cropped gamine-like and an understated black cashmere jumper gave the subject a sophisticated new appeal. The two women struck a deal:
Vogue
could publish one picture on the cover of its Christmas issue in return for publicising the Royal Ballet, a cause the Princess patronised. It was a notable coup for Diana in her struggle for independence, one made even sweeter because the Palace bureaucrats knew nothing of it until the magazine arrived on the newsstands. One of the photographs in particular, Diana had reasoned, would make the perfect illustration for a book jacket.

Now Diana was sure that the new pictures would receive the same reaction - and re-create her sense of victory over the Palace and the Highgrove Set. Emerging from a dark winter, Diana's purpose was to show that she was stronger and happier than she had ever been. Once again, she and Demarchelier had slipped off to a secret studio session and the results were even better. 'The Princess would make a natural picture editor,' the photographer enthused. 'She has a great eye for spotting the saleable points as well as the faults of any photograph.'

In the presence of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell, whom he was using in a series of car advertisements, Demarchelier would have had to admit that the thirty-one-year-old mother of two would not have qualified had she been other than the Princess of Wales. But inside his studio for the second time, Diana was content to know that, though she mightn't be in the supermodel class, she was her own best image-maker and publicist. The adroitly successful 'Selling of a Princess' thus far had been all her own work. Her skilful manipulation of her image to remain the most popular member of the Royal Family despite the separation from its heir had succeeded to great effect.

Great, too, was the pleasure it gave Diana to compare her efforts with those of her former best friend, her sister-in-law Sarah, the Duchess of York. Stumbling from one public relations disaster to another after she was photographed topless in St Tropez with her financial adviser and pedicurist Johnny Bryan, Fergie had tried to land the cover of
Harpers & Queen
a few weeks earlier. The result had been catastrophic and earned her a stinging rebuke from the magazine's editor, Vicki Woods.

Instead of a discreet lunch with the editor, Fergie instructed her Private Secretary, Jane Ambler, to dictate terms under which the Duchess would agree to grace the magazine's cover. Her Royal Highness, Ms Ambler told the editor, would be bringing along her own personal manicurist, her personal dresser and her personal photographic agent. When Ms Woods suggested top fashion photographer Michael Roberts for the shoot, the Duchess, unaware of his reputation, demanded a list of the celebrities in his portfolio; worse, she wanted to know if he matched up to Demarchelier's qualifications. Her motive, it was patently obvious, was to outshine Diana.

To make the project even more unworkable, Johnny Bryan took over the negotiations with an indelicacy which would have embarrassed a rhinoceros. Things went so badly that the day before the shoot, Ms Woods finally withdrew her offer of a cover after Bryan insisted that Fergie retain the copyright of Roberts's pictures, an unheard of demand in the world of professional photography. Nor would there be any interview to accompany the pictures. Nevertheless, the session went ahead with Fergie confident of salvaging something from the wreckage. The result was four pictures, mainly of the Duchess's Rita Hayworth-like hair, which failed to attract an immediate buyer at the asking price of £10,000. Ms Woods reconciled herself to the loss of an exclusive cover by filling four pages of the magazine with a swingeing attack on the Duchess and her so called courtiers for their ineptitude. Fergie had been furious about the collapse of the deal, which she interpreted as another example of royal favouritism.

Bryan had told Ms Woods that much of the reason the Duchess wanted the cover was that 'the Big D might be coming out with a cover too.' Fergie put it more personally, it's always me who has to carry the can; it's always me who gets the blame for this kind of thing; it's always MY fault, and I've had enough of it; that's why I want OUT of the whole thing so I can get on with my own life and stop being blamed for everything,' she moaned to the exhausted editor. 'I'm SO tired of carrying the can for all of them. I have been the scapegoat for the Waleses for four years.'

The Big D smiled when she heard about the debacle. She didn't like Johnny Bryan and she no longer trusted Fergie. Her comments merely confirmed the Duchess's paranoid attitude towards her. The two women, once so close that Diana had acted as matchmaker in Fergie's romance with Prince Andrew, had grown apart, although they were on speaking terms again. The disintegration of Fergie's marriage had given Diana some breathing space in trying to resolve her own marital difficulties. The spotlight, and the criticism, had swung in Fergie's direction. But the denouement at St Tropez had been so final that Diana no longer wished to be associated with Fergie's crass efforts at self-aggrandizement. Fergie, the Princess concluded, was a loser, and a bad one at that.

One big difference between the two royal superstars was money. Quite apart from what Charles paid for her upkeep, Diana had recourse to virtually unlimited funds of her own. She received the income from Spencer family trust funds worth £20 million. Diana was one of the richest women in Britain, while Fergie's fortunes at this stage continued to be more problematical. She received money from Andrew under the terms of their separation deal, but her future was largely tied into the marketing fate of her children's storybook character Budgie the Little Helicopter. So far, the Budgie millions remained pie in the sky.

As her sons headed north to join Charles in Scotland, Diana flopped down in a comfy chair in her empty nest at Kensington Palace and flicked through the new Demarchelier portfolio. She was also trying to decide whether to move out of this royal village to a home of her own.

IN the months prior to the Palace's admission that the Waleses were finished, it seemed that Diana's secrets had all been laid bare. Reacting to the powerful forces ranged against her, she and her brother Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer, were reputed to have orchestrated many of the revelations in Andrew Morton's book
DIANA: Her True Story.
But they had been unable to control the coverage to their liking. Much of it had rebounded and what emerged was Diana's pitiful dilemma as a woman who, although brave, was more victim than heroine. She was presented in the Press as a suicidal hysteric, a weak-willed bulimic, too sick and vulnerable to stand up for her rights. If Charles felt aggrieved by unflattering descriptions of himself, Diana saw her portrayal as a grotesque distortion of the truth. But the notion persisted that she was unwell, and it was said that constantly seeking public adoration was one of the symptoms of her food addiction; that she desperately needed to be the heroine.