The untold truth of Princess Diana

As with any major event, especially tragedies, many people remember exactly where they were when they heard the news of Princess Diana’s death on August 31, 1997. In my case, I was 16 years old, we had just moved across the country to a small town in Pennsylvania, and we were at a birthday party for one of my dad’s new colleagues. The radio was on, and the music was interrupted for a breaking news alert announcing her death. Everyone was shocked and saddened, but the party went on.

I tried to behave like a civilized adult and continue socializing with people, but I kept staring out the window while trying to comprehend what had happened. Diana was indeed the queen of people’s hearts, and many were stunned and bereft in the wake of her death. While many things about Diana are widely known — such as her altogether miserable marriage to Charles, her determination to raise princes William and Harry as normally as possible, the tragic circumstances that led to her death — many details of her life aren’t commonly discussed.

The fact that Diana didn’t excel in academic settings — she reportedly failed the first stage of her General Certificate of Education exams, known as the O Levels, twice — greatly affected her self-esteem, according to biographer Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles. “She thought she knew nothing and was very stupid,” historian Paul Johnson told Brown. “She’d say things like ‘I am very thick and uneducated.'”

Diana was, however, gifted in other areas, most notably when it came to her emotional intelligence. “Diana made her warmth available to anyone regardless of race, creed, or nationality,” wrote Brown. “An invisible thread of kindliness drew her to people who expected the least and needed the most.” 

Johnson told Brown, “She had something that very few people possess. She had extraordinary intuition and could see people who were nice and [be] warm to them and sympathize with them…Very few people compare to what she had.'” 

While the world saw Charles and Diana’s marriage as a fairy tale, their entire courtship, engagement, and run-up to the wedding was fraught with mixed signals, archaic traditions, and red flags that the union wouldn’t turn out well.

First and foremost were the circumstances of their initial meeting: with a 12-year age difference between them, Diana first encountered Charles when she was 16, he was 28. He had come over to the Spencer estate for a pheasant shoot — and he was also dating Diana’s older sister, Sarah. He and Sarah soon ended their romance, and he began to pursue Diana, according to a 1981 The Daily Times article.

She had only met with Charles 13 times before their wedding, and his efforts to woo Diana were rife with mixed signals. “He would ring me up every day and then not contact me for weeks; he wasn’t very consistent in his courtship,” she said in interviews, circa 1992-1993, that were aired as part of a documentary commemorating the 20th anniversary of her death (via the Independent). Adding to which, there’s the heebie-jeebie-inducing fact that “in order to satisfy the requirements of royalty, she was subjected to a discreet gynecological examination to ensure she could bear the heirs of the future King Charles III. It was felt necessary to make a public declaration of her untainted past, to announce in effect that she was a virgin,” according to The Daily Times. 

While Dodi Fayed, who was killed along with Diana in the famous Paris car accident, is perhaps the most well-known of her boyfriends, it’s believed that Diana’s greatest love was Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon she met in 1995. Khan was the surgeon for Joseph Toffolo, the husband of Diana’s acupuncturist Oonagh, who was recovering from a triple bypass. Toffolo suffered complications and had to be rushed back into the operating room. Khan first encountered Diana when he went to inform Oonagh of Toffolo’s imminent surgery. Khan and Diana went on to have a two-year relationship that was described as Diana’s “most significant relationship since her marriage to Prince Charles,” according to Vanity Fair.

Khan broke the mold of Diana’s typical love interest: he was reportedly serious, down-to-earth, committed to his work as a surgeon, and utterly normal. “Diana threw herself into the almost aggressive normalcy of his existence,” notes Vanity Fair. “Her friends tell stories about how she puttered around his small one-bedroom apartment and tidied up, doing the dishes and folding his laundry. Hasnat didn’t ride or hunt. He liked jazz and Guinness, so he and Diana stood in line to see the late-night acts.” 

The relationship ended during the summer of 1997, and according to Vanity Fair, many suspect that Diana’s fling with Fayed was engineered to make Khan jealous. Khan has largely stayed silent on his relationship with Diana, and continues to work in London.

Fashion and style were among Diana’s favorite means of communication and self-expression, and she found them deeply cathartic. For example, in the early stages of her relationship with Charles, she was photographed wearing two watches during Charles’ polo matches. One watch was hers, the other belonged to Charles, and according to Marie Claire UK, “She wore it as a tribute to him, and to wish him luck in the match.”

Using fashion and style as a means of communication was a habit continued throughout Diana’s life. As Eleri Lynn, curator of “Diana: Her Fashion Story,” an exhibition at Kensington Palace, told Vanity Fair, “It is very surprising how little footage there exists of the Princess actually speaking. We all have a sense of what we think she was like, and yet so much of it comes from still photographs, and a large part of that [idea] is communicated through the different clothes that she wore.”

Her fashion sense also evolved considerably over the years: she went from favoring frilly, romantic styles to preferring sleek, elegant silhouettes as she spent more time in the limelight. “She did clearly have fun with fashion,” Lynn told Vanity Fair, “and she took risks…and experimented with her style. She was the first member of the royal family to be photographed wearing trousers to evening events. But she often teamed that with tuxedo jackets and bowties — that’s quite the bold, fun look that you don’t necessarily expect of a princess.”

As The New York Times noted in her obituary, Diana had seemingly come into her own in the year before her death. “After recent years of loneliness, wounded vulnerability and feelings of rejection, Lady Diana struck friends this year as having acquired long-sought self-regard and hope for the future…In May Lord Attenborough, the actor and director, said: ‘Once she was a shy young woman who was suddenly thrown into a bear pit. Now you see her confidence, self-assurance and outgoing nature.”’ 

The New York Times went on to remark that, in a 1995 interview, she said she wanted to “transform herself into the ‘queen of people’s hearts’…that seemed to be the thrust of her last year as she focused in on the charities she cared most about — organizations addressing AIDS, leprosy, homelessness, cancer research and the treatment of sick children, along with the English National Ballet.” 

While Diana’s death will always be a loss, it’s clear that those close to her, most notably Princes William and Harry, have worked hard to ensure that it’s not also a waste. William and Harry have carried on her humanitarian work by championing the causes she loved, such as land mine eradication, AIDS advocacy, and de-stigmatizing mental health care. Indeed, her memory lives on in the minds of millions — and, perhaps most importantly, in their hearts as well.