Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Charles had essentially made up his mind during the summer of 1980 that he wanted Diana as his wife, and the courtship became an exercise in reassuring himself that he had made the right choice. With the press so avidly embracing Diana’s cause, Charles had no room for second thoughts. “The pressures on the prince began to seem like a tidal wave sweeping towards an inevitable destiny,” wrote Dimbleby.

  Diana came across as mature and levelheaded during this period, and she made no secret of her devotion to him. “She was most certainly in love with her prince,” said Stephen Barry. “She was always available when he called, and she always fitted in with his plans.” When Charles proudly showed her Highgrove, the country home eleven miles from the Parker Bowleses’ that he had purchased the previous June, Barry sensed her disappointment that the house didn’t live up to the grandeur she was used to at Althorp, but Diana hid such feelings from Charles. Somewhat primly, she was offended by Charles’s request that she help decorate the house although they weren’t engaged; she felt that Charles was acting improperly.

  After a month or so, the tabloid reporters began to describe Diana’s character with growing authority. In one of the more evenhanded early assessments, Mirror reporter Paul Callan described her as “quietly captivating … modest … not a great conversationalist, a trifle nervous, seemingly cool … a great laugher … she can look intensely serious one moment, then if someone cracks even a mild joke, her face lights up … she is quietly spoken, not particularly posh even …[with] a pleasant, even classless accent.” A more speculative but provocatively intuitive appraisal came from an astrologer’s reading in the Daily Star around the same time: Diana tended to “rely on instinct … to ‘feel’ what is right,” and was naturally inconsistent, wrote astrologer Lena Leon. “Every morning will be different—giddy or giggly, sulky or silky … coldness will suddenly be followed by warmth … trust is … terribly important.”

  Yet much of the tabloid reporting about Diana consisted of distortions and outright inventions, which set the template for the emerging portrait of Diana that included traits she couldn’t recognize and overstated her familiarity with the royal way of life.

  James Whitaker, for example, described Diana’s “reputation as a demon driver … scooting around London at a surprisingly nippy speed,” omitting the fact that she was speeding to avoid the pursuit of Whitaker and other hacks. (Whitaker even boasted later about “an 80-mph car caper in which he drove alongside the car she was driving while a photographer snapped her picture.”) Within days, other reporters picked up on Diana’s “erratic driving record.” Harry Arnold contributed to the misimpressions by exaggerating “the friendship which Charles and Diana have shared for years.” Arnold likewise incorrectly asserted that Diana “has been groomed from childhood to join the Balmoral set.”

  The tabloids also distorted the role of the Queen Mother and Diana’s grandmother Ruth Fermoy, presenting them as the conspiratorial architects of an arranged marriage. Charles’s “choice of bride,” wrote Andrew Morton in one representative account, “was engineered by the machinations of the grandmother he reveres and of Diana’s grandmother.” While both the Queen Mother and Ruth Fermoy strongly endorsed the marriage, the two women chipped in only after the relationship was already on track. Lady Fermoy signaled her approval that autumn when she accompanied Diana and Charles to a performance of Verdi’s Requiem, with dinner afterward at Buckingham Palace.

  The speculation about the cabal of the grandmothers began shortly after Diana’s October 1980 visit to Birkhall, the Balmoral residence of the Queen Mother, where Lady Fermoy was in attendance. “Both grandmothers know each other well,” wrote Anne DeCourcy several weeks later. “It is tempting to think that there has been a certain amount of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, if.’ ” In the British press, it was but a short leap from “It is tempting” to the unshakable notion that the two elderly women orchestrated the marriage, which became a pillar of the Diana myth.

  In fact, Ruth Fermoy had doubts about the match. “She never dared say anything,” said a man close to Charles, “but she thought Diana was unsuitable, and that she was an unreliable girl.” Shortly before her death in 1993, Lady Fermoy revealed her unspoken doubts. “If I’d said to [Charles], ‘You’re making a very great mistake,’ ” she said, “he probably wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention because he was being driven.” Even Diana recalled that during the courtship Ruth Fermoy registered some caution by telling her that the royal family’s “sense of humor” and “lifestyle” were “different” and might not suit her.

  Some of the mistaken assertions by the tabloid reporters deliberately cast Prince Charles in a harsh light to boost Diana. He “never sent flowers,” wrote Whitaker indignantly, although the Daily Mail’s Danae Brook reported the delivery of two dozen dark-red roses from Charles to Diana’s door. “I often felt sorry for her,” Whitaker wrote, because Diana “had to … drive hundreds of miles … to be with him…. No normal boyfriend would ever get away [with] treating his girl[friend] in such a cavalier manner.” Yet Charles’s valet Stephen Barry later described at length the number of times during the courtship that he met Diana at her sister’s or grandmother’s home in order to avoid the press before driving her to meet Charles in the country, then returning the following morning in a “dawn dash.”

  Inevitably, a few minor negatives popped into the developing picture of Diana. A butler at Althorp told the Daily Star that Diana had been “a bit of a nuisance” as a girl, but predicted that “with some training she could fit into the strict rules and regulations of a royal household.” Judy Wade of The Sun dredged up a 1976 interview with Raine Spencer in which she said Diana and her sisters had snubbed her. But for the most part, the press beat the drum on Diana’s behalf, virtually ordering Charles to propose, as Whitaker recalled, “or the whole country would lynch him.” “The time has come when Prince Charles should get married,” thundered Whitaker in the Daily Star on November 10. “It is his duty.”

  The months before her engagement were Diana’s first major test of character, and she impressed the tabloid hacks with her imperturbability—one account praised her “remarkably cool and mature approach”—during their siege. They were witnessing her self-professed ability to “put on the most amazing show of happiness” however “bloody” she might be feeling. They had no idea that she actually crumbled under the pressure very early. As she said years later, the reporters were “unbearable.… I cried like a baby to the four walls. I just couldn’t cope with it.” Diana revealed her feelings only once at the time, in her interview with neighbor Danae Brook of the Daily Mail. “I’m not so much bored as miserable,” said Diana. “It’s quite tiring and it’s been going on for two weeks now, solid.”

  While Charles limited his newspaper-reading to The Times, Diana read “everything she [could] lay her hands on,” according to Stephen Barry. After several months of publicity, a Daily Mirror reporter observed, “It seems that … Lady Diana … has come to enjoy recognition.” There were moments when Diana seemed to invite attention. In December 1980, Charles’s former girlfriend Anna Wallace married Johnny Hesketh at the Guards Chapel in London. To the astonishment of one of her friends, Diana showed up near the chapel pushing a child in a stroller. “I said, ‘For God’s sake, there are three hundred press crowded round. My God, you’d better get out of here,’ ” recalled her friend.

  In her Morton interviews, Diana bitterly criticized Prince Charles for being unsupportive. She remembered that he seemed only concerned for Camilla Parker Bowles, who had to fend off a handful of reporters at her home—versus thirty-four outside Diana’s door. Yet Stephen Barry disclosed that Charles was actually “more concerned” than Diana about the effects of press harassment on her. In earlier years Charles had been quite cordial to the press, but he had turned sharply against reporters when they began stalking his various girlfriends. “He used to say to me, ‘I wish the bloody press would leave [Diana] alone,’ ” according to Barry. At one point
in early December, Charles publicly attacked the British media’s “sensationalism” and lack of moral values. Encountering the pack at Sandringham, Charles blurted out, “I should like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy new year and your editors a particularly nasty one.”

  Diana claimed that she considered it inappropriate to complain to Charles about the press, so she remained silent. She added that she had asked him and the Buckingham Palace press office for help, but that they had rebuffed her: “They just said, ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Yet her employer at the time, Mary Robertson, related a different and more revealing story. In November 1980, Diana told Robertson that her grandmother Lady Fermoy “had suggested … that she seek help from Buckingham Palace in dealing with the press.” When Diana asked what she should do, Robertson gave her some advice that Diana unfortunately heeded—one of many examples of well-meaning but ill-informed guidance from people who didn’t grasp the extent of Diana’s problems. “I wouldn’t ask for help if I could possibly manage without it,” Robertson told her. “If the palace thinks you can’t handle the pressure now, they might think you couldn’t handle it once you’re part of the royal family. If you’re serious about this romance, you should try to struggle along on your own.”

  Much has been made of Diana’s anxiety about being photographed. Still, she seemed to know instinctively what to do in front of photographers, perhaps because she was more at ease than she let on. Growing up, she had loved posing for her father’s ubiquitous camera. “She would automatically sort of make gestures and strike poses,” her brother Charles recalled. “She was a natural performer.” Even as a child, he said, she had “star quality, the way she just reacted to the camera.”

  Felicity Clark, then the beauty editor of Vogue, knew both of Diana’s older sisters from their jobs at the magazine. When Diana was sixteen, Clark had heard that she was “really pretty” and tried to photograph her as one of the “young new faces” to watch. “Diana had been quite eager,” said Clark, but had been forced to cancel when she came down with appendicitis.

  When the stories began circulating about Diana and Charles in the fall of 1980, Clark asked again, and Diana agreed to be photographed by Lord Snowdon, the husband of Princess Margaret, for a feature in the February 1981 issue. Using what Clark described as “cloak-and-dagger” methods, Vogue arranged for Diana to be transported undetected to Snowdon’s studio for the shoot. Clark couldn’t help noticing that Diana was “strung up in general … terribly nervous because the press were all over her.” Despite Diana’s inexperience, Clark was also struck that she “wasn’t nervous about what she was doing with us.” Significantly, it was a controlled environment that soothed Diana’s anxieties, and the attention boosted her self-esteem. “She felt comfortable with Snowdon,” said Clark. “He knew what he was doing and he made it easy.”

  The low point in the courtship occurred on November 16 with the Sunday Mirror’s publication of a sensational page-one scoop headlined ROYAL LOVE TRAIN. The story claimed that Diana had twice met Prince Charles late at night earlier in the month on the royal train. The two reporters, Wensley Clarkson and Jim Newman, claimed that she had made a “100-mile dash” from London to Wiltshire in a “blue Renault car” and had been ushered through a police barricade. The following night, according to the Sunday Mirror, Diana had traveled to the “country home of the Prince’s close friend and confidante,” Camilla Parker Bowles, before “dashing once again to the same lonely siding.” The story was heavy with innuendo, noting that Diana “spent a number of hours in the carriage normally used by the Duke of Edinburgh” and “left in the early hours of the morning.”

  When the Sunday Mirror called Diana the night before publishing the story, she emphatically insisted it was untrue (a denial they did not even print), and in subsequent days she repeated her assertion that she had been at home with her roommates, all of whom backed her up. According to Whitaker, she said that she stayed in because “I was feeling frail and hungover” after the birthday party for Princess Margaret the night before. She told Roger Tavener of the Press Association wire service that she “had some supper and watched TV before going to bed early … I never moved out of the flat,” although she firmly denied “a newspaper story today that she had had a hangover from the party … ‘I never get hangovers.’ ” After issuing another denial to the Daily Mail, Diana seemed defeated: “The trouble is,” she said, “people do believe what they read.”

  Since Diana was not a member of the royal family, or even a fiancée, Buckingham Palace was not officially obliged to protect her. But the Queen and the Prince of Wales were incensed by the report and its implication of a sexual liaison. Instead of ignoring the story, as the tabloids expected her to do—and as she had previously done—the Queen countered with an unequivocal denial from her press secretary Michael Shea: “With the exception of the fact that the Prince of Wales … used the royal train on the two nights in question, any other suggestion made by you is a total fabrication … The only guests on board the train on either night were the Secretary of the Duchy of Cornwall, his successor and the local Duchy land steward.”

  The royal train story took a further bogus turn in James Whitaker’s 1993 book about the Wales marriage, which accepted that Diana had not been on the train. But even after firsthand denials that any woman had been present, Whitaker added his own new sensational twist by insisting that “a blond woman was hurried onto the train.… The woman on the train was Camilla Parker Bowles.”

  Part of Whitaker’s evidence was a telephone log from the royal train showing “that a call had been made to … the nearby home of the Parker Bowleses.” But Camilla’s husband, Andrew, told Ross Benson that Prince Charles “rang me from the train. The call was about hunting arrangements for the weekend. Nothing else.”

  Whitaker’s tale has also been contradicted by key people in a position to know the Prince’s whereabouts. “There was no foundation to it,” said Michael Colborne, then a close aide to the Prince of Wales. Charles’s valet Stephen Barry was equally emphatic when he said, “I myself was on the train with him, plus … two policemen.… There was no lady on his train, not Lady Diana nor anyone else.”

  Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the royal train story became part of the mythology surrounding Diana, with some believers contending that Diana had been present, while others insisted it was Camilla. Diana later traced her mistrust of Camilla to this period, although she didn’t specifically cite the royal train story. Diana recalled feeling “there was somebody else around” when Camilla seemed so well informed about the course of Charles’s new romance.

  Those close to Diana could see that the media coverage was taking a toll on her. Frances Shand Kydd was sufficiently alarmed to write a letter to The Times early that December denouncing the “inexcusable” lies printed about Diana (although she rather strangely sanctioned “fanciful speculation … in good taste”). Did the Fleet Street editors, she asked, “consider it necessary or fair to harass [her] daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way?” A month later, Diana’s father made his own plea: “Things have been getting very overwrought for her,” he told reporters who followed her to his estate. “Let her have some peace and quiet.”

  On her own, Diana tried to defend herself by selectively enlisting the help of the hacks. In the same month the train story appeared, Roger Tavener of the Press Association caught up with her at the Young England Kindergarten. His subsequent dispatch made headlines when he quoted her as saying, “I’d like to marry soon.… I don’t think nineteen is too young. It depends on the person.” Panicked by her evident indiscretion, Diana angrily disavowed the quote. According to a report in the Daily Express, “Lady Diana Spencer last night asked the Express to ‘help set the record straight.… I didn’t say any of this. I never said anything about marriage.’… Her blue eyes blazed as she read through the agency account.… ‘We on
ly spoke about two minutes. I hardly said a word.’ ” After checking Tavener’s notes, David Chipp, editor in chief of the Press Association, affirmed the accuracy of the story. But by striking back quickly, Diana had succeeded in blunting the interview’s effect.

  Diana’s family knew that she had “difficulty telling the truth,” as her brother once said. Early in their relationship the tabloid reporters began to suspect this tendency as well. Although for public consumption James Whitaker wrote that Diana “never lied to me,” he believed otherwise. “The whole thing was enormously complicated,” said Whitaker. “She was not straightforward at all. She was very tricky.”

  Despite the mutual suspicion, Diana and the hacks kept up cordial relations. They could see that Diana was infatuated with the Prince of Wales, so they redoubled their campaign on her behalf. The reporters promoted and protected her, declining to print comments that might damage her cause and even offering advice on what she should and should not say. Said Whitaker, “Diana was very aware that if she was going to progress with Prince Charles she needed the press on her side … saying how wonderful she was and what a dope he would be if he wouldn’t marry her.”

  Sometimes their efforts backfired, as when Whitaker quoted her uncle Lord Fermoy as saying, “I can assure you, [Diana] has never had a lover,” an intrusion into Diana’s privacy that Whitaker afterward admitted “horrified” her. Two weeks later, however, Diana fell into the same undignified trap, telling the Daily Mail that she didn’t have “a background of leaping in and out of bed with people” that “everybody else seems to have.”