Instead of building a shield, as Charles did by declining to read what was said and written about him, Diana got pulled into a process she found fascinating and terrifying. As perception and reality became more confused, Diana’s insecurities grew. From the beginning, Diana devoured everything written about her, and she viewed herself through the prism of the press. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle took over: The act of being watched warped her self-image and behavior. She herself once said, “I didn’t like myself. I was ashamed because I couldn’t cope with the pressures … I felt compelled to perform.”
In his eulogy, her brother Charles offered one perplexing observation against considerable evidence to the contrary. “She remained intact, true to herself,” he said. In some respects—certain signature traits such as her mischievous wit and her easy rapport—this was accurate. Habits drummed into her by an upper-class background persisted throughout her life: fulfilling her public engagements, for example, or writing instantaneous thank-you notes. As her friend Rosa Monckton observed, “Whenever things got too much for her she would say to herself, ‘Diana, remember you’re a Spencer’… and she would then get on with whatever she had to do.”
Yet she tended to define herself in terms of the approval of others. “I think essentially that she was an ill person,” said Dr. Michael Adler of the National AIDS Trust. “She was very, very insecure. She didn’t believe in herself. There was not a sort of real center to her personality. Her identity was created for her, and she increasingly got herself into personal problems, which highlighted her inadequacies.”
When she started out, she appeared to be a typical Sloane Ranger—an ill-educated girl with a perfect pedigree and good manners, but little else to prepare her for the rough-and-tumble ahead. Her identity was incomplete and unsatisfactory, her self-esteem shaky, especially regarding her intellectual ability. What’s more, she had certain juvenile preconceptions of her future, an idealized version of marriage that was fed by the fairy-tale romances written by her stepgrandmother, Barbara Cartland.
The royal family imposed a new identity on her, which was glamorized by the press and the demands of her international celebrity. She was expected to be a wife and mother as well as a royal spokesperson and stylish symbol. As she tried to fulfill her duties, she felt that neither the royal family nor the press adequately praised her. The tabloids would create one image of her, and she would react, at times unwittingly, to a view of herself that the public had accepted but that often had little basis in fact. “As she expressed it to friends,” wrote Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, “… she did not know who she really was.”
Seeing herself over and over in photographs and on television only deepened her insecurities. “She scoured the newspapers for photographs of herself with an eagerness unalloyed by familiarity,” wrote Dimbleby. “Not for the first time, it seemed to [Charles and Diana’s] friends that she was searching for her own identity in the image of a princess that smiled back at her from every front page.”
Diana felt inadequate to the burgeoning expectations, so she continually sought a new persona that would please everyone, mutating to fit the predominant impression and placate criticism. As Sam McKnight, one of her many hairstylists, observed, “Her whole life appears to have been a series of transformations, and I guess it was, but I think she made it like that because she had to transform and transform until she found her true self.” Diana’s constantly changing hairstyles were only the most visible evidence of her shifting identities. “The haircut was a way to have a strong image,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She changed it according to her moods. When she went to the excess of cutting it too short or making it too wet, she wanted to make a statement or fight a moment of her life. When it was looser and softer, I think she was feeling better about herself.”
When Diana began actively spinning her own story in 1991 by collaborating with journalists, she declared, “From now on, I am going to own myself and be true to myself. I no longer want to live someone else’s idea of what and who I should be. I am going to be me.” But she was still obsessed by the expectations of others. “Whatever I do,” she said toward the end of her life, “it’s never good enough for some people.”
Living as a celebrity did incalculable damage to Diana, whose emotional underpinnings were tenuous to begin with. “It is the inability to see oneself from the inside,” said a friend who was privy to Diana’s psychological torment. “There is always a reflection, a distortion. Who one is and what one’s contributions are may be perfectly ordinary and valuable, but they are skewed by the distortion of fame. It is difficult to see oneself in that circumstance.”
Chapter 2
Diana’s childhood was shattered in late 1967 “when Mummy decided to leg it.” Diana was only six. Andrew Morton wrote that she “sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs at her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought-iron banisters while all around her there was a determined bustle. She could hear her father loading suitcases into the boot of a car, then Frances, her mother, crunching across the gravel forecourt, the clunk of the car door being shut and the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life.”
As was so often the case, Diana’s memory shifted with various retellings. Debbie Frank, one of Diana’s astrologers, recalled that Diana told her with similar clarity, “I will always remember [my mother] packing her evening dresses into the car and saying, ‘Darling, I’ll come back.’ I sat on the steps waiting for her to return but she never did.” Frank wrote, “She could recall it as if it happened yesterday. In fact she told me the story again over our final lunch.” According to Ross Benson of the Sunday Express, Diana also remembered “cowering behind a curtain, listening to her parents berating each other in the most dreadful terms” and then “her mother’s footsteps walking away down the hallway for the last time.”
Diana described the episode to many of her friends. “I remember her telling me about her mother leaving,” Cosima Somerset said, “that it was the most painful thing in her life, that the children weren’t told why she was leaving, and that she was leaving permanently.” Diana’s abandonment became a central feature of her psychology. “Her mother left at the moment Diana adored her,” said Diana’s friend Elsa Bowker. “Diana told me she loved her father, but he couldn’t replace [her] mother. She said to me, ‘I have been unhappy all my life.’ ”
The marriage of Diana’s parents had started out as a whirlwind love match. Johnnie, then known as Viscount Althorp, was the son of the 7th Earl Spencer and Lady Cynthia Hamilton, a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn. Born in 1924, Johnnie was tall and handsome, wealthy and socially prominent—a “catch” for the women of his generation. He was educated at Eton, then went on to Sandhurst, and served in the Royal Scots Greys during World War II, seeing action in France, Belgium, and Holland.
The Spencers were one of England’s grand families. Originally sheep farmers, they made a fortune in wool trading from medieval times onward, and acquired vast tracts of land in Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Hertfordshire. In 1508, John Spencer built the family seat at Althorp, a 121-room house on 13,000 acres. The Spencer earldom originated in 1765, and in the following years the family bought more land in what is now Greater London’s Clapham, Wandsworth, and Wimbledon.
The Spencers were related to royalty (Charles II and James II) as well as other noble families. Along with the Bedfords, Devonshires, Sutherlands, Westminsters, Norfolks, Carlisles, and Egertons, the Spencers led the Whig aristocracy that governed Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Whigs were the “most serious, exclusive and illustrious cousinhood, held together by birth, blood and breeding,” wrote historian David Cannadine. “They were the very embodiment of glamour and grandeur, high rank and high living.”
When Diana said to herself “Remember you’re a Spencer,” it was no idle reminder. Being a Spencer was a vital element of her
character. Along with the other Whigs, the Spencers derived their power from the Revolution of 1688, when they helped topple the pro-Catholic James II, limited the power of the monarchy, and guaranteed that the throne would eventually pass to George of Hanover in Germany, whose mother, Sophia, was the granddaughter of James I. When he took the English throne as George I, the Whigs ascended to the dominance that would continue through the early nineteenth century. “Diana was brought up to believe her family was much grander than the royal family,” said historian Paul Johnson. “The Whigs are the most arrogant families in the world.”
At the same time, the Whigs “tended to be populist and antimonarch[ist], or at least for a feeble monarchy, not a strong monarchy,” said Johnson. “Despite their calm assumption of effortless superiority,” wrote David Cannadine, the Whigs “claimed a rapport with the people denied to most patricians.” This combination of Whig grandeur and populism passed down through the generations to Diana’s father, and to Diana herself. “It was instinctive for her,” Paul Johnson said. “She didn’t know Whigs.”
The Spencers used their riches to amass an extraordinary collection of paintings, porcelain, and rare books, much of which filled the vast rooms of Althorp House. Diana’s grandfather Jack, the 7th Earl Spencer, was known as the “curator earl” for his intensely serious stewardship of Althorp and its collections. Jack Spencer was “intolerant of differences and he was a perfectionist,” said Fiona Fraser, his niece. Behind his back, he was called, ironically, “Jolly Jack.” “He was very frightening when we were small,” said a Spencer cousin. “I think that made Johnnie slightly reticent.”
The relationship between Jack Spencer and his son Johnnie was “uneasy,” according to Charles Spencer. “Grandfather found it hard to accept that his custodianship of Althorp was to be limited by his own mortality.… For his part, my father was wary of Grandfather’s temper.” Father and son were also fundamentally incompatible. Johnnie’s interests ran to outdoor activities such as farming and shooting. He had neither his father’s intellect nor his passion for Althorp’s treasures.
The enduring image of Johnnie Spencer dates to Diana’s engagement and wedding. Although he was only fifty-seven, he had suffered a severe stroke three years earlier, and his unsteady gait and slightly slurred speech made him seem a dim and doddering Colonel Blimp. Yet as a young man, he had great charm, a formidable memory, and surprising shrewdness. Whenever he gave a speech, he spoke fluently, amusingly, and without notes.
“He was a good steady Englishman who wouldn’t have set the Thames on fire, but he was great fun,” said one of his relatives. Shy as a young boy, Johnnie grew confident after his service in the military but retained his gentle manner and sweet thoughtfulness. Johnnie was endearingly down-to-earth, with a warm geniality that extended to people of all classes. “I found him to be adorable,” his cousin Fiona Fraser said. “He was not buttoned-up, like a lot of patrician men. If he felt joy, he would show it.” Perhaps his most memorable “unstuffy” moment was snapping pictures with the tourists outside Buckingham Palace on the day Diana’s engagement was announced.
“He was in many ways not a twentieth-century figure, nor even a nineteenth-century one,” said his friend Lord St. John of Fawsley, “but an illegal immigrant from the eighteenth century, when the aristocracy lived fully and at ease with their neighbors. He was the perfect gentleman, but one never afraid to speak openly about his emotions. The words of love were on his lips.”
Yet to some who knew him, Johnnie seemed contradictory. One woman who knew Johnnie during her debutante season considered him “amazingly good-looking, but … odd and unpredictable and moody.” In his softness, Johnnie seemed disconcertingly weak—all the more so because he was drawn to women who were tougher than he was. “Johnnie Spencer liked strong women,” said one of his cousins. “He was motivated by them.” Frances Roche had many appealing qualities, but above all, Robert Spencer recalled, “Frances was dominant.”
Johnnie and Frances Burke Roche had met briefly during his visits to the royal residence at Sandringham in his role as equerry to King George VI, who died in February 1952. Frances was a daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy and his wife, Ruth, who had been such close friends of George VI that they leased one of his homes, Park House, on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.
Johnnie and Frances began what she described as a “rather fast romantic courtship” after her London coming-out ball in April 1953, when he was twenty-nine and she was seventeen. Johnnie had been unofficially engaged for some months to seventeen-year-old Lady Anne Coke, the eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who found him “sweet, amusing, charming … and a very good dancer.” But he was dazzled by Frances, one of the prettiest and most popular of the Season’s debutantes. That summer he broke his engagement to Lady Anne and proposed marriage to Frances during a tennis game at Park House.
“It was a real love match from his standpoint,” Robert Spencer said. “He wrote me a letter after they were engaged, and it was very passionate about her.” The age gap was never an issue, as Frances later explained, because “for four generations we’ve married men much older than ourselves. My grandmother’s husband was fifteen years older than [she], and my parents had twenty-three years between them—he was double her age when they married.”
While the Spencers were pure English stock, Frances considered herself a “mongrel.” “It really upsets me when the papers say I’m English,” she once said. “There’s not a drop of English blood in my body. I’m half Scots, a quarter Irish and a quarter American.” The Fermoys came from Ireland, where Diana’s great-great-grandfather Edmund Burke Roche was elected to Parliament and became a baron in the mid–nineteenth century. His son James Roche, who would succeed as the 3rd Baron Fermoy late in life, married an American named Frances (Fanny) Work, whose father was a prosperous stockbroker descended from one of the bricklayers who helped build Independence Hall in Philadelphia. As with many such alliances in the late nineteenth century, James Roche conferred a title on an eager American woman, and Fanny Work supplied a financial infusion to a cash-strapped aristocratic family.
But the marriage foundered, and Fanny took her three children, including twin sons Maurice and Francis, to New York. Having little use for Europeans, Frank Work told his daughter that her children would inherit his fortune only if they became American citizens and never returned to England. Fanny educated Maurice and Francis at St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire, and at Harvard.
In 1911, Frank Work died and left each of the twins $2.9 million (roughly $45 million apiece today). Neither son wished to become an American citizen, so they successfully challenged the conditions imposed by Frank Work’s will, collected most of their inheritance, and went to England in 1921. Their father, the 3rd Baron Fermoy, had died the previous year, which allowed Maurice to claim the title of 4th Baron. Instead of returning to Ireland, where civil unrest had made life inhospitable for the Anglo-Irish, Maurice settled in England at Norfolk and was elected to Parliament.
On a trip to Paris a decade later, Maurice met a Scottish woman named Ruth Gill, who was studying piano at the Paris Conservatoire of Music. The daughter of a colonel from Aberdeen, Ruth was “a very ambitious woman,” said a childhood friend of the Spencers. “Her roots were quite humble, and she had achieved everything herself. She had been a concert pianist, and she was very beautiful.” Maurice and Ruth fell in love and married in 1931, when she was twenty-three and he was forty-six.
By then Maurice was part of the inner circle of the Duke of York and his wife, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore. When the Duke of York became King George VI, the Fermoys ascended the social ladder even further. Ruth and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, were inseparable friends, in part because of their shared love of music. Ruth would eventually become the Queen Mother’s Woman of the Bedchamber, a position she would hold until her death.
The Fermoys had three children: Mary in 193
4, Frances in 1936, and Edmund in 1939. Like most aristocratic children, they were raised largely by nannies and governesses. Frances considered her father “the most compassionate, sensitive, and glorious man I have ever met.” Charming and intelligent, but also austere and enigmatic, Ruth was a courtier to the core, well versed in protocol and intensely loyal to the monarch and his family. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with as much confidence,” Frances recalled. “She made up her mind and went for it. She didn’t waver over anything.” Both Frances and her sister fulfilled Ruth’s social aspirations by finding suitable upper-class husbands: Mary married Anthony Berry, the son of Viscount Kemsley, but the alliance of Frances with the more prestigious Spencer family was even more satisfying.
A streak of instability ran through the Roche family. Frances’s sister Mary struggled through three failed marriages and lived reclusively in London after her mother’s death. Edmund Roche, who became the 5th Baron Fermoy in 1955, had a history of depression for which he sought treatment in 1969, but continued to suffer from black moods. In 1984, at age forty-five, he died after shooting himself in the chest.
Although Frances grew eccentric as she aged, she was always tough and determined. Educated at Downham, a second-tier boarding school for girls in Hertfordshire, she displayed a keen intelligence, a strong interest in art history and music, and a natural athleticism. “She has a very quick mind,” said Johnnie’s first cousin Fiona Fraser, “stronger on the cerebral side rather than the imaginative, intuitive side.” According to a friend of the Spencers, Frances was clever: “She could do the Times crossword puzzle in six minutes, things like that.” To some, she seemed brittle and coolly matter-of-fact. Yet according to Fraser, she was “good with people, and she could bring out the best in them.” Much like Johnnie, Frances was known to be democratic rather than snobbish, with a rollicking sense of humor. Above all, she seemed sure of herself at an early age. “Frances has an inner strength,” continued Fraser. “She is the most confident woman I have ever spent time with.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 3