DIANA: THE SECRET YEARS
by Simone Simmons with Susan Hill
The Ballantine Publishing © Random House Online, Inc. 1998
Group is a division of
Random House, Inc.
  |
Hardcover
November 1998
0-345-43365-3
$25.00
Preface Diana asked me to write this book.
It was in February 1997. She was sprawled on one of the sofas in her private sitting room at Kensington Palace and I had adopted my customary and comfortable place on the floor, propped up on the large stuffed fake hippopotamus in front of the hearth. We had been laughing like drains as she recounted another little story about her life--the real thing, her version--not the tabloids' or Buckingham Palace's. Yet again there had been a TV programme that evening which had got things all wrong. She dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex, laughed again and ordered me, one day, to write a book and 'tell it like it is.'
'They'll say I'm the nutty princess and that you're the nutty psychic,' she warned, quite cheerfully, 'but I want you to tell the truth. It'll be about time.'
The Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, one of her other close friends, was with us as we watched the documentary. Diana had been particularly amused during the programme by the neat turn of her butler Paul Burrell's calves, for he had been filmed wearing livery during his days as a footman at Buckingham Palace. But her request--indeed, demand--for truth from us was utterly serious.
She was so tired of the misquotes, the misunderstandings and the misjudgements. That afternoon she was quite entertained by allusions in the programme to her caprices, her extravagances and sulks. Previously, such reports had often angered her, but by then she had become strong enough to laugh sometimes, and to appoint me as the person who was one day to correct the distorted image and to explain her. By now she trusted me to tell a different and more truthful story. I made her a promise then and I am keeping it now.
At the time, as the afternoon had developed into an evening of chatter and giggles, it did not seem like a demand, far less an obligation. But since Diana's death my thoughts have turned back to that conversation. In life she was frequently misunderstood and misquoted, but at least then she was able to employ her own ways of setting records straight. Now only those who truly knew and loved her can do so.
She was undoubtedly a strong young woman, but even the strong feel pain, and a compulsion to rail against injustice. That Diana was also unusually sensitive made her swan-gliding, lofty, apparent indifference to criticism especially difficult for her to maintain. To me this explains her ability to release her pains in both laughter and tears when we were together--for she could trust very few people when she needed to express her true self. She had, perforce, become an expert dissembler, fibber and manipulator. She had many masks, and I think it was a relief for her when she could sometimes drop them.
By then we were friends but even so, or possibly because of this, I sometimes had to be forthright with Diana, and while this could be the cause of brief friction between us, it was this very trait which made her confident that I would tell the truth about her and not be intimidated by anyone who tried to stop me. She knew that in her I usually saw a cheerful young woman who loved life and men and good food and fun--someone very far from the pathetic, neurotic and lonely creature that she was often represented as being. She knew, too, that people underestimated her intelligence and wildly overestimated her self-obsessions--indeed, she had reached the point at which she found it relatively flattering when she was described in the press as being a 'loose cannon' within the royal family and the Establishment. Diana might not yet have fully matured into the woman she believed she was destined to be, but she wanted the world to know about her recovery and that it was a triumphant expression of independence and purpose. She wanted me to set that record straight.
Sometimes I'd find her, irritated and stretched on one of the sofas in the little sitting room, a tabloid newspaper strewn around her feet. Even the fact that some tiny detail in a story about her public or private life was wrong would enrage or frustrate her because, in her position, she knew she should appear to be above such concerns and yet she needed to straighten things out somehow. Even if the bald facts of a story were correct she still yearned to be able to offer her interpretation of things. But how could this be squared with her need for privacy? Certain privileged journalists would be pleased to take her call and write a story to correct things, or even to offer misleading information, but Diana knew that doing this too often would alienate writers on other, rival, newspapers. Since these might then fan the negative rumours which centred upon her alleged wish to manipulate people, her supposed self-pity and her aggressive use of the telephone, she was in a near-impossible situation. Desperate to put across her side of things and to have her version of the truth known, she was still miserably aware that if she attempted to intervene yet further gossipy spins could be put on whatever she said.
All I could do was listen. And advise as any friend would. I was well aware that my own background enabled me to be no more, or less, than a friend to Diana. Whatever the reasons for our first meeting, these had become irrelevant history by the time she aired her frustrations to me at Kensington Palace. It wasn't quite like Strangers on a Train because by then we knew each other quite well, but I was aware that it was sometimes easier for Diana to explain things to me, simply because our other lives were so different.