Filthy jokes, cosy lunches, outrageous gossip – secrets of Diana’s VERY flirty friendship with George Michael
She said it was a shame he didn’t like the ladies ’You’d hear his music blaring from her room’
PRINCESS Diana was in high spirits — it was one of her ‘good days’ — when George Michael came to a halt in his swanky cabriolet outside the entrance to her apartments at Kensington Palace.
Hearing the car pull up, she rushed into the kitchen, where her chef, Darren McGrady was preparing lunch for the pair, and yelled excitedly: ‘Darren, Darren, come here!’
Darren followed ‘the boss’ into the dining room and watched her sprint across the floor to the sash window, pull it up with one swift tug and put her head outside.
‘She said, “Look, look”, and there was this soft-top, a super nice one, and I looked down and on the passenger seat in the front there were two magazines — and on the cover of each was George Michael,’ recalls Darren.
‘She said, “George Michael’s just arrived, he’s downstairs, can you believe he has ridden all the way through Kensington High Street just gazing at those images of himself on the magazines. How vain can you get!” She said it to him, too, and he just laughed. He didn’t take any offence at all.’
Lunch proceeded in a similarly exuberant vein.
‘They were great friends,’ says Darren. ‘She loved his sense of humour. She felt relaxed with him. He was like one of the girls, someone she could be comfortable and relaxed with and say anything to.
‘She would tease him, she loved teasing. He would laugh and give as much back.’
Each of them held true superstar status and it was this empathy they had for each other, their instinctive understanding of how crazy the other’s life was, that drew them to one another.
That and the way they both loved a good old gossip (and even favoured, for a time, the same bouffant Eighties hairdo). And, of course, the fact that they were both superbly good looking.
Now sadly, these two iconic figures have another thing in common: their untimely deaths, following George Michael’s sudden passing on Christmas Day aged 53.
George was gay, of course, but there has long been speculation about the nature of the pair’s relationship and how far it went. And it was gossipy George, no less, in an interview with the Huffington Post, who fuelled the flames in an interview in 2009.
‘I was invited to the Palace many, many times before I actually met with her because I was so afraid of the publicity if we did become friends.
‘And when we did meet, I think we clicked in a way that was a little bit intangible, and it probably had more to do with our upbringing than anything else. (George had a difficult relationship with his father, while Diana did not always see eye to eye with her stepmother, Raine).
‘There were certain things that happened that made it clear she was very attracted to me,’ he said. ‘There was no question.’
Asked by the interviewer whether he had considered taking things further, he replied, somewhat obliquely: ‘I knew it would have been a disastrous thing to do.’
It seems, then, that Diana reluctantly accepted George’s sexuality, and settled for a friendship.
‘It was flirtatious on both sides,’ says Darren.
Whatever did or did not go on within the confines of Kensington Palace — or KP as it is known by the royals — will never be known.
But what is clear from the account of Darren McGrady is that Diana and George enjoyed a close and often uproarious friendship for several years after meeting at a concert held on World Aids Day in 1993.
For following her separation from Prince Charles in 1992, Diana was eager to carve out a new life for herself, identifying herself firmly with the causes she believed in — one of which was raising awareness into HIV/ Aids, also close to George Michael’s heart.
And now living alone in two apartments at Kensington Palace, the Princess had a certain degree of freedom.
With Charles and his more traditional tastes out of her life, she had the dining room redecorated, with burnt orange walls, a round wooden table and cane chairs.
‘It was more of an Italian rustic style, not at all formal,’ says Darren, who joined the staff as her personal chef in 1993 and stayed with her until her death aged just 36 in 1997 following the car crash in Paris with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. By then, he had already known Diana for many years, having joined the Royal Household in 1982, working for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Diana loved having friends over for lunch, away from the spotlight.
In the evenings, Darren would prepare a low-fat meal for the Princess which would be wheeled into her sitting room on a little cart so that she could enjoy a TV dinner — the soap opera Brookside, he says, was her favourite programme.
It was a small household, just Darren, a maid and a butler.
‘We were like a family,’ he recalls. ‘But although Diana had lost her HRH title by then, we always called her Your Royal Highness, out of respect.’
Before he started coming for lunch, George was already on the Princess’s radar.
At a Kensington drinks reception in 1992, according to royal commentator Dickie Arbiter, the Princess had commented to a guest about George in the earshot of Prince Harry: ‘Isn’t it a shame he doesn’t like the ladies?’
It was around 1994, says Darren, that George became a regular visitor. ‘He used to come over quite a bit. She felt comfortable with him.
‘Some people would meet Princess Diana and they’d be bowing, curtseying and nervous, whereas with George it was like meeting his sister. He didn’t care what came out of his mouth.’
Sometimes, says Darren, George would arrive with his friends, Elton John and designer Gianni Versace, who was also to die tragically — he was shot dead outside his Miami home just a month before Diana’s death in Paris. ‘She’d have Elton and George Michael and Versace over and she would come alive when they were here.
‘She used to laugh like crazy. I think they all called her Diana. Elton was a little bit more reserved than George, he’d have his dry quips.
‘She loved catching up on all the showbusiness gossip. She loved George’s sense of humour. He was vibrant and alive and she loved his music.’
Darren, 54, could always tell when Diana, who was often rather up and down in her mood, was having a ‘good’ day. On one of these good day, she would play George Michael at full blast in her bedroom.
‘Outside apartments eight and nine at KP, where the Princess
was, there was a quadrangle and we had huge sash windows. I’d have the window open and you’d hear George Michael music blaring out of her bedroom apartment.
‘I’m sure Princess Margaret could hear it, it was blasting out. It was that or Phil Collins, she’d blast him out, too.’ On the bad days, there was no music.
‘Maybe she was having lunch in the kitchen and she would see Charles and Camilla on the news and that was always embarrassing. Or if she’d had a bad press day. There were good days and bad days. She would be down and I would get on with my work.
‘But she loved it when the boys — William and Harry — were staying. They were in the kitchen all the time. They’d come in and hide from their nanny and William would have ice cream.’ And George Michael could always be relied on to cheer her up if she’d had a bad day.
‘He would tell her jokes that were really risqué and she would share them and I would say, “Oh my gosh, Your Royal Highness”, and she would laugh even more that she had shocked me.’ Diana enjoyed the company of men. And while George was a favourite, it didn’t hurt to invite an alpha male or two over for lunch.
And so it was that a guest one day was another living legend, the American actor Clint Eastwood. Darren says he and Diana were involved in a charity project together.
‘The Princess wasn’t a great meat eater, but when she had a man to lunch she felt she had to offer meat. So when Clint Eastwood came over she said, “Let’s do rack of lamb.” I did it with a parsley sauce.
‘I have cooked for many celebrities, but he was the only person who asked to meet the chef to thank him personally.
‘I walked into the dining room and he stood up, he had on big cowboy boots.
‘He said, “That was a delicious lunch.” And I said, “Oh, did it make your day?” (The catchphrase of Dirty Harry, arguably Eastwood’s most memorable character).
‘He laughed so much and the Princess just sat there looking, as though to say, “What are you talking about?” She could be so naïve, which was one of the lovely things about her.’
Diana also met another Hollywood star during this period — Tom Cruise.
‘Tom Cruise was filming Mission Impossible,’ recalls Darren, who prepared the menus for State Banquets for the American Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Bush while he was in the employ of the Queen. ‘She said she’d been invited to go out to the studios and see the set and meet Tom Cruise.
‘She came back later that afternoon and said, “Well, that’s another one off the list, he’s too short.” Just those quips that she’d come out with, I miss those.’
Darren was devastated when she died.
‘It was awful, an awful time. Being inside KP and watching the flowers get higher and higher.
‘Going to the Chapel Royal and seeing her there.’
George Michael sent flowers, of course, and attended the funeral, clearly distraught and weeping.
‘I hadn’t seen her for a couple of years by the time she died,’ he told the Huffington Post in 2009.
‘We nearly got together on that St Tropez trip (where Diana was on holiday before the fateful trip to Paris). I was supposed to go on to the boat, and I’m quite glad I didn’t because it would have been so fresh when she died, it would have been even more upsetting.’
Diana’s death shattered many. Her loyal chef, Darren McGrady, was so upset he couldn’t bear to remain in England. He moved to America, got married and had three children, and now runs a catering company called, fittingly, Eating Royally.
He wrote a cookbook of the same name and has given all the proceeds to the Elizabeth Glaser Aids Foundation.
‘Diana supported Aids charities and children’s charities so it felt right,’ he says.
This week, the sea of flowers outside George Michael’s Oxfordshire home has been steadily growing, just as it did outside Kensington Palace after Diana died.
But for Darren McGrady, that warm summer’s day, when this charismatic pair met for lunch and Diana teased George about his magazine covers on the seat of his cabriolet, is an even more poignant memory.
He wept at her funeral, clearly distraught