The Last Picture Show : Part 2

The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown

(Page 2 of 2)

Diana also made an improbable friend of Katharine "Kay" Graham. They had met in the summer of 1994, when Lucia Flecha de Lima had brought Diana to Kay's beachfront house on Martha's Vineyard. Not long after that, Kay gave a luncheon for Diana and Hillary Clinton at her Washington home. At a British Embassy lunch on the same visit, Diana met Colin Powell again. He told her he had been nominated to lead her in the dancing at the gala that night to raise money for the Nina Hyde Breast Cancer Foundation. Scotland Yard had been worried that at a ball in Chicago earlier in the year a stranger had cut in on Diana's dancing partner. The General was deemed able to handle such an eventuality, but the Princess suggested she do a few practice spins with him in the Embassy drawing room. "She was easy with any melody, and we did all right in our rehearsal," says Powell. "She told me, 'there's only one thing you ought to know. I'll be wearing a backless dress tonight. Can you cope with that?' " Flirting with the big boys - what bliss!

Diana thrived in America. "There is no 'Establishment' there," she told her fashion friend Roberto Devorik - wrongly, of course, but correct in the sense that America had no Establishment whose rules or members could possibly hurt her feelings. Richard Kay says she thought of America as "a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to disappear."

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 how Vogue's Hamish 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 she wanted to show them off," said the designer Jacques Azagury. She wore his stunning red bugle-bead tunic over a short pencil skirt in Venice in 1995 and his blue crystal-beaded cocktail dress six inches above the knee to another Serpentine gallery evening. Diana actually looked her best at her most informal. Jumping rangily out of her car for lunch with Rosa Monckton at the Caprice, wearing stone-washed jeans, a white T-shirt, a beautifully cut navy blue blazer, and bare feet in flats (she was usually shod in Jimmy Choo's black grosgrain "Diana" loafers), she was spectacular. Vanity Fair assigned the Peruvian-born photographer Mario Testino to capture her as she now wanted to be seen: a modern woman, active on the world stage - "vivid, energetic, and fascinating," in the words of Meredith Etherington-Smith, the former fashion editor who introduced Diana to Testino. When Meredith first saw Diana at Kensington Palace, she was astonished at how different she was from the formal, public Princess of old. Now she was "a tall, electrifying figure," wearing no makeup and "revealing the truest English rose complexion. Her hair, no longer a stiff helmet, free of lacquer and back combing, flew around her head like a dandelion in the wind." With her unerring sense of the dramatic, Diana timed Mario Testino's stunning shots to come out on the cover of Vanity Fair the same week as her decree absolute.

Diana purged her closets of the past. She hated the sight of the froufrou'd and sequined relics of her roles as Princess Bride and Windsor Wife and Dynasty Di, embalmed in their suit bags. It was William's brain wave for her to auction off her old gowns for charity in New York, and Diana loved her son's creative notion. It would be at once a glorious psychic gesture to her new life and a boon to the charities she chose, the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund. A royal rummage sale had never happened before. Most of the Windsor women, including the Queen, consign their old private-occasion items to a discreetly respectable resale shop in London's West End. Diana's auction would be a first.

Old clothes are often suffused with the emotions of the wearer. Meredith Etherington-Smith, who also worked as creative marketing director of Christie's, was assigned by the auction house to help Diana choose and catalog the items. They sorted through Diana's gowns every morning for a month while Diana relived the occasions when she had worn them. "Out! Out!" she would cry, pointing at some star-spangled throwback, or "No! I can't bear to give up this one!" In and out of the catalog flew Victor Edelstein's oyster dinner dress with a strapless bodice encrusted with white bugle beads and matching bolero, which she had worn that elegant night at the Élysée Palace in Paris with President and Madame Mitterrand. "It was such a happy evening," she dithered. She had been afraid of the French being so chic, but she felt she had really pulled it off. She sighed over another Edelstein gown, an ink blue silk velvet creation. This was the dress in which she had wowed the world with John Travolta at the White House. She relinquished it in the end, knowing it would get the auction's top dollar. (An anonymous bidder snapped it up for $222,500.) In retrospect, wrote the fashion maven Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, all the high-glamour outfits of Diana's past looked "like a dress rehearsal for the little black number worn on the evening Prince Charles confessed his adultery on prime-time television."

But now in the year after her divorce, relations with Prince Charles were on a nicely even keel, starting with that tea in July. The arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland as Charles's assistant private secretary inaugurated an era of glasnost between the offices of the Princess and the Prince. Bolland was a shrewd go-to guy with a marketing background and a useful four years of experience as director of the Press Complaints Commission. He lived in the real world, not the Palace bubble. He owed his job to Camilla; he had come to Charles at the recommendation of her divorce lawyer, Hilary Browne Wilkinson. In spite of that - or more likely because of it - part of his writ was to end the War between the Waleses. It got in the way, he believed, of the necessary rebuilding of Prince Charles's image. Bolland's first act was to persuade Charles to fire his private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, the facilitator of the Dimbleby fiasco, and rid the Prince's office of holdovers from the bitter years of marital competition. Nor was Bolland a fan of the undislodgeable Tiggy Legge-Bourke, sharing Camilla's belief that Tiggy spent a lot of her time "winding Charles up." Another positive augury, surely.

Better than all of the above, however, was that Diana's love life had simplified in a wonderful way. In the fall of 1995, she had at last fallen for a man who was worthy of her affections, who wasn't married, and who reciprocated her feelings: the thirty-six-year-old Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan.

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.