DIANA’S DANGEROUS LIAISON
Passionate. Destabilising. And ending in humiliation when she besieged him and his wife with hundreds of nuisance calls. Now, after the death of society art dealer (and Charles’s friend) Oliver Hoare, the full story can finally be told about...
oF ALL the men drawn into the vortex of Princess Diana’s life, he was one of the few to emerge with any credit. He was also the unlikeliest of suitors — a close friend of Prince Charles.
Too well-bred to ever allow his emotions to go on public display, Oliver Hoare weathered the endless speculation about his affair with the Princess of Wales with a wearied insouciance, keeping both his dignity and his silence.
Diana never publicly acknowledged her love for Hoare as she did for Cavalry officer James Hewitt, or allowed her friends to talk of him as they did subsequently of other men friends such as Hasnat Khan or Dodi Fayed.
But then her relationship with the married art dealer was by some distance the most dangerous, the most destabilising and the most humiliating of her life. It was also the most passionate.
Almost 25 years have passed since revelations about the couple exploded into the public consciousness after Diana was accused of bombarding the Hoare family home with more than 300 nuisance telephone calls.
Yet, throughout that near quarter of a century, Hoare said nothing. Now with his death at 73, after confronting illness with both bravery and dark humour, the Old Etonian has ensured what he always vowed — that he would take the secrets of the affair to his grave — has come to pass.
Diana’s infatuation with the dashing fatherof-three was so intense, so all-consuming that for a brief moment she considered leaving Charles for him.
Indeed, he was the only man she truly ever thought of giving up everything for. At the height of her unhappiness with Charles, the address where Hoare lived in Chelsea, Tregunter Road, was the code word she and her sister-inlaw the Duchess of York devised to describe their clandestine plans to abandon their husbands and their royal lives.
‘Tregunter Road was our code for escape,’ she once told me, ‘it meant our leap for freedom.’ By then, however, her love for Hoare had subsided, but her wish for a life outside the Royal Family had not.
It has always been said that Diana lost her nerve for that double break-out with Fergie from behind palace walls. And that when Fergie’s split from Prince Andrew was announced, the princess — whose marital unhappiness was the greater of the two women — quietly changed her mind.
That, though, was only half the story. Many believed that if push had come to shove, Hoare himself would anyway not have walked out on his own family. He once ruefully quipped that however rich he could possibly become, he would ‘never be rich enough to look after a princess’.
It was also significant that while Diana’s domestic life was joyless, his was happy, if chaotic. His French-born wife Diane had displayed great reserves of emotional resilience to steer her family through the crisis wrought by the princess’s unquenchable ardour for her husband.
Hoare’s continuing devotion to Diane and for his daughter and two sons were also key factors.
And unlike others over whom Diana cast a shadow, Oliver handled it so much better — and infinitely more stylishly.
Remarkably, he remained a friend of the Prince of Wales, who for many years spent part of each summer at the Hoares’ French retreat in rural Provence, sometimes with Camilla. He had also been one of the few insiders who had known about the prince’s relationship with the former Mrs Parker Bowles.
In part, their friendship survived thanks to his closeness to the family of the prince’s in-laws. Businessman Simon Elliot, who is married to the Duchess of Cornwall’s sister Annabel, was one of his closest confidants.
But it also involved their shared fascination for all things Islam, a curiosity for antiquity and a deeper regard for the mysticism of life and the spiritual.
‘Oliver admired the prince hugely,’ says an old friend of Hoare. ‘He never stopped liking him even though his involvement with Diana at the time meant they would no longer see one another. He always saw Charles as a force for good in the country, often misunderstood but a man with decent values.’
So it was perhaps inevitable that after Diana’s death in 1997 the two men should rekindle their friendship and take up where they had left off many years before.
While it served to illustrate a uniquely upper-class view of marital infidelity, it also demonstrated the prince’s remarkable capacity for forgiveness.
When he had first learned of the affair Charles had been incredulous that someone seemingly as erudite and well-read as Oliver could have anything in common with Diana, whom he did not consider his intellectual equal.
But for Diana, he would be remembered as one of the most influential figures in the art world. His expertise made him quite possibly Britain’s foremost authority on Islamic art in which he made and lost a fortune.
Although his success in the saleroom brought him plenty of attention in London art salons, it was through his wife that Hoare started socialising with the royals.
Oil heiress Diane, whose aristocratic mother Baroness Louise de Waldner was a friend of the Queen Mother, was close enough for the couple to be guests at a Windsor Castle house party during Royal Ascot in 1985.
Princess Diana, then just 24, was immediately attracted to the darkly handsome Hoare. Pictures at the time showed them smiling. She later admitted she had felt a little shy when they were introduced and had blushed when they shook hands.
It was another four years before their affair began.
Hoare was 16 years her senior and good looking, and some of her friends suggest his sophisticated manner satisfied her need for a father figure rather than a lover.
Others believe that for her there was an extra frisson of satisfaction in the relationship because he was a close friend of Charles.
And because he was also a friend of Camilla it meant he could keep the princess up to date about her rival. With the Waleses’ marriage moving into a state of open warfare, Hoare and his wife began to act as intermediaries.
Diana questioned Oliver constantly, trying to understand what her husband saw in the woman she called ‘the Rottweiler’. Soon he was more than a mere intermediary. Years later it was claimed that Diana smuggled him into Kensington Palace in the boot of her car and that security staff once found him half naked smoking a cigar behind a potted bay tree when a fire alarm went off in the middle of the night.
For his part Oliver said the stories were amusing, but untrue.
Undoubtedly, Diana was infatuated with him, and told her confidante and surrogate mother figure Lady Bowker, a diplomat’s widow, that she ‘daydreamed of living in Italy with the handsome Hoare’.
But this was to turn into the princess’s most dangerous liaison in which even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, then Sir Paul Condon, became involved.
For when Hoare tried to end the relationship, a number of silent ‘nuisance’ phone calls were made to the Hoares’ Chelsea home. These particularly upset his wife, who called in the police.
Enquiries were initiated and some of the calls were traced to the princess’s private line in Kensington Palace, some to mobile phones she used, and others to telephone boxes in the Kensington
‘I told her it would be fun, but end in a lot of pain for both of us’ The nuisance calls were from Diana’s phone
As he vowed, he never spoke about the affair
area. Over several months she was accused of bombarding the Hoares’ home with up to 300 anonymous calls. Sometimes Hoare answered, sometimes his wife, but each time the caller said nothing and just hung up.
At their peak, it was claimed, there were as many as 20 calls a week. On one occasion three came within the space of nine minutes.
In January 1994, a tap was finally placed on the line by Kensington police which could track the source of the mystery calls.
Then, suddenly the Commissioner announced the enquiries had been ended ‘at Mr Hoare’s request’.
It was clear that some, but not necessarily all, of the silent calls had been made by the princess herself.
The revelations were hugely damaging to Diana’s reputation, but in fact the affair which began in 1989 was already over when news of the phone calls scandal broke some four years later.
As the crisis unfolded, Hoare quietly moved out of the family home. But he returned when the dust settled and he and his marriage to Diane survived.
It had already survived an earlier ‘amoureuse’, as he once put it. This was with Ayesha Nadir, the twice-divorced wife of the Cypriot fugitive Asil Nadir who infamously fled Britain when his company Polly Peck went bust in 1991 leaving debts of £1.3bn. Their affair lasted four years.
‘He would never have left Diane, despite everything he adored her,’ says a friend. ‘She was his rock. But it was his great fortune that she was French and therefore much more understanding. No Englishwoman would have stomached his infidelities.’
Blessed with good looks, quick wit and a warm and throaty laugh, he had always been attractive to women.
Born in 1945, Hoare was distantly related to the City banking and broking family of the same name. His father Reginald, descended from Norfolk landowning stock, was a civil servant in the War Office and his mother Irina was a member of the Kroupensky family who had come to Britain from Moravia, a province of the Czech Republic.
His father died when he was 18 and it was the exotic and muchtravelled Irina — according to family legend she worked for MI6 — who fired his interest in antiquity.
After Eton, where a contemporary was the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes who recalled his enthusiasm for boxing, he moved to the Sorbonne in Paris where he revelled in the artistic world.
However, a meeting with a woman was to set him on the direction of his life. Hamoush Azodi-Bowler, a vastly rich Iranian princess took him under her wing, coyly referring to him as ‘my protégé’.
Hoare was in his early 20s while Hamoush was a couple of decades older, but she encouraged his interest in Islamic art and took him to Tehran, where he learned to read Arabic and Persian script. ‘He was very studious, very serious,’ she later recalled. ‘Everybody loved him, he played the guitar and sang beautifully.’
It was in Iran that Hoare first started collecting art, beginning with kilims, thin Persian carpets, and ancient pots. Back in London and working for Christie’s, he moved in bohemian circles becoming friends with the ballet star Rudolf Nuryev, actor Terence Stamp and travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
He took up aikido with Mark Shand, brother of the Duchess of Cornwall, and the pair had lessons with the Hollywood actor Steven Seagal. In recent times the actor Rupert Everett had become a close friend.
Women adored him. ‘Many wanted to have affairs with him,’ recalled a friend. But he was no mere dilettante.
With his own business established, he was keen to marry somebody he could look up to. That someone was Diane Waldner. They met at a dinner party in London in 1974 and he pursued her avidly. They married two years later.
Armed with an encyclopaedic knowledge, he travelled the world looking for and purchasing beautiful objects.
For eight years he went on a £1.7 billion shopping spree for the late Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar, the world’s biggest art collector, buying up treasures for the Gulf state’s Museum of Islamic Art.
That relationship came to an end when the Sheikh was arrested and accused of embezzling millions of pounds from Qatar using hugely inflated invoices. Some of the invoices were alleged to have been supplied by Hoare.
Although the case fizzled out, Hoare later lambasted the Qatar authorities for destroying Sheikh Saud’s reputation and for ‘throwing away the cultural future of their country.’
In recent years he held two exhibitions entitled Every Object Tells A Story, showcasing his extraordinary collection of treasures, from the bone of a Dodo to a walking stick he claimed to be ‘made of unicorn horn’ and silver skull pomander — a perforated container to hold perfume — owned by King James II.
This year he was also working on ‘at least six books’ about his life and the treasures he felt compelled to seek out. One concerned his triumph in engineering an exchange in 1994 between the Iranian government and the Houghton Family Trust in Britain of a priceless illuminated Persian manuscript with a painting by the Dutch abstract artist Willem de Kooning.
Hoare’s interests ranged far and wide. He was drawn to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, but also enjoyed lavish parties and boxing.
We met for the last time a few weeks ago. Although he had been ill for some time, he was determined to push ahead with his many projects. Over lunch of caviar and white wine (nothing else) he told me for the first and only time something of his affair with Diana.
Of course he regretted the hurt, especially to Diane. To the princess, he told me, he had said this: ‘I told her before anything had happened it would end in a lot of pain for us both but it would be a lot of fun along the way…’