Dish (48 page)

Tabloid reporter James Whitaker bobbed in a boat called the
Fancy
150 yards off the coast of Saint Tropez, watching the woman he had helped become the most famous person in the world. Whitaker, a reporter for the
Daily Mirror,
had known Princess Diana for nearly twenty years—since she was an anonymous apple-cheeked teenager with dreams of marrying a prince. Whitaker, a dapper dresser with a round, ruddy face and a chipmunk smile, became Diana’s biggest champion; she secretly gave him scoops about herself and he reciprocated with relentlessly adoring coverage. Diana had long since dropped Whitaker as her favorite confidante—he had been “traded up,” he knew, for the more upscale Richard Kay at the
Daily Mail
—but he was still quite friendly with Diana, and there were those who believed that Whitaker, more than any other person, had launched the remarkable worldwide fame of Princess Diana.

Whitaker watched with a certain amount of proprietary affection that cloudless Monday in July 1997 as the Princess, dressed in a bold gold jungle print bathing suit and dark sunglasses with gold trim, cavorted on the beach in front of the fleet of
journalists and paparazzi offshore. “She was absolutely parading herself,” Whitaker said.

The Princess’s vacation had been on the front page of every tabloid in London that weekend; “Di and Sleaze Row Tycoon!” the
News of the World
announced. “Di’s Freebie!” blasted the
Sunday Mirror.
Diana couldn’t have been surprised that her little holiday was big news: the Princess and her two sons, the heirs to the throne of England, were vacationing with the man who helped topple the conservative government by revealing that he had bribed top Tory officials.

After about half an hour of being photographed, Diana got into a speed boat and headed out to the
Fancy.
Clinging to the side of the boat, she giggled and joked with Whitaker, but she also complained about the press. “How long are you going to be here?” Diana asked. The attention was embarrassing, she protested, and her son William “gets really freaked out” by all the photographers. “My sons are always urging me to live abroad and to be less in the public eye,” she said. “Maybe that is what I should do, given the fact that you won’t leave me alone. I understand I have a role to play, but I have to be protective of my boys.” She didn’t speak French, Diana said, so Whitaker and the British journalists were going to have to pass her message on to the French press. “I am going to make an announcement in two weeks that is going to put an end to all this,” she told them, “and boy will you be surprised.”

Some of the media horde were already surprised by Diana’s behavior. Until that point, she seemed quite happy to be photographed. “She would flash a complicit smile toward the photographers whenever she appeared or left,” one of them said. She had “delighted” the photographers noted
Hello!
“Aware of the lenses but, for once, totally unfazed by them.” The Princess was so cooperative that at one point, the paparazzi chipped in and bought her one hundred red roses to thank her. Whitaker and others who had covered the Princess for years were less confounded by her behavior; they knew there were times when Diana cooperated with the press, and times when she didn’t. During her Saint Tropez vacation, Diana apparently wanted to be in the papers, and some of the British journalists thought they knew why:
although she was no longer married to Charles, Diana was still quite jealous of his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, whom she blamed for wrecking the marriage. “If there was a good shot of Camilla in the paper looking good and sexy, then you can guarantee that the Princess would be out the next day looking even sexier,” said royal photographer Glenn Harvey, “sort of saying, you know, ‘I’m number one.’ ” The week that Diana spent with the Al Fayeds, Charles was throwing a lavish fiftieth birthday party for Camilla at his Gloucestershire estate. Camilla had gone through a number of makeovers to redeem herself in the eyes of the British people, and she was finally getting a boost in the public opinion polls. London was buzzing with the rumor that Charles was finally going to ask Camilla to marry him—which Diana bitterly opposed. The thought of her rival, gussied up and grinning on the arm of Charles on the front of London’s tabloids, infuriated Diana. The Princess knew that her vacation with Mohammed Al Fayed was guaranteed front-page news.

“She drove Camilla to the back of the papers,” marveled Whitaker. Princess Diana had, once again, won the public relations battle.

Princess Diana—contrary to her brother’s famous “blood on their hands” speech—was never “baffled” by the tabloids. She lived by them. “I read everything that’s written about me,” she once told Lady Colin Campbell. Every morning, she pored over the papers, studying each article about her, every photograph taken of her, and all the press devoted to her enemies and rivals. “If the stories were positive, she was ecstatic,” according to a member of her household staff, “but if they were negative she would tailspin and bemoan the cruelties of the world. Then she’d hit the telephone and make sure that the journalists she had in her pocket put her side of whatever story she felt needed to be respun in the following day’s papers.”

Those reporters “in her pocket” felt that Diana was justified; the Princess was engaged in a public relations war, with both sides leaking to their allies in the media. Diana was much better at it than Charles and his side were. “She may have been tricky, contrary
and manipulative at times,” Whitaker said, “and why not after what she had been put through in life?”

Whitaker had good reason to be defensive about the Princess. He had, some might say, discovered her. Actually, it was she who discovered him. One day in 1978—when the only royal story of interest was who Prince Charles would marry and Whitaker was one of about seven royal reporters following the story—Diana Spencer walked up to Whitaker outside Buckingham Palace and introduced herself. “I know you,” Diana said playfully. “You’re the wicked Mr. Whitaker, aren’t you? I’m Diana.” Whitaker, who wrote for the
Star
back then, spotted Diana again several months later, fishing on the River Dee with Prince Charles. When Diana saw the royal press pack, she scampered off and hid behind a tree. She delighted the reporters, however, by spying on
them,
using a makeup mirror as a periscope. “What a cunning lady,” Whitaker thought. “This one is going to give us a lot of trouble if she is indeed the new girl in the life of Prince Charles.”

Whitaker and others covering Prince Charles became enchanted with Diana. “She was delightful,” said Whitaker. “She was immensely flirtatious…. And she did definitely seduce the media that were with her.” Diana became friendly with the reporters, greeting each of them by name. She was, according to Whitaker and others who covered her then, never shy. “‘Shy Di’ ” was always a silly tabloid cliché that made headline writing easy,” said Whitaker. “She was a girl with a lot of guts.”

Some were a tad more cynical than Whitaker about Diana’s “friendship.” “I always thought that she had a very well-developed native cunning,” said photographer Harry Arnold. “She knew how to manipulate men quite early on in terms of looking at them in a certain way and making them feel special and using a little phrase now and again. And she did it with all of us.”

“I had to court them. Make them like me. Make them my friends,” Diana later said. “I may have been only nineteen, but I wasn’t stupid.” Behind his back, Diana called Whitaker the Fat Red Tomato.

She joked with
Sun
photographer Arthur Edwards about giving him a knighthood if she ever became queen. Edwards never took her attention personally. “The reason is most likely that
thirteen million readers will see her at her gorgeous best,” he said. “Funnily enough, it is always the papers with the highest circulation to whom Diana is the most cooperative.”

One day, Whitaker, worried about the effects of the media glare on the young woman, wrote Diana a note:

Two days later, Diana approached the crowd of photographers and reporters waiting outside her apartment. “Please leave me alone for a second,” she said. “I want to speak to Mr. Whitaker in private.” Diana asked for his advice in dealing with the press and he counseled her. She began calling Whitaker daily, planting certain stories, killing others.

Whitaker used the
Star
shamelessly to lobby for the Princess. When word circulated that Diana’s past might not be as pristine as the tabloids had made it out to be, Whitaker ran an interview with Diana’s uncle, declaring—inaccurately, it appears—that she was a virgin. When the
Mirror
ran a sensational article claiming Diana had spent the night on a train with Charles, Whitaker ran a story refuting it. “I just didn’t want this romance to go wrong,” Whitaker said. “I wanted her to marry him because I thought it would be good for everyone.”

One day Whitaker advised Diana to be less forthcoming with reporters. “Look, Diana, if you go on talking to the press as much as you have done lately you can only damage any chance you might have of marrying Charles,” he told her. Other would-be Princesses had been dropped by the Prince for talking too much. “It is not liked by the Royal Family and I urge you to stop. There will be times when I will ask you a question to which I need an answer desperately. I am telling you now, don’t answer me. I know I am cutting my own throat, but I believe that marrying Prince Charles is very much more important than me writing another exclusive.” After that, all of Diana’s conversations with
reporters were off the record. “She was a brilliant operator,” said Whitaker.

Whitaker wrote a four-part series on Diana for the
Star,
urging Charles to marry her. “I took a decision, and I think some of my colleagues did, that she was a pretty suitable person to become the Princess of Wales.” The
Star’s
circulation shot up and the other tabloids followed. Diana became a superstar.

“To DI For!” headlines declared.

“Charles: Don’t Dither!” one headline demanded.

“She’s 19 and a perfect English Rose,” declared the
Sun.

“Divine,” announced the
Mirror.

“There was to be no turning back for the Prince from now on,” Whitaker noted. “The great British public would have lynched him if their beloved Diana had been hurt in any way. She had grown more popular than he by now.”

Indeed, the Royal Family saw Diana’s popularity as its possible salvation. The press and public were so uninterested in un-charismatic Windsors that the Royal Family—which has little real function other than one of public relations—was in danger of becoming obsolete. Prince Charles never much liked the media—he called reporters “gutter rats” and “bloody animals”—but he knew the Royal Family needed the good press that Diana would bring. “You know, the time we all have to worry is when you don’t write about me or want to take photographs,” he once said to a royal reporter. “Then there would be no great point in us being around.” The duty-bound Prince agreed to marry the smitten teenager that the people loved—even if he didn’t. The marriage was little more than a worldwide publicity stunt, but the romance of it temporarily silenced even the most cynical journalists. “Let’s talk about the size of Di’s feet,” Tom Brokaw said to a colleague during a commercial break of the broadcast of the royal wedding. “I mean, she’s got gunboats down there.” But even Brokaw seemed moved by the wedding kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, although it, too, was fake.

“Give her a kiss,” Prince Andrew urged Charles.

“I’m not getting into that caper,” Charles snapped.

“Oh, go on, give her a kiss.”

Charles turned to his mother. “May I?”

The queen consented and the fairy tale was complete. For a while, everyone—the press, the public, the palace—was happy to believe in the fairy tale. Diana, however, grew increasingly unhappy about the disparity between the public facade and her private unhappiness. “The fairy tale was killing me,” she said, so she decided, “I’m going to kill the fairy tale.”

Diana, like many celebrities, lived through her public image. While she did resent the constant intrusion of her privacy, she also depended on the press attention. “She got her emotional sustenance from the newspapers,” said biographer Andrew Morton. “She really defined herself in their terms. If they were nice to her she felt good.”

Diana, photogenic and charismatic, understood the media and understood the power of images. She courted the media brilliantly. When the couple went on outings, royal handlers were reduced to pleading with photographers surrounding Diana to take a few shots of Charles. At a speech in Australia, Diana once upstaged her husband by merely crossing her legs. The photographers, eager to get a shot of a royal thigh, all rushed to the side of the stage where Diana was sitting, nearly toppling the platform where Charles was speaking. Charles started getting jealous of Diana’s good press. He accused Diana of being an exhibitionist, acting out her own celebrity fantasies when she danced onstage for his birthday.