Diana Read online

  DIANA

  In Pursuit of Love

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  Diana: Her True Story

  Diana: Her New Life

  Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words

  Moi: The Making of an African Statesman

  Monica’s Story

  Posh & Becks

  Madonna

  Nine For Nine: The Pennsylvania Mine Rescue Miracle

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

  Michael O’Mara Books Limited

  9 Lion Yard

  Tremadoc Road

  London SW4 7NQ

  This electronic edition published in 2013

  Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Morton

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

  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.

  The right of Andrew Morton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-105-3 in ePub format

  ISBN: 978-1-78243-106-0 in Mobipocket format

  ISBN: 978-1-84317-084-6 in hardback print format

  Designed and typeset by Martin Bristow

  Jacket photograph: PA Photos

  Jacket design: www.glensaville.com

  www.mombooks.com

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION Love Factually

  PROLOGUE A Grotesque Tableau

  CHAPTER ONE Hard Road to Freedom

  CHAPTER TWO The Year of Living Dangerously

  CHAPTER THREE The Comfort of Strangers

  CHAPTER FOUR Unfinished Business

  CHAPTER FIVE In Search of Love

  CHAPTER SIX A Princess of the World

  CHAPTER SEVEN ‘They Want To Kill Me’

  CHAPTER EIGHT Fakes, Forgeries and Secret Tapes

  CHAPTER NINE The Long Goodbye

  CHAPTER TEN The Crowning of the Queen of Hearts

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Final Odyssey

  CHAPTER TWELVE Trials of the Torch Bearers

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Curse of the Lost Princess

  EPILOGUE Passport to Parachinar

  Timeline

  Bibliography

  Index

  For Mike

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  OVER THE YEARS I have come to know some of those in whom Diana, Princess of Wales confided, and it will be apparent in my narrative that I have had numerous off-the-record conversations with people close to major events in her life. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to them for their insights and advice.

  In the eighteen months it has taken to research and write this book I have enjoyed numerous convivial conversations with many others whose lives were also touched in some way by the late Princess. My thanks go to: Dickie Arbiter, LVO; Steven Bartlett; Carolan Brown; Dr James Colthurst; Paul Cooper; Mohamed Fayed; Debbie Frank; Philip Garvin, CEO Response International; Geordie Greig; Richard Greene; David Griffin; Robert Heindel; Soheir Khashoggi; Robert Lacey; Brian Lask; Ken Lennox; Keith Leverton; Thierry Meresse; Betty Palko; Vivienne Parry; Jean-Marie Pontaut; David Puttnam; Jenni Rivett; Ian Sparks; Raine, Countess Spencer; Chester Stern; Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo; Penny Thornton; Stephen Twigg; Matthias Wiessler; Ken Wharfe, and Hassan Yassin.

  My thanks too to my researcher, Lily Williams, for her valiant efforts under continuous pressure. As ever I owe an immense debt to my editors Dominique Enright and Toby Buchan, as well as to the rest of the editorial team at Michael O’Mara Books for their fortitude, steadiness and support, in particular Helen Cumberbatch, Kate Gribble, Judith Palmer and Chris Maynard. My thanks too to Martin Bristow for designing the text, to Glen Saville for his jacket design, and to Andy Armitage for the index. Finally, from the walk along the beach to the trip down memory lane, Michael O’Mara has been, as he has always been, a great supporter and witness.

  INTRODUCTION

  Love Factually

  ONE SATURDAY in March 2004 I was in my study adding the finishing touches to Chapter Eleven of this book when the front-door bell rang. It was a reporter from the tabloid Sunday People newspaper. She had been sent to get a quote from me about a story they were about to print. It concerned the contents of this book. They had learned, from the usual impeccable sources, that I was going to reveal in the book the identity of three of Diana’s secret lovers. The actor Terence Stamp, a rich captain of industry and a British movie heart-throb, who was in his fifties, were on my list. I flatly denied the story and went back to work.

  The next day I bought the Sunday People newspaper and discovered that the story occupied the front page and two inside pages with the headlines, ‘Diana Sex Bombshell’ and ‘Named: Diana’s Three Secret Lovers’ (only one so-called lover was named). It went on to detail how the ‘besotted’ Princess had launched an ‘astonishing stalking campaign to woo the three secret lovers’, ‘lovelorn’ Diana bombarding the men with intimate letters. The authority for this story was my as yet unpublished ‘explosive’ new book. The article went on to suggest how the wealthy but unnamed captain of industry had consummated his affair with the Princess at the home of a mutual friend. The newspaper’s source was quoted as saying, ‘Some authors could be accused of picking names out of a hat but Morton has pored over thousands of documents and interviewed hundreds of very well-placed people.’ All very flattering.

  By Monday the story, which went round the world, was given a further twist in the Daily Mail when they described the ‘terrible anguish’ suffered by William and Harry over this new information. ‘There seems to be no end to it,’ noted a concerned royal source. Then it was the turn of the columnists to weigh in with their five-cents’ worth. In the Daily Express Vanessa Feltz was delighted that the Princess had found ‘tender, considerate romance’ with Terence Stamp, who, she was sure, would have treated her with the ‘utmost delicacy’. Not to be outdone, Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell – whose own book Diana’s sons called a ‘cold and overt’ betrayal – joined the commentary. ‘I think it’s disgusting, to be honest,’ was Burrell’s considered view of my unpublished book. ‘What goes on between two people behind closed doors should be private. I’ve always respected people’s private lives and I have never talked about Diana’s love life. What he is doing is terrible.’

  To round off the coverage, the Sunday Times published a full-page profile of Stamp, who first made his name in the Swinging Sixties and has followed a distinguished career ever since, not only in the movies but as the author of a novel and an autobiography.

  In consequence of all this media activity, within a matter of days, a large number of people, in Britain and beyond, had some sort of idea that Diana, obsessed and lovelorn, had pursued and had had affairs with Terence Stamp and several other unnamed men.

  There was only one problem with the story. It was utterly untrue.

  The bizarre episode reminded me of why I returned to the subject of Diana, Princess of Wales in the first place, some twelve years after my first biography, Diana: Her True Story, written with her consent and cooperation, was published in 1992. This latest work has i
ts origins during a walk along St Petersburg beach in Florida with my publisher Michael O’Mara one morning in November 2002, when I was promoting a book called Nine For Nine about the rescue of a group of Pennsylvania miners who had been trapped below ground for three days.

  At the time, the trial on charges of theft of Paul Burrell was taking place at the Old Bailey in London. During TV and radio interviews in America I would be asked about the miners but also about the significance of the evidence in the trial. As Mike and I discussed the trial and Diana during our morning stroll it seemed that the woman we had come to know during our collaboration with her during the early 1990s was rapidly disappearing from view, her personality diminishing with every passing year. Listening to the commentary on her life based on evidence from the trial, it was as though the jigsaw puzzle of her personality had been scattered – so much had been forgotten but also exaggerated or distorted. The letters which Prince Philip sent to the Princess following the publication of my 1992 biography, for instance, were discussed during the trial and given a quite disproportionate significance. In any case, the letters had been comprehensively discussed a decade before by myself and others.

  This distortion has gone on apace since her death. Some of those who knew or worked for the Princess have offered their own recollections of her character, often exaggerating their own importance in her life, airing their disappointment with her, or continuing their own vendettas in the pages of their memoirs. Her private secretary Patrick Jephson, for example, probably burst into print too soon with Shadows of a Princess, about his years as the late Princess’s private secretary, the bitterness of his departure colouring many of his judgements. It is noticeable that in his subsequent newspaper articles he now writes much more warmly and sympathetically about Diana, perhaps realizing, from his own experience, the difficulties she faced in trying to forge her own life outside the royal compound. Similarly, Diana’s butler Paul Burrell allowed the anger he feels towards the Spencer family, whom he blames for his trial for theft at the Old Bailey, to infect the narrative of his memoir, A Royal Duty.

  Stories and opinions abound, the bewildered public treated to a parade of witnesses giving often contradictory impressions and anecdotes from their own necessarily narrow perspective. Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed, father of Diana’s last lover Dodi, for example, has consistently argued that his son was going to marry her. This contention, together with his staunch advocacy that there was a conspiracy to murder his son and the Princess, has affected the way the world assesses Diana’s last days. Others insist that she herself had told them she had no plans to remarry, while there are those who believe that it was Hasnat Khan she truly wanted to marry.

  So even for those who know the characters involved, much has to be decoded. What is said or written is often not what is meant. This is difficult for someone who knows the royal terrain – it is virtually impossible for interested observers. The fact that Diana lived her life in compartments, closing off whole areas of her life to those who now say they knew her well, has made the process of assessing her life in the round even more complicated.

  All the while, the continuing description of her life is via the distorting prism of the mass media. This is a trap for the unwary chronicler, for much of what is, and has been, written about the Princess bears scant relation either to events or to her personality. The article in the Sunday People, although outrageously inventive, is merely a vivid example. It means that judgements and conclusions based on its evidence are unavoidably distorted. In this book I have tried, as far as possible, to place Diana’s decisions in the context of what was actually going on in her life, rather than what the public and media assumed was taking place.

  Traditionally when an important public figure dies, the memoirs from friends, staff and others enrich the subject’s life. But in Diana’s case she seems to have been diminished, the impression that, following her separation and divorce, her life had little meaning, direction or worth, escalating since her untimely death. The Princess had been, to quote one respected biographer, ‘spiralling out of control’, a woman who was much loved but basically unstable.

  Could it be that all the heartache and endeavour she had gone through to present her story to the world through Diana: Her True Story, and subsequently to take control of her life, were wasted? If that was indeed the case, though, how then was it possible to explain the spontaneous outpouring of grief at her death, an upsurge of emotion surely linked to the esteem and respect in which she was held?

  What seems to have been lost is any sense or acknowledgement that here was a woman, who – still relatively young and often alone – struggled to make sense of an awesome public position and a difficult private life. As Diana’s life was cut short, the starting point of her search for a life of her own – her collaboration with her biography – has assumed a greater importance than we realized at the time. That too needed comprehensive re-evaluation, as did her other major mass-media undertaking – her famous 1995 BBC Television Panorama interview. The secretive causes and far-reaching consequences of that interview have now assumed historic proportions.

  In trying to make sense of a complicated and extraordinary life, all too often little consideration is given as to how far Diana had travelled, and the personal and social obstacles she had striven to overcome. Here was a woman, who in the words of Hillary Clinton, showed ‘courage and persistence in getting up and going on whenever life knocked her to the mat’. This book is an attempt to describe and celebrate that journey.

  ANDREW MORTON

  London, April 2004

  PROLOGUE

  A Grotesque Tableau

  FOR KEN LENNOX, an award-winning photographer and ­picture editor of the Sun, that Saturday night in August was no different from any other. Something of a night owl, the Scotsman was pottering quietly around his apartment in Primrose Hill, North London. As picture editor of Britain’s bestselling tabloid, he was idly considering the following day’s selection of photographs – images that could make the paper. Naturally, coverage would be dominated by sport, although the ongoing romance between Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed, son of the Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed, would feature somewhere. Given the fact that Britain’s public had been teased and titillated over the last few weeks with pictures of Diana on holiday with her latest lover, Lennox knew that any snaps had to be exceptional to captivate a public becoming sated with the tale of Diana’s romance.

  At 12.20 in the morning he was just getting into bed when his mobile phone rang. The voice of his caller was compelling, excited and French. Although Lennox did not know his face, he knew the voice – and the reputation – of the distinguished photographer Romuald Rat, who had exchanged conflict in the Congo and other trouble spots for celebrity chasing. It was 1.20 a.m. in Paris and not the time for small talk – this was strictly business.

  ‘Ken, there’s been a crash,’ said the urgent voice at the other end of the line. ‘Dodi is very badly injured but Diana looks all right. I have pix from the scene showing them still in the car.’

  Lennox asked how much. ‘You can have first publication, one day’s use only. I want three million francs [about £300,000 or US $540,000].’

  Lennox agreed without demur and told him to wire the images to the Sun’s picture desk in Wapping in East London. As he dragged on a pair of jogging pants and running shoes he told the Frenchman not to speak to anyone else.

  Even before Lennox had clambered into the taxi he had hurriedly summoned, the pictures of Diana and Dodi were on his ‘electronic picture desk’, a sophisticated computer system that allowed him to view pictures from agencies all over the world. Other exclusive deals, with the potential to make many thousands of dollars, were already under way with publications across the globe. At that moment those photographs were among the most valuable goods on the planet.

  While these business deals were being made, the dying princess was gently being removed from the wrecked Mercedes and carefully placed inside an ambulan
ce. As she made her painfully slow last journey to the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital, the ambulance stopping twice to give the paramedics a chance to stabilize the grievously injured woman, her last moments alive were being sold to the highest bidder. That she should have become a prisoner of the flashbulbs even as her life ebbed away was a crude, cruel reflection of her life as an iconic commodity.

  By the time Lennox had reached his office and opened up his electronic picture desk he had already dispatched the veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards and a dozen more cameramen to Paris. Ken and Arthur were old sparring partners. They had both been on the banks of the River Dee at Balmoral in the summer of 1980, taking part in the annual stalking of Prince Charles and his latest love. This new girlfriend seemed much smarter than the others. When she had spotted the photographers as they materialized on the opposite bank of the river she had turned smartly and marched up the slope, never once looking back. Then she had used the mirror from her powder compact to get a better view of her media adversaries. As she explained to me some ten years later: ‘I saw them appearing from the other side. I said to Charles I must get out of the way. You don’t need any aggravation.’ Her reaction meant that the only picture Lennox snapped that day was a back view of what looked like an attractive young girl. At the time he was intrigued that this young woman had shown such presence of mind.

  Now, some seventeen years later, the man who took the first-ever press photograph of Lady Diana Spencer was looking at the last pictures of a dying Diana, Princess of Wales crumpled in the back of a black Mercedes limousine in the Pont de l’Alma underpass in central Paris. The pictures had been taken perhaps a minute or two after the accident, and certainly before the first fire engine arrived on the scene at 12.32 a.m. Lennox had little time for reflection as he looked at the pictures, but as he gazed at the grotesque tableau of the photo marked ‘BIS.JPG@100%’ it was clear to him that Dodi, his jeans ripped by shards of glass and metal and one leg twisted at an impossible angle, was seriously injured, probably dead; as was the driver, Henri Paul, who was sprawled motionless over the driving wheel.