Jay looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite decipher. “Well,” he said, “I hope it will be full of happy memories.”
Maybe he knew all along how bad it was. And letting me handle it my way was something he did for me.
35
Diana
HOPE. HOPE. HOPE. “The thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson wrote.
I held on to it for dear life, worried that if I let go, Jay would too.
So I stayed positive. When Tom Nash pulled me into that anodyne room and said there were tumors all over Jay’s liver, I stayed positive. When the cancer spread to his lungs, I said, “We will fight this.” When Jay met me in the waiting room, so gaunt and courageous after yet another procedure, I smiled and slipped my hand in his, once again pretending to be strong and that it was going to be okay.
One weekend, Jay was in his riding clothes, having returned from an afternoon on horseback. Even though he was rail-thin, he still looked Ralph Lauren–handsome in his polo shirt, jodhpurs, and boots. We were packing up the car when out of nowhere he said, “Something’s wrong. I can’t really see.”
On Monday we went to yet another specialist: an ocular oncologist, something I’d never even heard of. After he examined Jay, we assumed the familiar position of terrified couple sitting across a desk from a doctor.
This one would tell us why Jay’s vision was blurry: he had a tumor growing behind his right eye. How many more ways could Jay’s body betray him?
MY PRODUCER AND friend Lori Beecher, her husband, Marc, and their kids came to Millbrook for Labor Day weekend. On Saturday around 8:00 p.m., Marc’s beeper went off—he was head of special events at ABC, and the news desk needed him to come in right away: Princess Diana had been in a car accident. After midnight in Paris, she and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, were being pursued at high speed by paparazzi when their driver crashed into a concrete pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.
We were glued to the TV. It being a holiday weekend, the networks were short-staffed （I wasn’t the only one who had escaped the city）。 Brian Williams, then the face of the young and struggling cable channel MSNBC, rushed to the set at 11:00 p.m. to continue coverage while Tom Brokaw headed to London. At 11:46 p.m., Williams reported that Princess Diana had died.
I had met the princess a year earlier, at a luncheon at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. She’d been invited by Northwestern University to spend three days helping raise money for breast cancer research. Diana sat between Anna Quindlen and me, glowing in a sleeveless cream-colored dress with a single strand of pearls. Anna and I were struck by her girlish charm, still looking like the rosy-cheeked, bashful, part-time kindergarten teacher Prince Charles introduced to the world when she was just 19. At one point she turned to me and said, “I like your lipstick,” which took me by surprise. I was flattered that she’d noticed.
Then the subject turned to parenting.
“How do you keep your children from watching too much telly?” Princess Diana asked us. “I’m having a terrible time with William and Harry” （then 13 and 11）。 I think we told her to hide the remote.
“This must be an exhausting trip,” I said, “with so many people to meet, shaking hands with all those strangers. Are you excited to go home?”
“I would be,” Princess Diana responded, “but I’m going home to an empty house.”
As we all knew, she was in the process of finalizing her divorce from Prince Charles. I was surprised by her openness and sensed a deep sadness. “Why don’t you invite some friends over for a slumber party?” I asked, half joking.
Princess Diana cocked her head quizzically at the idea of it, like a dog hearing a high-pitched whistle. At the time, I had no idea how miserable she really was.
Now, 15 months later, I was flying to London to broadcast her funeral live from Buckingham Palace. Bereft Londoners and tourists were leaving bouquets outside the gates; by midweek, they’d cover acres.
The service was on Saturday at Westminster Abbey. NBC had built a platform directly across from the entrance where Tom Brokaw and I sat, along with Tina Brown. After an hour, the cortege came into view; the casket, laden with lilies, had a simple white card on top that said Mummy—handwritten and placed there by Harry. Mourners wailed at the sight of the princes walking behind the casket, heads bowed. And I realized that what I was seeing was not the passing of the most famous woman in the world; it was two boys who’d lost a parent. And I thought of my girls.
Tears started to flow. I leaned over to Tom and whispered, “I’m having a really hard time.”