Diana and Rosa were closest when Rosa miscarried, then subsequently gave birth to a daughter named Domenica who had Down’s syndrome. Rosa recalled that Diana was “compassionate and practical” in the extensive help she gave her and her daughter. “Diana was there for her,” a friend of Rosa said. “Diana got some kind of strength from that.” Diana offered to be Domenica’s godmother, which led to another brief falling-out when Rosa invited photographers from Hello! magazine to the christening. Whenever anyone seemed to be exploiting a friendship with her, Diana took it as betrayal. “Diana was very angry about that; I don’t know how Rosa could have made that mistake,” another friend said. The two women repaired the relationship, but the episode left Diana uneasy.
Another friend sometimes identified as a maternal presence was Marguerite Littman, probably because she was of the same generation as Diana’s own mother. The Louisiana-born wife of an English barrister, Marguerite founded the AIDS Crisis Trust and met Diana through Adrian Ward-Jackson, vice chairman of the trust. “I would have loved to have been a mother figure,” Marguerite said. “But we were much more like playmates.” Known for her droll humor and numerous connections in Hollywood (where she lived in the fifties while coaching actors in Southern dialect), New York, and London, Marguerite often had lunch with Diana at Harry’s Bar, Kensington Palace, or Marguerite’s home in fashionable Chester Square.
“I deliberately didn’t get into situations where she would ask me for advice,” Littman said. “She would confide in me about little things, but she had enough people to confide in. You end up resenting people you confide in, because it gives them power. She told me her opinions of people, which was much more dangerous. That kind of thing she trusted me with. When I was with her, I liked everything to be as light as I could make it. If I had anything to tell about myself, it would have weighed on her. We were having a good time, talking about serious things but keeping it light.”
These new friends of Diana’s overshadowed the “girlfriends” she had met in the mid-eighties—Kate Menzies, Catherine Soames, and Julia Samuel. After the separation was announced, it was Catherine and her son Harry who joined Diana and her two boys on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Catherine, an heiress whose family controlled the Hong Kong-based Jardine Matheson Holdings, a multinational conglomerate, was the former wife of Nicholas Soames, Charles’s friend whom Diana disliked. Diana skied each spring in Lech, Austria, with Catherine and Kate, and vacationed at the home of Kate’s parents in exclusive Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. Kate was also from a wealthy family whose fortune was built on a network of newsstands.
“Diana was terribly giggly with Catherine and Kate,” a friend said. “They talked in little innuendos and private jokes and shorthand.” They even gave Diana a new nickname: “Princhey.” “Originally everyone called her Duch, so Princhey was an upgrade,” a friend explained. Since both Kate and Catherine were independently wealthy, they were less deferential than they might otherwise have been. “They didn’t want to be ladies-in-waiting to Diana,” another friend said. Although Julia Samuel was known for her lively parties, her relationship with Diana had a more serious cast, since she had trained as a therapist. “Julia was a helping sort, a great listener, who[m] Diana gravitated to,” a friend of Diana’s said.
Diana also had a group of male friends who played specific parts. One avuncular friend described himself from Diana’s viewpoint as “an old fart who was open-minded.” They teased each other, and he felt a duty to “cheer her up.” In later years, he gave her advice, which she declined to take, and he noticed a pattern to their friendship: “You could tell when she was up to something. You wouldn’t hear from her. I would hear from her in between, when she was under pressure.”
Wealthy Argentine Roberto Devorik, who first met Diana when he supplied clothes from his fashion business for her wedding trousseau, considered himself “like a brother to her. She was very British, and proud to be British, but she was fed up with the coolness and hypocrisy of the English upper class. I come from a middle/upper-class background, and I am Latin.” Devorik organized dinner parties and lunches for Diana with a glittering social set drawn from the worlds of film, theater, and fashion. He also organized several of her trips to the Caribbean. “My aim was to make her laugh in life,” Devorik said.
Diana’s up-and-down friendship with Fergie was unique in their shared antipathy for the royal family. Fergie’s path in 1992 had been nearly as bumpy as Diana’s, and by the year’s end, she was outside the fold as well. Fergie’s marriage to Andrew had begun to fray even before the birth of their second daughter in 1990. “By 1989, [Andrew and I] were sharing less and less,” Fergie recalled. “I should have asked Andrew to leave the navy.” Fergie clashed repeatedly with the Palace hierarchy over her spending habits, and her husband was absent too often to give her much help.
Although Andrew and Fergie remained fond of each other, Fergie ran into trouble when she turned to other men. The first was Steve Wyatt, a wealthy Texan she had started seeing in 1990; in January 1992, the Daily Mail reported that a maid had found a packet of compromising photographs in Wyatt’s London apartment showing Fergie with Wyatt on a Moroccan holiday. A week later, Fergie suggested to Andrew that they part company, and in mid-March, Buckingham Palace announced their formal separation.
By then, Fergie was already involved with another American, John Bryan, formally known as her “financial adviser.” In August 1992, Fergie and her two young daughters went on vacation with Bryan at a secluded villa in Saint-Tropez. It was this holiday that prompted one of Diana’s friends to remark that Fergie had a “judgment bypass.” While hiding in some nearby foliage, Italian paparazzo Daniel Angeli snapped nearly 200 pictures of a topless Fergie nuzzling and kissing Bryan. The Mirror bought more than fifty of the photos and published them in late August (just three days before the Squidgy story broke) when Fergie was with the royal family at Balmoral. In one shot, Bryan was shown kissing the top of Fergie’s foot, an image that transmuted into royal lore as the infamous “toe-sucking picture.” Fergie’s position in the royal family had become untenable and divorce inevitable.
Diana and Fergie had formed what Fergie called a “potent confederacy” in the year before they left the royal family, prodding each other in various acts of defiance. “If it hadn’t been for Fergie’s example and her encouragement to separate, Diana might have acted differently,” one of Diana’s close friends said. Even so, Diana had few illusions about her sister-in-law; her jaundiced view of Fergie had been evident in the spiky comments she made to Andrew Morton in the summer and fall of 1991 for his book. But by 1993, the two women were reunited in their outsider status, fueling each other’s worst conspiratorial view that, as Fergie put it, the royal “firm” was doing “its level best to isolate us.” Neither woman had the capacity to see beyond her own perspective, and any action seemed a plot against them.
Diana’s sister Sarah moved closer to her after the divorce as well, as Jane receded following the Morton debacle. Diana made Sarah a lady-in-waiting, and took her along on two foreign trips in the months following the split from Charles. “She’s the only person I know I can trust,” Diana said at the time. Sarah’s brisk wit struck a note of levity when Diana began to descend into self-pity; Diana also drew on her sister’s strength, practicality, and efficiency. But the role of lady-in-waiting proved difficult; Sarah chafed at having to stand aside holding Diana’s purse during official engagements instead of mixing it up with the guests. “Sarah loves the limelight,” one of Diana’s friends said. “It was a mistake to make her lady-in-waiting. Sarah doesn’t have the personality to play second fiddle.”
At the same time, Diana had a major falling-out with her brother Charles. With the loss of Highgrove for weekends, Diana faced the practical problem of finding a country retreat where she could take her two sons. Charles, by then the 9th Earl Spencer, offered her a home at Althorp, where he was living with his wife and children. She immediately chose Garden House, a “Palladian
jewel” inside the walls of the estate, where Jane and Robert Fellowes had lived for a decade before moving to a house in Norfolk. Charles initially agreed, but after the royal security service recommended an elaborate alarm system and thrice-daily sweeps of the property by dog patrols, Charles became concerned about the privacy of his family.
Charles offered Diana a choice of 120 other homes in the Spencer holdings in lieu of Garden House. He recommended Wormleighton Manor, the Spencer family’s original fifteenth-century manor house, which offered complete privacy: It was surrounded by a wall, with a gatehouse for bodyguards. But Diana had set her heart on Garden House, and she was furious that her brother denied her wishes. She told her friends how much he had hurt her, the press was soon decrying her brother’s unfeeling behavior, and she refused to speak to him—what he later characterized as a “brief but bitter silence.”
It may have been no coincidence that Diana abruptly chose that moment to reconcile with Raine Spencer, her sworn enemy. Only four years earlier, Diana had confronted Raine at Charles Spencer’s wedding and sputtered, “I hate you so much. If only you knew how much we all hated you for what you’ve done.”
Diana and Raine had met by chance in May 1993 at Claridge’s, where Diana was attending a charity luncheon. Afterward, Diana invited Raine to Kensington Palace, and the two women began to meet periodically for lunch. As word of their friendship spread, it caused endless comment, and at least one angry exchange between Diana and her mother.
When Diana encountered Raine, “she felt remorse,” recalled Elsa Bowker. “Diana’s sisters and brother were very cross with her [for reconciling]. Diana had been the one who hated her the most, but she decided to be nice. Diana did a great imitation of Raine. ‘Let me take you to a private lunch in a quiet place,’ Raine said to her. Diana said, ‘Look where she took me, to Claridge’s, and all she did was wave to people when they went by.’ ” But Diana had come to recognize that Raine had been good to her father, and she was amused by Raine’s flamboyant presence, fascinated by her cleverness, and titillated by her gossip. “Diana felt Raine was fun and amazing,” a friend of Diana’s said. “She took Raine as she was, and didn’t judge her.”
Chapter 19
Diana’s effort to define herself took on greater urgency after her official separation from Charles in December 1992. Her life as a mother had changed several months earlier when eight-year-old Harry went off to boarding school at Ludgrove, leaving her to cope with an empty nest and the loss of day-to-day family responsibilities. She was no longer a wife, except on royal occasions when her presence with Charles was required. She was left with the overwhelming portfolio of public responsibilities she had built up helter-skelter in her competition with Charles over the previous two years. By 1993, she was the patron of 118 charities that had come to depend on her to attract attention and money.
The mythology was that Diana drew “new strength” from the failure of her marriage, and that her official separation was “the trigger for her to complete her metamorphosis from despairing princess to confident new woman,” as reporter Richard Kay described it in the Daily Mail. AS had so often proved the case, the “new strength” was a tabloid fantasy; even Richard Kay admitted years later, “I never found her strong.”
Diana was a creature of impulses—both good and bad—who was as surprised as anyone by the consequences of her actions. She had no specific plan other than to use her position to comfort the afflicted—a genuine desire that gave her a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, her ability to articulate her mission was hampered by persistent suspicion of her estranged husband and his allies. Rather than thoughtfully crafting a positive role, she worried about imagined intrigues against her. “I was a problem,” she said. “I was a liability…. My husband’s side [was] very busy stopping me.”
One way Diana tried to combat her “husband’s side” was in making speeches. She hadn’t conquered her terror of public speaking, but she had learned how to use highly visible forums to send coded messages directly to her “public.” She may no longer have been an official representative of the royal family, but she had become a singular phenomenon: a celebrity princess who understood her power to command attention and even sway popular opinion.
Diana had made her first speech with clearly personal overtones in the fall of 1991. Addressing a convention of child and adolescent psychiatrists, Diana spoke of the legacy of an unstable childhood created by parental neglect: “Parents sometimes desert families, leaving their children bewildered and bereft with no explanation…. Many children even travel through life feeling responsible in some ways for their parents’ separation…. To travel through life with unbalanced emotions can feel like carrying a heavy rucksack of rubbish.” Diana emphasized the need for parents to “hug” and “cuddle” their children to protect them from psychological distress, and to allow children to express their emotions openly. As expected, the press saw Diana’s words as a veiled reference to her own unhappy childhood.
A year later, in November 1992, only weeks before her formal separation, Diana made her allusions even more pointed, and the media read her cues as an attack on Prince Charles (THE REAL PAIN OF A BROKEN MARRIAGE in Today; DIANA: THE PAIN OF BEING UNLOVED in the Daily Mail). In a speech to launch European Drug Prevention Week, she elaborated on her previous year’s theme to say that the best prevention against drug abuse was parental affection. Lines such as “children are not chores” but “souls to love and cherish,” and “there are potential huggers in every household,” seemed like a “lecture on good parenting”—delivered directly to Charles.
Once again, the tabloids went to the thesaurus of superlatives, calling Diana’s remarks “astonishing” and “extraordinary.” Actually, the speech was a collection of sweet-sounding bromides, delivered somewhat haltingly. Diana’s hand was evident in the scrambled syntax and unpolished, even childlike language. But what mattered in Diana’s case was the transmission of feelings, something she instinctively knew how to do. The tabloids also missed the underlying shrewdness in Diana’s oblique delivery. Had she forthrightly spoken about herself, she might not have received such a positive response. By approaching her subject sideways, she could get her message across without being branded as self-pitying.
Early in 1993, Diana began working closely with her new public speaking coach, Peter Settelin, a former soap opera actor. She had sixty sessions with Settelin, who tried to teach her how to relax and speak more conversationally. Diana asked for his guidance on a speech she had agreed to give at Britain’s first conference on eating disorders at the end of April. Settelin helped her write something “that didn’t actually say she suffered from [bulimia],” he recalled, “but made the connection in a way that people knew she knew what she was talking about.”
In her eight-minute address, Diana spoke with evident passion: “I have it on very good authority that the quest for perfection in society can leave the individual gasping for breath at every turn.” As Richard Kay wrote in the Daily Mail, “the ‘authority’ was herself,” pointing to some key phrases that “were all Diana’s”: calling bulimia a “shameful friend,” and describing childhood feelings of “guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem creating … a compulsion to dissolve like a dispirin [aspirin] and disappear.”
It was another “astonishing” effort by Diana, leading the tabloids to conclude that her words “showed she had beaten the disease.” She had not, and when Susie Orbach, a well-known psychotherapist, described her feminist approach to eating disorders in the keynote address, Diana was listening carefully. Orbach, the author of several best-selling books on eating disorders, had become a therapist after ten years of what she once characterized as “dieting, bingeing, and self-hatred.”
Orbach’s remarks that day were thick with psychological jargon (“the body as the personification of culture”), but she struck some themes that would appeal to Diana: the need for therapists to see the world through the eyes of their “food-refusing, mouth-stuffing, vomitin
g, laxative-using” patients; the unhelpful impulse to dismiss victims of eating disorders as “willful, manipulative and resistant”; the need to recognize that an eating disorder victim wants a therapist “who will understand her, who will respect her.… She is scared of being patronized, of having control wrested away from her.”
In one of the tabloid reports on the conference, Orbach remarked that Diana was “someone who had learned and thought a lot about the problem.” But all that Diana may have learned, all of her friends’ ministrations, and all the distractions of her healers and spiritualists were insufficient to dispel her symptoms of depression, bulimia, and self-injury. After hearing Orbach’s words, Diana decided to undergo therapy once again. The most important factor in Diana’s decision was Orbach’s own struggle with eating disorders, which would allow her to connect with Diana’s emotional turbulence.
Diana contacted Orbach soon after the conference, and began to see her twice a week. Orbach had a narrow agenda: Compulsive eating was “not about lack of self-control or lack of willpower,” but “a response to the inequality of the sexes.” Yet she also used Diana’s bulimia to examine other problems, including the warping effects of her celebrity. “I think Susie Orbach helped Diana try to sort herself out,” one of Diana’s friends said.
Diana in Search of Herself Page 35