Diana: In Pursuit of Love (5 page)

Clearly, we would have to find evidence to substantiate everything the Princess told us. What was more, since we were not able to quote her directly, we needed to find close friends of hers who could back up Diana’s story in their own words.

In the early weeks of this project, it was the Princess who was setting the pace. My notes from the evening of 2 July 1991, the day after her thirtieth birthday (which in the end she had spent alone
at Kensington Palace), gives a flavour of her impatient mood. At 5.10 p.m., while Colthurst and I were deep in conversation, his bleeper went off. It was Diana. ‘Sees major urgency for the book,’ I jotted down in my notebook. ‘She thought it could be brought out in weeks. Going to Earl Spencer to pack up a few photo albums and bring them down. If Camilla Parker Bowles leaked the story of the ball to Dempster then the mistress is running the show. Disgusted by the way it has gone.’

If I needed any signal about how tricky this project would be, it came a few days later when I wrote another article for the
Sunday Times
, headlined ‘Truce’, detailing the behind-the-scenes moves by such unlikely characters as the former DJ Sir Jimmy Savile to bring an end to the warfare between Charles and Diana. Even though the story was accurate, my long-term thinking was to put rival journalists off the scent by giving the impression that all had gone quiet inside the Waleses’ household, as well as underlining my credibility as a writer with an inside track – thus, I hoped, ensuring that when the book was published it would be taken seriously. I was trying to be too clever by half – the strategy crumbled to dust the moment the book was published. In the
Sunday Times
article I mentioned how, for Diana’s birthday, her sitting room was decorated with helium-filled balloons. It was a point the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, asked Diana about when courtiers carefully scrutinized the article to find clues as to my impeccable source. A few days later, the
Sun
’s veteran royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, phoned me with a warning. ‘You’ve got them rattled,’ he said. ‘For f—k’s sake be careful. They are looking because you are getting it right. They are turning the place over very quietly.’ His counsel of caution was echoed by the
Daily Mail
’s royal reporter Richard Kay, who had been told by his newspaper’s crime correspondent that the police had been asked to find my mole. A few months later, my tatty office above an Indian restaurant in central London was broken into, a camera stolen and files rifled through.

With the need for caution paramount and Diana eager to press ahead, it was clear that James would have to take on a much bigger role than he had previously envisaged. He had thought he would
be able to bow out after making a couple of tapes – instead he found himself visiting Kensington Palace on a regular basis armed with lists of questions that I had carefully compiled, to ask Diana to fill in the gaps she had left in her early testimony. For the next year he acted as the go-between, as the three of us – Mike O’Mara, James and myself – became her shadow court, not only writing, researching and producing what was to all intents and purposes an ‘unofficial official’ biography, but advising on her day-to-day life. Everything from handling staff problems, to dealing with media issues to drafting speeches came under our umbrella, as she used us to second-guess her small team of courtiers. It was exciting, exhilarating and amusing as this ill-assorted triumvirate helped shape the life and image of the world’s most famous young woman.

At one of our first ‘editorial’ meetings it occurred to us that Diana would feel much more comfortable if her participation in the project was not acknowledged, thus giving her the opportunity to deny her involvement. The Princess was in fact the last of us to realize the importance of ‘deniability’, and it was, according to my notes, not until 4 January 1992, when the book was well under way, that she asked James, almost as an afterthought, to make sure she was kept in the background. ‘She knew from the start that the enterprise was not without risks,’ Colthurst said. ‘But with the proviso that she had deniability she became much more excited.’

This strategy did give us an extra problem in that it became absolutely vital that we verified the Princess’s every claim independently. The emotional torrent that was her first interview raised many sensitive, not to say libellous, issues, particularly about Camilla Parker Bowles. This was my task for the next year – interviewing Diana’s friends, acquaintances and employees in order to acquire corroboration to underpin the original thesis. Some in her circle, like Carolyn Bartholomew and James Gilbey, were aware of her involvement although they did not know the full extent of her cooperation. When, for example, I interviewed Carolyn she told me that Diana had been ‘besotted’ with Prince Charles before they married. Just to make sure she called Diana to check that the word reflected her feelings. ‘I said the right thing, didn’t I?’ she asked. ‘Yes. I was. Totally,’ Diana said with emphasis. While Carolyn was
almost in with us, most of the others in Diana’s circle were out of the loop and she had to choose her words with care when they called her to ask if they should speak to me. With many she was noncommittal, with some downright negative – ‘Don’t touch it [a proposed interview] with a bargepole,’ she counselled her masseur Stephen Twigg. (Thankfully, he ignored her advice.) When I eventually interviewed James Gilbey at his Knightsbridge apartment in November 1991, he was explicit about what she wanted to achieve with the book: ‘She wants to make her point loud and clear. She doesn’t want any beating about the bush. She wants people to know the grief she has had to endure and the way she’s been abandoned.’

After her first session with James Colthurst, Diana knew that she had crossed a personal Rubicon. She had thrown away the map and was striking out on a journey with only a hazy idea of the route, let alone the destination. But she was determined to continue, and as the months passed she became increasingly energized by the process, suggesting topics herself, such as her bulimia, which she wanted to put into its proper context. While I busied myself with the Princess’s friends, James continued with his interviews: ‘Usually we chatted in the morning, then had lunch and sometimes had another session in the afternoon. But by then she had had enough. There were lots of interruptions especially when Paul Burrell [then her under-butler] and other staff were around. She clearly didn’t trust them so then we would move on to general conversation when they entered the room.’

(It is worth pointing out that, after he published his memoir in 2003, Burrell told the American talk-show host, Larry King, that in 1991 he and Diana used to discuss the secret interviews that were taking place for
Diana: Her True Story
. Straight-faced, he told millions of American viewers: ‘I knew about it. I was there and I knew it was happening. I helped the Princess to have a voice. And that’s the only time that she could ever sort of say how she felt and thought. It [the book] didn’t shock me because I was aware of the whole situation.’ The truth is very different. Far from being an intimate of the Princess, at the time she did not trust him because, as a butler based primarily at Highgrove with Prince Charles, he was in
the ‘enemy’ camp. In fact, when Burrell was in Kensington Palace while Diana was being taped for my book, she insisted that loud music should be played in case Burrell was listening at the keyhole.)

At the time what struck Colthurst forcibly was the invasive atmosphere which suffused her home at Kensington Palace. In a world where everyone wanted a piece of her, the Princess had to shield her personal space with the tenacity of a guard dog, hiding anything about her inner life, such as her astrological charts or a book on eating disorders. Her first instinct, demonstrated by the fact that she had a shredder on her desk, was to trust no one – not staff, not courtiers and certainly not the royal family.

While it is easy to scoff, in such an environment, where it seemed that every breath she took, every move she made was watched, monitored and commented upon, it did appear quite possible that Diana’s mail was being tampered with and her phones bugged. There was no doubt that she became noticeably more relaxed after the three of us had bought scrambler telephones to deter potential eavesdroppers.

The Princess was also concerned about Colthurst cycling around London, not just for his safety, particularly when he was carrying around with him the interview tapes or the Spencer family photographs, which she passed to us in November 1991. Her anxiety was justified when one day in the summer of 1991 James was knocked off his bicycle by a car after one of his interview sessions with her at Kensington Palace.

In this atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, the very fact that Diana was prepared to give frank and, at the time, deeply shocking interviews to an old friend for a writer she barely knew graphically demonstrates her desperation.

For Colthurst, the role he had taken on, somewhat reluctantly, of conduit between the Princess and her biographer brought responsibilities and concerns far greater than he had expected. ‘At the time, as far as I was concerned,’ he explained, ‘I was helping a chum at a bloody and difficult part of her life. I was quite uncomfortable with the role and never envisaged that helping her would become virtually my full-time job for the next few years. I saw it as
a one-off – that once she had said her piece she would then be free to make her own decisions. It didn’t happen like that.’

In her emotionally fragile state Diana turned repeatedly to her friend and interviewer for guidance and encouragement, and soon James found himself with the added responsibilities of adviser, counsellor and occasional speechwriter, shadowing and pre-empting decisions made by her paid officials, notably her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, who was appointed in November 1991 after working in a similar capacity while he was her equerry.

In the meantime, I was concentrating on the Princess’s biography, which meant that Colthurst and I had different, and at times diverging, agendas. For, naturally enough, in Colthurst’s mind where there was conflict between her needs and the book, Diana always took precedence. ‘Whereas the book was a means of her gaining recognition as an individual,’ he later observed, ‘my overriding concern was what she was going to do with her life and how she was going to run it.’ In many respects his most significant contribution to Diana’s life was not as a mere go-between for a book, but was in the help he gave her through the slow and painstaking process of shaping a new life and channelling away negative thoughts and emotions, and his encouragement to her to focus on a positive and productive future. It was work Diana was to continue with her therapist Susie Orbach, her astrologer Debbie Frank, and a loose-knit group of surrogate ‘father and mother’ figures, who included the film-maker David Puttnam and Lady Annabel Goldsmith.

The Princess trusted Colthurst with many of her most intimate secrets, and used him as a sounding board for her problems and concerns. She telephoned him constantly and the calls – usually around eight a day, more if there was a crisis – gathered momentum and took on a rhythm of their own. Morning conversations were short, dealing with the contents of newspapers and how to counter negative publicity. She would outline her engagements for the day, asking advice on how to handle a range of social situations. On one occasion, for example, she asked him what conversational gambits she could use to engage her lunch partner, the French President, François Mitterrand; on another day,
Diana, who was, until late in her life, intimidated by intellectuals, called in a fluster and asked how best to interest the formidable former American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Colthurst’s advice, just to be herself and ask him what really fascinated him, certainly seemed to strike a chord – over the years Kissinger became a great admirer of the Princess, agreeing to present her with a humanitarian award in New York in 1995.

Afternoon telephone calls usually involved an inquest into the Princess’s official duties; then in the early evening she would call to discuss her life and emotional situation. Invariably this involved her husband, her marriage and her future – although, once, while she was staying at Balmoral she asked Colthurst how to resolve a ticklish problem of protocol. It seems that for a time the Queen took to singing hymns unaccompanied after dinner was over. The Princess did not know whether to sing along, start clapping or remain silent. For once Colthurst was at a loss.

He was more helpful when Diana called from Sandringham during Christmas 1991. In the oppressive and accusatory atmosphere of this unhappy family gathering – the last before both the Princess and the Duchess of York separated from their royal husbands – she was desperate to find an excuse to leave, especially after a tart encounter with Princess Anne, who remarked, ‘It’s difficult for Charles with a wife like you.’ When Colthurst suggested to Diana that she visit the homeless in London, she seized on the idea, quickly making arrangements so that she could make her excuses and leave.

The final call, after the day’s torrent of requests for advice and support, was what Colthurst labelled the ‘bored call’, where, before she went to bed, she would chit-chat for up to ninety minutes about nothing in particular. Colthurst, who was then working full-time developing a medical device with British Oxygen and planning his own wedding, found himself juggling his own career with his shadow life as her de facto private secretary. In those days, when mobile phones were the size of house bricks, he regularly received urgent summons on his pager and often had to leave meetings to find a quiet public telephone from which to send his response. In June 1991, for instance, a worried Diana was
constantly on the telephone to him seeking reassurance when Prince William suffered a depressed fracture of his skull following a golfing accident at school.

Over time Diana came to rely on James Colthurst for suggestions and solutions to all manner of delicate or thorny problems. When she decided to replace her regular hairdresser, Richard Dalton, but was anxious to do so without hurting his feelings or provoking him to sell his story to the media, she turned to James. He suggested that she write a letter tactfully explaining her decision and give him a present in appreciation of his years of service. His counsel proved effective and while it was little more than sensible man-management, for someone floundering and vulnerable it was a welcome lifeline.