Diana in Search of Herself (21 page)

Like the rest of his family, Prince Charles saw no particular need to coddle Diana, but he did make a sincere effort to give her pointers.
He taught her to conserve energy during a public event by shaking hands with every fifteenth person in a crowd; to bite the inside of her lip to stifle inappropriate laughter; to toss out a general question (“Do you all come from around here?”) toward a group as a conversational stimulus; and to use a pleasant smile to extricate herself from a tedious conversation.

In many circumstances, Charles understood how to be thoughtful. According to Dimbleby, he was known for “
the care with which he nurtured personal friendships and the compassion he revealed when … [his] staff found themselves in personal misfortune.” Yet Charles’s character had a strain of self-absorption that came with being royal. A natural introvert, he was set in his ways. “It would take a lot to pull him out,” said a longtime friend. Charles was obsessive about his work—overseeing his charities, meeting with government officials, making speeches—at least in part because he was constantly trying to prove himself and justify his role. On weekends he buried himself in paperwork when he wasn’t off hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing polo. “
The Prince of Wales was always working at something,” said Charles’s aide Michael Colborne. “He was endlessly writing letters or painting.”

Charles tended—literally—to run from one place to another, and
he grew impatient with those who couldn’t keep his pace. “The trouble is,” he once told a friend, “
I always feel that unless I rush about doing things and trying to help furiously, I will not (and the monarchy will not) be seen to be relevant and I will be considered a mere playboy!” He frequently phoned his staff when they were off-duty, expecting them to produce instant answers. If they failed to please him,
he could be short-tempered, and he seldom complimented their successes. “He isn’t cynical,” said one of his friends, “but, like other royals, he is used to getting what he wants and having his own way.”

Preoccupied by his schedule of official duties and customary activities, Charles seemed scarcely aware that Diana was beginning to unravel.
“
When you don’t read and are not interested in current affairs, you get lonely and upset,” said Michael Colborne. “She wasn’t educated. She was an empty vessel, a pretty empty vessel, but empty nevertheless.” Lacking even hobbies or sporting pursuits to divert her, Diana had to confront the sort of enforced solitude that she had striven since childhood to avoid. She was disoriented by Buckingham Palace, where everyone seemed distant and unwelcoming, and she felt hemmed in.
Years later she told her friend Roberto Devorik that during these months she began having a recurring dream about Charles’s coronation: His crown fit perfectly on his head, but when a crown was placed on her head it was the wrong size, which she took as a sign that she would never be Queen.

Diana fretted about Charles during his frequent absences, reminiscent of her persistent childhood worry when her father left for long stretches.
She sometimes threw temper tantrums, became moody and unpredictable, and suffered bouts of depression. “
She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started,” said her former roommate Carolyn Bartholomew. “She wasn’t happy. She was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her. She was dizzy with it, bombarded from all sides. It was a whirlwind and she was ashen, she was gray.” Although Diana had shown signs of depression in her childhood, she insisted that until her engagement, “
I didn’t know about jealousy or depressions or anything like that.”

Diana had enormous difficulty dealing with Charles’s inflexible devotion to duty, even in the face of her obvious anguish.
When he had to leave for an engagement, “she didn’t like it all,” said Colborne. “She couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t stay with her, why he couldn’t do what he wanted.” Diana even felt anxious when Colborne left her alone in the office. “Every time I went to lunch, she didn’t like it because it was the only time the phone didn’t [ring], and she didn’t like that,” said Colborne. Charles considered her objections unreasonable, and he tried, as his close advisers did, to explain his obligations.

Just one month after the engagement announcement, Charles left for a five-week tour of Australia and New Zealand, followed by quick stops in Venezuela and the United States. It was, he confided to a friend, a “
much regretted” trip that he undertook to fulfill long-promised commitments. Diana wept publicly when they parted at the airport, and
Charles tried to reassure her by telephoning every day. The trip deepened Diana’s fears of abandonment and gave her far too much time alone to worry.

Diana’s suspicions of those around her hardened during her fiancé’s absence. As she later said, “
I was told one thing but actually another thing was going on. The lies and deceit.” In her insecurity, she focused on Charles’s former girlfriends and took to quizzing Michael Colborne and
Francis Cornish about them. At the time, she seemed unduly worried about Dale “Kanga” Tryon, a vivacious Australian friend of Charles’s who had married Anthony Tryon, an English baron close to Charles. Diana actually banned Kanga during the engagement, prompting Kanga to complain to Stephen Barry, “
I can’t understand why we’re never invited.” When Kanga turned up at Buckingham Palace for a royal event, Barry told Diana she was there. “Oh, is she?” Diana replied with a blank expression, “How nice.” Commented Barry, “[Diana] did not go and see her. She [was] still young enough to be slightly anxious that someone might interest him more than she [did].”

Diana fixated even more fiercely on Camilla Parker Bowles.
She told Colborne and Cornish that she had asked Charles if he was still in love with Camilla and that he had given her an ambiguous answer. When she asked the two men how she should react, both declined to offer advice, in part because they couldn’t speak for Charles. In Diana’s imaginings, these well-meaning evasions became “lies and deceit.”
She later claimed that Charles had responded to her inquiries by telling her that his former girlfriends were “safe” because they were married.

Her instincts were correct to zero in on Camilla’s special relationship with Charles. Her tearful parting from Charles at the airport, she said, had “
nothing to do with him going,” but was prompted by a call from Camilla the previous evening. The phone rang while Diana and Charles were talking in the library, and while there was nothing surreptitious, the idea of Camilla’s call on the eve of a journey undid Diana, who left the room to “be nice” and let them talk, although she later said “it broke my heart.”

While Charles was away, Diana and Camilla had lunch at Camilla’s suggestion.
Their time together was cordial, by Camilla’s reckoning, but Diana recalled an encounter filled with portents. Diana later concluded that Camilla—“
very tricky indeed”—was trolling for information. The older woman particularly wanted to know if Diana planned to take up hunting. Because she had no plans to do so, Diana came to believe that Camilla had designated the hunting field as her “communication route” to Charles after he married.

In his typically earnest, somewhat naive fashion, Charles came clean with Diana, telling her that Camilla had been “
one of his most intimate friends,” but he assured her that with his engagement and marriage there would be no other woman in his life. He declined to go into “unnecessary detail,” assuming that Diana would take him at his word. This was a perfect moment for a secure and confident woman to thank him for his candor and reassure him that she trusted his love: Such sweet forgiveness would doubtless have inspired Charles’s respect. But Diana was neither secure nor confident, and Charles lacked the insight to realize that Diana would become
even more paranoid about Camilla once she knew the truth of the relationship.

Diana didn’t acknowledge Charles’s frankness, later saying that she had “
worked it all out” about Charles and Camilla on her own, adding vaguely that she “found the proof of the pudding, and people were willing to talk to [her].” Diana went further when she confided to her friend Elsa Bowker in 1994 that “
she didn’t know about Charles and Camilla until she broke open Charles’s desk and found love letters from Camilla.” According to Bowker, Diana said she made her discovery about six months after the wedding.
When asked about Diana’s claim, Michael Colborne said he had not seen any evidence to indicate Diana had done such a thing.

Diana’s friends often wondered why she didn’t simply seize on her advantages—her beauty, her youth, her natural charm—and concentrate on eradicating Camilla from Charles’s thoughts. But that strategy assumed a level of self-assurance absent in Diana.
Instead, Diana alienated Charles by urging him to sell his new country home, Highgrove, because it was only eleven miles from Camilla’s house. In constant turmoil, Diana became obsessive, perhaps even delusional. She later said that Charles had sent Camilla “
flowers when she had meningitis. ‘To Gladys from Fred.’ ” Michael Colborne wasn’t aware that Charles sent flowers with such a card, or that “Gladys” and “Fred” were nicknames used by Charles and Camilla. Diana’s account, he said, was “
a bit muddled.”

The severity of Diana’s torment and the violence of her emotions shocked Charles—who called them “
her other side”—and he visibly worried about her. “
Whenever the Prince came back from engagements, his first question was, ‘Is Lady Diana all right?’ ” recalled Stephen Barry.
Charles saw that he was trapped in a mismatch, but he couldn’t call off the wedding without inflicting great damage on Diana. At that stage, he didn’t share his apprehensions with his family, or even with friends; only his aides witnessed Diana’s behavior. “
I was used to temper with him,” said Michael Colborne. “But her mood swings were quite frightening in a nineteen-year-old. [They] came from total despair.”

In her own recollection, Diana actually accused Charles of the volatility
she
experienced. “
He was obsessed with me,” she said. “But it was hot and cold, hot and cold. You never knew what mood it was going to be, up and down, up and down.” Projecting one’s own unpleasant characteristics onto others is known in psychotherapy as a “primitive defense.” Its appearance in Diana showed how disturbed she had become.

When Diana and Charles met with Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that spring for premarital instruction, they couldn’t hide the troubles in their relationship. Runcie recalled that his assistant, Richard Chartres—“
a very observant man”—noticed that Charles was “seriously
depressed. You [could] tell from his voice.” Runcie and Chartres concluded that it was an arranged marriage, but Runcie believed Diana would “grow into it.” Runcie was fond of Charles, and considered him “highly sensitive” and “capable of hidden acts of kindness.” The Archbishop was touched that Charles “encouraged [Diana] a lot when she looked a little anxious and wan.” Runcie noted perceptively that Diana was “very tender, very unformed,” yet “had a sort of shrewdness and was tremendously observant … of anything about you.” In Charles’s presence, Diana seemed awed. “
He’s very deep, Charles,” Diana told Runcie with childlike adoration.

No one, not even Charles, knew that Diana suffered from severe bulimia nervosa from practically the moment they were engaged. In her childhood and adolescence, Diana had shown a low tolerance for stress and a need for a safe environment where she would be accepted and encouraged. Given her vulnerabilities, Diana now found herself in the worst possible place—with a fiancé who couldn’t completely devote himself to her, a family that couldn’t support her, and a press and public that clamored for her attention, expecting her to perform perfectly.

When Diana had faced a previous highly stressful situation—her O-level exams—she had fallen apart and failed. When she felt strain in her personal life, she had turned to food for relief. The pressures of being the prospective bride of the Prince of Wales were too much, and her bulimia relapse seemed almost inevitable. “There are circumstances which bring difficulties to the surface,” said a leading British psychologist. “Some have been mild or never very apparent. I could imagine if she had been in a supportive situation it might have been different.”