Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  ‘Di, Di, over here.’ The Princess of Wales seemed about to lose herself in the crowd, seemed almost to be absorbed by it. She was moving through a blur of smiles and waves and handshakes. Someone kissed her hand and she blushed. Someone threw her a rose. She caught it and blushed again. As her car drove slowly past Ken Lennox in the pouring rain she looked at him through the window and mouthed: ‘How am I doing, Ken?’ Lennox burst out laughing, let both cameras dangle at his neck and gave her a double thumbs-up as he shouted ‘Okay!’.

  By the end of the day, Charles had started to make self-deprecatory jokes to the crowd. ‘Well, at least I know my place now – I’m a carrier of flowers for my wife.’ But Jayne Fincher saw his face fall from time to time.

  It would be really embarrassing sometimes because she’d be on one side of the road and they’d all be excited and screaming, and on the other side of the road they’d all be going, ‘Oh no!’ because they’d got him. He’d just turn round and say, ‘I’m really sorry, she’ll be here in a minute.’

  Even at this early stage, Charles was privately hurt by the public preference for his wife. Someone who accompanied the royal couple on this tour told us that:

  I caught Charles kicking a pebble around. He said, ‘They don’t want to see me.’ He was wobbly. He seemed schizophrenic, deeply caring followed by deeply selfish. Diana said, ‘Isn’t it great! They love us. I hope I can keep going, my feet are wet.’ She said, ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, what can we do about it? They keep moving to my side.’ We all adored working with her.

  Diana was a natural, a sensation. One local paper printed a special edition commemorating the visit. Their headline was ‘Diana: the Queen of Hearts’.

  * * *

  The Prince of Wales now returned to his habitual schedule. It took him all over the country, and only a few engagements were shared with the Princess. On 1 November there was a concert at Blenheim, on 3 November the National Film Festival’s gala opening, the next day the State Opening of Parliament followed by the opening of the ‘Splendours of the Gonzaga’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. On 5 November Diana’s pregnancy was announced and the planned 1982 tour to New Zealand, Australia and Canada was postponed. The mayor of Tetbury drank champagne beneath the union flag. Over lunch at the Guildhall, the Prince thanked the City of London for the wedding. He paid tribute to Diana, attributing the nation’s warm response ‘entirely to the effect my dear wife has had on people’.

  But his wife was not happy with the way he had resumed the pattern of his pre-nuptial life, dashing from engagement to engagement and spending time away from home – if you could call Buckingham Palace home. Someone who worked, but did not have to live there, told us:

  Moving into Buck House with the in-laws was a disastrous start to the marriage. Why nobody thought about it, goodness knows. They had a suite of rooms, but they didn’t even have a kitchen. They should have got Kensington Palace ready for them after the wedding. Every time you wanted to order tea, a footman was summoned. There was an element of ‘Why’s she ringing the bell again?’

  By now Diana was experiencing morning sickness or bulimia or both, and most of her engagements were cancelled as a result. She attended the Remembrance Sunday service and on 12 November made visits to York and Chesterfield, where she was showered with gifts of soft toys for the expected child. But she failed to go to church at Sandringham that weekend and cancelled a visit to Bristol on 18 November. In late November, appearing on her own for the first time, she switched on the Christmas lights in Regent Street.

  One reason why Diana was unhappy about appearing in public was that she did not want to be photographed looking ill, not out of vanity – according to one of her aides – but because she considered that looking good was part of her duty:

  She was terribly conscious of her image. She would get disproportionately pissed off by a silly headline. She thought it was her job to bring credit to her husband. She thought that was what it was all about.

  Diana supervised the decoration of Kensington Palace. But most days there was little for her to do except brood, and she was still brooding about Camilla. Charles would return home to face a litany of doubts, recriminations and anxieties. Whatever he said, he could not persuade her that her fears were groundless.

  Diana suspected that Charles was seeing Camilla during hunting excursions from Highgrove. There are contradictory accounts from Gloucestershire journalists, some of whom believe they saw the pair riding together at this time. Charles is reported to have rounded on a group of them, angrily asking: ‘When are you going to stop making my life a misery?’ Seeing Camilla, riding with Camilla, talking to Camilla on the telephone, none of this meant any kind of an affair was taking place. But Diana believed it did.

  During the autumn royal officials began to consider a full-time public role for her. But they did so without much enthusiasm. Relations with the courtly and old-fashioned Adeane, the private secretary, were strained. He was very busy keeping what he saw as the Prince of Wales’s wild enthusiasms and unwelcome advisers at bay. He did not approve of the Prince visiting summer camps full of teenagers on probation, for example. Frustrated with the Prince’s reluctance to listen to his advice, he had little patience to spare when it came to considering a new role for the Princess. Something to do with Wales and something to do with children were vaguely suggested, but in the Household Dining Room they complained that she had no serious interests to build on. And when Adeane tried to talk to her about such matters, she delighted in teasing him with lines such as ‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy, Edward’. The Prince was frequently called upon to assure his private secretary that his wife meant no insult.

  Diana was troubled by her intellectual shortcomings; she wanted to learn and improve. And yet she reacted badly to instruction, believing that she was being patronised. It was obvious to her that Charles felt she was stupid since he had Everett trying to educate her all the time. According to the courtiers, Charles tried to tell her that she had a natural flair for the job but with a little work she could be better. She chose to take that as criticism; chose too to point out that the press and the population clearly thought she was wonderful already. Charles – it appeared – began to avoid her because he couldn’t tell whether she would be friendly or argumentative. The outbursts of temper only made him more reserved when what she wanted, what she said she wanted, was his loving attention. But the more demanding she became, the more Charles viewed her with distaste. A courtier gave us his view:

  Prince Charles is somebody who is very caring, but to have a wife around who was constantly throwing wobblies when he couldn’t understand why drove him almost demented. That stems also from the bulimia thing, but back then nobody had even heard of bulimia. And then friends reacted to his reaction.

  Her friends say that she felt rejected and worthless. Charles’s friends say that however emotional, affectionate and attentive he was, it was never enough. They were both reacting in ways that made it impossible for them to be good for each other.

  * * *

  It was clear to everyone close to Diana that something needed to be done to relieve the pressure. In December 1981 the pregnant Princess left Highgrove to visit a Tetbury sweet shop to buy some wine gums. She was cornered by photographers and the resulting pictures were published the following day. The Queen’s press secretary invited all Fleet Street and television news editors to Buckingham Palace. It was the first time that this had happened in twenty-six years, since Charles’s first term at Cheam preparatory school. They all turned up except Kelvin Mackenzie of the Sun. He had a more pressing engagement with his boss, Rupert Murdoch. David Chipp of the Press Association was one of those who attended:

  We had a briefing and a discussion with Michael Shea, who was the Queen’s press secretary, and he made the point that could we lay off a bit, give them some freedom? And we chatted about this and then he said, ‘Would you like to come for a drink?’ And so we all went in next door, and in came the Queen and the
Duke of Edinburgh and talked to us in small groups. They came round, and the Queen made it clear that Diana was not from a family that had been used to this sort of press coverage, unlike her family which had from childhood. And she said it was very difficult for her, and said, for example, if she goes down to the local shop, near Highgrove, there’ll be photographers and reporters there, covering her buying a bag of sweets or something. And one of my colleagues from the Sunday papers said, ‘Well, ma’am, couldn’t she send a footman?’ And the Queen looked up at him and said, ‘Do you know, I think that’s the most pompous remark I’ve ever heard in my life.’

  The Sun did not take the Queen’s intervention very seriously. According to Harry Arnold, ‘We had no reverence for the Royal Family. We didn’t believe in following rules laid down by the old guard at the Palace, we went our own way. Kelvin printed my stories whether they liked them or not.’

  * * *

  Christmas at Windsor was happy and relaxed. There were carols and turkey and stockings hanging over the hearth, and much talk about how next year there would be a new baby to share it all with. But Diana’s mood changed suddenly as the extended family went to Sandringham for New Year. At the beginning of 1982, the Sun, acting on a detailed tip-off from a royal servant, reported that Diana had fallen down the stairs at Sandringham. A doctor was called but pronounced no harm done to mother or baby.

  Years later this episode assumed great significance in Diana’s account of her marriage’s disintegration. Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography told how she was at the end of her tether, overwrought at the cruel indifference of the Prince of Wales. She confronted Charles in a tearful row that was audible all over Sandringham. She told Morton that in her despair she threatened suicide. He coldly called her bluff, mocked her melodramatic style and refused to listen. He said he was going riding and left the room. Diana, three months pregnant, threw herself down the main staircase at Sandringham, landing at the feet of the Queen, who was ashen pale and shaking with fear. When Charles heard what had happened he went out riding, and when he came back he was just as dismissive as ever. To a friend called Elsa Bowker, Diana amplified her tale: she had broken into Charles’s desk and found love letters between Charles and Camilla. ‘She said that is why she threw herself down the stairs at Sandringham. She said she didn’t think it was worth living or having a baby.’

  In 1994 Jonathan Dimbleby repeated the story that Diana threw herself down a staircase, citing Morton, and lending further credence to this version of events. He tried to explain how Charles might have become frustrated with Diana’s refusal to be pacified by him. Then there was a plot twist. The writer Lady Colin Campbell announced that in an interview with her in 1995 Diana denied that any of this had happened at all and blamed Morton for distorting what she had told him. He had invented the ‘cry for help’, she said. Only a man would write such a thing, since it was obvious that no woman would do anything to harm her unborn child. Morton’s eventual response was to publish the transcripts of the tapes that Diana had recorded for him. This is what she had said:

  I threw myself down the stairs. Charles said I was crying wolf and I said I felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out and he said: ‘I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me. I’m going riding now.’ So I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened. I knew I wasn’t going to lose the baby; quite bruised around the stomach. Charles went out riding and when he came back, you know, it was just dismissal, total dismissal. He just carried on out of the door.

  That there was a bitter argument is not in doubt. That detail was part of the original story supplied to the Sun. The paper decided not to ignore it. Their informant, a royal servant, had seen the argument and then saw Diana trip and stumble down three steps before holding on to the banister. The Sun’s informant added that Charles had stayed with Diana until a doctor arrived to pronounce that no harm had been done.

  The Sun’s photographer, Arthur Edwards, who knew the witness well, was philosophical:

  It’s just the sort of thing you expect. In any marriage there are rows. Of course, they were royal and they were not supposed to row, and certainly not in public and certainly not where the servants can hear. But you see, Diana was very volatile, she just let it rip when she felt she should. Now she didn’t fall down, as it has been suggested, a whole flight of stairs: she fell down three. And of course Prince Charles was very concerned and called the doctor because she was pregnant to see if the baby was fine and it was fine. But that was interpreted later as Diana trying to commit suicide. Well, of course it wasn’t that, she just fell down three stairs.

  Joseph Sanders, a close friend of Diana’s in the 1990s, says that she told him she slipped and there was no suicide bid.

  * * *

  It’s a familiar story. Two people not getting on, blaming each other for the problems and then exaggerating later when they want outsiders to take their side. Selectively quoting incidents from the past to justify their current behaviour; writing off all the happy moments: ‘You never loved me’, ‘I was never happy’, ‘You were always unfaithful’. The great difference is that this particular failing marriage was to be played out inside an echo chamber.

  Jonathan Dimbleby’s book was published when the battle between the couple was at its height, the echoes of their past arguments at their loudest and least reliable. Nevertheless, his account is the closest thing we have to Charles’s side of the story. Dimbleby writes of Charles devoting hours ‘haplessly trying to soothe her back to cheerfulness’ at the time of the staircase incident, and goes into detail about Diana’s dark moods, calling them ‘unfathomable’, ‘inexplicable’ and ‘aberrant’.

  Dimbleby also gives us a telling account of the attitude of Charles’s friends at this time. Some of them, ‘those of their friends who had sympathy for them both’,

  did not rush to judgement but did their limited best to help, knowing that to attribute blame in such a predicament would do nothing to solve what they regarded as an awful plight for them both.

  But others were evidently less sympathetic:

  As her pregnancy advanced, a sense of despair lurked about the Princess. Her bouts of misery lasted longer and her outlook seemed bleaker than ever. The Prince confided his anxiety only to a tiny circle of his most trusted friends, one or two of whom urged him to be tougher with what they interpreted as her self-pity. They said that she needed to ‘pull herself together’, and that would not happen if he indulged her bouts of gloom with tender words.

  Dimbleby is careful to put the ‘self-pity’ line into the mouths of Charles’s friends, but he allows that Charles sometimes took their advice. It seems likely that in these early difficult months of her royal life, the pregnant, insecure twenty-year-old was told to ‘pull herself together’ rather a lot.

  Diana quickly came to believe that Charles’s friends, ‘the Highgrove set’ as she called them, were out to get her. She thought they saw her demands on his time as a threat to their own role in his life, and so to their position in society. She was also convinced that they were bad for him: ‘They were all oiling up, basically, kissing his feet and I thought it was so bad for an individual to receive all that.’ She was determined that family life would be different from the royal existence she had known up to now. She wanted Charles to herself in her own home. Things would change when her baby was born.

  6

  Mood Swings

  * * *

  The marriage was not unhappy at the beginning, just tempestuous. Loving at times and confused at times. But two things screwed the relationship. The Queen and his family constantly siding with him . . . and the Camilla relationship. Diana was extremely interested, always asking about it.

  It was spelt out to Diana. She was told that a lot of the time she would be on her own, that she was expected to be his consort, but everyone was telling her ‘You’re the future of the Royal Family’. A young girl like that, it turned her head.
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  Two senior members of the royal household, early 1980s

  Janet Filderman didn’t think that Diana made the best of her looks. She had often wondered if she would get the chance to do something with that lovely face. Now, thanks to a recommendation from Diana’s sister Jane, the top beautician was about to get her opportunity.

  ‘Oh, so this is where it all goes on, is it?’

  The young woman was a bit gangling in a way. Breezy and funny but rather unsure of herself.

  Filderman’s beauty parlour was crammed into the basement of a hairdresser’s salon in Porchester Place. She busied herself with her lotions and face flannels, looking respectfully away as the Princess discarded her blouse and lay on her treatment table. There was always something intimate in the relationship between beautician and half-naked client. But between Diana and Janet there soon developed an unusual closeness. ‘On the third visit she said, “Do you think you could call me Diana?” and I said, “If it’s not presumptuous, yes, I would love to.’ ”

  She became the daughter I have never had and a very delightful friend. I liked her humour, I liked her sense of purpose, her determination, her caring. I think she was a special person in that respect because she had this magic of making you feel that you were the most important thing in her life. She made you feel that she was grateful for seeing you, which was really the other way around

  We talked on the telephone a great deal. She would phone me up in the evenings, probably nine o’clock or something like that when she was on her own, she would just have a little chat about her day. And we would have a little giggle. She had a tremendous sense of humour. On one occasion when she was going to a state dinner and she came to me that afternoon and I said ‘Oh, marvellous, marvellous, what are you going to wear, what are you going to do?’ ‘Dah dah, dah dah,’ she said. ‘I always end up sitting next to the oldest person and they are usually deaf.’