Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (12 page)

Diana's insecurities about how she looked, a running theme in her reminiscences, is a classic symptom of eating disorders. As a teenager, she was remembered for her propensity to get “podgy” and her ability to gobble up food. Diana recalled that at boarding
school her classmates egged her on to demolish a big meal in the morning, and she readily complied. “I ate and ate and ate,” she recalled. “It was always a great joke—let's get Diana to have three kippers at breakfast and six pieces of bread, and I did all that.” One friend remembered Diana eating a one-pound bag of candy during a bridge game; another described her as a “nice country girl” who loved “sweets, chocolate, and biscuits.” She was also known to “dash across the street to ‘tuck into a good-sized chicken portion' ” when she was tense, according to Tina Brown in her biography,
The Diana Chronicles
. While taking a cooking class, Diana recalled, she was tempted by whatever was on the stove: “My fingers were always in the saucepans.”

These incidents might have been nothing more than a teenage girl's dalliances with the delights of food. Plenty of college-age kids report episodes of binge eating, a condition whose features include eating when not hungry and consuming excessive amounts of food until uncomfortably full. In most cases, the behavior does not become habitual. In people with an underlying vulnerability, however, bingeing can be a symptom of “disordered eating,” as it is known in the psychiatric world, which can progress to a full-blown eating disorder. The typical age of onset for bulimia is adolescence or early adulthood, which is precisely when Diana said her problems began—just after her engagement to Charles, when she was 19 years old.

After their first meeting, Charles and Diana had become reacquainted at several events, including the prince's 30th birthday party at Buckingham Palace in 1978 and at a country house gathering in Sussex in 1980. By this time, Charles's liaison with Diana's sister was long over (less than a year after they began dating, Sarah had declared their relationship “totally platonic”), and Diana had matured from a 16-year-old teenager to a young adult. It was in Sussex, at a summer
barbecue, that Charles and Diana connected at a personal level. Sitting next to each other on a hay bale, Diana expressed sympathy over the death of Charles's great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, with whom Charles had been very close. Diana noted how sad Charles had looked as he walked up the aisle at his great-uncle's funeral. “My heart bled for you when I watched,” she told him. “I thought, ‘It's wrong, you're lonely—you should be with somebody to look after you.' ” The prince later said he was moved by Diana's concern.

Charles was also under enormous pressure to marry. He was 31 years old, and the British tabloids had been having a field day publishing photos of the polo-playing bachelor and his legions of dates, embarrassing him and irritating the royal family. Diana came from aristocratic lineage; she seemed unthreatening, bubbly, funny, and presumably a “tidy” virgin bride (a requirement under the monarchy's moral code). After a six-month courtship, the two became engaged on February 6, 1981, much to the delight of the media and a British public eager for happy news during times of economic despair. Charles and Di engagement mugs, tea towels, thimbles, and figurines flooded the streets. The queen announced the engagement “with greatest pleasure” from Buckingham Palace; Prince Charles said he was “delighted and happy and I'm amazed that she's been brave enough to take me on.” Diana said, she was absolutely “delighted and thrilled, blissfully happy.” When asked if they were in love, Diana quickly answered, “Of course,” to which the prince responded, “Whatever ‘in love' means”—a statement that would be rehashed repeatedly in later years as an ominous sign of future troubles.

Within days of the much celebrated news, Diana found herself missing her friends and deserted by her fiancé, who left for a five-week overseas trip soon after they were engaged. She felt isolated in a suite in Buckingham Palace without support. “I couldn't believe how cold everyone was,” she said later. Above all, she was rattled by
the shadow of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles's former girlfriend. Diana stated that her bulimia started the week after her engagement when “My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren't we?' That triggered off something in me—and the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate.”

Patients with anorexia nervosa severely restrict the amount of food they eat; those with binge eating disorder, by contrast, eat large amounts of food in a short period of time and feel a loss of control over how much they're consuming. Bulimia is characterized by a two-step pattern of binge eating followed by purging through self-induced vomiting, laxatives, enemas, excessive exercise, or fasting to avoid weight gain. Patients with bulimia commonly report that bingeing is self-soothing and numbing, allowing them to block out negative emotions, says Cynthia Bulik, founding director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. Purging, meanwhile, can serve as a release from the physical discomfort of binge eating and the guilt and shame that often comes with it. The first time she made herself sick, Diana later recalled, “I was so thrilled because I thought this was the release of tension.”

The impact of Diana's eating disorder became starkly apparent over the course of just a few months. Between February 1981, when she got engaged, and her wedding in July, Diana's waist decreased from 29 inches to 23.5 inches—the size of an average eight-year-old girl. “I had shrunk to nothing,” she recalled. The evening before she and Charles were to be married, Diana had a particularly bad bout of illness. “I ate everything I could possibly find … I was sick as a parrot that night,” she said. “It was such an indication of what was going on.” The next morning, she was “deathly calm,” feeling as if she was “a lamb to the slaughter.” The “tiny bodice” and “tiny waist,” described by the TV commentator
on Diana's wedding day, were not the attributes of a princess but evidence of a serious sickness.

Diana's bulimia did not improve during the couple's honeymoon. Already, “her royal highness”—the title she would be stripped of after the couple's divorce—was overwhelmed by the role she had taken on as wife and public figure. She feared the unknowns that lay ahead, and she was demoralized by Charles's ongoing relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Just after their engagement, she had stood by when Camilla called to speak to Charles. “It just broke my heart,” she recalled in the Morton interviews. Two weeks before their wedding, she discovered a gold bracelet. Charles planned to give it to Camilla as a farewell gift and token of gratitude for her support, according to the prince's biographer Jonathan Dimbleby. But Diana assumed the worst. “I was devastated,” she recalled. On their honeymoon, the two fought over a pair of cuff links, given to Charles by Camilla. While at sea on a Mediterranean cruise, Diana was sick repeatedly. “By then the bulimia was appalling, absolutely appalling. It was rife, four times a day on the yacht,” she remembered. “Anything I could find I would gobble up and be sick two minutes later … I remember crying my eyes out on our honeymoon.”

Diana's pregnancy with William, the couple's first son, intensified her physical and mental strain. She endured both morning sickness and ongoing episodes of bulimia; constantly excusing herself in her evening dress to rush off to the bathroom, she found herself perceived as “a problem” by the royal family. After William's birth, in June 1982, she also suffered from postpartum depression, and soon became so noticeably gaunt that the British tabloids speculated that she had anorexia. A British journalist writing in
People
magazine pronounced Diana “not anorexic” (“She simply follows the axiom that has been attributed to the Duchess of Windsor:
‘No woman can be too rich or too thin,' ” the writer stated), but the story was illustrated with a photo of Diana dressed in a gown that exposed her exceedingly slender arms. Her backbone was so pronounced it appeared to be standing out in relief. Many people suffer from eating disorders in secret; Diana's illness played out on an international stage, adding to the mounting pressure she was already feeling to look good.

It must be said that Diana's reminiscences, published in Morton's book and shared by Diana in a 1995 BBC television interview, are a one-sided account told in reflection after unhappy times. Diana's descriptions of her suffering have been viewed by some as self-serving and by others as evidence of the hardships she endured. Diana linked her illness to the start of her life in the palace—and to her husband, whom she blamed for being unsympathetic and unsupportive. Even the birth of their second son, Harry, she said, was met with negativity, because Charles wanted a girl. At that point, she said, “the whole thing went down the drain.”

Prince Charles's perspective has been revealed most extensively in Dimbleby's authorized biography, published in 1994. Dimbleby's account depicts the prince as an exhausted husband dealing as best he could with a troubled and demanding wife who was desperate for attention. The prince was unprepared and “perplexed” by Diana's initial weight loss before their wedding and by her sudden mood shifts, which he observed repeatedly during their honeymoon and their marriage. She suffered from “overwhelming feelings of boredom, loneliness and emptiness, futility and abandonment,” Dimbleby writes, all of which put a terrible strain on the marriage. She was at times despairing, self-absorbed, jealous, and self-pitying. When she was unhappy, Diana sat with her head on her knees, and though the prince attempted to “soothe her back to cheerfulness,” it was often impossible to help her.

Diana conceded that she was psychologically ill equipped to cope with the expectations and responsibilities thrust upon her so quickly. “One minute I was nobody, the next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of this family, you name it—and it was too much for one person at that time,” she said. It might have been too much for anybody, especially a young woman barely out of her teens married to a man in his early 30s. When it came down to it, the two had few interests in common (she wasn't a big fan of hunting, polo, or books by the South African philosopher Laurens van der Post) and little foundation on which to build a deep and nurturing relationship. On top of all that, Diana had no emotional scaffolding to grasp on to, and was plagued by her ongoing lack of confidence. “I hated myself so much I didn't think I was good enough. I thought I wasn't good enough for Charles, I wasn't a good enough mother—I mean doubts as long as one's leg,” she said.

These insecurities seemed to contribute to a desperate, but futile, search for reassurance. Diana bemoaned a lack of encouragement from the royal family and complained that she never received a pat on the back for succeeding at her duties. When she attracted more attention than her husband—her glamorous looks, her smile, her openness lit up the crowds wherever they went together—he became jealous, she said. An effective speech won her no accolades. “Anything good I ever did, nobody ever said a thing—never said ‘well done,' or ‘was it OK?' ” she said in her 1995 television interview. “But if I tripped up—which invariably I did, because I was new at the game—a ton of bricks came down on me.” She coped, Diana said, by diving into bulimia as her “escape mechanism” and her “release valve.” On a royal trip to Majorca, she said, “I spent my whole time with my head down the loo.”

F
OOD FIXATIONS, ESPECIALLY ACCOUNTS
of willful starvation, date back hundreds of years. In medieval Europe, female saints were known to refuse food as a way of preserving their holiness. Some vomited when they smelled meat, others covered their faces around food, and some even starved to death. The most well known was Catherine of Siena, who lived in the mid-1300s. She “ate only a handful of herbs each day and occasionally shoved twigs down her throat to bring up any other food that she was forced to eat,” writes historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg in her book
Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa
.

Over the last few decades, eating disorders have been invariably associated with a culture that glorifies thin bodies. Models are air-brushed to trim their thighs and arms. Diet ads saturate the airwaves, promising weight loss fast or your money back. The fashion industry indulges in “vanity sizing,” in which designers slash size numbers so that women who might otherwise wear a 12 can gleefully buy an 8. In 2014, the clothing manufacturer J.Crew took this trend to a whole new level when they introduced a new size, 000, for women with a 23-inch waist—just the size Diana might have worn on her wedding day. Nutritionists and mental health experts decried the move, fearing that young women might resort to extreme dieting to squeeze into a size that would be unhealthy for all but the most petite among them.