“You expect to have a party like that at your funeral, so it was kinda dreamy that way,” Hedges, 35, mused after the recent Dutton’s reading and book party celebrating his quirky, semiautobiographical novel, “An Ocean in Iowa” (Hyperion). Passion Player: Peter Hedges was having such a good time, he could have been dead. Well, that certainly sets the record straight. We thought we had such a different perspective about Diana, and our experience had been so positive and so warm.” “My husband and I had been disturbed for years about some of the negative and unkind articles or books that have been written about her. “Over the next few days, we decided this could be something very nice I could do for Diana,” Robertson says. A book contract, roughly the 60th to see the light of print since Diana’s death last year. The media world beat a path to our door.” “Within two minutes of that spot, the phone was ringing off the hook,” Robertson says. Then it turned out being hounded by the press wasn’t so bad after all.ĪBC News tracked down the Robertsons after the princess’s death because they were the only Americans attending the royal wedding who weren’t famous.

Robertson says she kept a low profile until now because she didn’t want to be hounded by the press. She worked for the Robertsons for about a year, until a few months before her wedding. In 1980 Diana was a happy, normal teenager.”Īs long as she was a nanny, apparently. “I said, ‘It’s quite a surprise for us to have you with your impressive background, I mean a title and all, looking after Patrick.’ She smiled, gestured with a toss of her right hand, and said, ‘Oh, that.’ The subject never came up again. The English bankers with whom I worked were equally floored.” “I simply couldn’t believe that a young woman of such an aristocratic background was probably giving lunch to my son at that very moment. After a bit of snooping-hey, far be it from us-they determine their nanny “belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious families in England,” Robertson writes.

The Diana I Knew by Mary Robertson