The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Sunday 4 April 2004

The Keepers of Diana's Secrets

Diana, Princess of Wales, remains fascinating, not only because of her extraordinary life but because there are so many different interpretations of her. For many years now, a variety of books, articles, and television shows have been put forth by people who knew her in different ways, or did not know her at all. They range from adulatory to condemnatory, and from trivial to deeply analytical. Most recently, NBC aired excerpts from the audio tapes she made for author Andrew Morton and video tapes she made for voice coach Peter Settelen. None of it revealed anything, but it was a striking reminder of Diana to hear her voice revealing the pain of her past and her hope for a future that she would never know.

As usual, the media will not let Diana rest in peace. After six and a half years in her grave, she still seems to make more news than any other member of the royal family. The collective guilt over her death has faded with time, but curiosity about her life remains. This curiosity still makes people money. Andrew Morton, prominently featured in the NBC special, has a new book coming out. This time it will be an unashamedly gossipy account of her love life called In Search of Love. Morton and Peter Settelen also still hold hours more of Diana's tapes, which they are likely to sell in the future.

Meanwhile, Diana's Spencer family is also publishing a book about her, with a focus on her charity work. This is ironic in light of their vocal disapproval of the various books about Diana by others who knew her. In particular, they objected when Paul Burrell, Diana's butler, wrote a book after his acquittal on charges of theft. Diana's sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale was the person who initiated the police investigation that led to these charges, after she discovered that the Spencer family did not have certain sensitive possessions of Diana's that vanished after her death. Burrell did not have them either, but he and his family did have a great many other cast-off possessions of Diana's. This led to his arrest, and then a dramatic acquittal when the Queen revealed - just as a potentially embarrassing trial was beginning - that Burrell had told her that he was taking some of Diana's possessions to prevent the Spencers from destroying them.

Paul Burrell's memoir, A Royal Duty, is his response to the Spencers' belief that he was not as close to Diana as he claimed. His determination to convince the world that Diana was closer to him than anyone else (and pay his lawyers) has led him to reveal details about her personal life that she would unquestionably view as a betrayal. Disgustingly, the book ends with a teaser about a secret Diana had at the end of her life, no doubt to drum up interest for volume II.

Surprisingly little of the book is about Burrell's time as Diana's butler. The first third relates his early life and time working for the Queen, while the final third tells the genuinely awful (if overdramatized) story of his arrest, trial, and acquittal. Few people can resist the temptation to psychoanalyze Diana, but Burrell does; he admires her unconditionally with no mention of the problems he saw at close range. Aside from his personal respect for her, Burrell's motivation for his positive view of Diana is to redress the account of herself she gave in Diana: Her True Story and the Panorama interview. Diana's attempts to share her pain left the world with a view of a suffering princess that was not the whole truth.

This discretion makes his book far less insightful than Patrick Jephson's Shadows of a Princess - which does not mention Paul Burrell's name once, even inserting "the butler" into a quote to avoid it. My problem with Jephson is his discomfort with Diana's intense femininity; he obviously would have preferred working for a man. Burrell did not have this problem. Whether the rumors about his bisexuality are true or not, he is undoubtedly very in touch with his feminine side. (There is a priceless image of him dramatically lip-synching "A Whole New World" from the Disney film Aladdin in the car while Diana watched through a restaurant window. No doubt it amused her, but it does not fit our image of the butler of a senior member of the British royal family.) In 1996 Patrick Jephson resigned and Burrell essentially took on his job as Diana's private secretary, while retaining the title of butler and hiring an under-butler to do his old job. Unlike Jephson and others who had worked for Diana, Burrell was in awe of her and did not try to tell her what to do. This apparently gave her needed self-confidence in the last year of her life, but it also gave free rein to her impulsiveness. Perhaps if she had lived longer, she would have settled into a more stable life.

Burrell's increased role in Diana's life went to his head. He cares desperately that people should recognize his role as Diana's confidante, and no doubt she did share much of her life with him. The shock of her death - followed by the dismantling of her home, which had been his domain - sent him reeling. After her death, the Spencers claimed Diana's body, her possessions, and the right to give her eulogy. As she was largely estranged from her family, this offended Burrell greatly. Yet it was no more than the legal rights of the blood relatives of a divorced woman with minor children. (I do think that the executors of Diana's will seriously violated her wishes by not dividing her personal property among her godchildren as she requested.)

The real battle between Burrell and the Spencers was not over property but over who should be the keeper of Diana's secrets. Diana had many secrets, and many people knew some of them. Some of these people have told some of her secrets, and she would be appalled by the volume of gossip about her that has entered the public domain since her death. Yet the fact remains that she started the ball rolling by collaborating with Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story. Everyone who knew Diana personally and has written about her did so in the context of what has been called "the war of the Waleses," the ongoing argument over who was more at fault in the very public failure of their marriage. Diana's refusal to suffer in silence earned her admiration and independence, but her outspokenness started an avalanche of revelations that shows no sign of stopping.

- Margaret Weatherford