Diana in Search of Herself (4 page)

Instead of building a shield, as Charles did by declining to read what was said and written about him, Diana got pulled into a process she found fascinating and terrifying. As perception and reality became more confused, Diana’s insecurities grew. From the beginning, Diana devoured everything written about her, and she viewed herself through the prism of the press. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle took over: The act of being watched warped her self-image and behavior. She herself once said, “
I didn’t like myself. I was ashamed because I couldn’t cope with the pressures … I felt compelled to perform.”

In his eulogy, her brother Charles offered one perplexing observation against considerable evidence to the contrary. “
She remained intact, true to herself,” he said. In some respects—certain signature traits such as her mischievous wit and her easy rapport—this was accurate. Habits drummed into her by an upper-class background persisted throughout her life: fulfilling her public engagements, for example, or writing instantaneous
thank-you notes. As her friend Rosa Monckton observed, “
Whenever things got too much for her she would say to herself, ‘Diana, remember you’re a Spencer’… and she would then get on with whatever she had to do.”

Yet she tended to define herself in terms of the approval of others. “
I think essentially that she was an ill person,” said Dr. Michael Adler of the National AIDS Trust. “She was very, very insecure. She didn’t believe in herself. There was not a sort of real center to her personality. Her identity was created for her, and she increasingly got herself into personal problems, which highlighted her inadequacies.”

When she started out, she appeared to be a typical Sloane Ranger—an ill-educated girl with a perfect pedigree and good manners, but little else to prepare her for the rough-and-tumble ahead. Her identity was incomplete and unsatisfactory, her self-esteem shaky, especially regarding her intellectual ability. What’s more, she had certain juvenile preconceptions of her future, an idealized version of marriage that was fed by the fairy-tale romances written by her stepgrandmother, Barbara Cartland.

The royal family imposed a new identity on her, which was glamorized by the press and the demands of her international celebrity. She was expected to be a wife and mother as well as a royal spokesperson and stylish symbol. As she tried to fulfill her duties, she felt that neither the royal family nor the press adequately praised her. The tabloids would create one image of her, and she would react, at times unwittingly, to a view of herself that the public had accepted but that often had little basis in fact. “
As she expressed it to friends,” wrote Charles’s biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, “… she did not know who she really was.”

Seeing herself over and over in photographs and on television only deepened her insecurities. “
She scoured the newspapers for photographs of herself with an eagerness unalloyed by familiarity,” wrote Dimbleby. “Not for the first time, it seemed to [Charles and Diana’s] friends that she was searching for her own identity in the image of a princess that smiled back at her from every front page.”

Diana felt inadequate to the burgeoning expectations, so she continually sought a new persona that would please everyone, mutating to fit the predominant impression and placate criticism. As Sam McKnight, one of her many hairstylists, observed, “
Her whole life appears to have been a series of transformations, and I guess it was, but I think she made it like that because she had to transform and transform until she found her true self.” Diana’s constantly changing hairstyles were only the most visible evidence of her shifting identities. “
The haircut was a way to have a strong image,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She changed it according to her moods. When she went to the excess of cutting it too short or making it too wet,
she wanted to make a statement or fight a moment of her life. When it was looser and softer, I think she was feeling better about herself.”

When Diana began actively spinning her own story in 1991 by collaborating with journalists, she declared, “
From now on, I am going to own myself and be true to myself. I no longer want to live someone else’s idea of what and who I should be. I am going to be me.” But she was still obsessed by the expectations of others. “
Whatever I do,” she said toward the end of her life, “it’s never good enough for some people.”

Living as a celebrity did incalculable damage to Diana, whose emotional underpinnings were tenuous to begin with. “It is the inability to see oneself from the inside,” said a friend who was privy to Diana’s psychological torment. “There is always a reflection, a distortion. Who one is and what one’s contributions are may be perfectly ordinary and valuable, but they are skewed by the distortion of fame. It is difficult to see oneself in that circumstance.”

Chapter 2

D
iana’s childhood was shattered in late 1967 “
when Mummy decided to leg it.” Diana was only six. Andrew Morton wrote that she “
sat quietly at the bottom of the cold stone stairs at her Norfolk home, clutching the wrought-iron banisters while all around her there was a determined bustle. She could hear her father loading suitcases into the boot of a car, then Frances, her mother, crunching across the gravel forecourt, the clunk of the car door being shut and the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life.”

As was so often the case, Diana’s memory shifted with various retellings. Debbie Frank, one of Diana’s astrologers, recalled that Diana told her with similar clarity, “
I will always remember [my mother] packing her evening dresses into the car and saying, ‘Darling, I’ll come back.’ I sat on the steps waiting for her to return but she never did.” Frank wrote, “She could recall it as if it happened yesterday. In fact she told me the story again over our final lunch.” According to Ross Benson of the
Sunday Express
, Diana also remembered “
cowering behind a curtain, listening to her parents berating each other in the most dreadful terms” and then “her mother’s footsteps walking away down the hallway for the last time.”

Diana described the episode to many of her friends. “
I remember her telling me about her mother leaving,” Cosima Somerset said, “that it was the most painful thing in her life, that the children weren’t told why she was leaving, and that she was leaving permanently.” Diana’s abandonment became a central feature of her psychology. “
Her mother left at the moment Diana adored her,” said Diana’s friend Elsa Bowker. “Diana told me she loved her father, but he couldn’t replace [her] mother. She said to me, ‘I have been unhappy all my life.’ ”

The marriage of Diana’s parents had started out as a whirlwind love match. Johnnie, then known as Viscount Althorp, was the son of the 7th Earl Spencer and Lady Cynthia Hamilton, a daughter of the Duke of Abercorn. Born in 1924, Johnnie was tall and handsome, wealthy and socially prominent—a “catch” for the women of his generation. He was educated at Eton, then went on to Sandhurst, and served in the Royal Scots Greys during World War II, seeing action in France, Belgium, and Holland.

The Spencers were one of England’s grand families. Originally sheep farmers, they made a fortune in wool trading from medieval times onward, and acquired vast tracts of land in Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Hertfordshire. In 1508, John Spencer built the family seat at Althorp, a 121-room house on 13,000 acres. The Spencer earldom originated in 1765, and in the following years the family bought more land in what is now Greater London’s Clapham, Wandsworth, and Wimbledon.

The Spencers were related to royalty (Charles II and James II) as well as other noble families. Along with the Bedfords, Devonshires, Sutherlands, Westminsters, Norfolks, Carlisles, and Egertons, the Spencers led the Whig aristocracy that governed Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Whigs were the “
most serious, exclusive and illustrious cousinhood, held together by birth, blood and breeding,” wrote historian David Cannadine. “They were the very embodiment of glamour and grandeur, high rank and high living.”

When Diana said to herself “Remember you’re a Spencer,” it was no idle reminder. Being a Spencer was a vital element of her character. Along with the other Whigs, the Spencers derived their power from the Revolution of 1688, when they helped topple the pro-Catholic James II, limited the power of the monarchy, and guaranteed that the throne would eventually pass to George of Hanover in Germany, whose mother, Sophia, was the granddaughter of James I. When he took the English throne as George I, the Whigs ascended to the dominance that would continue through the early nineteenth century. “
Diana was brought up to believe her family was much grander than the royal family,” said historian Paul Johnson. “The Whigs are the most arrogant families in the world.”

At the same time, the Whigs “
tended to be populist and antimonarch[ist], or at least for a feeble monarchy, not a strong monarchy,” said Johnson. “
Despite their calm assumption of effortless superiority,” wrote David Cannadine, the Whigs “claimed a rapport with the people denied to most patricians.” This combination of Whig grandeur and populism passed
down through the generations to Diana’s father, and to Diana herself. “
It was instinctive for her,” Paul Johnson said. “She didn’t know Whigs.”

The Spencers used their riches to amass an extraordinary collection of paintings, porcelain, and rare books, much of which filled the vast rooms of Althorp House. Diana’s grandfather Jack, the 7th Earl Spencer, was known as the “
curator earl” for his intensely serious stewardship of Althorp and its collections. Jack Spencer was “
intolerant of differences and he was a perfectionist,” said Fiona Fraser, his niece. Behind his back, he was called, ironically, “
Jolly Jack.” “He was very frightening when we were small,” said a Spencer cousin. “I think that made Johnnie slightly reticent.”

The relationship between Jack Spencer and his son Johnnie was “uneasy,” according to Charles Spencer. “
Grandfather found it hard to accept that his custodianship of Althorp was to be limited by his own mortality.… For his part, my father was wary of Grandfather’s temper.” Father and son were also fundamentally incompatible. Johnnie’s interests ran to outdoor activities such as farming and shooting. He had neither his father’s intellect nor his passion for Althorp’s treasures.

The enduring image of Johnnie Spencer dates to Diana’s engagement and wedding. Although he was only fifty-seven, he had suffered a severe stroke three years earlier, and his unsteady gait and slightly slurred speech made him seem a dim and doddering Colonel Blimp. Yet as a young man, he had great charm,
a formidable memory, and
surprising shrewdness. Whenever he gave a speech, he spoke fluently, amusingly, and without notes.

“He was a good steady Englishman who wouldn’t have set the Thames on fire, but he was great fun,” said one of his relatives. Shy as a young boy, Johnnie grew confident after his service in the military but retained his gentle manner and sweet thoughtfulness. Johnnie was endearingly down-to-earth, with a warm geniality that extended to people of all classes. “
I found him to be adorable,” his cousin Fiona Fraser said. “He was not buttoned-up, like a lot of patrician men. If he felt joy, he would show it.”
Perhaps his most memorable “unstuffy” moment was snapping pictures with the tourists outside Buckingham Palace on the day Diana’s engagement was announced.

“
He was in many ways not a twentieth-century figure, nor even a nineteenth-century one,” said his friend Lord St. John of Fawsley, “but an illegal immigrant from the eighteenth century, when the aristocracy lived fully and at ease with their neighbors. He was the perfect gentleman, but one never afraid to speak openly about his emotions. The words of love were on his lips.”

Yet to some who knew him, Johnnie seemed contradictory. One woman who knew Johnnie during her debutante season considered him “amazingly good-looking, but … odd and unpredictable and moody.” In
his softness, Johnnie seemed disconcertingly weak—all the more so because he was drawn to women who were tougher than he was. “Johnnie Spencer liked strong women,” said one of his cousins. “He was motivated by them.” Frances Roche had many appealing qualities, but above all, Robert Spencer recalled, “
Frances was dominant.”