Chapter Seventeen ‘Her Level-Headedness and Strength…’
Chapter Seventeen
‘Her level-headedness and strength…’
Diana would often drop round for lunch at my London home, a mile from Kensington Palace, in the early years of her marriage. I would prepare her something simple – there was a phase when chicken mayonnaise was our staple dish – and she could relax, away from her duties, her marriage and the public.
Once she arrived early, and I let her in while in mid-call on my landline.
‘Who was that, Carlos?’ she asked, with a quiet earnestness, once I hung up.
‘Some journalist who wants to do a profile on me.’
‘Please don’t do it,’ she implored. ‘It just makes life so much harder for me when my family do anything that I can be criticized for at home.’
I assured her that was an end of the matter, that I had been going to refuse the request anyway but would do so for sure later that day.
It took me some time to learn that there were many who wanted to use me to feed off Diana’s celebrity. I thought I could trust the owner of a restaurant where I was a regular.
I asked him if he could promise to keep it a secret, but I wanted to bring Diana to his place for lunch. He assured me that was fine, and he pointed out his most discreet table as the place where we could most easily hide my sister. It seemed perfect.
A few days later I snuck Diana into the restaurant, her head bowed, and we enjoyed lunch together, while one of her protection officers watched over her from a table set at a discreet distance.
I remember registering mild surprise on seeing the restaurateur’s long-term girlfriend eating at a table near the door.
I had met her once before but had never seen her sit down as a diner. With her was a dark-haired stranger.
As we made to leave, the stranger stood up and whipped out a large camera, with mounted flashgun.
I shouted in shock, as I ushered Diana away, begging the photographer to leave us alone.
He ignored me and locked on to his target with greedy intent.
While Diana’s bodyguard managed to keep him a few paces away from her, he was unable to stop the man firing off dozens of photographs, one of which was in the papers the next day.
‘But they promised to respect our privacy!’ I said to Diana indignantly, after we made it the few hundred yards back to my home.
‘They always do, Carlos,’ she replied, with resignation, ‘they always do.’
Later, when I went back to hold the restaurateur to account, he smiled smarmily and swore on his mother’s life that the photographer had been there by chance, even though he and I both knew this was a lie.
I suppose he calculated that the loss of my future custom was a minor matter, when compared to the opportunity for national publicity for his indifferent trattoria.
Restaurants were where Diana and I met up two or three times a year, since they gave her an excuse to escape life at Kensington Palace, and enjoy a less formal setting.
Diana came with my mother and my then girlfriend to my graduation from Oxford. I thought it would be a treat to mark the special occasion by taking everyone to Restaurant Elizabeth, supposedly the best restaurant in town.
I explained to the manager that I would like to bring my family there. If I did, please could he make sure that his staff did not intrude on my sister in any way?
He solemnly promised to respect her privacy and, because I knew Restaurant Elizabeth had hosted many global dignitaries over the decades, I felt confident that I could trust him.
However, during our lunch, he came up to our table, proffering a handsome leather book.
‘Princess Diana,’ he said, in syrupy tones, ‘it would be an incredible honour if you could pay tribute to my humble restaurant by adding your signature to our special guest book.’
He presented the glorified autograph book with a bow, then produced a pen. It all happened so quickly, and with such evident expectation, that it would have been awkward for Diana to do anything other than sign.
I could sense Diana’s sad acceptance that her own privacy no longer seemed to count for anything. She had become perhaps the most famous woman in the world; the bold and the shameless felt entitled to gain from that.
From Restaurant Elizabeth to Queen Elizabeth…I look back now and appreciate that even those united in wanting to protect Diana from exploitation could unintentionally trip over one another.
At lunch at Buckingham Palace one day, I was seated next to the Queen.
‘And what do you intend to do, Charles, after university?’ I said that I was interested in starting a restaurant.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But I realise that, to make a restaurant work, you have to do something different – to make it stand out from all the others.’
‘And that difference would not be the fact that Diana is your sister, I hope?’ she asked. I was appalled. ‘God, no,’ I said, to the Defender of the Faith. ‘Sorry, m’am – I mean, serving food that you can’t get anywhere else. You know – maybe Japanese sushi? Something exotic.’
Even the Queen was aware that Diana was a commodity.
Diana’s celebrity could be a joy rather than a curse.
We were once having lunch in an Italian restaurant in London’s Pimlico Road.
We were at a window table, with a thin veiled curtain covering the bottom half of the glass.
That meant we could look out onto the bustle of the street beyond while nobody could see in.
As we ate, a coach full of people became stuck in traffic directly outside the restaurant.
The coach passengers were seated high enough up to be able to look down at our table from above the veil.
Disbelief turned to open delight as the passengers identified Diana seated just a few yards from them.
They waved excitedly and were overjoyed when she blushed and waved back.
It was the same when I sat beside her on car journeys.
She loved to drive herself when she could, and if we got caught in traffic, people in the next vehicle might catch sight of her, first incredulous – then ecstatic.
The people’s goodwill towards Diana seemed endless, joyous, and utterly spontaneous.
I witnessed a similar reaction when accompanying Diana to a classical concert in London in the late 1980s. It was an evening to benefit one of her charities and, after the performance, Diana and her party waited in a reception room for the last concertgoers to be clear of the hall.
I watched from the wings as Diana went onstage to meet and thank the orchestra.
They had been carefully lined up to greet her.
As soon as she appeared, though, they broke ranks.
Soon, dozens of accomplished professional musicians thronged round Diana, smiling with uncontained excitement as she chatted to them.
She turned this way and that, so everyone felt included in the moment, making jokes, and putting them all at their ease.
And, throughout, she never forgot why she was there.
She ensured that they felt properly appreciated for their skilled performance that night.
Diana had them in stitches at one point, then nodding in unified, solemn agreement as she explained the importance of the cause they had just kindly aided through the gift of their music.
Then more laughter, as she poked fun at herself, before thanking them all yet again.
In a few minutes, she lit up their evening and gave them a lifetime memory.
They broke into huge applause and cheered as she bade them goodnight and left the stage.
For Diana had this extraordinary magnetism. I can go further, and state that I have never seen anything remotely like it in anyone else.
My favourite footage of Diana in her public persona is from the prelude to a State Banquet. She processes with the other dignitaries towards the bank of cameramen allowed in to record the event, looking dazzling in a diamond tiara.
One of the members of the press calls out: ‘You’re looking wonderful this evening, Ma’am,’ and she – not missing a beat – playfully makes as if she’s pushing up the base of her hair, like a girl going on a night out with friends after work, and you hear the press pack erupt in delighted laughter.
She kept her dignity throughout, while adding a wonderfully spontaneous and original moment of humour to an otherwise stilted occasion.
This was Diana at her impromptu best, natural presence and fantastic timing blending with a moment of star power that invited the world into an otherwise stuffy event in a way that only she could manage. She simply could not be dull.
Her infectious appeal could be challenging for traditionalists at court.
In 1984, Diana attended the annual State Opening of Parliament.
Her hair stylist, Richard Dalton, swept Diana’s hair into a ‘chignon’ – a bun pinned at the nape of the neck, as favoured by some movie stars a generation earlier.
When Diana arrived at Parliament and descended from her horse-drawn carriage, there were gasps of admiration from onlookers.
They were used to her trademark look and were surprised that this had been replaced by something so ravishing.
The Spencer tiara looked particularly magnificent atop her sweeping hair, while her bone structure was shown off to great effect.
But the Queen was not amused. The next day’s headlines were about Diana’s daring new hairstyle, with the monarch’s address to Parliament, detailing the Government’s legislative priorities for the year ahead, relegated to a mere footnote in the papers.
Diana was told off, and she – ever respectful of ‘the boss’, as she called the Queen – from that point on, always wore her hair more simply at events that they both attended.
Once, I was asked in 1985 to help at one of Diana’s charity functions. This was a fancy-dress ball (where we all had to wear red) given at London’s Royal Albert Hall for Birthright, one of the children’s causes of which Diana was patron. I was invited to be junior chairman of the event.
Because I was then working during my university holidays for a record company, I was told to choose the headline music act for the ball, several months before it happened.
The concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith presented me with a shortlist of two, several months in advance of the ball. ‘We can easily get the Three Degrees,’ he said, mentioning a female group whose heyday had been in the seventies.
‘Perfect,’ I said, knowing that Prince Charles famously loved them, and it was as well to keep him happy if he chose to come to the evening.
‘But,’ Goldsmith continued, ‘I’d really recommend that you go with a new act that I know I can get for you.
She’s a singer who’s going to be huge by the time of the event.
’ He mentioned that this performer, whom I had never heard of, had an aunt who had made it in showbiz, which sounded fun – but, to me, no guarantee of future success.
‘No, Harvey – let’s definitely go with the Three Degrees, thanks. We know that’ll work.’
He sounded very disappointed.
I jotted down the name of the singer I had rejected – some unknown called Whitney Houston. She was an international sensation by the time of the Birthright Ball.
*
On another such evening a few years later I joined Diana, our two older sisters, some of Diana’s female friends and a couple of her ladies-in-waiting at a concert given by Neil Diamond to benefit yet another of her causes.
Neil Diamond and his wife Marcia met Diana backstage before the performance, and she insisted on individually introducing her personal guests to the great singer-songwriter. He was patient and smiled kindly as he politely shook hands with all of Diana’s entourage.
Diana then indicated me, and – in a playful reference to my being the only male in her large, otherwise exclusively female, group – said: ‘And this is my poor little brother, Charles…’
Mr Diamond, his ears no doubt pummelled by decades of excessive decibels, caught the ‘poor’ and the ‘l’ at the start of ‘little’, but not the rest.
He reached out his hand to me and said, in a very friendly tone: ‘Hi, Paul.’
This misnomer became the catchphrase of a thoroughly enjoyable evening and caused hilarity during the car ride home.
Happy memories, from an era that seemed set to run and run.