That’s what many people were calling former army Maj. James Hewitt, 36, last week, after the publication of a kiss-and-tell memoir that sets a new standard for sleaziness, even in the British royal-watching industry. “Princess in Love,” by Anna Pasternak, a grandniece of the great Russian writer, purports to tell the story of an alleged five-year love affair between Hewitt and Princess Diana. If the story is even partly true, it’s an affair to remember, but not for good taste or good writing (“Theirs was a love that could not be aired”). When Barbara Cartland, the doyenne of mushy romance, calls a book “absolute rubbish,” it’s hard to imagine anything sillier.
Which doesn’t mean that Hewitt and Pasternak made all of it up. In the tabloid Today, anonymous friends of the princess quoted her as saying: “I have never slept with James Hewitt.” But when a spokesman for Buckingham Palace dismissed the book as “grubby and worthless,” he didn’t say Princess Di hadn’t had an affair with Hewitt. Newspapers that castigated Hewitt as a “stinker” and a “rat” denounced him for telling, not necessarily for lying. Many readers thought publication of the all-too-sordid details had pushed the separated Prince and Princess of Wales one step closer to an early divorce.
Pasternak writes that the romance began in 1986, after Diana had become estranged from Prince Charles. Hewitt, a flirtatious and impeccably dressed cavalry officer in the socially top-drawer Life Guards, volunteered to give Diana riding lessons. Things galloped downhill from there. Pasternak, a 27-year-old Oxford graduate, chronicles the romance in ludicrously steamy prose. (“Their bodies were electric, aching to embrace…”) She piles cliche upon cliche; in a single sentence; the affair is jarringly described as both “a grand passion” and “a hardy perennial.”
According to Pasternak, James and Diana made love at Highgrove, the Gloucestershire estate owned by Prince Charles, in a pool house at Althorp, her ancestral home, and in his mother’s cottage in the county of Devon, among other places. After James returned from the Persian Gulf War their affair died out, mainly for want of a future; in the end, Pasternak writes, James “felt used.” But the book promises more than it delivers. Diana’s love letters to Hewitt are reduced to pallid paraphrase, evidently for legal reasons. And Pasternak keeps telling us what all the characters are thinking, putting herself inside the heads of Charles, Queen Elizabeth, the two little princes and their nanny and, most of all, Diana (“For in James she had thought that she had found strength, but in fact he, like Charles, was weak”). Pasternak didn’t actually interview any of them.
She did interview Hewitt, at length. Earlier this year, they sold a sanitized version of his story to the Daily Express for upwards of $100,000. After a fanfare of publicity the 75,000-copy first run of Pasternak’s book sold briskly, at $24 a copy. A second run reached stores at midweek, but sales of the 192-page book seemed to taper off quickly as word of mouth pronounced it thin. “It looks like a one-week wonder,” said London bookseller Rita Schreyer.
Pasternak insisted that Hewitt had not “made a penny” from the book. Hewitt himself had gone to ground, apparently overseas. But British newspapers reported that he had just bought a $850,000 estate in Devon. It was a big purchase for a man who washed out of the army in a post-cold-war cutback earlier this year and was left with an annual pension of about $11,000. There was speculation that Hewitt would turn the estate into a riding academy. If he needs a marketable skill to fall back on, the major may find himself back in the saddle again.
