Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  At the nadir of his “desperation,” Charles wrote to a friend in 1986, “I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage … longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is.… This extraordinary drama has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy.” In his paroxysms of introspection, Charles blamed himself for the failure. “I never thought it would end up like this,” he wrote to a friend. “How could I have got it all so wrong?”

  Charles turned to Camilla at that point because, according to Dimbleby, she offered “the warmth, the understanding and steadiness” that “he had never been able to find with any other person.” For her part, Camilla was still coping unhappily with her chronically unfaithful husband, and still in love with Charles. The relationship rekindled with telephone calls, which led to Camilla’s visits to Highgrove, typically with her husband or other friends of Charles: “The opportunities to be alone with each other for any length of time were infrequent. That they loved each other was not in any doubt.”

  Had Camilla simply disappeared from Charles’s life, she might have faded from his imagination. But one of the odd consequences of jealousy is its elevation of the object of that jealousy. With her constant complaints and questions, Diana kept Camilla in Charles’s thoughts. He was married to a woman beloved by the entire world, yet she was fixated on a rival who was older and less beautiful, as if she saw something in Camilla that Charles had missed.

  Charles understood the extent of Diana’s obsession; Camilla had become the “canker” in his marriage. Yet Charles took up with Camilla, well aware that the relationship could cripple Diana’s tenuous hold on stability once she figured out the situation—as she surely would. Charles knew all too well that Diana had good antennae, and that she eavesdropped and opened mail. Perhaps Charles believed he had no other options, but his decision to resume his intimacy with Camilla took him down a dangerous path.

  It wasn’t long before Diana confirmed her long-standing suspicions. In her somewhat cryptic answers on Panorama, she said that in 1986 she had “knowledge” of Charles and Camilla “from people who minded and cared about our marriage.” The household at Highgrove had caught on fairly quickly. Only the security officers knew at the outset, but other staff understood their boss’s destination when he went out on Sunday nights for dinner. He dispatched his loyal manservant Paddy Whiteland to deliver notes, flowers, chocolates, and other gifts to Camilla’s home, and Camilla’s housekeeper kept a tally of Charles’s visits, which she passed on to the Highgrove groom.

  Diana also said she noticed “the change of behavior pattern in [her] husband, for all sorts of reasons that a woman’s instinct produces.… It was already difficult, but it became increasingly difficult.” Although Diana didn’t yet mention Camilla by name, she began voicing her unhappiness. “It was into the mid-eighties before she started talking,” one friend recalled. “In 1986, it was mostly the lack of ability to communicate with Charles or get the sympathy and understanding she needed.” When Diana first met astrologer Penny Thornton that March, she referred to Charles’s affair with “a certain woman.” Diana contacted Thornton at a moment, she said later, when she felt “I’ve got to get out. I can’t bear it any longer.” Around this time Charles wrote to a friend about Diana’s unhappiness: “It’s agony to know that someone is hating it all so much. It seems so unfair to her.”

  Diana told Thornton she wanted to escape “the whole royal ‘setup,’ ” but Thornton dissuaded her from leaving. After reading Diana’s chart and talking with her for four hours at Kensington Palace, Thornton advised Diana to stop “berating Charles for seeing another woman” and to “make a friend of her opposition.” Her advice was sensible though futile, given Diana’s mental state, but she did succeed in defusing the crisis. Later that evening, Thornton heard from Sarah Ferguson, who had introduced her to Diana, that Prince Charles was grateful for her help. It turned out that Diana had packed her bags that morning before meeting with Thornton.

  Diana’s certain knowledge of Charles’s affair with Camilla was “pretty devastating,” she later said. Her bulimia became “rampant,” and she was consumed with “a feeling of being no good at anything and being useless and hopeless and failed in every direction.” She would later confide to one of her future lovers, James Hewitt, that she had been “terrified” that her bulimia would be discovered when she fainted in Vancouver. On a holiday that summer with King Juan Carlos of Spain and his family, Diana felt exhausted and “spent my whole time with my head down the loo.” She recalled feeling resentful of Charles because the king and his wife Sofia “were all so busy thinking Charles was the most wonderful creature … and who was this girl coming along?” Showing further evidence of confusion about her identity, she recalled knowing “there was something inside me that wasn’t coming out, and I didn’t know how to use it, in the sense of letting them see it.” At Balmoral afterward, Diana’s new sister-in-law Fergie couldn’t help noticing Diana’s disturbing symptoms: “She was teary and reclusive and out of sorts.”

  When Diana had her portrait painted that summer, she was vibrating with tension. Sitting periodically for portraits was a ritual for every member of the royal family, and Diana had already been painted seven times in the five years since her marriage. In early 1986, Richard Foster had spent sixteen hours painting her and had found her surprisingly uncertain about the sort of image she should project. Only months later, Diana was posing again, six one-hour sessions with Emily Patrick, who was disconcerted by Diana. “She was tense down to the very nails,” Patrick recalled. “She never stopped moving … and she always wanted to talk about dieting.” To Patrick’s trained eye, it was obvious “Diana was uncomfortable with herself and was hiding so much it was difficult to do a good portrait”—a problem encountered by other artists as well.

  Perhaps it was Camilla, or the reassignment of Barry Mannakee, but by the summer of 1986, Diana had relapsed into her most acute symptoms. Sometime during that period, by Diana’s account, “after five years of being married,” she was visited by her sister Jane (a Kensington Palace neighbor) “to check on me.” The previous evening, during a fight with Charles, Diana had grabbed a penknife off his dressing table and “scratched myself heavily down my chest and both thighs.” Although there was “a lot of blood,” Diana claimed Charles “hadn’t made any reaction whatsoever.” When Jane inquired about the marks on Diana’s chest, Diana replied, “Oh, it’s nothing,” and when Jane pressed, “What is it?” Diana still wouldn’t tell her.

  Diana was all of twenty-five years old, and had been exhibiting signs of mental illness for more than five years. As in the autumn of 1981 and 1982, this was a moment when it was vital for someone to intervene and find a long-term treatment for Diana, yet there was no evidence of such an effort by Charles or anyone else. According to Diana, after fainting in Canada, she had confided in the doctor about her bulimia. But she recalled that he couldn’t help her because he didn’t understand the severity of her problems. Instead, she said, “he just gave me a pill and shut me up.” A footman at Balmoral reported that a psychiatrist visited Diana a few times that September, after fights between the Waleses had grown particularly fierce. But again, Diana’s immediate family and in-laws appeared incapable of dealing with her situation.

  Diana suspected Charles’s friends of conspiring against her, and she feared being sent away for treatment—a reasonable course of action, given the severity of her symptoms. “Friends on my husband’s side were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better,” she recalled. In her view, their intention was only to “dismantle” her personality by isolating it.

  Luckily for Charles and Diana, the media spotlight during much of 1986 turned to the July wedding of his younger brother Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, known to all as Fergie. Their romance had begun in June 1985 when the Queen invited Sarah to join her Windsor house party for Ascot. Diana had suggested Fergie to the Queen—Fergie later called her “matchmaker Diana”—an
d ensured that Sarah was seated next to Andrew at lunch. Fergie was exuberant, even boisterous, which appealed to Andrew, who was noisy but somewhat passive. Their courtship proceeded quietly, abetted by Diana and Charles, who invited Sarah to Highgrove, Kensington Palace, and skiing in Klosters. When Andrew proposed to Sarah in February 1986, Diana was delighted. With her own marriage fraying, Diana was eager for a sympathetic contemporary inside the palace.

  After five years of family gatherings at Sandringham, Balmoral, and Windsor, Diana’s dealings with the royals ranged from cordial to unsatisfactory. She once said that the royal family sucked her dry, and that her in-laws put her under such stress that her bulimia invariably worsened when she was around them.

  Diana had settled into a correct if not overly warm relationship with the Queen, though she felt uncomfortable with Prince Philip, whom she called “The Greek” behind his back. (Diana’s irreverence even extended occasionally to the Queen, when she would refer to her as “Brenda,” Private Eye’s nickname, when joking with friends.) Philip, who had an eye for beautiful women, was enchanted by Diana at first. “I remember a party for Prince Philip when the Waleses came in late,” recalled a friend of the royal family. “Diana greeted Philip and they lingered holding hands. I thought, ‘How lovely.’ It couldn’t have been put on.” Philip eventually became disenchanted with Diana’s behavior and considered her difficult.

  From the beginning, Diana was unnerved by the Queen Mother, for several reasons: her closeness to Ruth Fermoy, who Diana said “tried to lacerate me”; the Queen Mother’s complete devotion to Prince Charles, which caused tension as the Wales marriage grew more estranged; and her long-standing friendship with the Parker Bowles family. “[Charles’s] grandmother is always looking at me with a sort of strange look in her eyes,” Diana once said. “It’s not hatred. It’s a sort of interest and pity mixed in one.… She’s sort of fascinated by me, but doesn’t quite know how to unravel it.”

  Despite the Queen Mother’s image as a plump, smiling matron, she was tough, sharp-tongued, and smart. “The Queen Mother has a big heart,” a friend of the royal family said, “but she is very rigid about many things. She believes if you marry into the royal family you have to act a certain way, you have to carry on, you have to be in control all the time, you cannot show your feelings.” When Diana failed to measure up in each of these important areas, she lost the Queen Mother’s support.

  Diana’s most sympathetic in-law was the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, whom Diana called “Margo.” To some extent, Diana identified with her aunt by marriage. As a young woman in 1955, Margaret had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, who, like Wallis Simpson, was a divorcé. Ultimately, Margaret rejected Townsend as unsuitable, and the tabloids made much of her being forced to submerge her happiness for the sake of duty. When Margaret married photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon) several years later, they departed from the royal stereotype by leading a jet-set life with fashionable friends outside the British establishment. After eighteen years of marriage, Margaret and her husband divorced in 1978 on the grounds that their relationship had “irretrievably broken down.”

  “Diana related to Margaret because she was an unhappy person,” one of Diana’s friends said. Margaret was often prickly and demanding, but she could be teased into a good mood, and her friends attested to her loyalty. “Diana sometimes said Princess Margaret should have been her mother-in-law,” Diana’s friend Roberto Devorik said. “She admired the way Margaret had worked within a broken home. Diana knew Margaret was always in the shadow of her sister, but she was always a fighter.” Diana was also drawn to Margaret’s love of ballet and her waspish wit, and she got on well with Margaret’s two children, David Linley and Sarah Armstrong-Jones. Margaret, in turn, found Diana’s sense of humor appealing, and she was touched by the spontaneity of Diana’s affection.

  Among Charles’s siblings, Diana was most comfortable with Andrew. Behind his bluff demeanor, Diana said she sensed “something troubling” and felt he got “squashed” by his family. She related to him because his family “dismissed” him as an “idiot,” although Diana found him to be quite shrewd. While her assessment was close to the mark, Diana underestimated Andrew’s favored position with the Queen, who was enormously proud that he had served in the Falklands war as a naval officer.

  Edward, the youngest of the Windsor children, initially got on well with Diana, although they weren’t close. He was bright and sensitive, somewhat on the shy side, which Diana found attractive. Over time, however, they grew more distant, as Edward seemed to pull away from her when he felt that she was undermining the royal family.

  Diana had the trickiest relationship with Princess Anne, and the tabloids periodically set them up as rivals, even enemies. Anne’s failure to appear at Harry’s christening sparked great speculation about her reported “pique” at not being asked to be a godmother. Anne and Diana were certainly not close and seldom socialized, although Highgrove was only twenty minutes away from Anne’s country house. Diana and Anne had little in common. Anne was plain and unfashionable, a countrywoman who loved to ride. While Diana was secretive, insecure, and unpredictable, Anne was straightforward, confident, and consistent. As a young woman, Anne was considered contentious (her nickname in the press at one point was “Her Royal Rudeness”) and more concerned with horses than people, but she turned her image around by zeroing in on one cause, Save the Children, which became her life’s work.

  Anne became a professional and efficient princess who even wrote her own speeches. Diana admired Anne’s dedication, as well as her lively mind and independent spirit. Still, Diana admitted that she didn’t like to “rattle her cage” and tended to “keep out of her way.” When Diana’s glamour stole the headlines, it was often Anne whose good work was overlooked. For the most part, Anne kept her displeasure to herself, but once, when Anne had been tramping through farms in Ulster, Diana appeared that evening in a low-cut burgundy dress at a Barbican gala in London. The next day, Diana’s image was everywhere, and Anne was ignored in all papers except The Daily Telegraph, which noted on its fourteenth page: BOVINE SALUTE FOR PRINCESS ANNE IN ULSTER. By one account, Anne was “hopping mad and quite indiscreet in saying so.”

  Compared with the chill of Diana’s sister-in-law Anne, Sarah Ferguson was a warm breeze. Their friendship, however, would turn out to be particularly turbulent, even for Diana: a blur of giddy, girlish pranks, support and affection, deep jealousy, astonishing lapses of judgment, and unhealthy paranoia about Palace conspiracies against them. Fergie introduced Diana to new friends, as well as the world of astrologers, psychics, and alternative therapists. Their exploration of this territory came to define their relationship and delude them both. In the end, their destructive synergy had a profound impact on the Wales marriage. “I wonder what would have happened if Sarah had not been there,” a former Palace adviser said, “because the two of them were trying to break the system.”

  Diana was much more grand than Fergie, who characterized her background as “country gentry, with a bit of old money.” Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, came from “a long line of distinguished gentleman soldiers,” but he left the service to play polo, run the Guards Polo Club for Prince Philip, and eventually become Prince Charles’s polo manager. Fergie’s mother, the former Susan Wright, was from a well-established Irish family that once owned a large estate near Dublin.

  Despite the difference in their backgrounds, Fergie and Diana had one important thing in common: Besides being schoolmates, their mothers had both left their husbands for other men and had moved to distant locales, Fergie’s mother to Argentina with another polo player, Hector Barrantes. Although the marriage of Fergie’s parents had been shaky for a while, she “never heard [them] argue,” and they didn’t separate until Sarah was thirteen. Until then, she had a relatively happy childhood with a mother who involved herself in the lives of her two daughters, teaching them to ride and taking them on skiing holidays.r />
  Sarah adored her father, a feckless sort who didn’t fully deserve such admiration. He was often away playing polo, and as Fergie put it, he had been “gone too often and strayed too far.” Fergie later grew closer to her mother, despite the geographic distance, and developed strong ties with her stepfather, Hector.

  Fergie had her share of emotional problems, including low self-esteem complicated by persistent worries about being overweight. She had an excessive need for approval, and an eagerness to please that played out as infinite adaptability. She sought attention by playing the fool, and often acted impulsively and without regard for consequences. But she was far more outgoing than Diana, and she became a good-time girl, eager to try anything. She worked in a London art gallery and scouted projects for a publisher of art books. She spent six months traveling around South America and the United States, at one point cleaning lavatories to earn money for her bus fare. When Sarah met Andrew, she was dating a widower twenty years her senior.

  Fergie remembered becoming friends with Diana a year before the wedding to Charles, keeping Diana company at Buckingham Palace in her loneliness during the engagement, and being invited to the Wales wedding but being hurt by her exclusion from the Queen’s luncheon afterward. Diana’s interpretation of the origins of the friendship was somewhat cattier. During the courtship with Charles, Fergie “kept rearing her head for some reason,” Diana recalled, “and she seemed to know all about the royal setup.… She suddenly appeared, and she sat in the front pew of our wedding.”

  When the tabloids discovered Sarah Ferguson, they fell in love with her, just as they had Diana. At age twenty-six (two years older than Diana), Fergie won over reporters with her unpretentious manner and ebullient personality. Not only did Diana become jealous of the press coverage, she resented that Sarah was succeeding with the royal family in ways she had not. Sarah was a country girl who adored Balmoral because it “set me free”—away from the strictures of city life. She could march around in what one of Diana’s friends called the “pissing rain,” stalking and shooting, fishing and hunting. “I was robust and jolly and not too highly strung,” Sarah recalled. Soon enough, the hurtful comparisons began.