Sex with the Queen (62 page)

But soon after the interview aired, Diana visited Argentina and was met by headlines such as “The adulteress Di arrives on a mission of charity” and “Ladies look after your husbands: the se-ducer Lady Di Arrives Today.”28

After finally obtaining a divorce from Charles in August 1996, Diana remained in the headlines more than ever. She fell in love with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon devoted to his work. Khan was not her usual type. Highly intelligent but 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 5

somewhat rumpled, he was no tall, dark, and scintillating swain to sweep the glamorous Diana off her feet. Moreover, he hated publicity.

Costumed as a Pakistani woman in a traditional ankle-length dress over flowing trousers, a silken shawl covering her hair, Di-ana visited Pakistan. She helped publicize Khan’s hospital and watched him perform open heart surgery. Yet the saintly martyr, who had so often had herself photographed oozing compassion by the side of a dying person, took to berating Khan for spend-ing too much time operating on sick patients at his hospital and not enough time with her. When visiting her in Kensington Palace, Khan would sometimes call his family in Pakistan. After several minutes, Diana, impatient and aching to be the focus of his attention, would distract him by turning up her music or dancing in front of him.

Trying to force Khan’s hand, Diana leaked stories about their romance to the press in November 1996. The surgeon was livid.

Moreover, the same problems kept cropping up that she had had with her husband and her many lovers. Khan refused to be at the princess’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day. “He saves so many lives,” Diana moaned to a friend. “He makes such a differ-ence in people’s lives. It’s wonderful. But he has so little time for me. It’s become a problem. We’re always arguing over it. He puts his work before me. If he really loved me, he’d put me first.”29

Khan, unable to take many things about Diana, broke up with her in June 1997. The princess, once again rejected and aban-doned, was devastated. She had been willing to convert to Islam and move to Pakistan to marry him. “No one wants me,” she opined to a former adviser. “I come with too much baggage. Why can’t I find a nice guy who loves me and wants me to love him?”30

But within days of losing Hasnat Khan, Diana finally found a man who
could
devote twenty-four hours a day to making her feel loved, another Muslim who would help her embarrass the stodgy Church of England royal family. A man with no job, a playboy living the life of a prince. He had much in common with Diana.

Both suffered from borderline personality disorder—they teetered precariously on the edge of life even as their periodic 2 8 6

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brilliance won them the admiration of many. Both were narcis-sistic, volatile, and self-destructive. The name of her new lover was Dodi Fayed.

A friend of Diana’s in London recalled, “I didn’t think he was good-looking. But he was nicely dressed, wore lovely cashmere, nice shoes, very soigné. And he smelt nice. He loved to laugh.”31

At five foot nine, Dodi was two inches shorter than Diana and at forty-one, five years older. Charming, fun-loving Dodi was a spoiled boy who had never grown up and felt no shame at accept-ing a $100,000-a-month allowance from his aging father. As insecure as Diana, Dodi was outrageously generous to friends and girlfriends and went out of his way to impress, often sub-stantially overspending his $100,000 monthly allowance. His distraught father sometimes refused to pay the balances, leaving Dodi to be sued by American Express for $106,000. But despite his generosity, Dodi couldn’t keep a girlfriend for very long; he was always looking for a woman who was prettier or more famous than his current one. Diana, Princess of Wales, was the big fish.

For no other woman on earth combined her beauty and fame.

When he met Diana, Dodi was engaged to a model named Kelly Fisher. After flirting with Diana on his father’s yacht in July 1997, he would sneak off and make love to his fiancée, who was waiting for him on another yacht, according to Fisher, who at the time had no idea he was coming fresh from the embraces of Princess Diana. When journalists got wind of Diana’s latest love affair, they were flabbergasted by her choice. On August 18

one paper wrote that Dodi was “so cynical, shallow and spoilt you feel nostalgic for James Hewitt.”32

With regards to Diana’s dating Dodi, Charles told a reporter,

“I’m happy if she’s happy.”33

But Diana was not happy. No amount of food, or sex, or fame, or shopping could ever fill the gaping wound in her psyche for very long. A good friend of Diana’s who spoke with her the day she died came away from the conversation with the distinct impression Diana was eager to dump Dodi, even as he was eager to propose.

It was not only with her lovers that Diana had problems.

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 7

Throughout the 1990s Diana grew increasingly suspicious of her friends and staff to the point of paranoia. She dropped most of her friends one by one, believing they had leaked stories about her to the press or had somehow profited from her friendship.

She never confronted them about her suspicions and simply re-fused ever to talk to them again. Many women expressed shock that their good friend Princess Diana had cut them dead with no explanation.

Palace employees soon learned that working for Diana in-volved looking into a pair of smiling blue eyes and feeling a stiletto sink into their backs. According to her private secretary of eight years, Patrick Jephson, Diana was vindictive, paranoid, manipulative, and cruel. She often threw important memos in the trash and claimed she had never seen them. Her staff soon learned to make copies of all memos, noting down the date and time they were placed on her desk. She frequently took sudden irrational dislikes to loyal employees and refused to speak to them until they quit in frustration.

By early 1996 she was sending macabre messages to her em-ployees’ pagers, messages claiming knowledge of their disloyalty to her and of their supposed extramarital love affairs. When ac-cused of sending the messages, the princess denied it vehe-mently, her blue eyes wide and innocent. Buckingham Palace, acutely aware of Diana’s nasty tricks on her employees, often smoothed the path for them to find other positions by giving them glowing recommendations.

If Diana became increasingly unhinged over time, it was not because she suffered all the tribulations of earlier crown princesses; we could hardly call her alone and impoverished at a foreign court. Living in her native land, surrounded by friends and family, in close and loving contact with her children, Diana received a truly royal allowance and wallowed in luxury. Yet she suffered one ancient lament of many princess brides—her hus-band didn’t love her, hadn’t wanted to marry her, rarely slept with her, and far preferred his mistress.

In her own way, Diana was heroic, even in her self-imposed victimhood. Suffering inconceivable emotional pain, Diana did 2 8 8

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not meekly go to bed and pull the covers over her head. Bristling at perceived injustice, the awkward girl who couldn’t graduate from high school rolled up her sleeves and took on formidable enemies: the royal family, the Buckingham Palace “firm,” the detested Camilla, even the entire British press when they weren’t cooper-ating with her efforts to increase her popularity or vilify her en-emies. She was defiant; at all costs she would fight for what she believed to be right. On one occasion Katharine Graham, pub-lisher of the
Washington Post,
asked Diana if she gambled. “Not with cards,” came the reply, “but with life.”34

Throughout her life, the world held a strange fascination for Diana’s body: her virginity, her pregnancies, her sexuality, her bulimia, the clothes draped on her tanned, well-toned flesh. In a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997, that body lay inert and bleeding next to the mangled corpse of Dodi Fayed, still the object of global fascination as photographers snapped away at it. She had gambled with life, and with men, and lost.

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 9

[ [ L C 1 M = 2 5 P 1 P = C O ] ]

c o n c l u s i o n

t h e p o l i t i c s o f a d u l t e r y
Titles are shadows and crowns are empty things.

— d a n ie l d e f o e

I

F o r n e a r ly n i n e h u n d r e d y e a r s — f r o m t h e d ay Q u e e n Urraca of Castile and Leon first rode into battle beside her lover Pedro Gonzalez until the last ride of Diana and Dodi—the fates of adulterous royal women have been as diverse as the women themselves. The common themes among these women were un-happy marriages and empty lives. Indeed, the seeds of a queen’s adultery were sown in negotiations for her marriage to a man unsuited in temperament and education.

“No hour of the day passes when I do not desire your death and wish that you were hanged . . . ,” the spirited Marguerite- Louise of France wrote to her husband, the somber and melan-choly grand duke Cosimo de Medici in 1680.1

“How fortunate you are, to marry where you wish!” sighed 2 9 1