by Tim Clayton
Filderman came to love her new friend’s style and spontaneity. Some mornings she would come in after swimming twenty lengths of the Buckingham Palace pool, her hair still wet and wearing cowboy boots and jeans. With a smile and a kiss on the cheek, she would throw her things off and get on to the table, sometimes sleeping as Filderman worked on her back and neck.
Yes, she had times when she was unhappy but usually I think if you were to ask her that she would probably say, ‘Oh, it is not as bad as all that.’ She wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a miserable person.
* * *
After the anxiety caused by the fall at Sandringham it seemed unwise to take Diana skiing so the February holiday of 1982 was scheduled instead for Eleuthera in the Bahamas, a genuinely glamorous royal hideaway that Charles hoped Diana would like. There they would stay with Norton and Penny Romsey at their secure beachside estate for a complete break, utterly secluded from crowds and prying eyes.
As a result of the Queen’s recent hospitality at Buckingham Palace, most newspaper editors fell in with the royal demand to give Diana a break. But one or two intrepid journalists had other ideas. James Whitaker spoke to Palace press officer Michael Shea, who said, ‘By all means come along, James, but you’ll get nothing. The Bahamian police have promised us complete seclusion.’ The editor of the Daily Star said, ‘Go for it! See what you can get.’ So Fleet Street’s finest took the plane to the Caribbean. Whitaker and his photographer Ken Lennox got there in plenty of time to watch the royal plane land and follow the couple’s car down a causeway on to the peninsula where the Romseys had their beach house. Charles and Diana disappeared past a policeman, who politely turned the curious public back.
Lennox and Whitaker chuckled to themselves. They had got on to the peninsula the day before, photographed the house and sent back the pictures of the seven-bathroomed ‘beach hut’ love nest. They had also bought an Ordnance Survey map that showed that the house was only half a mile away from another, unguarded spit of land. That night Ken Lennox shouldered his camera bags and his biggest lens and set off:
This spit of land butted on to a piece of very thick thorn jungle. So we did some compass bearings and made for the nearest part. We set off at two o’clock in the morning and we were in position by eight. We were torn to shreds by this stage, but we got there. We knew that Arthur Edwards and Harry Arnold would be doing their utmost to get there because Arthur had been telling us that he’d once photographed Prince Charles water-skiing on Eleuthera, but wouldn’t tell us how.
In those times Arthur and I were deadly rivals, and you didn’t get any second prizes. So we made our way in and set up. I had a huge big lens with me. I tied it on to a mangrove tree to try and keep it steady. And within minutes Diana appeared on the beach with Lord Romsey, and she was wearing an overdress, which she immediately took off, and revealed a bikini underneath. She was about four months pregnant so she had a little tummy. By this time I was halfway through my first roll of film – pictures of her walking down to the beach, paddling, giggling and laughing. Anyway, after I’d got the first two rolls of film I gave them to James and he disappeared off into the jungle to make his way back. Then Prince Charles arrived and I shot more film. They went into the water, kissed each other, just bobbing heads in the water. They came out of the water. He carried her out of the water. She threw a towel over his head. Raced up in the sand. So, to all intents and purposes, a very happy couple together, having a beach holiday. I thought I had the best set of pictures ever.
About an hour into this, I heard some crashing in the jungle beside me, and I thought, Oh God, it’s the cops. So I pulled my lens off the tree and disappeared. Sat in the bushes being eaten by insects. But then I heard the dulcet tones of Harry Arnold saying, ‘You’re wrong, Arthur, they haven’t made it. They haven’t made it. They never got here.’ And Arthur was muttering, ‘Yeah, yeah, they’ll be here someplace.’ So I said, ‘Hi, guys, how are you?’ ‘Where’s James?’ they asked. I said, ‘He’s gone off to wire the pictures.’ Well, Arthur turned chalk white, because time had run out for him basically, and he was unlikely to get anything in the paper, but he thought he had to try anyway. So he cursed me upside down and he disappeared off with Harry, and I stayed behind and shot another two hours of film.
The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I phoned London. I spoke to the picture editor and he said, ‘For God’s sake don’t wire any more of these pictures. The shit has hit the fan.’ To the Palace, Lennox’s photographs constituted a flagrant breach of the understanding they thought they had negotiated with the press, but the pictures were fairly tame. They showed Charles and Diana happy, having fun, kissing. They proved, to anyone who might have begun to wonder, that the marriage was not all misery. The Palace said that Princess Diana was extremely upset about this invasion of her privacy, but Lennox has convinced himself that she was not:
I met Diana in Wales much later with Arthur and she called us the Eleuthera Two – you know, at that time it was the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and all the various people being released from prison. So Diana christened Arthur and I the Eleuthera Two and thought it was a great giggle. She thought it was funny that we were in such trouble, because as you know Diana had no hang-ups about being photographed in a bikini.
Ken Lennox often thought back to his unpublished photographs of a happy couple frolicking in the waves. In the early 1990s, when the media echo chamber was reverberating to the distorted sound of ‘You never loved me’ and ‘You were raving mad’, as he waded through the Dimblebys and the Mortons, the photographer would ask himself: ‘Did my camera lie?’
* * *
On their return from holiday, Diana and Charles retired to Highgrove, where the garden was developing under Charles’s guidance while the Princess was decorating the interior. But the newspaper editors no longer had their telephoto lenses trained on the royal couple. They could do better than that. They had a war. On 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Britain mustered an invasion fleet to drive the ‘Argies’ out again. Friends and colleagues of the Royal Family would be in danger. And not just friends and colleagues: as a naval helicopter pilot, Prince Andrew was going into action.
During the war, and as Diana’s pregnancy advanced, bad feelings remained. Jonathan Dimbleby’s book provides a striking example:
The Princess also seemed extraordinarily self-absorbed . . . Even the Falklands campaign – which preoccupied her husband in his role as heir to the throne, as Colonel-in-Chief of two regiments fighting in the South Atlantic, and as the brother of Prince Andrew who was there as a helicopter pilot – failed to arouse her curiosity or to distract her from her own concerns. Some of those who bore witness to her disconcerting detachment were also perplexed by the fact that she seemed to resent the interest being shown in the Falklands rather than in her.
Did Charles’ friends really believe that Britain’s future Queen put concern about her newspaper image above a national emergency and the potential deaths of her future subjects? And resented attention being paid to them?
It was a marriage. There were good times and bad: deciding one sunny morning to make the best of things; shouting one rainy afternoon about how awful everything was. It was only later that a pattern was made, when one side or another decided that the moment had come to strike. Then the nastiness came out, the exaggerated nastiness that fills the front pages and the royal blockbusters. ‘He was always on the phone to her, I even found some letters’, ‘You remember during the Falklands, she was more concerned about her hairstyle.’
* * *
Diana visited a home for the blind near Leatherhead in Surrey – part of a routine ‘awayday’ as she had now learned to call them: a few detectives, a lady-in-waiting, the local papers.
But someone with her remembers an incident that was anything but routine. An old man was sitting near the Princess. He was clearly upset. She moved towards him, crouching low. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I’m sad that I can’t look at yo
u.’ Without a thought, she took his hand and placed it full against her face and held it there, looking at him intently as he smiled in sudden delight.
It’s a poignant story, but a little unsettling. Diana unembarrassed and instinctive as she would often be. Reminiscent of her teenage wheelchair technique, the one that allowed Darenth Park patients to see her as she pulled them around the floor.
It’s hard to imagine other public figures encouraging such fingertip intimacy, then or now. But, as the witness remembers wondering at the time: who took the most pleasure from the contact, the old blind man or the beautiful young Princess?
* * *
At last Kensington Palace was ready. A graceful building on the western fringe of Hyde Park, ‘KP’, as they soon came to call it, had been damaged by incendiary bombs during the London Blitz. The restoration of the apartments intended for Charles and Diana had been painfully slow. If, as intended, the couple had been able to move in immediately after the wedding, it would surely have made some difference to their first eight difficult months. As it was the Department of the Environment finished the work only five weeks before William’s birth, when the royal couple took up residence in apartments 8 and 9. Finally Diana had escaped from Buckingham Palace and had her own London home.
One day after the end of the Falklands War, at 9.03 p.m. on 21 June 1982, Diana gave birth to William in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. He was two weeks early. Prince Charles watched the birth, the first royal father to do so. Whatever the bad feelings of the past few months, this was an undeniably happy and bonding moment, even a funny one, as Janet Filderman recalls:
I said, ‘Oh God, I couldn’t do that, I just could not give birth with my husband there.’ And she said, ‘When Prince Charles came I kept saying, “Charles, come here and hold my hand, hold my hand.” But he kept wanting to go to the front of the engine instead.’ Now I think that was very funny. It was said so nicely and with such a lot of laughter too. She loved jokes like that.
The Queen visited the following day and laughingly said, ‘Thank goodness he hasn’t got ears like his father.’ ‘Rejoice!’ Margaret Thatcher had ordered. Now the nation had two reasons to celebrate – victory in a war and the birth of an heir to the heir to the throne.
After the birth of William, Diana appeared little in public for two months as she and Charles both focused on their baby. Charles cleared his diary to spend more time at home. Princess Margaret and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester also lived in Kensington Palace, while Diana’s sister Jane and Robert Fellowes lived in the Old Barracks near by. There were impromptu visits, coffee mornings and plenty of supportive chat. This, at last, was Diana’s idea of proper family life. She breast-fed William for a short period and carried out most of his early changing and bathing. After ten weeks she hired an experienced nanny, Barbara Barnes, as back-up. Charles and the nanny both got bossed about a bit, but it was clear to all that Diana was both capable and loving.
The christening was arranged in a spirit of co-operation. The choice of name was Diana’s (she later said that Charles had wanted Arthur), but having got her way Diana let Charles choose the godparents: King Constantine, Lord Romsey, Sir Laurens van der Post, Princess Alexandra, Lady Susan Hussey and the Duchess of Westminster. But by the time of the christening Diana was suffering severe postnatal depression. Within three months the media noticed that she was looking thin and gaunt again. Janet Filderman gave her beauty treatment during this difficult period:
I know that around the time of Prince William’s birth and just afterwards her hormones were up and down and in and out and I think that caused her a little bit of a difficulty – but no more than any other woman would have, having a new baby and being young. . . . I certainly don’t think that they understood how much postnatal depression she was under. And if you think about it, she married at what, nineteen or so, and immediately became pregnant. And that in addition to all the excitement of the wedding and the after-effects and the media chasing her must have been quite a hard time and one has to recognise that. I am not saying that she might not have been difficult to live with because people are when they are going through a depressive stage but I don’t think it was to do with her personality, I think it was to do with hormones. Anybody can have that.
* * *
In September 1982, while they were at Balmoral, the Royal Family received news that Princess Grace of Monaco had died in a car accident. The question of who should attend the funeral had to be settled. Princess Grace had met and calmed a very nervous Diana on her first public appearance eighteen months previously. Diana had liked her and wanted to go. The Queen said that Charles should go but he did not want to. Eventually, Diana was allowed to represent the family on her own.
The funeral was chaotic, seething with press people, not least because both Diana and Nancy Reagan had chosen to attend. It was a blazing hot Mediterranean late-summer day, the Rolls-Royce broke down and the royal party got stuck in a lift. Under these difficult circumstances Diana behaved impeccably and impressed all those around her.
On the plane home, Diana burst into tears with exhaustion. As they approached Scotland, she asked whether Charles was coming to meet her. Staff said it was unlikely because Prince Andrew was due back from the Falklands.
We looked at her big eyes looking out of the window in expectation. She said, ‘There’s one police car.’ She didn’t know what that meant – no Charles. She was very upset. She got into the police car and disappeared.
The next morning Diana got an excellent write-up in the press. She called a courtier to discuss the trip.
She rang up and asked, ‘How did I do? How did I do?’ ‘Have you seen the papers?’ I said. ‘You were absolutely brilliant.’ She said, ‘Thanks for saying that because nobody here has mentioned that.’
* * *
Having got married, Prince Charles was wondering what to do next. Years of being Prince of Wales yawned ahead but what did a Prince of Wales do? Available answers were usually expressed in negatives: a Prince of Wales did not get involved in politics, for instance. But Charles was determined to have his say in public life, believing that he could do some good.
At Cambridge, and during a term that he very much enjoyed in Australia, Charles had met young people from backgrounds very different to his own. One friend with whom Charles shared a kitchen at Trinity College was a Labour-voting coal miner’s son from South Wales. This helped generate in Charles a desire to intervene in social and cultural issues. Not all of his interests and initiatives were approved of by the men who served him at the Palace. Referring to enthusiasms that brought them work of a kind they did not relish, they would whisper, ‘What toys are coming out of the box today?’ as their master approached his office.
In December 1982 Charles spoke out to the British Medical Association in favour of alternative treatments, and against the influence of the drugs industry. His intervention sparked an acrimonious debate in which the Prince was widely ridiculed for being gulled by quacks. Twenty years later his attitudes seem less extraordinary. He continued his campaign for serious consideration of the issues by the medical establishment over the next year. Then he spoke out in favour of organic food production in an assault on modern farming methods that outraged another well-entrenched lobby, together with the agrochemical industry. Again, twenty years later he has widespread support. At the time he laid himself open to derision and was duly mocked in the tabloids as the ‘loony prince’. And when newspapers said that the causes the Prince was choosing to back were eccentric, the Buckingham Palace hierarchy was inclined to agree.
* * *
In the autumn of 1982 Charles suggested that Diana see a psychiatrist. She resisted, but in the end they both saw Dr Allan McGlashan, a dream analyst who was recommended by Laurens van der Post. Although Charles continued to see him, Diana was unreceptive. Instead she agreed to see Dr David Mitchell, a cognitive therapist.
Later, according to a senior member of the royal household, the courtiers sur
rounding Prince Charles discussed the possibility that Diana suffered from BPD – Borderline Personality Disorder. How this diagnosis was arrived at has never before been made clear, but it made its way into many books and television programmes in the mid-1990s. BPD describes people who are fitfully needy and aggressive, frequently retreating into paranoia. It covers feelings of panic, binge-eating and self-harm. One or another of its manifestations could probably be diagnosed in half the population.
We wanted to discover where the Borderline Personality story came from. Penny Junor, one of the first to specify it in print, told us that:
Dimbleby helped me come to the syndrome – there were several people actually who had mentioned Borderline Personality Disorder, Dimbleby was one of them. And when I then researched the subject further I discovered that it was absolutely spot on for the kind of behaviour that Diana exhibited.
In the months after the couple separated, Prince Charles’s friends spoke at length to Jonathan Dimbleby about Diana’s mental state. They told him many shocking stories about the early months of the marriage: Diana listening at doors and steaming open letters; Diana screaming at them and running out of the room; Diana’s intense possessiveness and jealousy; Diana’s endless suspicions about Camilla.