Diana (29 page)

“I was very daunted [by all the attention] because as far as I was concerned I was a fat, chubby, twenty-year-old, twenty-one-year-old, and I couldn’t understand the level of interest.”

One of the first photographs of Diana proved to be one of the most infamous. She stood in a garden with two of her kindergarten students, with the sun behind her, revealing her bare legs through her cotton skirt. Neither she nor the photographers were aware of this. “I was so nervous about the whole thing. I never thought I’d be standing with the light behind me. I don’t want to be remembered for not having a petticoat.”

She told
Majesty
editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward: “It makes me feel insecure, and it is difficult going
out and meeting people when I imagine what they might have read about me that morning.”

On the press: “I love working with children, and I have learned to be very patient with them.”

“I just can’t win. They either accuse me of spending too much on clothes or of wearing the same outfit all the time. I wish everyone would stop talking about my clothes.”

“The most daunting aspect [of my public life] was the media attention, because my husband and I, we were told when we got engaged that the media would go quietly, and it didn’t; and then when we were married they said it would go quietly, and it didn’t; and then it started to focus very much on me, and I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day, which is an isolating experience, and the higher the media put you, place
you, the bigger is the drop. And I was very aware of that.”

“Here was a situation which hadn’t ever happened before in history, in the sense that the media were everywhere, and here was a fairy story that everybody wanted to work. And so it was, it was isolating, but it was also a situation where you couldn’t indulge in feeling sorry for yourself: You had to either sink or swim. And you had to learn that very fast.”

“It was difficult to share that load [of media fascination], because I was the one who was always pitched out front, whether it was my clothes, what I said, what my hair was doing, everything—which was a pretty dull subject, actually, and it’s been exhausted over the years—when actually what we wanted to be, what we wanted supported was our work, and as a team.”

“It took a long time to understand why people were so interested in me, but I assumed it was because my husband had done a lot of wonderful work leading up to our marriage and our relationship. But then you [start to] see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you.”

“We struggled a bit with [the media interest], it was very difficult; and then my husband decided that we do separate engagements, which was a bit sad for me, because I quite liked the company.”

She couldn’t understand why the press portrayed her as someone who disapproved of country pursuits. “After all, I was brought up in that way. I hunted when I was young. And it is all part of their heritage.”

By 1985, Diana had developed a somewhat thicker skin when it came to the press. “You’ve got to
push yourself out and remember that some people, hopefully, don’t believe everything they read about you.”