Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Like many children, Diana took comfort in what psychiatrists call “transitional objects,” which serve as maternal substitutes. She kept twenty stuffed animals—“my family,” she called them—on her bed, with a “midget space” for herself. She was allowed to take only one of her animals to boarding school, so she chose a “green hippo” and painted its eyes fluorescent. When it was dark, she allayed her fears with the illusion that the hippo was looking at her.

  Until the end of her life, Diana kept her menagerie on a sofa at the foot of her bed. As her lover James Hewitt observed, they “lay in a line, about thirty cuddly animals—animals that had been with her in her childhood, which she had tucked up in her bed at Park House and which had comforted her and represented a certain security.” When she traveled in her adult years, Diana even took a favorite teddy bear with her; once, on a trip to New York City, she discovered that she had left her bear in Washington, D.C., which prompted a dash to the FAO Schwarz toy store for a replacement.

  Charles Spencer once said that because they had divorced parents, the Spencer children became “a self-contained unit, in a way.” They had in common a self-deprecating sense of humor, and an affinity for nicknames: Diana was “Duch,” Charles was “The Admiral,” Sarah was “Ginge.” But by virtue of age and temperament, the siblings reacted differently to the divorce. Since Sarah and Jane were off at boarding school when Johnnie and Frances separated, the aftershocks fell hardest on Diana and Charles, who formed a close bond.

  From the time he was a baby, Diana had nurtured Charles, who described himself as “an introspective and shy little boy.” He was more intellectually gifted than Diana, which made her feel inferior. While Diana claimed not to be jealous of her brother’s academic superiority, she yearned to do as well as he did.

  Diana’s relationship with her sisters was more distant. “Their growing up was done out of my sight,” she said, since she saw them only during vacations and considered them “very independent.” She felt a natural affinity with Charles because she saw him as more of a kindred spirit than Sarah or Jane. “Like me he will always suffer,” she said. Diana felt that her two sisters were perfectly content “being detached” from the problems of their family.

  Many of their friends thought Diana had traits in common with her eldest sister, Sarah, the most headstrong of the four siblings. “I didn’t like being a girl with red hair,” Sarah once told a reporter. “I’m a redhead with a terrible temper. When I was a child I tended to break the furniture.” Diana also had a hot temper, which shocked members of the royal family when they saw it firsthand; in her youth, Diana usually managed to suppress her rage.

  Whatever Sarah took on, she did well—learning languages, mastering the piano, playing games—all of which Diana struggled with. Because Sarah was so capable, outgoing, and confident, Diana idolized her. Whenever Sarah came home from school, Diana waited on her like a servant, washing her clothes, making her bed, running her bath, packing her suitcase. Diana prided herself on taking care of her sister, but there was also a competitive side to her relationship with Sarah that would come and go over the years.

  Jane, the second sister, was highly intelligent, quiet, and thoughtful. She was the most levelheaded of the Spencer children, and Diana respected her without being dominated, as she was by Sarah. “Jane and Diana had this thing of holding their head down and looking up with the eyes,” said Felicity Clark, a former Vogue editor who knew both sisters. “They had remarkably similar voices, but characterwise, they were fairly different.”

  Of the four siblings, Diana was the least self-assured. “She felt … her opinion didn’t count,” said a close friend of Diana. When Diana was feeling good about herself and her abilities—particularly in swimming and dancing—she was genuinely exuberant, “confident about her gracefulness,” said Charles Spencer. “She loved to show off what an excellent swimmer she was,” recalled nanny Mary Clarke. “She would shout, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ ”

  The years after the divorce were difficult for Diana’s father. One of Johnnie’s childhood friends visited him in Norfolk in the early seventies and found him “rather sad. His clothes looked as if he needed a wife.” It was obvious that he still loved Frances. “For five or six years, he was very crestfallen,” said Fiona Fraser. “He gradually got his confidence back.”

  In accounts of Diana’s life, it has often been said that Ruth Fermoy stepped into the maternal breach, visiting Park House frequently. But Ruth’s manner was aloof, not nurturing, and she had little tolerance for brooding. Her advice to Diana’s elder sisters on handling the family crisis was “Cheer up and grin and bear, because worse things happen at sea, my little sailors.” Ruth also had a life of her own, and her all-important royal connections. According to a Spencer relative, the Spencer children saw Ruth Fermoy as “a background figure”; she visited only four or five times a year, although she lived nearby in Norfolk. She spent much of her time in an apartment in London’s Eaton Square.

  Johnnie was a conscientious parent who treated his children with kindness. Jean Lowe, headmistress of the nearby Silfield School that Diana and Charles attended, said that Johnnie “was a wonderful father. He used to see that they’d got their wellies and they’d got their homework. He used to do the school run when he was able to.” When Diana turned seven, Johnnie hired a camel for a surprise birthday party, a treat intended to reward her for working hard at school. Johnnie was a stickler for manners, so much so that Diana later said she would go into a “panic” if she hadn’t written a thank-you note within twenty-four hours. Each day, Johnnie made an effort to have tea with his two younger children, a ritual he savored. “He was never happier than when he was eating marmite [a sticky brown spread believed to promote good health] sandwiches and drinking glasses of milk in the nursery,” said a neighbor. Whenever there was an important event in Diana’s life—“every step she took,” he once said—Johnnie recorded it with his camera.

  Diana and her brother appreciated the example Johnnie set and the values he taught. “My father always said, ‘Treat everybody as an individual and never throw your weight around,’ ” Diana said. Somewhat more poignantly, Charles considered “one of [Johnnie’s] greatest achievements as a father … [was] that never, ever did he say anything against my mother in front of his children.” Johnnie also made an effort to know his children’s friends, and he could recall, with surprising clarity, details of the friends’ school courses and sports, as well as particulars about their families.

  But as a reserved English gentleman, Johnnie’s inbred formality and diffident temperament limited his effectiveness as a parent. “He was of a generation that didn’t kiss and cuddle the children,” explained Jean Lowe of Silfield School. “Diana wanted … physical touch. When she used to come up and read to me, she would lean on me, and she obviously wanted that, and that, I suppose, was what was missing.” Mary Clarke, who observed Johnnie daily during the two years she worked at Park House, considered him a “very kind, understanding man who was very anxious to do his best for the children, even though he was not quite sure of himself with them.” Clarke could see that Johnnie “tried so hard. He would ask them about their games and their pets, but they only answered his questions; they never started a conversation.” In time, though, as Johnnie became more comfortable, Diana and Charles “became more relaxed with their father.”

  In his traditional role before the divorce, Johnnie had been free to come and go in the household as he pleased, attending to his duties (farming, local government, army reserves, charitable activities) and his sporting pursuits. Once he was in charge, the inconsistency of his presence became more troubling to Diana. “There were long periods in the evenings and at weekends when Diana was unoccupied and when Johnnie couldn’t always guarantee to be there,” wrote Penny Junor. Diana became noticeably worried whenever her father went away—much as she would when Prince Charles and others she loved had to leave her. “She did fret about Johnnie if he was gone for long,” wrote Ju
nor. “She would always ask, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’ ” These memories doubtless prompted Diana’s comment to her astrologer Penny Thornton about “constant loneliness,” and Diana’s anxiety about abandonment during her father’s absences may well have led to her hatred of solitude as an adult. From her school days onward, Diana thrived when she was surrounded by other people, which brought her relief from the emptiness she said she felt on her own.

  In later years, both Diana and her brother spoke openly of their love for their father. In the view of their cousin Robert Spencer, Diana was “particularly fond of her father, especially since he was the parent left behind.” Indeed, one of the more unjust calumnies made in the tabloid press was James Whitaker’s assertion that “to be left in the custody of a man they knew had been unkind to their mother was a burden [the Spencer children] had to endure.” When Diana was in the throes of her own difficult marriage, however, she did express resentment of her father, complaining to Penny Thornton—unfairly, it seems—that he had been “distant and remote, and if he wasn’t being unreachable, he was being angry and intolerant.” According to Thornton, Diana felt that her father “had driven her mother away, yet at the same time she felt utterly abandoned by Frances.”

  Diana’s contradictory feelings were aggravated by the tensions surrounding weekend visits to her mother. Mary Clarke, who accompanied Diana on these unsettling journeys, recalled that she invariably said on her departure, “Poor Daddy, I feel so sad leaving him on his own”; after parting from her mother, as well: “Poor Mummy, I feel so sad leaving her on her own.” Until the Morton revelations, little else was said about these visits. In her 1982 biography of Diana, Penny Junor had emphasized the stoicism shown by both parents and children. Before and after the weekend visits, “there were no tears,” wrote Junor, “and Frances didn’t allow herself to show any emotion either.… Both parents did their utmost to make their separation as easy and painless as possible for the children.”

  Diana’s own recollections were considerably more raw: “I can remember Mummy crying an awful lot,” Diana recalled. The moment Diana and her brother arrived for the weekend, Frances began to weep. When the children asked why she was crying, she told them that she couldn’t bear to have them leave after only a day—a reply that was “devastating” to nine-year-old Diana. According to one of Diana’s close friends, Diana said that in addition to weeping, Frances denigrated Johnnie during their visits. Not only did Diana have to deal with knowing her mother had been so dissatisfied that she had left home, she also had to console Frances while feeling conflicted about her father—a heavy load for a young girl.

  The immediate consequences of these traumatic weekend trips, according to Mary Clarke, were Diana’s increased willfulness and a tendency to “make unfavorable remarks about her father.” Johnnie didn’t help matters with his inability to cope with Diana and Charles on their return. “After he made them welcome, he would normally retire to his study and leave me to return equilibrium to the house,” said Mary Clarke. While at Park House, Diana didn’t say a word about her mother.

  The scars on her children, especially Diana and Charles, caused Frances profound sadness. “It was agonizing for her,” said cousin Fiona Fraser. Nevertheless, in 1972, Frances and Peter Shand Kydd made a radical move by relocating to a hill farm on the remote Isle of Seil off the west coast of Scotland. Somewhat defensively, Frances later explained, “Peter and I had no wish to distance ourselves from anyone. We just wanted to live in Scotland.” Yet the move made routine weekend visits impossible and effectively cut off regular maternal contact when Diana was only eleven.

  Children normally worship their parents without recognition of their quirks and flaws until adolescence or adulthood. A natural reaction for a girl in Diana’s situation would be to fault her own inadequacies for her mother’s departure. “She never felt good enough as a child, blaming herself for her mother’s leaving and subsequently living with a stark sense that those she loved would abandon her,” wrote Diana’s astrologer Debbie Frank. Only later, when she was in her twenties and thirties, did Diana shift the blame for her misfortunes. “Diana said her mother was not there when she needed her,” said her friend Roberto Devorik, echoing other friends to whom Diana had made the same complaint.

  As a child, Diana didn’t talk about her guilt, but an incident she recounted to Andrew Morton showed how burdened she had been. At age nine, she was asked to be a bridesmaid in a cousin’s wedding, and she had to choose between dresses given to her by her father and mother. Although she couldn’t recall which dress she wore, she did remember feeling “totally traumatized” that her choice might signal that she favored one parent over the other. The impulse to inflate such small dilemmas into full-blown crises became more powerful as Diana grew older.

  The push and pull between Johnnie and Frances meant that they often placated Diana when they should have set limits. “She learned how to manipulate her parents by playing one off against the other,” explained one of her close friends. “They both wanted her attention, so they indulged her.” Diana boasted that she was her “father’s favorite” and freely admitted she could “get away with murder.” Combined with her numerous insecurities, this kind of power allowed Diana to expect people to accept her terms, establishing behavior patterns that would lead to trouble later in life. “The problem was,” said her cousin Robert Spencer, “few people had said no to her.”

  The ultimate effect of Diana’s turbulent childhood was her sense that she could not depend on either of her parents. A feeling of healthy dependence—the certainty that parents are “there” for a child—is the usual path to security and confidence in later life. In her insecurity, Diana eventually became obsessively dependent in her search for a provider of the continuous love and understanding she needed.

  Chapter 4

  Afew years after the divorce, Diana’s father decided to send her to boarding school, which, under ordinary circumstances, probably would have caused scarcely a ripple. In the English upper class, boarding school was a time-honored ritual: Boys tended to go off at age eight; most girls left several years later. For boys, boarding school marked the start of a rigorous education. For girls, with the exception of a handful of demanding “public” (in fact, private) schools such as Cheltenham and Roedean, the aim was more social than academic. Girls learned the basics of English, math, language, history, and science, but boarding schools primarily taught them how to live together and develop habits of responsibility, good manners, neatness, discipline, and tolerance. Johnnie and Frances had both gone away to school, so it was natural that their children should do the same.

  Diana was only nine when her father decided to send her to Riddlesworth Hall, two hours’ drive from Park House. She had done reasonably well at the local day school, Silfield, where she had been enrolled since January 1968, following the chaotic autumn of separations and quarrels. On Diana’s arrival at Silfield, a teacher had noted she was “beginning to gain confidence in her work.” Two years later, she was “very good but she must be careful where she puts capital letters!” Shortly afterward, the assessment caught some emerging problems: “Unfortunately, Diana has a defeatist attitude where her weaknesses are concerned which must change if she is to achieve an overall improvement.”

  By one journalist’s description, Diana’s classroom demeanor was “bright and chatty,” while another called her “quiet and shy.” In all likelihood, she showed both sides of her personality. Diana recalled feeling uncomfortable at Silfield because she was the only student with divorced parents, which made her believe that she was “horribly different.” The school staff waited for Diana’s cheerful demeanor to crack, and when it didn’t, they concluded that she had a strong core of resilience.

  With 120 students between the ages of seven and thirteen, Riddlesworth offered a nurturing environment and a student body that included other girls from divorced families. One cousin and several friends were already there, so Diana would be in familiar compa
ny from the beginning. The headmistress was Elizabeth Ridsdale, a warm and wise woman the girls called “Riddy.” The philosophy of the school seemed ideal for Diana’s emotional and academic needs: “a stable family atmosphere in which a child can develop naturally and happily, where individual freedom and the discipline of a community are in easy balance, a sense of security can be achieved, and every child will have the opportunity to be good at something.”

  But when Johnnie described his Riddlesworth plan to Diana, she recalled feeling rejected. Having become accustomed to looking after her father, she tried to dissuade him from sending her off. “I used to make threats,” she said, “like, ‘If you love me, you won’t leave me’ ”—the same sort of entreaty she used with Prince Charles when she didn’t want him to go away.

  She enrolled in Riddlesworth, nevertheless, in the fall of 1970. After some initial homesickness, she adjusted well in the school’s friendly atmosphere. When Mary Clarke first arrived at Park House several months later, she was sent to retrieve Diana for a visit home. Diana greeted her with “those downcast eyes” that she had “whenever she met anybody new,” recalled Clarke; but “the longer Diana spent at Riddlesworth, the more settled and happy she became. She made lots of friends, I think because she posed no threat to anyone. She was generous-natured, openhearted, imaginative.”

  Diana later said she “adored” Riddlesworth, where her talents and attributes were reinforced. She won a trophy for swimming, took extra dancing lessons, received an award for the best guinea pig, and earned the Legatt Cup, the school’s prize for “helpfulness.” “She was overtaken by the busyness of the place,” wrote Penny Junor, “… alive and full of go, always wanting to dash on to the next thing…. She was happy to fit in…. Not the sort of girl the others looked up to, but the sort they liked to have around. She was a girl who wanted to be liked.”