Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (17 page)

Diana’s romantic life, meanwhile, was a shambles. “When I was born I was unwanted,” she famously said. “When I married Charles I was unwanted. When I joined the Royal Family I was unwanted. I want to be wanted.” After she pressed Natty Khan to marry—going so far as to ask Paul Burrell to secretly arrange for a Roman Catholic priest to do the job—Khan angrily accused Diana of leaking stories about their romance to the press. Khan stormed out of Kensington Palace, then called back to apologize.

Confused, Diana fled to one place she said people are “always on my side”—the United States. There, she appeared at a benefit for the Red Cross, had breakfast at the White House with First Lady Hillary Clinton, attended
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham’s eightieth birthday party, showed up at a preview party for an auction of her gowns at Christie’s (this had been William’s fund-raising idea), and visited with her friend Mother Teresa at an AIDS hospice in the Bronx—the last time the planet’s two most famous humanitarians would ever see each other.

Just days after returning to London, Diana celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday as guest of honor at a gala marking the Tate Gallery’s centennial. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had been
consulting with President Bill Clinton about what role Diana might play on the world stage, invited her to discuss the matter with him at Chequers, the PM’s official country estate. To her delight, Blair told Diana that he wanted to send her on a number of foreign assignments as Britain’s roving goodwill ambassador. She left feeling that “at last” she had found someone who “will know how to use me.” She also told friends that she found Blair “quite sexy.”

This new job for Diana had already been approved by the Queen, despite the fact that she knew Charles would be, in the words of a Palace staffer, “green with envy. He had always been pushed aside by people wanting to get close to Diana, and now it looked as if she was going to upstage him forever.” Or at least until he became king.

Diana remained convinced, of course, that this would never happen—certainly not as long he insisted on keeping company with the massively unpopular Camilla. In one week, Charles was throwing a fiftieth birthday party for Camilla at Highgrove. The highly publicized private event, to which no other members of the Royal Family were invited, was for all intents and purposes Charles’s first public declaration of love for Camilla. “This trial balloon,” Harold Brooks-Baker said at the time, “will determine whether Prince Charles is on shaky ground or not.” He went on to say that if the public showed signs of accepting Camilla, “you can be certain attempts will be made to make a marriage possible, because today—given the opposition of the Church, the Queen, and Parliament—it is not.”

At this point, the public’s attitude toward Camilla had already softened considerably. Polls now were showing that one in five Britons had changed their minds about Camilla, and fully 68 percent
felt that Charles should be free to marry his longtime mistress. The vast majority, however, could not yet bring themselves to accept a future “Queen Camilla.”

Nor, apparently, could Tony Blair, Diana’s most important friend and ally in the government. Although the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury had the ultimate say, the Prime Minister would also have to sign off on any marriage plan. “He certainly has the right of veto,” said British constitutional expert Ben Pimlott, “if he thinks it will be damaging to the country or the constitution.”

Diana hoped the best for Charles and Camilla but sensed that the party would be a public relations fiasco. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she cracked, “if I jumped out of the cake in a bathing suit?”

Hasnat Khan, meanwhile, was more convinced than ever that Diana was leaking details about their affair to Fleet Street. Not long after Diana’s summit with Tony Blair at Chequers, Khan again confronted her at Kensington Palace, reducing her to tears. True to form, on July 11, 1997, he apologized with a dozen red roses—but this time, Diana had had enough.

That same day, she departed London with William and Harry for the palatial Saint-Tropez estate of Mohamed Al Fayed.

“AL FAYED?” THE QUEEN LOOKED
up from the note she had just been handed and squinted at her private secretary over rimless reading glasses. Robert Fellowes, who also happened to be Diana’s brother-in-law, swallowed hard. The Queen’s tone always went up an octave or two at times like these, making her sound
less like a monarch and more like the schoolgirl she was during the Blitz. “
Really
? She can’t be serious.
Al Fayed
?”

There were, in fact, few more controversial figures in Great Britain than the Egyptian-born self-made billionaire entrepreneur. Over a span of three decades, Mohamed Al Fayed had managed to acquire a number of British icons: Harrods department store, royal shirtmaker Turnbull and Asser, several apartment buildings on London’s Park Lane, the Fulham Football Club, Scotland’s pink-walled fourteenth-century Balnagown Castle, and the satirical magazine
Punch
, to name a few. To underscore his love of all things British, Al Fayed also maintained a personal fleet of sixty-four Rolls-Royces.

None of it mattered. Al Fayed was stopped at every turn in his quest for respectability. Denied British citizenship, spurned by most of British society, he was considered a boorish arriviste by every aristocratic family but the Spencers.

The Queen was livid, and not just because the Princess of Wales had accepted Al Fayed’s standing invitation to visit his Saint-Tropez mansion. Under the terms of the divorce agreement, Diana was required to obtain the Queen’s permission in writing before taking either William or Harry out of the country.

It was too late to do anything about it now; Diana and the young princes were already aboard Harrods’ Executive Gulfstream IV jet bound for Nice. Once there, they would board the Egyptian mogul’s 195-foot yacht
Jonikal
for the five-hour trip to Al Fayed’s $17 million compound overlooking the Mediterranean.

Two days later, Diana’s affair with Al Fayed’s forty-two-year-old son Dodi began with a food fight aboard the
Jonikal
. The yacht’s chief stewardess, Debbie Gribble, remembered that they were
“chasing each other and laughing and giggling like a couple of kids.”

Following Diana’s turbulent affair with Khan, William encouraged his mother to pursue the relationship with the fun-loving, high-living Emad “Dodi” Fayed. (In pursuit of a career as a Hollywood producer—Dodi was executive producer of the Academy Award–winning
Chariots of Fire
, as well as
Hook
,
F/X
, and
The Scarlet Letter
—he dropped the “Al” in Al Fayed.) Over the next few days in Saint-Tropez, the Princess and the playboy spent long hours talking mostly about Diana’s hopes and dreams. Unlike the other men in her life, Fayed had perfected the art of listening to women. “Dodi could make you feel,” a former girlfriend said, “like you were the center of the universe.” Soon it became clear to Gribble that “something had passed between them. Suddenly they seemed to fit as a couple.”

For the rest of July and into August, Diana and Dodi were virtually inseparable. When they weren’t sharing cozy evenings in Kensington Palace or at his luxurious apartment in Mayfair, they were being photographed sunbathing and kissing aboard the
Jonikal
.

The Queen, Charles, Camilla, and for that matter the rest of the world were riveted by the tabloid saga of Diana and her improbable new love. Indeed, Camilla’s birthday party—Charles’s much-ballyhooed proclamation of love for the “other woman” in his royal love triangle—was completely overshadowed by Diana’s Mediterranean escapade.

Although Dodi showered Diana with attention, affection, and gifts (a Bulgari ring, a gold Cartier Panthère watch, a diamond bracelet), she told friends like Lana Marks, Rosa Monckton, and Annabel Goldsmith that marriage was the farthest thing from her
mind. “The last thing I need is a new marriage,” she said. “I need it like a bad rash on my face.”

The Queen was not so sure. She worried that Mohamed Al Fayed was seeking the ultimate revenge for being snubbed by the British establishment by marrying into the Royal Family. As the father-in-law to the Princess of Wales—and potentially grandfather to children who would be half-siblings of William and Harry—Al Fayed would gain more social status than he might otherwise have dreamed possible.

That August of 1997, William and Harry joined their father and the Queen at their beloved Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. Diana figured that they were “out killing something” whenever she tried to reach them on the phone, and she was invariably right. If they weren’t angling for trout in the River Dee, they were either hunting the red deer that were indigenous to the region or gunning down dozens of pheasants, grouse, and ducks—often in a single morning.

The Queen regarded Balmoral as a magical place. It was here that, at the age of seventeen, she shot her first stag. (Although Diana shot her first stag at thirteen, she detested killing in all its forms and found the country life “immensely dull.”) Although Elizabeth no longer hunted—she shot her last stag in 1983, in a glen now called “the Queen’s Corry”—she loved nothing more than riding the estate’s narrow trails on horseback or traipsing through the muddy landscape with a brace of corgis swarming at her feet.

A trained mechanic who worked in a motor pool during World War II, the Queen also enjoyed getting behind the wheel of a Land Rover and taking it for a spin across the Highlands terrain.
Her Majesty never wore a seat belt and, in the words of her cousin Margaret Rhodes, usually drove “like a bat out of hell.” Most days at Balmoral, the Queen would drop in on the all-male hunting parties at some point to see how they were progressing. On these occasions, corgis were seldom seen. When the menfolk raised shotguns to blast away at the birds that were flushed out of bushes and trees at Balmoral and Sandringham, the Queen stood behind them, flanked by Labradors and cocker spaniels—her “gun dogs.”

Midday, the Queen often presided over an elaborate picnic lunch sans servants, setting the places herself (“She has to have it absolutely right,” said frequent guest Anne Glenconner) and then listening intently to the princes’ tall hunting tales over a gin and tonic and plates of cold roast chicken. Once the Queen had finished, she cleared the table with the help of her grandsons, then donned rubber yellow kitchen gloves to scrub the dishes before putting them away. “You think I’m joking but I’m not,” said Tony Blair, recalling one of his “intriguing, surreal, and utterly freaky” weekends with the Royal Family at Balmoral. “The Queen asks if you’ve finished, she stacks the plates up and goes off to the sink.”

While the Windsors enjoyed their country pursuits in Scotland, five hundred miles to the south a psychic named Edward Williams walked into the South Wales police station at 2:12 in the afternoon and told police he had a premonition that Princess Diana was going to die. He had previously predicted—correctly—that Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II would be victims of failed assassination attempts. The log of the department’s Special Branch investigative unit recounted Williams’s August 27, 1997, visit in detail, and described him as appearing to be “quite normal.” Williams realized he could have been dismissed as the “local
nutter,” but felt he had to “do
something
 . . . the feeling that Diana was in danger didn’t leave me.”

Three days later, Charles penned a letter to “My Dearest Diana,” asking if Harry, already held back one year, should stay an additional year at Ludgrove before joining William at Eton. No intellectual match for the Heir, the Spare had been struggling with his grades. The Prince signed the letter “Lots of love, Charles,” and then told his secretary to put it on Diana’s desk at Kensington Palace so she would have it as soon as she returned to London.

She had been separated from William and Harry for more than a month now, and all Diana could think about now was getting home to her children. She told one American friend, Richard Greene, that she believed she was destined to reform the monarchy (“Yes, I believe in destiny”). But towering above all other considerations was her sons’ happiness.

Stopping over in Paris on the way to London, Diana and Dodi were staying on the Place Vendôme in the Hotel Ritz, which happened to be owned by Dodi’s father. Harry’s thirteenth birthday was in a matter of weeks, and since she could not face the army of reporters camped outside, Diana asked a hotel staffer to pick up the Sony PlayStation he had asked for.

Late that afternoon, Prince William called from Balmoral. If Diana had been thinking of marrying Dodi, as Fleet Street speculated and the Queen deeply feared, she would have talked it over with her “little old wise man”—the one person whose opinion on all such things she valued most—William. She didn’t. Instead, the conversation centered on Harry, and whether a photo opportunity being set up at Eton to mark the beginning of William’s third year there would make the Spare feel awkward and “ignored.”

They talked about other things as well in that final twenty-minute phone conversation—how many game birds he and Harry bagged that day, what a great shot Grandpapa Philip was, how fast Granny drove, how they were looking forward to spending time with her in London before returning to school, the Sony PlayStation Mummy was giving Harry for his birthday. William also asked if he and Harry could meet her when she arrived at Heathrow—a homecoming that was sure to create a scrum of photographers at the airport.

“Of course,” the Princess instantly replied. In stark contrast to her in-laws’ stiff formality, Diana was famous for running to her children and sweeping them up with bear hugs and kisses. She also knew that those heartwarming images would again be splashed across the front pages of newspapers worldwide. After cavorting with Dodi on the Riviera and in Paris, Diana wanted to remind the Queen, Charles, and the world at large of her place in the Royal Family—and, as the mother of a future king, her role in shaping the monarchy. “Diana was Merlin—an absolute wizard—when it came to manipulating the media,” said veteran
Times of London
correspondent Alan Hamilton, a favorite of the Royal Family. “The Queen, in particular, was in awe of this.”