Princess Diana and Her Mother Confessor

In her mid-eighties, Lady Elsa Bowker bonded with the thirty-two-year-old princess during her turbulent love affair with Oliver Hoare, a magnetic and handsome English art dealer

Oliver Hoare and his wife Diane with Prince Charles and Diana, the Princess of Wales at the Guards’ Polo Club in Windsor, June 17, 1986

Last week’s Royals Extra, Part Three: An Insider’s View of the Royal Family, caused a stir by revealing the Queen’s misgivings about Prince Harry’s marriage to American actress Meghan Markle. Two veteran reporters on the royal family, Robert Jobson and Richard Kay, called the revelations “explosive.” The disclosures emerged from my numerous conversations with Lady Elizabeth Anson, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, a great-niece of the Queen Mother, and a goddaughter of King George VI. Liza—as she asked to be called—and I had first met in 1998 when I was doing research for my biography of Diana, and over the years she periodically shared insights with me about other members of the royal family. I recounted a selection of these observations in a three-part Royals Extra series, including a real-time chronicle of how the Queen’s view of Harry and Meghan shifted to worry and wariness in the run-up to their wedding in May 2018.

“Formidable women in their own right”

Thinking about the role of the confidante as I wrote about the Queen and Liza Anson, I recalled a group of very different confidantes selected by Diana, Princess of Wales, whose mother Frances ran off with another man when Diana was six. As I wrote in Diana In Search of Herself in 1999, “Diana’s collection of surrogate mothers emerged in the late eighties and early nineties, and included Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Lucia Flecha de Lima, Hayat Palumbo, and Elsa Bowker—formidable women in their own right, but all living outside the conventional world in which Diana had been raised…Diana’s mother figures were anywhere from twenty to fifty years her senior; even within the maternal category, they occupied different niches.”

Elsa Bowker in her later years when she became friends with Diana, Princess of Wales

I have always considered Elsa Bowker to be the most intriguing of these women—exotic, mysterious, and especially compelling to Diana when she was at her most vulnerable. “Effortlessly, Elsa enchanted all kinds of people, from great aristocrats to high ranking politicians and bureaucrats; from the mixed company in a doctor’s waiting room to the nuns in Burma who kept her picture on the walls of their convent,” said the wife of a prominent ambassador who had known her for some twenty years. “She spoke with heavily accented femme fatale English that would have earned her a fortune in Hollywood. Her personality and vitality were pure Mediterranean.”

“She was extremely close, incredibly close”

I first heard of Elsa in late 1997 after I had taken the assignment from Random House to write Diana’s biography following her death. Various English and American sources suggested that Elsa could give me a unique perspective. Elisabeth, Baroness Ampthill, a friend of Diana’s family who had known her since her childhood, described “an old lady, Elsa Bowker, one person in the later part of Diana’s grown-up life. She was extremely close, incredibly close. They used to laugh a lot, see each other all the time, more than anyone else I could mention.”

I was introduced to Elsa by Nicky Haslam, one of the most well-connected men in Britain. “Elsa Bowker is a wonderful lady,” Nicky told me over lunch at Santini’s restaurant in London on December 1, 1997. “She told me she was intimate with Diana, who was reliant on Elsa’s advice. They met through Oliver Hoare.” Eleven days later, I sat down with Elsa in flat H at 3 West Eaton Place, her elegant home in London’s exclusive Belgravia neighborhood.

“She would pour out private things”

It was the first of two long interviews, followed by three more conversations over tea and lunch. Elsa was nearly ninety by then, and her memories of Diana were as clear as they were deeply personal, with vivid views on the princess’s romance with Oliver Hoare. Elsa adored Diana, but she understood her flaws. “She would pour out private things, her thoughts and reactions and descriptions,” said Elsa. “She told me so many intimate things.”

The link to Oliver Hoare—sixteen years Diana’s senior—was crucial. Elsa’s friendship with Diana began when he took the princess to her flat for dinner in 1993. Their love affair had begun the previous year as the Wales marriage was breaking up. “She wore black velvet Escada,” Elsa recalled. “She was radiant. She was holding an enormous basket of red roses. We kissed each other, and I tried to take the basket, but she insisted on carrying it…