Camilla's rise hit Diana with blunt force when Charles chose Highgrove as the venue for his mistress's 50th-birthday celebration, on July 17, 1997. The flagrant use of their former marital home was an unnecessary blow for Diana. It plunged her more deeply into her "darkness." She was deeply envious as well as deeply hurt: while Charles had found his love, Diana had lost hers. Salt was rubbed in the wound by a flattering television documentary about Camilla—another plank in Bolland's relentless campaign. Shirley Conran advised Diana not to watch it, but she couldn't resist. After all this time, she still wanted one question answered: Why? Why was it this woman who had taken it all—her Prince, her emotional security, her destiny as Queen? After watching the program, Diana called her astrologer, Debbie Frank, in anguish. "All the grief in my past is resurfacing," Diana told her. "I feel terrible … so frightened and needy." She sounded, Frank said, "breathy, child-like, again."
A Surprise Invitation
She needed to get out of town. She had toyed for a bit with the idea of spending the summer in the United States, and asked Teddy Forstmann, the financier and a sometime beau, to find her a house near his in Southampton. "I found her something, but five days later she called back and said the security people had said the openness of the Hamptons wasn't safe," said Forstmann. It was a boon when the importunate bullfrog Mohamed Al Fayed asked her to bring the boys to stay at his villa in the South of France. There she would be fully protected, not just by the security men who always accompanied the royal boys but by Al Fayed's own prodigious security. She wanted to nurse her wounds. When her hairdresser, Natalie Symons, arrived on the morning of July 11, after Diana's breakup with Khan, she was packing for the villa holiday and sobbing her heart out. "I could tell she was totally distraught because she didn't have any mascara on, and she always puts her mascara on before she does anything else," Symons recalled.