The Last Picture Show

The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown

Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she "the people's princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?

In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Diana's sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but finally came to terms with, and bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who concealed wounds of her own. Most formidable of them all was her mother-in-law, the Queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.

Chapter 20

Is she an angel?

- Helena Ussova, aged seven, land-mine victim in Angola, January 1997

Diana never looked better than in the days after her divorce. Divestment was the name of the game, in her life and in her looks. The downsizing started with her Kensington Palace staff, which she reduced to cleaner, cook, and dresser. The assiduous Paul Burrell became maître d' of her private life, combining the roles of P.A., man Friday, driver, delivery boy, confidant, and crying towel. "He used to pad around listening to all," says a friend of Diana's mother. "I was quite sure his ear was pressed firmly to the key hole when I went to Kensington Palace for lunch."

Diana reinforced her break with married life by stuffing a heavy-duty garbage bag with her entire set of Prince of Wales china and then smashing it with a hammer. "Make a list of everything we need," she told Burrell. "Let's spend a bit more of his money while we can."

Diana now used police protection only when she attended a public event. Her favorite officer was Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Royal Squad. He was a tall, fair-haired matinee idol who was also a Class One driver, trained by the SAS. 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 Diana. "There was always a buzz when she was at home. I thought she was beginning to enjoy life. She was a different lady, maturing." Tebbutt says she would always sit in the front of the car, unlike the other Royals, such as Princess Margaret, who called him by his surname and, without looking up from her newspaper, barked, "Wireless!" when she wanted Tebbutt to turn on the radio.

"I drive looking in all three mirrors, so I'd say to Diana 'I'm not looking at your legs, Ma'am' and she'd laugh." The press knew the faces of Diana's drivers, so to shake them off Tebbutt sometimes wore disguises. "She wanted to go to the hairdresser one day, shortly before she died. I had an old Toyota MRT which she called the 'tart trap,' so I drove her in that. I went to the trunk and got out a big baseball hat and glasses. When she came out I was dripping with sweat, and she said 'What on earth are you doing?' I said, 'I'm in disguise.' She said, 'It may have slipped your notice, but I'm the Princess of Wales.' "

Every Tuesday night, the Princess sat at her desk in her study at Kensington Palace, writing her steady stream of heartfelt thank-you letters and listening to a piano playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 and - her favorite - Manning Sherwin's "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square." In the living room, Maureen Stevens, a clerk from the Prince of Wales's office, who also happened to be a talented concert pianist, gave Diana a weekly private recital as she worked. You can almost hear Stevens's piano rippling in the background as Diana writes a fulsome note to her close friend, Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis: "Dearest Liz, How proud I was to be at your side on Monday evening... so deeply moved by your personal touch - the presents for the boys, candles at the hotel and flowers to name but few but most of all your beaming smile, your loving heart. I am always here for you, Liz." Sometimes Diana would stop and telephone the Daily Mail's Richard Kay - "Ricardo," she called him - to help her with the phraseology of a letter. KP was her fortress. On warm summer afternoons, she vanished into its walled garden in shorts and T-shirt and her Versace sunglasses, carrying a bag of books and CDs for her Walkman. On weekends, when William and Harry were home, Burrell would see her in a flowing cotton skirt on her bicycle with the basket in front, speeding down the Palace drive with the boys pedaling furiously behind her. On her thirty-sixth birthday, in July, she received ninety bouquets of flowers and Harry gathered a group of classmates to sing "Happy Birthday" to her over the telephone.

Diana's charity commitments were pared down from around a hundred to the six she most cared about: Centrepoint, the Royal Marsden Hospital, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the English National Ballet, the Leprosy Mission, and the National AIDS Trust. The public announcement she insisted on reaped her unnecessary flak and the resignation of her media adviser, Jane Atkinson. But Diana had a reason for being explicit. She wanted to avoid situations where she was just a letterhead. "If I'm going to talk on behalf of any cause, I want to go and see the problem for myself and learn about it," she told the chairman of the Washington Post Company, Katharine Graham, at that time.

There was a round of social purging. Lord and Lady Palumbo were excised after Peter's candid warnings about Martin Bashir. Elton John was in the deep freeze after acting as a go-between with Diana and Gianni Versace for the fashion designer's coffee-table book Rock and Royalty. (The pictures of the Princess and the boys appeared amid a portfolio of seminude male models, and Diana feared it would further annoy the Queen.) Sir Ronald Grierson was bounced after he made the mistake of offering a job to Victoria Mendham, one of the many secretaries Diana fired. And Fergie was back in Siberia, this time for good. The divorced Duchess had cashed in with an anodyne memoir, which was full of nice comments about her sister-in-law - except for one fatal line. She wrote that when she borrowed a pair of Diana's shoes she had caught a verrucca - plantar's wart - from them. Goddesses don't get warts. Despite Fergie's pleading apologies, Diana never spoke to her again. In 1997, the Princess gave a birthday party for her friend David Tang and told him he could ask anyone he wanted.

"Anyone?" he asked.

"Anyone."

"All right, then - Fergie."

"Absolutely not," Diana replied, and would not be moved.

A new and unexpected ally was Raine. In 1993, Diana had finally made her peace with her formidable stepmother. The painful years of separation and divorce from Charles made the Princess see her old adversary in a different light. Still grieving for Daddy, her greatest support, Diana was at last able to recognize that Raine had loved him, too. She invited her stepmother for a weepy reconciliation over lunch at Kensington Palace. For moral support, Raine brought along her fiancé, the French Count Jean François de Chambrun. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. Afterward, the Princess and the Countess were often sighted deep in a tête-à-tête at the Connaught Grill. One of Raine's cautions was to try to stay on friendly terms with Charles for the sake of the children. She told Diana that both she - Raine - and her mother, Barbara Cartland, had maintained warm relations with all their former husbands and lovers.

Copyright © 2007 by Tina Brown

About the Author

Tina Brown was 25 when she became editor-in-chief of England's' oldest glossy, The Tatler, reviving the nearly defunct 270 year old magazine with an attitude and style that gave it a 300 percent circulation rise. She went on to become editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and won four National Magazine Awards. In 1992 she became the first female editor of the New Yorker where she raised circulation by 145 percent on the newsstand and was honored with 4 George Polk Awards, 5 Overseas Press Club Awards, and 10 National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Ms. Brown was awarded C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth in 2000. She is married to Sir Harold Evans. The couple have two children and reside in New York.