![]() It was a dream sequence I'd heard from her before, but this time I knew she meant it." Kay wrote those words the day after Diana's death, but eight months later he admitted to me, "My feeling was at that time she meant it, but she could have changed the next week." and then, around November, would completely withdraw from her formal public life. She was going to complete her obligations. Only hours before she was killed, Diana called to tell him that "she had decided to radically change her life. Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, her main confidant during those years, admits that he wasn't certain how much he really knew or what she meant at any given moment. Yet her mixed messages often bewildered those who covered her. In the last five years of Diana's life, her contacts with British journalists were frequent, substantive, and often chummy. "It is an undisputed fact that the Princess connived with the media and exploited it for her own interests," wrote Sir David English, the late chairman of Associated Newspapers and one of her most ardent advocates, "just as much as we exploited her for ours." Yet another version, in the Evening Standard, had her "getting increasingly distraught and working herself up." The combination of her half-thoughts and their half-truths created a persona that was at once effulgent and slightly zany.įor most of Diana's 17 years on the public stage, she and the press performed a dance designed to satisfy both of their audiences. ![]() "Diana was aware that if she was going to progress with Prince Charles she needed the press on her side." Whitaker, writing in The Mirror, claimed an exclusive interview (despite photographs showing her talking to the group) in which she "appeared upset," yet "joked and giggled." Nick Craven of the Daily Mail found her "relaxed" and "comfortable." (Within 24 hours she made a vague denial: "There was no discussion of the possibility of any statement being issued in the future.")Īt these moments, the reporters were like besotted schoolboys, made incoherent by her dazzling presence. "You will have a big surprise coming soon, the next thing I do," she teased, and implied that she was thinking of living abroad. On a holiday in July 1997 with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and his family in Saint-Tropez, she first eluded paparazzi by crawling along a balcony and hiding behind a towel, then surprised a contingent of British tabloid reporters and photographers-two of whom, James Whitaker and Arthur Edwards, had been present at the Dee-by addressing them from her motorboat in a fetching leopard-print bathing suit. She had a natural cunning, and she would lay down false scents to confuse her pursuers. From the moment a reporter peered through binoculars and caught the 19-year-old "Shy Di" slipping behind a tree while Prince Charles fished in the river Dee in Scotland, to the final high-speed race with paparazzi that led to her death at age 36 in August last year, Diana dreaded the stalkers of the Celebrity Age.īut as with so much in Diana's life, her dealings with the press were far more complicated than she ever let on. Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this: a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age."įor the more than one billion viewers of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, those bitter words, spoken by her brother, Earl Spencer, from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, defined Diana's relationship with the press.
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