Diana: Her True Story--In Her Own Words

Auteur

Andrew Morton is one of the world’s best-known biographers and a leading authority on modern celebrity and royalty. His groundbreaking 1992 biography of Diana, Princess of Wales—written with her full, though then secret, cooperation—changed the way the world looked at the British royal family. Since then, he has gone on to write New York Times and Sunday Times (UK) bestsellers on Monica Lewinsky, Madonna, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The winner of numerous awards, he divides his time between London and Los Angeles.

Texte du rabat

A "biography of Princess Diana, written with her cooperation and now featuring exclusive new material to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her death"--Amazon.com.

Échantillon de lecture
Diana

Foreword

Even at a distance of 25 years, it is a scarcely believable story. Hollywood producers would dismiss the script as much too far-fetched; a beautiful but desperate princess, an unknown writer, an amateur go-between and a book that would change the Princess’s life forever.

In 1991 Princess Diana was approaching 30. She had been in the limelight all of her adult life. Her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981 was described as a ‘fairytale’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the popular imagination, the Prince and Princess, blessed with two young sons, Princes William and Harry, were the glamorous and sympathetic face of the House of Windsor. The very idea that their ten-year marriage was in dire trouble was unthinkable – even to the notoriously imaginative tabloid press. Commenting on a joint tour of Brazil that year, the Sunday Mirror described them as presenting a ‘united front to the world’, their closeness sending a ‘shiver of excitement’ around the massed media ranks.

Shortly afterwards I was to learn the unvarnished truth. The unlikely venue for these extraordinary revelations was a working man’s café in the anonymous London suburb of Ruislip. As labourers noisily tucked into plates of egg, bacon and baked beans, I put on a pair of headphones, turned on a battered tape recorder and listened with mounting astonishment to the unmistakable voice of the Princess as she poured out a tale of woe in a rapid stream of consciousness. It was like being transported into a parallel universe, the Princess talking about her unhappiness, her sense of betrayal, her suicide attempts and two things I had never previously heard of: bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder, and a woman called Camilla.

I left the café reeling, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It was as though I had been admitted into an underground club that was nursing a secret. A dangerous secret. On my way home that evening I kept well away from the edge of the Underground platform, my mind spinning with the same paranoia that infected the movie All the President’s Men, about President Nixon, the Watergate break-in and the subsequent investigation by Woodward and Bernstein.

For nearly ten years I had been writing about the royal family, and was part of the media circus chronicling their work as they toured the globe. It was, as the members of the so-called ‘royal ratpack’ used to say, the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I had met Prince Charles and Princess Diana on numerous occasions at press receptions which were held at the beginning of every tour. Conversations with the Princess were light, bright and trite, usually about my loud ties.

However, life as a royal reporter was not one long jolly. Behind the scenes of the royal theatre, there was a lot of hard work, cultivating contacts inside Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, where the Waleses occupied apartments eight and nine, in order to find out about royal life when the grease paint was removed. After writing books about life inside the various palaces, the royal family’s wealth and a biography of the Duchess of York, as well as other works, I had got to know a number of friends and royal staff reasonably well and thought I had a fair idea of what was going on behind the wrought-iron royal gates. Nothing had prepared me for this.

My induction to the truth came courtesy of the man in charge of the tape recorder. I first met Dr James Colthurst in October 1986 on a routine royal visit when he escorted Diana after she opened a new CT scanner in his X-ray department at St Thomas’ hospital in central London. Afterwards, over tea and biscuits, I questioned him about Diana’s visit. It soon became clear that Colthurst, an Old Etonian and son of a baronet whose family have owned Blarney Castle in Ireland for more than a century, had known the Princess for years.

He could become, I thought, a useful contact. We became friendly, enjoying games of squash in the St Thomas’ courts before sitting down to large lunches at a nearby Italian restaurant. Chatty but diffuse, James was happy to talk about any subject but the Princess. Certainly he had known her well enough to visit her when she was a bachelor girl living with her friends at Coleherne Court in Kensington and listen to her mooning about Prince Charles. They had even gone on a skiing holiday to France with a party of friends. Upon her elevation to the role of Princess of Wales, the easy familiarity that characterized her life was lost, Diana still speaking fondly of her ‘Coleherne Court’ but in the past tense.

It was only after she visited St Thomas’ that Colthurst and the Princess renewed their friendship, meeting up for lunch every now and again. By degrees he too was admitted into her secret club and was given glimpses of the real life, rather than the fantasy, endured by the Princess. It was clear that her marriage had failed and that her husband was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of his Army friend Andrew who held the curious title of Silver Stick in Waiting to the Queen. Mrs Parker Bowles, who lived near to Highgrove, the Waleses’ country home, was so close to the Prince that she regularly hosted dinners and other gatherings for his friends at his Gloucestershire home.

While Colthurst felt he was being let in on a secret, he was not the only one. From the bodyguard who accompanied the Prince on his nocturnal visits to Camilla’s home at Middlewick House, to the butler and chef ordered to prepare and serve a supper they knew the Prince would not be eating as he had gone to see his lover, and the valet who marked up programmes in the TV listings guide Radio Times, to give the impression the Prince had spent a quiet evening at home – all those working for the Prince and Princess were pulled, often against their will, into the deception. His valet Ken Stronach became ill with the daily deceit while their press officer Dickie Arbiter found himself in an ‘impossible position’, maintaining to the world the illusion of happy families while turning a blind eye to the private distance between them.

When Prince Charles broke his arm in a polo accident in June 1990 and was taken to Cirencester hospital, his staff listened intently to the police radios reporting on the progress of the Princess of Wales on her journey from London to the hospital. They were keenly aware that they had to usher out his first visitor – Camilla Parker Bowles – before Diana arrived.

Those in the know realized that the simmering cauldron of deceit, subterfuge and duplicity was going to boil over sooner or later. Every day they asked themselves how long the conspiracy to hoodwink the future queen could continue. Perhaps indefinitely. Or until the Princess was driven mad by those she trusted and admired, who told her, time after weary time, that Camilla was just a friend. Her suspicions, they reasoned, were mi…