Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Events moved swiftly after Frances left for good at the end of 1967. She and Johnnie spoke “only through lawyers,” said Frances. “I desperately tried to make contact personally, but it wasn’t fruitful.” On April 10, 1968, Peter Shand Kydd’s wife Janet was granted a divorce, with custody of their three children. The next day, just two newspapers, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, carried brief accounts of the decision. The Telegraph ran four sentences, noting the cause as “adultery by Mr. Peter Shand Kydd with Viscountess Althorp.” The following June, Frances went to court with her own custody plea, which she lost.

  That December, Frances filed for divorce on the grounds of her husband’s cruelty, an action that prompted one sentence in The Times. Johnnie quickly responded with his own petition charging her with adultery. It was Frances’s cruelty charge that led many journalists to conclude that Johnnie had physically abused her. According to James Whitaker, Johnnie made his own counterclaim because he was “fearful the details of cruelty to her would become public”—a puzzling notion, since the proceedings were closed, and there was no coverage of the case in the press. Whitaker further alleged that “Frances declined to give evidence of his cruelty because her lawyers advised her against doing so.”

  Those who knew the situation have said that Frances’s charge was a standard legal device at the time. “In those days, [an accusation of] mental cruelty was one of the more discreet ways to get a divorce,” said Fiona Fraser. More significantly, another member of the Spencer family said that Frances “only accused [Johnnie] of mental cruelty basically to blackmail him into a divorce that he didn’t want to give.”

  Frances had no defense against the adultery charge; she had already been identified as an adulteress in the Shand Kydd divorce, which Peter had not contested. What she didn’t anticipate was Johnnie’s stubborn fight for custody of the children: He summoned a string of character witnesses, including Frances’s mother, Lady Fermoy, in an extraordinary rejection of her own daughter. The more charitable view was that Ruth felt the children would be happier in the country than in London. Said one neighbor, “Ruth lived down the road, and she saw Johnnie a lot. I suppose she felt Frances had behaved badly.” Others saw a more insidious reason: Modestly born Ruth Gill couldn’t bear to see her grandchildren leave the prestigious embrace of the Spencers.

  Neither the Spencer children nor their friends and relatives knew the specifics of the courtroom testimony at the time. It was not until 1982, with the publication of more than a dozen biographies about Diana, that particulars of the Spencer divorce became widely known. The story of the bitterness between Diana’s parents spilled into the tabloids after Frances issued a statement to biographer Gordon Honeycombe, who wrote Year of the Princess, explaining why she was not a “bolter.” As the Daily Mail noted that August, “Only now is the full story emerging of a family split that has produced the effect of Earl Spencer remaining close to his mother-in-law Ruth, Lady Fermoy.”

  Diana and her siblings had learned in the mid-seventies what their grandmother had done. While Diana shared her mother’s hurt and resentment, she didn’t turn against her grandmother. One reason, according to a Spencer relative, was that the children “hardly knew [Lady Fermoy], anyway.” It was only well into Diana’s marriage, when Ruth Fermoy took Prince Charles’s side as she had with Johnnie, that Diana grew to hate her grandmother. “A courtier to the end,” explained the Spencer relative, Ruth Fermoy “wanted Diana to stay in the marriage, no matter how bad it was, in order to spare the royal family the embarrassment of a divorce.”

  Diana’s unwavering antagonism was evident in her comments to Morton: “My grandmother tried to lacerate me in any way she could. She fed the royal family with hideous comments about my mother, so whenever I mention her name the royal family come down on me like a ton of bricks. Mummy came across very badly because grandmother did a real hatchet job.”

  On April 15, 1969, the court granted Johnnie his divorce. According to the Evening Standard, Johnnie was given his decree “on the ground of the adultery of thirty-two-year-old Viscountess Althorp with Mr. Peter Shand Kydd. Lady Althorp did not proceed with the petition which she had filed. Her husband denied her allegations of cruelty.” The account continued, “Adultery was alleged at an address in Queens Gate, South Kensington, in April and May 1967. The judge ordered that the wife and Mr. Shand Kydd should pay jointly an agreed £3,000 [$30,000 at today’s values] for the husband’s costs.” The two paragraphs in The Telegraph the following day contained the additional information that Johnnie “was granted custody of his four children.”

  As a leading divorce judge described the situation to Diana’s biographer Gordon Honeycombe, “The fact that the father was staying in the family home and that he wanted the children to stay there with him would have been the most powerful factor in coming to the decision about custody.” Explained Honeycombe, “Several factors worked against Lady Althorp…. The weight of aristocratic opinion was against her, as was her own mother. And Norfolk, where the children had spent nearly all their lives, was a better place to bring them up than London. The law itself favored the father, who happened to be the son of an earl. Custody of children involved in a divorce case is invariably given to the mother, unless she is mentally deranged, a drug addict—or married to a nobleman. His rank and title give him prior claims.” In the divorce of Diana’s parents, the final condition seemed to prevail. Said Honeycombe, “It reflects the aristocracy’s view of women.”

  That May, Frances married Peter Shand Kydd. Two years later, in July 1971, she reopened the custody question, and after a five-day hearing behind closed doors was rejected again. Throughout these disputes, Johnnie freely permitted the children to visit Frances on weekends in London and on the West Sussex coast, where she and Peter bought a house shortly after their wedding.

  For different reasons, each of Diana’s parents was undone by the separation and divorce. Frances had lost her children, and her mother had repudiated her, which “unbalanced” Frances, said Robert Spencer. “It was a very emotional period for Diana,” he added. Even more troubling was Johnnie’s state of mind. “He was really miserable after the divorce, basically shell-shocked. He used to sit in his study the whole time,” Charles Spencer recalled. Johnnie’s “body language was appalling,” said his friend Rupert Hambro. “He walked with a stoop and he wasn’t concentrating on what was going on.” Recalled another friend, “He used to come over and visit my sister and just talk to her and then thank her for listening to him.”

  But Johnnie couldn’t bring himself to talk to his children about the divorce, which left Diana and Charles mystified and uneasy. Diana recalled that not only was her father silent about the divorce, neither she nor her brother asked about it. Charles remembered “asking where [my mother] was, and being told that she’d gone away on holiday, then asking every day and sensing that something was very wrong but not understanding at all, really.… I can remember that, as a child, you know if somebody’s lying to you.”

  Johnnie clearly intended no harm by his silence, which seemed a predictable response for a nobleman of his generation, but it worsened the situation, especially for Diana. At age six, she had witnessed distressing tension and strong emotions in her parents: anxiety, anger, and grief. Naturally reticent, she was unable to speak about either their reaction or her own, and she kept her feelings inside. At a time when a healthy child should be building a strong bond with parents based on love and trust, Diana was emotionally adrift, her mother gone and her father sinking ever deeper into melancholy.

  Chapter 3

  The emotional drama we grow up in can be, even without our knowing it, an imprint for life. It stays with us and shapes who we are and our expectations. What we observe in our parents’ relationship to each other and to ourselves provides emotional signposts for what each of us feels entitled to get out of life.

  —SUSIE ORBACH (WITH LUISE EICHENBAUM),

  Diana’s therapist from 1993 to 1997

  When Dia
na Spencer first hit the tabloid headlines in September 1980, the press and the public glossed over her parents’ divorce, neglecting to consider the damage it might have caused her. The fairy tale couldn’t have a dark side. Diana was portrayed as the perfect mate for Prince Charles: well-born, pretty, virginal, and charming. She was from a “broken home,” but the tabloid reporters responsible for creating her image regarded the Spencer divorce as an unfortunate incident that Diana had simply brushed away. (Indeed, in their quest for scandal, they were far more focused on futile attempts to uncover a secret lover.)

  Diana’s chroniclers focused on her willfulness as evidence that she had come through the divorce unscathed. In his portrait of Diana’s troubled childhood in the Daily Star on July 1, 1981, James Whitaker wrote, “It is hard to imagine it now but this sequence of events shattered Diana. It was worse for her because she loved her mother and father so much, and like anybody of that age couldn’t really understand what was going on.” Continued Whitaker, “Outwardly happy she may have appeared, but I am told she often suffered ‘like mad.’ ” Nevertheless, Whitaker concluded on a typically upbeat note, “Diana’s tremendous strength and depth of character brought her through it all.”

  Over and over, those who knew Diana in her childhood and adolescence insisted, “She was just an ordinary girl.” As a child, especially when she was in supportive surroundings, she seemed even more adept at shielding herself from emotional turmoil than she was as an adult. To most of those around her, Diana’s personality and demeanor seemed little changed after her mother left home. But if anyone had bothered to dig more deeply, some clues would doubtless have been apparent.

  As difficult as it is to diagnose mental illness in adults, it is even harder with children because their personalities are still developing—yet warning signs are often evident. Virginia Woolf once wrote that from an early age she had “never been able to become part of life; as if the world was complete and I was outside of it, being blown forever outside the loop of time. Other people seemed to live in a real world but I often fell down into nothingness.” According to psychiatrist E. James Anthony, Woolf’s description suggested the early stages of serious psychological problems. Her words differ little from Diana’s confession of childhood isolation to Andrew Morton: “I always felt very different from everyone else, very detached.… I always had this thing inside me that I was different. I didn’t know why. I couldn’t even talk about it but in my mind it was there.… I felt I was in the wrong shell.”

  By the time Diana began divulging intimate details of her life to Morton in 1991, she had been through a number of psychotherapists, as well as several less conventional spiritual advisers and astrologists. She had grown accustomed to reaching into her past for painful memories, many of them at odds with the Diana seen by others as she was growing up. “I don’t know what she was talking about,” said a Norfolk friend of the Spencer children. “They had dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, swimming, and school parties, and she had a sunny disposition. I saw no storm clouds.”

  Diana’s most astute friends and relatives did see signs of troubling behavior at various stages of her youth. These manifestations, which seem highly significant in retrospect, included moodiness, fearfulness (of the dark, of being alone), depression, obsessive behavior, food bingeing, academic difficulties, anxiety, distractibility, detachment, and insecurity—all of which occurred against the backdrop of prolonged separation from her mother.

  The divorce severed virtually all contact between Frances and Johnnie. “Between their divorce … and my father’s death [in 1992], they hardly spoke,” said Charles Spencer, “so I’ve never really thought of them as a unit in any way.” Diana and her brother had to deal with constant unpredictability. “It was a very unhappy childhood,” Diana recalled. “Parents were busy sorting themselves out…. Too many changes over nannies, very unstable, the whole thing, generally unhappy and being detached from everybody else.”

  The children treated their nannies badly, especially after their mother left. Diana recalled that she and Charles dealt with nannies they disliked by sticking pins in their chairs and tossing their clothing out the window. The two children would view their nanny as a threat if she tried to usurp their mother’s position. Not surprisingly, some nannies responded with cruelty. “Diana and I had a nanny who—when we did something wrong—would bang our heads together,” said Charles. “Or if one of us did something wrong, would bang our head against the wall.” Charles also recalled having “three or four nannies during those years who were exceptionally nice.” Unfortunately, none stayed very long.

  Even as a little girl, Diana could put up a brave front. In home movies filmed by her father, she comes across as an extroverted gamine, gaily striking poses for the camera and running around, as her brother Charles remarked in a television interview, “like a little bee.… She was very energetic, always on the move.” Diana took pride in her self-control. “I’ve got what my mother’s got,” she said. “However bloody you’re feeling you can put on the most amazing show of happiness.” Given the extent of her distress, it was remarkable that she could maintain a pleasing exterior, especially at such an early age. Only those closest to her were aware of her insecurity below the surface. “As a child, she was deeply unhappy,” her brother Charles privately admitted to a friend. “I don’t remember her being a sunny child.”

  Not surprisingly, accounts of her demeanor before and after the divorce are contradictory. In some respects, she appeared to change very little. Janet Thompson, the nanny who came to Park House three years before the separation, recalled that at age three, Diana had been fearful of the dark and required frequent reassurance. Yet Diana was hardly meek and retiring. “Diana could not be called a difficult child, but she could be obstinate,” Thompson said. “Even in those days she knew what she wanted and how she wanted things done.… She wasn’t easy. Some children that young will do as they are told immediately, but Diana wouldn’t—it was always a battle of wills. She was full of spirit. But she was a lovely child, and after she had been reasoned with she would usually cooperate … eventually.”

  Although willful, Diana had a finely tuned sensibility from the outset. “She was very modest,” said her father’s cousin Fiona Fraser, “and she was like that before Johnnie and Frances separated. She was deeply perceptive from an early age, observing everything.”

  In Diana Princess of Wales, her 1982 biography, Penny Junor described Diana’s behavior in late 1967 and early 1968 as “on the go all day long and quite exhausting to be with. This seemed to be her method of dealing with her problems. She refused to allow herself to think or to notice that Mummy wasn’t there.” Junor also noted that Diana “began to talk far more than anyone ever remembers her talking either before or later in her life. She chattered constantly from the moment she got up in the morning to the time she went to bed.”

  Junor’s book has some weight because it was partly sanctioned. Diana answered a “long list of questions” submitted by the author to the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, who also read the manuscript for accuracy. In addition, members of Diana’s family checked material about her early years. Still, Junor’s disquieting description of Diana’s sudden volubility did not disturb the conventional wisdom, which said her withdrawal and reticence began when her mother left. In one typical account, British writer Ingrid Seward claimed that Diana “became introverted and nervous and acquired [a] lifetime’s habit of always looking down.” A more plausible reason for looking down came from her mother, who had the same habit as a child. “In school I was taught to keep my head up and smile,” Frances said. “I was always dropping it to hide my height.”

  A reliable description of Diana’s moods and behavior can be found in Little Girl Lost: The Troubled Childhood of Princess Diana by the Woman Who Raised Her, a 1986 book by Mary Clarke, who joined the Spencers as their nanny in 1971—four years after the separation—and worked for the family for two years. Within the family, Diana was anything but
shy: “ever so talkative,” recalled Clarke, “warm and friendly, genuinely interested in whatever was going on.” Diana had a tendency to giggle, Clarke noted, “especially when she was nervous.”

  Clarke also discovered that Diana was “very sensitive.” Of the four Spencer children, she had been “most affected” by her parents’ divorce. Clarke’s description hinted at some of Diana’s more extreme traits as an adult: her tendency to want “everything very clear-cut,” for example, which presaged the difficulty she had with ambiguities in personal relationships. Most telling was the report Clarke heard from other staff that Diana “fluctuated between being very bright and happy and quiet and moody.… She was confused.”

  An unnerving aspect of that confusion was her tendency to lie. When Charles Spencer described her “difficulty telling the truth,” he wondered “whether a psychologist would say it was the trauma of the divorce.” Spencer also told a friend he considered this dishonesty “a classic sign of attention-seeking, trying to get attention by being naughty.”

  She was so afraid of the dark that she described her feeling as an “obsession,” and she recalled the nighttime sound of her brother sobbing for their mother from his room on the other side of the house. (Her brother, who has said his childhood “wasn’t particularly happy,” admitted, “a lot of my childhood is a blank. I’ve been told that when my mother left, I used to cry the whole time, sob all night … but I have to say I can’t remember it.”) According to astrologer Penny Thornton, Diana said “her early life had indeed been awful. She talked about the constant loneliness she felt, and the lack of attention; [she said] that no one took the time to ‘really listen’ and give her the deep affection she required.”

  Diana submerged her own needs by looking after her father. She may have yearned for someone to care for her, but seemed to find some solace in taking on this maternal role. By one newspaper account, Diana was often seen “trailing after her father, offering to make him cups of tea and cook him cake. Many’s the time he begged her to ‘run along with your sisters,’ but Diana was obdurate. The thought had grown in her mind that her father needed protection, and she saw herself in this protector’s role, adopting a gravitas beyond her years.… She made ‘looking after daddy’ her big childhood task.”