The message could not have been lost on Diana, who read every word in the tabloids. In her own mythology, the Klosters tragedy took on outsize importance: “the beginning of a slow process of awakening to the qualities and possibilities which lay within herself,” wrote Morton. Diana did deal effectively with people in distress, so her reaction to the accident was quite natural, just as those around her rose to the occasion. But her imagination magnified her actions to symbolize the confident and capable woman she wanted to be. After the weekend in Klosters, she was no more mature than she had been before, and her general behavior didn’t perceptibly change, but she did feel she had achieved something, even if it was at Charles’s expense.
Back in England with Hewitt, Diana wept and vented, and for the first time turned her anger toward her lover instead of Charles. She and Hewitt were at his mother’s home in Devon for the weekend when she felt he was ignoring her during a lunchtime picnic. She lashed out, saying he had tired of her and considered her inadequate. When Hewitt explained that he was only trying to rest, she ran across the fields in a fury, and Hewitt didn’t pursue her. She eventually returned in a sullen mood. Only after fulsome reassurance from Hewitt—she was the “most beautiful woman alive” and “of course he found her attractive”—did she settle down.
In recalling this period, Diana maintained that her years of bulimia had not affected her looks. She said that her skin hadn’t been damaged, nor her teeth, despite years of acid from her forced vomiting. But by 1988, people had begun to notice that underneath heavy makeup, her complexion appeared rough and unhealthy. Those particular observations didn’t make it into the tabloids, but after only glancing references to her figure for more than a year, the press began noting that she was again “painfully thin, almost gaunt.”
In the spring of 1988, Diana “suddenly woke up and realized what I was going to lose if I let go.” Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew actually jolted her awake by intervening with the sort of decisiveness Diana needed. After Diana finally confided in her old schoolmate about her bulimia, Carolyn warned that her gorging and purging were draining her system of vital minerals. Carolyn gave Diana an ultimatum: If she did not immediately call a doctor, Carolyn would call the press and tell them the entire story.
The threat worked. Diana phoned Dr. Maurice Lipsedge, a psychiatrist based at Guy’s Hospital in London who dealt frequently with eating disorders. It had been five years since Diana had abandoned her last round of therapy, but she had a connection to Lipsedge, who had treated her sister Sarah. Diana was reassured by Lipsedge’s combination of sympathy and directness; she considered him a “sweetheart, very nice.” When he asked her how many times she had tried to commit suicide, she blithely told him “four or five.” She agreed to his proposed treatment—an hour of talk therapy once a week, plus books to educate her on eating disorders. Lipsedge’s approach seemed effortless to Diana, who recalled that he promised she would be better in six months if she learned to keep her food down.
Diana told Andrew Morton in her 1991 interviews that her therapy with Lipsedge made her feel “born again,” and her bulimia had “finished” in 1989. In the next breath, she acknowledged that she still suffered from the symptoms in 1990 when she binged and purged every three weeks instead of four times daily. The sad reality was that Diana gave up on Lipsedge, as she had with her previous therapists, in a matter of months. The eating disorders persisted, along with her other symptoms of psychological problems.
Oddly enough, in the spring of 1988, no one seemed to fully consider the example of Diana’s sister Sarah, who only overcame her eating disorder after checking herself into a clinic for a six-week stay. But residential treatment was not an option for Diana, who feared the stigma of being considered mentally ill, and whose high profile guaranteed that word of her condition would be leaked and sensationalized by the tabloids.
Chapter 14
Inherently wary of psychiatry, Diana could not bring herself to make the long-term commitment required for effective therapy. But she knew she needed help dealing with her mood swings, depression, and self-destructive behavior, and after she dropped Maurice Lipsedge, she began shopping for easy salvation in the alternative-therapy bazaar.
“In the late eighties and early nineties she was with every different sort of person,” a former Palace official said. “They marched in and out, and I don’t know how they got there, but once you get into that scene, it’s a cry for help.” Diana sent confusing signals to her chosen “therapists,” none of whom was trained to grasp the full extent of her problems; as in other areas of her life, she maintained tight control of these relationships. When she called, they jumped. “She’d never ask if she was disturbing me when she rang out of the blue,” astrologer Debbie Frank said. Diana “tended to seek out people who would tell her what she wants to hear,” astrologer Penny Thornton recalled. “Her instability makes it difficult for her to make rational decisions.” Diana also lacked the analytical skills to determine whether her “healers” were doing her any good.
Diana’s approach suggested a classic adult response to childhood neglect as described by psychologist Hugh Missildine, author of Your Inner Child of the Past: The behavior pattern, according to Missildine, includes moving “from one person to another, hoping that someone will supply whatever is missing,” and feeling “restless and anxious” due to an inability to find emotional satisfaction. “Anyone who offers admiration and respect has appeal,” Missildine noted, “and because [the] need for affection is so great, [the] ability to discriminate is severely impaired.”
Diana had already begun her search in 1986 by consulting Thornton, and three years later, she added Debbie Frank. When Diana first called in February 1989, Frank was surprised that the Princess “immediately began to pour out her troubles, as if she had known me all her life.” This indiscriminate tendency of Diana’s seemed inconsistent with her strong streak of mistrust, but in fact it showed how powerfully impulsive she could be. Two years later, Diana brought in still another astrologer named Felix Lyle, who felt that Diana was “easily defeated,” “self-destructive,” and unpredictable, although he underestimated her willfulness when he concluded that she was readily “dominated by those with a strong character.”
Diana’s view of astrologers was ambivalent, and she moved from one to another to find the answers she wanted. An overriding theme was whether she could win back Charles to revive her marriage. “What is going to happen to me? Will I ever be happy?” she would ask Frank, who, to her credit, urged Diana to “see a proper therapist.” Diana relied on astrologers mostly when she was too uneasy with herself to make a decision on her own. “Diana believed in astrology,” one of her friends said. “She opened up to the astrologers in a way she would not open up in a drawing room, where word could get around,” another friend said. “Then if the astrologers betrayed her, she could dismiss them by saying they were just trying to make money off of her.”
Diana said that she would listen to astrological predictions, but added that she didn’t “believe [astrology] totally. It’s a direction and a suggestion rather than it’s definitely going to happen.” But she seemed to have greater faith in astrology than she let on. “She was not ruled by every prophecy,” Morton wrote, but “her belief [was] at times all-consuming.” Diana invoked her astrologers in conversations, telling her friend James Gilbey (who shared her fascination with reading the stars) that Debbie Frank predicted he would “go through a transformation” and that the message to Diana from another astrologer was “anything you want you can get next year.”
Diana was equally credulous with the spiritualists she embraced. Psychic Rita Rogers, who, like Penny Thornton, was referred by Fergie, recognized that Diana was “willful and capable of making up her own mind.” Rogers tried to give Diana “inner strength” by connecting her to dead relatives and friends. Through Rogers and other clairvoyants, Diana believed she communicated with her grandmother Spencer—who looked out for her “in the spirit world”—
as well as her uncle Edmund Fermoy and former lover Barry Mannakee. Still, Diana was reluctant to talk to friends and family about her spiritual contacts because she feared being branded a “nut.”
Betty Palko, who did monthly tarot card readings, said that Diana “had deep emotional problems,” but in her attempt to help, Palko reinforced Diana’s insecurity. “I think the most important thing I used to say at a reading was to be careful in whom she placed her trust,” Palko said. “I could see a lot of deceit around her at that time.”
For four years, energy healer Simone Simmons made weekly visits to Diana. During their first session together, Simmons claimed to have extracted “truckloads of negative emotional waste” from Diana when she “analyzed her aura.” While Simmons “rarely met anyone so greatly in need of physical and emotional repair,” and routinely fielded eight-hour phone calls from the Princess, she felt that Diana “always seemed completely compos mentis to me.”
Diana’s spiritual advisers abetted her “magical thinking,” another kind of primitive psychological defense that produced a false sense of power. Diana claimed to experience déjà vu when she encountered places she thought she had been before or people she had met in an earlier incarnation. “I know this sounds a bit crazy, but I’ve lived before,” she told James Gilbey. By one account, she said that in a former life she had been a nun, and she told Penny Thornton that she had been a martyr in the time of Christ. She spoke of voices that pushed her to take certain actions or think certain thoughts, and she talked of having premonitions such as her “strange feeling” that her father would “drop down” the day before he suffered a stroke.
Diana also experimented with a variety of other nostrums. She used hypnotherapy to “visualize” her anger by “throwing it up an imaginary chimney and burning it”; “anger release” therapy, in which she would scream, shout, and pummel a punching bag; and most controversially, colonic irrigation, to “take all the aggro [aggression] out of me.” According to Simone Simmons, Diana and Fergie would schedule their irrigation appointments together “so that they would be in different rooms of the same clinic at the same time and then giggle afterward.” In effect, colonic irrigation was another form of purging, “a peculiar mixture of trying to get the bad things out and trying to get rapid transit to lose weight,” in the view of eating disorder expert Kent Ravenscroft. Physicians take a dim view of the practice in the absence of medical supervision.
Diana suffered from back pain that may have been stress-related, and for treatment she turned again to alternative practitioners: an osteopath, who used massage, and a chiropractor, who manipulated her spine. For physical and mental solace, she used reflexology, a foot massage designed to reduce pain and tension in various parts of the body; aromatherapy massage, with aromatic oils; tai chi chuan, a slow-moving exercise to increase energy; and acupuncture, the ancient Chinese therapy in which needles are inserted in strategic spots to relieve pressure and pain. Acupuncture “helps me to keep calm and relax,” Diana once said. “In my job I cannot afford to panic.” Diana was least successful in her efforts to meditate; she was too fidgety to remain still.
Her principal “mind-body” therapist was Stephen Twigg, a onetime tax accountant who specialized in deep massage, diet consultation, and new-age advice based on problems he claimed to detect below the surface of the skin. When Twigg first came to Diana in December 1988, “she had reached a very low point indeed,” he recalled. She had “intensely painful emotions and thoughts, muscular tension, digestive problems and other physical problems.” He said he taught Diana how to “work her way out of the hole into which she had dug herself” and claimed to have ended her bulimia in 1992—although other therapists encountered the problem in subsequent years. Acupuncturist Lily Hua Yu treated Diana as late as 1996 for depression and “an eating disorder which in Chinese terms is caused by disharmony between the stomach and the spleen.”
As Diana zigged and zagged through the world of alternative treatments, there is scant evidence that any of them actually eased her problems, with the possible exception of acupuncture, which research studies have shown to alleviate mild to moderate depression. At best, her range of treatments kept her occupied and distracted, offered any number of sympathetic listeners, and staved off her fear of losing control. Whatever extravagant claims her various healers may have made, Diana’s symptoms carried through to the end of her life. Diana was vulnerable and gullible, and she leaned on her therapists as she did her friends and lovers, phoning them, as psychic Rita Rogers recalled, “just to tell me what she had been through that day.” Astrologer Debbie Frank found Diana’s manner in these frequent calls surprisingly childlike. “Most of all,” Frank said, “she needed someone to talk to, to tell her problems to.”
From the early eighties, when Diana first began exploring a public role, she had gravitated toward soothing the sick and dying, work that became a source of her own comfort as much as it was others’. When she would “support and love” people, she said, “they weren’t aware just how much healing they were giving me, and it carried me through.” It was often said that Diana “created a new royal role” by reaching out to victims and using her position to promote important causes, yet both her husband and his sister had long been similarly engaged, Charles with the disadvantaged in the inner cities, Anne with children in the Third World. Diana’s impact was more a matter of style: her down-to-earth manner and heartfelt empathy contrasted with stiff royal formality. Diana had no grand plan to immerse herself deeply and build an expertise in one or several causes. Rather, she reacted to events and found views that she embraced passionately for a time before moving on. Though she had genuine feelings for these causes, her unstable temperament prevented her from sustaining her support—which often left those who counted on her disappointed and confused.
Diana’s pursuit of a meaningful public role was bound up in her effort to understand who she was. “I want to feel I am needed,” she said. “I want to do, not just be.” As she strove to redefine herself, she frequently felt indecisive about which direction to take, succumbing to feelings of fraudulence for achieving celebrity when her actual achievements amounted to little. “She was up and down in terms of her morale and her self-worth,” a former Palace official said. “She was sometimes confident, but sometimes unsure of her own abilities and her own worth, and had questions about her impact as a human being.”
The turning point in Diana’s public role occurred in April 1987, when she made an enormously symbolic gesture by shaking the hand of an AIDS patient without wearing a glove. Her work for AIDS awareness was a cornerstone of her official life, and her first step was typically described as an act of singular courage in her quest to help the outcasts of society. According to the prevailing mythology, Diana disregarded the advice of friends and defied Buckingham Palace courtiers by launching a crusade for a marginal disease associated with homosexuals. The Sunday Express called it “the toughest battle of her royal life” after “royal advisers … warned her it would harm her position as the future Queen.”
In fact, her AIDS activities were carefully orchestrated and approved by the Palace, and her initial decision was motivated by personal considerations, rather than by an ambitious urge to take on a societal problem. The emotional tug of AIDS came from Diana’s friendship with a London art dealer named Adrian Ward-Jackson, whom she met in the mid-eighties during a ballet gala at Sadler’s Wells theater in London. Ward-Jackson was personable and erudite without being threatening. “He had a connoisseur’s knowledge of ballet,” said a man who was close to Ward-Jackson.
Around the time they became friends, Ward-Jackson learned he was HIV-positive, which he confided to Diana almost immediately, and she became interested in the disease. “He more or less said, ‘It would be very nice if you would help me through this,’ ” a friend of Ward-Jackson said. “She said, ‘Of course I will.’ Sort of a pact was established before many of Adrian’s friends knew he was HIV[-positive].” “Diana was a good friend
of Adrian and also his partner Harry Bailey,” said William Haseltine, an American research scientist and early advocate of AIDS education. “She was with them a lot before they deteriorated. Harry died first, and she knew very well Adrian had AIDS too.”
In January 1987, Diana met Michael Adler, a London doctor working with AIDS patients, who asked if she would help him change the public perception of the disease. “She was very, very nervous,” Adler said. “AIDS was still a very controversial disease.” That month, Middlesex Hospital announced that Diana would open the first dedicated AIDS ward the following April. In describing Diana’s task, Adler requested that she wear no protective clothing, such as a surgical mask or gown, but assured her that she would be in no danger. “We hope if people see the Princess of Wales opening the ward it will help to demystify and destigmatize AIDS,” Adler said at the time.
A few weeks later, the Daily Mirror ran a story quoting a doctor named Graham Sharp, who said, “Princess Diana should shake hands with an AIDS sufferer” in order to allay public fears about how the disease is transmitted. This was a period of widespread fear about catching the disease by touching, sharing a swimming pool, or sitting across a dinner table; there were even suggestions that those infected with the virus be quarantined. A simple handshake with someone of Diana’s stature could indeed have important consequences.
Adler proposed to Buckingham Palace that she not only shake the hand of an AIDS patient, but that her gesture be photographed. “It was highly programmed and rehearsed,” Adler said. “We were concerned about patient confidentiality and privacy, so we ran a proposal past the Palace, and we agreed on a photo over the patient’s left shoulder, with only one pool photographer [designated to supply pictures to all the newspapers]. So the whole thing was set up, and it was not a relaxed visit, not spontaneous. I don’t think Diana knew what she was taking on when it was agreed she would do this. Suddenly she found herself at the center of attention in an area that was controversial, with people who were marginalized.” The photograph had a worldwide impact, and profoundly affected Diana: “I found myself being more and more involved with people who were rejected by society … and I found an affinity here.”
Diana in Search of Herself Page 27