Princess Diana emerged from her divorce with a new style, a new crusade, and a new love. But her superstar status and emotional scars, writes Tina Brown, proved to be too much. VFArchive
Princess Diana emerged from her divorce with a new style, a new crusade , and a new love, Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she hid from the press for 18 months.
Diana now used police protection only when she attended a public event. Her favorite officer was Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Royal Protection Squad. A tall, well-built matinee idol, Tebbutt knew that by going to work for Diana he was effectively shutting the door to any future work with the Prince of Wales, but he had a soft spot for her. “There was always a buzz when she was at home.... I thought she was beginning to enjoy life. She was a different lady, maturing.
There was a round of social purging. Elton John was in the deep freeze after a dispute with Diana and Gianni Versace about the fashion designer’s coffee-table book Rock and Royalty. Sir Ronald Grierson was bounced after he made the mistake of offering a job to Victoria Mendham, one of many secretaries Diana had fired. And Fergie was back in Siberia, this time for good. The divorced duchess had cashed in with an anodyne memoir, some of which annoyed her sister-in-law—particularly one fatal line.
Like her life, Diana’s taste in fashion became pared down and emphatic after her divorce. “English style refracted through an un-English sensibility” was howHamish Bowles defined it. Her new evening dresses were minimalist and sexy, a look that had been taboo when she was an in-house royal. “She knew she had great legs, and after her divorce she wanted to show them off,” said the designer Jacques Azagury.
Diana took to meeting with Dr. Khan in his small overnight room at the Royal Brompton Hospital. She asked if she could watch him perform open-heart surgery. “Anybody with courage enough to watch a heart operation can come in,” Khan told her. He couldn’t keep her away after that. Sky TV had arranged to film Sir Magdi Yacoub operating at the Harefield Hospital on a seven-year-old African boy, flown to the U.K. by the Chain of Hope charity.
Diana’s desire to impress Khan gave her new purpose. He was a serious man for whom she wanted to do serious things. She was looking for a cause that would passionately involve her, something in which her presence could produce a transformative result, as it had done in the mid-80s with AIDS. “She felt very strongly about getting involved with something that wasn’t a ballet charity,” said a friend. Mike Whitlam, then director general of the British Red Cross, had the answer.
BRAVING IT Diana, wearing protective armor and a visor, crosses a minefield being cleared by the HALO organization in Huambo, Angola, 1997. Bringing to bear all the reckless bravery she’d once used to defy the royal family—but in a much better cause—she walked through a half-cleared minefield. “One or two journalists,” said Whitlam, “hadn’t quite got the shot they wanted and jokingly asked her if she’d mind doing it again.” To everyone’s astonishment, she agreed. “She realised that this was one of the shots that was really going to make a big impact around the world,” said Whitlam. “So she did the walk a second time.
A witness to open-heart surgery in the operating theater of Harefield Hospital, an affiliate of the Royal Brompton, 1996. Hasnat’s pager would go off 20 times a day on his medical rounds. For a woman so sensitive to the needs of others, Diana was strangely blind when it came to those of the people closest to her. She wanted to own his future, arrange his life. She wanted to re-arrange his surgical schedule so that he could travel with her.
The Prince and Princess of Wales with their son William on the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, May 7, 1995. “She saw the protectors as assailants,” Clive James noted. “It seemed she would rather have gone down in a hail of broken glass than live in fear.” Diana did live in fear, but it wasn’t death she was afraid of. It was the thought of being dropped again in the darkness, as she put it to Devorik. She had carried that darkness inside her since she was a child. She had always fought it with her dazzle. Now more than ever, she feared being left alone in the dark.
Diana’s fear of exclusion was aggravated by the deterioration of her relationship with Charles. The promising thaw, in which she had invested hopes, did a nosedive once she perceived the key issue in Mark Bolland’s agenda. She had not reckoned that Bolland’s rehab plan for her husband’s image would be focused so intently on the selling of Camilla to the public. The Prince’s mistress would not have sponsored Bolland for the job if his agenda had not tallied with hers.
Camilla’s rise hit Diana with blunt force when Charles chose Highgrove as the venue for his mistress’s 50th-birthday celebration, on July 17, 1997. The flagrant use of their former marital home was an unnecessary blow for Diana. It plunged her more deeply into her “darkness.” She was deeply envious as well as deeply hurt: while Charles had found his love, Diana had lost hers.
The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace in South Beach, Florida, on July 15, while Diana was on A1 Fayed’s yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer. Versace had bridged the gap between fashion and celebrity, just as Diana had bridged the gap between royalty and celebrity. Versace had turned hooker style into high fashion, adopted by movie stars and rock icons in the 80s and 90s. Even a princess could feel exciting in his clothes.
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