Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  When it actually came to being interviewed by Alastair, I remember thinking: ‘Gosh, I’m not flapping my arms about. I’m sitting here quite calmly. But if only the man would be more receptive to what I’m saying.’ Every time he asked a question he’d then look at the next bit of paper. There was no eye contact. I thought it was hopeless. But my father-in-law said to Charles how impressed he was that I’d come across so calmly, which I hadn’t appreciated at the time. It was very nice that he said that.

  [On Lynda Lee-Potter, columnist at the Daily Mail] I always admire her because she always hits the nerve on the head about me. She seems to know me so well. I met her earlier this year at the Women of the Year launch and I asked if someone could fish her out. And I said to her: ‘I’m sorry to dig you out of the masses, but I just did want to say thank you very much for all your support.’ And she was very sweet and just said nothing, but understood everything. It meant so much.

  [On Patrick Demarchelier] Very nice. I much prefer to be photographed by him than anyone else. Because he’s a) so professional and b) he understands what it’s like to be at the other end of the lens. Which means he brings one alive. He knows when you’re tired so he lets you have a rest. He doesn’t punish you.

  DIANA’S CHARITY WORK

  [On the first patronages] I didn’t have any choice. It was thought: ‘You’re interested in children, let’s go with the children aspect.’ One or two I could have done without now. But the ones I have – I have over a hundred now – I choose myself. They’re usually to do with the terminally ill. I haven’t got the courage to stop any yet.

  [On the idea of a Princess’s Trust] It won’t be going ahead. My husband won’t allow it.

  [On working with the dying] It doesn’t frighten me when people die, like Adrian [Ward-Jackson, Diana’s friend who died from Aids-related illnesses], it doesn’t frighten me at all. He says he wants me to be there at the end – it’s a privilege. I’m not so gripped by those who are getting better. Just the ones on their way out that I feel a deep need to be with.

  YEARS OF SUFFERING

  I think an awful lot of people tried to help me because they saw something going wrong but I never leant on anyone. None of my family knew about this at all. Jane, my sister, after five years of being married, came to check on me.

  I had a V-neck on and shorts. She said: ‘Duch [Diana’s childhood nickname], what’s that marking on your chest?’ I said: ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ She said: ‘What is it?’ And the night before I wanted to talk to Charles about something. He wouldn’t listen to me, he said I was crying wolf. So I picked up his penknife off his dressing table and scratched myself heavily down my chest and both thighs. There was a lot of blood and he hadn’t made any reaction whatsoever. Jane just went for me. She said: ‘You mustn’t let the side down.’ And I turned on her, and said: ‘Give me some credit that I haven’t troubled any of the family in five years about this.’ Their perception is very different now. They’re annoyed by the lack of support from my husband.

  I picked up his penknife off his dressing table and scratched myself heavily down my chest and both thighs.

  [On other suicide attempts] I was running around with a lemon knife, one with the serrated edges. I was just so desperate. I knew what was wrong with me but nobody else around me understood me. I needed rest and to be looked after inside my house and for people to understand the torment and anguish going on in my head. It was a desperate cry for help. I’m not spoiled – I just needed to be allowed to adapt to my new position.

  I don’t know what my husband fed her [the Queen]. He definitely told her about my bulimia and she told everybody that was the reason why our marriage had cracked up because of Diana’s eating and it must be so difficult for Charles.

  It was at the Expo [in Canada] where I passed out. I remember I had never fainted before in my life. We’d been walking round for four hours, we hadn’t had any food and presumably I hadn’t eaten for days beforehand. When I say that, I mean food staying down. I remember walking round feeling really ghastly. I didn’t dare tell anyone I felt ghastly because I thought they’d think I was whinging. I put my arm on my husband’s shoulder and said: ‘Darling, I think I’m about to disappear’, and slid down the side of him. Whereupon David Roycroft and Anne Beckwith-Smith [royal aides] who were with us at the time took me to a room. My husband told me off. He said I could have passed out quietly somewhere else, behind a door. It was all very embarrassing. My argument was I didn’t know anything about fainting. Everyone was very concerned. I fainted in the American section. While Anne and David were bringing me round, Charles went on around the exhibition. He left me to it. I got back to the hotel in Vancouver and blubbed my eyes out. Basically I was overtired, exhausted and on my knees because I hadn’t got any food inside me. Everyone was saying: ‘She can’t go out tonight, she must have some sleep.’ Charles said: ‘She must go out tonight otherwise there’s going to be a sense of terrific drama and they are going to think there’s something really awful wrong with her.’ Inside me I knew there was something wrong with me but I was too immature to voice it. A doctor came and saw me. I told him I was being sick. He didn’t know what to say because the issue was too big for him to handle. He just gave me a pill and shut me up.

  It was all very strange, I just felt miserable. I knew the bulimia started the week after we got engaged. My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me – and the Camilla thing, I was desperate, desperate.

  My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me.

  I remember the first time I made myself sick. I was so thrilled because I thought this was the release of tension. The first time I was measured for my wedding dress I was 29 inches around the waist. The day I got married I was 23½ inches. I had shrunk into nothing from February to July. I had shrunk to nothing.

  [On people trying to help] but they were coming from Charles’s side, such as the odd lady-in-waiting. They weren’t coming from my side. I shut my friends out because I didn’t want to pull them in on it. My mother tried to give me Valium. Someone else tried to take me off it. I never actually took it. But it was all very strange. There were so many forces pulling me and I didn’t have a clue which way to turn.

  I didn’t get any choice over the people I met [for therapy]. I didn’t take to either [doctor]. One of them drove me mad. He seemed to be the one who needed help, not me. The other would ring me at 6 o’clock and I’d have to explain to him the conversations I’d had with my husband throughout the day. There weren’t many conversations, more tears than anything else.

  On the outside, people were saying I gave my husband a hard time, that I was acting like a spoiled child, but I knew I just needed rest and patience and time to adapt to all the roles that were required of me overnight. By then there was immense jealousy because every single day I was on the front of the newspapers. I read two newspapers, albeit I was always supposed to have read them all. I did take criticism hard because I tried so hard to show them that I wasn’t going to let them down, but obviously that didn’t come across strongly enough at that point. We had a few trying to cut wrists, throwing things out of windows, breaking glass. I threw myself downstairs when I was four months pregnant with William, trying to get my husband’s attention, for him to listen to me.

  But he just said: ‘You’re crying wolf.’

  I gave everybody a fright. I couldn’t sleep, I just never slept. I went for three nights without any sleep at all. I had no fuel to sleep on. I thought my bulimia was secret but quite a few of the people in the house recognized it was going on, though nobody mentioned it. They all thought it was quite amusing that I ate so much but never put any weight on.

  I always kept my breakfast down. I don’t know what the hell it was. I didn’t take any vitamin pills or anything. I just got help from somewhere – I don’t know where it came fr
om. I swam every day, I never went out at night, I didn’t burn candles at both ends. I got up very early in the morning, on my own, to be on my own, and at night-time went to bed early, so it wasn’t as though I was being a masochist – I was to my system but not to my energy level. I always had terrific energy – I’ve always had.

  It went on and on. Only a year and a half ago I suddenly woke up and realized that I was on the way down fast. I just cried at every opportunity, which thrilled people in a way because when you’re crying in this system you are weak and ‘We can handle her.’ But when you bounce up again, ‘What the hell has happened?’ questions again.

  Little did they [the public] realize that the individual was crucifying herself inside, because she didn’t think she was good enough.

  The public side was very different from the private side. The public side, they wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them and everything will turn into gold and all their worries would be forgotten. Little did they realize that the individual was crucifying herself inside, because she didn’t think she was good enough. ‘Why me, why all this publicity?’ My husband started to get very jealous and anxious by then, too. Inside the system I was treated very differently, as though I was an oddball and I felt I was an oddball, and so I thought I wasn’t good enough. But now I think it’s good to be the oddball, thank God, thank God, thank God!

  I had so many dreams as a young girl that I wanted, and hoped this that and the other, that my husband would look after me. He would be a father figure and he’d support me, encourage me, say: ‘Well done’, or ‘No, it wasn’t good enough’, but I didn’t get any of that. I couldn’t believe it, I got none of that, it was role reversal.

  He [Prince Charles] ignores me everywhere. Ignored everywhere and have been for a long time but if people choose to see that now, they are a bit late in the day. He just dismisses me.

  [The worst day of my life] was realizing that Charles had gone back to Camilla.

  [On her feelings of isolation] Definitely separation from friends. I would be too embarrassed to ask them to come in for lunch. I couldn’t cope with that. I would be apologizing the whole way through lunch.

  FERGIE

  I met Fergie when Charles was getting near me and she kept rearing her head for some reason and she seemed to know all about the royal set-up, things like that. She just sort of encouraged it. I don’t know, she just suddenly appeared and she sat in the front pew of our wedding – and everything like that. She came to lunch at Buckingham Palace and didn’t seem daunted by it all.

  My husband said: ‘I wish you would be like Fergie – all jolly. Why are you always so miserable?’

  I wasn’t quite sure how to take it. Suddenly everybody said: ‘Oh, isn’t she marvellous, a breath of fresh air, thank God she’s more fun than Diana.’ So Diana was listening and reading every line. I felt terribly insecure. I thought maybe I ought to be like Fergie and my husband said: ‘I wish you would be like Fergie – all jolly. Why are you always so miserable? Why can’t you be like Grannie?’ I’m quite glad I’m not Grannie now. I made so many balls-ups trying to be like Fergie. I went to a pop concert, Spider concert, David Bowie, with David Waterhouse and David Linley. I went in leather trousers, which I thought was the right thing to do, completely putting out of mind that I was the future Queen and future Queens don’t wear leather like that in public. So I thought that was frightfully ‘with it’, frightfully pleased to act my own age. Slapped hands. The same summer at Ascot I put somebody’s umbrella up somebody’s backside. In my astrological chart Penny Thornton always said to me: ‘Everything you will do this summer you will pay for.’ I did, definitely. I learned a lot.

  I got terribly jealous [of Fergie] and she got terribly jealous of me. She kept saying to me: ‘You mustn’t worry, Duch, everything is going to be fine, let me do this, let me do that.’ I couldn’t understand it, she was actually enjoying being where she was, whereas I was fighting to survive. I couldn’t understand how she could find it so easy. I thought she would be like me and put her head down and be shy. No, a different kettle of fish altogether and she wooed everybody in this family and did it so well. She left me looking like dirt. Another dark age.

  But up in Scotland she used to do everything that I never did. So I thought: ‘This can’t last; the energy of this creature is unbelievable.’ Meanwhile everybody looking at me – ‘It’s a pity Diana has gone so introverted and quiet, she was so busy dieting and trying to sort herself out’, and then this holocaust arrived. I knew eventually she would turn round and say: ‘Duch, how on earth have you survived all these years?’ She’s said it now for the last two years. I never explain. I just say it’s just happened.

  It’s fascinating watching Fergie trying to make her way. I’m in the wings just watching her do it – it’s very clever. But it’s not recognized, it’s effort. They think: ‘Oh, isn’t it nice Sarah’s doing that!’ But it’s not, you don’t get ten points for doing it. You don’t get one point.

  PHILIP DUNNE AND MAJOR DAVID WATERHOUSE

  Fergie was asked by Charles to find two single men for our ski holiday in Klosters. It was the year before Hugh Lindsay was killed. And both these young men came in and they were great fun, particularly David [Waterhouse]. I took an enormous shine to him, unfortunately. And he made me laugh very much. Philip [Dunne] was very sweet, but he didn’t have the charisma that David had. And we went off skiing, the four of us, Catherine Soames, David, Philip and I.

  But it was a foot on the outside, [to have] someone who said they actually liked being with me. And that to me meant everything.

  When we came back [home] I saw a lot of David, sometimes with or without Philip. Then that weekend, when we went to stay at Gatley Park [the Herefordshire home of Dunne’s parents, Thomas and Henrietta]. [The press] got so excited, [even though] there must have been about fifteen of us in the house. Philip was there, obviously, and David, as well. A lovely weekend, and then the press picked up on Philip. They knew it was one of them, but I think they just went for Philip because he was the better-looking. And that’s how everybody got excited [hinting at an affair].

  [I was] totally shocked by the attention. [David was] laughing about it, thinking it was all funny, whereas I didn’t. When I went to the David Bowie concert, David Waterhouse, who I shouldn’t have taken anyway, came and sat on my right and that’s how the picture arose. One ran on every front page on Monday morning.

  I was in tears. I was hysterical. I was horrified, mortified, cross with myself. I rang David up in the [Household Cavalry] to apologize, and I got such a strange reply back. ‘Oh it’s fine, it’s all right. I can cope with it.’ And I thought: ‘Wait a minute, he’s enjoying this.’ I was so naïve. He enjoyed the whole thing. And I absolutely loathed it.

  But it was a foot on the outside, [to have] someone who said they actually liked being with me. And that to me meant everything.

  JACOB ROTHSCHILD

  Jacob’s very clever, very clever. I admire him enormously. He’s fascinating. And he’s got a very nice wife too. I go and have lunch with him and his partner. And there’s so much to learn from that man, I just drink it all up. He’s a terrific gossip – I have to be very careful what I say to him. For instance, he wants a painting of me to go into Spencer House, as one of the three Spencer daughters.

  He kept ringing me up [when he was refurbishing Spencer House] asking if I’d like to come round and talk to the builders, which I did very happily. As I felt more comfortable with him [I’d be able to ask] penetrating questions rather than saying: ‘Gosh, Jacob, you’re marvellous to have done this house. Isn’t it lovely!’

  I don’t know if it’s a crush, I can’t quite work that out yet. But I’m bubbling along because Jacob’s fascinating and I just learn from him. I don’t see myself falling in love with him. Oh no. No, no, no, no.

  THE TURNING POINT [IN KLOSTERS, SWITZERLAND, IN 1988]

  We went off skiing. I had flu, I had been in bed for two days. Third day in bed. Fe
rgie came back in the afternoon at 2.30pm. She was carrying Beatrice then, she was four to five months pregnant. She landed upside-down in a ditch and had come back shaken, pale and exhausted. I put her to bed and both of us were in the chalet and we heard this helicopter go up. I said to her: ‘There’s been an avalanche’, and she said: ‘Something’s gone wrong.’

  He said: ‘There’s been an accident and one of the party is dead.’

  We heard Philip Mackie [royal aide] come into the chalet. He didn’t know that the two girls were upstairs. We heard him say: ‘There’s been an accident’, so I shouted down: ‘Philip, what’s going on?’ ‘Oh, nothing at all, nothing at all, we’ll tell you soon.’ I said: ‘Tell us now.’ He said: ‘There’s been an accident and one of the party is dead.’ So we sat there, we just sat on top of the stairs, Fergie and I, and we didn’t know who it was.

  Half an hour later it came through that it was a man and then three-quarters of an hour later Charles rang up Fergie to tell her that it wasn’t him, that it was Hugh [Major Hugh Lindsay, a former equerry to the Queen]. That really turned me inside out. So everyone started shaking. They didn’t know what to do next. I said to Fergie: ‘Right, we must go upstairs and pack Hugh’s suitcase and do it now while we don’t know what’s hit us. We must take the passport out and give it to the police.’ And we went upstairs and packed everything. I took the suitcase downstairs and said to Tony [Prince Charles’s bodyguard]: ‘I’ve put the suitcase under your bed. It’s there when you need it but we’d like Hugh’s belongings back so we can give them to Sarah [Major Lindsay’s wife], his signet ring, his watch.’ And then it all went haywire. My husband was very much the centre of attention – how he coped with it, and whether he was going to crack up. Charlie Palmer-Tomkinson comes in and says: ‘Patricia’s having a second operation on her legs.’ So we, as a party, think: well why isn’t he with her? ‘Oh, I’ll see her in the morning,’ he said. The coroner came and told us quite a strange story about how it was because the snow had been dangerous. To this day I think it was the two men – my husband and Charlie’s – sense of danger that took someone’s life. And when [the press] said my husband suffered, okay, he suffered but nothing like Sarah suffered. [She was then heavily pregnant with her first child, Alice]. When I went to talk to my husband about Sarah Lindsay and how she felt about Hugh being taken, he always said to me: ‘I don’t understand why she’s angry.’