Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Even in little ways, Diana had trouble relating to the royals. “You cannot judge them by our standards,” explained a friend of Diana’s whose family served the royal family. “They live on another planet. Things that we get excited about, the royals just wouldn’t … because they don’t even notice. They are oblivious.” They are also notoriously tightfisted, while Diana tended to be extravagantly generous. She later told friends about being nonplussed during her first royal Christmas that the family took pride in giving each other inexpensive gifts, making hers seem inappropriately lavish by comparison. Although Ruth Fermoy had warned her granddaughter that the royal family’s sense of humor was “different,” Diana later said she was nevertheless put off by what she called their “silly” inside jokes. Paradoxically, in a December 1981 letter from Sandringham, Diana praised the family’s “generosity” and seemed to enjoy the royal sensibility, noting, “Even though thirty of us were here, it was all laughter.”

  Diana treated the Queen with respect, but privately betrayed a tinge of animosity. After the engagement, Diana felt the Queen viewed her as a threat, for reasons Diana couldn’t quite explain. Diana’s hostility could be petty; when the family gathered for drinks, Diana was irked that Charles correctly deferred to his mother and grandmother by serving them first. “Fine, no problem,” Diana grumped. “I always thought it was the wife first—stupid thought!” Nor could Diana abide the Queen’s adoration of her dogs, a prevailing royal preoccupation. “The Queen is always surrounded by corgis,” she once said, “so you get the feeling you are standing on a moving carpet.”

  Despite her reedy voice and matronly looks, the Queen has a powerful mystique. By a simple turn of her head she can cut off a conversation, and her rigid self-control commands attention. “It is hard to be natural with the Queen, because she is very frightening,” said a friend of the Queen Mother. “The truth is, she is frightened of us, too.” The Queen’s fear—shyness, really—creates an unsettled atmosphere in which people often feel ill at ease. “The Queen is not a demonstrative person,” said a former courtier. “She is not ‘touchy-feely.’ But she is kind and warm. She is very shy by nature and has mastered that.” Diana would later resent Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, for her easy rapport with their mutual mother-in-law; Fergie was more of an extrovert than Diana, which appealed to the Queen.

  Clever and noncommittal, the Queen gave away very little in dealing with her family. She was fundamentally sympathetic, but she had no tolerance for self-indulgent whining. “The Queen is the opposite of Diana,” said a former courtier. “She is the least self-obsessed person you have ever met. She doesn’t think it is interesting to talk about herself, and she is not interested in other people’s efforts to talk about themselves.” She could register disapproval with a stern glance, but otherwise, it was not in her nature to confront problems. “Regardless of how rude Princess Margaret is to [the Queen], she never says anything,” said a longtime friend of the royal family. “That is her policy. She never says anything to her children. She is a very decent person, but she won’t intervene with anyone.”

  Diana considered herself the outsider, and made little effort to ingratiate herself with the royal family. She showed her emotions and flouted royal protocol with her informality, causing comment among the courtiers from almost the first day. In a sense, she was laying down her terms and conditions, assuming she would prevail. “Diana was raised without a mother,” explained one of her friends, “and I don’t think she understood the idea of duty toward a husband’s family and toward a husband.”

  “Her willfulness was a direct result of her insecurity,” said aide Michael Colborne. Royal houseparties intimidated her, just as gatherings of people outside her circle had unnerved her, growing up. “Suddenly people were hanging on her every word,” recalled her friend Rosa Monckton, to whom Diana confessed, “Only I had none.” She couldn’t bear that the Balmoral guests just “stared at [her] the whole time, treated [her] like glass.” Fearful of being judged inadequate, Diana would sometimes leave meals abruptly, or not appear at all. She later explained her behavior by saying she regarded the regimentation of royal life old-fashioned and boring, claiming it made her feel claustrophobic. She said she loved Scotland but hated the stressful atmosphere at Balmoral because she constantly detected “undercurrents” of “all their moods,” and the family depleted her strength.

  Diana may have been daunted by the royal family, but in a curious way she also felt superior to them, which stoked her defiance. She had what historian Paul Johnson called “the toughness of Whig women.” Explained Andrew Roberts, another historian, “Because her family looks down on the royal family, she thought of them wrongly as German parvenus.”

  When Diana began behaving erratically, members of the royal family chose not to notice in the hope that the problem would disappear. “They are a very matter-of-fact family,” said a friend of the Queen. “They would find it difficult to understand a difficult girl who was very young and having a hard time learning to cope. But someone should have done something.” As Jonathan Dimbleby explained it, “[The family] had witnessed symptoms of the princess’s distress, but not wishing to interfere, they had become accustomed to averting their gaze.” The royals even have a name for their ability to ignore the unpleasant: “ostriching.” “Maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful,” Diana said. “Obviously this was daunting, because if you’ve never seen it before, how do you support it?”

  But their failure to acknowledge her pain, much less to sympathize with and comfort her, made Diana feel more isolated and wounded than ever. Her reaction summoned up all her memories of rejection: “She told me, ‘I am unwanted. I was born and they wanted a boy. I married Charles and I was unwanted, then the royal family didn’t want me,’ ” said her friend Elsa Bowker. Quite understandably, Diana felt the royal family had cast her adrift emotionally, as she had been in childhood by her parents’ divorce.

  In October 1981, after many days of rain, Diana was “about to cut my wrists,” as she put it, when Charles finally persuaded her to go to London for professional help—a significant step, given his family’s discomfort with mental illness. But Diana could be neither diagnosed nor treated properly because she refused to admit her bulimia, an essential symptom along with her mood swings and spells of depression. Diana saw “all the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of,” but she was a mistrustful patient, unwilling to concede that she was seriously ill.

  Instead of prescribing an antidepressant, the doctors gave her the tranquilizer Valium, which she rejected, believing that they only wanted to remove her as a problem by sedating her. In recalling these first encounters with psychiatrists, Diana revealed her rage, resentment, and denial: She spoke in the third person, as if about someone else. “The Diana that was still very much there had decided it was just time, patience, and adapting were all that were needed,” she said. She believed she was only given pills so the doctors could rest easily, knowing that “the Princess of Wales wasn’t going to stab anyone.”

  Diana returned to Balmoral no better than before, and even more wary. “She was brought down to London and seen, but she resisted it because she was frightened,” said Michael Colborne, who believed she was more gravely afflicted than anyone realized. “You get fed up with people giving you advice, and you do what you want to do and then find you can’t. She knew she had problems but she wasn’t willing to take help.”

  Just at that moment, amid all the turmoil, Diana learned that she was one month pregnant, which she considered a “godsend” because it “occupied [her] mind.” According to a friend of Charles, the pregnancy relieved him as well, because he thought it would stabilize and focus Diana, and assure her that the marriage had a future. On the other hand, a quick pregnancy robbed the couple of more time to settle down together, and imposed yet another role on an immature woman struggling to come to terms with herself.

  At the e
nd of October, Diana and Charles went to Wales for their first official visit, three days in cold, rainy weather—a punishing schedule of seven stops the first day, eight on the second, and eight more on the third. Despite Diana’s pregnancy and her delicate mental state, the trip proceeded according to plan. Diana performed superbly, facing overwhelming crowds, shaking hands indefatigably, even delivering brief remarks—three sentences in English and one in Welsh. Neither Charles nor Diana had seen anything like the turnout in Wales, and it unnerved them both. Charles smiled proudly as she went through her paces, but for the first time an unsettling dynamic became clear. “We want Diana,” the people chanted whenever the Princess was on the other side of the road. “You will have to make do with me, I’m afraid,” Charles said. “Poor Charles,” noted Douglas Keay, who covered the royal beat. “Not a single photographer was taking his picture, he who had known all his life what it was like to be the focus of everyone’s attention.”

  Behind the scenes, Diana was a wreck, “sick as a parrot” with bulimia, convinced that she was doing everything wrong. Between engagements she wept in the car, terrified of facing the crowds again. Charles encouraged her to “get out and do it,” so she did, drawing on her ability to put on a face despite how awful she felt. Later, she expressed her bitterness that she “never got any praise” from Charles—although Charles commended her publicly at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in London: “The response of the people in Wales during our visit there was entirely due to the effect my dear wife has on everybody.”

  She was also aggrieved that no one in the royal family gave her credit for doing well. If the Queen offered approval at all, it was usually by way of an aside or a chance observation. “Diana couldn’t understand why nobody said, ‘Well done,’ ” recalled a former Palace aide. “The reason is that they all do their duty, and they wonder what is so unique. It’s a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. At the time, she said she never got any praise, but it isn’t in their nature. This amazed Diana, who needed it more than most.”

  Diana feared making any public appearances on her own, to the extent that the mere thought gave her tremors. She did one solo engagement—switching on the Christmas lights on Regent Street in London, which required a three-sentence greeting. “I was shit-scared,” she said later. Otherwise, she stayed by Charles’s side when she ventured out.

  Shortly after their return from Wales, they attended the opening of the “Splendours of the Gonzagas” exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The director of the museum, Roy Strong, was seated next to Diana and had been specifically asked by Edward Adeane to look after her. To Strong, Diana seemed nervous. She was “like a young colt, immensely well-meaning, unformed.” Charles seemed, by contrast, “assured and mature … with a wonderful sense of humor and great warmth of personality (which she [had], too).” Significantly, Strong observed, “I did not think that he looked after her enough.”

  Instead of calming her down, Diana’s pregnancy made her even more volatile. Her bulimia continued, complicated now by severe morning sickness. In the first two weeks of November, she had to bow out of four official engagements, once because Prince Charles insisted she stay in bed. She lost her appetite and had even greater difficulty sleeping. “People tried to put me on pills to stop me from being sick,” she said. “I refused. So sick sick sick sick.”

  At formal dinners with the royal family she had to excuse herself periodically. “I either fainted or was sick,” she recalled, feeling like an outcast for having morning sickness in a family unfamiliar with such an ailment: In fact, the highest value was placed on one’s ability to leave a sickbed to attend an official engagement. She believed they saw her only as a “problem” and a “nuisance,” yet she recalled resisting any suggestion to retire to her room and lie down when she was ailing. “I felt it was my duty to sit at the table,” she said. “Duty was all over the shop.” Her dilemma was complicated by what she described as Charles’s unwillingness to advise her.

  “In some ways she was crying out for someone to say, ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ ” said a former Palace aide. “You come up against doctors who leave it to you to do what you feel up to. But in her position she was longing, in hindsight. If someone could have told the doctors to say ‘[you] mustn’t do that,’ she could have stopped doing things, with a clear mind. The awful thing was she came from a family where her father raised her not to let people down, and she married into a family where duty was even more important, where you never canceled anything, and they didn’t comprehend the idea that people do feel unwell.”

  The press, meanwhile, was operating on a parallel track, keeping the fairy-tale drama rattling along. The only brief exchange between the royal couple and the tabloid hacks occurred on the fourth day of the honeymoon at Balmoral, when they posed for pictures and took brief questions. The Daily Express, in the first of many similar pronouncements over the years, said Diana “showed a confident new face to the world … gone were the shy smiles and the lowered head of prewedding days.” The couple had their arms around each other and Charles gallantly kissed her hand, but he seemed solemn and fidgety—perhaps because shortly before the arrival of the press Diana had suddenly refused to participate, then just as quickly changed her mind. When asked how she was enjoying married life, Diana smiled and said, “Highly recommend it,” but when someone shouted to Charles, “Have you cooked her breakfast yet?” Diana tersely replied, “I don’t eat breakfast,” while Charles said nothing.

  Less than three weeks later, the press picked up the scent of unhappiness, thanks to tipsters inside Balmoral. In the increasingly competitive arena of royal reporting fanned by the Murdoch papers, tabloids had begun paying for information, and disgruntled former and current staff members were willing to tattle for cash payments that could not be traced. Stuart Higgins, a former editor of The Sun, was unapologetic about the policy. “The Sun has often paid royal sources for stories,” he said. “There were people that were leaving, like butlers, or there were junior staff who knew little things.”

  James Whitaker initially dismissed the hints of marital trouble, writing in the Daily Star, “Diana has been laughing at recent suggestions that she is suffering from the strain of being Charles’s wife,” but the News of the World and The Sun persisted. Diana, said the News of the World, “goes for lonely walks or a paddle on the River Dee” in an effort to “get away from the stuffed-shirt atmosphere of formal royal functions.” The Sun went even further, reporting that Diana “has reached a personal crisis in her new lifestyle as a royal. She is known to be deeply unsettled.”

  The newspaper noticed that she had continued to lose weight, was finding it difficult to adapt to the royal routine, and was feeling the pressure to live up to “all that [was] expected of her.” Among the danger signs cited were her unwillingness to attend shooting parties, her premature departure from long evening meals, and Charles’s decision to take her off to Craigowan—all accurate indicators of her malaise.

  After the triumphant trip to Wales and the announcement of Diana’s pregnancy, however, any concerns raised during their stay at Balmoral drifted away—a pattern of press coverage that would persist throughout the marriage. The trip reinforced the image of a happy couple, and as long as Diana was performing well, the tabloids assumed that she was fine. Still, the Queen was evidently more aware of Diana’s mental fragility than she let on, because she authorized her press secretary, Michael Shea, to invite twenty-one editors from Fleet Street, along with representatives of radio and television, to a highly unusual meeting in Buckingham Palace that December—the first such gathering in twenty-five years.

  Shea spoke candidly about the concern felt by the Queen and the members of the royal family over invasions of Diana’s privacy. He said Diana was growing “despondent” that she could no longer go outside her front door without being snapped by the army of photographers staking out her homes. She was young and newly pregnant, and she was entitled to a private life. When Barry Askew, editor o
f News of the World, wondered if he was hinting that Diana was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Shea said he intended no such suggestion.

  The newspapers continued to cover the royal couple nonstop, but the photographers backed off, and a period of relative calm followed. Charles and Diana spent a quiet holiday at Windsor; he gave her a beautiful emerald-and-diamond ring, which, she noted in a letter at the time, “I spend most of my time looking at in a stupid gaze.” As Charles wrote to a friend, “We’ve had such a lovely Christmas—the two of us. It has been extraordinarily happy and cosy being able to share it together.”

  At the same time, the tabloids offered their own rhapsodic speculation about the couple. James Whitaker wrote in the Daily Star that while “Diana [had] felt desperate at times, trapped and very unhappy … now she is sophisticated and elegant. She has learned to turn herself on for the camera. When it suits her she ‘flirts’ with photographers,” though he unhelpfully observed that “she has learned to use makeup to hide her too-large nose.” The royal couple, reported Whitaker, “are very much in love.… It is the loving soft side of Diana and the romantic side of Prince Charles that brings the two of them the greatest pleasure. He is a man who goes in for flowers, light music … soft lights and extreme tenderness.… She gives him shirts and ties … He gives her chocolates, bath salts and bottles of scent…. I am told the prince regularly gives her flowers and leaves gifts for her under her pillow at nighttime.” This depiction of Charles is sharply at odds with Whitaker’s later judgment that the Prince had been unfeeling and cynical.

  The path of mental illness follows a jagged line, and Diana’s melancholy had not in fact lifted, despite the hopeful signs at Christmas. As she went out to events with Charles, she seemed at times to enjoy the enthusiasm that invariably greeted her, yet at other moments she appeared bewildered. Sometimes she would refuse even to appear before reporters and photographers, confounding her staff.