Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  As their father left the hospital in January 1979 to begin his long convalescence, Sarah and Diana were invited to Sandringham for a shooting weekend; their sister Jane was part of the house party because of her husband’s position as assistant private secretary to the Queen. According to Penny Junor’s 1982 biography of Diana, “that weekend was the beginning of Diana’s relationship with the Prince of Wales…. Diana still nurtured a schoolgirl crush on him, which she had had ever since their meeting in November 1977, which he cannot have failed to notice and be flattered by.”

  Tabloid reporter James Whitaker had taken up his customary position outside the Sandringham estate that weekend, peering at the royals through binoculars, as was his habit. “They were shooting pheasants,” Whitaker recalled, “and [Diana] was a very young girl who stayed very close to the Prince of Wales. Sarah was around, too, but Diana was absolutely at his side, and he was interested. We established that it was Sarah’s sister, so we thought she must be there for [his younger brother] Andrew. Still, it was odd that she spent all day close to Charles. She was grabbing Charles’s binoculars and pulling him along, pulling at the binoculars and looking through them. It was the kind of thing that would ordinarily annoy him, but clearly it didn’t. She was looking at us. She was very relaxed, intimate, not a bit fazed, and Charles was not irritated. There was some chemistry because he didn’t object to her pulling his neck off. It was a flirtatious thing.”

  Penny Junor ventured further in her book, offering two slightly different interpretations of Charles’s feelings for Diana. “Charles probably didn’t see his relationship with [Diana] as anything other than platonic in those days,” she wrote, “but he must have enjoyed her sense of humor and found quite refreshing her ease with him and her lack of sophistication.” Further along, Junor turned more categorical, stating, “Charles found himself strangely attracted to her, though not in any consciously physical sense…. He found Diana fun to be with.… She did liven up the party. She wasn’t quite as unpredictable as Sarah but she was irreverently giggly and girlish, yet sensitive. In some ways she was a little girl, in other ways she showed uncanny maturity. It was a curious mixture, which Charles found appealing.”

  According to Junor’s biography, Charles began to see Diana “quite a lot” in 1979—not as a girlfriend, but as part of a group. “He would ring up Cadogan Place out of the blue and ask her out to the ballet or to the opera, often to make up numbers.” Diana was considered “good value … guaranteed to make everyone enjoy themselves.” As a companion, Junor continued, “she was undemanding, she obviously liked to be with him, which was flattering.” Yet “no one ever took much notice” of Diana: Those aware of the Prince’s activities during that time don’t specifically recall her. “She could have been amongst the party and I might not have known it,” said Michael Colborne, a close aide at the time. According to Charles’s valet Stephen Barry, the Prince was “disorganized about arrangements” and often put together impromptu groups.

  Diana turned eighteen in July. After her customary visit to her mother in Scotland, she went to stay with her sister Jane at her cottage at Balmoral, where Charles and his family were spending their holiday. Nothing remarkable occurred during this visit—Charles, at this time, was preoccupied by his growing closeness to Camilla—and Diana returned to London, where she busied herself with her new apartment.

  A month later, in August 1979, tragedy hit Charles for the first time. His beloved great-uncle Mountbatten was assassinated by IRA terrorists while fishing off the west coast of Ireland. Mountbatten’s fourteen-year-old grandson Nicholas was also killed, along with the Irish boatman, and Doreen, Lady Brabourne, who was the mother of Mountbatten’s son-in-law. Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia, her husband, John, and Nicholas’s twin brother were severely injured. “I have lost someone infinitely special in my life,” Charles wrote in his journal that night, “someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.”

  Charles had others to console him that fall—Camilla, to be sure, and Amanda Knatchbull, with whom he remained friends. Charles also became infatuated with twenty-five-year-old Anna Wallace, whom he met while hunting in November. The daughter of a millionaire Scottish landowner, she had worked as private secretary to a flamboyant Iranian hostess named Homayoun Mazandi. Known in social circles as the “caviar queen,” Mazandi threw lavish parties in her grand six-story house at 46 Chester Square in London. Mazandi’s secretary was predictably high-spirited as well, earning the nickname “Whiplash Wallace” from friends impressed by her enthusiasm on the hunting field.

  Anna was very pretty, and Charles was smitten—although revelations in Nigel Dempster’s gossip column cast doubt on her fitness to be Charles’s wife. “There is a risqué picture of Anna in circulation—and I have a copy of it,” he wrote on June 10, 1980. “She’ll never be Queen of England.” The tabloids speculated that Charles asked Wallace to marry him and she said no. Yet a man who knew Charles well said, “I don’t think he was interested in marrying her. She wasn’t that important.” Indeed, Stephen Barry noted that although the Prince was “enormously attracted” to Wallace, “he seemed to be more cautious with her than any of his other girls.”

  Even as Charles was distracted by his romances, the invitations kept coming to Diana Spencer. In February 1980, she traveled again to Sandringham for a shooting party, this time accompanied by Amanda Knatchbull. One of Sarah Spencer’s roommates, Lucinda Craig Harvey, recalled that Diana’s excitement was tinged with self-deprecation over the prospect of anything serious developing with the Prince of Wales: “Can you see me swanning around in kid gloves and a ball gown?”

  Around the same time, Diana started baby-sitting for Mary Robertson, her American employer, who was struck by her blossoming good looks: “perfect English skin, a slight blush on her cheeks, and clear blue eyes. She simply glowed with youth and good health.” Diana’s beauty caught the eye of a man who met her for the first time early that year at a twenty-first birthday party for the Duchess of Westminster, the former Natalia Phillips, whom Diana had known since childhood. “I said, ‘God, that’s a pretty girl,’ ” he recalled. “Diana was definitely doelike.” For all her insecurities, Diana had a disconcertingly bold side as well, and the man at the birthday party was struck that she recognized him as a friend of one of her sisters and introduced herself. “In England, people don’t do that,” he recalled. “People are so reserved. She seemed to have no ‘side’ to her: By that I mean she was totally natural.”

  After a number of “casual encounters” with Diana, Charles “began to think seriously of her as a potential bride,” according to Dimbleby, although he had not experienced “any apparent surge in feeling for her” in the more than two years since they crossed paths at Althorp. They next met in July 1980 shortly after Diana’s nineteenth birthday, when both were invited to a weekend at the Sussex home of Robert de Pass, whose son Philip ran with the crowd of men she knew in London. “You’re a young blood,” Philip had said to her. “You might amuse him.”

  Diana watched Charles play polo during her weekend with the de Pass family, and tabloid veteran James Whitaker recalled seeing her at the tournament without linking her with Charles. At the de Pass’s barbecue following the polo match, Diana and Charles sat together on a bale of hay, beyond the lenses of the tabloid press. The image of that scene, however, has earned nearly as prominent a place in their saga as the initial meeting in the plowed field.

  Diana’s description of this encounter was filled with Charles’s mixed signals and her own disquieting interpretations: “He was all over me … and it was very strange,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t very cool.’ I thought men were supposed not to be so obvious. I thought this was very odd.”

  She told him how sad he had looked during Lord
Mountbatten’s funeral, and that her heart had bled for him. “The next minute,” she recalled, “he leapt on me, practically, and I thought this was very strange, and I wasn’t quite sure how to cope with all this.” Yet after expressing alarm about his being too physical with her, she seemed distressed by Charles’s evident restraint when he seemed content only to talk. “Frigid wasn’t the word,” she said. “Big F when it comes to that.”

  Charles was touched by Diana’s compassion for his grief over Mountbatten, and he recalled “how she had sensed his loneliness and his need for someone to care for him.” Several weeks later he spilled out his feelings to a close friend, in all likelihood Lady Susan Hussey, a woman somewhat older than Charles who had been lady-in-waiting to the Queen for two decades. “It was to Lady Susan that he talked about his girlfriends and his problems,” explained Stephen Barry. “She was always at the palace.” In late July 1980, Charles told his confidante that “he had met the girl he intended to marry,” wrote Dimbleby. “He spoke of Diana Spencer’s easy and open manner, of her warmth, of her enthusiasm for rural life and of her background, through which she knew a little of his family and certainly enough, he presumed, to have few fears of marrying into it.”

  By then, Charles had spent more time with Diana in different settings. They had danced together at the Goodwood Ball, and they met again when she traveled to Balmoral shortly after the de Pass weekend to stay with her sister Jane and her new baby. Diana was “as soft, cheerful and bouncy as ever, still dancing attendance, still hanging on his every word, enjoying his company, boosting his ego, and still waiting for some show of affection from him, like a puppy underfoot,” Junor wrote in her 1982 biography. Diana seemed completely comfortable with country life, giving “the impression to the Prince’s family and friends,” according to Dimbleby, “that she was one of nature’s ‘tomboys.’ ” During this private interlude at Balmoral, Charles and Diana got to know each other better, which fortified his feeling that she was the one.

  “The summer of 1980 was all rosy for Diana,” said her cousin Robert Spencer. “She was in great heart, on good terms with her parents. She had a new flat and plenty of money. She may have had the Prince of Wales in her head, but she was not in the position to do anything about it until that summer when the cards were stacking in her favor. When she went to stay with Jane, that was the crucial visit. The romance didn’t start, in my opinion, until she went up there. She had visited me earlier in the summer, and she said nothing at all about Prince Charles.”

  At Charles’s invitation, Diana joined his group on the royal yacht Britannia during the first week in August for the Cowes sailboat races—the capstone of the English summer social season. Diana’s recollection was once again faintly uneasy, touched by her mistrust and insecurity: She was disconcerted by his older friends, who were “all over me like a bad rash.” Somewhat cryptically she said she sensed that “obviously somebody was talking.”

  Tabloid reporters would later write about the way Diana showed off while waterskiing, flirtatiously bumping into Charles’s Windsurfer. But Diana’s real impact seemed more subtle. “Lady Diana’s presence struck me right away,” wrote Stephen Barry, who detected her variable moods. She combined “a natural maturity with a charming artlessness,” he observed. “She seemed quite different from any of the other ladies who had ever engaged the Prince’s attention.” Barry recalled that she was “shy and confident at the same time,” “wonderfully good-looking,” and instantly popular with the crew, who were taken by her refreshing friendliness. Charles “didn’t seem to take too much notice of her at the beginning,” noted Barry, “though her eyes followed him everywhere.”

  Charles persisted in his own way, inviting her to Balmoral during the Braemar Games in early September. Although she had visited her sister Jane there several times previously, Diana recalled, “I was terrified—shitting bricks. I was frightened because I had never stayed at Balmoral, and I wanted to get it right.” Perhaps she was indeed fearful, because for the first time she was asked to stay at the castle, although she later said she was “all right once I got in through the front door.”

  Charles was surrounded by his closest friends that weekend, including Camilla and Andrew Parker Bowles. Another couple, Patty and Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson, were impressed by Diana’s vivacity and apparent enjoyment of the sporting life as she slogged through mud during their deer stalking, and learned how to fish on the River Dee. “She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything,” Patty Palmer-Tomkinson said, “naturally young, but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.”

  Diana seemed attuned to Charles’s needs. She quizzed Stephen Barry about the Prince’s likes and dislikes and was “always buying him little presents,” according to Barry, including shirts and ties to “spruce up his wardrobe.” She had an “instinctive understanding of Prince Charles,” Barry observed, and in the early days, she looked to his valet for guidance on whether she was “doing the right thing…. She picked up my signals amazingly quickly,” he noted. “The only time I perhaps needed to slightly raise an eyebrow was when she wanted to giggle and he wanted to be quiet. The Prince needs periods of silence. Then Diana would quickly pick up a book or the tapestry work she loves to do and sit silent herself.”

  In September, Charles “confided to one of his friends that though he did not yet love her, she was lovable and warmhearted, and he was sure he could fall in love with her.” He also had the somewhat antiquated notion that “as her first love, he would also be her last,” and he felt that, at nineteen, she was sufficiently malleable to learn her role as his consort.

  In later years, Charles’s critics accused him of cynicism in his courtship of Diana, an impression abetted by Diana, who described herself to Morton as “the virgin, the sacrificial lamb”—an intriguing choice of words, since a year before their interviews Morton had written in The Sunday Times that Diana had been “the sacrificial virgin bride.” Because of his complicated feelings for Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles was certainly conflicted in his approach to Diana. Yet he seemed less cynical than tangled in his theoretical model of marriage and blinded by the peculiarities of his status as Prince of Wales—“not a position but a predicament,” wrote Alan Bennett in the play The Madness of George III. Television host Clive James, an avid fan of Diana’s, considered Charles “a man as good and honest as I have ever met,” but James pointed out that Charles was “born to a life in which people magically appeared when needed.”

  Like many men of his generation and class, Charles had not been raised to nurture a wife—a deficiency compounded by the essential selfishness bred into him as heir to the throne. He could not envision an equal partnership; he expected to be listened to, respected, and even obeyed. He wanted a soulmate, a country girl of intelligence and wit, willing to share his hobbies, embrace his passions, and honor his values; a wife who was loyal, committed to duty, and who, as he said to Alistair Cooke, was willing to mold herself to him and walk two steps behind. That was the royal way, and above all, he needed the support of a woman who would be consistent and dependable.

  Charles also believed in the notion that an “arranged” marriage could work, as it had for his grandparents the Queen Mother and George VI, who grew to love each other deeply. “He often used to say that he wanted to have the same kind of long and happy marriage which his grandmother had,” said his friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson. “To a detached or untutored non-establishment observer, his approach seems bizarre in that he wouldn’t think in terms of passion,” said a man close to Charles. “This is a romantic age where passion is important. He was aware of the fact that he was inviting someone to do a job, and … over and above the normal tests of marriage, he always felt, ‘Who would ever want to do this job?’ That explains his diffidence.”

  If Diana had read any of Charles’s various statements on marriage, his expectations and attitudes about a helpmeet would have been clear. But she had no interest i
n doing that sort of homework. Finding a husband was much on her nineteen-year-old mind after her sister Jane had her first child and her sister Sarah had been married the previous May. Diana’s rivalry with Sarah remained a backdrop to her interest in Charles. Years later, Diana told her friend Elsa Bowker that Sarah “resented it terribly because I accepted to go out with Prince Charles.” At the time, Diana confided to her employer Mary Robertson that she was unnerved by Sarah’s constant inquiries about the relationship. “I don’t even dare to pick up the telephone at my flat for fear it might be Sarah,” said Diana.

  Diana seemed to have scant reason for such wariness, but it was ingrained in her temperament. It didn’t matter that Sarah was now spoken for, having settled on Neil McCorquodale, a wealthy gentleman farmer and former Coldstream Guards officer, described by a friend as “solid, very steady, private, quiet, with a good sense of humor.” He was in many ways the opposite of Sarah, who was ebullient and enterprising, with an unpredictable streak and a fondness for the limelight. Just weeks before her wedding day, in February 1980, Sarah called it off only to reschedule it three months later. “Sarah was smart enough to know she needed a man like Neil,” said a friend of the couple. “He was the sort of man Diana should have married, but Diana went for ambition.”

  Diana idealized marriage as a fantasy that contrasted sharply with Charles’s elaborately considered view. “I had so many dreams as a young girl,” she recalled. “I wanted, and hoped … that my husband would look after me. He would be a father figure, and he’d support me, encourage me, say ‘Well done’ or say, ‘No, it wasn’t good enough.’ But I didn’t get any of that. I couldn’t believe it. I got none of that. It was role reversal.” Diana also believed that since Charles had to marry “forever,” she would be safe from the possibility of divorce, and she saw the royal household as a place where she would be protected. In contemplating marriage to Charles, Diana supposedly told friends that she felt secure for the first time in her life.