Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Charles had his own busy official schedule, which included three major trips abroad—five days in Brunei in February, a month in Africa in March, and a week in Papua New Guinea in August. Otherwise, the royal couple attended the usual charity concerts and other royal events. But according to Dimbleby, they were living “within the shell of a normal marriage,” and “still lacked the intimacy and mutual understanding without which the relationship could not grow. As they shared no common interests there was little to talk about except the mundane arrangements that are necessary when two people share the same roof.”

  Nearly three years into Charles and Diana’s marriage, the full extent of their incompatibility was more obvious than ever. Their differences have usually been cast as matters of taste and preference: She loved the city, and he thrived in the country. She adored Elton John and Abba; he listened endlessly to opera. She enjoyed the company of film stars, and he gravitated to philosophers and academics. She loved everything trendy; he cherished tradition, right down to the clothing he wore for shooting: an unfashionable Norfolk jacket identical to those worn by his father and grandfather.

  Even their styles of letter-writing showed their disparities: Charles was known for settling down and composing five- or six-page letters punctuated with passionate outbursts and bold underlinings. His letters were intensely engaged with the recipient’s predicament, or his own situation. “His letters were anguished, concerned, and also extremely funny,” said one friend. “They showed his character, beliefs, hopes, what disturbed and pleased him, what made him despair, and made him optimistic.”

  Diana’s approach was more brief, chatty, and girlish, redeemed by sly flashes of flippant humor (“a lot of tiara functions, which left the head sore”). She wrote effusively, with simple descriptions of what she was doing and how she was feeling at a given moment, sprinkled with an “occasional spelling or grammatical mistake or a crossing-out,” according to her former employer Mary Robertson. “One winced when one got letters sometimes,” said a longtime friend. “She wrote ‘lots of love,’ with little smiles inside the o’s for hugs. The little faces were a trademark, and the words were slightly archaic.” Nevertheless, her letters could be entertaining, full of charm, and often touching.

  If their letters reflected sharply divergent personalities, Charles and Diana provoked even more striking reactions in people who met them. Charles tended to be more rigid and programmed, especially when he was with Diana. He sometimes appeared uncomfortable, while she seemed at ease anywhere. His charm was quiet and contained, while she had the glow, the magic, the magnetism, the energy, and the spontaneity. Charles used to notice that, after he left a party, the noise level immediately rose. “What happened after I went?” he would frequently ask. “The real point of Diana is that when she walked into a room, she lifted the temperature,” said one of her longtime friends. “The general rule in England is when a royal arrives at a party it goes stone dead, but she put all the men on their mettle and they began performing.”

  The basic polarities between Charles and Diana showed a clash of attitudes and values, but in some areas they did find common ground: Diana had grown up with classical music and developed a love of opera, and she came to share Charles’s interest in alternative medicine as well. In other ways, the couple had the potential to learn from each other and find compromises. Long after their marriage had broken up, Diana told friends that she and Charles could have made an “amazing team.” “They had strengths and weaknesses she was aware of,” said film producer David Puttnam. “She felt they could have made a good team because of their complementary abilities.” But their different temperaments—Diana’s persistent suspicion, insecurity, possessiveness, and unpredictability set against Charles’s inability to cope with her problems and his continuing need to be nurtured—proved too great an obstacle.

  Throughout 1984, the press promoted the fairy-tale marriage by seeking evidence of harmony, such as the “lingering look and quick kiss” at a polo match on their third wedding anniversary. In an assessment headlined DI OF A THOUSAND DAYS, Judy Wade of The Sun declared in April that Diana “leads conversations … and if anything, dominates the discussion with Charles.” This was patent nonsense, as Andrew Neil, the editor of The Sunday Times, discovered when he and the editor of The Times, Charles Douglas-Home (a cousin of Diana’s), had lunch with the Waleses that month at Kensington Palace. “It was clear the royal couple had very little in common,” wrote Neil. “Charles roamed far and wide on the issues of the day.… Diana played little part in the conversation.… Charles made no attempt to involve her.”

  Neil tried to draw out Diana by noting that she had attended a Dire Straits concert the previous evening. “Then she got animated,” recalled Neil. The only other time she chipped in was when they talked about Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s coming visit to London. Diana called Reagan a “Horlicks,” a Sloane-Ranger term for a boring old person, and she said Nancy Reagan was only interested in being photographed with the royal family. “That surprised me a bit,” said Neil. “She was bitter in her comments.”

  Diana withdrew from public activities in July, and the royal couple left for their annual Balmoral visit in late August. She was jolted by the suicide of her uncle Edmund Fermoy that month at age forty-five, and she wept openly at his memorial service. Only days later, when Charles drove off into the Highlands for a fishing trip, Diana breezily wrote to a friend, “Can’t stand being away from him, in case I lay my egg.” Although these were her “dark ages,” the summer months before Harry’s birth were also the time when Diana later said she and Charles were closer than they had ever been.

  Nevertheless, Diana incongruously failed to share one vital fact with her husband. Ever since Diana’s ultrasound the previous April, she had known she was carrying a boy, but she kept the sex of their child a secret. (Both Diana and Charles had been quoted in the press that spring as wanting a girl: Diana said she was “hoping” for one, and Charles said it “would be nice” to have a girl.) “Diana said that all the royal family always had a boy and then a girl,” said a former courtier. “She had it in her mind he wanted a girl, and she kept it from him that she was having a boy. She was obsessed about it.”

  Diana was still preoccupied by Camilla as well—a fixation that had become a permanent part of the marital dynamic. Over the years, Diana contradicted herself so frequently regarding her suspicions about her husband that it is nearly impossible to know what she was thinking at any given time. She variously said she believed that Charles never stopped seeing Camilla, that he cynically went back to Camilla after the royal wedding, and that she actually agreed with Charles that the affair with Camilla had resumed in 1986 after the Wales marriage had “irretrievably broken down.” In discussing the birth of their second child, Diana told Andrew Morton: “By then I knew he had gone back to his lady, but somehow we’d managed to have Harry.”

  The conflicting messages sent by Diana to Charles grew even more complicated after the arrival of Henry Charles Albert David on September 15. Diana later said she was shocked by the disappointment she heard in Charles’s voice when he said, “Oh God, it’s a boy,” followed by, “and he’s even got red hair.” At that moment, said Diana, “something inside me closed off.… It just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.” Yet a man close to Charles said Diana had gravely misinterpreted the moment: “To have said something like that in disgust or dismay was not in his character. He may have squealed ‘Ooooohhh, red hair,’ teasingly. But when he was told about this at the time of the Morton book, he was horrified by the interpretation.”

  Friends of Charles and Diana viewed Diana’s “closed off” remark to mean the end of their sexual relationship. “She said [the marriage] all went badly wrong after Harry’s birth,” said a friend of Diana’s. “She always maintained to me she didn’t know why.” Yet a friend of Charles said that he didn’t spurn Diana after Harry’s birth. “That simply doesn’t square with the available evidence,” s
aid the friend. “By this point, there was practically nothing anyone could do to make her feel her needs were being met. With her problems, mere demonstrations of kindness and trying to make it right would not have been enough.”

  Chapter 12

  Alight may have switched off in Diana, but it was by no means clear that the marriage had fallen apart. Rather, the relationship seemed to enter a downward drift, hastened along by hostile press coverage. Charles continued to try to cope with Diana’s mystifying volatility. She moved between shadow and light, her despairing mood punctuated by periods of deceptive calm. Her “interludes of happiness” were usually brought on by her two sons, whose antics caused her to shriek with laughter. At other times, Diana disintegrated over imagined slights or critical headlines in the morning tabloids.

  As far as the public knew, Diana had adjusted to royal life and settled into her role as wife and mother. As The Sunday Telegraph reported, “Professional Diana-watchers will tell you that 1984 was really the year when the princess became her own woman, knowing just who she is and how to cope with the phenomenal pressures upon her.” While Diana’s carefree public appearances were little more than performances, her fondness for motherhood was genuine. Her hairstylist Kevin Shanley arrived several days after Harry’s birth to find her “in such good form … overjoyed with Harry.” With William she had stopped breast-feeding after only three weeks, but with Harry she continued for nearly three months.

  Nor did she suffer a debilitating postnatal depression, partly because she resumed a busy schedule of public engagements in November, visiting centers for the deaf and blind, inspecting a new preschool playground, and christening a cruise liner. She seemed determined to hold herself together. She rose early, took a daily swim, seldom went out in the evenings, and got to bed early.

  Yet her insecurity about Charles appeared to intensify. A few of Charles’s friends became alarmed by the degree to which she demanded his constant presence, and they worried, as Dimbleby described it, that “she sought to possess him, but only in order to reject him.” At Diana’s insistence, Charles had already curtailed his hunting and shooting; during the previous year’s shooting season, from October through January, he left his guns at home, and he went fox-hunting only occasionally, compared to a twice-weekly routine before his marriage. Contrary to the popular tabloid theory, Diana’s objection to these pursuits wasn’t a philosophical opposition to “blood sports”; rather, she found them tiresome to watch, and she resented the amount of time they took Charles away from her.

  Diana disliked polo as well. She considered the sport rough and boring—an antipathy that deepened on the day Charles brought her home from the hospital with Harry, then left to play a game at Windsor. Despite Diana’s hostility, Charles stubbornly kept up with the game, which he once said was “very important to my physical and mental well-being, and makes me feel incredibly well afterward … one of the best ways I know, aside from my painting … of forgetting the pressures and complications of life. It’s the intense concentration required that is, funnily enough, what makes it so relaxing.”

  After Harry’s birth, Diana asked Charles to cut back his official calendar to be at home more with the boys. Diana even advised the starchy Edward Adeane that he shouldn’t expect to meet with Charles in the early mornings—when the private secretary had been accustomed to working undisturbed with Charles—because her husband needed to be in the nursery. Adeane took a dim view of her communiqué but did not protest. Although Charles felt guilty about shirking his public duties, he went along with Diana’s wishes.

  As a result, Charles drew closer to both of his boys. Diana later said that Charles had enjoyed helping to care for his young sons, feeding them bottles and playing with them, and that he had done these tasks well. Inevitably, the eagle-eyed tabloids began to chart Charles’s absences from the public arena. They kept a running tally based on the “Court Circular” page at the back of each day’s Times and Telegraph: listings of the day’s appearances by members of the royal family. Periodically, the tabloids published a scorecard to compare the royals’ relative devotion to duty. When Charles came up with only fifteen engagements during a three-month period, compared with fifty-six for his indefatigable sister, Anne, the tabloids didn’t hesitate to point out his shortcomings. Anne’s “peak of royal productivity,” noted the Daily Express, “has coincided with her brother’s sizable withdrawal from the royal round” because of “his desire to spend as much time as possible with his children.”

  In early January, Edward Adeane abruptly resigned, and the press unfairly tarred Diana as the reason. Adeane’s friends, reported the Daily Express, “are in no doubt that it is the Princess of Wales who drove him out of royal service.” The razor-tongued Nigel Dempster proclaimed Charles “so wet you could shoot a duck off his back” and said Diana had “every single opportunity of becoming a first-class bitch.” Adeane’s discomfort with Diana was a contributing factor, but the resignation was actually precipitated by a philosophical difference with Charles. Adeane had been accustomed to obedience when he advised the Prince to avoid controversy in his role, but Charles wanted to voice his unconventional views on important issues such as urban planning, an outspokenness that Adeane couldn’t abide.

  Two weeks later, Diana stormed off the ski slope in Liechtenstein after she became annoyed with photographers during a prearranged picture session. “I’ll get it in the neck for this,” Charles mumbled. Andrew Morton stitched together Adeane’s firing, Diana’s snit, and Charles’s new image as a househusband and produced an article asking if Charles was a “dithering wimp” at the mercy of “his diamond-hard wife”—a “royal mouse” or a “Thoroughly Modern Man.” After trotting out the circumstantial evidence, Morton concluded that “while Diana has the upper hand on the home front, Charles is firmly in the driving seat in the official royal world.” Contrary to the impression of weakness, Morton said Charles had “iron in his soul” and was in fact “a mouse that roars.”

  Other tabloids saw the relationship differently, with one calling Diana “the real ruler” and Charles “a thoroughly henpecked husband.” The Sun said that Diana was a “prima donna,” and a “woman of steel” who didn’t “seem to give a damn” if she humiliated her husband in public. “No man can have tried harder to please a woman,” Harry Arnold and Judy Wade wrote. “She must allow the man who will one day rule the country to rule the roost.”

  In April 1985, the royal couple spent two weeks in Italy, where the crowds thronged to glimpse Diana, and the Italian press covered her relentlessly. Charles was transported by what he called Italy’s “great flights of human spirit,” and the Daily Mail optimistically predicted that the trip would make Diana “more of a companion to Charles in the intellectual sense.” Diana, however, was less than enthralled, though she hid her lack of interest behind her poise and her smiles. Touring a garden in Florence, Charles spotted Diana walking toward an archway and shouted, “Mind your head.” “Why?” Diana cracked. “There’s nothing in it.” Charles found himself resenting Diana’s popularity, but he buried his insecurity in the beauty of the art and architecture around him.

  Before the Waleses left England, the tabloids had speculated about the small fortune Diana was spending on her wardrobe for the Italian trip. Then, when she wore too many familiar outfits, the press called her “secondhand Rosa.” The Italian fashion critics declared her “unsophisticated,” especially her collection of what one commentator called “heinous hats.” But the public, primarily women, couldn’t get enough of Diana’s procession of new looks. She was like a paper doll come to life, playing dress-up to feed women’s fantasies.

  As the press and public came to view her as a fashion avatar, she indulged in ever-more daring surprises—an ankle-length fuchsia, pink, and turquoise silk dress in the style of a dressing gown, a silver lamé dress that upstaged Joan Collins’s, a specially altered black dinner jacket from Charles’s closet, a backless dress with a string of pearls “the wrong way round,
” and one of her most dramatic inspirations: a $3 million emerald-and-diamond choker that she wore across her forehead as an Indian-style headband. “She would go out and do things to court press attention,” a former Palace adviser said, “whether it was wearing something new and outrageous rather than an old dress, there would be something flashy and different and stylish. She knew how to play it.”

  These stunts attracted applause, but they also created a perception of frivolity and exhibitionism. “Being a princess, even if you marry into the royal dynasty, means more than creating an image,” huffed The Times. Diana grew more insecure and ambivalent about how she was perceived, even complaining to her friend Roberto Devorik when she was complimented for being beautiful or chic. “She said, ‘Why don’t they say what a beautiful human being I am?’ ” he recalled.

  In all the hullabaloo that winter and spring, the press missed an important development in the life of Diana and Charles: the quiet departure on January 1 of Charles’s aide Michael Colborne after ten years of service. Colborne had been a solid support to both Waleses, mainly because he knew how to be responsive without overstepping the invisible royal barrier, especially with Diana. But his position inevitably made him a referee between warring parties, which sapped his enthusiasm for the job. The turning point had actually come during the Canada trip in mid-1983.

  One day, when Charles was out on his official rounds, Diana remained behind on the Britannia and asked Colborne to meet her. She was lonely and wanted his company—a role he had played many times to keep her calm. After completing some arrangements for Charles, Colborne spent the afternoon with Diana. When Charles returned, he summoned Colborne to his cabin and exploded in anger, accusing his trusted aide of giving short shrift to princely needs. Charles wouldn’t be mollified by Colborne’s explanation that assisting Diana was in everyone’s best interests. When Charles ended his outburst, he opened the door to find a tearful Diana eavesdropping.