Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Shortly after Frances and Johnnie’s engagement, Johnnie left for a six-month royal tour. He had previously served as an aide to the governor of South Australia after World War II, and while an equerry to King George VI, Johnnie Spencer had pledged to help him when he visited Australia. After the King’s death, Johnnie kept his commitment to the new Queen, Elizabeth II. Decades later, Diana confronted a similar situation when Charles spent five weeks in Australia soon after their engagement. While Diana was traumatized by the departure of her fiancé for even a short trip, her mother took Johnnie’s commitment to his duty in stride, occupying herself by traveling to Florence and Paris with Johnnie’s cousin Fiona to study art history and languages.

  Frances and Johnnie were married in June 1954 in Westminster Abbey, with more than 1,000 guests, including Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, and numerous members of the royal family. Decades later, Frances would describe her wedding—and Diana’s as well—as “mirages of happiness.” Yet she would also say, paradoxically, that she had been “immensely happy for a long time” with Johnnie. For their honeymoon, Frances and Johnnie toured Europe, then spent their first year together in a house on the grounds of Althorp. Nine months after their wedding, their first daughter, Sarah, was born—a “honeymoon baby,” as Frances liked to call her.

  Frances didn’t care for Althorp, which she considered a place of “enormous sadness” that was “strange … like you’re … locked in [a museum] after it’s shut.” The gloomy atmosphere was aggravated by the tension between Johnnie and his father. In the beginning, Jack Spencer got along reasonably well with Frances. “She was very attractive and intelligent and forthright and a strong woman,” Fiona Fraser said. “And he respected all that,” but Frances had an independent streak that didn’t sit well with the Spencers. “They were a very, very conservative family,” recalled another cousin. “Frances could have stepped out of line and they could have been sharp with her. Frances didn’t fit in. They always expected her to do the right thing and open the right show, but … Frances had quite a bit of character.”

  After the death of Frances’s father in 1955, she and Johnnie moved away from Althorp and into Park House at Sandringham, where she had grown up, and Johnnie became a gentleman farmer. Frances’s substantial inheritance from her American forebears enabled her to spend £20,000 ($317,000 at today’s values) on 236 acres of land to double her husband’s holding.

  At the beginning, Frances and Johnnie seemed the ideal couple, with her forthrightness balancing his diffidence. They lived the country life, traveled abroad, and socialized with their aristocratic friends. “I was blissfully happy and immensely busy having children,” Frances recalled.

  It was in building their family that Frances and Johnnie encountered their first heartache. As in any aristocratic dynasty, they felt considerable pressure to produce a boy who would inherit the Spencer title and estate. Two years after Sarah’s birth, they had a second daughter, Jane, who was born six weeks prematurely. Then on January 12, 1960, Frances gave birth at Park House to a boy. “I never saw him, never held him,” she said years later. “I was told he needed help and I could see him later on. He never came back…. He was an eight-pound baby who had a lung malfunction, which meant he couldn’t survive.” The boy, named John Spencer, died when he was eleven hours old.

  The death of their son shattered Frances and Johnnie and had a profound impact on their marriage. A number of accounts have alleged that Johnnie responded cruelly to Frances afterward. “Thwarted in his wish for a son, he lashed out,” wrote Johnnie’s biographer Angela Levin. According to Diana’s biographer Andrew Morton, Johnnie forced Frances to visit doctors in London “for intimate tests” to determine if she had a problem—an ordeal Morton described as a “humiliating and unjust experience.”

  “It was a dreadful time for my parents,” Charles Spencer said years later, “and probably the root of their divorce, because I don’t think they ever got over it.” Like most men of his upbringing and class, Johnnie Spencer probably lacked what Angela Levin described as an “instinctive understanding of how to help his young wife recover from a severe emotional and physical trauma.” Frances did say years later, with a trace of bitterness, “One had to keep a stiff upper lip and get on with it. I was crying about what had happened, and I was told, ‘You’ll have another child.’ ”

  “The death of John was a deep tragedy in their lives,” Fiona Fraser said. “Afterwards, there was a sadness in both of them that had not been there.” The death hit Frances especially hard. “She had been married six years, and the marriage went wrong,” said Robert Spencer. “Frances was depressed, and, not surprisingly, she became pregnant again as soon as possible.”

  The result of that pregnancy was Diana, born on July 1, 1961, eighteen months after the birth and death of John. Diana’s father was thirty-seven at the time, and her mother twenty-five. Johnnie declared Diana “a perfect physical specimen,” but he still needed an heir. In Diana’s adult life, the circumstances of her birth—“the girl who was supposed to be a boy”—assumed enormous significance in her mind as the first of a series of rejections that would splinter her self-esteem. Diana recalled wondering during her childhood if she was a “nuisance to have around.” As she analyzed those feelings later, she came to believe that she had been a disappointment because she followed the son who died, that her parents had still longed for a son and had considered it a “bore” to have to “try again.” Frances and Johnnie did try again, and on May 20, 1964, when Diana was nearly three, her mother gave birth to Charles Edward Maurice Spencer.

  By all accounts, Frances and Johnnie treated Diana as they had their two other girls—and didn’t consider her an inferior substitute for their dead son. “Diana was a different soul [from John],” Frances said later, “so it is wrong that a child should ever be considered a replacement.” Friends and family didn’t recall Diana’s talking about feelings of rejection or unworthiness during her childhood. “I don’t know what to say about Diana[’s] saying she was unwanted because she was born a girl,” said Robert Spencer. “I never saw any of that, but I don’t know what was going on inside her head.”

  Nor is it possible to know what signals Diana may have picked up from her parents in her first few years, when maternal attachment is considered so vital to forming a secure sense of self. It was a time, as Robert Spencer observed, when Frances “was feeling pressure to have another boy, and the marriage seemed to be under stress.” The nub of Diana’s insecurity was her nagging belief that had John survived, she would not have been born. “She said she felt rejected because the whole family was under the shock of John’s birth and death,” said one of her close friends. “They didn’t treat her differently, but she always felt this way. Her father liked her very much, but maybe at the first moment he didn’t. Or maybe it was her own imagination. Her mother had five children, and Diana felt rejected. Her self-esteem was very low.”

  In the years following her brother’s birth—when Diana was aged three to six—her parents’ marriage unraveled. Various tabloid writers have alleged that the marriage was “violent and unhappy,” as Penny Junor wrote in Charles: Victim or Villain?, her 1998 book on Prince Charles. Longtime tabloid reporter James Whitaker even claimed that Diana’s psychological problems were not at all due to her “motherless years,” but rather the “violent scenes which went on before Frances … finally quit [her marriage].”

  After Johnnie Spencer’s death in 1992, tabloid reporters toughened these accusations about his behavior. In Diana vs. Charles: Royal Blood Feud, his 1993 book on Diana and Charles, James Whitaker said flatly that Johnnie was “a wife beater. There was little doubt in the minds of Norfolk society—and in the wider world—that it was so.” Others joined the chorus, including Angela Levin, who wrote that his bullying was “believed to have extended to physical violence.”

  Members of the Spencer family have said such charges are false, and Johnnie and Frances themselves described the disintegration of their re
lationship in sad but undramatic terms. “Over the last three years we spent together we just drifted apart, and there was nothing either of us could do about it,” said Frances in 1997. Johnnie acknowledged as much in a 1981 interview: “We hadn’t fallen apart. We’d drifted apart.”

  Johnnie and Frances’s friends in Norfolk found it hard to believe that there could have been violence in their marriage. “It was never discussed at the time,” said Fiona Fraser. “My mother lived in Norfolk and she knew nothing of it.” Nor did others close to Johnnie believe he was prone to physical abuse. One Spencer relative said emphatically that Johnnie was “the least violent man I ever met.” A friend similarly described Johnnie as “odd, gentle, and weak, not capable of cruelty.” Robert Spencer said that his cousin Johnnie “showed no evidence of brutal behavior. Johnnie could be insensitive and unimaginative and dominated by his wife.” A woman who had known Johnnie since 1971 said, “He was more a pacifist gentleman than an aggro [aggressive] one.”

  If anything, the Spencer family appeared to be a rather prosaic English aristocratic household. Johnnie came and went on the periphery, leaving the nurturing to the women, especially the nannies and governesses; yet neither parent appeared disengaged from the children. “She was a wonderful mother and spent a lot of time with her children,” said Fiona Fraser, “and he was a wonderful father.” Janet Thompson, the nanny who arrived when Diana was three, recalled that on return from her days off, she would find that Frances had slept in the nanny’s nursery bed to be with the children.

  Frances had always been “very stay-at-home,” said one Spencer relative, while Johnnie had wanted to go abroad and travel. But in these years a shift took place, and Frances became restless, while Johnnie seemed more settled and dull. As one of his friends explained to Angela Levin, “He was a reasonably intelligent man who never had his brain taken out of its box.… It was never used or stretched.” While Johnnie stayed behind in Norfolk, Frances began traveling more frequently to London, where she joined the dinner party circuit. “Frances had lots of ‘go,’ ” a Spencer cousin explained. “Living in Norfolk, she was a bit bored.”

  It was not so much that Frances yearned for a sparkling city life; although she would keep an apartment in London for years, she would never give up the country ways she loved. But after more than ten years of marriage, she was nearing her thirtieth birthday, and she seemed to feel she was missing something. With the exception of boarding school and little more than a year at Althorp, Frances had essentially never left home. “She went off for her own reasons,” said a man who was close to her for several decades. “She was definitely looking. John’s death had a major impact. She got engaged at seventeen, married at eighteen, Johnnie was twelve years older, and she wanted something else.” She also had the means to find it. “She was financially independent, an almost totally rare thing in an Englishwoman,” said one of her Norfolk neighbors. “That gave her latitude.”

  If Johnnie did have a dark side, it likely was manifested in words, not actions. As his son Charles acknowledged, “There is a thing called the Spencer temper. We are renowned for having a very bad temper.” Johnnie’s temper was more an expression of exasperation than abuse. On those infrequent occasions when he showed his anger, it was without “the remotest threat of violence,” a Spencer relative said. “I remember at a dinner party, Raine [Johnnie’s second wife] had been talking and talking, and he wanted to get a word in,” said one of Johnnie’s neighbors. “He shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’ ”

  Johnnie himself confirmed such behavior in several interviews that offered naively revealing glimpses of his contradictory attitudes as a husband dealing with a forceful woman: equal measures of traditional chauvinism, admiration, and compensatory bravado for his own self-effacing manner. “I don’t touch [Raine] physically or even shake her, but don’t worry about suggesting it. Maybe I should,” he said with a smile to Jean Rook of the Daily Express in 1981. “She’s an amazing person, but you’ve got to control her. When I’m cross, I’m very direct with her. I shout, ‘Now bloody well listen to me for a minute,’ and she does.” On the other hand, he said, “She grumbles that I’m too soft and kind and nice with people, and that I’m too idle. I don’t work hard enough … but I’m very strong, strong steel underneath, so we do have our very occasional rows. When I jump on her, she jumps back at me, but it doesn’t worry me. She always comes round to my decision in the end.”

  Diana was notably restrained when talking with friends about her parents’ relationship. “She once told me that her father was not a good husband to her mother, but she went no further,” said a close friend of Diana’s. After the accusations of wife-beating came out, a member of the Spencer family asked Frances directly about it. “She said it was not true, that he was the most gentle and mild-mannered man,” said the family member, who added, “It’s too ludicrous. It wasn’t in his makeup; and secondly, both Frances and Raine were married to him, and they both say it didn’t happen.”

  Frances did, however, give Johnnie reason to be angry with her. In the summer of 1966, she found what she was seeking when she met Peter Shand Kydd at a London dinner party. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” she later said, “but I do remember we made each other laugh.” Shand Kydd’s family had made its money in the wallpaper trade, but Peter had little appetite for business. He had run a sheep station, or ranch, in Australia, and when he ran into financial problems, he had returned to London. He was handsome and full of charm, but he was also the married father of three children. Peter Shand Kydd has been described as a “bohemian” and a “bon viveur,” which would seem to imply that he offered Frances something more urbane than she had with Johnnie, but Shand Kydd was an equally dedicated countryman, although decidedly livelier.

  At the end of 1966, the Spencers and the Shand Kydds went skiing together in Courchevel, France. Recalled Frances, “That’s when we realized there was a strong attraction.” Frances and Shand Kydd began having an affair, and early in 1967, he left his wife of sixteen years. During Frances’s visits to London the following spring and summer, she met Shand Kydd secretly at an apartment in South Kensington. “Peter wasn’t responsible for our separation,” Frances later insisted. “If Johnnie and I had had a strong marriage, it wouldn’t have happened.” Others weren’t so sure. “She fell in love with Peter Shand Kydd,” Robert Spencer said. “I don’t think she would have left Johnnie to be on her own.”

  When Frances told Johnnie in the late summer of 1967 that she wanted a separation, he was thunderstruck. “It was a terrible shock,” he said in 1981. “We had fourteen years together, and I was very upset—distraught.” Asked how many of those fourteen years had been happy, he said, “I had thought all of them, until the moment we parted.” Friends and relatives were equally astonished, because the marriage was considered a great success. One cousin entertained Johnnie and Frances shortly before Frances left. “I thought they seemed perfectly happy,” recalled the cousin.

  Frances walked out in September 1967, but not as a “bolter,” as she has often been described in the tabloid press. The day after her departure, with Johnnie’s blessing, Diana and her younger brother Charles, aged three, along with their nanny, joined Frances at her apartment in London. She had enrolled Diana in the Frances Holland School and Charles in a nearby kindergarten. The two older daughters, Sarah and Jane, were already away at boarding school. Before Frances left, she explained to her four children that she and their father would have a “trial separation.” “It was something I put a lot of thought into,” Frances recalled.

  Throughout the autumn of 1967, Diana and Charles shuttled to Norfolk on weekends, or their father came to London for visits. Andrew Morton later described Charles’s memory of “playing quietly on the floor with a train set while his mother sat sobbing on the edge of the bed, his father smiling weakly at him in a forlorn attempt to reassure his son that everything was all right.” Frances acknowledged the pain of these meetings, saying, “Of course there were tears �
�� from all my children. It would be ridiculous to suggest that it [was] anything other than traumatic.” Yet she hastened to add, “It was better for them that we separated, as there was such an air of tension in the house.”

  When the family reunited in Norfolk for the Christmas holidays, Diana’s father played his trump card. Without telling Frances, he had registered Diana and Charles at new schools near his home, after calling in his lawyers. According to Frances, “He refused to let [Diana and Charles] return to me and applied to the court for their permanent return to Norfolk, and this was granted. The courts were closed for Christmas, and I could do nothing.”

  “I was devastated,” recalled Frances, who had no choice but to return to London once again—this time on her own. It was probably this highly charged second departure that fueled Diana’s memory of the footsteps crunching on gravel, the car door slamming, and the fading sound of the car’s engine, filling her with sadness, confusion, anger, insecurity—and guilt. Indeed, according to Diana’s friend and energy healer Simone Simmons, Diana “always felt especially bleak at Christmas. The season reminded her of her mother’s departure.”