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She was the world's most famous woman, he is one of its richest men. But Princess Diana and Gulu Lalvani had more than their wealth and fame in common.
The Princess had suffered the emotional distress of a very public divorce from the heir to the throne. Multi-millionaire tycoon Lalvani's obsessive devotion to building his pounds 60 million Binatone electronics empire from nothing had already cost him one marriage and was about to destroy a second.
Diana knew she could help him through it. And she did - with a remarkable book which taught her to put the trauma behind her, to begin a new life with a new love, and even to build a new friendship with the husband she had once detested.
The Princess gave Gulu her own copy of If It Hurts It Isn't Love, by Hawaii-based psychologist Chuck Spezzano. The £ 9.99 paperback, published by Arthur James, was Diana's own book of love.
On its 385 pages she marked the passages that had touched her heart, scribbling notes with blue ink in her distinctive rounded handwriting. When she found something particularly meaningful, she turned down the corner of the page.
Mr Lalvani says: "She read it from cover to cover. It had really helped her."
Now, only because he knows how much Diana wanted to help others, Mr Lalvani has agreed to talk of how she helped him.
He says: "Diana and I became good friends. We used to cry on each other's shoulders, so to speak.
"I was divorced in the first week of January this year. To me that was quite a shock.
"I told Diana I had lost my trust in women after my divorce. Diana told me, 'I know how it feels. I went through this too.'
"One day we were having drinks at Kensington Palace. She said, 'This will do you a lot of good,' and we talked about the book."
Gulu says he baulked at a book nearly two inches thick. He joked that it took all his spare moments just to read just the Financial Times.
"I told her I would never read a book that size," he recalled. So Diana told him, 'I will mark the most important bits and give it to you.'
Four quotations particularly caught Diana's attention. The first was: "The beauty of forgiveness is that it changes your perception." She had neatly turned down the corner of that page.
Diana also underlined: "Forgiveness releases you from being a victim." The third to which she drew special attention was: "Every trauma offers a choice."
"Absolutely true," she wrote next to it with that blue pen. The other was: "The less you expect, the more you receive."
"Exactly!" she scribbled enthusiastically in the margin.
The Princess marked other passages with large brackets and turned down the pages.
They included: "Forgiveness is not something you do, it's something that's done through you"..."A broken heart is always an attempt to control someone through guilt"... "Pain is an area where we have cut the lines of relatedness, where we have removed ourselves or pulled back from someone."
Another section she marked was: "When you let go, something better always comes to you, because letting go moves you forward." Again Diana put an exclamation mark at the side.
After years of bitterness and fear, Diana had turned her life around and found happiness with the help of the book.
She had even found a closeness with Prince Charles that seemed impossible a year before.
As millions watched Prince Charles in Hong Kong for the hand-over to the Chinese this year, attention focused on the tearful departing Governor Chris Patten. There was a brief glimpse of Charles looking emotional in the rain-drenched ceremonies.
No one knew until then that he was also mourning the loss of another dream. He had hoped Diana would accompany him to Hong Kong. It would have been a public show of an incredible reconciliation.
"Diana asked me later what I thought of the book," Mr Lalvani says. "I said I agreed with most of the things. Some pages, chapters, helped me get over things much faster."
Ironically Diana did not pick out from the book what many would consider a fitting epitaph:
"Your happiness is the best gift you can give the world."
2 comments:
Chuck Spezzano is not a psychologist.
Touting Shy Di as a POV success story, which used to be more common in the cult's advertising than it is today, is sort of sick. She had enough troubles without being tied to this cult after she died. Using her sad story as a marketing device is perverse. But then, so is Psychology of Vision so why should I not be surprised?
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