Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana also conspicuously avoided intimate relationships with the young men in her group. “She just wasn’t that involved with boys,” said the mother of one of her friends. “She often said, ‘Let’s go out with the girls.’ She preferred that.” Diana had reached her full five foot ten height, and she certainly was pretty, but her mousey-brown hair was styled boyishly, she was slightly plump, and she wore juvenile clothing. Diana held her head down primarily to disguise her height, and she blushed easily. Yet Diana was good company, and men were drawn to her, though she kept her distance. Rory Scott found her “sexually attractive,” he recalled, “and the relationship was not a platonic one as far as I was concerned, but it remained that way.”

  Another admirer, George Plumptre, wrote decades later in Diana’s obituary for The Daily Telegraph that “Lady Diana’s life in London lacked one element for which the press were to search ceaselessly and in vain—boyfriends. It seemed that she was happy to enjoy the company of a close and fairly small circle, and that she had no desire to form any serious attachment.”

  Characteristically, Diana offered differing explanations for her early relationships with men. The most dramatic, as revealed in her interviews with Morton, reflected her then-secret belief that she was destined to marry someone important. Diana explained that she was the only girl among her contemporaries who didn’t have a boyfriend “because I knew somehow that I had to keep myself very tidy for whatever was coming my way.” Diana did indeed project a quaintly virginal image for the swinging seventies. “She was an unusual thing, a good girl, fantastically innocent,” said a longtime male friend. “I never heard any evidence Diana had sex before marriage, which was as rare as rocking-horse shit.” Perhaps because of the trauma of her parents’ divorce, Diana suffered from anxiety when it came to the opposite sex. “I had never had a boyfriend,” Diana also said. “I’d always kept them away, thought they were all trouble—and I couldn’t handle it emotionally. I was very screwed up, I thought.”

  By shutting the door on meaningful relationships with young men, Diana created an emotional vacuum in her life. She didn’t learn the responsibilities that come with commitment—the sort of “practice” relationships that can provide valuable experience prior to marriage—nor was she exposed to the give and take of healthy interdependence with a man.

  Diana also continued to have a low opinion of herself despite her devil-may-care facade. She was self-conscious about being plump, although if she was bingeing and purging she kept it well disguised. When Diana was feeling tense during her days at the Vacani ballet studio, she was known to dash across the street to “tuck into a good-sized chicken portion.” During her cooking course in the fall of 1978, Diana “got terribly fat,” she recalled. “My fingers were always in the saucepans.” Her friend Rory Scott vividly remembered the time when Diana gobbled a one-pound bag of sweets while playing bridge.

  Diana’s refuge in compulsive neatness—another way she imposed control when feeling overwhelmed—was more obvious. At the apartment she bought at eighteen in Colherne Court, she took charge of the cleaning. During dinner parties she was known to rise even before the meal was finished so she could start washing up, because she couldn’t bear the sight of dirty dishes.

  Diana’s arrival in London coincided with a significant turning point for her sister Sarah. Back in June 1977, Sarah—still so thin her bones nearly poked through her skin—had been working for a London real estate company. In spite of her illness, at twenty-two she was an eligible young woman, and she had been invited by the Queen to join her house party at Windsor Castle during the races at Ascot. That weekend, Prince Andrew introduced Sarah to Prince Charles, then twenty-eight, whom she had known from afar as a child at Sandringham.

  According to Sarah, Charles greeted her by tactlessly asking, “Do you have anorexia?” “I, of course, like an alcoholic, said that I hadn’t,” she recalled. “But although I knew I hadn’t fooled him, he did not persist.” They enjoyed each other’s company nevertheless, and six weeks later she checked herself into the Regent’s Park Nursing Home to treat her eating disorder. “It is mind over matter and I had finally sorted myself out,” Sarah said later. Although numerous accounts said that Charles had helped her toward recovery, Sarah credited “my mother and just common sense.” “Within a week she had put on a stone [14 pounds],” recalled one of Sarah’s friends. “She would eat and a nurse would prevent her from going to the loo.”

  It is difficult to account for the relative ease with which Sarah threw off her eating disorder once she committed herself to effective treatment, compared with Diana’s inability to conquer her symptoms throughout two decades of affliction. “Bulimia ranges from fad bulimic people to people with serious personality disorders,” explained child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Kent Ravenscroft, who has a special expertise in eating disorders. “If your bulimia is a passing skirmish, or a passing neurotic period of young to middle adolescence, it can be brief.… If it is embedded in a larger disorder, it can be difficult to treat.”

  By mid-July 1977, Sarah and the Prince of Wales were an item. One reporter even noted in the Daily Express, the “touching side to this friendship”: “Lady Sarah … has been suffering from anorexia nervosa [and]… a member of her family tells me, ‘Sarah has been in and out of hospital in recent months, and she has been seeing Prince Charles in between times.’ ” Sarah became a regular at Charles’s polo games, and she joined him during the royal family’s holiday at Balmoral, in Scotland, at the end of the summer. “He makes me laugh and I enjoy being with him,” she told The Sun in November, adding rather boldly, “I have two or three other boyfriends, and I go out with them just as much.” However, one of the tabloid reporters who tracked her at the time, The Sun’s James Whitaker, undercut Sarah’s apparent nonchalance by reporting that a “friend” of Sarah’s told him, “She is crazy about the Prince. You should see her bedroom. The whole wall is covered in photographs of him.”

  So which was it: smitten or indifferent? According to a friend since childhood, while Sarah was flattered that the Prince of Wales was paying attention to her, “She realized quite early he was not for her. She didn’t fancy him.” Charles’s longtime valet Stephen Barry later wrote, “I never thought there was anything in it” with Sarah. To Barry, she was little more than “the girl next door” from Norfolk days. This was also a time when the late twenty-something heir to the throne seemed especially fickle in his romances. “His closest friends began to worry about the rate with which young women came in and out of his life, too often—it seemed to them—picked up and discarded on a whim,” wrote his authorized biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, “but he seemed to derive precious little joy from these encounters.”

  Nevertheless, Sarah Spencer invited Prince Charles to Althorp for a pheasant shoot in November 1977. Diana was about to take her O-level exams for the second time, and she came home for the weekend from West Heath. Diana had supposedly been mooning over Prince Charles from afar for years. “When she was twelve, Diana attended the exclusive West Heath School in Kent,” wrote Time magazine in a typical account, “where she hung a picture of Charles above her bed.” The story of the picture was untrue, and its origins reveal something of how the tabloid press concocted vital parts of the Diana saga: “After the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969,” said West Heath headmistress Ruth Rudge, “Cecil King, then at the News of the World, sent his granddaughter Lorna, who was at West Heath, a large picture of the investiture. We put it on the wall in a bedroom. Later, when the press decided to descend on the school, we happened to be by this particular bedroom. I pulled open the door and said, ‘I expect Diana slept in here sometime,’ because in the course of their school life, the girls changed rooms and roommates at the end of each term. The reporters rushed up to this picture under which Diana might have slept and gazed, and made it a big deal.”

  With thirteen years between them, Diana and Charles had scarcely crossed paths during her childhood at Sandringham, so th
e weekend at Althorp was the first time they had been properly introduced. The circumstance of their meeting, in a plowed field at Nobottle Wood on the estate, has taken on totemic significance. In their own recollections, however, neither professed to be overwhelmed by the other. “His first impression,” wrote Dimblebly, “was that she was, as his friends put it, ‘jolly’ and ‘bouncy,’ an unaffected teenager who was relaxed, irreverent and friendly.”

  Diana’s account was more uneasy, complicated by her self-doubts as well as a surge of competition with her older sister. “The first impact was ‘God, what a sad man,’ ” Diana recalled. “My sister was all over him like a bad rash, and I thought, ‘God, he must really hate that’ ”—an astute observation for a sixteen-year-old, although it’s more likely that Diana was applying her retrospective knowledge of Charles’s aversion to public displays of affection. Diana described herself as a “fat, podgy, no-makeup, unsmart lady,” but admitted that she tried to attract Charles’s attention by being noisy, which he seemed to enjoy. At a dance given by the Spencers that evening, Charles asked her to show him Althorp’s picture gallery. She was about to comply when Sarah intervened and told Diana to “push off.”

  The next day at the shoot, Diana ignored her sister’s admonition and took up position next to Charles. Diana was “sort of amazed” that he paid attention to her. “Why would anyone like him be interested in me?” she wondered, “and it WAS interest.” Diana’s explanation: “He was charm itself.” Diana may well have developed a full-blown crush that weekend, yet no evident spark was struck between them. One of the tabloids subsequently reported that Sarah and Charles “were seen walking around the corridors hand in hand,” and several weekends later Sarah was a guest of the royal family at Sandringham.

  However Sarah might have felt about the Prince of Wales, her head seemed to be turned by the publicity. According to The Sun’s James Whitaker, Sarah kept a scrapbook filled with clippings about her relationship with Charles that she intended to “show [her] grandchildren one day.”

  The following February, Charles invited Sarah to join a group of friends for a ten-day skiing holiday in Klosters, Switzerland. Tabloid reporters trailed her around the slopes, and photographers took her picture. Back in London, she made a crucial mistake by meeting two of her new tabloid friends—James Whitaker and the Daily Mail’s Nigel Nelson—at a Mayfair restaurant. She showed up in a long blue skirt and a green vinyl parka, and over a meal of smoked salmon and fish pie, Sarah revealed how she felt about the Prince of Wales.

  After characterizing him as “a romantic who falls in love easily,” she said, “I’m not in love with Prince Charles. I’m a whirlwind sort of lady, as opposed to a person who goes in for slow-developing courtships. I can assure you that if there was to be any engagement between Prince Charles and myself, then it would have happened by now. I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love—whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.… He doesn’t want to marry anyway. He’s not ready for marriage yet.… Our whole approach has always been a brotherly-sisterly one, never anything else.… There’s no question of me being the future Queen of England. I don’t think he’s met her yet.”

  On February 18, 1978, the Daily Mail and The Sun published Sarah’s comments about her relationship with Charles, along with a brief reference to her history of anorexia. “This is the first time one of Charles’s girlfriends has talked publicly and frankly about her relationship with the Prince,” Nelson wrote in the Mail. The News of the World was positively gleeful the next day, proclaiming, “What a girl! Prince Charles will be lucky indeed if he finds one to match her for candor, charm and common sense.”

  Yet it wasn’t until more than a month later that Sarah got into serious trouble for her indiscretion. Whitaker wrote a longer article based on the interview for the widely read Woman’s Own magazine, under the byline Jeremy Slazenger, one of his six pseudonyms. (A gossip columnist in the Daily Express later described Whitaker as a “panicky perspiring figure who begs me not to reveal his true identity.”) Whitaker, as Slazenger, recycled Sarah’s comments about Prince Charles, along with her descriptions of her drinking and expulsion from boarding school, a detailed account of her battle with anorexia, and her claim to have had “thousands of boyfriends.” According to Whitaker, Sarah told him that when she called Charles to alert him to the article, he remarked, “You’ve just done something extremely stupid.” Sarah frantically tried to backpedal, telling the Daily Mail that her comments were obtained “by foul means,” perhaps forgetting that a shortened version had already appeared in two tabloids, including the Mail. “My sister Sarah spoke to the press,” Diana later told Mary Robertson, her employer in London, “and frankly … that was the end of her.”

  Nevertheless, Diana seemed intrigued by Sarah’s brush with fame. When James Whitaker showed up to cover her sister Jane’s wedding in April 1978 at the Guard’s Chapel in London, Diana recognized the tabloid reporter and approached him. “I know who you are, you’re the wicked Mr. Whitaker,” she said. “Who are you?” Whitaker asked. “I’m Sarah’s baby sister,” Diana replied. “I know all about you.”

  Chapter 6

  Sarah Spencer was correct when she said Prince Charles was “not ready for marriage yet.” “He was a complete bachelor,” said Michael Colborne, who worked as an aide to Charles from 1975 to 1985. “I think if he hadn’t had the pressure to produce an heir to the throne, he might not have married.”

  Nevertheless, Charles’s romantic entanglements had become a tabloid press preoccupation as the young prince approached his thirtieth birthday in November 1978—a benchmark he had rashly set for himself during an interview with Woman’s Own magazine in February 1975. “I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls,” Charles had said, “but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with.… I personally feel that a good age for a man to get married is around 30.”

  With those jaunty words, Charles inadvertently issued a challenge to the tabloid hacks, who had already been amusing themselves with reports on the dashing young naval officer—an “action man” who parachuted out of airplanes, flew jets, skied, surfed, and played polo. By pushing himself to the limit physically, Charles was showing the world that he was a made of stronger stuff than anyone might have anticipated a decade earlier.

  As a young boy born in the first years of the postwar baby boom, Charles had been strikingly timid, with a sensitive, easily wounded nature. Like most of his aristocratic contemporaries, he had been cared for largely by servants, and his relationship with his parents had been highly ritualized: half-hour sessions with his mother in the mornings, ninety-minute intervals in the evenings. Even in her days as Princess Elizabeth, his mother had been diverted by the burden of her public duties, and when she became Queen at twenty-five, she grew even more distant.

  Neither parent was emotionally demonstrative, and both were often away on official tours during Charles’s birthdays and holidays. According to his official biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, they both had a “deep if inarticulate love for their son,” yet their way of life prevented them from sharing much of it with Charles. His father was an intelligent, robust character who utterly lacked the sensitivity required to motivate a diffident boy. Philip viewed Charles’s manner as weak, and in his irritation mocked and criticized the boy, often unfairly. Charles reacted by withdrawing further into his shell, while his mother declined to intervene. Explained Dimbleby, “she was not indifferent so much as detached, deciding that in domestic matters she would submit entirely to the father’s will.”

  Charles found emotional solace from two women: his nanny, Mabel Anderson, and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Anderson was a constant presence from Charles’s infancy, providing physical affection and moral support—the very sort of “surrogate mother” Diana Spencer could have used. During his parents’ prolonged absences, Charles also spent a great deal of time with his grandmother, who cuddled h
im, regaled him with stories, and nurtured his interest in art and music. His connection with the Queen Mother was “the most intimate of the Prince’s relationships within the family … for him a vital source of praise and encouragement,” wrote Dimbleby.

  From his earliest years, Charles’s education groomed him to inherit the throne from his mother. He had a governess until age five, when he was sent to Hill House, a London private school, in an effort to expose him to everyday life outside the royal cloister. Like Diana, he was an indifferent student. At age nine, he went to Cheam, a boarding school in Berkshire, where his father had done well. Charles felt lost, but managed to hide his unhappiness. Although he emerged as a school leader by the end of his five years at Cheam, he had little enthusiasm for the place.

  When Charles turned thirteen, his father marched him into another alma mater, Gordonstoun in Scotland, which prided itself on instilling physical and mental toughness—just the thing to bring out a reticent boy, in Prince Philip’s view. The Queen Mother had wanted her grandson to attend Eton instead. Located in the shadow of Windsor Castle, Eton would have offered Charles the camaraderie of boys more like himself, but Philip’s preference prevailed.

  The rigors of Gordonstoun’s infamous cold showers, early morning runs, and mandatory dress code of shorts year-round seemed of dubious value. Yet in theory, the school’s egalitarian ethos and the diversity of its student body offered a sensible way to broaden the horizons of a privileged royal prince. In practice, the culture of humiliation among the boys—cruel taunts and gratuitous punches, organized gangs of older bullies who preyed on younger students—proved harrowing for Charles. Because of his position, Charles felt the brunt of this malicious treatment. “I simply dread going to bed as I get hit all night long,” he wrote in one letter.