Diana's Nightmare - The Family (17 page)

To some measure, Charles was consoled by the companionship of his old flame, Anna Wallace, but at two a.m. his anger boiled over and he strode across to exchange a few well-chosen words with his wife. Her reaction was to laugh in his face, leading one guest to conclude: 'Someone must have spiked her drink. She was out of control. She was almost falling out of her dress.' Whatever her condition, Charles left Diana to dance until dawn and drove himself to Highgrove.

The episode was repeated a few nights later when she again refused Charles's entreaties, this time to leave a barbecue for the polo fraternity hosted by Susan Barrantes at a house near Cowdray Park. The Queen and Prince Philip had been among the guests but Diana waited until they had left before amusing others with a wild new dancing style, it was like watching a windmill in action,' said one who watched her dance to records which included the obligatory Diana Ross offering,
Chain Reaction.
Once more, Charles left alone. Then, while he visited his regiments in Germany, he learned that the mother of his children had accompanied her sister Sarah to yet another all-night party in Lincolnshire.

Her friend Lucy Acland, the heiress granddaughter of wealthy businessman Cyril Kleinwort, said: 'Diana has suddenly realised what she's been missing all these years married to Prince Charles, surrounded by fuddy-duddy philosophers and elderly businessmen. Fergie has introduced Diana to a whole new crowd who like to go to nightclubs, down bubbly and have a good time. Naturally some of them are handsome young men like Philip Dunne. They are elegant, charming and full of fun. They pay her nice compliments and Diana responds.'

It had not escaped Charles's attention that it was his sister-in-law who had brought both Dunne and his friends the Greenalls into Diana's life. Fergie had also introduced her to Major David Waterhouse, a Household Cavalry officer who had been another member of the skiing party in Klosters. Waterhouse received a telephone call from Diana asking him if he would escort her to a David Bowie concert at Wembley. She told him she had the tickets and that the concert would be as great a treat for her as it would be an endurance test for her husband. He had his own treat fixed up — a performance of Vivaldi's work he had arranged to attend with the Archbishop of Canterbury. At the Bowie concert, with no visible encouragement from the army officer, Diana perfected her teasing technique by nestling her head on his shoulder. Photographs suggested they were cuddling, but Waterhouse explained them away saying: 'The unfortunate thing about those pictures is that at a concert like that, the noise is simply astronomical and you have to lean towards the person next to you to make yourself heard.'

The experience did not faze her companion and Water- house, a cousin of the Duke of Marlborough's drug- addicted heir Jamie (the Marquess of) Blandford, became something of a regular escort, taking her to the cinema and to restaurants whenever she tired of royal life. One of her girlfriends was usually on hand to act as a chaperone and it was Julia Samuel who made it a threesome when Diana and Waterhouse went to see Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
at the Kensington Odeon. Later they went back to Kate Menzies' mews house, enjoying what witnesses described as 'an especially merry night'.

Merry, that is, until Diana and Waterhouse stepped from Kate's doorway and into the viewfinder of Jason Fraser's paparazzi camera. Fraser resisted threats from Diana's detective but agreed to hand over his film when the Princess herself tearfully pleaded with him. He regretted the decision almost immediately. 'As soon as I gave her the film, she stopped blushing and her tone became clipped,' he said. 'Her tears were turned off and I had the distinct feeling that it had all been an act.'

THE Queen was growing increasingly alarmed about Diana's most unroyal acts. But the crux of Diana's dilemma was loneliness of a particularly feminine kind. As she told one of her
confidantes
over a Chinese meal at the Tai Pai restaurant in Knightsbridge, she had produced an heir and a spare and, in the light of her loveless marriage, she faced a stark choice: to enjoy some pleasure with the bankin', shoppin' and dancin' set, or to stay at home and turn into a Palace couch potato.

At close quarters, she had seen Princess Anne, once her marriage had turned sour, promptly enjoy the advances of a handsome replacement for Captain Mark Phillips in the young naval officer, Commander Timothy Laurence. Diana had no need to be taught that royal dalliances were not in themselves forbidden, only royal scandals. It was acceptable for one to cavort as long as one was not caught.

She came close to stepping over the line however, when her fondness for Major James Hewitt, an athletic Life Guards officer, caused her to be generous to the point of carelessness. She had met the major at a friend's party in St John's Wood and he became one of three of the officers in the Sovereign's bodyguard regiment who would accompany her on picnics when Charles was away. Hewitt quickly became her favourite. The ginger-haired officer's tendency to blush easily was an endearing trait and he was entrusted with the task of teaching William and Harry to ride. Initially, Diana took her sons to Cobermere Barracks on the outskirts of Windsor for their lessons but the instructor so charmed the trio that his face was soon familiar at Highgrove. No one could quite remember the circumstances or even the date on which Diana decided that she would also like to learn to ride properly and duly placed herself in the horseman's hands.

Hewitt had acquired the services of an attentive (and, as it turned out, inquisitive) valet and groom, one Lance Corporal Malcolm Leete, who started to make careful note of Diana's comings and goings, what she wore and what she brought with her. His record subsequently showed that the Princess would arrive for instruction on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, more often than not accompanied by neither her detective nor a lady-in-waiting. Furthermore, he observed, she would often bring the Major presents of expensive clothing carried in highly distinctive green Harrods bags. She was later to boast to Gilbey of her generosity to Hewitt on the Squidgy tape:

Diana: I've decked people out in my time.

Gilbey: Who did you deck out? Not too many, I hope.

Diana: James Hewitt. Entirely dressed him from head to foot that man. Cost me quite a bit.

Gilbey: I bet he did. At your expense?

Diana: Yeah.

Gilbey: What, he didn't even pay you to do it?

Diana: No.

Gilbey: God, that's extravagant, Darling.

Diana: Well I am, aren't I? Anything that will make people happy.

Gilbey: No, you mustn't do it for that, Darling, because you make people happy. It's what you give them ...

In addition to clothes, the gifts HRH showered on her instructor to make him happy included a diamond- studded tiepin from Asprey's and a gold-and-silver clock from Garrad & Co. She did not itemise them in the Squidgy call nor did she mention the name she used to sign the cards which accompanied her expensive gifts to him: Dibbs.

Exhilarated though she appeared after more than twenty months of living dangerously, Diana was reaching a low ebb. So much so that before the year ended a caring friend gave her the unlisted telephone number of Stephen Twigg, a therapist who did not advertise but whose techniques had achieved spectacular results, especially for women who were close to rock bottom in their emotional lives.

With the arrival of the cold autumn weather, Diana's riding lessons were transferred from the park to the indoor riding school. The disloyal servant Leete claimed that one November morning he stood on a mounting block to peer in through a window and saw his master cuddling the Princess. Hewitt could, of course, have been soothing a bruised arm Diana was known to have strained, possibly from a fall. But the bigger bruising was taken by the gallant officer's girlfriend, Emma Stewardson.

Ms Stewardson said she ended a four-year relationship with the officer after he had ended a passionate bedroom session with her in ungentlemanly fashion by talking about Diana. After that, she said, 'he wouldn't even discuss it'. Bitter about losing his undivided attention, she told her story to the
News of the World
in 1991, declaring emotionally: 'I felt threatened by his crush on her. How could I compete with that? Diana's beautiful, she's fabulously rich and she lives in a completely different world from me.'

In her memoirs, Emma recalled how James had first talked to her about the Princess when they went for a meal in a village pub. 'All through the meal he was being very light and entertaining, but I knew he wanted to get something off his chest,' she said. 'It was then that Jamie told me of his feelings for Diana. He said, "By the way, the Princess of Wales is a close friend of mine ... a very close friend of mine." He seemed to think he could tell me as a friend about this crush without damaging our relationship.' She said he had even stood her up to keep a lunch date with Diana at Highgrove and then told her that she shouldn't feel threatened by such events as they changed nothing. Charitably, Emma concluded that Hewitt, who colleagues called The Iceman but she nicknamed Winkie, had merely helped Diana to overcome her fear of horses.

'The relationship is entirely innocent,' Hewitt maintained strenuously. At the beginning of September 1992 he launched a libel action against
News International.
His solicitor, Mark Stephens, said his client 'felt it necessary to bring this action because of the scandalous nature of the false allegations about him'. But when experts on defamation explained that Diana could be subpoenaed by the defence and cross-examined in the witness box, Hewitt dropped his action even though he said the Princess had vowed to stand by him. 'If she had been called as a witness the court ordeal would have been horrendous for her,' he said. 'The whole case would have turned into a media circus. It would have caused too many people too much distress.' Besides, he admitted, there was always a chance that he would lose: 'I was told costs could have topped £300,000. Even though the truth is on my side, nothing is clear cut when it comes to libel cases.'

HEMMED in at Kensington Palace by her in-laws, attended by servants who were plugged in to their counterparts at Buckingham Palace and constantly watched by the protection service, Diana was aware that nothing but nothing escaped Her Majesty's notice. The network, however, could feed intelligence in both directions. It was in this way Diana learned that, although Her Majesty understood her daughter-in-law's dilemma, she very much disapproved of the open gossip.

To escape the royal network, Diana joined the Vanderbilt Racquet Club in Shepherd's Bush, ostensibly to play tennis, and found herself plugged into another network. Other members included Mick Jagger, Charlton Heston, the Harold Pinters and Richard Branson's mother, Eve. She especially endeared herself to Charles Swallow, the club's director and a former history master at Harrow, by insisting that she pay the £650 entrance fee and annual subscription of £550. Furthermore, she made no objection to photographs of herself chatting with other members being included in the montages which lined the club hallway.

Her court manners were impeccable. She became known for clapping a hand over her mouth and blushing when she missed an obvious shot. Her court partners included Swallow, her friend Antonia, the Marchioness of Douro, the former tennis professional Annabel Croft, the Conservative MP William Waldegrave and tennis writer April Tod, who observed: 'She is not a particularly good player. She is fairly competitive but her main object seems to be to keep the ball in play.'

But her regular visits to the nine converted hangars in an unfashionable area of West London did not release her from the pressures that were closing in on her at Buckingham Palace. There, at a musical evening, she said she found herself being regarded by her mother-in-law in what she could only describe as an unnerving manner. It was to her father that she turned for advice.

Earl Spencer sought to comfort his daughter by pointing out that Her Majesty had also formed a circle of male friends when she was about the same age and at a similarly troubled stage in her own marriage. What, for example, would a disrespectful Press have made of the Queen's highly private visit to Lord Porchester at the Savoy Hotel in 1959 had the likes of Jason Fraser been around to capture her coming and going on film? Once the Queen's teenage dancing partner and sweetheart, Porchester was admired by her every bit as much as James Hewitt was by Diana three decades later.

Although nothing had appeared in the newspapers, royal gossip had linked the Queen's name with Old Etonian Porchester, who was later appointed as Her Majesty's racing manager and who succeeded his father as the Earl of Carnarvon in 1987. When her second, and preferred son, Prince Andrew, was born in February 1960, royal observers hoped that the rift between the Queen and her husband had been healed in the bedchamber. But as Andrew grew up to resemble Porchy's children rather than Charles, Anne or Edward, false rumours took root and spread. 'Prince Andrew's paternal grandfather?' a baronet's son queried. 'You don't mean Prince Andrew of Greece, you mean the late Earl of Carnarvon.' Ironically, when Andrew once needed to conceal the identity of a real girlfriend in his pre-Fergie days, it was Porchester's daughter — Diana's friend and lookalike Lady Carolyn Herbert - who he enlisted as a decoy, often escorting her in public. After Andrew himself had confided in a woman with whom he became deeply attached, she subsequently remarked to a later lover: 'He knows who his real father is and it's not Lord Porchester.'

The Queen had other close male friends including her equerry Patrick, the seventh Baron Plunket, who was Deputy Master of her Household. Eton and Cambridge educated, Lord Plunket had been equerry to King George VI. A slender and handsome man with thinning dark hair and an aristocratic profile, he worked with Sir Anthony Blunt in the Queen's Gallery. Despite the assertion of a Palace source that she was in love with him, the Queen knew that Patrick Plunket, like Blunt, was not interested in women. Safe in his company, she would apparently slip out of the Palace on Monday evenings, driving her Rover car, a scarf over her head, and travel to the cinema - usually the Odeon in the King's Road, Chelsea. Together with the man she referred to as 'my beloved Patrick', she would go on to Raffles Club for supper, dining at a table towards the darkened back of the wood-panelled room, enduring what one member described as 'particularly nauseating food' at the time in return for the anonymity on offer. She was distraught when her friend died of cancer.