Sex with the Queen (61 page)

The story was the sensation of the moment and made the newspapers. Philip Dunne received a call from Buckingham Palace instructing him to stop seeing the Princess of Wales. With journalists hunting him down like a pack of ravenous wolves, he went into hiding.

Having learned her lesson with Dunne, Diana was far more discreet with her next lover, David Waterhouse. A distant cousin of hers, Waterhouse was tall, dark, and handsome, and a grand-son of the duke of Marlborough. He never spoke about the rela-tionship, and little is known about it.

In the summer of 1989 Diana reconnected with a man she had flirted with as a teenager, car dealer James Gilbey, tall, handsome, and muscular. Diana visited him in his apartment building while members of the press waited in the street counting the hours until she reappeared. With time she became reckless.

One morning the police stopped her for speeding at 6:45 a.m.

coming back to the palace from Gilbey’s apartment. Trying to keep a straight face, the palace spokesperson asserted that the princess had, in fact, been going for an early morning swim.

When the story broke, a red-faced Gilbey claimed they had been playing bridge, just the two of them—but bridge requires at least three players. Unwisely, Diana had phone sex with Gilbey on a cell phone call in December of that year in which he called her Squidgey, and Diana, who had stopped sleeping with her hus-band, admitted her fear of getting pregnant.

The tabloid the
Sun
was given a copy of the cell phone record-ing, and a reporter accosted Gilbey about his voice being on it.

He blanched and started to shake, confirming the reporter’s sus-picions. When Gilbey told Diana, she dumped him as too hot to handle for her public image. The tabloid kept the recording in a safe for three years before releasing it. When it was released in d i a n a , p r i n c e s s o f m a n y l o v e r s 2 8 1

August 1992, the newspaper carefully edited out segments of the conversation in which the lovers apparently had phone sex.

As embarrassed as Diana was about the recording, she was de-lighted when, in January 1993, an equally damning recording of a cell phone conversation between Charles and Camilla was re-leased. In the recording the Prince of Wales expressed the desire to be reincarnated in his next life as Camilla’s tampon. Surely that was worse than phone sex and made the Squidgey tapes look positively boring in comparison.

Serving in the Gulf War in 1991, James Hewitt received Di-ana’s impassioned letters accompanied by presents. But an old girlfriend of Hewitt’s, jealous of his passion for Diana, con-tacted the press. Newspaper reporters swooped down like vul-tures on the Princess of Wales for sending the army captain gifts and steamy missives.

An adulterous love affair, like mold, grows in dark and humid places. Confronted with fresh air and the clear light of day, it of-ten shrinks back into nothingness. Hewitt’s affair with Diana was over. He was drummed out of the army for having failed his ex-ams by 1 percent, and, worst of all, invitations to parties stopped coming. When Hewitt’s story
Princess in Love
was published in 1994, he became public enemy number one in Britain, the quintessential cad. To kiss was fine, but to kiss and tell was un-forgivable. “Sometimes it seems that serial killers get a better press,” he lamented, as he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars for his titillating revelations.15

When Hewitt’s book first came out in 1994, Diana denied their love affair. But by then she was having her own problems with the press. In 1992, the same year she and Prince Charles of-ficially separated, she began seeing married Islamic art dealer Oliver Hoare. The affair sometimes raced, sometimes limped, until 1994. At the start of her affair with Hoare, Diana dis-pensed with her personal protection—a move that certainly con-tributed to her accidental death in 1997—in order to enjoy her romantic adventures unencumbered by detectives watching her every move.

At forty-seven Hoare was Diana’s type—handsome with melt-2 8 2

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

ing dark eyes, flirtatious, and suave. She often had sex with Hoare at the home of her best friend, Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador to the United Kingdom, and at the home of restaurateur Mara Berni. Sometimes she smuggled him into the Kensington Palace compound hidden in the trunk of her car. Diana would park in the courtyard next to her own, which happened to be owned by Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret; there Hoare would climb out of the trunk and sneak into the rear entrance of Diana’s apartment. Peering through the lace curtains of her drawing room, Princess Mar-garet was not amused.

Hoare’s chauffeur reported that Diana would call Hoare up to twenty times a day while he was driving around London. “If she only called five or six times, we thought of it as a quiet day,”

the chauffeur reported. “The sheer number of calls she made used to get Mr. Hoare down. Whenever his wife was in the car, he’d carefully pull the plug out just a fraction to break the con-nection.”16 Unable to reach him, Diana would become frantic and start calling him at his home.

Anonymous telephone calls began in September 1992 and continued until October 1993, when Hoare’s wife, Diane, asked the police to trace the calls. In January 1994 the police tracked the anonymous phone calls to Kensington Palace and Diana’s cell phone.

According to the police report, “Mr. Hoare believes that the calls are being made by Princess Diana.”17 Hoare followed the police advice and, next time a call came, called Diana by name.

She began to cry and said, “Yes, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”18 But a few days later the calls started again, this time traced to phone booths in the vicinity of Ken-sington Palace. Still, he did not dump his possessive lover. In March 1994 a photographer caught them driving into Kensing-ton Palace. By August 1994 the January police report leaked to the press, who had a field day.

Diana’s obsession with Hoare did not preclude other lovers.

She started working out regularly at the Harbour Club where her objective was not only keeping her body toned and trim. “She was d i a n a , p r i n c e s s o f m a n y l o v e r s 2 8 3

definitely on the lookout for men . . . ,” said a former palace adviser. “The fact that they were in shorts and vests left little to the imagination. If she saw someone she liked, she’d go right up to him, introduce herself, and ask him when he was going to ask her for coffee. She met many, many men there and had several flings. Believe me, Diana had more men than anyone will ever be able to figure out.”19 One of her Harbour Club conquests was Christopher Whalley, a tall, muscular property developer she saw for several years until shortly before her death in 1997.

In 1994 Diana met American billionaire businessman Teddy Forstmann, who flew her to the United States to wine and dine her and play tennis. Forstmann remained a friend of Diana’s until her death, though details of the relationship are unclear.

Another of her conquests was Will Carling, captain of the English rugby team. Carling was easygoing, confident, and ath-letic. He was also very married. Tabloids reported that the princess was enjoying secret trysts with Carling at Kensington Palace. Speaking to the press, Julia Carling insisted that her marriage was strong “however much someone is trying to destroy what you have. This has happened to [Diana] before, and you hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does.”20

Carling promised his wife never to see Diana again. “If I had a sexual relationship with her,” he remarked, “I wouldn’t say I had.”21 Considering that the press had countless photographs of Carling entering and leaving Kensington Palace for late-night visits with Diana, he didn’t have to say a word. “She struck me as an incredibly lonely person,” he later said.22

The press tore Diana to shreds for having an affair with yet another married man. “Is Will Carling merely another trophy for a bored, manipulative and selfish princess?” asked
Today
. The
Sun
called her a home wrecker. The
Daily Express
asked, “Is no mar-riage and no man safe from the wife of the heir to the throne?”23

Soon after the unfavorable coverage, Diana dumped Carling.

She had not been in love with him and felt she was paying a high price for merely having a bit of fun. “Why can’t they leave me alone?” she wailed, the innocent victim of an evil press.24

Why so many affairs? Diana’s fitness counselor, Carolan 2 8 4

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

Brown, explained, “She was the sort of person who didn’t like being out of a relationship. She didn’t like being on her own be-cause she needed constant reassurance that she was loved. That was her ultimate dream—to find the perfect husband. Have more children and settle down. She was looking for the right man.”25

Diana’s public adventure with telephone harassment resulted in even greater rumblings about her precarious mental state.

“Friends, on my husband’s side, were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort,” she said.26
Sun
photographer Ken Lennox agreed: “The courtiers were saying she was a mad woman, they were putting out stories at dinner parties that she was a mad woman.”27

To vindicate herself in the eyes of the world, to present her-self as a sane woman victimized by a cruel palace, in 1992 Diana authorized Andrew Morton to write a book about her travails.
Di-
ana, Her True Story
was supposedly the product of interviews with Diana’s friends who spoke with the author about the princess’s atrocious treatment by the royal family. In fact, Diana herself delivered audiotapes to Morton, tapes which surfaced after her death.

In November 1995, bolder than ever, Diana agreed to a tele-vision interview with journalist Martin Bashir. She intended to vilify Charles and Camilla in the public eye and draw admiration from the public for her silent suffering. The press lambasted her performance, but according to surveys, Diana achieved her goal of winning public sympathy among her audience of fifteen mil-lion Britons, and tens of millions of viewers around the world.

Treated so despicably by her philandering husband, Diana was forgiven for her love affair with James Hewitt.