Diana in Search of Herself (10 page)

In her last year, Diana was named a prefect, as her sister Jane had been, and she carried out her leadership role so responsibly that she was awarded a special prize for service—an award “
for anyone who has done things that otherwise might have gone unsung,” said Ruth Rudge. “She was dependable in her own doings, reliable, and went out of her way to help people. She was generous with her time.” Once after Diana had been discharged from the infirmary during an epidemic, she came back to help Violet Allen serve meals to the other ailing girls. “
She had a very caring heart,” said Allen.

More than five years had passed since her parents’ split, but Diana was still troubled by it. “
Mostly it was a traumatic time for her,” said Allen. “We had quite a few girls from divorced families, and she came and talked to me quite a lot. Of course she missed her mother and father. The others who had divorces felt the same way. Some accepted it, and some had more difficulty with it. No doubt about it, Diana found it difficult to accept. She was vulnerable in some things. I can’t put a finger on it, but it probably all had to do with the insecurity and breakup of [her parents’] marriage.”

Yet Diana held her sadness in check, as she had at Silfield and Riddlesworth. “
Most of the girls from a divorced family would come in and have a little weep,” said Allen. “I never saw her cry. She probably kept a lot to herself.” Allen’s observation was strikingly similar to the Riddlesworth staff’s, who noticed that Diana “
was always very controlled, never likely, as they put it, to have ‘boo-hooed’ under any circumstances.”

No school could protect Diana from further dislocations in the family, however. She was hit hard by the death of her favorite grandmother, Lady Cynthia Spencer, in 1972. A bigger blow came when her grandfather Jack, the 7th Earl Spencer, died on June 9, 1975, causing the family to leave Norfolk and move to Althorp, where Johnnie would take over as the 8th Earl Spencer. “
A terrible, terrible wrench,” Diana called her departure from Park House at fourteen. Her brother Charles considered it “
a difficult phase in all our lives: uprooted from our childhood haunts and friends, and marooned in the middle of a park the size of Monaco.” The 121-room house reminded Charles of “
a chilling time warp, complete with the permeating smell of Trumper’s hair oil and the ubiquitous tocking of Grandfather’s clocks.” According to Junor, Diana “
never grew to be fond” of Althorp.

Shortly after the move, the Spencer children were shocked to learn that Johnnie, then fifty-two, had married Raine, the forty-six-year-old Countess of Dartmouth, in a quiet ceremony on July 14, 1976—without notifying any of them in advance. Raine was a handsome woman with a meticulous bouffant hairstyle and
a controversial image. Her family, the McCorquodales, had been minor gentry who made money in the printing business. Her mother was the flamboyant romance novelist Barbara Cartland, and
one of her cousins, Neil McCorquodale, would later marry Diana’s sister Sarah. Raine was known for her involvement in London government, where she earned a reputation for outspokenness. She had a keen intelligence, enormous energy, and big ambitions.

Johnnie and Raine fell in love in the early seventies when they worked together on a book about historic buildings for the Greater London Council. Raine had been married for twenty-eight years to the Earl of Dartmouth and had four children. “
When I met Johnnie he was a very lonely and unhappy man who’d been divorced for years,” Raine once said.
By the time Johnnie brought Raine to his daughter Sarah’s debutante party in 1973, the affair was already the stuff of gossip; Raine left her husband in 1974. Like Johnnie, Gerald Dartmouth won custody of the children when he divorced Raine in 1976 after naming Johnnie—his former friend from Eton days—as the corespondent.

Johnnie was besotted with Raine, and friends and relatives could see that he was in high spirits once again. “When Raine came into his life, he was vulnerable to her gushing flattery and settled for her,” said a Spencer relative. She even charmed Johnnie’s famously grumpy father, and other relatives as well. “
In the beginning I was very much for Raine,” said Robert Spencer. “I thought she would be good for Johnnie, and that she would be a good chatelaine for Althorp. Everyone was for her, really. Everyone except the children.”

Diana and her siblings took an instant dislike to Raine, primarily because they didn’t want to share their father with someone they barely knew. Diana recalled that Raine “
used to … pour us with presents, and we all hated her so much because we thought she was going to take Daddy away from us.” Raine’s overbearing and tactless manner made matters worse, prompting the Spencer children to call her “Acid Raine.” “She dominated him and wouldn’t let them get close to him,” said a friend of the Spencer sisters. “They were hurt that their father would drop everything and rush to this woman who had him under wraps. She wouldn’t let them come home without giving her a date three months before. She ruled his life and spent his money.”

In one revealing episode,
Diana enlisted a friend to write a nasty anonymous note to Raine after coming across a letter her future stepmother had sent to Johnnie about plans for redoing the decor at Althorp. (Diana’s habits of reading other people’s mail and eavesdropping were aspects of her suspicious nature that would cause problems in her marriage.)
Diana’s mistrust of Raine hardened as the new Countess Spencer orchestrated the sale of Althorp treasures to pay inheritance taxes and finance elaborate renovations. “They minded terribly what she did to Althorp,” said another Spencer cousin. “It was so overpolished and overgilded and overshiny. There was a gap with the children. If they could make it awkward for her, they did it. She was tough enough to take it, but they kept their distance.”

Although Diana spoke bitterly in later years about her hatred of her stepmother, Raine clung to a more benign view of her youngest stepdaughter. In a 1981 interview, Raine recalled that Sarah “
resented” her and Jane ignored her for two years, but Diana “was sweet, always did her own thing.”

Raine joined the Spencer family at an especially difficult time for Sarah. After securing the job at
Vogue
, Sarah began what she described as an “
intense love affair” with Gerald Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, who had been one of the escorts at her debutante party. Early in 1975, Sarah went to Australia, where her mother and stepfather owned a farm in New South Wales. On her return to London three months later, her relationship with Gerald Grosvenor ended, setting off Sarah’s two-year ordeal with eating disorders.

“Sarah was very attractive and there were always little dramas in her love life,” said a friend. “Her eating disorder had more to do with being rejected by a man than anything else.” Sarah herself attributed her condition to the ruptured love affair, plus what she described as “
domestic upheavals concerning my family,” which created a situation she considered “catastrophic.” Within a month of her return from Australia, recalled Sarah, “I
just stopped eating. I would toy with a couple of pieces of lettuce, and if I forced a meal down I would just bring it up again.”

Sarah’s diminished appetite and weight loss were so alarming that her mother put her in a hospital in May 1975. “
I sought a lot of medical help,” Frances said. Instead of improving, Sarah dropped seven pounds in two weeks. On leaving the hospital, she was no better, and she continued to struggle for the next year. Sarah’s weight plummeted from 112 pounds to 77 pounds, which on her five-foot-seven frame made her look “
like something out of a concentration camp,” said Sarah. “I couldn’t find any normal clothes to fit me and did my shopping in the children’s department.” She didn’t seek treatment because, as she said, “one behaves like an alcoholic. You will just not admit there is a problem. You end up believing you are beautiful, looking so thin.”

Around the time of Johnnie’s wedding to Raine in July 1976, Sarah escaped to Africa, where she spent several months traveling through Kenya, Rhodesia, and South Africa with two friends. On returning to England at the end of the year, she got a job working for a London real estate company, but, she said, “I was really in a physical mess, although of course I wouldn’t admit it.”

Sarah later acknowledged that she suffered from anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder dating from the mid–nineteenth century that is characterized by self-imposed starvation diets, but she also engaged in the binge eating and self-induced vomiting that define
bulimia nervosa. (“Bulimia” comes from the Greek word
limos
, meaning “hunger,” coupled with
bous
, meaning “bull” or “ox”; the term can mean either “hunger as great as that of an ox,” or “hungry enough to consume an entire ox.”)
Although bulimia nervosa was not identified as a specific disorder until 1979, its symptoms had been seen in cases of anorexia such as Sarah’s. “Sarah was sick after meals,” recalled a friend from those years. “She was tiny. The only thing that kept her alive was Coca-Cola.”

During this tense period, Diana visited Sarah at her apartment in Eaton Mews South on weekends away from West Heath. While bulimics and anorexics typically try to disguise the patterns of their fasting, overeating, and “
inappropriate compensatory behaviors” such as vomiting, Sarah’s friends and family saw through her subterfuges. Diana worried about her sister along with everyone else, but “she didn’t try to play a role” in helping Sarah, said one of Sarah’s friends.

It wasn’t until several months before her death that Diana revealed how much she had been affected by watching Sarah’s illness. Previously, Diana had always said her own eating disorder had been provoked by Charles’s unfeeling treatment of her during her engagement. To psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, such a sudden emergence at
that age seemed implausible without some history of eating problems. Finally, in May 1997, Diana told patients at Roehampton Priory, a private clinic outside London, that she first had symptoms of bulimia nervosa in the mid-seventies. “
It started because Sarah was anorexic and I idolized her so much that I wanted to be like her,” Diana said. “I never really understood why two sisters would develop such similar diseases, but we did, and I can only put it down to me wanting to emulate everything she did.”

Diana’s analysis made sense up to a point, as she did worship Sarah and was impressionable, but she failed to take into account other factors that seemed to govern her personality and behavior. One element might have been the influence of her mother, who admitted to her own difficulties with eating. Shortly after Diana’s visit to Roehampton Priory, an interviewer asked Frances about stories that she had problems with alcohol. “
I don’t think I have,” replied Frances, but added, somewhat elliptically, “I have a problem with eating, when I get fussed.… I don’t think there is anything wrong with my eating.… It’s only when I’m under pressure.… My problem has simply been not noticing if I haven’t eaten.”

There are strong indications that Diana began bingeing as a teenager in response to stressful situations. Diana may have been able to effectively cover up her bouts of purging, but the evidence of overeating was obvious. Both Ruth Rudge and Violet Allen at West Heath observed that Diana ate with gusto. “
She was often seen lurking near the pantry, whether for leftovers to bolster her healthy appetite, as I suspected, or because she actually enjoyed domesticity, as she assured me,” noted Ruth Rudge. Rudge also remembered Diana’s “
midnight feasts, bringing food back illegally into the school.” Diana “
loved food,” wrote Penny Junor in her 1982 biography, “particularly baked beans, and she’d help herself to anything up to four bowls of All-Bran every morning.” Diana herself recalled, “
I ate and ate and ate. 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.”

The administrators at West Heath were attuned to anorexia, but not bulimia, which had yet to be identified by the psychiatric community. Although Diana had a tendency to put on weight quickly, she didn’t balloon in a way that conformed to her eating habits. As one of Diana’s relatives observed, “She used to eat a lot. She probably had to get rid of it somehow.” The need to purge requires elaborate secrecy. “It is so easy to hide,” said a woman close to the royal family who suffered from bulimia. “You get clever about running taps, putting on the radio. The deception with bulimia is huge.” Diana had the capacity for secret behavior, as was evident in one of her descriptions of West Heath days:
She recalled sneaking downstairs after lights-out, turning on her music, and dancing ballet routines for “hours on end” without being discovered.

Bulimic symptoms can be motivated by any number of impulses, but one is the need to impose some control—over the body as well as the mind—in uneasy circumstances. Such a situation occurred when Diana had to leave her childhood home in 1976.
As the movers were packing up the family’s belongings, Diana found the scene unbearable. She called Alex Loyd, one of her neighbors, and together the two girls gathered all the peaches in the Park House larder. They then went to the beach and devoured the entire cache. But no one took much notice of Diana’s overeating in those days, and her symptoms seemed to be intermittent as well, limited by the protective environment of West Heath.

In addition to bingeing and purging, Diana kept things together in other ways that verged on obsessive behavior.
From a very early age, she had been unusually neat. Even as a six-year-old, she had kept an immaculate bedroom, with her clothing and her toys perfectly arranged. Diana’s cousin Robert Spencer noticed that she “
was always washing or tidying or ironing. That was a nervous streak in her.”

Diana’s preoccupation carried over to school, where she seemed to find relief in cleaning up after the other girls. “
I would go in sometimes and she would be there with a dustpan and brush,” said matron Violet Allen. “I think perhaps some of the other girls thought she was excessively tidy. It could be, I suppose, her wanting to control her situation.” In light of Diana’s later loss of control in her private life, her behavior seems significant. “
Diana had strong character traits that held her glued together,” said Dr. Kent Ravenscroft, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. “She was a good girl cleaning up her bad feelings when she cleaned up around her. She had the urge to do untidy things, to be messy, but she used her character and upbringing and strength to hold on. Her tidiness was a way of managing.”