She was the most famous woman on Earth. From fairytale bride to estranged royal wife and divorced mother, Diana captivated hearts and headlines. But behind the public facade of royal duty was a hidden secret life of marital betrayal. Between Diana’s spectacular wedding and her televised revelations of adultery, lay a saga of turmoil and court rivalry.
At the center of it all was one woman, Camilla Parker Bowles. Charles found his young wife very different from the worldly women he had known before her. Actress Susan George was one. So he solace was another. There was Lady Tryon, wife of a close friend. She also claimed an affair with Charles.
Divorcee Jane Ward was a girl he could date but not marry. Diana seemed perfect but proved vengeful, capable of performing her royal duties while plotting to undermine her husband. The aristocratic Diana had grown into a beguiling teenager by her engagement in 1981. She linked her Spencer dynasty to the royal house of Windsor, but by the time of her father’s death 11 years later, her marriage had entered its terminal phase.
Charles’ enduring love for Camilla and Diana’s consequent affairs tore apart the royal couple. Their misery was evident on this, their last tour together in Korea in 1992. The last banquet, the final duties abroad for the couple who were once the great hope of the British monarchy. They lived separate lives.
Diana took comfort from other men, including a bodyguard, just 5 years after her dream wedding. She had a long affair with a cavalry officer, the only adulterous relationship she ever admitted in public. There was an intense closeness with an old friend. A private phone call was secretly taped and became known as Squidgey gate.
She was linked to a famous rugby player and blamed for the end of his marriage. She fell in love with a married art dealer and plagued his home with hundreds of silent phone calls. After her divorce, she wanted to marry a heart surgeon. And finally, there was a summer romance with a playboy which ended with their tragic deaths.
Despite her affairs, this is the Diana people prefer to remember, the Princess of Wales, a woman with inimitable style and charm. She was the jewel in the crown, one of the royal family’s greatest assets. After her marriage failed, Diana looked for different directions in her life.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m immensely proud to be here in New York tonight with you all. She became an international campaigner against landmines. She visited countries on behalf of major charities. She still had to attend official functions, but as a semi-detached royal, her life lacked definition. Diana decided to use her fame to help the world’s disadvantaged and afflicted.
In December 1995 in New York, she won the humanitarian of the year award for her charity work. In the same month, the Queen wrote to Diana recommending divorce. In the United States, Diana found the warmth and acceptance she felt lacking in the royal court, which sided with Charles. This was not the way she imagined her life would become when she and Charles faced the press on their engagement day.
Diana later said, “At the age of 19, you always think you’re prepared for everything and you think you have knowledge of what’s coming ahead.” She scarcely understood Charles’ complex personality. He was a Cambridge graduate, she left school at 16. He’d had torrid romances, some with married women. She had no previous lovers.
Charles was 12 years her senior. Diana was almost a child. This nearly mirrored the age gap between Diana’s parents when they married. Her father was 30, her mother just 18. Diana’s mother, Frances, seen here with baby Diana, shocked society by leaving home and family for another man. I think that Diana’s mother could be described as a hot-headed and strong-willed.
And indeed, she proved that really by running off with the second husband, Peter Shand Kydd, at a time when this was very unusual behavior. You might have mistresses, lovers, etc., but you stuck with the family and stuck together. A bitter divorce and a child custody battle left Diana, her sisters and brother with their father, a former equerry to the Queen.
Her sister Jane’s marriage to the Queen’s assistant private secretary kept them close to the royal court. Bridesmaid Diana had an idealized vision of her own future. She was brought up. She was very unsophisticated, even for her age in those days. And I mean, that’s just the ideal she lived with. She said to the lots of people, you know, “I’m going to get married and have lots of children and we’ll always be together.
” Diana, who failed her school exams, became a kindergarten assistant in London. She met Charles, then dating her sister Sarah, at the family’s ancestral home, Althorp. I’m sort of met in a plowed field. [laughter] I started you previous to that. And what did you what did you think then? What was your instant impression both of you? What did you think about Lady Diana? Well, I remember thinking what a very jolly and amusing and and attractive 16-year-old she was.
And I mean, great fun. Mhm. And bouncy and full of life and everything. And um um I don’t know what you thought of me. Pretty amazing. [laughter] The press chased Diana during her brief courtship with Charles. They were convinced that at last he had found his future bride. Very few previous girls had been serious contenders.
Davina Sheffield was presumed suitable, but her romance with Charles ended when a past affair was revealed. Respectable Jane Wellesley, a duke’s daughter, was an early favorite with the bachelor prince. After he left university, he was very uptight. He was very worried about getting caught with his trousers down.
In those days, he was very dutiful about doing all the right things, being the Prince of Wales, not uh in besmirching the family uh reputation in any way. And so, he’s highly nervous about even approaching girls. So, it had to be the other way around. And any woman who could actually grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him into the bedroom was going to win every time.
Charles had a select circle of friends who also enjoyed his favorite sports, hunting, skiing, and polo. It was through polo that Charles met the woman who would dominate his life. She was then dating one of his closest friends. Camilla Shand was from the county set, not noble enough to marry a prince in the early ’70s, but discreet enough to be a lover.
She had an earthiness he found irresistible. The polo fields around Windsor were just filled with these girls who were absolutely desperate to um get into bed with Prince Charles. But the only people that he really looked at were the girls who were a bit unusual. And certainly, Camilla was one of those. And uh she turned up wearing a pair of jeans held up with a safety pin and her hair was all over the place.
And there was that magnetic attraction. But duty intervened and Charles’ naval career beckoned. After a brief and heady affair, he left Camilla for the high seas. With Charles gone, she resumed her long-time romance with army officer Andrew Parker Bowles, marrying him in 1973. He was a very attractive man, regarded in high society as a good catch.
Andrew Parker Bowles was supposed to be the best lay in London. Uh and she had been trying to grab him for years and years. In fact, by the time that Prince uh Charles bumped into Camilla, she’d been going out on and off with Andrew Parker Bowles for 6 years. She was 6 years of a 7-year campaign into trying to get Andrew Parker Bowles up the aisle.
She knew she could never marry Prince Charles because she wasn’t a virgin, uh she was not sufficiently aristocratic enough, and she knew jolly well that the courtiers who were looking for a wife for Prince Charles wanted somebody whose face could go on a postage stamp and hers was no photographic portrait. Knowing Charles had to marry, Camilla championed the innocent Diana hoping she wouldn’t threaten their relationship.
The The The The The The The engagement interview shows the difference in Charles’ and Diana’s feelings. And I I’m amazed that she’s been brave enough to take me on. [snorts] And I suppose in love? Of course. What is it in love means? Charles loved two women. Diana was besotted with him alone. The royal road show began while they were engaged.
Although nervous, Diana soon established an easy rapport, especially with children. Her first mistake was a choice of dress. She wore a strapless low-cut gown to accompany Charles to a music recital at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, London. The dress was considered too daring and the wrong color. She said later, “I hadn’t appreciated that I was now seen as royalty.
Black to me was the smartest color you could possibly have at the age of 19. It was a real grown-up dress.” Camera angles made the dress too revealing. It was fit for a film star, but not a future queen. She should have been given advice beforehand because actually it’s a well-known royal principle that you do not wear black except in mourning.
Um so that’s one she shouldn’t have done and number two of course the frock was um a disaster when you think that the photographers all going to be peering down her décolletage. And that was something that was picked at the last moment, I think. Princess Grace of Monaco was a guest of honor.
She jokingly warned the nervous Diana, “Don’t worry, dear. It’ll get a lot worse.” Diana would receive little help from her husband’s family. Princess Margaret liked her very much and did help her and did show her things like, you know, where to put your handbag, how to get up, that sort of practical thing. But um on the whole, she was just expected to get on with it.
The months before the royal wedding were fraught with tension. Diana grew jealous of Camilla and uncertain about her own role as the Princess of Wales. This was one of Diana’s problems that nobody rushed forward to help her. Uh nobody seemed to have really thought out a role for her beyond walking up the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Spencers were a proud and noble dynasty, more English and aristocratic than the Germanic House of Windsor. Diana’s mother had tried to warn her about marrying Charles’s royal position rather than the man. You could say that her family was certainly more English or British than the Windsors.
And I think in a way the family would have looked themselves as more aristocratic. And possibly, I think this has been down the ages aristocratic view of the Windsors that they’re rather middle class. Diana said of her wedding, “I had such hopes in my heart.” But just days beforehand, she’d almost called it off because of her fears over Camilla.
And walking down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Diana had spotted her rival among the congregation. Camilla would become the third person in the marriage. [cheering] Swept along by the occasion, Diana hoped that Camilla belonged to the past. But as the royal couple left for their honeymoon, there was another reminder of Charles’s mistress.
Leading the official escort group was Camilla’s husband, cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles. A long-time friend of Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, he remained part of the gilded circle at the royal court. Years later, people would joke that Andrew laid down his wife for his country by ignoring her affair with Charles.
She knew that the best she could be was Prince Charles’s mistress, but she was determined when she got Charles into bed that she would remain Prince Charles’s mistress. She saw that she could do that and have Andrew at the same time. Get married to Andrew, have Andrew’s children and still be the Prince of Wales’s number one mistress.
On honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia, Diana discovered the hold Camilla had over her bridegroom. Charles had kept photographs of Camilla and a gift of cufflinks engraved with their initials. The newlyweds left Britannia and went to Scotland. Diana’s hopes were dashed and she no longer trusted her husband.
Diana was deeply suspicious about Charles and Camilla. She couldn’t always tell when they were together, but she could sense it. She had extrasensory perception. She was a remarkable woman in that way. And I don’t believe that she knew that the night before the royal wedding that Charles and Camilla were together in bed in Buckingham Palace after the ball.
Uh but she could sense it. She knew that they were still talking. The evidence was there that Camilla knew what Diana’s movements were. And she, I think, could only live in the hope that once she actually got her husband away on honeymoon, that everything would change. She really believed that somehow the act of love, going to bed together, would somehow change Charles and allow him to forget about Camilla and concentrate only on his wife.
Posing for the press at the Queen’s estate, Balmoral, they successfully hid the truth. Diana had already succumbed to an eating disorder, bulimia, which she blamed on the specter of Camilla. Diana and Charles were already finding it difficult to relate to each other. Most of all, she could not compete with the older and more experienced Camilla.
I think that it was very hard for her. I don’t think that sexual things were her main attraction. I’m not sure that she was very, very sexy, really. As often very beautiful women are, they are not terrific on the sexual front. And I think that that’s the strength of Camilla. That’s the sort of aura she has, a sort of sexual power.
And so from that point of view, Diana didn’t stand much of a chance. The births of William and Harry did not create the happy family unit Diana had craved. When they holidayed with the Spanish royal family in Majorca in 1986, Diana was secretly ill with bulimia. Charles left early and returned to Camilla. Diana wanted a little girl to complete her family, but after Harry’s birth, the marriage was effectively over.
I think she terribly wanted a daughter. And um there was no way it was going to happen. I don’t mean instead of Harry, but she wanted a daughter after the sons. And it was so bad by then it wasn’t going to happen. For a while, there was an uneasy truce. Charles kept Camilla and Diana hid her affairs while putting on a show of support for her husband.
In 1990, Charles broke his arm while playing polo. The arm did not heal and had to be reset. Playing the role of caring wife, Diana collected him from hospital. They left together, but out of sight they went their separate ways. Well, of course this sort of thing dates of when relationships happen.
It’s very difficult. You’re not hang You’re not behind the curtains. You’re not under the bed. I think that by the time Prince Harry was born, it was very difficult already. The coolness between the couple was noticed. The press counted their time apart. Faced with a barrage of speculation, Charles and Diana were forced to appear together in public.
Diana was suspected of leaking stories to the media. I think she really started her manipulative behavior when she found her marriage going wrong. And she felt that she had no voice. And she was determined to get her voice. And the only way she could really get back on the Charles and Camilla situation was to promote herself, which she was very good at.
In the early years, the couple worked well together. Diana said, “We were a good team.” Her radiant beauty captivated people around the world, such as here in Australia. At first, Charles was proud of her and there were telling glimpses of his affection. But the diffident prince became jealous of his superstar wife.
Diana learned that the cameras picked up every nuance of her style and expression. Using that knowledge, she signaled her displeasure with Charles in a skillfully missed kiss. I think Diana became the wife from hell. I think in fact when they got married, they really loved each other and he said that quite often.
Do you know, there was a time when we were very much in love and that all although brief, that was so. Camilla came back into Charles’s life in the mid-80s when he claimed his marriage had irretrievably broken down. Their secret affair bolstered his fragile ego. Her role as his lover and confidant was known only to trusted friends.
The great thing about Camilla was that nobody really knew anything about her. The people who were immediately around Charles knew that he’d been seeing Camilla both when she was a single woman and also when she was a married woman. The thing was that the press had no idea that for all those years he was having an adulterous relationship with the woman he was in love with.
Diana changed all that. There were carefully placed stories in the press portraying her rival in a bad light. The media was soon on the trail. Camilla was hounded by the press. On one occasion, Charles was forced to make a quick exit from her home in the back of a car hiding under a blanket with photographers in pursuit. The relationship was forced out into the open when a tape of a phone call between Charles and Camilla was made public.
Known as Camillagate, it was published in January 1993, a month after Charles and Diana’s official separation. It justified all Diana’s suspicions. In often embarrassing terms, it revealed the depth of the lovers’ intimacy. I think Diana loved it. She had the most wonderful time roaring, reading out sections of the the Camillagate tapes over the breakfast table at Kensington Palace.
She had a field day because her husband had been so pompous, so determined that she was in the wrong and that he was in the right. And here was a moment when he was caught with his trousers down. What a fool he looked and the things that he said made him look even more foolish. Diana just was absolutely beside herself with laughter. Diana’s beauty and charisma won sympathy for her as a wronged wife.
Even Charles’s father, Prince Philip, wrote to her saying, “I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla.” Happy to see Camilla pilloried, Diana had secrets of her own. While superficially supporting the Queen and the royal family, Diana had indulged in a series of ill-judged affairs. The first was in 1986 with her married bodyguard, Barry Mannakee.
As her marriage collapsed, she sought comfort from the man whose job kept him at her side. He was dismissed for over-familiarity. She told some people they were lovers, but she denied the affair to others. I spoke to Diana about it. I believed her when she said, “Ken, everyone thought that I was having an this affair with Mannakee. I wasn’t.
I enjoyed a good relationship with him.” Crucially, what happened here, Mannakee probably did overstep the the red carpet line that in real sense should debar, you know, the below stairs peasants from rising above their station. I think he actually sort of got himself into the drawing room occasionally and was seen by the envious butler, you know, the dresser, the chambermaid and whoever else and they put the knives out and said, “Hang on, this guy is getting a bit too close.
” For a while, the royal marriage survived at its official level. Charles and Diana continued to represent Queen and country abroad, such as here in Japan in 1989. It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful and stylish ambassador. And even harder to contemplate that Diana was also enjoying a passionate affair at home with cavalry officer James Hewitt.
Later, from the proceeds of a book on Diana, Hewitt bought a manor house. But it was at his family home in Devon that Diana shared a normal domestic routine witnessed by her bodyguard, Ken Wharfe. I never lost sight of the person I was protecting. There comes a point in the day when you have to go to bed.
At some point, when the sun comes up, you get up and you eat and you begin the next day. There’s nothing odd about that. For Diana, the private life she shared with Hewitt probably saved her from a total breakdown. It did um sort of draw her back from the brink. She was very, very unhappy, very depressed.
And I think that um she that Hewitt gave her a lot of confidence, a sort of calm, steady, normal sort of young man. And um he was very good at at at you know, caring for her, looking after her, loving her. And I think at that particular point, it was important for her psychologically. Diana confessed her affair with raffish Hewitt in an interview with the program Panorama.
Did your relationship go beyond a close friendship? Yes, it did. Yes. Were you unfaithful? Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. She ditched him um I think because she thought that they were going to be found out. Uh she ditched him the twice. The first time it was because he was ordered to Germany. And she wanted to fix it so he didn’t go.
And he as a regular soldier uh refused to have this and said, “No, no, I’m going.” So she considered that was a betrayal. She cut him off the second time after the Gulf War because uh stories were appearing in the newspapers about her relationship with him. And she realized this was extremely dangerous. To have um Diana, Princess of Wales as his conquest was a tremendous feather in his cap.
He used to absolutely sicken me. I may I’m only good at two things, riding horses and riding women. But I have to admit, I think it’s most likely an accurate answer. He was a complete rat think, but he sort of comforted her when she was at her very lowest. With the death of her father in March 1992, Diana lost a vital prop in her life.
Charles felt obliged to play the caring husband for the sake of his public image, but the growing distance between them was becoming evident. I think from what one can gather, Prince Charles was really rather relieved when she took up with James Hewitt so he could get on with his life with Camilla. And that she was probably taken care of, happy. That was fine by him.
I mean, he no longer loved her in that sense. I you know, basically, I suppose she was rather an encumbrance in his life. And so if she was occupied and happy, all the better. The end of the Hewitt affair tipped the balance. Diana sought vengeance on her husband by cooperating with a sensational biography. She pretended to have no connection with it and continued her duties on this hospice visit.
And all that you do, you reflect so very sincerely the philosophy of tender loving care, which is and always will be the hallmark of this hospice. [applause] The Morton book shattered the fairy tale of Charles and Diana. She had let daylight in on the magic of monarchy and nothing would ever be the same. It was a mistake she was already regretting.
Her adoring public sympathized with her, the establishment with Charles. Soon her life came under prurient scrutiny when a tape of a call made to James Gilbey, an old friend, was mysteriously released to the media. The tape, known as Dianagate or Squiddygate, a reference to Gilbey’s nickname for her, laid bare her feelings.
Diana believed it was released to harm her in a serious manner. Behind the ceremony of royal life lay deep personal unhappiness. Diana referred to her husband’s staff as the enemy. She blamed Charles’s friends for putting around stories that she was mentally unstable. Some of them encouraged his affair with Camilla providing safe houses for trysts.
They did nothing to help save the royal marriage. I think perhaps they should have tried and thought that this marriage was important to the monarchy, and important to the people of this country, and it shouldn’t been allowed to go wrong. And I think that they did not help. I think they actually briefed against Diana as we know.
And again in this rather cruel way about her being psychologically disturbed. I think that though they were good friends to him, they did do quite a lot of harm. Diana had some foolish liaisons including one with rugby player Will Carling. She was linked to his marriage breakdown. I was told actually very, very recently, which surprised me, that he’d spent and had been seen quite often with Diana up at a beach hut that the royal family own up on the Norfolk coast, quite near Sandringham, and that they’d been together up there quite a lot.
To have your wife sleeping with the captain of England rugby team is just too disgusting for words if you are Prince Charles. The awful thing about him was he could not see that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, that if he is allowed to have extramarital sex, so is she.
As her marriage fell apart, Diana sent out subtle gestures to win sympathy. Famously, she used the Taj Mahal for a posed statement of her solitude, but her own search for love tarnished her reputation. Diana fell in love with handsome art dealer Oliver Hoare. After he decided to stay with his wife and children, she made hundreds of silent phone calls to their home.
He had an immensely rich wife who completely controlled everything that Oliver Hoare could do in life with the amount of money. Oliver Hoare was also a friend of Charles and Camilla, part of their trusted circle. In 1994, Charles cooperated with his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby in a television program in which he admitted adultery with Camilla.
On the night the program was shown, Diana upstaged him by wearing this stunning dress. The War of the Wales’ has continued. Diana dated men in pursuit of love and also to provoke Charles, but she genuinely wanted to marry Pakistan-born doctor Hasnat Khan. Diana adored very clever people and Hasnat Naughty, as she called him, Khan was a person who was a brilliant heart surgeon.
She would go down to the Brompton Hospital and watch him working, would meet him at night. But as a wife for Naughty Khan, absolutely not. And I think the fact that he sort of kept her at a distance, I think it absolutely infuriated her. She could not believe that somebody could be so cold towards her and it made her more and more keen.
What she really wanted was companionship, adulation, to be seen on the arm of somebody who would irritate her husband and this really was at the root of much of her actions. She was determined to pull her husband by the tail and so she did. But I think that the choice of men says nothing about Diana apart from the fact that they were available.
None of them, I would say, would have been an ideal consort for her for the rest of her life. I think that she was so unhappy and she was searching for a solution all the time and I think an awful lot of people do do that. I certainly have been to a fortune teller at an unhappy period of my life and I think that’s what she was doing, looking for an answer, looking for a way out, looking for a solution and anything that made her feel better and kept her going, really.
Charles and Camilla took holidays abroad, such as this one in Turkey in 1989. Photographs of the couple proved that Diana was not inventing their affair. At a private party that summer, she challenged Camilla over her relationship with Charles, but nothing changed. There were trips to Florence.
Charles and Camilla visited this house given to her great-grandmother Alice Keppel by King Edward VII. There, Camilla shared Charles’ passion for painting. But Camilla had a rival. Lady Tryon was also close to Charles. He called her Kanga, a name she chose for her London boutique. She died soon after Diana. I think Charles was needed a sounding board.
Um, he needed to talk to people who he could trust but weren’t part of the royal entourage and so therefore, I think that with those girls that he remained friendly with, I think particularly of Lady Tryon, that he would be able to go to her and say, “Look, I’ve got a problem and you know, can you help me?” You know, he would be able to ask advice and whether he listened to advice, I think we know that he doesn’t listen to advice, but at least he would be able to ask it.
Although she made mistakes, Diana sought out opinions and ideas from those around her, not only from her private secretary, but from ordinary staff like Ken Wharfe, her police bodyguard, seen here with her relaxing at the British Embassy during a solo tour of Egypt. She even said to him, “If anything happens to me, you’ll let people know what I was really like, won’t you?” Diana was always asking a lot of people for advice.
I mean, to her credit, she sort of never soldiered on, you know, based solely on what she thought that she should do. I mean, from my part, it was almost constantly that she’d say, “Well, you know, what do you think of this, Ken? I mean, I’ve got to do this. What do you think?” It was actually bouncing ideas off.
And and, you know, she was prepared to listen to those answers. And I think that was the same of private secretaries, it was the same of of anybody and she’d bounce these ideas off regularly to to the chef even, you know, to her dresser or to the chauffeur. I mean, she was quite happy to share the fun and try and air the knowledge of everybody and it worked.
Bodyguard Ken Wharfe accompanied Diana, then officially separated from Charles, on a visit to Nepal on behalf of the Red Cross and the Leprosy Mission in 1993. She was a tremendous asset because she had this amazing ability to speak to people across a huge social and political spectrum. And and that wasn’t something that she was taught because nobody actually told her anything.
Diana picked all this up herself. Diana had a connection with the ill and suffering. No other royal had this special gift. In touching leprosy patients, Diana lifted taboos just as she had done earlier with AIDS sufferers. This was one of her greatest achievements. I think Diana felt a sense of destiny in her that that’s what her role was.
She had this grandmother, Cynthia Spencer, who was very like Diana in that way. She’s wonderful at charities, very much loved. And I think that Diana realized she had a gift for this from very early age. Diana’s magic was not enough to keep her in the royal family. As heir to the throne, Charles was the one who mattered.
On their tour of South Korea in November 1992, their expressions and body language revealed the strain between them. The couple were nicknamed the Glums. The announcement of their separation was weeks away. It is announced from Buckingham Palace that with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate.
Diana briefly appeared at Sandringham for Christmas, but her life as a semi-detached royal soon proved untenable. She tried to scale down her public life. Over the next few months, I will be seeking a more suitable way of combining a meaningful public role with hopefully a more private life. Press intrusion had forced her decision.
Sadly, many charities lost their patron, but Diana soon returned to the public arena. She also sought a life as a private citizen. The paparazzi made her visits to the gym one of their main targets. After she dismissed her police bodyguards, there were no restraints on photographers’ behavior.
She was trailed while visiting her therapist, Susie Orbach. The photographers, the paparazzi, were making a lot of money out of Diana. That was the principal thing. Otherwise, they probably would have left her alone. But there we are, newspapers were paying them a great deal of money for significant photographs. That awful one of chasing her among the cars.
I think she’d been to see Susie Orbach, all these sort of ones, her trying to hide her face. And they really would provoke her in the latter days. I remember hearing somebody say that they were quite ashamed, although they were themselves a paparazzo. You know, once when she was in a a taxi and she was sitting there with her head bowed trying to avoid the attention.
And this Spanish photographer yelled at her, “Why don’t you behave like a princess?” You know, it’s I mean, treatment beyond what you would expect. She was never free from harassment. Here, attempting to take a Caribbean holiday with a female friend, Diana found they were surrounded by photographers. Watch her reactions.
Come on, get lost. We got your accommodation. Come on, get lost. S’il vous plaît, monsieur. Opportunities to relax with friends were important to her. She was separated from her husband and felt increasingly isolated from the royal court. When her love affairs fell apart, as they always did, she could rely on a band of female confidantes.
I think that when she was under intense pressure, there were a lot of people who tried to help her. Specifically those women friends, the ones who were slightly older than her. Um and her younger friends as well. I think a lot of people really did try to help her. But you see she was in a terrible situation.
Her husband didn’t love her. Um the press were after her the whole time. She couldn’t get out without a photographer snapping her. Um people would were selling information about her. It’s a frightful world to live in. Camilla’s life also fell under media scrutiny. Tougher than Diana, she showed a more robust approach to the press.
Watch her reaction. Hello. I will be with you in a minute. I was just wondering. The year after Charles’s admission of adultery, Diana took part in the television program Panorama. Do you think Mrs. Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage? Well, there were three of us in this marriage. So it was a bit crowded.
[snorts] Diana also questioned Charles’s suitability for kingship. The Queen had to draw a line under the impossible situation between her son and his estranged wife. In doing so, she went against Diana’s wishes. I don’t want a divorce. But obviously we need clarity on a situation. That has been of enormous discussion over the last 3 years in particular.
So all I say to that is that I await my husband’s decision of which way we are all going to go. The crowds loved Diana. The establishment supported Charles. The Queen’s intervention was not popular. But the war of the Waleses had polarized the country. I think the Queen was quite right to insist on a divorce because the situation had become so appalling in terms of public relations for the monarchy, in privately for the children, that really only a break could help.
I I think it was the only answer by then. With the divorce, Diana lost the title Her Royal Highness along with many of the privileges of royalty. Without the palace’s smooth machinery to make arrangements, she had to rely on her friends. A financial settlement of 17 million pounds did not fully compensate for the loss of her royal status.
I think that the Queen in that sort of traditional way of hers thought that once the after the divorce, Diana was no longer a member of the royal family. She shouldn’t have the title HRH, which absolutely signifies being a member of the royal family. She was now a celebrity in her own right, adored around the world.
Her warmth and spontaneity ensured massive public support wherever she went. Cast aside by British high society, Diana searched other cultures for personal fulfillment. She had visited Pakistan in 1991 and returned shortly before she died to raise money for a cancer hospital. She admired much about the people she met.
She was attracted I think by the sort of solid family values that she saw in Muslim countries. I think that was one of the principal things. Diana cast off her old life symbolically by selling her dresses for charity. Among the lots was the dress she wore the night Charles admitted his affair with Camilla. The auction at Christie’s, New York, raised 3 and 1/2 million pounds.
A new life and a new wardrobe for the new world. Diana reinvented her image with considerable skill. Although she was a woman alone, she still had the allure of royalty. Added to that was her glamour and a delightfully flirtatious manner. This was the Diana Americans loved. A powerful woman with celebrity appeal.
I think Diana felt very much at home in America. And where women really, perhaps not so much now, but certainly used to be powerful as compared with how they are in Europe. And they have much better um life experience than European women. They’re not supposed to sit behind the curtains being a good mother.
So I think Diana would certainly identified with that and she had a lot of close, important American friends. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m immensely proud to be here in New York tonight with you all. Among the impressive figures Diana met in the USA was Henry Kissinger, who called her a princess in her own right, who aligned herself with the ill, the suffering, and the downtrodden.
Winning the Humanitarian of the Year award was a huge achievement, but it didn’t prevent her divorce and it didn’t gain for Diana the role of roving ambassador that she wanted. I think she was a wonderful ambassador. I don’t can’t think of anybody who would have been better. Because not only was she wonderfully photogenic, but she was empathetic.
Um she had this terrific gift with people from high and low. I mean prime ministers, presidents, office cleaners would just melt in her company. And she had this terrific gift of being able to convey um caring, a human and personal warmth. In January 1997, Diana visited Angola to raise awareness of landmines. This didn’t please the establishment in Britain.
Her detractors called her a loose cannon. Diana defended her actions. You know, many trying to highlight a problem that’s going on all around the world. Diana and Charles shared custody of their sons, but family events were rare. William’s confirmation in May 1997 was the last time they were all seen together. She faced a lonely summer in London.
Her boys were with Charles. The Hasnat Khan affair had ended. She was ready for fresh adventures and a new romance. The whole of August she was going to be on her own. She got no arrangement. And she was facing an entire month sitting at Kensington Palace clicking her heels, the loneliest woman in the world. An invitation to the south of France to spend time at the sumptuous holiday home of tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed was too good to refuse.
There she fell for Dodi Fayed, the son of her Egyptian-born Muslim host. It would be a controversial affair and people had mixed feelings about Dodi. He was a cocaine user. He was I don’t think he’d done a day’s work in his life, but he was very charming. And women liked him and he was sympathetic and I don’t think he pushed himself.
I don’t think sex was high on his agenda. And I think Diana rather liked that. Didn’t want somebody pushing in too fast. The couple cruised aboard the Fayed yacht Johnny Kal. Wherever they went, photographers appeared. Even when they were out at sea in the Mediterranean, somehow the press seemed to know their destination in advance.
Rumors still abound that Diana herself tipped off favored pressmen to send back signals to Charles and Hasnat Khan, the men who had let her down. With the pictures came a twist in the story. The couple had been to the Paris home of the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor, now owned by the Fayeds. After revisiting the Windsor Villa, Diana and Dodi stayed at the Paris Ritz Hotel, also owned by Dodi’s father.
Security cameras captured the couple’s last hours. Trying to avoid the waiting paparazzi at the front of the Ritz, they devised a plan. Henri Paul, the Ritz head of security, would drive them from the back exit. Driven at high speed, their car crashed in a tunnel. I absolutely believe that if she’d had proper security that night of August the 31st in Paris, that accident would never have happened because proper Scotland Yard um protection would have never let Henri Paul get in that car and drive it and
certainly not at that speed. Dodi and Henri Paul were killed outright. Diana died in hospital from her injuries. A royal plane brought back Diana’s body to a unique funeral for a unique person. A royal flag draped her coffin. In the procession were William and Harry, Charles, Philip, and Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, who paid tribute to his sister in a rousing speech.
It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this. A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age. I think that people had become really involved with Diana in a personal way from the day of the wedding.
And I think that she had got this terrific pull with people who didn’t know her. And I think that they found it a just a sort of unbelievable tragedy, which it was, and ended in a way that I suppose an unbelievable tragedy should end. Perhaps if Shakespeare were alive today and wrote Diana’s story, it would make his finest tragedy.
