Whitaker, a reporter for the Daily Mirror, had known Princess Diana for nearly twenty years—since she was an anonymous apple-cheeked teenager with dreams of marrying a prince. Whitaker, a dapper dresser with a round, ruddy face and a chipmunk smile, became Diana’s biggest champion; she secretly gave him scoops about herself and he reciprocated with relentlessly adoring coverage. Diana had long since dropped Whitaker as her favorite confidante—he had been “traded up,” he knew, for the more upscale Richard Kay at the Daily Mail—but he was still quite friendly with Diana, and there were those who believed that Whitaker, more than any other person, had launched the remarkable worldwide fame of Princess Diana. Whitaker watched with a certain amount of proprietary affection that cloudless Monday in July 1997 as the Princess, dressed in a bold gold jungle print bathing suit and dark sunglasses with gold trim, cavorted on the beach in front of the fleet of journalists and paparazzi offshore.
