Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Although Charles later apologized, Colborne decided he could not continue. He was pained by Charles’s “stress and disruption,” while Diana’s behavior “seemed something out of a nightmare, beyond all reason and out of control.” Colborne resigned in April 1984, but Charles and Diana persuaded him to remain until after the birth of their second child. “To both of them, my resignation was a bit hard,” Colborne said. “I didn’t realize it was going to upset him so much, and when she saw me going, she had the two children, her engagement calendar was filling up, and she couldn’t change him. She could see what was happening. She could see her future.”

  By mid-1985, the word was spreading in aristocratic circles that the gloomy reports about the Wales marriage were more than just tabloid tittle-tattle. Princess Michael of Kent, a neighbor of the Waleses in Kensington Palace, was known for her indiscretion as well as her powers of observation. She also had an ax to grind, since Diana had supplanted her as the most glamorous royal. During an event at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Princess Michael unloaded some intelligence on museum director Roy Strong that took him aback. She called Diana a “catastrophe” and expressed pity for “poor Prince Charles, who had bought Highgrove to be near his former girlfriends. Nothing was happy. Diana was hard. There was no pulling together, no common objectives, and it was misery for him.… And Diana has become a media queen, which only makes it worse.” Charles, Princess Michael told Strong, was “increasingly isolated, the Queen is withdrawn.” With some prescience, she characterized Diana as a “time bomb.”

  Fed by leaks from assorted staffers, the tabloids kept dancing around the edges of the unraveling Wales marriage. The first serious doubts about the marriage were raised, ironically enough, by an American publication, Vanity Fair. Because the article was written by Tina Brown, then the magazine’s British-born editor in chief, it attracted instant attention back home. Essentially, the article pulled together themes that had run through the tabloids earlier in the year, added new information and provocative interpretation, and presented it all in a glossy package. Titled “The Mouse That Roared,” the story turned Andrew Morton’s earlier portrayal on its head, declaring Diana, not Charles, the “iron mouse,” and concluding, “the heir to the throne is, it seems, pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” The article noted Diana’s “obsession with her image” and cautioned that her “adversary mood toward the press” was “the first stage in the removal from life that fame inflicts. The second stage is ‘Graceland,’ when the real world melts away altogether. There is a danger that this has started to happen to Diana.”

  Buckingham Palace dismissed the story as “nonsense,” and the tabloids predictably jumped on “snobby Vanity Fair” for its “astonishing,” “amazing,” and “horrid” attack, all the while meticulously detailing the particulars. The Daily Mirror, while denouncing the “ratbag of gossip,” conceded that “parts of it are very plausible, and it’s all too easy to believe.” The News of the World insisted that Charles was not a “royal wimp,” but added its own evidence of further tension in the marriage. In the end, recalled Deidre Fernand, former royal correspondent for The Times, “ ‘The Mouse That Roared’ had an impact, but people thought it wasn’t true, just bitchy New York gossip.”

  Charles and Diana were sufficiently stung that they felt compelled to respond in a much-anticipated television program shown in late October. The program had been in the works since the previous summer, when Palace courtiers decided it was time for the couple to give an extensive interview to counteract stories circulating about their marriage; a companion documentary to be broadcast a year later would include footage of the couple at home and at work. The 1985 interview, conducted by Sir Alastair Burnet, touched on topics ranging from their public duties to their press coverage, from Charles’s eccentricities to Diana’s eating habits and taste in fashion.

  Diana was almost phobic about public speaking, so Charles enlisted film director Richard Attenborough to coach her. (Earlier in the year, when asked to introduce a campaign on drug abuse education she got so tangled she could only blurt, “Oh, gosh … well … er … fingers crossed.”) Attenborough worked with Diana on how to move while on camera, how to sit attentively while being questioned, and how to speak slowly and clearly. To calm her nerves, Burnet gave Diana a full rehearsal.

  Sitting side by side on a silk sofa, Diana and Charles appeared confident and charming before a television audience of 20 million. When asked if she had been hurt by the malicious reports on their private life, Diana looked directly at the camera and spoke revealingly of her anxieties: “Well, obviously. You feel very wounded. You think, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t want to go out and do my engagement this morning. Nobody wants to see me, help, panic.’ But you have got to push yourself out.” Regarding the charge that she ruled the roost, Diana pleaded not guilty, admitting only to being a “perfectionist with myself but not necessarily with everyone else.” To dispel her image as a trendy airhead, she insisted that “my clothes are not my priority,” though she admitted, “sometimes I can be a little outrageous.” She also said, “I’m never on what’s called a diet.… Maybe I’m so scrawny because I take so much exercise.” Diana’s most important role, she said, was “supporting my husband whenever I can and always being behind him, and also most important, being a mother and a wife.”

  Charles admitted to “becoming more eccentric as I get older,” but said his interest in alternative medicine reflected his desire to be “open-minded.” He responded most forcefully to critics of his effort to voice his outspoken views on architecture. The previous year he had given a speech blasting the “monstrous carbuncle” proposed as an addition to the National Gallery—a vivid metaphor that led to a highly praised replacement design. “I just feel sometimes, not too often,” he said, “I can throw a rock into a pond and watch the ripples create a certain amount of discussion and hopefully to see whether something better can come out.”

  Both Prince and Princess showed flashes of self-deprecating humor, Diana when she defended the size of her wardrobe for foreign tours by saying, “I couldn’t go round in a leopard skin,” and Charles by calling himself an “ancient old thing.” When Diana said she was learning sign language to communicate with the deaf, Charles interjected, “I shall look forward to her teaching me. She says I am deaf anyway.”

  There was only one glimmer of mild irritation, when Burnet asked if they argued. “I suspect that most husbands and wives find they often have arguments,” Charles admitted. “But we don’t,” countered Diana. “Occasionally we do,” Charles insisted. “No, we don’t,” she said. The exchange was described as a “friendly tiff” by the Daily Mail, but Diana’s insistent denial of such an obvious truth seemed peculiar.

  Compared with her awkward, monosyllabic demeanor in the engagement interview, Diana appeared poised and articulate; if anything, she was slightly more voluble than her husband. All the tabloids awarded them high marks and drew extravagant conclusions about the state of the marriage. “What a smashing royal couple they are,” James Whitaker wrote in the Daily Mirror. “There is no kinder, more considerate person in the world than Prince Charles.” The Sun declared, as if it were July 1981 all over again: “Di and Charles are so very much in love.”

  After their television triumph, the couple took another overseas tour, returning to Australia and visiting the United States for the first time. Charles and Diana gazed at each other as they danced to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” in Melbourne. In Washington and Palm Beach, their dance partners stole the show: John Travolta and Clint Eastwood with Diana at the White House and Joan Collins with Charles in Florida (“unbelievable cleavage…. Eye wander was a problem!” he wrote to a friend).

  One of the more poignant moments in the Wales marriage occurred in late December, during the Christmas benefit for the Friends of Covent Garden at the Royal Opera House. The annual variety show featured Covent Garden performers doing offbeat singing, dancing, and theatrical routines. The previous year, Cha
rles had made an engaging appearance as Romeo in a Shakespeare vignette, and this year, Diana had decided to surprise him by showing her own talent. “She was trying to please him,” one of her friends recalled, “to make him proud of her.” In October she contacted dancer Wayne Sleep, who at five foot two was eight inches shorter than Diana, and asked him to choreograph a duet with her to the Billy Joel song “Uptown Girl.”

  Diana secretly rehearsed the routine, and at a designated time on the night of the benefit, she excused herself from the royal box. She changed from her red velvet gown into a clingy, low-cut white satin dress and appeared onstage with her diminutive partner as the audience gasped. Their four-minute number drew applause at every step. Although Diana towered over Sleep, at one point he lifted her above his head and carried her twenty feet across the stage. Covent Garden photographer Reg Wilson called Diana’s performance “provocative and sensuous.… She kept looking up at Charles. There was an enormous sense of fun between the two of them.” Charles was stunned, but he smiled and clapped enthusiastically through the eight curtain calls. Afterward, Charles told Sleep that Diana was a “terrific” dancer, but privately, he had been discomfited by Diana’s Salome routine. “He was perhaps a little concerned about the decorum and felt she should have worn something different. The dress was a bit slinky,” a friend of the couple said. “She was trying hard to impress him, but possibly it backfired.”

  In 1985, the Waleses still presented a united public front—even carrying on with playful kisses after polo matches—but they now seldom socialized together. From the earliest days of their marriage, Diana had shown little enthusiasm for entertaining, primarily because she lacked confidence as a hostess. Diana tended to avoid people who seemed too clever. She took to complaining about the “heavies,” the Foreign Office and political types who dutifully talked to her about issues when she landed next to them at dinner. Her self-consciousness in unfamiliar settings even extended to children’s parties. “She would hardly bother to say hello to the mothers,” one of her friends said. “If she was in a good mood she would talk to the nannies and play with the children. If in a bad mood, she would just play with the children.”

  Diana and Charles began showing the first signs of following different paths in their private lives. Diana appeared at several parties on her own, where she seemed visibly more relaxed than in her husband’s company. At one weekend house party with old friends, she danced until four A.M. Afterward, the host, a captain in the Coldstream Guards named Richard Clowes, was reported to say that Diana “was in sparkling form.” Charles had also resumed seeing his exiled friends, including Nicholas Soames, the Brabournes, Romseys, Palmer-Tomkinsons, and even Kanga Tryon. The rapprochement with Kanga conspicuously included Diana, who gave her blessing with a visit to the clothing boutique Kanga owned on Beauchamp Place, where she bought several dresses. Before long, the two women were spotted having lunch together. Diana may well have had an ulterior motive, since Kanga was known to be “blue with jealousy for Camilla” in her rivalry for attention from Charles, said London interior designer Nicholas Haslam. “Camilla had a fallout with Kanga during the eighties,” said Sun journalist Stuart Higgins, who spoke to Camilla regularly.

  At some point in 1985—it is impossible to know precisely—Diana decided to look beyond Charles for affection and support. In the late spring, a new bodyguard had come aboard, Sergeant Barry Mannakee. He was an unlikely prospect for romance: slightly plump, with thinning brown hair and a working-class background. But he had a jocular personality, and he put Diana instantly at ease. She first drew close to him when he comforted her during bouts of weeping and depression. He described to another staff member how she had collapsed in tears before making a public appearance, insisting she couldn’t go through with it. He had no choice, he said, but to embrace and soothe her so she would stop crying and pull herself together.

  Diana came to rely on his compassion, and she looked to him for approval when she was feeling uncertain. She often asked him how she looked: whether, for example, her jewelry was becoming or her dress flattering. He poured on the compliments, usually with an amused grin, and in front of the other staff they bantered about “fancying” each other. Diana flirted with him, listened to him attentively, and shared private jokes with him. Eventually they became intimate, and Diana was often alone with him at Kensington Palace, when she would dismiss the rest of the staff.

  Diana was so smitten that a decade later she told Anthony Holden, a biographer of her husband, that Mannakee had been “the love of my life,” the same words she had used to describe Charles in conversations with a few close friends. As Charles had already learned, involvement with Diana meant submitting to her overpowering possessiveness. In her fear of rejection, she believed that if she didn’t have someone’s total attention, she couldn’t count on him at all. Barry Mannakee was married and had two children, and although he sympathized with her neediness, he couldn’t give her the constant support she wanted. “Once it began, [Mannakee] was very distraught about being caught up with her,” a friend of Charles’s said. “She was so intense, and he found it very difficult to handle.”

  The relationship between the guard and the guarded is, by definition, unusual, especially for a woman employing a male security officer. “It is intense and strange,” a friend of Diana’s explained. “The bodyguards knew the most personal things. They went with her to the dentist, and the doctor, and to Marks and Spencer to buy knickers and bras.” For that reason, their tenure was usually limited to four or five years, when they were reassigned by Scotland Yard to traditional police duties.

  When Barry Mannakee was suddenly transferred to another job in July 1986 after scarcely a year, the staff speculated that he and Diana had become “too close,” as one courtier described it. Mannakee had been warned by the senior protection officer, Colin Trimming, that his familiarity with Diana was unseemly, and he should put an end to it. Mannakee couldn’t control Diana’s behavior, however, and every time she spoke an endearment to him or gave him an affectionate squeeze, Trimming took note. Given the pressure Mannakee was feeling from Diana, his reassignment was for the best, because it defused a hopeless—and potentially explosive—situation. Nevertheless, Diana was disheartened by his transfer.

  For all the signs of familiarity witnessed by the staff, Charles knew nothing of Diana’s involvement with Mannakee at the time and only learned about it some years later. He was by nature incurious about such matters, in typical royal fashion. “I don’t want to spy on [Diana] or interfere in her life in any way,” Charles wrote to a friend. Consequently, another friend said, “It is absolutely untrue that there was any cause and effect regarding his going back to Camilla. He went back to her for completely different reasons.”

  On the question of why Charles resumed his romance with Camilla, Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography is considered definitive. According to former courtiers, Charles read the book line by line before its 1994 publication, as did his private secretary Richard Aylard, who checked all the facts. The book is indisputably Charles’s perception of events, with some shadings by Dimbleby.

  By this account, Charles felt after five years that his marriage was beyond repair. Instead of diminishing, Diana’s rages intensified: “There appeared to be a terrible conflict inside her that would suddenly erupt in anger or grief. As her public prestige soared, she grew correspondingly anguished in private.” Worn down by Diana’s ragged emotions, Charles finally gave up: “There was no specific incident that precipitated the end of the Prince’s effort to hold his marriage together; it collapsed gradually.… By 1986 their marriage had begun slowly to disintegrate.”

  The most visible evidence that Charles had, according to Dimbleby, “started to withdraw the support which … had drained his reserves of sympathy and compassion” came during their tour of Canada and Japan in May 1986. Diana had virtually no appetite and seemed unusually tense; Charles was more brooding than ever. Picking up signs of their disaffection, the Canadian
press had turned hostile, calling Charles “bat ears” and accusing Diana of having a “plastic smile.” Diana and Charles were visiting an exhibition in Vancouver when Diana suddenly fainted. As she slid to the floor, she was caught by two men on her staff, who helped her into a nearby room to be revived by a physician and several aides. “I didn’t know anything about fainting,” Diana said, although by her own admission she had fainted numerous times during pregnancy.

  Diana later spoke bitterly of Charles’s insensitivity: “My husband told me off,” she said, when he rebuked her for not withdrawing to a private room when she began feeling faint. She also said he insisted she go out later in the evening to avoid speculation that she might be seriously ill. While Charles’s behavior didn’t strike their aides as blatantly cruel, they did detect, in the words of a former Palace official, “for the first time a real lack of sympathy. It was obvious that something had gone from the relationship. He wasn’t that caring, and he had been before.”

  The Waleses’ domestic staff also noticed a new chill. “Even together,” Dimbleby wrote, “they were apart.” Diana and Charles had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some time, and they kept different hours as well, she retiring early, he staying up late, listening to opera and doing paperwork. Now, when Diana fled to her room from the breakfast table in tears, Charles declined to follow. They arrived at Highgrove in separate cars; Charles would come a day early and depart on Mondays, while Diana would leave with the boys on Sunday afternoons, often weeping so hard she could scarcely say good-bye. After an altercation with Charles, she would retreat into silence for several days, or she might blister members of her staff in frustration. Sometimes Diana slammed the door in Charles’s face or called him names. At other times, she would unexpectedly run to embrace him while he was busy in his garden; when he didn’t reciprocate immediately, she would retreat in despair. Small wonder that the staff took to shouting “storm stations” or “hard hats” when they sensed trouble coming.