The royals - Kitty Kelley [247]
“No mileage in it,” said Diana, who clung fiercely to her position as a wronged wife.
“Especially without a signed financial,” said the pragmatic Duchess, who was calling for a settlement of $10 million. She was also hoping to keep her status as Her Royal Highness. Fergie with no title was like Saudi Arabia with no oil.
Diana, too, was determined to hang on to her position, but her lawyers advised her to let Fergie lead the way through the divorce maze. They called the Duchess “the yellow canary” (referring to the bird that miners take underground to check for deadly gas; if the canary keels over, the miners back out of the pit).
Although both women were privately exploring financial settlements, they maintained publicly that they were very much married. “The subject of divorce has never come up between myself and my husband,” Diana assured Richard Kay in the fall of 1995. By then the Princess was struggling to appear virtuous. Branded a home wrecker by Will Carling’s wife, she was accused of breaking up the Carlings’ marriage of less than a year. “This has happened to her before,” said Julia Carling, who looked like a younger, blonder version of Diana, “and you only hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does. She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger.”
But within days the Carlings separated, with Julia Carling blaming the Princess. Reacting to reports that her husband had had an affair with Diana, Julia Carling told reporters: “I have always valued my marriage as the most important and sacred part of my life,” she said. “It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control.”
Diana’s relationship with the rugby captain was headlined in the News of the World as “Di’s Secret Trysts with Carling.” So she called Richard Kay. She assured him that her “innocent friendship” with Carling had started only because of her rugby-mad sons. She summoned the News of the World’s managing editor to Kensington Palace and begged him to lay off. She also contacted the Daily Mirror and insisted her friendship with Carling was platonic. The paper quoted her as saying, “I don’t need a lover.” In distress, she phoned her friends—“endlessly,” recalled one woman, who finally lost patience with the Princess. Diana also consulted her therapist, Suzie Orbach, who began seeing her on a daily basis.
“Through these sessions, Her Royal Highness determined to take control of her life,” explained a friend who spoke with Diana during this time. The words sounded measured, as if they had been written in advance: “Eventually she desired a respectable forum to demonstrate that she was not deranged or mentally incapacitated…. She felt she needed to answer her critics, reclaim her sanity, and prove her strength….”
Having pleaded for privacy two years earlier, Diana now sought the world stage. She decided the only way she could banish the image of herself as deranged was to give a television interview. She was encouraged by Fergie, one of the few people she confided in, who said that she had benefited from going on television and admitting her mistakes. So she urged Diana to do the same. Fergie agreed that Panorama, the award-winning current affairs program, was the proper vehicle to treat her seriously. But she cautioned Diana to keep her plan under wraps, because if the Queen found out, she would put the kibosh on the interview. Diana concurred.
Coached by her therapist and confident of her telegenic skills, the Princess met secretly with the BBC’s Martin Bashir and his camera crew at Kensington Palace on November 5, 1995, to talk about herself, her husband, her marriage, and her life in the royal family. She had not sought permission from the Palace. And she informed the Queen only a few days before the interview was to be aired. The BBC announced its “world exclusive” four hours after playing the National Anthem to celebrate Prince Charles’s