The royals - Kitty Kelley [248]
On the night of November 20, 1995, more than twenty-two million Britons gathered in front of their television sets to watch the Princess perform. “And it was a performance,” said the royal biographer Penny Junor. “A brilliant performance—totally plausible. Charming, demure, and vulnerable… but a performance—an acting job.”
Grid engineers had installed an additional power station to accommodate the expected national surge in electricity after the 9:40 P.M. program; they estimated the extra megawatts to be the equivalent of three hundred thousand teakettles being plugged in at once. When the show was broadcast worldwide, some two hundred million people in one hundred countries were watching.
Calmly and with poise, Diana discussed her postnatal depression, her suicide attempts, her crying jags, and her bulimia. She said she suffered because her husband made her feel useless and unwanted—a total failure. She said he had taken a mistress and then blamed her, his wife, for getting upset. He said she was an embarrassment to the royal family, and his friends, “the establishment that I married into,” considered her unstable enough to be committed to a mental institution. She said her husband was jealous of her “because I always got more publicity, my work was more, was discussed much more than him.” Yet she maintained she did not want a divorce.
She admitted having been unfaithful during her marriage. She denied having affairs with James Gilbey and Oliver Hoare but said she had been in love with James Hewitt. “Yes, I adored him,” she said. “But I was very let down.” She told the interviewer that she did not tell her children about her affair with Hewitt, but she did tell them about their father’s adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles. “But I put it in gently,” she said, “without resentment or any anger.”
She faulted the press for its intrusions: “I’ve never encouraged the media. There was a relationship which worked before, but now I can’t tolerate it because it’s become abusive and it’s harassment.”
Conceding she would never become Queen of the country, she asked instead to be a queen of people’s hearts. “I’d like to be an ambassador,” she said.
The interviewer asked, “On what grounds do you feel that you have the right to think of yourself as an ambassador?”
Diana replied: “I’ve been in a privileged position for fifteen years. I’ve got tremendous knowledge about people and know how to communicate, and I want to use it.”
Minutes later she was asked whether she thought her husband would ever be King. She raised her kohl-rimmed eyes to the camera and replied, “I don’t think any of us know the answer to that. Who knows what fate will produce, who knows what circumstances will provoke?” She expressed hope that her tormented husband would find peace of mind. Without uttering an unkind word, she questioned his ability to reign. “I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don’t know whether he could adapt.” Perhaps, she concluded, because of his “conflict” about becoming King, he should forgo the throne and allow the crown to pass directly to their son, Prince William, when he comes of age.
“You could almost hear the country’s collective gasp,” said a television commentator on the late news.
The next morning every one of Britain’s newspapers devoted its front page to Diana. Every aspect of the interview was scrutinized: her clothes (tailored navy blazer, opaque black hose), her lighting (harsh), her demeanor (restrained), her vocabulary (impressive, according to Time, which reported she