Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (33 page)

At the moment I am writing this to you from Majorca, where I am on holiday with the boys. As soon as I return and you are well I would love to meet up and have some time together. The boys send you their very best wishes. Much love from me, and please let me know when we can meet.

Love, Diana

The psychiatrist gives his patient a broad smile. ‘It wasn’t every day that one of his patients received a letter from the Princess of Wales, and I guess he couldn’t hide his excitement,’ reflects Barrymore.

A few weeks later, Barrymore, fresh out of rehabilitation, receives a letter from Diana asking why he hasn’t phoned. He sends a letter back saying, ‘I didn’t want to bother you.’ The reply comes: ‘Well, bother me!’

Their first meeting is, in Barrymore’s view, ‘all very cloak and dagger’. It is arranged through courtiers: Barrymore’s agent deals with the journalist Martin Bashir, who has become something of a fixer for the Princess. It
was in his
Panorama
interview with her that she spoke of her betrayal by her husband, her bulimia, and her affair with James Hewitt. It was also in this interview that she announced her intention to be the ‘Queen of Hearts’, helping ‘other people in distress’.

The Princess stipulates that they should meet at Barrymore’s house, and that no one else should be there, not even Barrymore’s wife Cheryl. On the day itself, Bashir rings twice more, to make sure that Cheryl will not be present.

At the back of Barrymore’s mind is the idea that it is all a hoax. ‘Then in walked the Princess of Wales as large as life. Up until then, I was extremely nervous, but the moment she walked in she had this amazing ability to put you at ease.’

‘Hello,’ she says, kissing him. ‘How are you feeling?’

They sit together on a sofa and talk about Barrymore’s shows. Barrymore is impressed by how many the Princess remembers. ‘It was as if we’d known each other all our lives.’

‘So, what do I call you? Princess Diana?’

‘Just Diana. I’m not a princess any more.’

Diana looks around the room. She points at a framed photograph of Cheryl, Barrymore’s wife of twenty years.

‘Oh, is this wifey?’

‘Yes.’

Cheryl is at that moment alone at the top of the house, four floors above them.

‘I want you to know that you can come through all this – you just have to be strong.’ The Princess tells the entertainer that she really wants to be there for him.

‘It was pretty strange really, hearing that the Princess of Wales wanted to be there for me,’ he says some years later. ‘I keep asking myself
Why? Why me?
... I think she truly believed that we were both very similar in personality.’

She is right. Both are adored by the public but uncomfortable with those close to them. They have the gift of empathy, but largely with people they don’t know. They possess unstable, addictive personalities but have become popular through their capacity to appear ‘down to earth’. And they both like to retreat into the spotlight.

After several hours, the door opens. It is Cheryl, interrupting them. ‘Diana, your car is waiting.’

Diana gives Barrymore her telephone number, and leaves. He feels a huge weight lifting from his shoulders, ‘I felt I was getting advice and immense support from the highest level possible. I will always remember those eyes ... she was able to show every emotion through them.’

From then on, they talk almost every day. She sends him handwritten notes, delivered by her butler Paul Burrell, asking him to call her whenever he has a problem. It is a bad year for Barrymore: he has a nervous breakdown, his new television series is cancelled, he is readmitted to a clinic and his next television show,
Barrymore in Hollywood
, is shelved.

He begins seeing Diana at Kensington Palace. One day, she ticks him off for parking his Bentley in Princess Margaret’s parking space. He thinks of her as a counsellor. She tells him they are so alike, so unique, and nobody must ever control them again.

He starts to rebel, falling over at awards ceremonies and slurring inappropriate jokes at charity shows. Cheryl thinks of Diana as a destructive force, and blames her for mesmerising him: ‘He would often have a distant look in his eyes, almost like a religious conversion.’ He tells Diana he is gay; she urges him to come out, and he does.

Diana likes to tell him that she, Barrymore and Paul Gascoigne are the three most famous people in Britain. Within a short time, she will be dead, and Barrymore and Gascoigne ruined.

One Friday, she appears distant. He asks her what is wrong. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she says. ‘I’ve just been rushing around because I’m going off to Paris with Dodi ... Do you want to meet next Wednesday?’

That Sunday morning, she dies in a car crash. He and Cheryl go together to her funeral, even though they have split up. Inside Westminster Abbey, Cheryl tells him to adjust his suit.

‘Give it a break will you?’ he snaps.

After the funeral, he moves away from Cheryl to go and chat to the crowd.

‘It seemed the right thing to do,’ he explains.

LEARNS A LESSON FROM

Goldsmiths’ Hall, London EC2

March 3rd 1981

The engagement of HRH the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer was announced exactly a week ago. The future Princess’s first public engagement is to be a musical recital at Goldsmiths’ Hall in aid of the Royal Opera House.

The nineteen-year-old Diana is excited. She has chosen a black dress from the Emmanuels.
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‘It was just a simple dress I had hanging in the show room,’ recalls Elizabeth Emmanuel. ‘It had actually been worn once by Liza Goddard. Lady Diana asked for something off the peg, which we didn’t really do. She needed it quickly and there was no time to make a dress from scratch ... We showed it to her, she tried it on and she looked sensational.’

‘I thought it was OK because girls my age wore this dress,’ is the way Diana remembers it. ‘I hadn’t appreciated that I was now seen as a royal lady, although I’d only got a ring on my finger as opposed to two rings. Black to me was the smartest colour you could possibly have at the age of nineteen. It was a real grown-up dress.’ The dress is in stark contrast to the frumpy one she wore for her engagement photographs. One writer describes it as ‘a black, very décolleté, strapless evening gown’; another, more excitable, calls it ‘that nipple-busting, black taffeta eye-popper’.

Diana is due to attend the concert without her future husband by her side. She is nervous, but excited. Before she sets off, she appears at the door of his study. He looks at her, and drily comments that only people in mourning wear black. Diana tells him she has no other dress suitable for the occasion.

This little spat knocks her confidence. Now she fears she will prove an embarrassment to the royal family.

When her car arrives at Goldsmiths’ Hall, Diana steps out to a mass of flashing cameras. The same excitable writer describes it as ‘the greatest moment of sexual theatre since Cinderella swapped her scuffed scullery clogs for Prince Charming’s glass slippers’. Diana, already nervous, is taken aback. ‘I was quite big-chested then and they all got frightfully excited.’ Elizabeth Emmanuel is similarly surprised. ‘We were overwhelmed by the impact it made when she stepped out of the limo, revealing all that cleavage. It knocked the Budget off the front page of every newspaper.’ Even those without any great interest in current affairs take an interest in the dress. Leafing through
The Times
the next morning, the ancient society belle Lady Diana Cooper remarks to a friend, ‘Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king?’ An aide to Princess Grace of Monaco recalls, less jovially, ‘Her breasts were on display and she was quite a wreck.’

As the evening progresses, Diana grows even more unsure of herself. ‘It was an horrendous occasion. I didn’t know whether to go out of the door first. I didn’t know whether your handbag should be in your left hand or your right hand. I was terrified really – at the time everything was all over the place.’

A reception at Buckingham Palace follows. The fifty-two-year-old Princess Grace, the object of this sort of attention back in the 1950s, notices Diana’s discomfort, and suggests they retire to the ladies’ room for a little chat together. Diana tells Princess Grace that she is worried her dress is unbecoming. It is, she explains, two sizes too small. Her experience tonight has suddenly made her realise how unbearable it will be to have hundreds of people always looking at her. She sees stretching ahead of her a life without any form of privacy. She feels isolated, and fears for the future. What should she do? She bursts into tears.

Princess Grace puts her arms around her and pats her on the shoulder. She cups her cheeks in her hands and jokes, gently, ‘Don’t worry, dear. You’ll see – it’ll only get worse.’

The two women return to the throng, there to mingle and be assessed. ‘I remember meeting Princess Grace and how wonderful and serene she was,’ Diana later tells her confidant Andrew Morton. ‘But there was troubled water under her, I saw that.’

Eighteen months later, Princess Grace is killed after her car fails to take a sharp corner on the serpentine D37 outside Monaco. Though the Prince of Wales sees no reason why Diana should attend the funeral, she is adamant that she should go. It will be the first time she has officially represented the royal family on her own.

By now, she has grown used to the hullabaloo surrounding her every appearance, and in some way appears to feed off it. For this occasion, she chooses to wear another black dress, far more demure, with a diamond-and-pearl heart necklace and a black straw boater.

On the way to the funeral, a number of things go wrong: the car breaks down, a lift gets stuck. But Diana remains poised and unflustered throughout. At the High Requiem Mass, she takes her place between Nancy Reagan and Madame Mitterrand. Other guests include many of the crowned heads of Europe, as well as Hollywood stars like Cary Grant, but for the worldwide TV audience of 100 million and the weeping crowd of onlookers outside the cathedral, Diana is the centre of attention. She doesn’t put a foot wrong. ‘My respect for her rose a hundredfold ... She was very hassled but behaved brilliantly,’ says a fellow guest. At the reception afterwards, she speaks to Princess Caroline of Monaco about her mother. ‘We were psychically connected,’ she tells her.

At the end of a long, hot day, she flies back to Scotland. Exhausted and full of pent-up emotion, she bursts into tears. As they approach Aberdeen airport, she asks an aide, ‘Will Charles be there to meet us?’

‘We looked at her big eyes looking out of the aeroplane window in expectation,’ the aide recalls. There is just one police car waiting.

‘That means Charles isn’t coming,’ she concludes; and she is right.

IS ALMOST PERSUADED BY

Grimaldi Palace, Monaco

Winter 1961

The last film Grace Kelly made with Alfred Hitchcock was
To Catch a Thief
, back in 1955. That December, Prince Rainier of Monaco proposed to her over a pudding of pears poached in wine. ‘If you are to be at my side then you may need this,’ he said, passing her a pictorial history of the Grimaldi family. Some say he lacks the romantic touch.

But Grace Kelly was not to be put off. In April 1956, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actress became the Princess of a country roughly the size of Hyde Park with a population of 38,000, roughly the same as Crystal Lake, Illinois.
¹⁴⁸
At the same time, she picked up so many titles – twice a Duchess, once a Viscountess, eight times a Countess, four times a Marchioness and nine times a Baroness – that she instantly became the most titled woman in the world.

But Monaco has its limitations. After five years there, Princess Grace pines for her Hollywood days. Around the same time, Alfred Hitchcock convinces himself that his new movie,
Marnie
, is tailor-made for her.

He visits her at the Grimaldi Palace to discuss the matter. He has always got on well with Grace; some believe she represents his idea of the perfect woman. ‘People have quite the wrong idea about Grace,’ he says. ‘They think she is a cold fish. Remote, like Alcatraz. But she has sex appeal, believe me. It is ice that will burn your hands, and that is always surprising, and exciting too.’ When working together, their relationship was
always chummy rather than romantic, and revolved around a shared sense of humour. Shooting
Dial M for Murder
, for instance, they had a running joke in which they would drop the first letter from the names of various stars: hence, Rank Sinatra, Lark Gable, Ickey Rooney and Reer Garson.

Is he in love with her? John Michael Hayes, the screenwriter of
Rear Window
, certainly thinks so. ‘He would have used Grace in the next ten pictures he made. I would say that all the actresses he cast subsequently were attempts to retrieve the image and feeling that Hitch carried around so reverentially about Grace.’

Their lunch goes well. Hitchcock does not mention a script. ‘I am too much of a gentleman to mention work to a Princess. That would be most uncouth. But I waited and finally she came to me.’ Instead, he posts the new novel
Marnie
, by Winston Graham, to her agents in New York (‘She always kept her agents, you know’), and they pass it on to her. She is instantly tempted, even though the book’s subject-matter is hardly fit for a Princess, even of Monaco: it is the tale of a woman who has been left a frigid kleptomaniac by a childhood trauma involving the rape of her prostitute mother.

Prince Rainier considers the movies vulgar, and has good reason to distrust actors: William Holden, Ray Milland, Clark Gable, David Niven and Gary Cooper are just a few of Grace’s many former lovers.
¹⁴⁹
But he is moved by a letter from his mother-in-law, who says Grace hasn’t been really happy since she stopped making films. Later that day, Rainier says to one of his aides, ‘Well, she’s doing a movie. God help us all, that’s all I can say, when the news gets out. Run for cover, my boy, run for cover!’