Diana in Search of Herself (24 page)

More than ever, Camilla was the focal point of Diana’s angst. Diana recalled being undone twice by jealousy of her rival during the cruise. The first time, she said, two pictures of Camilla fell out of Charles’s calendar; the second time, Diana spotted him wearing cuff links with entwined C’s.
When Diana asked if Camilla had given him the cuff links, Charles admitted that she had, but only out of friendship. Charles’s honesty once again fueled Diana’s outrage, provoking another fight.

Diana’s emotions intensified when they arrived at Balmoral in late August and she confronted the everyday reality of a married royal. “
This was going to be her life,” said Colborne, “spending wet days shooting, and she hated it.” She had persistent nightmares about Camilla, and found herself “
obsessed by Camilla totally. Didn’t trust him, thought every five minutes he was ringing her up, asking how to handle his marriage.” Charles confided to friends that Diana had a fixation on Camilla that he couldn’t dislodge.
Despite Charles’s repeated assurances that he had closed the book with Camilla before the wedding, Diana refused to accept his word, telling him, according to Dimbleby, that she was “
convinced that [he] was still deceiving her.… She more than once exploded into a tirade of anger from which he retreated in bewilderment and despondency.” At the same time, Diana felt bereft when Charles went off to fish by himself, or to stalk deer with friends. However much he infuriated her, she couldn’t bear to see him leave.

Diana kept her bulimia hidden, but her weight continued to drop.
Since February she had lost 28 pounds, and she now weighed slightly more than 110 pounds—alarmingly low for her five foot ten frame. “
Everybody saw I was getting thinner and thinner, and I was being sicker and sicker,” Diana recalled.
She slept poorly and wept for hours—sitting in a chair, with her head on her knees. “She would almost cry privately in front of you,” said a friend who witnessed her bouts of weeping in later years. “You couldn’t help her. She would be wrapped up in herself. Nobody spoke to her or touched her because they knew they could not.”
At one point in the fall of 1981, Michael Colborne tried for an entire day to console Diana as she alternated between tears and silence, her head buried in her hands.

One problem in offering Diana help was her combination of fragility and defensiveness. She wanted to be soothed, yet invariably rejected efforts to comfort her—especially when they came from Charles. Her silences, which often signaled reproach, were especially difficult to read, as
they arose from Diana’s inability to articulate what was troubling her.

Largely because Diana’s behavior was so unpredictable, Charles’s responses were inconsistent, even counterproductive. “
He was totally unaware that people suffered as his wife was suffering,” said Michael Colborne. “He was totally unable to cope.” Charles found it easier to deal with her mute sulks than with her tears.
When she wept, he would knead his hands in frustration and say, “What is it now, Diana? What have I said now to make you cry?” Whether she was angry or tearful, he usually temporized—
capitulating to her demands, beseeching her to cheer up, staying by her side for long stretches to offer consoling words that she frequently ignored even as she insisted he remain. Other times he withdrew in exasperation, reinforcing her abandonment fears. Diana would then react either by retreating or by lashing out yet again. If Charles seemed unflappable, she would become even angrier.

As Diana challenged Charles’s devotion, she tested her own limits as well.
Occasionally Charles rebuked her, but neither he nor anyone around him called Diana to account for her behavior. Urging her to pull herself together was as ineffective as efforts to coax her out of her unhappiness.

Charles’s fondness for Diana had not evolved into deeper feelings as he had hoped. He was protective of her and genuinely sorry for her, but when
he felt suffocated by her possessiveness, he tended to pull away. The more he withdrew, the more she tried to bring him back with her demands and entreaties, which pushed him further away. Charles couldn’t tell her what she needed to hear—that he loved her unconditionally—so he compensated by yielding to her wishes. Diana was astute enough to know he was humoring her, so she resorted to even more extreme behavior to get Charles’s attention.

When he felt he couldn’t manage Diana, Charles sought help from others.
He invited Laurens van der Post to Balmoral to offer his counsel, but Diana couldn’t connect with the philosopher and felt he misunderstood her.
Charles arranged for Diana’s old roommates Virginia Pitman and Carolyn Bartholomew to visit, hoping they would distract and entertain Diana. At one point Charles even took Diana to a more remote Balmoral location, a lodge called Craigowan, so they could be alone, and she momentarily brightened. Observed Stephen Barry, “
The princess was happier at Craigowan, as she was out of the royal system and could run the house.”

The royal family and their employees couldn’t avoid witnessing Diana’s distress as she grew more vocally defiant. “I heard of Diana’s moods early,” recalled a relative of the royal family. “She suddenly refused to come to dinner. The Queen asked Charles to persuade her, and he returned red-faced and said he could not. I was fascinated. I could not imagine doing that. It did happen, and everyone was vastly embarrassed.” Yet, the relative continued, “[The royals] didn’t see her as ill. Mental illness they do not understand.”

It is difficult to imagine life inside the royal family. While the rest of England views the world as a social hierarchy, the royals divide the world into “us” and “everyone else,” making no essential distinction between the Duke of Devonshire and the local grocer. They also firmly adhere to their own rules. Duty always prevails, everyone defers to the Queen, emotions are kept private, and personal matters are not discussed. The royals have an ingrained sense of entitlement; when offered a concert ticket purchased by a friend, for example, a member of the royal family wouldn’t think of paying for it. “
The royals are spoiled, but not by the common definition,” said Mark Lloyd, a London entrepreneur with friends in the royal family. “They are spoiled by deference. They go through life being ‘yessed’ to. A royal makes a vague joke, and everyone roars. Then when people disagree with a royal, he finds it intolerable.”

In her last interview before she died, Diana said, “
From the day I joined that family, nothing could be done naturally.” Yet the royal family regards its habits and customs as routine: They know no other way. For much of the year, they follow their own schedules. The Queen and her husband could easily breakfast together, only to discover later on the staircase that
they were about to visit the same part of London. But at certain times—August, September, and October at Balmoral, December and January at Sandringham, and June at Windsor, they gather as a clan and share the timeless rituals of sporting pursuits, barbecues, teas, concerts, picnics, cocktail hours, and large formal dinners.

General conversation tends to be quotidian and bland; if anyone brings up a personal dilemma or disagreeable topic at dinner, the response is usually silence. “
It’s a strange family, the royal family,” Robert Runcie told his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, “because conversations aren’t followed up. I think it’s also that survival is the overarching priority, and you have to prove yourself as a safe person with whom to be a friend, not a man who enjoys boasting about his position with them.”

Even in little ways, Diana had trouble relating to the royals. “You cannot judge them by our standards,” explained a friend of Diana’s whose family served the royal family. “They live on another planet. Things that we get excited about, the royals just wouldn’t … because they don’t even notice. They are oblivious.” They are also notoriously tightfisted, while Diana tended to be extravagantly generous.
She later told friends about being nonplussed during her first royal Christmas that the family took pride in giving each other inexpensive gifts, making hers seem inappropriately lavish by comparison. Although Ruth Fermoy had warned her granddaughter that the royal family’s sense of humor was “different,” Diana later said she was nevertheless put off by what she called their “
silly” inside jokes. Paradoxically, in a December 1981 letter from Sandringham, Diana praised the family’s
“generosity” and seemed to enjoy the royal sensibility, noting, “Even though thirty of us were here, it was all laughter.”

Diana treated the Queen with respect, but privately betrayed a tinge of animosity. After the engagement,
Diana felt the Queen viewed her as a threat, for reasons Diana couldn’t quite explain. Diana’s hostility could be petty; when the family gathered for drinks, Diana was irked that Charles correctly deferred to his mother and grandmother by serving them first. “
Fine, no problem,” Diana grumped. “I always thought it was the wife first—stupid thought!”
Nor could Diana abide the Queen’s adoration of her dogs, a prevailing royal preoccupation. “
The Queen is always surrounded by corgis,” she once said, “so you get the feeling you are standing on a moving carpet.”

Despite her reedy voice and matronly looks, the Queen has a powerful mystique. By a simple turn of her head she can cut off a conversation, and her rigid self-control commands attention. “It is hard to be natural with the Queen, because she is very frightening,” said a friend of the Queen Mother. “The truth is, she is frightened of us, too.” The Queen’s fear—shyness, really—creates an unsettled atmosphere in which people often feel
ill at ease. “The Queen is not a demonstrative person,” said a former courtier. “She is not ‘touchy-feely.’ But she is kind and warm. She is very shy by nature and has mastered that.” Diana would later resent Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, for her easy rapport with their mutual mother-in-law; Fergie was more of an extrovert than Diana, which appealed to the Queen.

Clever and noncommittal, the Queen gave away very little in dealing with her family. She was fundamentally sympathetic, but she had no tolerance for self-indulgent whining. “The Queen is the opposite of Diana,” said a former courtier. “She is the least self-obsessed person you have ever met. She doesn’t think it is interesting to talk about herself, and she is not interested in other people’s efforts to talk about themselves.” She could register disapproval with a stern glance, but otherwise, it was not in her nature to confront problems. “Regardless of how rude Princess Margaret is to [the Queen], she never says anything,” said a longtime friend of the royal family. “That is her policy. She never says anything to her children. She is a very decent person, but she won’t intervene with anyone.”

Diana considered herself the outsider, and made little effort to ingratiate herself with the royal family. She showed her emotions and flouted royal protocol with her informality, causing comment among the courtiers from almost the first day. In a sense, she was laying down her terms and conditions, assuming she would prevail. “Diana was raised without a mother,” explained one of her friends, “and I don’t think she understood the idea of duty toward a husband’s family and toward a husband.”

“
Her willfulness was a direct result of her insecurity,” said aide Michael Colborne. Royal houseparties intimidated her, just as gatherings of people outside her circle had unnerved her, growing up. “
Suddenly people were hanging on her every word,” recalled her friend Rosa Monckton, to whom Diana confessed, “Only I had none.” She couldn’t bear that the Balmoral guests just “
stared at [her] the whole time, treated [her] like glass.” Fearful of being judged inadequate, Diana would sometimes leave meals abruptly, or not appear at all.
She later explained her behavior by saying she regarded the regimentation of royal life old-fashioned and boring, claiming it made her feel claustrophobic. She said she loved Scotland but hated the stressful atmosphere at Balmoral because she constantly detected “
undercurrents” of “all their moods,” and the family depleted her strength.

Diana may have been daunted by the royal family, but in a curious way she also felt superior to them, which stoked her defiance. She had what historian Paul Johnson called “
the toughness of Whig women.” Explained Andrew Roberts, another historian, “
Because her family looks down on the royal family, she thought of them wrongly as German parvenus.”

When Diana began behaving erratically, members of the royal family chose not to notice in the hope that the problem would disappear. “They
are a very matter-of-fact family,” said a friend of the Queen. “They would find it difficult to understand a difficult girl who was very young and having a hard time learning to cope. But someone should have done something.” As Jonathan Dimbleby explained it, “
[The family] had witnessed symptoms of the princess’s distress, but not wishing to interfere, they had become accustomed to averting their gaze.” The royals even have a name for their ability to ignore the unpleasant: “
ostriching.” “
Maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful,” Diana said. “Obviously this was daunting, because if you’ve never seen it before, how do you support it?”

But their failure to acknowledge her pain, much less to sympathize with and comfort her, made Diana feel more isolated and wounded than ever. Her reaction summoned up all her memories of rejection:
“She told me, ‘I am unwanted. I was born and they wanted a boy. I married Charles and I was unwanted, then the royal family didn’t want me,’ ” said her friend Elsa Bowker. Quite understandably, Diana felt the royal family had cast her adrift emotionally, as she had been in childhood by her parents’ divorce.

In October 1981, after many days of rain, Diana was “
about to cut my wrists,” as she put it, when Charles finally persuaded her to go to London for professional help—a significant step, given his family’s discomfort with mental illness. But Diana could be neither diagnosed nor treated properly because she refused to admit her bulimia, an essential symptom along with her mood swings and spells of depression. Diana saw “
all the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of,” but she was a mistrustful patient, unwilling to concede that she was seriously ill.