Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana expressed her affection by showering Hewitt with gifts, including a diamond tie pin and a gold-and-silver alarm clock from Asprey, as well as countless articles of clothing; she would later boast to her friend James Gilbey that she dressed the army officer from “head to foot. Cost me quite a bit.” Hewitt read her passages from Tennyson or Wordsworth and took to calling her “Dibbs.” Together they would read issues of Country Life and pick out dream houses. They periodically met for lunch at Diana’s favorite restaurant, San Lorenzo; he introduced her to his father, and Diana traveled to Devon for weekends with Hewitt and his mother. Diana’s West Heath friend Carolyn Bartholomew also knew of the romance and spent several weekends with the couple.

  In the spring of 1987, Hewitt was promoted to the rank of major and moved to the Combermere Barracks near Windsor Castle. Diana continued to ride with Hewitt there, and brought William and Harry, then aged four and two, for a tour of the barracks. When Charles was away, Diana and Hewitt had assignations at Kensington Palace and Highgrove. These were risky encounters, since William and Harry might easily have come into Diana’s room during the night. The household and security staff felt as awkward about the situation as they did about Charles and Camilla. At least one maid worried about what to say if Charles made any inquiries. He did not, a friend explained, because he “had a tremendous gift for not observing what was not desirable to observe.”

  Hewitt believed that, during the first months of their affair, Diana still had not entirely given up on Charles, and that “she would try anything to win him.” During that period, some friends of Diana and Charles made efforts to patch up the marriage. Film producer David Puttnam and his wife, Patsy, were invited to several dinners that were “an attempt by others to help the Prince and Princess by getting them out,” recalled Puttnam. “What was noticeable during those dinners was how hard Diana was working at the relationship, to be a good wife. She was affectionate, and she was trying hard to be special.”

  But faced with what she perceived as continued rebuffs, Diana not only gave up, she began to tell Hewitt she hated Charles. She also started to boycott dinner parties planned by her husband. When their guests arrived, Diana would stay upstairs, leaving him to explain lamely that she was feeling ill and couldn’t join them. During a dinner for eighteen to honor patrons of the Royal Academy, Diana was spotted swimming outside while the group was having drinks. Charles didn’t display similar hostility toward Diana, only persistent anguish that his marriage had fallen apart so completely. “That is the total agony about the situation,” he wrote to a friend in October 1987.

  The fights between Charles and Diana grew less frequent as their chill hardened into a cold war, stripped of basic civility except in the presence of their sons. At Highgrove, Diana would take vigorous swims each morning (even Hewitt couldn’t help noticing that swimming had become “an obsession for her. Whenever she felt overemotional she would pound up and down the pool”) and then retreat to her room to watch movies with the boys or talk on the phone while Charles lost himself in the garden.

  If Diana and Charles had been tougher, they might have been able to publicly maintain the illusion of a happy marriage. But both were too sensitive—albeit in different ways—to prevent the stress from showing. As always, the press played a pivotal role. Simon Jenkins, editor of The Times from 1990 to 1992, said reporters sensed it was “the biggest story they’d ever got. It was the love story gone wrong, and as we all know, the only thing that’s a better story than a love story is a love story gone wrong.” At this point, the tabloids assigned Diana her heroine role and began vilifying Charles in earnest. Lacking solid information about what was really going on, the tabloids relied on body language, hunches, and tips to launch a new wave of speculation about the Wales marriage. For five years, beginning in 1987, the press published what Jonathan Dimbleby called “a version of the facts … which bore more than a passing resemblance to reality,” though many details were inaccurate.

  The first significant clue came during an official visit to Portugal in February 1987, when the news leaked that Charles and Diana had taken separate rooms. Diana actually told Andrew Morton that the Portugal trip was “the last time we were close as man and wife,” which seemed to contradict her other assertion that the marriage “closed off” and “went down the drain” after the birth of Harry. In the following months, the press tracked the amount of time the couple spent apart, culminating in a thirty-nine-day stretch at the end of the summer.

  Charles had resumed shooting and hunting, the pursuits he had previously renounced to please Diana, and he took an increasing number of holidays on his own—several trips to Italy, four days in the Kalahari Desert, a retreat on a Hebridean island to herd sheep, long sojourns at Balmoral. These escapes into solitude for thinking and painting invariably prompted rebukes from Diana for abandoning her, and from the press for being a neglectful husband and father. After Diana and the boys returned to London from Scotland in September 1987, while Charles remained in Balmoral for three weeks on his own, some tabloid reports even hinted unfairly and incorrectly that Charles was having affairs with two of his guests, Kanga Tryon and Sarah Keswick, the wife of Sir Chippendale Keswick, chairman of Hambros Bank, who were friends of both Waleses.

  With his fortieth birthday a year off, Charles went into full retreat, according to Dimbleby, “eclipsed by the Princess, resentful of the public adulation of her and wounded by the media’s contempt for him.” He became more temperamental, introverted, and gloomy—“I can’t see a light at the end of a rather appalling tunnel at the moment,” he wrote one friend in the fall of 1987—and relied even more on his friends, “unable to turn to his parents to discuss the misery either of his private life or his public persona,” wrote Dimbleby. As Charles said, “When marriages break down, awful and miserable as that is … it is your friends who are most important and helpful and understanding and encouraging. Otherwise you would go stark, staring mad.”

  Instead of turning inward, like Charles, Diana began to acquire new friends and new activities. She took up tennis and tried to get Charles to build a court for her at Highgrove. When he refused—partly due to the expense, but also because a court would mar the aesthetic of his carefully planned gardens on the estate—she joined the exclusive Vanderbilt Racquet Club in London. For three years, she played a regular doubles game there with a group that included Antonia Douro, whose alliance with Camilla she had not yet discovered. Diana wasn’t good at the sport, and as with so much she took on, she lacked the discipline to practice and improve her skills with lessons; her aim was more to socialize in a place where the photographers couldn’t find her.

  But Diana’s private life revolved primarily around Hewitt, whose presence soothed her, although his usefulness as a safety valve only worked when they were together: “The very fact that she felt he relieved her of responsibility for herself meant that when he was not with her, her panic could grow worse than before,” Pasternak wrote. “Sometimes her fear of coping with her own instabilities would grow so great, create such hysteria, that the only answer was to escape from herself. Then, she would frantically dial James’s number, eager to hear him, anxious for him to calm her and restore her balance.”

  Diana’s instability was particularly evident in May 1987, when she learned that her former lover Barry Mannakee had been killed in a motorcycle accident, just a year after he had been transferred out of his job with the Waleses. As the royal couple prepared to leave Kensington Palace for an evening at the Cannes Film Festival, Charles and members of the couple’s staff learned about Mannakee’s death. Charles told her about Mannakee when they were alone in their limousine en route to the Northolt airport, where they boarded their plane in private. On the flight to Cannes, Diana wept inconsolably as Charles and her lady-in-waiting tried to comfort her.

  A report by Penny Junor that Diana “slashed herself” during the flight, requiring her dress for Cannes “to be adjusted to hide the damage,” was an exaggeration, h
owever. If Diana had mutilated herself, the wounds were not apparent to her staff, and the long gown she brought for the evening’s festivities was singularly unadjustable: a pale-blue strapless chiffon that revealed her pristine arms, back, chest, and shoulders. She wore a matching pale-blue chiffon scarf draped softly across the nape of her neck and trailing down her back—not tied securely, as it might have been, to conceal telltale cuts. A small gust of wind or an inadvertent snag could have easily dislodged it.

  The most striking aspect of Diana’s behavior was her ability to put on a sunny facade as soon as she reached Cannes. In fact, she was ebullient that evening when she met TV personality Clive James, master of ceremonies for the dinner. “She was like the sun coming up,” James wrote. “Coming up giggling.” She mischievously flirted with James, laughing about the clips from Japanese game shows that he screened on his weekly program. “You are terrible,” she teased, then rapidly changed the subject as she glimpsed media tycoon Robert Maxwell across the room. “Ooh. There’s that odious man Maxwell over there. Don’t want to meet him again. Yuck.”

  In the following weeks, Diana showed no evidence of lingering upset over Mannakee’s death, nor did the tabloids learn of her distress during the trip to Cannes. But beginning early in 1987, they did get wind of a series of incidents involving Diana that, taken together, indicated a pattern of disconcerting public behavior, some of it involving other men. By her own admission, she was trying on a newly exuberant, Fergie-like identity, but she was displaying her confusion as well. The commotion Diana created proved irresistible to the press.

  During a February ski holiday in Klosters, Diana and Fergie drew attention to themselves by jokingly pushing each other around on the ski slopes, causing the Daily Mail to pronounce the two women “undignified.” In subsequent months, Diana blurted out to a group of reporters that she was thinking of taking a “black lover”; she smirked while reviewing a parade of cadets at Sandhurst; and, during Ascot, she and Fergie poked a rolled umbrella into the backside of Lulu Blacker, a friend of Fergie’s.

  But it was Diana’s public flirtatiousness that drew the most pointed comment—beginning on her Klosters holiday, when “sexy” Diana danced at discos without “grumpy” Charles. Unknown to the press, Diana’s bulimia had again become acute, and each evening in Klosters, she was calling James Hewitt to complain about her loneliness and declare how much she missed him.

  Two of the men in Diana’s company that winter became the subject of endless conjecture in the coming year: Guards Major David Waterhouse and banker Philip Dunne. Both were introduced to Diana by Sarah Ferguson, and they were part of the lively new set that formed around the Princess. Waterhouse and Dunne were solid establishment figures. Dunne’s parents, Captain Thomas Dunne, Lord Lieutenant of Hereford and Worcester, and his wife, Henrietta, were great friends of the Queen. Dunne’s sister Camilla, who also became friendly with Diana, married Nicholas Soames’s brother Rupert. Waterhouse was the son of Hugo Waterhouse, a Life Guards major, and Lady Caroline Spencer-Churchill, the sister of the Duke of Marlborough and a friend of the Queen’s as well.

  The tabloids went into a frenzy over Diana’s behavior with Philip Dunne during the wedding reception for the Marquess of Worcester and actress Tracy Ward in June 1987. Diana spent the evening dancing wildly with an assortment of partners including a “mystery fat man” later identified as David Ker, a happily married London art dealer. Most conspicuously, Diana danced with Dunne. According to the tabloids, she was seen “running her hand through [his] hair and planting a kiss on his cheek.” Charles left the party at two A.M. (“stormed off” by one account, “in a huff” by another) after spending his time talking with former girlfriend Anna Wallace. Diana continued dancing until dawn, and for weeks afterward, the press went into overdrive probing the nature of her relationship with Dunne.

  There was something almost too showy about subsequent sightings of Diana with Philip Dunne and David Waterhouse—at concerts, films, house party weekends, and fashionable London restaurants. She was deeply entangled with James Hewitt, and titillating press reports about a string of other men served as a convenient diversion. Still, as one of Diana’s friends observed, “Diana lit a fire that occasionally burned out of control.” The tabloids castigated Diana for being a “tease,” a “flirt,” and a “pampered princess” who “loves being the center of attention.” The hacks also made life miserable for Dunne and Waterhouse, combing through their lives in forensic detail—to the point that Waterhouse declared to The Sun, “We are not having an affair.”

  Although the press paid greater attention to Dunne, perhaps because he was better looking, Diana was actually quite close to Waterhouse, who happened to be in James Hewitt’s regiment. In his book on Charles, Dimbleby singled out Waterhouse among Diana’s friends during this period as a “frequent visitor to Kensington Palace, arriving accompanied by his dog to spend long hours with the Princess.” Waterhouse also visited Diana at Highgrove when Charles was away. Hewitt was jealous of Waterhouse, and Diana “repeatedly tried to reassure [Hewitt], telling him over and over that she and David were just friends,” according to Pasternak.

  The tabloids were so preoccupied by the Wales marriage that they barely acknowledged much of what Charles and Diana did in their official roles, which especially galled Charles, who grew less tolerant of Diana’s fixation on her press coverage. His irritation at her distress over negative articles became a major source of friction between them. Charles refused to read what he considered rubbish—although aides gave him abridged briefings on the coverage—and accused Diana of encouraging the tabloids by paying such close attention to them. In a letter to a friend, Charles railed about the “positive hurricane of self-righteous, pontificating censorious claptrap in the newspapers.”

  By the autumn of 1987, both Diana and Charles were profoundly unhappy. They spent several weekends at Highgrove with Diana’s mother, who helped persuade the couple to keep their marriage together and Diana to comport herself more properly in public. A group of advisers to Charles outlined the terms of a proposed truce: that the couple continue with separate but discreet social lives while they worked harder to present a united front through more joint engagements.

  Diana later said she had her own epiphany that fall about the need to erase her image as “Disco Di,” the femme fatale. After making what she called “so many cock-ups,” she told herself, “Diana, it’s no good, you’ve got to change it right round, this publicity. You’ve got to grow up and be responsible.… You must adapt to the position and stop fighting.” Diana had decided to “rediscover the real Diana Spencer.” She and Charles settled on an arrangement she described to astrologer Penny Thornton as giving each other a “comparatively civilized ‘space’ ”: She would use Kensington Palace as her base, and he would use Highgrove as his.

  The Waleses’ new resolve was on display the following January during a trip to Australia for the country’s two hundedth anniversary. “They were back in sparkling form for the first time in almost a year,” the Sunday Mirror declared. Diana took the trouble to learn Australia’s national anthem, which she sang heartily, as Charles, who did not know the words, “glanced affectionately at his wife as he tapped along to the beat.” James Hewitt, watching the royal couple on television as they danced together, felt mystified that Diana could seem so happy with the man he believed “she now hated with a vitriolic intensity.”

  The trip seemed to benefit Charles and Diana, at least temporarily; on their return to England they appeared to their staff more calm and civil in private than they had been. But for Diana, periods of peace couldn’t last long: When she and Charles traveled to Klosters for their third skiing holiday in the Swiss resort, Diana’s bulimia was again severe. She was on the phone constantly to Hewitt, who sensed her mood was “worse than her usual melancholy.”

  On the afternoon of March 10, 1988, Diana and Fergie were together in their chalet, Diana ill with a cold and Fergie, who was four months pregnant, recovering
from a spill she had taken earlier in the day. During a run down some little-used slopes, Charles and his friends Hugh Lindsay and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson were caught in an avalanche. Charles escaped without injury, but Lindsay was killed, and Palmer-Tomkinson was gravely injured with multiple fractures.

  Charles acted heroically, staying by Palmer-Tomkinson’s side, digging her out of the snow with his hands, holding her head and talking nonstop to keep her conscious until the rescue helicopter arrived. But when he returned to the chalet he was shattered. As Diana recounted the day’s events to Penny Thornton, she had offered to comfort Charles, but he wanted to grieve alone. Instead of accepting his reaction as the predictable way he would deal with such strong emotions, Diana felt rejected. “He just pushed me aside,” Diana told Thornton, who recalled, “She felt that if Charles had fallen into her arms … their relationship would have turned round completely.”

  Diana took pride in the fact that she organized the logistics of their return to England. “I felt terribly in charge of the whole thing,” she recalled. She insisted that they take Hugh Lindsay’s body home immediately to his widow, overruling Charles’s arguments for staying longer. Diana viewed her ability to make decisions and take control as a signal that she could fight Charles’s effort to make her feel “so inadequate in every possible way.”

  The tabloids used the occasion to praise Diana and condemn Charles anew. IN THE MIDST OF GRIEF, OUR FUTURE QUEEN STOOD TALL, read the headline in the Daily Express. “We cried for Prince Charles, who wept for himself,” the Express said. “But nobody patted Diana on the 26-year-old back she held so straight…. Unlike her husband, she hadn’t been able to join in the struggle to save their friend.… Diana has suffered in silence from her apparently now emotionally frozen husband, who has turned less to her than into his own private grief … At Klosters she showed … inner strength.”