Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Camilla was at the ball that Monday night with her husband, Andrew, who later denied to Nigel Dempster that his wife had stayed at Buckingham Palace. What’s more, Diana and Charles left the ball together, and she slept in her apartment at the Palace as usual, not Clarence House. The following night, her wedding eve, Diana did move to the Queen Mother’s residence, and after the evening’s fireworks celebration, Charles stayed up late to talk with Susan Hussey. As he looked out the windows of Buckingham Palace, Charles was “in a contemplative mood,” according to Dimbleby. He was “not at all elated, but aware that a momentous day was upon him,” and he was “clear about his duty and filled with concern for his bride at the test she was to face.” When Charles was back in his room, he watched the people gathered on the steps of the Victoria Memorial, singing “Rule Britannia.” “It really was remarkable,” he recalled in a 1985 television interview. “I found myself standing in the window with tears pouring down my face.”

  Like the royal train fabrication, the prewedding assignation story leached into the mythology of the Prince and Princess, and Diana tormented herself by taking it to heart. As early as March 1986, when Diana first consulted astrologer Penny Thornton, she recounted a variation of the story, saying that not only had Charles “spent the night before the wedding with this woman,” but that he had told Diana, the same day, “categorically that he did not love her”—an assertion Diana would later disavow.

  Diana was distraught the night before her marriage, although she hid her worries from Jane, who stayed with her at Clarence House. She had a severe bulimic attack, eating “everything I could possibly find, which amused my sister.” Neither Jane nor anyone else could begin to grasp Diana’s problem. “It was very hush-hush,” Diana recalled. “I was sick as a parrot that night.”

  Her wedding day was no less emotional. Diana’s later description was typically equivocal, one moment expressing happiness at the adoration of the crowds, the next saying, “I don’t think I was happy.” She described her “deathly calm” and sense of dread as a “lamb to the slaughter,” yet said she was “so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.” She remembered that she had concentrated on guiding her father—unsteady from the damage done by his stroke—up the aisle, but she also said she had been searching for Camilla. When Diana finally found her, she saw a “pale gray, veiled pillbox hat, saw it all, her son Tom standing on a chair. To this day … vivid memory.” It was her only sighting of Camilla that day, because at Diana’s request, Camilla and Kanga Tryon had been excluded from the guest list for the “wedding breakfast” (really a luncheon) following the ceremony.

  Years later, when asked about the worst moment of her life, Diana made a chilling comment about her wedding day: “The day I walked down the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral, I felt that my personality was taken away from me, and I was taken over by the royal machine.” At a time when she might have experienced love, happiness, and exultation at her position in the world, she could only recall feeling utterly defenseless.

  To family and friends, as well as to the press and the public, Diana projected an impressive serenity. Charles Spencer remarked that she was “very composed … happy and calm.” Frances, who told her children after the ceremony, “Now we can go back to normal life,” also observed that her daughter seemed “incredibly calm and unfazed by it all. I really don’t think she suffered any nerves.” But sharper eyes might have spotted a manic edge to her behavior. After the wedding breakfast, the photographs, and the appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony before thousands of well-wishers, Diana paused on the platform of the Waterloo train station and impulsively kissed Sir “Johnnie” Johnston, comptroller to the Queen, and Lord MacLean, the Lord Chamberlain, the two senior officials who had organized the wedding. It was a distinctly unroyal gesture that, for all its poignant sweetness, summed up in an instant the unpredictability that would increasingly define Diana.

  Chapter 9

  Charles and Diana spent a long stretch of time together at the beginning of their marriage—a two-week Mediterranean cruise on the royal yacht Britannia, followed by two-and-a-half months at secluded Balmoral, Charles’s favorite retreat. It seemed an ideal plan. Without the interruptions of Charles’s duties or the intrusions of the press, they could build their relationship and develop the shared values and interests that sustain a happy marriage over the years.

  By all outward appearances, the cruise was a great success. As Diana wrote to her former nanny Mary Clarke, “I adore being married and having someone to devote my time to.” When they boarded in Gibraltar, the newlyweds stood on the aft deck and waved to the cheering crowd, Charles holding Diana tightly. Lady Hassan, wife of Gibraltar’s chief minister, was touched that Diana was so overcome by emotion “she was almost in tears.” The only other public glimpse was in Egypt, where Charles and Diana disembarked, smiling and waving, to dine with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his wife—after which Diana unexpectedly kissed each of them good-bye.

  Charles’s valet Stephen Barry, one of four private staff aboard, gave an eyewitness account of the couple’s days together that conjured tranquillity and harmony. They “spent most of their evenings alone on the royal deck,” he reported, “and we never knew at what time they went to bed.” Charles and Diana often had “intimate” meals together in their sitting room and watched videos after dinner, including tapes of their wedding. Many days they went off to deserted beaches for picnics, swimming, and sunbathing. The crew of more than 200 men, noted Barry, at all times tried “to keep a discreet distance.” While Charles rarely left his deck, Diana frequently roamed around, giggling and chatting with the sailors and snapping photographs. She joined in sing-alongs with the crew and once even played “Greensleeves” on the piano for the delighted men.

  For reasons no member of the Britannia crew could possibly have fathomed, Diana was actually in a bad way. When she and Charles were alone together, she would suddenly flip into different moods, from extreme anguish to extreme anger. Diana’s sporadic depression turned chronic, and, unknown even to Charles, her bulimia became “appalling,” as she later described it, “rife, four times a day on the yacht.” Ironically, Diana fell apart when she was under minimal external pressure; the hacks couldn’t reach the royal couple, and she scarcely had to appear in front of crowds. (Diana later said she hated the strain of having to entertain the ship’s officers at dinner.) But the sharp contrast between her public and private selves that had emerged during the engagement now settled into a disturbing pattern.

  Charles found it difficult to know what would set Diana off. With almost touching obliviousness, he had brought a stack of books for his enjoyment and Diana’s edification during the honeymoon: works by Laurens van der Post, an elderly mystical philosopher who had become a guru to Charles, and by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, another of Charles’s favorites. Charles assumed that, as with his sporting pursuits, Diana would enjoy sharing the books that he loved. On the second night, Charles produced his books, to the dismay of Diana, who called it the “worst moment” of the honeymoon. By her account, his Pygmalion-style effort “slashed” her “tremendous hope” (for happiness, presumably) and created a “grim” atmosphere. According to Diana, Charles insisted on discussing his latest reading with her every day at lunch. Later, at Balmoral, Charles would read aloud from van der Post and Jung. But reading aloud from treatises on spiritualism and psychology was far removed from Diana’s own marital reverie: “the idealized bride, cooking suppers and darning socks for her husband.”

  Charles was no intellectual, but he had developed a searching intelligence. He earnestly probed spiritual puzzles, dabbled in psychology, and enjoyed debating theories of environmental and social policy. He was fundamentally serious-minded, while Diana had superficial interests and no inclination to explore weighty topics. She also had an inferiority complex about her intelligence, and was easily cowed by bright people. “When y
ou began on abstract ideas,” recalled Archbishop Robert Runcie, “you could see her eyes clouding over, her eyelids become heavy.” But Runcie also grasped how to draw Diana out, an insight that eluded Charles and his family: “It was a matter of encouraging her through talk about people, about personalities, and she was very receptive to that.”

  Still, even the gap in their intellects might have mattered little if Diana or Charles had been able to nourish the other. Both of them wanted the marriage to succeed—Diana to avoid going through a traumatic divorce, and Charles to fulfill his duty. “Marriage is something you ought to work at,” Charles had said several years earlier. “I intend to work at it when I get married.” Yet neither had the temperament to accommodate the other’s needs. “She didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand her,” said Michael Colborne. What’s more, Diana and Charles were far more interested in being understood than trying to understand.

  Since his school days, Charles had savored solitude and privacy. He required a measure of tranquillity in his life that Diana couldn’t comprehend. Diana had tried joining him in salmon-fishing at Balmoral, but was too impatient to endure standing for hours in a chilly river. Nor did she retain the tolerance she had shown during their courtship for sitting silently during his extended periods of quiet contemplation. On their honeymoon, Charles was perfectly content to stay in his cabin writing long letters or curled up with one of his books, reading. “Diana dashes about chatting up all the sailors and the cooks in the galley, etc., while I remain hermitlike on the verandah deck, sunk with pure joy into one of Laurens van der Post’s books,” he wrote to one friend, unwittingly emphasizing the gulf between them.

  Diana wanted Charles’s undivided attention, and misread his preoccupation as rejection. Such fears reflect a common anxiety, but only the most deeply disturbed would act out their worries the way Diana did: “Anything I could find I would gobble up and be sick two minutes later.… That slightly got the mood swings going in the sense that one minute one would be happy, the next blubbing one’s eyes out. I remember crying my eyes out on our honeymoon.” Charles remained mystified by Diana’s mercurial moods, but he blamed postwedding nerves and assumed her misery would recede.

  More than ever, Camilla was the focal point of Diana’s angst. Diana recalled being undone twice by jealousy of her rival during the cruise. The first time, she said, two pictures of Camilla fell out of Charles’s calendar; the second time, Diana spotted him wearing cuff links with entwined C’s. When Diana asked if Camilla had given him the cuff links, Charles admitted that she had, but only out of friendship. Charles’s honesty once again fueled Diana’s outrage, provoking another fight.

  Diana’s emotions intensified when they arrived at Balmoral in late August and she confronted the everyday reality of a married royal. “This was going to be her life,” said Colborne, “spending wet days shooting, and she hated it.” She had persistent nightmares about Camilla, and found herself “obsessed by Camilla totally. Didn’t trust him, thought every five minutes he was ringing her up, asking how to handle his marriage.” Charles confided to friends that Diana had a fixation on Camilla that he couldn’t dislodge. Despite Charles’s repeated assurances that he had closed the book with Camilla before the wedding, Diana refused to accept his word, telling him, according to Dimbleby, that she was “convinced that [he] was still deceiving her.… She more than once exploded into a tirade of anger from which he retreated in bewilderment and despondency.” At the same time, Diana felt bereft when Charles went off to fish by himself, or to stalk deer with friends. However much he infuriated her, she couldn’t bear to see him leave.

  Diana kept her bulimia hidden, but her weight continued to drop. Since February she had lost 28 pounds, and she now weighed slightly more than 110 pounds—alarmingly low for her five foot ten frame. “Everybody saw I was getting thinner and thinner, and I was being sicker and sicker,” Diana recalled. She slept poorly and wept for hours—sitting in a chair, with her head on her knees. “She would almost cry privately in front of you,” said a friend who witnessed her bouts of weeping in later years. “You couldn’t help her. She would be wrapped up in herself. Nobody spoke to her or touched her because they knew they could not.” At one point in the fall of 1981, Michael Colborne tried for an entire day to console Diana as she alternated between tears and silence, her head buried in her hands.

  One problem in offering Diana help was her combination of fragility and defensiveness. She wanted to be soothed, yet invariably rejected efforts to comfort her—especially when they came from Charles. Her silences, which often signaled reproach, were especially difficult to read, as they arose from Diana’s inability to articulate what was troubling her.

  Largely because Diana’s behavior was so unpredictable, Charles’s responses were inconsistent, even counterproductive. “He was totally unaware that people suffered as his wife was suffering,” said Michael Colborne. “He was totally unable to cope.” Charles found it easier to deal with her mute sulks than with her tears. When she wept, he would knead his hands in frustration and say, “What is it now, Diana? What have I said now to make you cry?” Whether she was angry or tearful, he usually temporized—capitulating to her demands, beseeching her to cheer up, staying by her side for long stretches to offer consoling words that she frequently ignored even as she insisted he remain. Other times he withdrew in exasperation, reinforcing her abandonment fears. Diana would then react either by retreating or by lashing out yet again. If Charles seemed unflappable, she would become even angrier.

  As Diana challenged Charles’s devotion, she tested her own limits as well. Occasionally Charles rebuked her, but neither he nor anyone around him called Diana to account for her behavior. Urging her to pull herself together was as ineffective as efforts to coax her out of her unhappiness.

  Charles’s fondness for Diana had not evolved into deeper feelings as he had hoped. He was protective of her and genuinely sorry for her, but when he felt suffocated by her possessiveness, he tended to pull away. The more he withdrew, the more she tried to bring him back with her demands and entreaties, which pushed him further away. Charles couldn’t tell her what she needed to hear—that he loved her unconditionally—so he compensated by yielding to her wishes. Diana was astute enough to know he was humoring her, so she resorted to even more extreme behavior to get Charles’s attention.

  When he felt he couldn’t manage Diana, Charles sought help from others. He invited Laurens van der Post to Balmoral to offer his counsel, but Diana couldn’t connect with the philosopher and felt he misunderstood her. Charles arranged for Diana’s old roommates Virginia Pitman and Carolyn Bartholomew to visit, hoping they would distract and entertain Diana. At one point Charles even took Diana to a more remote Balmoral location, a lodge called Craigowan, so they could be alone, and she momentarily brightened. Observed Stephen Barry, “The princess was happier at Craigowan, as she was out of the royal system and could run the house.”

  The royal family and their employees couldn’t avoid witnessing Diana’s distress as she grew more vocally defiant. “I heard of Diana’s moods early,” recalled a relative of the royal family. “She suddenly refused to come to dinner. The Queen asked Charles to persuade her, and he returned red-faced and said he could not. I was fascinated. I could not imagine doing that. It did happen, and everyone was vastly embarrassed.” Yet, the relative continued, “[The royals] didn’t see her as ill. Mental illness they do not understand.”

  It is difficult to imagine life inside the royal family. While the rest of England views the world as a social hierarchy, the royals divide the world into “us” and “everyone else,” making no essential distinction between the Duke of Devonshire and the local grocer. They also firmly adhere to their own rules. Duty always prevails, everyone defers to the Queen, emotions are kept private, and personal matters are not discussed. The royals have an ingrained sense of entitlement; when offered a concert ticket purchased by a friend, for example, a member of the royal family wouldn
’t think of paying for it. “The royals are spoiled, but not by the common definition,” said Mark Lloyd, a London entrepreneur with friends in the royal family. “They are spoiled by deference. They go through life being ‘yessed’ to. A royal makes a vague joke, and everyone roars. Then when people disagree with a royal, he finds it intolerable.”

  In her last interview before she died, Diana said, “From the day I joined that family, nothing could be done naturally.” Yet the royal family regards its habits and customs as routine: They know no other way. For much of the year, they follow their own schedules. The Queen and her husband could easily breakfast together, only to discover later on the staircase that they were about to visit the same part of London. But at certain times—August, September, and October at Balmoral, December and January at Sandringham, and June at Windsor, they gather as a clan and share the timeless rituals of sporting pursuits, barbecues, teas, concerts, picnics, cocktail hours, and large formal dinners.

  General conversation tends to be quotidian and bland; if anyone brings up a personal dilemma or disagreeable topic at dinner, the response is usually silence. “It’s a strange family, the royal family,” Robert Runcie told his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, “because conversations aren’t followed up. I think it’s also that survival is the overarching priority, and you have to prove yourself as a safe person with whom to be a friend, not a man who enjoys boasting about his position with them.”