Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana seemed to take in these instructions while actually feeling overwhelmed and resentful, an attitude that grew out of her insecurity, her determination to stick to her old habits and patterns, and her reflexive mistrust of those around her. The courtiers and members of the royal family were tentative in their dealings with her. “I don’t think any of them really helped her,” said Michael Colborne, who was an aide to Prince Charles at the time. “They didn’t resent her, but they were apprehensive about her. Was she going to be molded?” The courtiers may have thought they were doing the right thing, but they misunderstood the profound challenges posed by a vulnerable young woman.

  The courtiers assigned to Diana were of the highest caliber—a signal that the Queen wanted her to be thoroughly tutored. Susan Hussey, who had been close to Charles since his boyhood, was a trusted lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Hussey was intelligent and experienced, with a strong personality and a no-nonsense view of life. Because of her long-standing affection for Charles and the Queen, whom she had served since 1960, Hussey took her assignment seriously. She offered Diana advice on protocol and other aspects of royal life. “I know from talking to her at length that she helped Diana,” said a former Palace aide.

  At the time, Diana seemed to regard Hussey as an elder sister—or at least, she wrote her letters to that effect—but she later claimed to have felt quite differently. “She thought Susan Hussey was slightly in love with Charles,” said one of Diana’s close friends. “Diana felt Susan loathed her from the moment she walked in.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that Susan Hussey’s friendship with Charles would create a wedge—as Michael Colborne said, she was “two hundred percent behind the Prince of Wales”—and that her powerful personality would intimidate Diana. “She wasn’t sympathetic, and she would not tolerate anything that didn’t conform to royal behavior,” said a friend of the Queen Mother’s.

  Another high-ranking courtier tapped to assist Diana was Edward Adeane, a punctilious bachelor nine years older than Prince Charles who had been his private secretary since 1979. Like the Spencers, the Adeane family had served the royal family over the years; Edward’s father, Sir Michael, had worked as the Queen’s private secretary. Known for his serious intellect and rigid personality, Edward Adeane was an austere figure whose temperament was less than ideal to tutor a skittish nineteen-year-old. Although Diana later said she admired and got along with him, she made it known at the time that she considered him too formal for her taste.

  Diana fared somewhat better with Francis Cornish, Adeane’s thirty-nine-year-old assistant, and Oliver Everett, another Buckingham Palace veteran summoned by Charles from a diplomatic post in Spain to be Diana’s first private secretary. Both men were veterans of the foreign service. They instructed Diana on the public requirements of her role; Everett in particular made himself available to listen to her concerns and brief her about events she would attend and people she would meet. “Before the wedding, Oliver was very supportive to her,” said a fellow Palace aide.

  Yet Diana felt vaguely uncomfortable with all of them—at times, with good reason, because they couldn’t help being patronizing. To Diana, they seemed stuffy and reserved, with the exception of Michael Colborne, Charles’s personal secretary who handled his financial accounts and helped organize his private life. After serving with Colborne in the navy, Charles had hired him as an aide in 1975. “I was not the usual type of person to do that job,” Colborne said. “I was the first graduate of grammar school [the English equivalent of an American public school]. I was known as a rough diamond, and I was.”

  Twenty-five years her senior, Colborne was a soothing presence for Diana. “I was Uncle Michael to her,” he recalled. She shared an office with Colborne, and she spent many hours unburdening her apprehensions to him. “She was very unnerved by it all,” Colborne recalled. “At one point she said, ‘Do you think I’ll change?’ I said ‘You will change in five years. You will be a b-i-t-c-h because you won’t be able to help it. You will expect people to wait on you.’ ”

  At first, Diana was completely intimidated by the Queen. When Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sat between Diana and her future mother-in-law at a meeting on the eve of the engagement announcement, he could see that “Diana was terrified of her.” In her own fashion, the Queen tried to help Diana relax. “I hope to see her every now and then,” the Queen wrote to a friend, “but I hope she will feel free to come and go as she pleases.” Unfortunately, Diana was too intimidated to walk unbidden through the Queen’s open door.

  Along the way, Diana’s new family did give her some tips on royal behavior, such as the “royal wave”—cupping the right hand and swiveling it from side to side, “like screwing a lightbulb, it was all in the wrist,” observed Diana’s future sister-in-law Sarah Ferguson after her first try—and the art of the curtsy. The Queen Mother offered advice on instructing staff and remembering faces in a crowd. She also showed Diana how she would pause during official visits to ask for the date before signing a visitor’s book; as she lifted her head to inquire, she gave photographers a good picture. The Queen and Prince Philip demonstrated, by example, their techniques for interacting with the public. The Queen was diligent about memorizing names and places, and Prince Philip was known for making people feel important by asking them what they did, then repeating back to them what they had just said. (“Ah, you’re the baker, are you?”)

  Their approach was hardly systematic, however. The royals avoided involvement in one another’s lives, and they assumed that newcomers would work things out on their own. Since their duties were second-nature, they expected Diana to take the initiative and adapt. “You don’t get training to be Princess of Wales,” said the Queen’s press secretary Michael Shea. “There was never any question of that. It’s a matter of making information available if she wants it. Being Princess of Wales is an education in itself.”

  All the experts and briefing papers and instructions only disoriented Diana: “I was terrified, really. Everything was all over the place,” she later said. Diana considered it unfair that she had to conform to strict royal rules. “The royal family are not like us,” said a friend of the Queen who knew Diana well. “They cannot be, bless their hearts. It is difficult to find yourself in that world and have your wings clipped.” When Diana attended royal receptions and garden parties, she could no longer simply enjoy herself; she had to charm and converse with hundreds of people while enduring the piercing gaze of the tabloid press. “For Diana, royal life was like a movie,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She thought royalty was one thing when she was growing up. Then she opened the back door of royalty and couldn’t cope with it.”

  Instead of protecting her, the palace walls became a formidable barrier, preventing her from leading her old life and blocking spontaneous visits by her roommates and school friends. “It was as though she had been whisked off to an ivory tower … never to be seen again,” said her friend Carolyn Bartholomew. It wasn’t quite that bad, because Diana did entertain them from time to time at small lunches in her sitting room, usually along with her mother and her sister Jane. But all visitors had to arrive through the front gates and cross the vast expanse of the forecourt, in full view of gawking tourists, to an entrance guarded by a footman. It was an intimidating experience for Diana’s young friends, so they didn’t come as often as they might have. “I missed my girls so much,” Diana said. “I wanted to go back there and sit and giggle like we used to and borrow clothes and chat about silly things.” Perhaps most telling of all, she said she yearned to be “in my safe shell again.”

  Like the rest of his family, Prince Charles saw no particular need to coddle Diana, but he did make a sincere effort to give her pointers. He taught her to conserve energy during a public event by shaking hands with every fifteenth person in a crowd; to bite the inside of her lip to stifle inappropriate laughter; to toss out a general question (“Do you all come from around here?”) toward a group as a conversational
stimulus; and to use a pleasant smile to extricate herself from a tedious conversation.

  In many circumstances, Charles understood how to be thoughtful. According to Dimbleby, he was known for “the care with which he nurtured personal friendships and the compassion he revealed when … [his] staff found themselves in personal misfortune.” Yet Charles’s character had a strain of self-absorption that came with being royal. A natural introvert, he was set in his ways. “It would take a lot to pull him out,” said a longtime friend. Charles was obsessive about his work—overseeing his charities, meeting with government officials, making speeches—at least in part because he was constantly trying to prove himself and justify his role. On weekends he buried himself in paperwork when he wasn’t off hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing polo. “The Prince of Wales was always working at something,” said Charles’s aide Michael Colborne. “He was endlessly writing letters or painting.”

  Charles tended—literally—to run from one place to another, and he grew impatient with those who couldn’t keep his pace. “The trouble is,” he once told a friend, “I always feel that unless I rush about doing things and trying to help furiously, I will not (and the monarchy will not) be seen to be relevant and I will be considered a mere playboy!” He frequently phoned his staff when they were off-duty, expecting them to produce instant answers. If they failed to please him, he could be short-tempered, and he seldom complimented their successes. “He isn’t cynical,” said one of his friends, “but, like other royals, he is used to getting what he wants and having his own way.”

  Preoccupied by his schedule of official duties and customary activities, Charles seemed scarcely aware that Diana was beginning to unravel.“When you don’t read and are not interested in current affairs, you get lonely and upset,” said Michael Colborne. “She wasn’t educated. She was an empty vessel, a pretty empty vessel, but empty nevertheless.” Lacking even hobbies or sporting pursuits to divert her, Diana had to confront the sort of enforced solitude that she had striven since childhood to avoid. She was disoriented by Buckingham Palace, where everyone seemed distant and unwelcoming, and she felt hemmed in. Years later she told her friend Roberto Devorik that during these months she began having a recurring dream about Charles’s coronation: His crown fit perfectly on his head, but when a crown was placed on her head it was the wrong size, which she took as a sign that she would never be Queen.

  Diana fretted about Charles during his frequent absences, reminiscent of her persistent childhood worry when her father left for long stretches. She sometimes threw temper tantrums, became moody and unpredictable, and suffered bouts of depression. “She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started,” said her former roommate Carolyn Bartholomew. “She wasn’t happy. She was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her. She was dizzy with it, bombarded from all sides. It was a whirlwind and she was ashen, she was gray.” Although Diana had shown signs of depression in her childhood, she insisted that until her engagement, “I didn’t know about jealousy or depressions or anything like that.”

  Diana had enormous difficulty dealing with Charles’s inflexible devotion to duty, even in the face of her obvious anguish. When he had to leave for an engagement, “she didn’t like it all,” said Colborne. “She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t stay with her, why he couldn’t do what he wanted.” Diana even felt anxious when Colborne left her alone in the office. “Every time I went to lunch, she didn’t like it because it was the only time the phone didn’t [ring], and she didn’t like that,” said Colborne. Charles considered her objections unreasonable, and he tried, as his close advisers did, to explain his obligations.

  Just one month after the engagement announcement, Charles left for a five-week tour of Australia and New Zealand, followed by quick stops in Venezuela and the United States. It was, he confided to a friend, a “much regretted” trip that he undertook to fulfill long-promised commitments. Diana wept publicly when they parted at the airport, and Charles tried to reassure her by telephoning every day. The trip deepened Diana’s fears of abandonment and gave her far too much time alone to worry.

  Diana’s suspicions of those around her hardened during her fiancé’s absence. As she later said, “I was told one thing but actually another thing was going on. The lies and deceit.” In her insecurity, she focused on Charles’s former girlfriends and took to quizzing Michael Colborne and Francis Cornish about them. At the time, she seemed unduly worried about Dale “Kanga” Tryon, a vivacious Australian friend of Charles’s who had married Anthony Tryon, an English baron close to Charles. Diana actually banned Kanga during the engagement, prompting Kanga to complain to Stephen Barry, “I can’t understand why we’re never invited.” When Kanga turned up at Buckingham Palace for a royal event, Barry told Diana she was there. “Oh, is she?” Diana replied with a blank expression, “How nice.” Commented Barry, “[Diana] did not go and see her. She [was] still young enough to be slightly anxious that someone might interest him more than she [did].”

  Diana fixated even more fiercely on Camilla Parker Bowles. She told Colborne and Cornish that she had asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla and that he had given her an ambiguous answer. When she asked the two men how she should react, both declined to offer advice, in part because they couldn’t speak for Charles. In Diana’s imaginings, these well-meaning evasions became “lies and deceit.” She later claimed that Charles had responded to her inquiries by telling her that his former girlfriends were “safe” because they were married.

  Her instincts were correct to zero in on Camilla’s special relationship with Charles. Her tearful parting from Charles at the airport, she said, had “nothing to do with him going,” but was prompted by a call from Camilla the previous evening. The phone rang while Diana and Charles were talking in the library, and while there was nothing surreptitious, the idea of Camilla’s call on the eve of a journey undid Diana, who left the room to “be nice” and let them talk, although she later said “it broke my heart.”

  While Charles was away, Diana and Camilla had lunch at Camilla’s suggestion. Their time together was cordial, by Camilla’s reckoning, but Diana recalled an encounter filled with portents. Diana later concluded that Camilla—“very tricky indeed”—was trolling for information. The older woman particularly wanted to know if Diana planned to take up hunting. Because she had no plans to do so, Diana came to believe that Camilla had designated the hunting field as her “communication route” to Charles after he married.

  In his typically earnest, somewhat naive fashion, Charles came clean with Diana, telling her that Camilla had been “one of his most intimate friends,” but he assured her that with his engagement and marriage there would be no other woman in his life. He declined to go into “unnecessary detail,” assuming that Diana would take him at his word. This was a perfect moment for a secure and confident woman to thank him for his candor and reassure him that she trusted his love: Such sweet forgiveness would doubtless have inspired Charles’s respect. But Diana was neither secure nor confident, and Charles lacked the insight to realize that Diana would become even more paranoid about Camilla once she knew the truth of the relationship.

  Diana didn’t acknowledge Charles’s frankness, later saying that she had “worked it all out” about Charles and Camilla on her own, adding vaguely that she “found the proof of the pudding, and people were willing to talk to [her].” Diana went further when she confided to her friend Elsa Bowker in 1994 that “she didn’t know about Charles and Camilla until she broke open Charles’s desk and found love letters from Camilla.” According to Bowker, Diana said she made her discovery about six months after the wedding. When asked about Diana’s claim, Michael Colborne said he had not seen any evidence to indicate Diana had done such a thing.

  Diana’s friends often wondered why she didn’t simply seize on her advantages—her beauty, her youth, her natural charm—and concentrate on eradicating Camilla from Charles’s thoughts. But that st
rategy assumed a level of self-assurance absent in Diana. Instead, Diana alienated Charles by urging him to sell his new country home, Highgrove, because it was only eleven miles from Camilla’s house. In constant turmoil, Diana became obsessive, perhaps even delusional. She later said that Charles had sent Camilla “flowers when she had meningitis. ‘To Gladys from Fred.’ ” Michael Colborne wasn’t aware that Charles sent flowers with such a card, or that “Gladys” and “Fred” were nicknames used by Charles and Camilla. Diana’s account, he said, was “a bit muddled.”

  The severity of Diana’s torment and the violence of her emotions shocked Charles—who called them “her other side”—and he visibly worried about her. “Whenever the Prince came back from engagements, his first question was, ‘Is Lady Diana all right?’ ” recalled Stephen Barry. Charles saw that he was trapped in a mismatch, but he couldn’t call off the wedding without inflicting great damage on Diana. At that stage, he didn’t share his apprehensions with his family, or even with friends; only his aides witnessed Diana’s behavior. “I was used to temper with him,” said Michael Colborne. “But her mood swings were quite frightening in a nineteen-year-old. [They] came from total despair.”

  In her own recollection, Diana actually accused Charles of the volatility she experienced. “He was obsessed with me,” she said. “But it was hot and cold, hot and cold. You never knew what mood it was going to be, up and down, up and down.” Projecting one’s own unpleasant characteristics onto others is known in psychotherapy as a “primitive defense.” Its appearance in Diana showed how disturbed she had become.