The doctor’s diagnosis bolstered her budding sense of self-esteem. She needed every scrap of help. Even as she started the long haul to recovery, her husband derided her efforts. At mealtimes he would watch her eat and say: ‘Is that going to reappear later? What a waste.’ Dr Lipsedge’s prediction proved correct. After six months the improvement was noticeable. It felt, she said, as if she had been born again. Before she had begun her treatment she had been regularly sick four times a day. Now this was reduced to once every three weeks. However, whenever staying with the royal family at Balmoral, Sandringham or Windsor, the tensions and pressures triggered a more serious recurrence. The same was true of Highgrove, the couple’s country house which the Princess perceived as Charles’s territory where he entertained friends, such as the Parker Bowleses and members of his set. From the beginning she had disliked the Georgian manor house, and the passage of time merely exacerbated those feelings. Each weekend she spent there with her husband brought on anxiety followed shortly by an attack of bulimia.
At the same time that she determined finally to conquer her bulimia she decided to confront the woman about whom she had felt such anxiety and anger. This confrontation happened when she and Prince Charles attended the 40th birthday party of Camilla Parker Bowles’s sister, Annabel Elliot, which was held at Ham Common near Richmond Park. There was an unspoken assumption among the 40 guests that Diana would not attend and so there was a frisson of surprise among the assembled company when she walked in. After dinner, Diana, who was chatting to guests in an upstairs room, noted the absence of her husband and Camilla Parker Bowles. She went downstairs and found her husband, Camilla and another guest chatting. The Princess asked the others to leave because she had something important to say to Camilla.
They duly departed and an expectant hush fell over the company. There followed a brisk conversation in which Diana gave voice to her feelings about what she believed to be the nature of the relationship between Camilla and her husband. Diana had long been concerned about the influence of ‘the Highgrove Set’ on her husband. When they were at their Gloucestershire retreat she routinely pressed the ‘last number redial’ button on his mobile telephone and invariably found herself connected to Middlewick House, the Parker Bowleses’ Wiltshire home. She was also aware of the regular correspondence between her husband and Mrs Parker Bowles. The meetings between members of the Highgrove Set and Prince Charles while out fox hunting or as guests at Balmoral and Sandringham merely fuelled her suspicions.
During that conversation, seven years of pent-up anger, jealousy and frustration came flooding out. She told her: ‘I’m sorry I’m in the way, I obviously am in the way and it must be hell for both of you but I do know what’s going on. Don’t treat me like an idiot.’ The experience resulted in a profound change in Diana’s attitude. Although she still felt tremendous resentment towards her husband and Camilla and the Highgrove Set, it was no longer the consuming passion in her life.
It was during this time that she became good friends with Mara and Lorenzo Berni, who, at the time, ran the San Lorenzo restaurant in fashionable Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge. Mara, who died in 2012, had the reputation of an Italian earth mother, regularly asking guests about their star signs, the meaning of their names and the importance of the planets. While Diana had been visiting the restaurant for some years, Mara and Lorenzo first came properly into her life in the early 1990s. She was waiting for her lunchtime guest when Mara, who tended to be protective and attentive to favoured guests, wandered over to her table and sat down. Putting her hand on Diana’s wrist she told her that she understood what she was going through. Diana was sceptical and asked her to justify her statement. In a few sentences Mara painted a portrait of Diana’s solitary, sorrowful life, the changes she was undergoing and the path she would take. Diana was transfixed, astonished by her acute observations on the nature of her life which she thought she had managed to disguise from the outside world.
She peppered Mara with questions about her future, if she would find happiness and if she would ever escape from the royal system. From then on, San Lorenzo became not just a restaurant but a safe haven from her turbulent life at Kensington Palace. Mara and Lorenzo became comforting counsellors who listened as the Princess discussed her many woes. As their friend James Gilbey observed: ‘Mara and Lorenzo are highly attuned, very perceptive and have seen a lot of unhappiness and frustration in Diana. They have been able to help her come to terms with her situation.’ The couple encouraged Diana’s interest in astrology, tarot cards and other realms of alternative metaphysics such as clairvoyance and hypnotism. Such things were something of a tradition in the royal family. Author John Dale has traced what he calls the ‘psychic bloodline of the royal family’ back to the days of Queen Victoria. Over the years, claims Dale, numerous members of the royal family, including the late Queen Mother, the Queen and Prince Philip have attended seances and other investigations into the paranormal. Around this time Diana was first introduced to the astrologer Debbie Frank, whom she continued to consult over the years. Hers is a gentle technique which combines general counselling and analysis concerning the present and the future as they relate to the conjunction of planets appropriate to Diana’s birth time and date. Born under the sign of Cancer, Diana has many qualities typical of that sign: protective, tenacious, emotionally attuned and nurturing.
When she first began investigating the possibilities of the spiritual world, Diana was very open, almost too open, to belief. She was so much at sea in her world that she clutched at any prediction, in the way that a drowning man clutches at flotsam. As her confidence in herself grew, she started to see these methods of self-analysis and forecast as tools and guides rather than as a lifeline to grab on to. She found astrology interesting, occasionally relevant and reassuring, but in no way at all the dominant motivation of her life. As her friend Angela Serota observed: ‘Learning about the inner growth in ourselves is the most important part of life. This is her next journey.’
This interest was a vital stepping stone on her road to self-knowledge. Her open-minded approach to philosophies outside mainstream Western thought echoed that expressed by Prince Charles. Just as the Prince and other members of the royal family have allied themselves to alternative medicine and holistic beliefs, so Diana independently explored alternative methods of approaching the world. Astrology was one such field of inquiry. For most of her adult life Diana had allowed herself to be governed by others, particularly her husband. Consequently her true nature was submerged for so long that it took time for it to resurface. Her voyage of self-discovery was by no means a smooth passage. For every day she felt at peace with herself there were weeks of depression, anxiety and self-doubt. During these black periods the counselling of therapist Stephen Twigg was crucial and the Princess readily acknowledged the debt she owed him. After training in Swedish and deep tissue massage, he evolved a coherent philosophy towards health which, as with Chinese medicine, links the mind and body in the pursuit of well-being. He started visiting Kensington Palace ostensibly to perform relaxing massage in December 1988.
Her appreciation of Stephen Twigg did not surprise Baroness Falkender, former political secretary to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had been one of his patients for some time following her illness with breast cancer. She stated: ‘He must have helped her an awful lot as he has helped me. He is a remarkable character. While he is extremely good at therapeutic massage, he has a complete philosophy of life which is challenging and helps you find your own path in life. He makes you feel confident and relaxed and that in turn gives you a new lease of life.’
During his consultations with Diana, which lasted around an hour, he discussed everything from vitamin supplements to the meaning of the universe as he endeavoured to enable his patient to understand herself and bring into harmony her physical, mental and spiritual components. It was at his suggestion that Diana tried vitamin supplements, used detoxifying processes and started to follow the Hay diet, wh
ich is a system of eating based on keeping carbohydrates and proteins apart in a defined eating pattern. As with all his patients, he discussed processes whereby individuals affirm their positive characteristics and examine threatening situations in their lives – for instance, Diana’s visits to Balmoral, which made her feel so vulnerable and excluded. ‘Remember,’ he told her, ‘it’s not so much that you are stuck with the royal family, rather they are stuck with you.’
As Twigg said: ‘People like Diana show us all that it doesn’t matter how much you have or what benefits you are born with, your world can still be restricted by unhappiness and ill health. It still takes courage to recognize these limitations, to confront them and change your life.’
She experimented with other techniques, including hypnotherapy with Roderick Lane and aromatherapy, an ancient art which involves the use of aromatic oils to reduce stress, promote physical health and a serenity of mind. ‘It has a deep relaxing effect,’ says Sue Beechey, a Yorkshirewoman who has been practising the art for 20 years. She would make up the oils in her Chelsea practice before taking them to Kensington Palace. Diana often combined aromatherapy with a session of acupuncture, a Chinese healing art in which needles are used to puncture the skin at certain defined points in order to restore the balance of ‘chi energy’ which is essential to good health. The needles stimulate invisible lines of energy called meridians which run beneath the skin. The acupuncture was performed by Oonagh Toffolo, a trained nurse from County Sligo in Ireland who also treated Prince William from time to time as well as the Princess. Like Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine, the Princess of Wales also had faith in the healing power of crystals.
During this period she would keep physically fit with a daily swim at Buckingham Palace as well as exercise classes and the occasional workout with the London City Ballet of which she was patron. She also had a personal instructor who trained her in the subtle skills of tai chi chuan, a slow-moving form of meditation popular in the Far East. The movements are graceful and flowing and follow a set pattern, enabling an individual to harmonize mind, body and spirit. Her appreciation was all the more discerning because of her lifelong love of ballet. This gentle physical activity was matched by the inner peace she found through quiet meditation and prayer, often with Oonagh Toffolo whose Catholic faith had been tempered by her work in India and the Far East.
While she still read romantic fiction by authors such as Danielle Steele, who would send her signed copies of her latest books, she was drawn to works dealing with holistic philosophy, healing and mental health. Often in the morning she would explore the thinking of the Bulgarian philosopher Mikhail Ivanov. It was a quiet meditation in a crowded day. She cherished a blue leather-bound copy of The Prophet by the Lebanese philosopher Kahlil Gibran which was given to her by Adrian Ward-Jackson whom she helped to nurse as he was dying of Aids.
Her preoccupations at that time owed little to her husband, whose interest in holistic medicine, architecture and philosophy is widely recognized. When he saw her reading a book called Facing Death while she was on holiday he asked her bluntly what she was doing wasting her time reading about those issues. However, she was no longer afraid of coming to terms with her own feelings nor of confronting the uncomfortable and disturbing emotions of others as they approached death or for that matter seeing humour and joy in situations of intense sorrow. Her love of choral music, ‘because it touches the depths’, was eloquent testimony to her serious reflective spirit. If cast away on a desert island her first three choices of music to have with her would have been Mozart’s Massin C and the requiems by Fauré and Verdi.
The counselling, the friendships and the holistic therapies she embraced during this period enabled her to win back her personality, a character which had been smothered by her husband, the royal system, and the public’s expectations towards their fairytale princess. The woman behind the mask was not a flighty, skittish young thing nor a vision of saintly perfection. She was, however, a much quieter, introverted and private person than many would like to have believed. As Carolyn Bartholomew said: ‘She has never liked the media although they’ve been friends to her. Actually she has always been shy of them.’
As she matured the physical changes in her became noticeable. When she asked Sam McKnight to cut her hair in a shorter, sportier style it was a public statement of the way she felt she had altered. Her voice, too, was a barometer of the way she had matured. When she spoke of the ‘dark ages’, her tone was flat and soft, almost fading to nothing, as though dredging thoughts from a dim recess of her heart which she only visited with trepidation. When she was feeling ‘centred’, and in charge of herself, her voice was lively, colourful and brimming with wry amusement. When Oonagh Toffolo first visited Diana at Kensington Palace in September 1989 she observed that the Princess was timid and would never look her straight in the eye. She said: ‘Over the last two years she has got in touch with her own nature and has found a new confidence and sense of liberation which she had never known before.’ Her observation was borne out by others. As one friend who first met Diana in 1989 recalled: ‘My initial impression was of a very shy and retiring person. She bowed her head low and hardly looked at me when she spoke. Diana emanated such sadness and vulnerability that I just wanted to give her a hug. She has matured enormously since that time. She now has a purpose in life and is no longer the lost soul of that first meeting.’
Her willingness to take on challenging and difficult causes such as Aids was a reflection of her new-found confidence. As her interests moved into the world of health she found that she had less time to devote to her portfolio of patronages and sometimes this had awkward results. For example, she endured a sticky meeting with executives from a ballet company who made it clear that they would like her to devote more time to their cause. As she said afterwards: ‘There are more important things in life than ballet, there are people dying in the streets.’ During the winter of 1991 and 1992 she made seven private visits to hostels for the homeless, often accompanied by the late Cardinal Basil Hume, then the head of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales who was patron of a trust for the homeless. On one trip in January 1992 she and Cardinal Hume spent nearly two hours with homeless youngsters at a hostel on the South Bank of the Thames. Some teenagers, many with drink and drug problems, greeted her presence with aggressively hostile questions, others were simply surprised that she had bothered to see them on a cold Saturday night.
As she was talking, a drunken Scotsman lurched into the room. ‘Hey, you’re gorgeous,’ he slurred, totally oblivious of to whom he was talking. When he was told about the identity of the Princess, he was unconcerned. ‘I don’t care who she is, she’s gorgeous.’ While Cardinal Hume was deeply embarrassed, Diana, perfectly at ease among these young people, found the incident amusing. In spite of these lapses in manners, she felt very comfortable on these occasions, far more so than when she mixed with the royal family and their courtiers. At Royal Ascot in 1991 she attended the race meeting for just two days out of five before undertaking other engagements. In the past she used to enjoy Ascot’s annual parade of fashion and horseflesh, but she later found it frivolous. As she said to friends: ‘I don’t like the glamorous occasions any more. I feel uncomfortable with them. I would much rather be doing something useful.’
Ironically, it was Prince Charles’s love of polo which gave Diana a greater understanding of her own worth. The Prince broke his right arm during a game at Cirencester in June 1990. He was taken to a local hospital but, after weeks of rest and recuperation, his arm failed to respond to treatment and a second operation was advised. His friends Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson recommended the University Hospital in Nottingham.
Even though it was a National Health Service hospital, the Prince was duly ensconced in his own ward, which had been newly decorated. He brought along with him, from Kensington Palace, his butler Michael Fawcett and his personal chef. During Diana’s visits to see her husband, she spent much time with other patient
s, particularly in the intensive care unit. She sat with Dean Woodward who was in a coma following a car accident and when he recovered she paid a private visit to his family home. It was a spontaneous gesture but Diana was horrified when news of these secret visits reached a wider audience after the family sold their story to national newspapers.
An incident which meant a great deal to Diana took place in that same hospital away from the cameras, smiling dignitaries and the watchful public. The drama began uneventfully three days earlier in a backyard in Balderton, a village near Newark, when a housewife, Freda Hickling, collapsed with a brain haemorrhage. When Diana first saw her behind the screens in the intensive care unit she was on a life-support system. Her husband Peter sat with his wife, holding her hand. Diana, who was visiting patients in the hospital, had been told by the consultant that there was little hope of recovery. She quietly asked Peter if she should join him. For the next two hours she sat holding the hands of Peter and Freda Hickling before the specialist informed Peter that his wife was dead. Diana then joined Peter, his stepson, Neil, and Neil’s girlfriend, Sue, in a private room. Sue, who was so shocked at seeing Freda Hickling on a life-support machine, did not recognize Diana at first, vaguely thinking she was someone from television. ‘Just call me Diana,’ said the Princess. She chatted about everyday matters; the size of the hospital, Prince Charles’s arm; and asked about Neil’s forestry business. Eventually Diana decided that Peter could do with a large gin and asked her detective to find one. When he failed to reappear, the Princess successfully found one herself.
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