Christopher Andersen - The Day Diana Died

The Day Diana Died

Christopher Andersen

When I was born I was unwanted.

When I married Charles I was unwanted.

When I joined the Royal Family I was unwanted.

I want to be wanted.

Diana, Princess of Wales

The Day Diana Died

All Rights Reserved 1998, 1999. 2017 by Andersen Productions

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Globe Photos for permission to use their images in this book

Published by Andersen Productions

Originally published in print by William Morrow

Published in paperback by Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN

Game of Crowns

The Good Son

These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie

Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger

William and Kate: A Royal Love Story

Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage

Somewhere in Heaven

After Diana

Barbra: The Way She Is

American Evita: Hillary Clintons Path to Power

Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot

George and Laura: Portrait of an American Marriage

Dianas Boys: William and Harry and the Mother They Loved

The Day John Died

Bill and Hillary: The Marriage

Jackie After Jack: Portrait of the Lady

An Affair to Remember

Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage

Young Kate

The Best of Everything

The Serpents Tooth

The Book of People

Father

The Name Game

For my incandescent Kelly

AUTHORS NOTE

Gone too soon. It is a phrase that we have all heard a thousand times. Yet seldom have so many tens of millions around the world used these words to describe one person--in this particular case the single 36-year-old mother who, despite having already had an enormous impact on the world, still felt adrift in it. Had she lived another 20 years, Diana, Princess of Wales would have been only 56--still young for a grandmother. She would have reveled in her grandchildren, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, and taken pride in the men her sons had become. By any measure, William had found and married his soul mate, just as Diana had hoped he would. In fact, Williams bride might just as well have been hand-picked by Diana to carry on as Queen of Hearts. Kate Middleton was more than just stunning, stylish, and smart. A descendant of coal miners who was destined to become Britains first working-class queen, Princess Catherine possessed Dianas innate ability to connect with people--the common touch that had for generations eluded senior members of the Royal Family. She also proved herself adept at navigating the treacherous waters of palace intrigue as well as endless intrusions from the tabloid press-talents for survival that Diana never quite mastered. Most important, Diana would have been thrilled that, unlike her own marriage and the doomed marriages of so many royals, the bond between William and Kate was rock-solid. As for her younger son, it probably would not have surprised Diana that Harry chose to spend his youth playing the field, or that in the end that he would probably choose to settle down with someone who did not fit the royal mold.

Diana would also almost certainly have been humbled and amazed at the lasting impact her inspiring life and tragic death were destined to have on the monarchy. Had it not been for the Peoples Princess, the thousand-year-old institution would have grown even more hopelessly out of touch with the people, eventually collapsing from the sheer weight of its own self-satisfied pomposity. Without her, it is doubtful that the monarchy would have made it far into the 21st Century without finally being dismissed as--to use the word that sends chills up every royal spine--irrelevant.

Were she still alive, Diana could find plenty to grumble about as well. Although she had come to terms with the enduring love Charles and his longtime mistress Camilla Parker Bowles had for each other, Diana could not have imagined that the Queen would ever have permitted them to marrycertainly not after the divorced Mrs. Parker Bowles had destroyed Dianas marriage and in the process poured gasoline one of the most incendiary scandals ever to engulf Buckingham Palace . Diana had vowed that William would succeed the Queen on the throne--not Charles--so the fact that her ex-husband was now poised to become king would have been disappointing, if for no other reason that it would delay the reign of William V by years or perhaps even decades. Equally galling, one assumes, is the looming specter of a Queen Camilla. In order to gain public support for his marriage to Camilla in 2005, Charles had to agree that Dianas nemesis--the woman she famously called "The Rottweiler" would never be Queen. Upon his taking the throne, Charles pledged, Camilla would become Princess Consort--a hollow promise since Charless wife automatically becomes queen the moment the current monarch dies. To make matters worse, both Charles and Camilla coyly hinted around the time of Elizabeths Diamond Jubilee in 2012 that all bets were off; when the time came, Charles intended to have Camilla crowned right alongside him.

Even as speculation swirls around Charles and Camilla and William and Kate as they chart a course for the Crown in the new millennium, Diana has never really been out of the news. There was Operation Paget, the governments official investigation into allegations that Diana may have been murdered by British intelligence. When Scotland Yard asked me for help piecing together the puzzle of Dianas last days, I willingly obliged, although I had no idea that the investigation would devolve into a bizarre, headline-grabbing, seven-year-long sideshow. In 2006 Operation Paget finally reached the same conclusion I did while researching The Day Diana Died back in l997--that in the end the most famous woman on the planet was nothing more or less than the hapless victim of a drunk driving accident. Along the way, Dianas devoted butler Paul Burrell--the man she called "my rock"--would be wrongly accused of robbing her estate, the Queen herself would warn Burrell to beware of "mysterious powers at work in this country," Harry would cope with depression and substance abuse as well as persistent speculation concerning his paternity, and Dianas old pal the Duchess of York would be caught up in a series of sordid scandals that would destroy her marriage and end in her banishment by the Queen.

For all the undeniable drama of the past two decades, we return to those sad last days of August, l997 and the singular tragic event that still holds the power to touch us all. Researched and written in the immediate aftermath of the Paris car crash that stunned people everywhere, The Day Diana Died seeks to capture a unique moment in history. When it was originally published, Newsweek observed that the book "recounts the story in such crisp detail and from so many perspectives" that The Day Diana Died is "grist for a narrative thriller." According to the Washington Post, the book offers "breathless new details about the last hours of Dianas life," and People described it as "riveting." Indeed, the book was written with the kind of urgency that I believe cannot be improved upon by updating or re-editing. So, for this first-ever ebook edition of The Day Diana Died, readers will be able to place themselves in the moment as we experienced it then--when William was only a boy of 15, Harry not yet 13, and the worlds most celebrated human being was a beautiful, lonely, inspiringly compassionate and fiercely independent young rebel known simply as Diana, Princess of Wales.