Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Her celebrity simultaneously bolstered and bothered her, and she felt disconnected from the superstar she saw on television and in the newspapers each day. In her mind, she later said, “I was a fat, chubby, twenty-year-old, twenty-one-year-old, and I couldn’t understand the level of interest.” She was painfully aware of the difference between her public and private selves. In public, she said, “they wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them,” while Diana “was crucifying herself inside, because she didn’t think she was good enough.”

  To Charles and their staff, Diana seemed apathetic, her tearful spells protracted, and she was sometimes paralyzed by despair about the future. According to Dimbleby, “She spent long hours with the Prince’s friends and advisers, talking about the plight in which she found herself, the loss of freedom, the absence of a role, the boredom, the emptiness in her life, the heartlessness of her husband. They listened and did their best to offer comfort and reassurance.”

  Charles had his obligations to attend to, as always, which Diana continued to resent and resist. For a while, though, she had legitimate tasks to divert her, including the redecoration of Highgrove and their Kensington Palace apartment; according to a former courtier, “she was rushing around like a demented flea moving house.” But once she was settled, Diana could find little to fill her days other than shopping excursions and luncheons with friends. “She was trying to find a role for herself,” said the former courtier. “She was very soon expecting William, so she didn’t do a lot of public things. She didn’t take on new things, so she didn’t have enough to do. She was lonely in little ways that manifested themselves. There were undercurrents of instability all the time.”

  When gripped by her extreme mood swings, Diana took to impulsive, even dangerous behavior. One night she left home in an agitated state and jumped into her car, heading out alone without telling anyone her destination. This incident was kept quiet, but others like it filtered out into the press. The most famous was the Sandringham staircase scare, early in 1982.

  New leaks about discord between Charles and Diana surfaced in early February with an account that they had a “blazing public row” during a pheasant shoot. A week later, The Sun and the Daily Mail reported that shortly after the new year Diana had fallen down half a flight of stairs at Sandringham, causing a “clearly worried” Prince Charles to summon the local doctor. Charles sat with her until the doctor’s arrival, and after an examination turned up no injuries to mother or baby, Diana rested for several hours before Charles took her with him to a royal barbecue.

  Nine years later, Diana told Andrew Morton that she and Charles had been fighting that day, and when he wouldn’t listen to her, she had thrown herself down the staircase to “get [her] husband’s attention.” By Diana’s account, Charles had told her, “You’re crying wolf,” before she ran to the staircase. After the fall, which left the Queen “shaking” and “horrified,” Diana said that Charles left to go riding and when he returned, his attitude was “just dismissal, total dismissal.” She added that she “knew” she wasn’t going to lose the baby, although she didn’t reveal how she knew.

  Diana’s account, which Morton reported as an attempted suicide, was at variance with what she told a woman who was close to her at the time. “I talked to her afterwards,” said the woman, “and she said she tripped and fell down the stairs and landed at the feet of the Queen. I didn’t get the impression it was more than an accident. The way [it] came across to me was she had fallen, a doctor had been called as a precaution, and it was no big deal. Nobody told me anything like, ‘You ought to be aware, this was a suicide attempt.’ What struck me as so inconsistent in what she told Andrew Morton is that she would not have done anything to harm herself and that baby.”

  The story Diana related to her friend meshes with the contemporary newspaper reports, so the Morton version seems to have been designed to make a point: that Charles disregarded Diana and treated her callously. To add a further twist, Diana later told her friend Elsa Bowker, it was around this time that she claimed to have broken into Charles’s desk drawer and discovered an exchange of letters between Charles and Camilla—a claim that Michael Colborne has disputed. “She said that this is why she threw herself down the stairs at Sandringham,” said Elsa Bowker. “She said she didn’t think it was worth living or having a baby.” As with so much concerning Diana, her state of mind—at the time of the fall as well as during the various retellings—was probably turbulent and quite possibly unreliable.

  Soon after the revelation about Diana’s fall at Sandringham, she and Charles took a vacation at Windermere Island in the Bahamas. The tabloids lapsed into their customary misbehavior, as James Whitaker and Harry Arnold each supervised a “smudge” (an especially intrusive picture) of Diana by their photographers with long lenses from a nearby beach. The resulting shots of Diana, five months pregnant and wearing a bikini, were accompanied by Whitaker’s observation that “her sensational figure has not gone out of shape” and Arnold’s comment, “Carefree Di threw royal caution to the wind to wear her revealing outfit.”

  The Queen denounced the tabloids’ “unprecedented … breach of privacy,” and the newspapers halfheartedly apologized—although Whitaker admitted, “I’ve never done anything as intrusive in my life, but it was a journalistic high.” Whitaker also later disclosed that while watching from his concealed surveillance post, he had been reassured to see Diana and Charles looking “blissfully happy” as they stood in the water “kissing constantly”—an observation he had withheld from his Daily Star readers, for whom he only noted that “Charles led Diana into the water for a cooling swim. The Princess laughed with delight as the cold waves splashed against her.”

  The vacation had, in fact, been good for Diana—at least until the smudge—as she had been able to unwind. Still, it was clear to their hosts, Penny and Norton Romsey, that the relationship between Charles and Diana was shaky. Even in the presence of the Romseys, Diana objected when Charles wanted to read or paint, and she openly expressed her boredom with his conversation.

  Diana seldom appeared in public as her pregnancy progressed, and when she did, her demeanor raised questions. At the Cheltenham races in March, the tabloids again caught her in a glum mood. As an edgy Charles “fired a series of questions” at her, “shocked racegoers saw her shake her head to each one, then gloomily turn away.” During the race, she “looked aimlessly around at the countryside.” Within weeks, the predictable follow-up appeared in The Sun: “Why Di Keeps Throwing a Wobbly,” an article that listed examples of her “odd behavior” and offered a London cardiologist’s theory that “the pressures on the princess are just too great.”

  On June 21, the longest day of the year, Diana gave birth to William Arthur Philip Louis. Labor was induced, as Diana was beginning to crumble under the strain of constant press speculation about the baby’s arrival. With Charles by her side throughout, she had a difficult sixteen-hour labor that nearly ended in a cesarean section. Afterward, Charles described the event to his godmother, Patricia Brabourne, as “an astonishing experience…. I really felt as though I’d shared deeply in the process of birth.” A decade later, Diana’s memory had a sadly sour aftertaste: She sarcastically recalled that the date was chosen so “Charles could get off his polo pony for me to give birth. That was very nice, felt very grateful about that!” But back in June 1982, she was genuinely thrilled, and she and Charles shared in the joy of a healthy son. “It was a great relief because it was all peaceful again,” she said years later. “And I was well for a time.”

  Chapter 10

  The peace after William’s birth was short-lived. Diana breast-fed for only three weeks, and opposed Charles’s effort to bring in his favorite childhood nanny, Mabel Anderson, to help care for the baby. Instead, Diana chose a nanny herself. By the time William was barely a month old, Diana was hit with depression even worse than what she had experienced during her honeymoon and pregnancy. “You’d wake up in the morning feeling you didn’t
want to get out of bed,” she recalled. “You felt misunderstood and just very, very low in yourself.” At the same time, Diana’s abandonment fears grew more acute. “Boy, was I troubled,” she said. Diana panicked when Charles didn’t arrive home on time, which drove her to tears because she thought “something dreadful had happened to him.” Yet Charles didn’t witness her panic, according to Diana, who concealed it by sitting quietly when he returned.

  Diana said that the two years between the births of William, in June 1982, and of their second son Harry, in September 1984, were “totally darkness” to her. She claimed she could remember very little because she had “blotted it out, it was such pain.” This was the beginning of what she called her “dark ages,” yet she actually recounted vivid memories of this period, many of them bad, but with bright moments, too. She often told friends that the two months before Harry’s birth were the happiest of her marriage.

  After waving and smiling sweetly on leaving the hospital, Diana went into seclusion for a month, emerging for a service at St. Paul’s in late July. The press coverage was enough to drive her back into hiding, as the tabloids insensitively carped at her for looking plump (“Her shape,” said the Mirror, “was, to put it kindly, generous”) and for behaving inappropriately (“Diana fidgeted [and] whispered incessantly to a rather embarrassed-looking Prince Charles,” noted the Daily Express).

  For the rest of the summer and into the autumn, Diana stayed out of the public eye, sinking into a deep malaise. She scarcely marked her twenty-first birthday on July 1, quietly lunching with Sarah Ferguson, whom she had known since their teenage years: their mothers had gone to Downham together. Felicity Clark, Vogue’s beauty editor, also saw Diana that summer when she assisted in Lord Snowdon’s photo shoot of Diana and William at Kensington Palace. Clark detected no black moods, but she was struck by “a wistfulness about her in general.” At William’s christening in early August, Diana’s anguish was more apparent. She later complained that she hadn’t been consulted about the timing of the ceremony and that she had been “excluded totally” by the royal family. “I wasn’t very well,” she said, “and I just blubbed my eyes out.” The only other time she ventured forth was an unexpected trip to Monaco for the funeral of Princess Grace, whom Diana had met once and admired greatly. The tabloids interpreted Diana’s public tears—unusual in a member of the royal family—as a sign that she was “endearingly human,” with a “big heart.”

  On August 14, the day Charles, Diana, and William left for the royal family’s annual holiday at Balmoral, the tabloids broke a story that added to Diana’s misery. For Gordon Honeycombe’s new biography of Diana, her mother had made an “exclusive statement” detailing the events surrounding her separation and divorce fifteen years earlier. The tabloids seized on Frances’s “rash” choice of words: that Johnnie had “insisted” the children remain with him, and “refused” to allow them to return to London with her—thus placing the blame on Johnnie for being stubborn and cruel, and portraying herself sympathetically. The newspapers also printed Johnnie’s condemnation of Frances’s statement as “very unkind” and “cheap publicity” that could “only hurt Diana” by reopening old wounds. Diana was indeed “deeply distressed” to revisit her parents’ acrimony in such a public fashion.

  At Balmoral, Diana was plagued by insomnia—at one point she went for three nights without sleeping—and continued to binge and purge. Once again, her weight dropped alarmingly. She sensed that members of the royal household knew about her bulimia, but she decided that they preferred to ignore the problem and even considered it “quite amusing” that she ate such large quantities without gaining weight. However, Michael Colborne recalled that “she kept the bulimia a secret,” and “no one suspected it.” Those around Charles and Diana were puzzled by her “disconcerting propensity to consume large quantities of junk food (ice cream, biscuits and popcorn),” yet neither Charles nor anyone else identified her eating disorder.

  Nor had Diana’s obsession with Camilla abated; Camilla continued to embody Diana’s anxiety about being rejected by Charles. Despite Charles’s denials, Diana persisted in accusing him of maintaining the affair. Diana’s suspicion, Dimbleby noted, “continued to grow to the point where it became a canker between them, destructive of every effort on both their parts to draw closer together.” In her interviews with Morton, Diana claimed that her worst fears had been confirmed when she stood outside Charles’s door to deliberately eavesdrop, and overheard him on a cordless telephone in his bath, telling Camilla, “Whatever happens, I will always love you.” Although Diana didn’t attach this conversation to any particular time, Morton wrote that it occurred soon after William’s birth, and that she had overheard Charles “accidentally.”

  This incident occupies a pivotal place in the saga of Diana and Charles, which makes it worth scrutinizing. Jonathan Dimbleby wrote unequivocally that once Charles became engaged, he “had made virtually no contact with Camilla Parker Bowles for over five years,” and that Charles had seen Camilla only “fleetingly” at “social gatherings.” They had conversed by telephone “a few” times during the engagement and “only once” after his marriage, when he called in the autumn of 1981 to tell Camilla that Diana was pregnant. By Dimbleby’s account, Camilla and Charles had not spoken after William’s birth—in fact “had not talked to each other at all” until they resumed their relationship in 1986.

  Others close to the situation also said that while Charles had indeed ended his relationship with Camilla, it is likely that the former lovers continued communicating in some form, by direct or indirect means. Stuart Higgins, editor of The Sun from 1994 to 1998, conducted regular off-the-record conversations with Camilla Parker Bowles from 1982 to 1992, when he was a reporter and junior editor. He had first known her when he was covering weekend sporting events, and when he returned from an assignment in the United States in 1982 he got in touch with her.

  “I talked to her once a week for ten years,” said Higgins. “I talked to her about Diana and Charles. She guided me on things that were not true, or things that were off the beam. Everything was behind closed doors, and I didn’t write about her, although I spoke to her all the time during that period. I didn’t sense that she and Charles were out of touch. I felt she was involved, but not necessarily in a romance or affair with Charles. I never sensed that she was out of contact, though I definitely believe there was a cessation in the relationship and that Charles put an effort into the marriage.”

  Camilla spoke reliably about Charles and Diana, and she became a trusted source for Higgins, who protected her by keeping their relationship confidential. “Our relationship was two ways,” said Higgins. “We had some long conversations. She was trying to really gauge whether the press was on to her [and Charles], so it was a question of her keeping in touch, too.”

  It is conceivable that Diana heard the sort of conversation she described to Andrew Morton. She had a disconcerting tendency to listen at doors, and Charles, for all his public restraint, often spoke and wrote with great affection to his close friends. “He has a habit of saying things like ‘Masses of love,’ ‘I adore you,’ and ‘Whatever happens I’ll look after you’ if someone has been going through a hard time,” said a friend of Charles. In Diana’s turbulent state—and given her predisposition to imagine the worst—she could have jumped to the conclusion that Camilla was the recipient of such endearments when they were completely innocent. Alternatively, the exchange might have been Diana’s own invention; the circumstances of the conversation she described could only have occurred some years later, because Charles was reported to have purchased his first cordless phone in August 1986.

  Regardless of the truth of the matter, Diana’s imaginings had a profound impact on the relationship, and on her own behavior, which took an alarming new turn in Scotland during the autumn of 1982: She began to injure herself with sharp objects. By Diana’s later description, she tried to cut her wrists, and she slashed her arms and legs using a lemon kn
ife with a serrated edge as well as fragments of glass from windows she broke. A series of these incidents occurred at Balmoral, the most dramatic of which took place when Diana and Charles were once again on their own at Craigowan. As an indicator of how rapidly her mood could shift, she seemed quite calm when the couple first arrived. In a letter to a relative on September 21, Diana remarked, “We are now installed [in the lodge], which is marvelous and very relaxing.”

  The provocation for her violent actions, she later said, was her feeling that “no one’s listening to you.… You have so much pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help.” The intent was not “attention-seeking”; rather, in her confusion, “I was actually crying out because I wanted to get better.” It was her “desperate cry for help,” she said, because she wanted “people to understand the torment and anguish going on in my head.” She also “didn’t like” herself and felt shame “because I couldn’t cope with the pressures.” She didn’t characterize her actions as suicide attempts, although they were portrayed as such in the press when Morton’s book disclosed them. Diana did later say that she had tried to commit suicide a number of times without naming the specific incidents.

  Self-mutilation is one of the most severe symptoms of mental illness, and “cutting” is the most prevalent form, accounting for nearly three-quarters of cases. According to a 1986 survey, ninety-seven percent of self-mutilators are women. Mental health professionals generally agree that such self-destructive behavior is seriously pathological and requires prompt and thorough psychiatric evaluation—and frequently hospitalization.

  Self-injury sometimes accompanies bulimia, but more often indicates an even more wide-ranging psychological disorder. It springs from depression and hopelessness, and—as Diana indicated—is a desperate plea for rescue, a way to demonstrate the extent of internal suffering. Even more disturbingly, self-injury can signal someone’s wish to experience pain as an alternative to numbness. One 1986 study of self-cutters showed that they knew when to stop because after a certain point they felt soothed. Twenty-three percent of those in the study experienced only moderate pain and sixty-seven percent little or none. When self-injury occurs in front of someone else, there is usually a corollary intention to punish that person.