Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  “Why can’t you be more like Fergie?” Charles said to Diana during their first ski holiday in Klosters in February 1986. Fergie could ski the expert slopes, while Diana still wobbled along. “It must have been hell for Diana,” Sarah admitted. At Sandringham in the fall of 1986, Diana grew even more envious, particularly when she saw the instant connection Sarah formed with the Queen. “Diana felt the Queen was much warmer to Fergie, gave more chances to Fergie,” Roberto Devorik said. As Sarah described their relationship, “our common interests and acquaintances dated back.… The Queen and I both doted on horses and dogs, on farming and open air.” Fergie rode horses with the Queen, and said she “felt favored and blessed.” After listening to the praise for her sister-in-law and reading her favorable press coverage, Diana grew more insecure and decided, “maybe I ought to be like Fergie.”

  In the tabloids, Fergie was, as she put it, “flavor of the month,” while the press was taking a dim view of Diana once again. Aside from the routine reports on her public appearances, the tabloids paid scant attention to Diana’s official role. They took a far greater interest in charting Diana’s appearance and eating habits, which they began to pursue aggressively again in March 1985 when her weight had once more dropped down to around 110. Her shoulder blades jutted sharply through her clothing, and her skin seemed translucent. Diana’s weight became headline news during the 1986 Canada-Japan tour when her fainting spell prompted speculation about diets and anorexia.

  The tabloids had no knowledge of Charles’s unsympathetic reaction to Diana’s collapse—indeed, James Whitaker called him “a tower of strength to her; no woman could have a more caring and understanding husband”—so they chose instead to blame the victim. The Daily Express criticized Diana’s “near obsession about how she looks and what people are saying and writing about her. She behaves like a top fashion model.” James Whitaker in the Daily Mirror rebuked her for “the cold indifference on her face as she defied the photographers” and complained that she “lacked the sparkle we have come to expect.”

  With the focus continuing only on her possible anorexia, Diana seemed almost to taunt the press when she periodically showed how much she could eat. In Japan she conspicuously downed a ten-course meal, telling Japanese journalists “I don’t know why there are all these stories saying I am too thin. I am eating a lot.” Back in England touring a health center, she proclaimed, “It doesn’t matter what I eat. I never put an ounce on!” as she stared at a black cherry cheesecake and several pizzas and said, “I could eat all that!”

  At midyear, two tabloids moved closer to the truth. Judy Wade in The Sun wrote that “fasts and feasts” were beginning to worry Diana’s staff. Wade described how Diana ate little in public—one member of her household said she would refuse to eat for days after being criticized—but that at home she was known to feast: “At night she cannot resist gorging on her old favorites—ice cream and chocolates.” Though there was no mention of vomiting, a staff member observed that “indulging in these sweet treats always seemed to make her feel guilty. Afterwards she would barely eat a thing for days.” In News of the World, Fiona MacDonald Hull concentrated more on Diana’s “weeping self-doubts, nerves and desperation,” but noted that her staff “always believed her emotional nature has stopped her eating, rather than a desire to diet.… She finds it difficult to swallow food even when she is relaxed.”

  Given the usual half-life of ideas launched on tabloid pages, these perceptive observations evaporated without further comment. They were replaced by another burst of schizophrenic coverage of the Wales marriage, this time prompted by the Majorca vacation with King Carlos in August 1986. When Diana wasn’t periodically escaping to “put [her] head down the loo,” she sunbathed and swam while photographers snapped away. The tabloids did handsprings over their pictures of the happy family: “Nothing like a touch of Spanish sun to put the shine back in a marriage!”; “Having a wonderful time!”; and most absurdly, “Recent worries about starvation dieting can be banished,” because Diana “has filled out in just the right places.”

  When Charles flew off to Balmoral, leaving Diana and the boys to finish out the vacation, the naysayers were ready. ARE CHARLES AND DI MOVING APART? asked The Sun, asserting that the couple now had a special agreement to allow Diana more time on her own “for the things she enjoys and Charles doesn’t.” The gist was that Diana was “growing restless” and had taken to “repeatedly embarrassing Charles with such complaints as ‘My husband doesn’t approve of the books I read.’ ”

  No one knew about the severity of Diana’s emotional problems, or, for that matter, about Camilla. Not even Stuart Higgins of The Sun, in his regular conversations with Camilla, understood what was going on. “Whether that was bad journalism or she was very good at hiding things, I don’t know,” he said. The News of the World may have stumbled on a case of mistaken identity when it reported that “Charles spends long hours on the phone to Kanga [Tryon]… calling her on his private line from his soundproofed study.” With his new cordless phone, he would also go for long walks at Highgrove, “making calls from the middle of a field.”

  If the details of such reports were often stretched or fanciful, Charles and Diana’s tense body language was sufficient evidence of their marital difficulties. Before the Balmoral holiday, two tabloids captured a startling incident after a polo match: Charles lightly cuffed Diana on the back of the head, prompting her to unexpectedly turn and kick him, and Charles to push her against their car. After Diana leaped into the driver’s seat, Charles took a final swipe at the back of her neck. It was all supposed to have been playful, but the public display of anger was all too real.

  That fall, the companion documentary to the 1985 interview with Alastair Burnet appeared on British television. Unlike the previous effort, this intimate view of the Prince and Princess was unsuccessful. The consensus of critics, according to the Daily Mail, was that “Diana seemed to be permanently having fits of the giggles and wasn’t overbright, with Prince Charles being humorless and taciturn.” Both Charles and Diana made statements that would subject them to endless ridicule, and that neither would live down. In talking to a boy at a children’s home, Diana said, “I never got any O levels: brain the size of a pea, I’ve got.” When asked about his garden, Charles said, “I just come and talk to the plants, really. It’s very important to talk. They respond, don’t they?”

  It would be their last joint television program. Though they tried to appear devoted to each other, their unhappiness was obvious. But this was the marriage of the heir to the throne, and Diana and Charles were locked into position. They would both keep pretending, without fully understanding the consequences of their charade.

  Chapter 13

  In November 1986, Diana invited a cavalry captain named James Hewitt to dine with her at Kensington Palace. She had met Hewitt in the late summer at a London cocktail party, and over the following four months, he had been giving her riding lessons in Hyde Park. At twenty-eight, Hewitt was three years older than Diana, who had an admitted weakness for men in uniform. Copper-haired and slender, Hewitt was as meticulous about his appearance as Diana was about hers. He redeemed his evident vanity with ornate manners, and he was skillful at attracting a woman with the sort of studied attentiveness that made her feel “as if no other woman matters—which, of course, is not the case,” said his embittered former girlfriend Emma Younghusband. In some of his mannerisms—grimacing as he gathered his thoughts, fiddling with his signet ring, shying from showing too much emotion—James Hewitt even bore an eerie resemblance to Prince Charles.

  Diana had found Hewitt attractive, charming, and sufficiently sympathetic to tell him about her fear of horses dating from a childhood fall. When she asked if he might help restore her confidence on horseback, he said he could arrange lessons down the road from Kensington Palace at the Knightsbridge Barracks, where he was in charge of the stables for the Household Division of his regiment, the Life Guards. Only days after their meeting, Di
ana called to accept his offer.

  Accompanied by Hazel West, a lady-in-waiting who was an accomplished horsewoman, Diana rode with Hewitt in the early mornings once or twice a week. Hewitt patiently instructed Diana, and afterward they had lengthy talks over coffee in the Officers’ Mess. Before long, Diana unburdened herself to Hewitt, telling him that she and Charles had drifted apart and were now living separate lives. As she confessed her marital unhappiness and her childhood insecurities, Hewitt responded with comforting words. When she returned home, she called to thank him for being supportive, and afterward phoned him whenever she needed cheering.

  She invited him to dinner following the royal couple’s state visit to the Middle East. Diana and Charles had successfully toured Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, and when Diana left for England, Charles had continued on the Britannia through the Suez Canal to Cyprus—which is where he was when James Hewitt arrived at Kensington Palace. Having dismissed her staff for the evening, Diana asked Hewitt to open a bottle of champagne, and she served him from a buffet laid out in the dining room. They talked about the Middle Eastern trip, and after coffee in her sitting room, Diana first sat on Hewitt’s lap, then led him by the hand to her bedroom, where they became lovers. “It wasn’t a typical seduction scene with me as the big white hunter going after a princess,” Hewitt later said.

  Thus began a five-year affair that remained secret for a surprisingly long time. Diana reached out to Hewitt because she needed attention, but she was also reacting to her husband’s behavior. It was the traditional aristocratic solution to a troubled relationship: With three in the marriage already, Diana made it four. Diana showed little sign of guilt, either with Hewitt or her friends who knew of the relationship. “Charles was involved with Camilla, and she felt that what was good for the goose was good for the gander,” Hewitt recalled.

  From the moment Diana met Hewitt, she controlled the relationship, taking the initiative, making the demands, intensifying or drawing back as her feelings dictated. For all his apparent confidence, Hewitt was in many ways the wrong man for Diana, which fit her pattern of choosing partners who were bound to disappoint her. “I always want the unobtainable in men,” she told astrologer Debbie Frank. Hewitt was weak, emotionally immature, and self-pitying, and, like Diana, suffered from a deep sense of inadequacy, for which he compensated by womanizing.

  A middle-class man with upper-class pretensions, Hewitt was the son of a Royal Marine officer and a simple countrywoman who taught riding. His father was often away during Hewitt’s youth, so he grew up in the company of women: his mother, his twin sister, and a sister eighteen months older. He became an accomplished equestrian, but he performed miserably in school. He was diagnosed with dyslexia, and at age thirteen, when he went to Millfield, a progressive boarding school in Somerset, he said later, “I couldn’t read and assumed it was my lot in life to be dumb and stupid. I was always at the bottom of the class.” Hewitt was also a late-blooming adolescent: only five feet tall until age seventeen, when he shot up to his adult height of six feet. “I had red hair, was short, slow, very quiet, and had absolutely no confidence,” Hewitt recalled. As a consequence, he still felt “very small and inadequate” well into his thirties.

  During his school days, Hewitt used sports to make up for his inferiority complex. He competed in fencing, swimming, running, and rowing, and his horsemanship led him to learn polo. Despite his learning disability, Hewitt passed six O levels, but he dropped out of school to become a riding instructor. At nineteen, he joined the 5th Royal Inniskillen Dragoon Guards, an upper-class regiment where Hewitt was known as a “temporary gentleman,” an expression dating from World War I that described socially ambitious officers. Hewitt trained at Sandhurst and polished his skills on horseback by riding six hours a day at the École Nationale d’Equitation for a year. While he was abroad, his parents divorced, and although he was twenty-six, he took the news unusually hard. “He lost his trust in people and relationships,” according to his biographer, Anna Pasternak, and retreated from emotional intimacy.

  Diana’s friends believed she was drawn to Hewitt precisely because he was insecure, and he didn’t intimidate her with complicated ideas as Charles did. Diana did not know, however, that Hewitt was unfaithful as well; throughout the relationship with Diana, he was involved with Emma Stewardson (later Younghusband)—as a “decoy,” Emma later said. Emma knew about Diana and tolerated her rival even when Hewitt “was holding long whispered conversations with the princess while I was in his company.”

  The torrid (“She let her fingers mingle momentarily with his, and he felt a voluptuous thrill shoot up his arms”) version of Diana’s relationship with James Hewitt was recounted in Pasternak’s Princess in Love, published in 1994. Hewitt later said that he had “trusted” the Oxford-educated Pasternak (Russian novelist Boris was her great-uncle) and “cooperated with her, but the book was not the kind I imagined.” For her part, Pasternak said that Hewitt, whom she had known “vaguely, socially,” had approached her to write his story under two conditions: that the book be published before a follow-up volume by Andrew Morton, with whom Hewitt had declined to cooperate on Diana: Her True Story, and that it be a “love story.” Pasternak wrote the book in five-and-a-half weeks; when it was published three weeks later, it was widely ridiculed for its overheated prose.

  Diana acknowledged the affair in her 1995 Panorama interview (“Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him”) and admitted that the Pasternak book contained “factual evidence,” although she added that “there was a lot of fantasy.” As with the Morton and the Dimbleby books, Princess in Love has to be regarded as the perspective of one person, James Hewitt. But aside from the book’s audacious mind reading (“She knew that somewhere, lurking frightened and embarrassed, was a hungry capacity for sexuality, a need to feel a fulfilled and potent woman …”) and self-serving, misguided assertions (“It was with James Hewitt’s unswerving devotion and patience that she managed to conquer her bulimia and embark on the long and often arduous journey of self-discovery”), the essential narrative stands as a generally accurate chronicle of events.

  Diana’s romance with Hewitt intensified in the months after the evening at Kensington Palace, although its components remained essentially the same: long telephone calls, once or twice a day, which Diana filled with quotidian detail that Hewitt listened to without complaint. She solicited his comments on her clothing, and constantly asked for reassurance about her looks. According to Hewitt, Diana told him that she “spent hours lying in bed at night dissecting her body, endlessly enumerating to herself its deficiencies, telling herself that she was not good enough.”

  The relationship had an unhealthy imbalance, with Diana simultaneously clingy and controlling, as Hewitt willingly assumed subordinate status. “I was with her because she needed me,” he recalled. “I was prepared to give up my life for her.… I could have been for her what Camilla has become for Charles, I would have accepted that supporting role.” This meant riding along with her mood swings to provide a “release from the tension that characterized her daily life.”

  Diana’s “emotional roller coaster” frightened Hewitt. In the beginning she would sit, as she had with Charles during their courtship, and watch Hewitt read—although she herself was disconcertingly unable to read because she was too excited and restless. The more time they spent together, the more mood gyrations Hewitt witnessed. Just when she seemed calm and balanced, she would be overcome by “violent paroxysms of despair.” She generally hit bottom at the end of their weekends together, growing agitated at the prospect of his departure, which “struck her as a form of rejection.”

  Hewitt confided to his father that “he had never seen anyone so distraught, so churned up … that he really feared that she might even take her life if he tried to end their relationship.” Perhaps most disquieting was the sense of detachment Diana had experienced since childhood: “Often she felt as if she was perching on the doorstep of life peering in, an
onlooker while everybody else … was a participant.” Six months into their affair, in the spring of 1987, she told him about her bulimia. Although Hewitt read about the affliction and tried to understand it, her “lack of control” and “seemingly unmitigated greed” baffled him.

  Hewitt responded to Diana differently than Charles, who tried to calm her down through cajolery, followed by irritation when he failed. Hewitt expressed his love and pledged to take care of her. In the short term, Hewitt’s approach helped Diana, who couldn’t help talking about him to her staff. “She was crazy about him,” a former Palace adviser said. “He was a big support for her. He tried to make her feel better, to give her a good time with little things. She was happy with him, and happy is not a word you can use about her often.”

  Yet over time, Hewitt couldn’t be as open with Diana as she wanted. When Diana would beg him to share the anxieties tucked behind his reserve, he couldn’t reveal how shocked he was by her volatility, or how burdened he felt by the responsibility of keeping her stable. Diana could detect when Hewitt was withholding his feelings, which left her feeling defeated.

  Hewitt was also more obtuse than Charles about Diana’s need for expert professional help. “I view depression as a sign of weakness…. I believe in the stiff upper lip,” Hewitt once said. Psychological counseling was anathema to him. “Some people go to psychiatrists or take drugs,” Hewitt said. Diana “needed love and support, she needed to know and be told that it would all be all right.”