Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition Read online

  From the reviews of Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words

  ‘Andrew Morton’s spectacular coup. Rarely has any biography played so crucial a role in the life of its subject.’

  Anthony Holden, Daily Mail

  ‘A devastatingly and intensely personal account.’

  Independent

  ‘The definitive account of royalty in the late twentieth century.’

  Sun

  ‘A modern classic, the book that changed the lives it described.’

  David Sexton, London Evening Standard

  ‘The most carefully researched, authoritative book about the royal family ever.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Andrew Morton is one of the most prominent authors of his generation.’

  Daily Express

  ‘… [A] credible, intriguing, but also alarming portrait of “the twentieth century’s last icon”.’

  Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Compulsive reading.’

  Sunday Express

  ‘The Morton book will be forever Diana’s testament in her words to the public which she adored.’

  Belfast Telegraph

  ‘The closest we will get to her own version of her life story.’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Succeeds in putting Diana’s actions in context and presenting a balanced assessment of this indelible figure.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Startlingly candid.’

  People

  ALSO BY ANDREW MORTON

  17 Carnations: The Windsors, the Nazis and the Cover-Up

  William & Catherine: Their Lives, Their Wedding

  Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

  Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography

  Madonna

  Posh & Becks

  Monica’s Story

  First published in Great Britain in 1992

  as Diana: Her True Story by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard, Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  Copyright © Andrew Morton 1992

  This revised 25th anniversary edition,

  Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words,

  first published in Great Britain in 2017

  by Michael O’Mara Books Limited.

  (Excluding ‘In her Own Words’)

  © Andrew Morton 2017

  Edited edition of ‘In Her Own Words’

  © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 1997, 2017

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-744-4 in hardback print format

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-694-2 in trade paperback print format

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-693-5 in e-book format

  www.mombooks.com

  Cover design by Ana Bjezancevic

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  In Her Own Words

  DIANA: HER TRUE STORY

  1 ‘I Was Supposed To Be a Boy’

  2 ‘Just Call Me “Sir”’

  3 ‘Such Hope in My Heart’

  4 ‘My Cries for Help’

  5 ‘Darling, I’m About To Disappear’

  6 ‘My Life Has Changed Its Course’

  7 ‘I Don’t Rattle Their Cages’

  8 ‘I Did My Best’

  DIANA: HER TRUE STORY - THE AFTERMATH

  9 ‘We’d Run Out of Steam’

  10 ‘My Acting Career Is Over’

  11 ‘I Am Going To Be Me’

  12 ‘Tell Me Yes’

  13 ‘The People’s Princess’

  Afterword: ‘We Think of Her Every Day’

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  This biography is unique in that the story contained in its pages would never have appeared had it not been for the wholehearted co-operation of Diana, the late Princess of Wales. The story is based on lengthy, tape-recorded interviews with Diana, supplemented by the testimony of her family and friends. Like Diana, they spoke with honesty and frankness in spite of the fact it meant laying aside the ingrained habits of discretion and loyalty which proximity to royalty invariably engenders. My thanks for their co-operation are therefore all the more heartfelt and sincere.

  My grateful thanks, too, to the Princess of Wales’s brother, the 9th Earl Spencer, for his insights and reminiscences, particularly about the Princess’s childhood and teenage years.

  My thanks also to the Baroness Falkender, Carolyn Bartholomew, Sue Beechey, Dr James Colthurst, James Gilbey, Malcolm Groves, Lucinda Craig Harvey, Peter and Neil Hickling, Felix Lyle, Michael Nash, Delissa Needham, Adam Russell, Rory Scott, Angela Serota, now Baroness Bernstein of Craigweil, Muriel Stevens, Oonagh Toffolo and Stephen Twigg.

  To Professor John Taylor and Dr Frank Prochaska, my thanks for your thoughts on legacy and the future of the monarchy.

  There are others whose positions prevent me from officially acknowledging their assistance. Their unstinting guidance has been invaluable.

  My thanks to my publisher, Michael O’Mara, for his guidance and support on the tortuous path from conception to the completion of the numerous editions that charted Diana’s ultimately tragic journey.

  PHOTOGRAPH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Before his death in March 1992, the father of the Princess of Wales, the 8th Earl Spencer, very kindly allowed access to his private family photograph albums. Many of the photographs in this volume are reproduced from those albums. His generous co-operation is greatly appreciated.

  The sources of all other photographs in this volume are stated in the captions.

  Foreword

  Even at a distance of 25 years, it is a scarcely believable story. Hollywood producers would dismiss the script as much too far-fetched; a beautiful but desperate princess, an unknown writer, an amateur go-between and a book that would change the Princess’s life forever.

  In 1991 Princess Diana was approaching 30. She had been in the limelight all of her adult life. Her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981 was described as a ‘fairytale’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the popular imagination, the Prince and Princess, blessed with two young sons, Princes William and Harry, were the glamorous and sympathetic face of the House of Windsor. The very idea that their ten-year marriage was in dire trouble was unthinkable – even to the notoriously imaginative tabloid press. Commenting on a joint tour of Brazil that year, the Sunday Mirror described them as presenting a ‘united front to the world’, their closeness sending a ‘shiver of excitement’ around the massed media ranks.

  Shortly afterwards I was to learn the unvarnished truth. The unlikely venue for these extraordinary revelations was a working man’s café in the anonymous London suburb of Ruislip. As labourers noisily tucked into plates of egg, bacon and baked beans, I put on a pair of headphones, turned on a battered tape recorder and listened with mounting astonishment to the unmistakable voice of the Princess as she poured out a tale of woe in a rapid stream of consciousness. It was like being transported into a parallel universe, the Princess talking about her unhappiness, her sense of betrayal, her suicide attempts and two th
ings I had never previously heard of: bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder, and a woman called Camilla.

  I left the café reeling, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It was as though I had been admitted into an underground club that was nursing a secret. A dangerous secret. On my way home that evening I kept well away from the edge of the Underground platform, my mind spinning with the same paranoia that infected the movie All the President’s Men, about President Nixon, the Watergate break-in and the subsequent investigation by Woodward and Bernstein.

  For nearly ten years I had been writing about the royal family, and was part of the media circus chronicling their work as they toured the globe. It was, as the members of the so-called ‘royal ratpack’ used to say, the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I had met Prince Charles and Princess Diana on numerous occasions at press receptions which were held at the beginning of every tour. Conversations with the Princess were light, bright and trite, usually about my loud ties.

  However, life as a royal reporter was not one long jolly. Behind the scenes of the royal theatre, there was a lot of hard work, cultivating contacts inside Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where the Waleses occupied apartments eight and nine, in order to find out about royal life when the grease paint was removed. After writing books about life inside the various palaces, the royal family’s wealth and a biography of the Duchess of York, as well as other works, I had got to know a number of friends and royal staff reasonably well and thought I had a fair idea of what was going on behind the wrought-iron royal gates. Nothing had prepared me for this.

  My induction to the truth came courtesy of the man in charge of the tape recorder. I first met Dr James Colthurst in October 1986 on a routine royal visit when he escorted Diana after she opened a new CT scanner in his X-ray department at St Thomas’ hospital in central London. Afterwards, over tea and biscuits, I questioned him about Diana’s visit. It soon became clear that Colthurst, an Old Etonian and son of a baronet whose family have owned Blarney Castle in Ireland for more than a century, had known the Princess for years.

  He could become, I thought, a useful contact. We became friendly, enjoying games of squash in the St Thomas’ courts before sitting down to large lunches at a nearby Italian restaurant. Chatty but diffuse, James was happy to talk about any subject but the Princess. Certainly he had known her well enough to visit her when she was a bachelor girl living with her friends at Coleherne Court in Kensington and listen to her mooning about Prince Charles. They had even gone on a skiing holiday to France with a party of friends. Upon her elevation to the role of Princess of Wales, the easy familiarity that characterized her life was lost, Diana still speaking fondly of her ‘Coleherne Court’ but in the past tense.

  It was only after she visited St Thomas’ that Colthurst and the Princess renewed their friendship, meeting up for lunch every now and again. By degrees he too was admitted into her secret club and was given glimpses of the real life, rather than the fantasy, endured by the Princess. It was clear that her marriage had failed and that her husband was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of his Army friend Andrew who held the curious title of Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen. Mrs Parker Bowles, who lived near to Highgrove, the Waleses’ country home, was so close to the Prince that she regularly hosted dinners and other gatherings for his friends at his Gloucestershire home.

  While Colthurst felt he was being let in on a secret, he was not the only one. From the bodyguard who accompanied the Prince on his nocturnal visits to Camilla’s home at Middlewick House, to the butler and chef ordered to prepare and serve a supper they knew the Prince would not be eating as he had gone to see his lover, and the valet who marked up programmes in the TV listings guide Radio Times, to give the impression the Prince had spent a quiet evening at home – all those working for the Prince and Princess were pulled, often against their will, into the deception. His valet Ken Stronach became ill with the daily deceit while their press officer Dickie Arbiter found himself in an ‘impossible position’, maintaining to the world the illusion of happy families while turning a blind eye to the private distance between them.

  When Prince Charles broke his arm in a polo accident in June 1990 and was taken to Cirencester hospital, his staff listened intently to the police radios reporting on the progress of the Princess of Wales on her journey from London to the hospital. They were keenly aware that they had to usher out his first visitor – Camilla Parker Bowles – before Diana arrived.

  Those in the know realized that the simmering cauldron of deceit, subterfuge and duplicity was going to boil over sooner or later. Every day they asked themselves how long the conspiracy to hoodwink the future queen could continue. Perhaps indefinitely. Or until the Princess was driven mad by those she trusted and admired, who told her, time after weary time, that Camilla was just a friend. Her suspicions, they reasoned, were misplaced, the imaginings, as the Queen Mother told her circle, of ‘a silly girl’.

  As Diana was to explain years later in her famous television interview on the BBC’s Panorama programme: ‘Friends on my husband’s side were indicating that I was again unstable, sick and should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better. I was almost an embarrassment.’

  Far from being the ravings of a madwoman, Diana’s suspicions were to prove correct, and the painful awareness of the way she had been routinely deceived, not just by her husband but by those inside the royal system, instilled in her an absolute and understandable distrust and contempt for the Establishment. They were attitudes that would shape her behaviour for the rest of her life.

  So, as Colthurst tucked into his chicken kiev, he watched as Diana toyed with her wilted salad and spoke with a mixture of anger and sadness about her increasingly intolerable position. She was coming to realize that unless she took drastic action she faced a life sentence of unhappiness and dishonesty. Her first thought was to pack her bags and flee to Australia with her young boys. There were echoes here of the behaviour of her own mother, Frances Shand Kydd, who, following an acrimonious divorce from Diana's father, Earl Spencer, lived as a virtual recluse on the bleak island of Seil in north-west Scotland.

  This attitude, however, was merely bravado and resolved nothing. The central issue remained: how to give the public an insight into her side of the story while untangling the legal, emotional and constitutional knots that kept her tethered to the monarchy. It was a genuine predicament. If she had just packed her bags and left, the public and media, who firmly believed in the fairytale, would have considered her behaviour irrational, hysterical and profoundly unbecoming. As far as she was concerned, she had done everything in her power to confront the issue. She had spoken with Charles and been dismissed. Then she had talked to the Queen but faced a blank wall.

  Not only did she consider herself to be a prisoner trapped inside a bitterly unfulfilled marriage, she also felt shackled to a wholly unrealistic public image of her royal life and to an unsympathetic royal system which was ruled, in her phrase, by the ‘men in grey suits’. She felt disempowered both as a woman and as a human being. Inside the palace she was treated with kindly condescension, seen as an attractive adornment to her questing husband. ‘And meantime Her Royal Highness will continue doing very little, but doing it very well,’ was the comment by one private secretary at a meeting to discuss future engagements.

  Remember, this was the same woman who in 1987 had done more than anyone alive to remove the stigma surrounding the deadly Aids virus when she shook the hand of a terminally ill sufferer at London’s Middlesex Hospital. While she was not able to fully articulate it, Diana had a humanitarian vision for herself that transcended the dull, dutiful round of traditional royal engagements.

  As she looked out from her lonely prison, rarely a day passed by without the sound of another door slamming, another lock snapping shut as the fiction of the fairytale was further embellished in the public’s mind. ‘She felt the lid was closing in on her,’ Colthurst later recalled. ‘Unlik
e other women, she did not have the freedom to leave with her children.’

  Like a prisoner condemned for a crime she did not commit, Diana had a crying need to tell the world the truth about her life, the distress she felt and the ambitions she nurtured. Her sense of injustice was profound. Quite simply, she wanted the liberty to speak her mind, the opportunity to tell people the whole story of her life and to let them judge her accordingly.

  She felt somehow that if she was able to explain her story to the people, her people, they could truly understand her before it was too late. ‘Let them be my judge,’ she said, confident that her public would not criticize her as harshly as the royal family or the mass media. However, her desire to explain what she saw as the truth of her case was matched by a nagging fear that at any moment her enemies in the Palace would have her classified as mentally ill and locked away. This was no idle fear – when her Panorama interview was screened in 1995, the then Armed Forces Minister, Nicholas Soames, a close friend and former equerry to Prince Charles, described her as displaying ‘the advanced stages of paranoia’.

  It gradually dawned on her and her intimate circle that unless the full story of her life was told, the public would never appreciate or understand the reasons behind any actions she decided upon. She chewed over a number of options, from commissioning a series of newspaper articles, to producing a television documentary and publishing a biography of her life. Diana knew her message; she was struggling to find a medium.

  How then could she smuggle her message to the outside world? Reviewing Britain’s social landscape she saw that there were few outlets for her story. The House of Windsor is the most influential family in the land, its tentacles wrapped tightly around the decision makers inside television and much of the press. Credible media outlets, the BBC, ITV and the so-called quality newspapers, would have had a collective attack of the vapours if she had signalled that she wanted them to publish the truth of her position. Again, if her story appeared in the tabloid press it would have been dismissed by the Establishment as so much exaggerated rubbish.