Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana enacted some of her self-mutilation in Charles’s presence, implying that he showed a lack of concern by failing to understand the reasons for her actions. Based on what she later told them, Diana’s friends judged Charles even more harshly: Morton quoted one who asserted that Charles’s “indifference pushed her to the edge.” But Diana’s distressing behavior greatly worried Charles, who shared his anxieties with a few of his closest friends and advisers. Fearful of leaks, he was extremely careful about confiding such explosive information. “The trouble is one day I think some steps are being made uphill,” he wrote in a letter to one of his confidants on October 10, 1982, “only to find that we’ve slid back one and a half steps the following day.… This afternoon a heavy feeling descended.”

  After Charles consulted with his confidants and talked with Diana, they agreed that she should undergo psychiatric counseling. (Neither the Queen nor any other member of the royal family was privy to these discussions.) Charles was still unaware of Diana’s eating disorders, so the impetus for treatment was her self-mutilation. As a friend of Charles explained, “They were at a loss and knew she needed psychiatric care. They wanted to do something, but bulimia wasn’t the buzzword.”

  On October 17, a week after Charles’s letter confessing his despair about Diana’s condition, he took her, along with William and the nanny, to London so Diana could begin treatment. She did not return to Balmoral that fall. As Charles had done a year earlier when he urged Diana to find professional help for her depression and mood swings, he showed that he considered her symptoms serious enough for special care.

  The day after Charles and Diana left for London, James Whitaker reported in the Daily Mirror that Diana had been depressed at Balmoral following two-and-a-half weeks of rain. After “complaining and sulking,” Diana had announced that she wanted to go to London to shop and see her friends, provoking a “blazing row” with Charles. Her abrupt return to London “caught many royal aides on the hop.” Andrew Morton followed in the Daily Star along similar lines, describing Diana as “bored to tears” in Balmoral and adding that she was “reported” to be on a “shopping spree” at Harrods.

  Over the following months, these small drumbeats became an extraordinary cacophony, beginning on November 13, 1982, when Diana committed an inexplicable faux pas by showing up late at the annual Festival of Remembrance at Albert Hall, a solemn occasion presided over by the Queen and other members of the royal family. (“No one, but no one, is EVER late for the Queen,” Whitaker thundered.) Prince Charles had already announced that Diana was “unwell” and wouldn’t be attending, when Diana unexpectedly turned up looking out of sorts. It was clear to everyone around them that a fight between the royal couple had preceded her arrival. “I will never forget it,” said a woman who was sitting in an adjacent box. “Diana and the Prince of Wales had a row right there. I wanted to pinch Charles and caution him that someone might be able to read lips. Prince Philip was looking daggers at Diana. It was agonizing.” The following day the tabloids were full of comments on Diana’s gaunt appearance and flustered demeanor.

  It took the two tabloid rivals, James Whitaker and Harry Arnold, to make a leap that set off a whole new round of speculation. Each of them put several elements together: Diana’s “unpredictable” behavior at Balmoral and the Remembrance event, her weight loss, her sister Sarah’s battle with eating disorders. The conclusion: Diana was suffering from anorexia nervosa.

  IS IT ALL GETTING TOO MUCH FOR DIANA? asked a Daily Mirror headline over a November 15 story by Whitaker, who noted that Charles was so concerned, he went “out of his way whenever possible to join Diana for lunch.” Whitaker also stumbled on fresh evidence of Diana’s compulsive tidiness when he quoted a “family friend” (later revealed by Whitaker to be Diana’s press secretary, Vic Chapman) who said, “If … her shoes are cleaned, she wants them put back precisely in line in her cupboard. She is obsessed that everything and everybody around her should be perfect.”

  In his report the same day, Arnold said Prince Charles was “seriously concerned” and had “taken top medical advice.” Both Arnold and Whitaker were onto something, although they had offered only a partial picture by highlighting anorexia, and Arnold didn’t know what sort of medical help Charles had really sought.

  Almost immediately, other newspapers ran stories in which a Buckingham Palace spokesman denied that Diana was suffering from anorexia and said she was “fit and well … and in sparkling form.” The most emphatic disavowal came from Nigel Dempster, writing several days later in The Mail on Sunday. Dempster scolded The Sun and the Mirror for running speculative stories that exaggerated the “inevitable stresses” of the Waleses’ marriage. He went on to undercut his own denunciation by listing various signs that Diana was “cracking,” quoting a member of the “inner circle” as saying “quite simply she has freaked out.” Dempster continued, “My sources tell me that the Princess has become so disorientated by the type of exposure that she may have to seek psychiatric assistance.”

  These pronouncements sparked a wave of stories discrediting Dempster. Andrew Morton wrote in the Daily Star that Dempster was just a “sniper” and dismissed such “professional knockers” as “wide of the mark.” Several days later, the Daily Express ran a piece headlined LOOKING GOOD, FEELING GREAT that described Diana’s “new lease of enthusiasm and energy” as she undertook thirteen official engagements in three weeks, on her own for the first time. “It was Diana herself who decided that the time was indeed right to make her solo run,” the paper reported.

  The amazing denouement of this surge of overheated coverage was an appearance by Dempster on ABC’s Good Morning America in early December 1982. Barely two weeks after his plea to the tabloids to “give her a chance,” Dempster launched into a vicious tirade, calling Diana a “fiend” and a “monster.” “Diana is very much ruling the roost,” he said. “Charles is desperately unhappy … because Fleet Street forced him into this marriage.” Sixteen years later, Dempster was as confident of his information as ever. “I got it straight from one of Prince Charles’s staff,” he said.

  Predictably, his tabloid competitors furiously denounced him. The News of the World called his remarks “the greatest howler of all time for the balding 41-year-old columnist.” Yet within weeks, the same tabloid returned to the fray with an account in early 1983 that said Diana was “near to tears much of the time … and her quick temper never far from the surface.” Her basic problem, according to the tabloid, was that she could not handle being left alone, leading to concern that “she might well be heading for some kind of breakdown.”

  Andrew Morton countered the bad news once again, this time with six pages in the Daily Star dismissing the “nonsense” about Diana “teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown.” Charles has, Morton wrote, “acted as her guide and mentor. [He] is very seldom away from Princess Diana for any length of time.” Morton based his account on a “heart-to-heart talk” with a “reliable source close to the Palace” whose pattern of speaking was virtually identical to Michael Shea’s, the Queen’s press secretary. According to this authoritative source, Charles and Diana had “occasional spats” and “a few fireworks.” “It’s a rumbustious marriage,” said the source, who also emphasized that Charles and Diana were “very fond of each other.”

  With that final burst of positive spin, the press frenzy subsided. But Diana, who took her coverage all too seriously, had been badly battered. She was hurt that the press had called her names and admitted that she “did take criticism hard.” “One minute I was a nobody,” she recalled, “the next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of the family, and it was just too much for one person at that time.”

  The Spencer family was noticeably absent during Diana’s acute psychological crisis. As Diana said, “None of my family knew about [my bulimia, self-mutilation, suicide attempts] at all.… I never leant on anyone”—a sad admission of the distance she felt from her parents and siblings. The pub
lic squabble between Frances and Johnnie about their divorce had hurt and embarrassed Diana, who held her mother responsible for generating the bad publicity. Even before then, relations between mother and daughter had cooled. Her mother was busy with her own life, splitting her time between Scotland and her farm in Australia. “I am a firm believer in maternal redundancy,” Frances had told the Daily Mail in June 1982, shortly after William’s birth. “When daughters marry they set up a new home, and they don’t want mothers-in-law hanging around. They should be free to make their own decisions and maybe to make their own mistakes.”

  While Frances’s sentiments reflected her own confidence and independent spirit, they revealed how little she seemed to understand her daughter, given the reports of Diana’s unstable behavior that began leaking out of the royal household only weeks after the marriage. What Diana needed—as she later told her friends—was unconditional support and reassurance from her mother.

  Johnnie Spencer told his cousin Robert that Diana had been “upset” after William’s birth by the “constant attention.” But Johnnie’s view of his daughter’s situation was as clouded as Frances’s, though in his case by the certitude of being a Spencer. “I know the royals can appear to swallow people up when others marry in,” he said in a 1983 interview, “but that could never happen to us. We can cope with the pressures.” Little grasping how confused his daughter was most of the time, Johnnie affirmed his belief that Diana would prevail as Princess of Wales because she “knows her own mind.”

  During the flurry of speculative articles about Diana’s health, James Whitaker quoted “a close member of the Princess’s family” who revealed, “I am extremely worried about her.… I can’t say for sure that Diana has anorexia.… Somebody at some time has to sit down and talk to her.” Some years later, Whitaker dropped his pledge of confidentiality by naming Diana’s sister Sarah as his source. “She told me then they were very, very worried,” he said. “I couldn’t name her at the time.” By Diana’s account, neither Sarah nor Jane seemed to offer more than perfunctory sympathy. Although Diana considered Jane “wonderfully solid,” she said that if she called with a problem Jane would say, “ ‘Golly, gosh, Duch, how horrible, how sad and how awful.’ ” Sarah would reply along similar lines: “Poor Duch, such a shitty thing to happen.”

  Diana’s relationship with her family “sort of went in cycles,” said one Spencer relative. “That was how she treated her family, but it was not a problem because they were the ones she could let off steam to and not worry about being betrayed. Someone was always in and out of favor. The other thing was, they were the only ones to tell her the truth.”

  It was for this very reason, in the view of one of Diana’s friends, that she couldn’t be closer to her immediate family: “She didn’t have anyone to turn to. Diana was very up and down with Jane and Sarah. Diana and I discussed it, and she said, ‘I envy you so much the relationship you have with your family.’ It was love-hate in her family, up and down, never steady or constant. The sisters were of a different emotional kind. Diana wanted to be listened to and loved and told she was doing the right thing. She wanted to be told she was wonderful, and the family brought her down to earth.”

  The one family member Diana began to strongly mistrust was her grandmother Ruth Fermoy, with whom she had never enjoyed a close relationship. Ruth Fermoy’s first loyalty was the royal family, and early in the Wales marriage she began to express her dismay about Diana’s treatment of Charles, who she believed needed “a woman to love and be cared for by.” During a dinner at Balmoral in March 1982, Ruth Fermoy observed to her dinner partner Roy Strong that Diana “had a lot to learn” about royal life. Lady Fermoy was even more pointed with Robert Runcie, a close friend of hers. “Ruth was very distressed with Diana’s behavior,” Runcie recalled. “She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’d seen him grow up, loved him like all the women of the court do, and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.”

  Chapter 11

  On March 20, 1983, Charles, Diana, William, and their entourage left England for their first major royal tour—forty-five days in Australia and New Zealand. The trip was a defining moment for Diana, although perhaps not for the conventional interpretation, that she developed a “new maturity.” In the battle between the strong elements of Diana’s character and the fragility of her temperament, her character prevailed under extreme stress. Because of the demands made on both Charles and Diana, and the enormous pressure to perform flawlessly, the trip also proved an important bonding experience for them as a couple. But in other ways, it drove a greater wedge between them. The experience deluded the press and the public into believing that Diana had become the superwoman she still could not be—as long as her fundamental psychological problems were not fully addressed.

  The tour took the couple to every state in Australia, from scorching heat one day to chilly rain the next. As a veteran of more than fifty overseas visits by age thirty-four, Charles knew how heavily he had to support his inexperienced and emotionally vulnerable twenty-one-year-old wife; even for someone twice Diana’s age with a solid sense of herself, the pressure of being “on” for forty-five straight days would have been daunting. As Charles himself admitted in a letter to a relative, “The great problem is … keeping our enthusiasm … when everything is so exactly the same each day. After three weeks a strange feeling overcomes you, and when you see another crowd all you want to do is scream and run away as fast as possible!”

  On what Charles called their “Antipodean Odyssey,” all eyes were on Diana: She had to watch every word, smile incessantly, and show excitement for everyone and everything she encountered. Charles rarely left Diana on her own, gently steering her from place to place. He was often seen lightly squeezing her hand to bolster her confidence. In her later bitterness, Diana bemoaned that “nobody ever helped me at all” during the tour. But in a letter to a friend at the time, she praised Charles for encouraging her when she felt overwhelmed, and she expressed admiration for his ability to inspire others with well-chosen words. What’s more, staff members like her press secretary Vic Chapman were soothing and supportive. “He was very good at talking her through things,” said a former courtier. “He would brief her about what to expect. He would say, ‘You will get out of the car, and there will be four thousand screaming children.’ ”

  The crowds in Australia and New Zealand were staggeringly large; in the city of Brisbane, more than 100,000 people turned out. During that stop, Diana was nearly mobbed as sweat poured down her face in the 86-degree heat. Charles quickly intervened by wrapping his arm around her waist and guiding her into a room where she could rest: It was the closest she came to losing her public composure. She moved informally among the people on “walkabouts,” shaking hands (6,000 by one estimate) and offering down-to-earth comments. She complained from time to time about the heat, but if she felt bored, she didn’t show it, and her emotional state seemed steady. “She has a wonderful way of dealing with people,” Charles wrote to a relative. “Her quick wit stands her in excellent stead.” Occasionally, her impish humor got the better of her: When she greeted a man with one arm, she blurted out, “I’ll bet you have fun chasing the soap around the bath!” Diana managed to be so endearing that he didn’t take offense.

  One of the more perceptive assessments of her public persona was from Simon Hoggart of The Observer: “The Princess was plainly ill at ease,” he wrote. “This I suspect is partly the cause of her astounding international celebrity. Her voice is ordinary and a little flat.… Her face, with its self-deprecating little smiles and giggly grimaces, signals that she is really just another nice and nervous girl. She is somehow gawky and graceful at the same time. She is both princess and commoner, the living embodiment of a million fantasies.”

  The extraordinary adulation for Diana that the royal couple first experienced in Wales turned into a tidal wave Down Under, and once again, Charles took second billing. After applauding his arrival, the crowds erupted in
to cheers and screams when they caught sight of Diana. Charles took these lopsided greetings in good humor: When Diana’s fans begged him to bring her over to his side of the street, and she continued chatting on her side, he cracked, “You can’t tell a woman to do anything these days.” In his moments of privacy, Charles coped with the strain of these encounters by listening to his favorite classical music and immersing himself in Ivan Turgenev’s First Love as well as Carl Jung’s Psychological Reflections. These activities, he confided to a friend, helped “preserve my sanity and my faith.”

  Charles took pride in Diana’s performance, although he was mildly disturbed by her reaction to the crowds. Sometimes they frightened her, but she also found pleasure in the sense of power they gave her. Charles understood the dangers of giving credence to such idolatry, because he understood the fickle nature of celebrity. “The terrifying part,” he wrote to a friend, “is that [the crowds] construct the pedestal, they put you on top of it, they expect you to balance on the beastly thing.… [Then] along come the demolition experts amongst them who are of the breed that enjoy breaking things down.”

  Although he masked it well, Charles also felt resentful, and Diana knew it. “All you could hear was, ‘Oh, she’s on the other side,’ ” Diana recalled. “Now, if you’re a man, like my husband a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks.” In a letter to a friend written on April 1, Diana described the situation but emphasized that they were supporting each other. In her reminiscences, though, Diana took a harsher view, claiming that not only did Charles fail to share in her success, he was “jealous” and “took it out on [her]”—although there is no evidence that he did so.