Diana

by Andrew Morton

  He was so concerned that at their next session, when they felt more comfortable with each other, he invited her to make an affirmation, a powerful vocalization of faith in front of a witness. At his behest she repeated: ‘From this moment on I choose to be alive,’ a statement indicating a conscious choice about her life rather than a passive acceptance that life goes on. For the next seven years Twigg was on hand to observe those words become reality. His intervention had been successful. ‘He used to teach me affirmations about myself [at a time] when I could never believe [in myself],’ Diana later acknowledged. ‘He said that if I wanted to get better I could. I never gave anyone else [that] credit.’

  Twigg, who now lives in the south of France, was one of a disparate band of outsiders who, in the late 1980s, were admitted into her real life, charged with carrying the heavy burden of her unhappiness in secrecy. The astrologer Penny Thornton, introduced to Diana by Sarah Ferguson, was one of the first to see the flip side of the fairy tale, discovering a young woman who was ‘clearly angry, desperate, disappointed’, a far cry from the saccharine image of the popular photographic poses for the public. ‘She felt abused, rejected, betrayed, alone,’ said Penny remembering the first time she saw the Princess in her sitting room at Kensington Palace in 1984. ‘Prince Charles was the focus for much of that anger because she told me that the day before they married he told her that he didn’t love her. He told her that categorically.’

  Another outsider to meet the Princess during her dark days was an acupuncturist, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, a former nun, who when she first met Diana in September 1989 saw a woman who ‘presented a very tormented landscape. Diana was very fragile, very low in energy and in extreme need of affection,’ she recollected. ‘Diana was constantly searching for love, for appreciation.’

  Yet, bleak as Diana’s world presented itself, she had by the end of the 1980s, come a long way from what she called the ‘dark ages’ of her life inside the royal family: the time when she cut her body out of frustration; when she famously hurled herself down the stairs at Sandringham while pregnant with Prince William, because her husband had ignored her concerns about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles; and when her eating disorder was at its most pernicious.

  A skiing tragedy at Klosters in Switzerland in the spring of 1988, in which a member of the royal party was killed in an avalanche, was a watershed for the Princess. Though suffering from flu, and shocked by the news of the death of a good friend, she was jolted into calm, sensible, decisive action. She packed their dead friend’s possessions and firmly discouraged her husband from staying on to continue his skiing, insisting that they must accompany their friend’s body home.

  Possibly emboldened by her own firmness – ‘I took charge there,’ she was to comment later – she sought to take charge of herself too, and, with a push from Carolyn Bartholomew, received medical help for her eating disorder. Not long after that, she was able to force a confrontation with her husband’s mistress at a party, remaining calm and self-controlled throughout. These achievements had combined to give her a greater sense of self-worth, a belief in herself that was bolstered and sustained by other affirmative actions, such as helping to nurse her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson, who eventually died of AIDS in 1991. Such shoots of personal recovery were nurtured by the reception she received from the public – she was particularly touched by the growing crowds of well-wishers who greeted her on public occasions – and by the stalwart support of a growing group of friends and advisers.

  The publication of Diana: Her True Story in June 1992 blew open the secret little world of deception and illusion in the Palace and revealed to the public the millstone that had been carried for so long by those inside the freemasonry of the royal inner circle. As recounted in the previous chapter there was considerable anger and resentment within the royal circle at Diana’s ‘betrayal’, and among many people at the puncturing of the collective dream of monarchy; but there was also a deep sense of relief, amongst friends, courtiers and royal staff that the charade was over. In this epic drama of kings and queens, princes and princesses, the book was the literary equivalent of Gollum, the unlovely and unloved creature from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who none the less plays a critical part in resolving the titanic conflict between the forces of light and darkness. As crude and jolting as it was, Diana: Her True Story went some way to resolving a phoney royal peace that was causing crippling casualties all round.

  Even before the book was published, lawyers from both sides of the marriage had been secretly negotiating a separation. The strain of maintaining the illusion of happy families had left everyone drained and exhausted, not least because the Princess, acutely aware of the forces now ranged against her, had refused to go along with the pretence. ‘It’s so bloody dishonest, a damned farce,’ she declared repeatedly. That said, Prince Charles himself seemed to be dropping the charade, his behaviour becoming more blatant. In May 1992 the Princess went on an official visit to Egypt at the invitation of the President’s wife, Mrs Mubarak. The aircraft on which she was travelling had to make a detour to Turkey in order to drop off the Prince and his entourage, so that he could go on a cruise with some friends – one of them being Camilla Parker Bowles – while Diana went on to Egypt to carry out the tour solo. As the aircraft approached Cairo, she broke down in tears of self-pity, rage and sadness.

  A Mediterranean cruise on board a yacht owned by the Greek billionaire John Latsis, which was unwisely billed as a ‘second honeymoon’ by Prince Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard, was an unmitigated disaster. Diana, who had only agreed to the holiday for the sake of her boys, was miserable and hated the pretence. She was, with reason, convinced that her husband was spending a great deal of time on the telephone to Camilla Parker Bowles, and she demanded to fly home early; this would have been very difficult to manage and she was eventually dissuaded by her bodyguard Ken Wharfe.

  A few months later, in November 1992, it once again took the combined efforts of various courtiers – as well as considerable cajoling from James Colthurst – to convince her that she should go with the Prince on a joint tour of South Korea. As soon as the warring couple landed, their press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, waiting for them at Seoul airport, took one look at their body language and commented to a royal aide: ‘Oh, f—k, we’ve lost this one.’ Headlines referring to the sullen couple as ‘The Glums’ later endorsed his view. So when, on 9 December 1992, the then Prime Minister, John Major, announced the couple’s ‘amicable’ separation there was an audible sigh of relief inside the Palace.

  The woman at the centre of the storm was calm, controlled and determined, brimming with humour and sunny spirits, a world away from the brooding malcontent of the autumn. In the days following the announcement it was as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘I see you have bought yourself another German car,’ someone remarked on seeing her new Audi outside Kensington Palace. ‘Well, it’s more reliable than a German husband,’ Diana replied.

  The impact went way beyond surface banter. Her bulimia, which tormented her in times of stress, was subdued; a sign of her inner strength and serenity. A triumphant three-day tour of Paris on her own, just before the announcement, had given everyone a tantalizing glimpse of how the Princess, unfettered and unencumbered, could perform on the world stage. ‘She glowed under the rapturous attention, responding as usual to the stimulus of public expectation by producing a flawless display of how to be a royal celebrity,’ her private secretary Patrick Jephson wrote in Shadows of a Princess. ‘Every gesture, every glance, every stop of every walk­about revealed a professional at the peak of her form.’ Exhilarated by her solo success and exulting in the heady sense of impending freedom, she enjoyed a late-night drive through the empty Paris streets with only her bodyguard Ken Wharfe for company. As they drove along the Champs-Élysées, she suddenly remarked, ‘By God, Ken, this is living.’

  If the book had given Diana the chance to be heard, then the announcement, six
months later, of the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales had presented her with the opportunity to be herself. Once the initial euphoria had subsided, Diana gradually came to realize that she faced a journey of self-discovery more challenging than anything she had hitherto encountered. ‘I am going to own myself now and be true to myself,’ she declared bravely. ‘I no longer want to live someone else’s idea of what I should be.’ Who was the person she saw when she looked in the mirror of her dressing room at Kensington Palace? Perhaps more importantly, who was the woman she would like to become? These were questions easier to ask than to answer. She had been barely out of her teens when she had married the Prince, inexperienced and impressionable (although perhaps not quite as malleable as Charles and his clique had hoped). As her friend and astrologer, Debbie Frank, pointed out, the days following her separation were a time of re-evaluation and reassessment. ‘She had to really look at herself and where she was going. She only knew herself through her iconography, so she had to find out who the real Diana was.’

  Diana was well aware that, because of her title and status, she had become a living icon, a real-life fairy-tale princess on whom the public could focus their hopes, and feed their starry-eyed dreams of princes and princesses. The famous photograph from the Spencer family albums showing the teenage Diana sitting engrossed in one of Barbara Cartland’s romantic novels demonstrated how far the young Diana was herself initially captivated by the idealized image of courtly love and romantic marriage. By the time of her separation, the spell had been savagely broken. ‘They [the public] are told there is this fairy princess with a bleeding tiara on her head and it is fairy-story stuff for them,’ she said bitterly during one of our interviews.

  She had spent all her adult years in an institution where her life had been controlled – either by courtiers who managed her time­table and massaged her ego; by her bodyguard, who monitored her movements; or by the media, who defined her personality through bewildering distortion, unthinking contradiction and facile cliché. By and large, however, the media was the only day-to-day yardstick Diana had ever had to judge herself by.

  ‘The process of finding herself was very hard,’ James Colthurst observed. ‘For most of her adult life, decisions had been made for her – she was, to a degree, institutionalized. After the separation it became very much a question of her regaining control of herself and building momentum. The focus was always on trying to move towards something, rather than simply away from the royal family.’

  The weeks following the official announcement of the royal couple’s separation were, to put it mildly, stressful, as members of the royal family closed ranks and a perceived whispering campaign started up against the Princess of Wales – and against the Duchess of York – while the Queen lamented her annus horribilis. Diana had to get away.

  The much-needed tonic was provided by a sun-drenched holiday with her sons on the Caribbean island of Nevis in January 1993 – ‘You saved my life,’ she told Ken Wharfe, who had organized the break. Back at Kensington Palace, it was now time for her to take control of her life.

  Like any injured animal, the Princess needed a safe refuge where she could lick her wounds in peace. She had resisted urgings from Prince Philip and others to move out of the former marital apartment at Kensington Palace and into the much smaller and semi-derelict apartment no. 7. As far as she was concerned she wanted to be surrounded by the familiar, even though many of the memories were painful. Also painful was the division of the spoils, including in some cases the disposal of the staff, a number of whom were made redundant while others were moved. Prince Charles’s under-butler at Highgrove, Paul Burrell, and his wife Maria, a housemaid at Highgrove, for instance, moved to Kensington Palace, and very reluctantly too. The feeling was mutual – the Princess instinctively distrusted the loyalties of anyone who had ever worked for the other side.

  As her slimmed-down staff settled down, every scrap of her marital past was being scrubbed, brushed and painted over. Charles was history. Everything of his, from the Prince of Wales carpet to his antique lavatory, was removed and the Princess asked her interior designer friend Dudley Poplak – who had helped her decorate the Kensington Palace apartments twelve years before, in the weeks ahead of her marriage – to freshen up a number of rooms; she even talked about asking another of her friends, Gianni Versace, to design distinctive uniforms for her staff.

  Diana also brought in a New Age healer, Simone Simmons, to exorcize and cleanse the negative energy from her former marital home, as well as an expert in feng shui to reinvigorate some of the rooms. ‘I feel as though I have died here many times,’ she explained sadly. While it would take much more than new wallpaper and a coat of paint for Diana to forget her unhappy past, it was a start. From the purchase of a new double bed to the slightly risqué cartoons in the downstairs loo, there were signs of new beginnings.

  It was a similar, if less exhaustive, story at Highgrove House, where another interior designer, Robert Kime, was giving the Prince’s country seat a makeover, to remove traces of the Princess’s original decoration.

  Diana’s London home, while still a place of much sadness and anger, was – even though she called it a prison – at least a safe refuge. This secure base helped her body to heal, which was important as for most of her life her body had been her master. In the first months of her newly single life she demonstrated consistent control over herself, in particular over her eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, which had plagued her ever since she joined the royal family. As this illness involves feelings of control, now that she had more control over her life the bulimia had less control over her – as opposed to the early days of her royal career, particularly when she stayed at Balmoral and Sandringham with the rest of the family, when her bulimia was at its most intense. As the prospect of a life of her own grew, the Princess was able to speak lightly of the disorder. When she refused to attend a shooting party on the Sandringham estate with her husband in November 1992 – a decision that precipitated the separation – she remarked to Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, ‘Nicholas Soames [the Conservative politician and rotund grandson of Winston Churchill] can eat all the food they have brought for me. I’d probably only have sicked it up anyway.’ That she could now joke about her illness with staff showed how far she had come. Her appetite now was for life rather than binge eating. Even on the occasions her bulimia returned it was more as a sporadic coping strategy than an endemic problem.

  In other areas, the Princess gradually and consistently moved away from the days where her body controlled her life, slowly weaning herself off her dependencies. Thus she replaced the sleeping pills in her medicine cabinet for sessions with a sleep therapist who monitored her oxygen levels; and she went for colonic irrigation to deal with her inner rage rather than, as she had done in the past, cut and mark her body. In time, colonics would be replaced by kick-boxing sessions with Keith Rodriques, the husband of her therapist Chryssie Fitzgerald, although Diana’s bodyguard did not share her enthusiasm for visiting Rodriques’ seedy basement gym in the rundown East End of London. While her endless experimentation with New Age therapies – from casting runes and sitting under copper pyramids to sitting in a stone circle and absorbing energy from the sun – became widely derided, they were part of a long, haphazard process of healing, not to say self-absorption. The absurdity of some of her experiments was not lost on Diana. When her detective Ken Wharfe encountered her ‘wired up as if for a NASA launch’ in a treatment room in Beauchamp Place he asked her quizzically, ‘Are you enjoying that, ma’am?’ From the tangle of tubes and wires she retorted with cheerful irony: ‘It’s very therapeutic.’

  A more conventional form of therapy was Diana’s daily exercise routine; apart from her regular workouts being physically invigorating, they gave her a powerful feeling of being in charge of herself. When her fitness coach Carolan Brown was first introduced to her in 1990, Diana exhibited all the classic signs of insecurity and low self-esteem. Her shoulders slop
ed, making her chest look droopy, her chin jutted out, and rather than looking up at her coach she peered at her through her blonde fringe. More surprisingly for a young woman celebrated for her fashion sense, Diana wore shapeless T-shirts and baggy shorts as if she were ashamed of her body. Over the next few years, particularly after the separation, she worked on her body, gaining self-confidence as she developed a toned torso that she allowed herself to be proud of. Indeed, she reached the point where she was actually prepared to reveal it to strangers. Wearing nothing more than a flesh-coloured Lycra thong leotard, she offered to see Carolan out after a workout session at Kensing­ton Palace. As Carolan and the Princess made their way into the courtyard, Diana’s next-door neighbour Princess Michael of Kent, and the art historian Sir Roy Strong came out on their way to the Chelsea Flower Show. As they prepared to drive off Diana made idle chit-chat, all the while slyly amused at the impact her display had had. ‘It was showing off in a way,’ Carolan commented, ‘but it was much more than that. When I first met Diana she could never have done it. It was a sign that at last Diana felt comfortable in her own skin and wanted to enjoy her new-found confidence in her body.’

  While she worked to control her petulant body, Diana also sought to expand her mind, displaying the same kind of voracious appetite for knowledge that she had once shown for food. She was a curious, and for many an unsettling, combination – a sophisticated woman of the world able to discuss death and dying with the Archbishop of Canterbury one minute, yet innocent of the ways of the world. A socially accomplished woman who could face a sophisticated cocktail party and say to her companions: ‘Hold your nose and dive in’, she had never been to a pub or a bar on her own, and neither could she boil a pan of pasta. ‘She had a sheltered upbringing and was very immature when she married,’ Dickie Arbiter, the press secretary she shared with Charles, pointed out. ‘She went from one fantasy world to another.’ Yet as the dust settled surrounding her separation, the upper-class girl who left school without a significant academic qualification demonstrated a wide, if untutored and unselective, breadth of reading. This student princess was as experimental as any undergraduate, cherry picking from an eclectic range of texts. She herself remarked, ‘I’m going to be amused by people’s reactions to the titles of the books.’ From pious texts by the philosopher Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, New Age books on tarot cards and the I Ching, medical books such as Gray’s Anatomy and the seminal Fat is a Feminist Issue by the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, Diana displayed her growing and continuing interest in the spiritual, medical and psychological. According to Debbie Frank, ‘She read anything she could get her hands on. Some things she found hard to digest, but she wanted to find out why she was in this position, how she could help herself and others in times of difficulty and stress. She didn’t want to be a victim who was out of control any more.’