Princess Diana's private letters reveal the sadness of her final years
‘Intimate and at times both moving and eloquent’: Princess Diana’s darkly private letters reveal the aching sadness of her final years, writes RICHARD KAY
How typical of Princess Diana to put her innermost thoughts into letters — and, in retrospect, how sensible.
As the stresses and anxieties of her divorce negotiations multiplied, which included her belief that her telephone calls were being bugged, she increasingly put pen to paper to trusted friends.
Just how vivid those pressures were was revealed this week in a remarkable cache of correspondence written by the princess to Susie Kassem, who became a close confidante during the last two years of Diana’s life.
In one, she describes to her friend how ‘desperate and ugly’ things had become and that, had she known what she was going to experience, she would never have consented to the divorce.
Yet despite it all, she manages to retain a sense of humour in her writing, while displaying a wry if slightly sardonic attitude to events often outside her control.
Thirty two of the letters and notes which the princess wrote to Mrs Kassem and her businessman husband Tarek are being sold at auction. Highly personal and poignant, they span a 20-month period from the last days of summer 1995 to the spring of 1997, an extraordinary period in the late princess’s life.
Princess Diana’s letters were revealed this week in a remarkable cache of correspondence written by the princess to Susie Kassem
In one, she describes to her friend how ‘desperate and ugly’ things had become and that, had she known what she was going to experience, she would never have consented to the divorce
That time-frame includes her divorce from the Prince of Wales, her explosive Panorama interview and scandals over love affairs, as well as her hopes and dreams of building a new life.
Even now, close to three decades later, they are a fascinating and moving insight into a key period in recent royal history.
In one letter she speaks of her longing for a post-divorce calm — a calm that never truly came. So what was going on — and how serious was the casual remark she wrote in one letter that ‘I will top myself if I remain here’?
As I learned myself over my years of friendship with the princess, the answers are darkly complex.
I can picture Diana at the desk in her first-floor sitting room at Kensington Palace, sun flooding in behind her through the double-height window as she scratched away with a gold-nibbed Parker fountain pen on her monogrammed stationery.
It bore a coronet over a capital letter D and her home address. At her side was always a Thesaurus for when she needed that special word to convey her feelings.
She was always the most assiduous of letter-writers. Barely had a gift been opened than she would be crafting a thoughtful and amusing thank-you note.
It was one of the reasons she hated her birthday: there would be so many flowers and presents delivered to the palace that she had to devote hours to thanking every single well-wisher.
‘She was always the most assiduous of letter-writers. Barely had a gift been opened than she would be crafting a thoughtful and amusing thank-you note’
The letters that she shared with Mrs Kassem are, of course, far more intimate and at times both moving and eloquent. They reveal Diana’s warmth and charm. But most of all they are testament to the aching sadness in her life — the absence of domestic happiness.
The Kassems didn’t just open their hearts to the princess but also the doors to their home and their family.
I know Diana adored being with them, as she did with other figures such as Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Indeed, she later found that same fulfilment around the dining table of Mohamed Al-Fayed when she joined his family for that fateful last holiday in the South of France.
Tarek and Susie’s Chelsea home became a vital refuge. At weekends when her diary stretched emptily before her, they would invite her to jolly family lunches.
If their grown-up children were there too, so much the better. Sometimes they would take her out to restaurants off the beaten track to avoid the paparazzi.
In two of the letters she thanks them for trips to the famous Compleat Angler in Marlow, and the French Horn at Sonning on the River Thames.
These were days when Diana was at her most relaxed — but the couple were also often there when things were tougher.
Even now, it is impossible to exaggerate the intensity and daily microscopic attention that followed the princess for the five years from her official separation from Charles to her death.
Susie had often been at her side when the princess was ambushed by paps. On one occasion she had been shocked by the aggressive treatment Diana received as she helped her board a flight to Spain at Heathrow airport.
The pictured letters were written just eight months before Princess Diana’s death
The friendship between the two women grew from a chance meeting at the intensive care unit in the Royal Brompton Hospital. Susie, a London magistrate, was a hospital visitor, a volunteer who helped out with patients and staff.
Diana was seeing her Irish-born friend and acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo, a former nurse to the Duke of Windsor. Oonagh’s husband Joe was being treated at the hospital, where he was under the care of cardiologist Dr Hasnat Khan.
And so it was that, in the space of just a few days in late August 1995, the princess met two people who were to have a profound effect on her life — Mrs Kassem and the heart surgeon with whom she fell in love.
It was to Susie that Diana described the Pakistan-born Khan as ‘Mr Wonderful’.
But while she was romantically drawn to the doctor, she and Susie very quickly became firm friends. Both later described this friendship as being one of ‘kindred spirits’. Indeed, Mrs Kassem was one of the very last people the princess telephoned from the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the night of her death.
As Diana writes in one of her first letters: ‘I am extremely happy that our paths have crossed as I feel I have known you before.’
Initially they saw each other every couple of days or so at the hospital — but soon Susie, whose husband was an investment banker, was a regular at Diana’s Kensington Palace apartment.
‘I’d love you to meet my two young men,’ she said in a letter about William and Harry soon after the pair met.
At Christmas that year, with William and Harry at Sandringham with the Royal Family, Diana was alone. I remember her telling me that the only company she had was when she accidentally set off her panic alarm and police rushed into her apartment.
She did, however, spend Boxing Day with the Kassems. ‘Your tribe were terrific,’ Diana wrote in thanks. ‘I was so thrilled to be invited into a family occasion, particularly as I was made to feel like one of the team.’
Private letters from Princess Diana reveal she wouldn’t have agreed to separate if she knew it was going to be so ‘desperate and ugly’
The princess had often been drawn to more experienced and worldly wise older women such as the businesswoman Rosa Monckton and Brazilian diplomat’s wife Lucia Flecha de Lima.
She described to me her friendship with Mrs Kassem, who was 15 years her senior, as being like that with an older sister.
The two women shared an interest in meditation and the healing qualities of crystals. Diana used to sleep with a piece of amethyst under her pillow, believing it would ward off ‘negativity’.
In one emotional note, she wrote: ‘I am lost words for all the lovely things you bring into my life, when many people would have deserted this ship!!’
Sometimes it is only the date which reveals what was going on in Diana’s life at the time. Writing to thank Susie and her husband for lunch on December 10, 1995, she said: ‘I am immensely touched by how protective you both are of me . . . I’m not used to that.’
It was written not long after the princess’s controversial interview with the BBC’s Martin Bashir.
Although there are no letters in the lots being sold that refer by name to either the reporter himself or the interview, Bashir’s influence is apparent. Writing in May 1996, she said her telephone conversations on Kensington Palace phone lines were ‘constantly recorded and passed on’.
Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their last official trip together – a visit to South Korea in 1992
We now know that, by this time, Bashir had become an influential figure in Diana’s life. Years later, it emerged that he had deceived her in order to get the interview, convincing her that her phone calls were bugged and her movements tracked.
On December 19, 1995, Diana wrote to Tarek: ‘I may have been described as a butterfly but I don’t want to fly away from this loving family, so thank you for caring.’ The date is of huge significance, as on the previous day the Queen had written to the princess and to Prince Charles, instructing them to agree to an early divorce.
The wording of this card clearly shows just how much Diana needed and appreciated the support the Kassem family provided during this tumultuous time in her life.
Susie was forever sending Diana presents such as jewellery, perfume and CDs. And on March 16, 1996, the princess wrote to thank her for a gift of Chrysocolla — a crystal said to promote clarity and calm at times of turbulence.
Diana was in the midst of considerable upheaval, with newspaper headlines claiming she’d had an affair with the then-married England rugby captain Will Carling.
‘I am overwhelmed totally by your cherishing,’ Diana wrote, ‘and know that without your support and understanding I’d never have made it through the last few months.’
By then, of course, the princess had actually been conducting a relationship with Hasnat Khan for months. And after returning from an official visit to Australia in November that year, Diana wrote to them with typical understatement of her reaction to a newspaper account of her closeness to Khan.
‘A tremendous shock to read the Sunday Mirror, totally unexpected, however time to make decisions.’
As the pressure increased for her to end her 15-year marriage to Charles, the friends in whom Diana could truly confide had dwindled to very few in number. The shrewd Kassems were a vital counsel at a time when she told me the paperwork for the divorce was so perilously tall it reached waist height.
The Kassems were not just a shoulder to cry on but would also offer her much-needed diversions. She couldn’t always take them up.
In a letter to the couple in April 1996, she wrote apologising for the short notice that meant she would be unable to join them at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden for a performance of Tosca that evening.
‘I am having a very difficult time and the pressure is serious and coming from all sides. It’s too difficult to keep one’s head up and today I’m on my knees and just longing for this divorce to go through as the personal cost is tremendous.’
What she didn’t mention was that on that day she was at the centre of a media storm after being photographed observing the eminent surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub performing a heart operation at Harefield Hospital.
Previously revealed letters by Princess Diana took veiled digs at the Royal Family for isolating her and told of how she believed her phone at Kensington Palace had been bugged
Accused of crude attention-seeking, the princess was deeply hurt. At the time, she told me she had attended many such operations but this one had been filmed to help raise money for charity.
Diana was criticised for wearing make-up beneath her surgical mask and gown, and for not removing her earrings.
Susie shared the princess’s deep frustrations at the constant attention. The two women had become close to a young Greek lawyer, Yannis Kaliviotis, who was waiting for a heart and lung transplant at the Royal Brompton Hospital.
He suffered from debilitating cystic fibrosis and Diana later wrote a foreword for a book Mrs Kassem compiled to raise funds for the condition. Yannis did not survive and the two attended his funeral in Greece.
She touches on the loss in one letter where she writes how much she misses the young man.
After her divorce in August 1996, a note of optimism suddenly infuses Diana’s writing. ‘I am more than happy to have my freedom and reckon that I’m very fortunate to have a second chance,’ she says in a letter a month later, adding: ‘Lots of nice things have come my way . . . who’d have thought!’
That Christmas, she writes of her plans to be abroad (she flew to Barbuda in the Caribbean on December 24), explaining: ‘As not being a lover of Christmas I will top myself if I remain here!’
She added: ‘I hope ’97 will be an easier year for us all.’
Diana died barely eight months later. At the time, Mrs Kassem described her friend as being like ‘fairy dust’, adding: ‘She used to sprinkle her fairy dust around and give joy whatever the situation.’
Now, almost 26 years later, she and her husband have decided to sell many of the treasured letters because ‘owning the documents is a great responsibility’ which they do not wish to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
The 32 letters and cards are expected to fetch £90,000 at auctioneers Lay’s in Penzance, Cornwall, on Thursday. Proceeds from the sale will go to charities Diana supported.
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