Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  By 1988, after the truce between Charles and Diana took effect, and Diana decided to “grow up and be responsible,” the tabloids started to focus on the latest manifestation of a “new Diana.” “The caring princess has thrown herself fully into her work,” Today reported in May 1988. Four months later, Georgina Howell, in The Sunday Times, proclaimed “a cooler and more independent Princess of Wales,” followed by the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay, who announced the “fully fledged emergence of a new princess” eager to express opinions with a “confidence and maturity that have surprised observers.”

  Diana had still done little public speaking, confining herself to brief remarks that she hurried through in a breathy monotone. When Turning Point, a patronage of Diana’s devoted to treating drug and alcohol abuse, asked her to speak at their conference in May 1989, she sought coaching from Richard Attenborough, the film director who had prepared her for the 1985 interview with Alastair Burnet. Attenborough helped Diana cast the speech in her own idiom, and she spent several days rehearsing each phrase, replaying her words on a tape recorder to hone her delivery. Diana spoke for all of six minutes about the damage alcohol and drug addiction can do to families, saying at one point, “the line between recreational use and creeping addiction is perilously thin.” In keeping with the tabloids’ customarily lavish praise for Diana, Richard Kay of the Daily Mail called her talk “remarkable.”

  Behind the hyperbole, Diana was actually showing signs of progress in her public duties. She was working harder—250 engagements in 1988, compared with 153 for Fergie and 665 for Princess Anne—and she showed a greater willingness to do the necessary preparation. She still couldn’t absorb complex documents, but she paid closer attention to the materials prepared by her staff. “Reading briefing papers was not her idea of fun,” a former Palace official said, “but she had a natural street wisdom, and a natural intelligence to ask the right questions.” She had also learned how to turn to her advantage aspects of her personality that others might have seen as defects. An avid viewer of TV soap operas such as Coronation Street, she would talk about the shows during her public engagements: “I say, ‘Did you see so and so?’ ‘Wasn’t it funny when this happened or that happened?’ ” By making such connections, Diana tried to break down the barrier between royalty and ordinary people and move “immediately” to “the same level.”

  “She was very good if you would go to an AIDS ward,” said another courtier who worked with her. “Most people would think, ‘I have an hour, what in the world do I say?’ I would say, ‘There are five who are nearly dead, and you can’t talk to them; six with relatives; eight more who are in pretty good shape,’ and so on. She would then calibrate everything and know how much time to spend with each of them so that she would fill the hour.”

  She also made a greater effort to keep herself informed about her charities. “I would have an ongoing thing of seeing her and telling her what was going on with AIDS,” Michael Adler said. “After a conference, I would tell her about it. She didn’t ask penetrating questions, but she was strong when she was feeling a person’s problems.” William Haseltine, who briefed her about AIDS as well, said she “fulfilled her public function perfectly. When she was on, she did what she was supposed to do, was knowledgeable and friendly and chatty and warm but proper.”

  The key to engaging Diana’s attention was ensuring she had an emotional connection to an issue. “I used to write her the most outrageous briefing notes,” said Vivienne Parry, the national organizer of Birthright, a research group concerned with preventing premature births. “I knew that if I wrote ‘So and so was chairman of the finance committee 1979 to 1983,’ those details would mean nothing, so I wrote character sketches of people, which gave me enormous pleasure, as it did her when she was able to come up with some small personal detail when she was talking to somebody, and the person just lit up and glowed with pleasure because here was the Princess of Wales remembering a detail about them.”

  Diana had strong feelings about other causes that she took on in the late eighties: drug and alcohol abuse, the hospice movement, mentally handicapped children, leprosy, and most intriguingly, marriage counseling. In 1988, Diana began visiting centers operated by Relate, a counseling group for troubled couples. She sat in on sex therapy sessions, played the role of an overwrought mother, and expressed an interest in working with couples facing divorce. “She was totally involved,” said Rose Spurr of the Bristol Relate Center after Diana’s role-playing. It was no small irony that she and Charles had not engaged in marital counseling themselves, and Diana gave all the appearance of trying to educate herself through her work with Relate. She even kept a copy of the Relate Guide to Marital Problems on her bedside table.

  During these years Diana’s unusual rapport with strangers, including those with deformities and terminal diseases, became more evident. Through a combination of natural warmth and curiosity about people, the gentle use of touch, and her laserlike intensity, Diana could make instant connections. “Some people find it very difficult to confront people who are seriously disabled,” said Roger Singleton of Barnardo’s homes for orphans. “It’s something she takes on board in a very direct and open way.” Father Alexander Sherbrooke, a Catholic priest who was a friend of Diana’s, said he had to prepare himself intellectually before he could visit the sick and dying. Diana, by contrast, “was completely intuitive and saw something special in every human being.”

  Over the years, Diana came to believe she had a special healing power after watching her effect on others. “She did have a powerful persona,” Michael Adler said. “You could believe she felt she had a magic touch, and in a sense she did. She had real qualities. She absolutely had a heart.” “Her charisma was not normal,” one of Diana’s close friends said. “Her visits would bring light into sick people’s lives, and they felt better.” This friend recounted the time Diana visited a man who had been wounded by a land mine: “He changed while she was there. He had been hugely depressed, curled up in bed, but when she left he was so happy. Since then he went up and up. He was happy she had singled him out.”

  Diana’s complicated temperament added a psychological component to her interaction with sufferers. Her uncanny empathy grew out of her tenuous sense of herself. She could shed her own troubles, compensating for her own emptiness, by losing herself in others’ traumas—in effect, she could “be” another person, if only momentarily—even as she delivered the sort of compassion she desperately wanted for herself. This was the positive extreme of Diana’s sensitive personality; at other times, she couldn’t fill her emptiness in a constructive way, and would feel abandoned. Imagining that others were thinking the worst of her, she would react with panic or anger.

  Diana could visibly strengthen while comforting those even more fragile than she. “This morning I arrived in a filthy mood,” she once told Christopher Spence, president of the London Lighthouse, a center providing care for HIV and AIDS sufferers, but after visiting the dying patients, she said, “I’m leaving on top of the world.” One of her friends remembered accompanying Diana to a hospital ward when “an Indian gentleman had a major heart attack, and his family were there, not knowing what to do. Diana took control and said ‘You sit next door, you go in, do this.’ She had a natural sense of authority.”

  In such situations, Diana displayed a false maturity, because, as her astrologer Debbie Frank pointed out, “She often felt powerless to do anything when it came to her own life.” In a hospital, “she knew exactly what to do and say,” said her friend Cosima Somerset. “It was all right when she had a role. But in social situations she didn’t find it easy.” Most of her empathy was directed at those she felt closer to than her social peers: children, the elderly, social outcasts, and the dying, whom she found “more open and more vulnerable and much more real than other people.”

  Diana had become the “caring princess” whose image plastered the tabloids almost daily. But as press approval of Diana soared, the image of her friend Fergi
e collapsed. Although Diana and Fergie often showed affection for each other, their relationship was strained by rivalry: Diana dominated the tabloid front pages unless Fergie did something outrageous.

  The hacks had pinned the blame on Fergie for Diana’s reckless behavior in 1987, and by the end of that year, the Duchess of York, by her own admission, “was declared a loser.” As Fergie recalled, Diana’s rehabilitation “opened a vacancy on Fleet Street for ‘the bad royal.’ ” Behavior that had previously been lauded as refreshing and exuberant became “appalling … crass, rude, raucous and bereft of all dignity,” Fergie said. She was mocked mercilessly for being overweight, most memorably in the cruel headline DUCHESS OF PORK! Fergie’s troubles were compounded in mid-1988 when her father was caught in a London massage and sex parlor.

  Prince Andrew was away much of the time in the navy (by Fergie’s tally, he came home only forty-two days a year), and she was stuck living in a gloomy Buckingham Palace apartment “as cozy and personal as a railway hotel.” Besides his £35,000 ($55,000) salary from the Royal Navy, the Yorks depended entirely on the largesse of the Queen and Prince Philip. Diana and Charles, on the other hand, lived independently on £1 million (more than $1.5 million) in annual disposable income from the Duchy of Cornwall—128,000 acres of land in nine counties that included 1,500 dwellings in London, administered solely for the benefit of the Prince of Wales. Charles also had income from more than £2 million (around $3 million) in investments that he had accumulated over the years, using unspent income from the Duchy.

  “Sarah should have lived the life of a naval officer’s wife in Dorset, made a home there and done a few things, but instead she wanted to emulate Diana,” a former Palace official said. “There was a lot of jealousy. Diana was able to live a more exotic life and have what she wanted.” Sarah tried to keep up, said the courtier, “by going on one spending spree after another, and [she] resented the powers who were trying to restrain her spending.” Fergie was amassing a debt that would eventually run well into six figures, and she was battling Palace aides she called the “gray men” who disapproved of not only her spending habits, but her “hopelessly erratic” behavior. To further complicate matters, her chief adversary became Robert Fellowes, private secretary to the Queen, who was both her father’s first cousin and Diana’s brother-in-law. “Robert Fellowes would come into Fergie’s office and slam down the papers and say, ‘We haven’t done very well today,’ ” said a friend of Fellowes.

  Diana began to realize that Fergie’s jealousy sometimes translated into disloyalty. In a conversation with her friend James Gilbey, Diana called Fergie “the redhead,” and noted that she was “actually being quite supportive … I don’t know why.” Recalled another friend of Diana’s, “I remember Fergie and Prince Andrew coming to a dinner when there was a lot of talk about the York marriage, and Fergie saying, ‘If only they knew what is happening at Kensington Palace.’ ” By the late 1980s, Diana’s suspicions that Fergie took advantage of their friendship prompted her to pull away. Diana knew, according to one of her friends, “the Fergie association brought criticism, and she couldn’t take any more criticism.”

  Chapter 15

  After his 1987 truce with Diana, Charles could more freely take separate holidays—Africa for safaris, Italy and Turkey for painting, Switzerland for skiing, along with his usual interludes at various royal residences—and Diana began to do the same, traveling to Italy and the Caribbean. Since they irritated each other if they were together for any extended period, Charles and Diana structured their schedules to minimize the time they would both be at Highgrove or Kensington Palace. They showed scant interest in each other’s activities, and their phone conversations focused primarily on William and Harry. Sometimes they would let weeks go by without talking, and when they happened to sit down over a meal, Diana might well leave in tears.

  Diana’s moods continued to fluctuate. Although she would seem resigned to their arrangement, at times she disintegrated into resentment and anger. She absorbed yet another emotional blow in June 1988, when she learned that her mother and stepfather were divorcing. Peter Shand Kydd left Frances for another woman, which so shattered Frances that it took her four years to recover. “I was very bad about getting my act together, it took a long time,” she said later. Frances blamed unrelenting tabloid scrutiny as the principal factor. “The media descended on [Diana] … and have never left me since,” she said. “I think the pressure of it all was overwhelming and finally impossible for Peter.… I became Di’s mum and not his wife. You could say the marriage wasn’t strong enough in the first place, but that’s rather like saying the house wasn’t strong enough after a hurricane has gone past.”

  When Diana and Charles made an official visit to France in November, they put on an adroit performance of public amicability. Diana showed her seriousness about AIDS research by visiting the Pasteur Institute, and her beauty and style enchanted the French. “You have seduced every man in France,” said Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris. Diana delighted the tabloid hacks by performing an impromptu “sexy dance” for Charles after dinner in a French chateau, when she started “wiggling her hips and shimmying until both she and her husband dissolved with laughter.” Still, for a change, it was Charles’s statesmanship that dominated the headlines. “We got the balance right,” a staff member said. The tabloids were upbeat about what one paper called a “triumphant tour” that included a “romantic” candlelit dinner cruise on the Seine. Three years after the fact, the Mirror’s James Whitaker finally reported that the riverboat cruise had actually been a “disaster.” There had been a “sourness in the air,” he wrote, and Charles and Diana had “never once looked at one another all evening.”

  In mid-November, 1988, the Waleses were together again for Charles’s fortieth birthday ball at Buckingham Palace. Diana managed to include James Hewitt among the three hundred guests, and he spent the evening stewing because he couldn’t get near her. He thought she put up a “valiant front,” and he felt jealous every time he saw her dancing or laughing with friends. Finally, Hewitt captured her for one dance, which they carried off by feigning indifference.

  TV personality Clive James met Diana that evening for the second time and noticed a change from their first encounter at Cannes, eighteen months earlier. James was well aware that Charles and Diana “were sticking together for the sake of the monarchy and the children, but were otherwise going their separate ways.” Although Diana was cordial enough, James saw that “the lights in her face were dimmed down to about three-quarter strength.… She was still there physically, but her soul had gone AWOL, and without that soul, the party had no life.”

  The following month, masseur Stephen Twigg began trying to help Diana deal with her “painful emotions and thoughts.” By then, Diana had redoubled her fixation on Camilla. With no discernible provocation, Diana had become vocal about her rival, speaking openly about her to friends and staff. Diana’s initial consultation with astrologer Debbie Frank early in 1989 was primarily to deal with the “presence of Camilla,” Frank said. “It became a complete obsession,” a former Palace official said. “It was all anger against Camilla. ‘How dare she do this?’ ” If that anger happened to flare up before a public engagement, Diana’s aides had to work fast. “She would get into the car all steamed up,” a former Palace adviser said. “I would try to calm her down. You just absorbed it. You would listen, sympathize, you would agree, or disagree, and she would eventually calm down.”

  Diana decided to meet the enemy face-to-face that February when she and Charles were invited to a fortieth birthday party for Camilla’s sister Annabel Elliot at the home of billionaire tycoon James Goldsmith and his wife, Annabel. The invitation had been sent with the expectation that only Charles would come, but at the last minute, Diana opted to join him because “a voice inside me said, ‘Go for the hell of it.’ ” Perhaps she was emboldened by the trip she had recently made to New York City, her first official solo visit overseas. Before her arriv
al, the New York Post had called her “the most famous welfare mother in the world,” and Women’s Wear Daily had pronounced the visit “out.” Three days later, Diana overcame the skepticism by balancing a charity gala with tours of a Bowery homeless shelter and Harlem Hospital, where she hugged a toddler dying of AIDS. At the end, the New York tabloids were calling her DI-VINE.

  Before making her final decision about the Goldsmith party, Diana consulted James Hewitt, who urged her to go, on the grounds that she should “hold her head high.” Diana later said she concluded that she would “come away having done her bit.” In the car, en route to the party, Diana recalled, Charles “needled me the whole way … needle needle needle.” The Goldsmiths’ house on Ham Common in Richmond was filled with friends of Charles and Camilla, and Diana felt instantly out of place. Still, Diana “looked ravishing, and charmed everyone. She was full of energy,” one guest said. After dinner, Diana noticed that Charles and Camilla had disappeared. She sat for a while with two of Charles’s friends, Christopher Balfour, chairman of Christie’s Europe, and Rick Beckett, whose wife was the sister of David Waterhouse. After more than an hour, Diana decided to go to the downstairs dining room to locate Charles.

  When she spotted Charles, Camilla, and another friend, Diana joined the conversation “as if we were all best friends.” Diana recalled asking the two men if she could speak privately to Camilla. Charles and his friend headed upstairs, where Annabel Goldsmith intercepted Charles and took him on a tour of paintings by her daughter Jane Birley. Charles politely followed, but it was clear that he was edgy and eager to return downstairs.