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By Root 1431 0

to make out I am mad,” she sobbed. She had just found out the next day’s newspapers were reporting that for eighteen months she had been peppering the art dealer Oliver Hoare with anonymous telephone calls. She was suspected of making the crank calls to Hoare’s home and hanging up when his wife answered. Sometimes the caller stayed on the phone without saying a word. Diane Hoare complained to her husband about the “silence” calls, which she found “unnerving.” After a mysterious woman caller screamed torrents of abuse at her, Diane Hoare insisted her husband call the police. At first the art dealer, an expert in Islamic art, feared a terrorist threat against his family. So he insisted on answering the phone himself. But when the sinister silent calls continued, he realized that whoever was calling just wanted to hear his voice.

“I would be polite and say, ‘Hello, who’s calling? Who’s there?’ ” he said. “But there was just silence at the other end. It was eerie.”

After tapping the Hoares’ telephone line, police traced the calls to Diana’s and Charles’s private lines at Kensington Palace, to Diana’s mobile phone, and to Diana’s sister’s phone on the days Diana was visiting. An investigator from the Nuisance Calls Division speculated that the Princess was using different lines to avoid detection.

“Mr. Hoare went white as a sheet when he saw our report,” said the investigator. “He never imagined in his wildest dreams that Princess Diana could be making the calls.”

The Hoares, who were close friends of Prince Charles and had known Diana since their marriage, showed him the police report that logged the time of every call. A confidential extract from January 13, 1994, shows:

8:45 A.M. Phone rings. Silence. Hoare punches in the police code. The number that flashes up is a private office at Kensington Palace.

8:49 A.M. Phone rings. Hoare: “Who’s there?” Code reveals Diana’s private line.

8:54 A.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s office phone at Kensington Palace. [Charles no longer living or working at Kensington Palace.]

2:12 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s office at Kensington Palace.

7:55 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s line from Kensington Palace.

8:19 P.M. Phone rings. Silence. Code reveals Charles’s line from Kensington Palace.

The Prince shook his head sadly and expressed concern for his children. “They are the ones who will suffer from all this and will get it all played back when they return to school,” he said. The Hoares declined to press charges, but someone in Scotland Yard leaked the story to the press, and the Princess looked pitiful. People began questioning her sanity. “Is the Princess of Wales going mad?” asked an editorial. “She’s an hysterical woman,” wrote a columnist, “clearly teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

Her therapists explained her alleged pathological behavior as typical for a bulimic experiencing loneliness and isolation. “For a woman who has difficulty confronting people, and is struggling for control,” said one specialist who treated Diana, “phone harassment gives a feeling of empowerment. It’s a safe way to retaliate.”

Then came a few tasty tidbits. The art dealer, a dashing married man and father of two children, apparently had extended friendship to the troubled Princess, and she had turned into an obsessive pest. But that was not entirely accurate, said Oliver Hoare’s chauffeur, Barry Hodge. He spoke up after Hoare had fired him for unrelated reasons. The chauffeur asserted that Diana and the art dealer had been having an affair. He said the couple had set up a “love nest” in Pimlico, where they had been meeting three or four times a week for almost four years. The chauffeur said Hoare, who did not want to leave his wealthy, aristocratic wife, was very much taken with the Princess. And he said they dined secretly at the homes of friends such as Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of a Brazilian diplomat. The chauffeur said the Princess “could phone [the limo] more than twenty times a day.”

When Hodge’s story was published, Diana