Over the years it became a running joke: "Where on earth did you get that tie?" Diana would "josh when she saw me wearing my latest garish fashion statement. After the formal bow and handshake, I would respond along the lines of "You are getting very boring in your old age."
This is the way I shall remember Diana: not just for her compassion, her dignity and her glamor but for her disarming and often self-deprecating humor. When you talked to her at cocktail parties or other gatherings, the chat was invariably light, bright and trite, but you always had to be ready for the dry aside or the gentle put-down. On one occasion I mentioned that I was vaguely related to the Duchess of York—at about 900th remove. She rolled her eyes in a theatrical gesture and said, "I'm sure she will be pleased." She even made light of her eating disorder—bulimia nervosa—once laughing with friends who were visiting for lunch at Kensington Palace, "I'm cheap to feed."
Covering Diana in the 1980s was a lot of fun. Unlike other members of the royal family, she was aware—sometimes too aware—of the watching media. But after the first few months of her royal apprenticeship, Diana was behaving like an old pro, conscious of camera angles and using press gatherings to plant little stories, invariably about baby Prince William. "Charles loves to bathe with him," she would say, knowing full well that the aside would make the front pages.
It was on a tour of Portugal during a cold and wet February 1987 that members of the royal rat pack—as the reporters covering the royal family are known—noticed the first signs of frost. No more cuddling in public, no more gentle hands on the shoulder. Instead the couple took separate suites at a palace in Lisbon. Once back in Britain it became very clear that Charles and Diana were leading separate lives. Her eloquent body language said more about her misery than any words. In hindsight, of course, we know that their growing estrangement coincided with Diana's affair with Capt. James Hewitt and the renewal of Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
From that time on royal tours became increasingly tetchy affairs, with little face-to-face contact between the family and the press and far less of the banter of old. But through my sources I was able to piece together a quite different picture of the princess. Beneath the glamor was a young woman desperately alone and in danger of suffocating in a stuffy royal system and a painfully unhappy marriage.
Underneath her smiling mask and her sweet sense of humor was a sorrowful woman, attempting to make sense of her life inside an institution that made few concessions to her spontaneity, her generosity of spirit, her informality and her sense of fun. She felt trapped inside Kensington Palace and watched with quiet envy as her friends went shopping or to the movies without the world weighing their actions. She often spoke wistfully of running along a beach without a bodyguard in tow, of learning to play the piano to concert grade and, ironically, of spending a weekend in Paris. Not for nothing did her friends ascribe her Princess of Wales acronym, POW, as standing for Prisoner of Wales.
Since her divorce from Prince Charles last August, Diana had begun to achieve a measure of freedom she had once only dreamed about. Her blossoming romance with Dodi Al Fayed, son of the owner of Harrods department store, had given her the chance to grasp the happiness she so richly deserved. She longed for a partner to share her burden. "Wherever you are, come to me," she joked after one of many astrological readings at which a possible suitor was forecast. It seemed that the unlikely figure of the paunchy playboy could well have been the Prince Charming she had been looking for. Then, in the crudest act of fate, her opportunity for lasting love was snatched from her, a life suddenly ended on the brink of a new dawn.
Only now are the British people coming to terms with Diana's legacy. Almost single-handedly she transformed the Family Firm—as the royals call the monarchy—from a staid, dour and essentially domestic enterprise into a glamorous, stylish global corporation where the world came to pay court. If the 1970s—particularly the Queen's Silver Jubilee of 1977—marked the high point of royal excess and privilege, then the 1980s were the decade of Diana. Her easygoing informality and hands-on approach contrasted vividly with the rigid protocol of the older generation. While the royals were uneasy with the new kid on the block, the public loved her. They liked the way she thumbed her nose at the rules, throwing away the starchy white gloves so beloved by the older royals. And the public loved her sophisticated fashion sense.
Most of all they warmed to the way she welcomed contact with ordinary people, hugging AIDS victims, cradling sick children and comforting bereaved parents. The day she shook hands with AIDS patients in a London hospital in 1987 marked a true coming of age, showing a woman prepared to confront difficult and unpopular issues in order to make the public sit up and take notice. As Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "She was truly the people's princess."
Her death is the ending of an era for the royal family, perhaps a closing chapter for the monarchy. With her death the brightest light in the royal firmament has been snuffed out. We shall not see her like again.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
