The royals - Kitty Kelley [243]
Oliver Hoare admitted that he had met with Diana on several occasions, but only to advise her and console her about her marriage. Still, his wife insisted on a separation, so he moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Pimlico. A few months later the Hoares reconciled and he moved back into their home.
“All we know is that Mr. Hoare did not want to prosecute the Princess of Wales,” said an investigator from London’s Metropolitan Police Department. “He agreed to withdraw his complaint and said he would talk to the lady privately.”
Diana denied making the harassing calls. “There is absolutely no truth in it,” Richard Kay quoted her as saying. She showed him extracts from her calendar, saying she was at lunch with friends or at the movies when some of the calls were made. “They are trying to make out I was having an affair with this man,” she said, “or that I had some sort of fatal attraction…. It is simply untrue and so unfair…. What have I done to deserve this? I feel I am being destroyed.”
He listened sympathetically. When she acknowledged that she and Hoare were “friends” and had spoken on the phone “occasionally,” he asked if she had placed any of those occasional calls to him from pay phones.
“You can’t be serious,” she said indignantly. “I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box.”
Her response made James Hewitt smile ruefully. He remembered many calls from Diana, who always disguised her voice when she called him at his army barracks. She told him she was dialing from a pay phone so the call would not appear on the phone bills that Charles examined. “I feel sorry for her,” Hewitt said. “Very sorry.”
Less sympathetic were the cartoonists, who lampooned her without mercy. One drew the Princess on the phone, saying: “Can you hold on a second? There’s someone at the door….” Through a window, two men in white coats were approaching with nets and manacles. In another cartoon an old woman answers the phone. Hearing nothing but heavy breathing, she turns to her husband. “I think it’s Princess Di for you.”
Charles took advantage of the crack in his wife’s stature. Having portrayed her as intellectually vacant and television addicted, he now said her only goal in life was to empty Chanel’s boutiques and stock her closets at his expense. He complained loudly during a London dinner party about her expenses for travel and clothing and said she cost him $13,900 a month for “grooming.” When Diana heard the comment she snapped, “I don’t cost half as much to groom as his goddamned polo ponies.” Days later people could decide for themselves when her yearly “grooming” expenses were itemized in the papers:
$25,000: manicures and pedicures
$24,000: hair, including color, cuts, and daily styling
$ 7,000: fitness instructor
$ 4,400: chiropractor
$ 4,300: colonic irrigation
$ 4,290: reflexology
$ 3,800: osteopathy
$ 2,200: holistic massage
$ 3,800: aromatherapy, plus home visits
$ 1,000: acupuncture
$ 2,000: hypnotherapy
$65,000: astrologers, psychics, and holistic counselors
$20,000: psychotherapy
Again Diana rang up Richard Kay in dismay. “This is a deliberate attempt to discredit me,” she said. She did not deny the therapies or their costs. Rather, she said that “someone” in the Palace wanted to make her look like a New Age flake who had her colon flushed every week because she was obsessed with being thin and didn’t have anything better to do with her time or her husband’s money. The reporter quoted “a friend of the Princess” as saying: “If the Prince had not treated her so shabbily, she would not have needed to turn to expensive therapists.”
Her estranged sister-in-law, the Duchess of York, phoned to commiserate. She, too, felt persecuted by the Palace machine.
“They are out to get us—especially Bellowes,” Fergie said, using her nickname for the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, who was Diana’s brother-in-law. “First me, now you…. We’re the