Diana: In Pursuit of Love (16 page)

The family that Diana once held in such esteem, and had been so excited to become a part of, saw her as tainted and troublesome. ‘In their view she had put herself outside their charmed circle and was now relegated to the role of outsider,’ observed Patrick Jephson. Their feelings, however, went well beyond indifference or dislike. The Princess of Wales was, in a phrase used by several members of the royal family on numerous occasions, simply ‘evil in their midst’.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

In Search of Love

W
HEN
D
IANA MADE
her emotional Time and Space speech in December 1993, she argued that she was bowing out of public life for a time because of the media attention that had made life in the first year after her separation such a misery. There was, though, another reason for her dramatic decision. She was head-over-heels in love and saw the opportunity to indulge her passion away from the demands of her public or the attentions of the police.

Her secret four-year relationship with art dealer Oliver Hoare was to leave her with a bruised ego, a damaged reputation and a broken heart. ‘It was a very, very painful relationship for her,’ recalled Debbie Frank. ‘We often talked about it. But through the pain she learned something about herself.’ As for escaping the attentions of the press, that was plainly unrealistic.

With hindsight, the Ascot-week house party at Windsor Castle in June 1985 might be seen as a momentous occasion. One of Diana’s guests was her friend Sarah Ferguson, the rumbustious daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager Major Ronald Ferguson. Sarah was to find herself seated next to Prince Andrew at dinner: they got on like a house on fire, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Another guest was Oliver Hoare, who was there with his wife, Diane, the daughter of a very wealthy French heiress, Baroness
Louise de Waldner, a friend of the Queen Mother. On meeting this man, sixteen years her senior, with saturnine good looks and an urbane and courteous manner, the Princess – as she afterwards admitted to Ken Wharfe – felt shy as she flirted mildly with him. In some ways he must have seemed to her to represent what her husband might have been. There are some similarities between the two men, both having a sophisticated appreciation of the finer things in life as well as an interest in the holistic and esoteric. An Old Etonian and art connoisseur, Hoare moved in cosmopolitan and cultured circles that fascinated the Princess, his friends including the late Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev and David Sulzberger of the American publishing family that owned
The New York Times
. ‘He is a bit of a sybarite, not in the bad sense, but he likes to live well and not make a huge effort,’ a friend of Hoare’s said of him. He had lived for a time in Tehran, and he and the Prince of Wales struck up a friendship based on a common interest in Islamic art – a subject in which Hoare is an expert. Indeed, in 1985, the Prince attended an exhibition of Islamic art at Hoare’s gallery in Belgravia and, while the business came under judicial scrutiny during a theft trial that same year, the friendship between the Waleses and the Hoares flourished.

Ironically, as the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales collapsed into mutual animosity and bitterness in the early 1990s, it was Diana’s jealousy of Camilla Parker Bowles that drew her closer to Oliver Hoare. Not only were he and Diane friendly with Charles and Diana – they were also part of the royal inner circle who were aware of Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Charles and Camilla attended dinner parties at the Hoares’ Chelsea home, and Diane’s mother, Louise de Waldner, regularly invited the Prince to her château near Carpentras in the south of France to paint and relax, which was also where he went to recuperate after breaking his arm in 1990. In 1991, Diane and Oliver Hoare, together with improbable characters like the TV personality Jimmy Savile, were drafted in as intermediaries to try to resolve the differences between the Prince and Princess of Wales.

To begin with, Diana (by now cooperating enthusiastically with me for
Diana: Her True Story
) turned to Hoare for advice and
comfort – and in order to tease information out of him about the movements of Camilla and Charles – as much as to develop their relationship. Under normal circumstances, Hoare’s friendship with Camilla would have put him beyond the pale, a figure to be treated with suspicion and circumspection. At that critical time in their marriage, as far as both the Prince and Princess were concerned, friends, courtiers and staff had to choose whose side they were on. There was no middle way. So the fact that Diana was prepared to pursue her friendship with Oliver Hoare was a sign of her interest. As for Hoare – ‘He was flattered that Diana had a crush on him,’ a friend told the American writer Sally Bedell Smith. ‘He encouraged her without knowing it.’ That remark seems rather disingenuous given that some eighteen months before, Hoare, then forty-six and most certainly a man of the world, had ended a four-year friendship with Ayesha Nadir, a former Turkish beauty queen and the estranged wife of Asil Nadir, the disgraced business tycoon.

While Diana was pursuing this new secret relationship – having given James Hewitt his marching orders over lunch at Kensington Palace in December 1991 – her obsession with Charles and Camilla remained. Questions about when they met, who they saw, what they did, constantly gnawed at her, undermining her self-esteem as they stoked her jealousy. The specific information she got from Oliver Hoare helped to relieve her lurid imaginings – and, more practically, it meant that she had details about the times that Charles and Camilla were together, and if applicable, who they were with, that she could pass on to me. I would then have some concrete information for which to seek independent corroboration. On one occasion, for instance, she sent me the dates when Prince Charles was due to visit the château owned by Oliver Hoare’s mother-in-law, even including the château’s telephone number. The source was presumably Oliver Hoare – although neither I nor James Colthurst had any idea at the time of how she was receiving her intelligence.

It was during the feverish summer of intrigue and plotting in 1991 that Diana became a regular visitor to Hoare’s art gallery in Pimlico, calling in a couple of times a week. Indeed, to celebrate her thirtieth birthday in July, Hoare bought her a birthday cake,
and he and his staff sang ‘Happy Birthday’ as she sat on his desk, smiling at the discordant throng assembled before her. While she saw him at his gallery, Diana was also spending much time at Lucia Flecha de Lima’s home in Mount Street, where she had been given the use of a bedroom. It was just a few hundred yards from the apartment of Adrian Ward-Jackson, a prominent figure in the arts world and also a friend of Oliver Hoare, who was in the terminal stages of AIDS. She helped her friend Angela Serota, now Lady Bernstein of Craigwell, nurse him, on one occasion driving from Balmoral to be at his bedside in August 1991.

For a time Mount Street became her second home, the Princess staying there at weekends when the Brazilian Ambassador and his sons were away. Indeed when I dropped off a chapter of the book for her there on one occasion, Diana said afterwards she had read it in the company of her Brazilian friend. By now the Princess was besotted with Hoare, and despite the knowledge that when my book was published it would focus intense attention on her romantic life, it did nothing to curb her infatuation. To Ken Wharfe, who in his position as bodyguard knew more than most about what was going on, Diana confided that she ‘absolutely adored’ Oliver Hoare (though she insisted that ‘We just talk’). During a trip to Egypt in May 1992, as speculation about the contents of the forthcoming
Diana: Her True Story
intensified, the Princess apparently told her butler Paul Burrell about her secret liaisons in Mayfair. As he noted in his memoir: ‘The Princess regularly used their [the Brazilians’] embassy in Mount Street, London to meet someone. Not James Hewitt.’ It was a risky confession – at the time Burrell was nominally in the ‘enemy camp’, as he and his wife Maria were still living at Highgrove in the employment of the Prince of Wales.

While the Brazilian Embassy in Mount Street was a favourite meeting place, according to Hoare’s former chauffeur, Barry Hodge, who was interviewed by the
News of the World
in February 1995, the Princess and the art dealer also saw each other at a number of other locations, including the home of the restaurateur Mara Berni in Walton Street, as well as cafés and restaurants in Kensington and Knightsbridge. Shortly after her separation in December 1992, the Princess and Hoare frequently had breakfast
together at the Chelsea Harbour Club, which she started frequenting in the spring of 1993, after she and her trainer Carolan Brown were alerted to the possibility that sneak pictures might have been taken of her at Bryce Taylor’s gym, LA Fitness. ‘He would come over and try and kiss or touch her,’ said Carolan, who now runs her own health club. ‘He was openly flirtatious towards her and she would push him away with her hand. She made it clear to me that she was having an affair with him.’

As was her habit, Diana courted Hoare by taking an intense interest in his life. She visited his mother Irina, and after Hoare had talked to her about Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam that he had embraced, it was not long before she was spotted reading
Discovering Islam
by Professor Akbar Ahmed, and was asking friends to explain the finer points of the abstruse subject of Sufism.

In the view of her protection team, Diana took things a little too far on one occasion in March 1993, when she was on a skiing holiday in Lech with her boys. It seems that late one evening, when everybody assumed she was safely in her room for the night, she threw herself from the first floor of the hotel, a fall of twenty feet but cushioned by a huge snowdrift. Then she walked off into the night. While her detective never did find out exactly what had happened, he knew that at five-thirty in the morning she had walked back into the hotel, which she had not been seen to leave. He saw for himself clear evidence of her escape in the snow – and he knew that her friend Oliver Hoare was skiing at a nearby resort, so it was not hard to get a rough idea of what she had been up to.

It was not only snow into which the Princess made daring leaps: Elsa Bowker was to relate how Diana once jumped out of Hoare’s car into Sloane Square in the middle of a traffic jam because she suspected that he was going to see his wife rather than, as he told her, his sick daughter. Hoare later found her sitting sobbing on a park bench outside Kensington Palace. The Princess in tears was not an unfamiliar sight. On several occasions around this time, Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, Dave Griffin, found her in her car outside her royal apartment, crying her eyes out. In his unofficial role as an uncle figure, Griffin also gave her friendly advice about the clumsy manner in which, for a time, she smuggled her friend
into her apartment. She would drive in with him hidden in the boot of her car, which she would park in the courtyard of her next-door neighbour, Princess Margaret. Hoare would then slip out and sneak through the rear entrance into Diana’s apartment. The Princess of Wales’s behaviour both irritated and intrigued her royal neighbour. When Diana drove into her courtyard, Princess Margaret was annoyed that her private space was being invaded – but her displeasure did not stop her peering round one of the double doors she kept open to try to spot Diana’s secret visitor. After a while, Dave Griffin respectfully advised the Princess that she was drawing more attention to herself by this cloak-and-dagger behaviour than if her visitor came in through the front door.

On another occasion the art dealer drew attention to himself because of his nocturnal activities. At about 3.30 in the morning the smoke alarms in Diana’s apartment went off. The Princess’s detective hurried there to find an unkempt and embarrassed-looking Oliver Hoare, who had been standing in the hallway smoking a cigar.

In her relationship with Hoare, the Princess seemed for the first time to be presented with both an emotional dilemma and a possible resolution. While she saw my book as her escape from the constricted life inside the royal prison and a stifling marriage, it is now clear that she probably imagined life with Oliver Hoare as the Promised Land once she had made her getaway. She told Lady Bowker, to whom she had been introduced by Oliver Hoare, that she fantasized about leaving England and buying a house in Italy with the art dealer. She talked gaily of having two daughters to match William and Harry. Idle daydreaming was one thing, though – she had talked of buying a house in the country with her former lover James Hewitt – the reality was quite another.

With the Waleses’ separation in December 1992, there was now before Diana the possibility of one day genuinely pursuing this romantic vision. Within a year she had dispensed with her Scotland Yard protection officers, which meant that there were now no watchful bodyguards spying on her movements. At the same time, her decision to take a breather from public life in
December 1993 gave her an opportunity to explore life with the man she loved. This was, as she told Stephen Twigg, the real reason for bowing out of public life. ‘Her heart truly ruled her head,’ he observed. ‘She was always driven by her emotions.’