20170203

DIANA

Richard Kay of the 'Daily Mail' had known Diana for 12 years. In his 1997 untold story with Geoffrey Levy, it was reported Diana "enjoyed New Age therapies. She wrote to tell Richard Greene (whom she had met at the Chelsea Harbour Club) how much she had enjoyed reading the book 'Journey Into Spiritual Healing' which he had given her. Reincarnation was one subject Diana discussed with Richard over lunch. 'I'm not coming back,' she told him brightly, and he understood this to mean that she believed she would achieve everything she was meant to in her life." 

It was understood "from the early years of her marriage, Diana had consulted psychics, mystics and stargazers" including astrologers Felix Lyle, Penny Thornton, Betty Palko, Debbie Frank, spiritual healer Simone Simmons, therapist Ursula Gatley, Chinese acupuncturist Dr Lily Hua Yu and psychotherapist Susie Orbach. As reported, "Years before meeting Dodi Fayed (born Imad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed), Diana had predicted her future living abroad in France and of meeting someone 'who's foreign or has a lot of foreign blood in him.' Most poignantly, however, she said: 'I've got things to do and time is precious.'" 

On August 12 1997, Diana and Dodi flew 160 miles in the Harrods helicopter to Derbyshire to see psychic Rita Rogers. Rita gave evidence at the Diana inquest told Harriet Griffey of 'Mail On Line' in 2008, "Diana had visited several times before on her own, and we spoke regularly as friends. I'd read for her several times, of course, but not on this occasion. 

"She wanted me to meet Dodi, and while I did a private reading for him, she sat in the sunshine on the patio with Mo (Rita's partner) and waited until we had finished. As she came in, Diana said, 'We've got about an hour, Rita, before the press get here' - she was well aware of the problems with the press, and never wanted to make things difficult for me. That was her way, thinking of others. 

"I'd read for Dodi before over the phone but on this occasion I read for him in person. He was so interested, because of what Diana had told him about me, and had asked to visit me - in fact, I hadn't expected to see Diana, but she told me she couldn't resist coming too. When I read for him that day, I warned him about the accident - specific details of the color of the car, the tunnel, and told him to always use his own driver - although I had no idea of the timing or the fact that Diana would be with him when it happened. My reading had been for him, and not for her. 

"He was so in love with Diana, there's no doubt about that. And they were very happy; it warmed your heart to see them together. Would they have married? I don't know, but I do know that Diana would never have done anything that would have caused a problem for her sons. They were her absolute priority. But there's also no doubt that they were in love. She was radiant, the happiest I'd ever known her." 

In his article in 1997, Richard Kay reported Diana "believed she was looked after 'in the spirit world' by her paternal grandmother, Countess Spencer. Diana spoke frequently about deja vu experiences and hearing voices. 'I've got a lot of that (deja vu). Places I think I've been before, people I've met,' she said. It was not only as an adult that Diana claimed to have had premonitions. 

"At 13, she had told her father, Earl Spencer: 'I'm going to marry someone who is in the public eye.' At 17, while staying with friends in Norfolk, she had a vision that her father was going to be seriously ill. During her engagement in 1981, Diana had another premonition. While watching Prince Charles put his mount, Allibar through its paces at Lambourne, she suddenly said that the 11-year-old horse was going to have a heart attack and die. Within seconds, the animal reared and dropped to the ground, having suffered a coronary, and it did, indeed, die almost instantly. Diana never claimed anything more than having 'instincts' about what was going to happen: 'I have feelings about things.'"

In the 1971 Paramount picture, 'Let’s Scare Jessica To Death', Broadway star Zohra Lampert, best known at the time for her Ocean Spray Cranapple juice commercials, was credited for playing Jessica with more method than madness. Did Jessica imagine hearing voices in the cemeteries or were someone trying to scare Jessica to death? Shot on location in New England, the psychological drama 'Let's Scare Jessica To Death' sought to explore the supernatural doings which terrified a woman who was recovering from a severe nervous breakdown.

Leaving the Big Apple for the good, clean, unpolluted air of rural Connecticut, Jessica, Duncan (played by Barton Heyman), a bass player with the New York Philharmonic and Woody (played by Kevin O’Connor) moved into a creepy old house still haunted by the death of a 20-year-old girl drowned in 1880. Bernard Drew of 'Free Press-Gannett Service' continued, "'Let's Scare Jessica To Death' is a horror film. It sets out to scare you and it scares you, it contrives to keep you guessing. John Hancock, known mainly for his work in the theater and screenwriters Norman Jonas and Ralph Rose, have played fair. The hints are dropped all along, even at the beginning, and if you're not alert enough to pick them up, that's your problem."

Donald Miller of the 'Pittsburgh Post-Gazette' added, "After the first 10 minutes of 'Let's Scare Jessica To Death', I thought director John Hancock was into something – if not a new genre, then perhaps something as arresting as 'The Cat People'. The color scenes of an old Connecticut farmhouse and its cove in autumnal dress are beautiful. Hancock clearly has an eye for film and shows great potential, even if his pace is too slow in the beginning." John Hancock's first film reportedly impressed producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown.

Based loosely on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 'Carmilla', John Hancock elaborated in an interview, "'Jessica' had those sorts of roots. I thought a lot about (Henry James') 'The Turn of the Screw' and the idea that this woman didn't know whether any of this was actually happening or not. I was living in a place called Sneedon's Landing at the time and working on it at night in my study and it really got under my skin. 

"I was so excited to hear the film was coming out on DVD. It’s been almost impossible to find even VHS copies for awhile. The parts that scared me turned out to be the parts that scared the audience and I was very pleased with that. 'Jessica' came after a trip to San Francisco and a lot of my acting company were really into acid trips and the whole hog farm thing. I really got sick of it. I was in my 30s by now and I was a little bit beyond that whole lifestyle. 

"I think I had the sense too of an era starting to pass away, Altamont and all that. There’s a lot of the death of the hippie movement and the counterculture in 'Jessica'. There hadn’t been a really successful scary adult picture in a long time when 'Jessica' opened thing and it opened really big in New York and made a lot of things possible for me. 

"Another picture that really influenced me was Robert Wise' 'The Haunting' with Julie Harris. It made me just love the idea of a neurotic female lead. I had heard a rumor that Robert Evans was going to remake it, you know, just grab the title and make an unrelated picture and that worried me some. I’d hate to see something like that happen. Another aspect though that definitely came from me and that I've always loved about 'Jessica' is that the picture was set on an apple farm. 

"That's something you see in a lot of my films. It's something I’ve always come back to. When I was born my parents bought an apple farm. I remember the shed full of equipment and watching my father spray the apples with pesticides. I didn’t realize until the picture was done but 'Jessica' offered sort of a child's view of a visit to a scary farm. There were other elements that came from my life. My mother was a redhead like Mariclare Costello who plays Emily and my father really did play bass and lugged the thing around in this huge coffin-like box."

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