Chapter Twenty-Seven ‘I Stand Before You Today…’
Chapter Twenty-seven
‘I stand before you today…’
I have just watched my eulogy, as I write this, having not seen it for more than quarter of a century.
I recall the walk to the pulpit, the climbing of the steps, and the fear that I would not get through the words on the sheets of loose paper that I had unfurled from my pocket.
While I had not given a eulogy before, I had recently given a best man’s speech, and I had read a fair few lessons in church.
What was more valuable to me at this moment of total public exposure was my time as a TV reporter on NBC News’s Today Show – a post Diana had thoroughly approved of.
Late at Prince Charles’s fortieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace, in 1988, I was standing talking with Diana and a group that included David Frost.
Frost teased me that I was trying to replicate his career, by becoming an Englishman on American TV, yet he was kind enough to compliment me on a recent report of mine that he had watched.
‘Yes – I’m so proud of my little brother,’ Diana chimed in. ‘He’s found a job that really suits him. Bravo, Carlos! Yay!’ She clapped lightly, her hands fluttering in front of her smiling face, while we all laughed.
None of us could ever have guessed, of course, that the career she applauded would help me to speak at her funeral just a few years later. At NBC I wrote all my own scripts and learnt how to write in a way that might, hopefully, connect and stay with the viewer.
I had also, during my time at the network, delivered hundreds of ‘stand-uppers’, those key pieces of a report addressed by the correspondent directly to camera.
And, when recording my scripts in the sound booth – after a very unpromising start – I came to recognize the words or thoughts that mattered, so they could be emphasized.
I had also introduced most of my reports live, by satellite, from NBC’s London bureau to the programme’s anchors in their New York studio. This gave me invaluable experience in saying something in a small setting, knowing that it was being instantly beamed to millions of TV sets far away.
I think there is – for better or worse – something of the broadcaster in the construction of my eulogy’s opening sentences. I set the scene for my audience, as they adapt to the picture of Diana that I plan to share with them.
It was all quite focused, real and unflowery – constraints that also helped me to squeeze the emotion dancing in my stomach as tightly as I could manage. I knew I could not let such overwhelming feelings escape because they would wreck any hopes of my completing my brotherly task.
I reckoned that if I could successfully detach, even slightly, from such thoughts and concentrate on the performance of delivering such a speech, then maybe I could stop myself plunging through the ice beneath me, whose ominous cracking I could feel all the time.
Elton John revealed he thought very similarly, when performing in front of the world that day: ‘What was going through my mind was Don’t sing a wrong note.
Be stoic. Don’t break down and just do it to the best you can possibly do it without showing any emotion whatsoever. ’
I knew that if I stopped at any point, I would not be able to start again. That would be that, and I would simply have to leave the pulpit and return to my seat, defeated. Momentum would be the key.
With ‘I stand before you today, the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning, before a world in shock,’ I heard myself set out my purpose, just as I had planned at my desk at Althorp, a few days earlier.
My next words betray my ignorance at just how large the funeral’s audience was going to be.
I talked about ‘tens of millions’ joining the funeral ‘via TV and radio’.
That figure was some way short of the 2.
5 billion that are estimated to have tuned in to Diana’s leave-taking from the world stage.
But how could anyone anticipate quite how many would feel compelled to say goodbye to her that day?
I knew that I should look up and engage the Abbey’s congregation with equal glances in every direction.
This was what people declaiming are meant to do, as every speech coach knows.
But about a minute in, when having cast my eyes around me for slightly longer than normal, I stumbled. Panic. I had lost my place.
I quickly spotted where I was to resume, but it was at this stage that I recall saying to myself in a calm, internal voice that brooked no disagreement: ‘Stop! Slow down! You don’t need to perform here, you just have to get through this.
It’s the words that matter, not the style of their delivery. Just – get – this – done!’
And from that point on, the flow was better. I still looked up occasionally but never felt that I had to do so.
I remember the more lyrical phrases, such as ‘My own and only explanation…’ when dissecting why elements of the British media had taken it on themselves to do Diana down.
These touches were important to me: I wanted to engage the audience with the language, so they might find what I had to say easier to absorb.
I was glad that I identified Diana as having had a ‘constituency of the rejected’, when explaining her connection with outcasts afflicted by HIV and AIDS, leprosy and homelessness.
It was a thought that emphasized Diana’s own feelings of somehow being an outsider, despite all the trappings that she was born with or received through marriage.
I wanted what I said to be as up to date as possible, keen to emphasize that she never stopped championing important causes, even after divorce, so I added the one that she had so recently written to me about, landmines.
Who knows where it might have led? Maybe even a foray into the political world that she had previously sidestepped.
I also talked of our recent time together in Cape Town and chose to mention the meeting with President Mandela that had taken place then and had meant so much to her.
Diana once wondered aloud, after her separation from Prince Charles: ‘Carlos, do you think I would make a good American First Lady?’
‘Christ – where’s that come from?’ I asked.
She explained that one of her many powerful, ageing American suitors, keen to secure her as the ultimate trophy wife, had told her he was sure he could win the presidency if she would marry him.
The idea of the position titillated her rather more than the elderly would-be husband: there was, I could see, a mischievous attraction to reinventing herself in a role that would make her enemies in the British Royal Family sick with jealousy, while ushering in an era of glamour in the White House that would surely have surpassed even that of the Jackie Kennedy years.
Watching my speech after so long, I noted how many of the more expressive phrases are to be found in its second half, when I moved from saluting a global icon to more personal themes.
I took the role of the protective brother, the one who had bristled with indignation outside the Hind’s Head in late 1980, and I remember as I spoke that I felt at one point that my role was to fight now for Diana as I had never had the chance to before.
It was the very least I could do, given the ghastliness of the circumstances.
My fury at the crucial part the press had played in Diana’s death had simmered inside me throughout the six days since I had thundered at them outside my Cape Town home.
People said afterwards that my whole speech was angry, but most of the time it was not.
Emotional – yes, of course. But angry – no.
Yet for this passage, it definitely was.
I had studied the paparazzi’s antics in the Paris underpass that night with mounting disbelief and revulsion.
I had read how those that reached the mangled wreck of her Mercedes in the Alma tunnel realized that Diana must be dying before their eyes but, rather than looking to help her in any way, encouraged one another to take all the pictures they could, because they would be the last they would ever be able to sell of the woman whose image was so valuable in their mercenary world.
When I had noticed that one of the French photographers had the surname ‘Rat’, I smiled to myself darkly at how apt that was.
At one point in that turbulent week after Diana died, I had come across a typed memo from my secretary, left outside my office at Althorp, in which she passed on an update from my brother-in-law:
Message from Robert Fellowes:
The British Ambassador from Paris has telephoned him.
The driver of the car was more than three times over the limit.
The 7 photographers have been detained. An investigative judge has been appointed.
My immediate suspicion, at this time of intense anger and grief, was that this was all too convenient.
I felt strongly that somebody high up in the media world – maybe a newspaper owner – must have had agents tamper with driver Henri Paul’s blood analysis to ensure a reading that might partially exonerate their camera-wielding goons.
When I got to my favourite line in the speech, ‘Perhaps the greatest irony about Diana’s life is this: that a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted woman of the modern age’, it was a relief finally to lay out the true horror of Diana’s ordeal, in language that begged to be noticed.
I remember registering the surprise in Westminster Abbey when I delivered such a startling thought. But then I felt all those around me settle, as they realized that my accusation was true, and fair, and appalling. How had we all let it happen?