It’s not the secrets of her sex life that’ll hurt the boys – it’s another emotional Exocet...
DON’T SHOW DIANA LOVE TAPES ON TV PLEADS EARL
DIANA left a hole in my heart when she died. Of course, time has healed it over but watching Diana: In Her Own Words allowed grief I had thought long gone to ambush me again. For here on screen was the Princess as I knew her, a golden thread that had run through 12 years of my working life as a charity organiser.
Based around tapes made by her voice coach, Peter Settelen, the 90-minute film to be shown on Channel 4 tonight is curious but wholly compelling. In front of us, we see Diana living, breathing once again, describing some of the most emotionally painful aspects of her life: her days at school, her love life, her marriage to Prince Charles and its eventual sad collapse.
Yes, it has been controversial. Her brother, Earl Spencer, has pleaded with Channel 4 not to broadcast the tapes, describing them in this newspaper as a betrayal of her memory. Many, too, have asked how fair it is that Wil- liam and Harry should hear their mother’s candid discussion of her sex life with their father, or see it broadcast to the nation.
And is it not unsettling that she should disclose such things to a professional voice coach, rather than, say, a therapist?
Yet it is not the revelations about their parents’ love life that will hurt William and Harry most. Instead, it is the moment, about a third of the way through the programme, when Diana laughs as William fiddles with the camera that will be unbearable.
For a few seconds – as he makes a brief appearance in the room – you see mother, and hear the offcamera William, shrieking with laughter together. It’s how I remember her. Head thrown back, laughing her head off.
Those few precious seconds of shared laughter will remind her sons more viscerally of what they lost on that terrible day two decades ago than anything else in this programme.
It’s the emotional Exocet. Everything else is history, in my view, information of national record, but that intimate moment should not have been shared with the world. It made me feel grubby intruding, as I and millions of others will have, into a moment that should have belonged to William and Harry alone.
Such intrusion aside, watching it reminded me powerfully of the Diana I knew when we first met, the young woman who had just given birth to William. Her selfconscious awkwardness of that time, as she tried to tackle the overwhelming seriousness of her role, is here on film, along with her sense of fun. And yes, a bit of that flirting too. For me there is nothing in the programme that is grossly intrusive or ghoulish – but for that one moment of laughter, a moment of private bonding between mother and son which has now been rawly exposed.
The film shows Diana emerging, butterfly like, from the shy ingenue to the world superstar she became.
As she giggles her way through the text of a speech, you can see her potential, see her understanding what she could achieve for others and perhaps, for herself.
Would Diana have wanted this film to be shown? That is impossible to answer.
For she was the most mercurial of people who could change her mind three times before teatime. So I cannot claim to know but I suspect that she would have done, were it not for the impact on her sons.
The result is the authentic Diana. She is saying something that she wanted people to hear and indeed that I myself heard her say not once, but several times.
The idea – notwithstanding the fact that she had always been a fully paid-up member of the aristocratic establishment – of being an outsider, someone who identified with people rejected by society, someone who was able to give love to those who needed it most, was something she often articulated.
However, she did have form for speaking out about the Royal Family then regretting it. I organised an event which she attended a couple of days before Andrew Morton’s book [Diana: Her True Story
I felt grubby intruding into their moment of bonding...
– In Her Own Words] was due to be published. Diana was not her usual self, she was jumpy and agitated, knowing as she did what was about to hit the fan. It was clear that she couldn’t concentrate on a lot of ladies swigging champagne.
But then she met a woman – in a side room, away from cameras – who had had 13 miscarriages. The woman started to tell Diana her story but then fell apart. Diana gathered her up, hugged and comforted her in that unique way of hers. Many of us struggle to know what to say to someone who is hurting. Diana never did.
The Morton book was a bombshell, laying bare the casual indifference and cruelty with which she had been treated. And it started a pattern of confiding desperate secrets to the most random outsiders. For in truth, she learned to trust strangers more than those around her.
What some may find inexplicable, even astonishing in this documentary, is the degree to which Diana unburdened herself without any apparent hesitation, providing explosive information to someone she hardly knew. This is not out of character, nor is it as reckless as it first appears.
There were some people who she wrote to on an almost weekly basis – and they were not the people you might expect. There were the people she’d met whilst they were in hospital, people who had been through trauma or bereavement, people who had been rejected by society. As she says at the beginning of the programme: ‘I respected their honesty.’
She also trusted them completely. From those few letters that have now been discovered, it is clear that their recipients never revealed her secrets. Given the febrile tensions at court, she trusted such people in a way she could not trust those around her. It would not surprise me one bit if, some years from now, a new hoard of letters from Diana, containing equally intimate confidences, were found among the personal possessions of someone very ordinary after their death.
Diana was a prolific and accomplished letter writer. By turns funny, perceptive, concerned and gossipy, her letters in that bold hand on blue notepaper or postcards were a treat to receive and read.
By the early 90s, Diana was utterly magnificent. She discovered that simply by doing her duty – something that was very important to her – and by doing her job well, she could make the rest of the Royal Family look as shabby as they deserved to be seen. The Jonathan Dimbleby interview with Prince Charles in 1994 unfortunately lit a fuse that led inexorably to her explosive Panorama interview. She told no one about it and fell out with many close friends when they discovered what she had done. It was not Diana as I prefer to remember her but then she always was the original little girl with the curl.
When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad (and it was rare) she could be horrid. There were times, for example, when she would spitefully return letters from those she had fallen out with. But painful circumstance was often to blame.
What always amazed me about Diana is articulated in the programme by Patrick Jephson, her Private Secretary. Diana would return from a packed day of events, many of them gruelling encounters, and there would be nobody to welcome her and say ‘Well done’.
For years, I used to write to Diana after every event we did together and say ‘Well done’. I con- tinued to do so when I left my job running the mother and baby charity Birthright and joined the BBC as a presenter of Tomorrow’s World, congratulating her on particular things where I thought she had excelled, but equally telling her occasionally of what could have gone better.
It was utterly genuine on my part and Diana knew it. But I was still startled when she said to me one day: ‘Don’t ever stop sending those notes, Vivienne, they mean so much to me.’ I was nobody, why should my thoughts matter?
The truth, as Patrick Jephson says in this programme, is that no one else was doing it and precious few others were listening.
Although she grew dramatically in confidence from the time I met her as a timid Sloaney teenager to the last time I saw her – striding confidently into a posse of the great and the good – she remained vulnerable to feelings of worthlessness to the end.
To see this film is to see a woman frozen forever in her 30s, a woman who did indeed ‘lead with the heart, not the head’ as she says in her own words. Snatched away all those years ago, Diana was a magnificent gift to us all.