Diana in Search of Herself (28 page)

Diana’s relationship with her family “sort of went in cycles,” said one Spencer relative. “That was how she treated her family, but it was not a problem because they were the ones she could let off steam to and not worry about being betrayed. Someone was always in and out of favor. The other thing was, they were the only ones to tell her the truth.”

It was for this very reason, in the view of one of Diana’s friends, that she couldn’t be closer to her immediate family: “She didn’t have anyone to turn to. Diana was very up and down with Jane and Sarah. Diana and I discussed it, and she said, ‘I envy you so much the relationship you have with your family.’ It was love-hate in her family, up and down, never steady or constant. The sisters were of a different emotional kind. Diana wanted to be listened to and loved and told she was doing the right thing. She wanted to be told she was wonderful, and the family brought her down to earth.”

The one family member Diana began to strongly mistrust was her grandmother Ruth Fermoy, with whom she had never enjoyed a close relationship. Ruth Fermoy’s first loyalty was the royal family, and early in the Wales marriage she began to express her dismay about Diana’s treatment of Charles, who she believed needed “
a woman to love and be cared for by.” During a dinner at Balmoral in March 1982, Ruth Fermoy observed to her dinner partner Roy Strong that Diana “
had a lot to learn” about royal life. Lady Fermoy was even more pointed with Robert Runcie, a close friend of hers. “
Ruth was very distressed with Diana’s behavior,” Runcie recalled. “She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’d seen him grow up, loved him like all the women of the court do, and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.”

Chapter 11

O
n March 20, 1983, Charles, Diana, William, and their entourage left England for their first major royal tour—forty-five days in Australia and New Zealand. The trip was a defining moment for Diana, although perhaps not for the conventional interpretation, that she developed a “new maturity.” In the battle between the strong elements of Diana’s character and the fragility of her temperament, her character prevailed under extreme stress. Because of the demands made on both Charles and Diana, and the enormous pressure to perform flawlessly, the trip also proved an important bonding experience for them as a couple. But in other ways, it drove a greater wedge between them. The experience deluded the press and the public into believing that Diana had become the superwoman she still could not be—as long as her fundamental psychological problems were not fully addressed.

The tour took the couple to every state in Australia, from scorching heat one day to chilly rain the next. As a veteran of more than fifty overseas visits by age thirty-four, Charles knew how heavily he had to support his inexperienced and emotionally vulnerable twenty-one-year-old wife; even for someone twice Diana’s age with a solid sense of herself, the pressure of being “on” for forty-five straight days would have been daunting. As Charles himself admitted in a letter to a relative, “
The great problem is … keeping our enthusiasm … when everything is so exactly the same each day. After three weeks a strange feeling overcomes you, and when you see another crowd all you want to do is scream and run away as fast as possible!”

On what Charles called their “Antipodean Odyssey,” all eyes were on Diana: She had to watch every word, smile incessantly, and show excitement for everyone and everything she encountered.
Charles rarely left
Diana on her own, gently steering her from place to place. He was often seen lightly squeezing her hand to bolster her confidence. In her later bitterness, Diana bemoaned that “
nobody ever helped me
at all
” during the tour.
But in a letter to a friend at the time, she praised Charles for encouraging her when she felt overwhelmed, and she expressed admiration for his ability to inspire others with well-chosen words. What’s more, staff members like her press secretary Vic Chapman were soothing and supportive. “He was very good at talking her through things,” said a former courtier. “He would brief her about what to expect. He would say, ‘You will get out of the car, and there will be four thousand screaming children.’ ”

The crowds in Australia and New Zealand were staggeringly large; in the city of Brisbane, more than 100,000 people turned out. During that stop, Diana was nearly mobbed as sweat poured down her face in the 86-degree heat.
Charles quickly intervened by wrapping his arm around her waist and guiding her into a room where she could rest: It was the closest she came to losing her public composure.
She moved informally among the people on “walkabouts,” shaking hands (6,000 by one estimate) and offering down-to-earth comments. She complained from time to time about the heat, but if she felt bored, she didn’t show it, and her emotional state seemed steady. “
She has a wonderful way of dealing with people,” Charles wrote to a relative. “Her quick wit stands her in excellent stead.” Occasionally, her impish humor got the better of her: When she greeted a man with one arm, she blurted out, “
I’ll bet you have fun chasing the soap around the bath!” Diana managed to be so endearing that he didn’t take offense.

One of the more perceptive assessments of her public persona was from Simon Hoggart of
The Observer:
“
The Princess was plainly ill at ease,” he wrote. “This I suspect is partly the cause of her astounding international celebrity. Her voice is ordinary and a little flat.… Her face, with its self-deprecating little smiles and giggly grimaces, signals that she is really just another nice and nervous girl. She is somehow gawky and graceful at the same time. She is both princess and commoner, the living embodiment of a million fantasies.”

The extraordinary adulation for Diana that the royal couple first experienced in Wales turned into a tidal wave Down Under, and once again, Charles took second billing.
After applauding his arrival, the crowds erupted into cheers and screams when they caught sight of Diana. Charles took these lopsided greetings in good humor: When Diana’s fans begged him to bring her over to his side of the street, and she continued chatting on her side, he cracked, “
You can’t tell a woman to do anything these days.” In his moments of privacy, Charles coped with the strain of these encounters by listening to his favorite classical music and immersing himself in Ivan Turgenev’s
First Love
as well as Carl Jung’s
Psychological Reflections
.
These activities, he confided to a friend, helped “
preserve my sanity and my faith.”

Charles took pride in Diana’s performance, although he was mildly disturbed by her reaction to the crowds.
Sometimes they frightened her, but she also found pleasure in the sense of power they gave her. Charles understood the dangers of giving credence to such idolatry, because he understood the fickle nature of celebrity. “
The terrifying part,” he wrote to a friend, “is that [the crowds] construct the pedestal, they put you on top of it, they expect you to balance on the beastly thing.… [Then] along come the demolition experts amongst them who are of the breed that enjoy breaking things down.”

Although he masked it well, Charles also felt resentful, and Diana knew it. “
All you could hear was, ‘Oh, she’s on the other side,’ ” Diana recalled. “Now, if you’re a man, like my husband a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks.”
In a letter to a friend written on April 1, Diana described the situation but emphasized that they were supporting each other. In her reminiscences, though, Diana took a harsher view, claiming that not only did Charles fail to share in her success, he was “
jealous” and “
took it out on [her]”—although there is no evidence that he did so.

By all accounts, Charles publicly showed his delight in her popularity, while he privately agonized about the impact of the disproportionate adoration. “
I do feel desperate for Diana,” he wrote to a friend on April 4. “There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly and, I’m convinced, mindless people photographing it.… Can’t they see … what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?”

Diana’s toughest moments occurred during the first week of the tour, when she was nearly overcome by the pressure. She was sick with bulimia, she wept to her twenty-nine-year-old lady-in-waiting Anne Beckwith-Smith, and she begged to go home. Gradually, she began to relax and concentrate on her job as a royal representative.
In a letter written nearly two weeks into the trip, Diana told a friend that her depression had lifted, and she expressed remorse about her earlier behavior in London and Balmoral, which she characterized as “selfish.” Diana was comforted by having William nearby. When she and Charles periodically visited him at the sheep station where he stayed with his nanny, it provided a welcome escape. “
We were extremely happy there,” Charles wrote to his friends the van Cutsems. “The great joy was that we were totally alone together.”

Diana and Charles openly showed affection for each other—as one writer described it, “
his hand resting on hers, her glance towards him, those sort of telling things.”
During a tree-planting in New Zealand, Diana
winked at Charles, he tossed away the shovel, heaved her over his shoulder, and carried her into a nearby building as they dissolved in laughter. And when a photographer accidentally encountered the couple in an elevator in Melbourne, Charles pointed to Diana and reportedly said, “
Isn’t she absolutely beautiful? I’m so proud of her.”

At the end of the tour, Diana and Charles escaped for a nine-day rest on Windermere Island, and this time the tabloids left them alone. Once recharged, they were off again on a seventeen-day visit to Canada, but without William. Diana again acquitted herself well under considerable pressure. “
Not a moment to breathe,” Diana confided in a letter to a relative. “I find the endless receptions quite difficult, as people tend to ask extraordinarily personal questions.” She could also spot the absurdity in their situation, as in her description of greeting children chewing bubble gum: “
When trying to drag a sentence out, all we actually see is a bright pink thing, turning round and round, like a washing machine inside.”

Diana and Charles missed William’s first birthday on June twenty-first. Somewhat surprisingly, Diana wrote to her relative, “
I haven’t missed William as much as I’d thought,” and revealed a flash of media savvy on her son’s birthday: “I smiled myself stupid all day, as the press were quite determined to see a ‘sad mama.’ ”

Brian Peckford, the premier of Newfoundland, commented that Diana was “
very witty” and “asked questions about what we may consider simple things but they are really the ones that count.” He also praised her ability to relate to patients during a hospital visit: “She sat down on every single bed to talk to people. She speaks very softly. She does not raise her voice. She makes people come down to her decibel level, and it is lovely.”

More significantly, Peckford revealed that Diana had said to him, “I am finding it very difficult to cope with the pressures of being the Princess of Wales.… I have learnt a lot in the last few months … [and] feel I am doing my job better now than I was before. I have matured a lot recently and got used to coping with things.” Only days earlier, Diana had confessed to a Halifax newspaper owner that her royal life was agonizing at times. “
When they write something horrible,” Diana said, “I get a horrible feeling right here,” pointing to her chest.

At the time, nothing “horrible” was being written about Diana. Broadsheets and tabloids alike hailed Diana’s mastery of her royal role. “
Prince Charles is largely responsible for this newfound confidence,” James Whitaker declared, “but it is Diana herself who can take most of the credit.” Andrew Morton proclaimed in the
Daily Star
that Diana was “
a big girl now … a far cry from the nervous young woman who twice burst into [public] tears before her marriage when the pressure got too much. As she celebrates her
twenty-second birthday tomorrow, she’ll be saying good-bye forever to Shy Di, and hello and welcome to a self-assured and poised princess.”

The rosy assessments of Diana’s progress were based on little more than the appeal of her charm and looks, and her ability, through practice, endurance, and determination, to learn the royal drill. A relative of the royal family who attended a public event with Diana that year recalled, “She was saying, ‘I’ll take five deep breaths and plunge in and talk to all those people.’ She did it well.” Diana had clearly benefited from the boost to her public confidence provided by her reception on the two tours. But her later assertion that she had returned from Australia a “
different person” was an illusion. She was fooling herself and the public by learning to function well in her public role. The symptoms of her emotional disturbance—mood swings, bulimia, self-mutilation, depression—could persist privately while she functioned well outwardly.

By the autumn of 1983, Diana had long since given up her psychiatric therapy. She had stuck with treatment for several months, but ended it early in the year, saying she no longer needed it. “The therapy appeared not to be delivering a solution for her,” according to a friend of Charles. Because Diana still didn’t admit to her bulimia, her diagnosis was incomplete, which limited the effectiveness of her therapy.
She had been to at least two therapists: Dr. Allan McGlashan, a Jungian specialist friendly with Laurens van der Post who focused on dream analysis, and David Mitchell, who probed her reactions to daily events and her conversations with Charles. Diana’s sessions with Mitchell at Kensington Palace often brought her to tears.
She didn’t think her therapists genuinely understood her, and without that essential trust, her treatment could not succeed.