Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  By all accounts, Charles publicly showed his delight in her popularity, while he privately agonized about the impact of the disproportionate adoration. “I do feel desperate for Diana,” he wrote to a friend on April 4. “There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly and, I’m convinced, mindless people photographing it.… Can’t they see … what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?”

  Diana’s toughest moments occurred during the first week of the tour, when she was nearly overcome by the pressure. She was sick with bulimia, she wept to her twenty-nine-year-old lady-in-waiting Anne Beckwith-Smith, and she begged to go home. Gradually, she began to relax and concentrate on her job as a royal representative. In a letter written nearly two weeks into the trip, Diana told a friend that her depression had lifted, and she expressed remorse about her earlier behavior in London and Balmoral, which she characterized as “selfish.” Diana was comforted by having William nearby. When she and Charles periodically visited him at the sheep station where he stayed with his nanny, it provided a welcome escape. “We were extremely happy there,” Charles wrote to his friends the van Cutsems. “The great joy was that we were totally alone together.”

  Diana and Charles openly showed affection for each other—as one writer described it, “his hand resting on hers, her glance towards him, those sort of telling things.” During a tree-planting in New Zealand, Diana winked at Charles, he tossed away the shovel, heaved her over his shoulder, and carried her into a nearby building as they dissolved in laughter. And when a photographer accidentally encountered the couple in an elevator in Melbourne, Charles pointed to Diana and reportedly said, “Isn’t she absolutely beautiful? I’m so proud of her.”

  At the end of the tour, Diana and Charles escaped for a nine-day rest on Windermere Island, and this time the tabloids left them alone. Once recharged, they were off again on a seventeen-day visit to Canada, but without William. Diana again acquitted herself well under considerable pressure. “Not a moment to breathe,” Diana confided in a letter to a relative. “I find the endless receptions quite difficult, as people tend to ask extraordinarily personal questions.” She could also spot the absurdity in their situation, as in her description of greeting children chewing bubble gum: “When trying to drag a sentence out, all we actually see is a bright pink thing, turning round and round, like a washing machine inside.”

  Diana and Charles missed William’s first birthday on June twenty-first. Somewhat surprisingly, Diana wrote to her relative, “I haven’t missed William as much as I’d thought,” and revealed a flash of media savvy on her son’s birthday: “I smiled myself stupid all day, as the press were quite determined to see a ‘sad mama.’ ”

  Brian Peckford, the premier of Newfoundland, commented that Diana was “very witty” and “asked questions about what we may consider simple things but they are really the ones that count.” He also praised her ability to relate to patients during a hospital visit: “She sat down on every single bed to talk to people. She speaks very softly. She does not raise her voice. She makes people come down to her decibel level, and it is lovely.”

  More significantly, Peckford revealed that Diana had said to him, “I am finding it very difficult to cope with the pressures of being the Princess of Wales.… I have learnt a lot in the last few months … [and] feel I am doing my job better now than I was before. I have matured a lot recently and got used to coping with things.” Only days earlier, Diana had confessed to a Halifax newspaper owner that her royal life was agonizing at times. “When they write something horrible,” Diana said, “I get a horrible feeling right here,” pointing to her chest.

  At the time, nothing “horrible” was being written about Diana. Broadsheets and tabloids alike hailed Diana’s mastery of her royal role. “Prince Charles is largely responsible for this newfound confidence,” James Whitaker declared, “but it is Diana herself who can take most of the credit.” Andrew Morton proclaimed in the Daily Star that Diana was “a big girl now … a far cry from the nervous young woman who twice burst into [public] tears before her marriage when the pressure got too much. As she celebrates her twenty-second birthday tomorrow, she’ll be saying good-bye forever to Shy Di, and hello and welcome to a self-assured and poised princess.”

  The rosy assessments of Diana’s progress were based on little more than the appeal of her charm and looks, and her ability, through practice, endurance, and determination, to learn the royal drill. A relative of the royal family who attended a public event with Diana that year recalled, “She was saying, ‘I’ll take five deep breaths and plunge in and talk to all those people.’ She did it well.” Diana had clearly benefited from the boost to her public confidence provided by her reception on the two tours. But her later assertion that she had returned from Australia a “different person” was an illusion. She was fooling herself and the public by learning to function well in her public role. The symptoms of her emotional disturbance—mood swings, bulimia, self-mutilation, depression—could persist privately while she functioned well outwardly.

  By the autumn of 1983, Diana had long since given up her psychiatric therapy. She had stuck with treatment for several months, but ended it early in the year, saying she no longer needed it. “The therapy appeared not to be delivering a solution for her,” according to a friend of Charles. Because Diana still didn’t admit to her bulimia, her diagnosis was incomplete, which limited the effectiveness of her therapy. She had been to at least two therapists: Dr. Allan McGlashan, a Jungian specialist friendly with Laurens van der Post who focused on dream analysis, and David Mitchell, who probed her reactions to daily events and her conversations with Charles. Diana’s sessions with Mitchell at Kensington Palace often brought her to tears. She didn’t think her therapists genuinely understood her, and without that essential trust, her treatment could not succeed.

  In some ways, Diana did seem better that fall, largely because she was performing her royal duties so reliably. But according to Jonathan Dimbleby, “her swings of mood continued, and there were periods of distress that were exhausting to both [Charles and Diana].” She still suffered from attacks of weeping, during which Charles spent “hours comforting and reassuring her.”

  In February 1984, Diana made her first solo foreign trip—an overnight to Oslo, where she captivated the Norwegians. She became the patron of seven new organizations, in addition to the five she had previously adopted—ranging from ballet and opera companies to schools and groups combating childhood cancer and other ailments. Out of seventy-six public engagements in 1983, forty-five had been without Charles. Years later, Diana complained that because so much attention was directed at her, “my husband decided that we do separate engagements, which was a bit sad for me, because I quite liked the company. But there again, I didn’t have the choice.” Like other statements Diana made for revenge, this one seems untrue and sadly unfair. When she first went solo at the end of 1982 (before the Australia trip), press reports made clear the initiative was hers.

  Much of the perception of Diana was based on her glamorous image. “The combination of style and glamour has always been explosive,” observed Woman’s Own magazine in January 1984, “and Diana’s brand is positively atomic.” Every account of her public appearances included detailed descriptions of her clothing, usually accompanied by critiques of her latest fashion statement. She made her share of blunders, but she availed herself of the best advisers, and she had great flair. After the first year, Diana stopped relying on the Vogue editors and chose her own clothing. “She was terribly keen and interested in fashion,” said former Vogue editor Felicity Clark. “She knew what she liked and didn’t like. At the beginning, she would not wear a short skirt because she didn’t like them, and she consciously wore very low heels so she wouldn’t tower over her husband. She bought hats because she liked hats. One of our useful functions was editing the collection. She made mistakes when she started going to
collections on her own and saw the whole thing. Most designers have a few mistakes, and once or twice she chose them.”

  It took only a couple of years in the public eye for Diana to begin appreciating the clout of her celebrity, especially her ability to command attention with a dramatic new look. Because she so frequently yielded to this impulse, her image lacked consistency. Sometimes out of insecurity, at other moments simply to capture the limelight, she constantly changed her appearance. Early in the marriage, Diana began her habit of combing through the tabloids to scrutinize her photographs. She could sit for as long as an hour, exclaiming that the tabloids were trying to make her look awful, inviting compliments from staff members on the flattering shots and reassurance about other images that bothered her.

  Beyond her place as “queen of fashion,” Diana had no specific role. No one had thought out in detail what she would do, and she offered the Buckingham Palace courtiers scant guidance on her interests, which were still quite limited. Her inclination was, as The Times described it, toward “visiting the very young, the very old, and the sick, to whom she brought a touching directness.” By putting her in familiar, comfortable settings, the royal schedulers could rely on her natural abilities, first developed when she did community service in boarding school.

  Diana later said that Charles had not allowed her to have interests: “I think I’ve always been the eighteen-year-old [sic] girl he got engaged to.” But Charles, according to one of his friends, “wanted her to find things she enjoyed doing,” and he tried to help her develop some skills. In 1982, Charles had brought in his friend Eric Anderson, the headmaster of Eton who had been his drama instructor at Gordonstoun, to assist Diana with her writing skills and spark some intellectual leanings. “It was to educate her,” said a former Palace aide. “He would come and talk to her about poetry and Shakespeare.” These once-weekly sessions at Kensington Palace lasted less than six months, however. “She was enthusiastic about it,” said the courtier, “but only for a short time. I don’t know why, but it petered out in a matter of months. This was a pattern.”

  In those early years, Diana balked at getting too involved in anything. “She worried about being bored by her public duties,” said a former Palace official. When aides presented Diana with lists of charities and descriptions of what they might mean to her, she showed no inclination to learn about them in any depth. “She couldn’t understand the requirement of duty, that you had to be sitting next to an architect or a don, and that you had to prepare yourself for it,” said Michael Colborne. “Diana was intelligent enough,” noted another former courtier. “You could give her a brief, and she could read through it. But it was a matter of intellectual discipline and application. She didn’t have sustained concentration for anything. She was disciplined in other ways. She wouldn’t let people down.”

  Diana’s erratic behavior took a heavy toll on the royal staff. In the first four years of the marriage, some forty officials left the Waleses, among them butlers, valets, private secretaries, bodyguards, and chauffeurs. Stephen Barry, Prince Charles’s longtime valet, was one of the first to go, explaining philosophically that it was “understandable [Diana] would not wish to have around herself and her husband those who had known him at earlier times, when there were other girlfriends.”

  Some staff members retired or left for a better job, but quite a few were pushed out by Diana’s displeasure. Sometimes there was poor chemistry, as with several bodyguards who “made her feel nervous.” But more often, the dismissal followed a predictable sequence of events. Diana would draw a staff member into her confidence, burdening him with intimate details of her anxieties that caused him discomfort. Misreading her familiarity, he would then overstep an invisible line or say something that struck Diana as inappropriate or disloyal, and she would, without warning, cease speaking to him or even acknowledging his presence.

  While Charles was upset over the departure of loyal staff, he was disheartened that Diana compelled him to exile some of his closest friends, a number of whom he had known since his boyhood. As even the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, conceded, “Certain friends had to go—because they just didn’t fit anymore, and Charles and Diana began to make new friends together as a couple.” The Parker Bowleses and the Tryons topped the banned list for obvious reasons, but Diana was equally adamant about the banishment of the Brabournes, the Romseys, the Palmer-Tomkinsons, and Nicholas Soames, with whom Charles had been accustomed to speaking almost daily on the telephone. The Palmer-Tomkinsons were in the cold for three years, Soames for more than two.

  Diana felt these friends were against her from the start, a misguided impression, according to one friend of Charles: “They thought she was a young person who needed help to make her way,” said the friend. “There was no animosity toward her, no coven saying, ‘She’s a new witch and we don’t like her.’ Early on, they were extraordinarily helpful, but then she quickly turned against them.”

  Diana had little use for Soames, a Conservative member of Parliament known for his large size and pungent views (“Pass the port, he’s not my sort”) whom Diana disparaged as “heavy furniture.” The others, she was convinced, were colluding with Charles in the relationship she believed he was continuing with Camilla or were simply against her in some way. By one account, she turned on the Romseys after she learned that the couple had counseled him not to marry her. Because of the awkwardness of the situation, Charles shrank from directly telling his friends why he could no longer see them. Instead, he stopped calling and sending them invitations to country weekends and Balmoral holidays.

  Those friends who stayed in favor—among them Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, Charles and Antonia Douro, Rick and Libby Beckett, and Gerald and Tally Westminster—along with newer friends from the polo world, such as Galen and Hilary Weston, and Geoffrey and Jorie Kent—had to deal with Diana’s range of disturbing symptoms and the self-pity her moods stirred in Charles. Many of them tried in the beginning to befriend Diana. “In many ways, I fell in love with her the way Charles did, but she was the most difficult woman in the world,” said one friend. “To sit next to her at a dinner party was such hard work. She just wouldn’t respond. You would ask her questions and she just wouldn’t reply. She wasn’t interested in reading anything, in learning anything. She didn’t make an effort. She would throw food and do childish things. She could be spontaneous and endearing, but in some basic ways she never matured.”

  Several of the wives became Diana’s confidantes—Emilie van Cutsem, in particular. A contemporary of Charles who was born in Holland, Emilie had old-fashioned attitudes, taking the view, for example, that “jeans are workman’s clothes.” She established herself as a mother figure to Diana, who poured out her troubles and asked for advice. “Emilie was very helpful to Diana early on,” said a former Palace aide. Antonia Douro, the wife of the heir to the Duke of Wellington, was a powerful London hostess who also befriended Diana. When Diana was once portrayed in the press as domineering and demanding with Charles, Antonia offered a spirited public defense.

  Both Emilie and Antonia were also close friends of Camilla Parker Bowles, and when Charles returned to Camilla in 1986, Emilie and Antonia helped facilitate the affair. Antonia supplied them with a cottage in Scotland, and the van Cutsems invited Charles over from Highgrove. “Diana discovered that when she would leave the van Cutsem house, Camilla would arrive,” said one of Diana’s friends. “It shattered Diana. She felt they behaved according to a double standard.” Diana often discovered evidence of such treachery through subterfuge, because she didn’t fundamentally trust anyone. “She steamed open letters and listened in to telephone conversations,” said a friend of Charles. “These were just letters from friends. There is a sorting postal system, and she used to on occasion take letters out, and if addressed to him she would steam them open. With the letters, she was caught red-handed quite early.”

  On Valentine’s Day 1984, Charles and Diana announced that she was expecting their second ch
ild in September. The pregnancy seemed to progress more smoothly this time, although Diana twice said publicly—in March and June—“I haven’t felt well since day one.” “It was a good year,” said Michael Colborne. “The second child was coming, things were going well, they had done good tours, she wasn’t as sick as she had been with William.”

  William’s presence was an important stabilizing factor. Even with a nanny in residence, Diana took an active role in caring for her toddler, allotting three hours in the morning for him before beginning her official schedule. Diana also seemed more focused on maintaining her emotional balance through exercise: two to three times a week, she went to Buckingham Palace, where she would swim laps “very energetically for about half an hour,” according to her press secretary Vic Chapman. Also vital to her mental stability was her full schedule of official engagements—primarily visits to hospitals and other medical treatment and research centers. Only once did she falter publicly, when she had to leave midway through a performance of Aïda at the Royal Opera House, feeling ill.

  In a departure from her customary reticence, the Queen made a point that April of praising Diana publicly with an official statement through a Buckingham Palace spokesman: “The Queen could not be more pleased with her daughter-in-law. She is very proud of the Princess’s activities around the world and at home.” By then, Diana and her mother-in-law had developed an easier relationship. When Diana came to the palace to swim, she would usually bring along William afterward to play in the garden while she visited the Queen.