Diana in Search of Herself (6 page)

In the years following her brother’s birth—when Diana was aged three to six—her parents’ marriage unraveled. Various tabloid writers have alleged that the marriage was “
violent and unhappy,” as Penny Junor wrote in
Charles: Victim or Villain?
, her 1998 book on Prince Charles. Longtime tabloid reporter James Whitaker even claimed that Diana’s psychological problems were not at all due to her “
motherless years,” but rather the “
violent scenes which went on before Frances … finally quit [her marriage].”

After Johnnie Spencer’s death in 1992, tabloid reporters toughened these accusations about his behavior. In
Diana vs. Charles: Royal Blood Feud
, his 1993 book on Diana and Charles, James Whitaker said flatly that Johnnie was “
a wife beater. There was little doubt in the minds of Norfolk society—and in the wider world—that it was so.” Others joined the chorus, including Angela Levin, who wrote that his bullying was “
believed to have extended to physical violence.”

Members of the Spencer family have said such charges are false, and Johnnie and Frances themselves described the disintegration of their relationship in sad but undramatic terms. “
Over the last three years we spent together we just drifted apart, and there was nothing either of us could do about it,” said Frances in 1997. Johnnie acknowledged as much in a 1981 interview: “
We hadn’t fallen apart. We’d drifted apart.”

Johnnie and Frances’s friends in Norfolk found it hard to believe that there could have been violence in their marriage. “
It was never discussed at the time,” said Fiona Fraser. “My mother lived in Norfolk and she knew nothing of it.” Nor did others close to Johnnie believe he was prone to physical abuse. One Spencer relative said emphatically that Johnnie was “the least violent man I ever met.” A friend similarly described Johnnie as “odd, gentle, and weak, not capable of cruelty.” Robert Spencer said that his cousin Johnnie “
showed no evidence of brutal behavior. Johnnie could be insensitive and unimaginative and dominated by his wife.” A woman who had known Johnnie since 1971 said, “He was more a pacifist gentleman than an aggro [aggressive] one.”

If anything, the Spencer family appeared to be a rather prosaic English aristocratic household. Johnnie came and went on the periphery, leaving the nurturing to the women, especially the nannies and governesses; yet neither parent appeared disengaged from the children. “
She was a wonderful mother and spent a lot of time with her children,” said Fiona Fraser, “and he was a wonderful father.” Janet Thompson, the nanny who arrived when Diana was three, recalled that on return from her days off,
she would find that Frances had slept in the nanny’s nursery bed to be with the children.

Frances had always been “very stay-at-home,” said one Spencer relative, while Johnnie had wanted to go abroad and travel. But in these years a shift took place, and Frances became restless, while Johnnie seemed more settled and dull. As one of his friends explained to Angela Levin, “
He was a reasonably intelligent man who never had his brain taken out of its
box.… It was never used or stretched.” While Johnnie stayed behind in Norfolk, Frances began traveling more frequently to London, where she joined the dinner party circuit. “Frances had lots of ‘go,’ ” a Spencer cousin explained. “Living in Norfolk, she was a bit bored.”

It was not so much that Frances yearned for a sparkling city life; although she would keep an apartment in London for years, she would never give up the country ways she loved. But after more than ten years of marriage, she was nearing her thirtieth birthday, and she seemed to feel she was missing something. With the exception of boarding school and little more than a year at Althorp, Frances had essentially never left home. “She went off for her own reasons,” said a man who was close to her for several decades. “She was definitely looking. John’s death had a major impact. She got engaged at seventeen, married at eighteen, Johnnie was twelve years older, and she wanted something else.” She also had the means to find it. “She was financially independent, an almost totally rare thing in an Englishwoman,” said one of her Norfolk neighbors. “That gave her latitude.”

If Johnnie did have a dark side, it likely was manifested in words, not actions. As his son Charles acknowledged, “
There is a thing called the Spencer temper. We are renowned for having a very bad temper.” Johnnie’s temper was more an expression of exasperation than abuse. On those infrequent occasions when he showed his anger, it was without “the remotest threat of violence,” a Spencer relative said. “I remember at a dinner party, Raine [Johnnie’s second wife] had been talking and talking, and he wanted to get a word in,” said one of Johnnie’s neighbors. “He shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’ ”

Johnnie himself confirmed such behavior in several interviews that offered naively revealing glimpses of his contradictory attitudes as a husband dealing with a forceful woman: equal measures of traditional chauvinism, admiration, and compensatory bravado for his own self-effacing manner. “
I don’t touch [Raine] physically or even shake her, but don’t worry about suggesting it. Maybe I should,” he said with a smile to Jean Rook of the
Daily Express
in 1981. “She’s an amazing person, but you’ve got to control her. When I’m cross, I’m very direct with her. I shout, ‘Now bloody well listen to me for a minute,’ and she does.” On the other hand, he said, “She grumbles that I’m too soft and kind and nice with people, and that I’m too idle. I don’t work hard enough … but I’m very strong, strong steel underneath, so we do have our very occasional rows. When I jump on her, she jumps back at me, but it doesn’t worry me. She always comes round to my decision in the end.”

Diana was notably restrained when talking with friends about her parents’ relationship. “She once told me that her father was not a good husband to her mother, but she went no further,” said a close friend of Diana’s.
After the accusations of wife-beating came out, a member of the Spencer family asked Frances directly about it. “She said it was not true, that he was the most gentle and mild-mannered man,” said the family member, who added, “It’s too ludicrous. It wasn’t in his makeup; and secondly, both Frances and Raine were married to him, and they both say it didn’t happen.”

Frances did, however, give Johnnie reason to be angry with her. In the summer of 1966, she found what she was seeking when she met Peter Shand Kydd at a London dinner party. “
It wasn’t love at first sight,” she later said, “but I do remember we made each other laugh.”
Shand Kydd’s family had made its money in the wallpaper trade, but Peter had little appetite for business. He had run a sheep station, or ranch, in Australia, and when he ran into financial problems, he had returned to London. He was handsome and full of charm, but he was also the married father of three children. Peter Shand Kydd has been described as a “
bohemian” and a “
bon viveur
,” which would seem to imply that he offered Frances something more urbane than she had with Johnnie, but Shand Kydd was an equally dedicated countryman, although decidedly livelier.

At the end of 1966, the Spencers and the Shand Kydds went skiing together in Courchevel, France. Recalled Frances, “
That’s when we realized there was a strong attraction.” Frances and Shand Kydd began having an affair, and early in 1967, he left his wife of sixteen years. During Frances’s visits to London the following spring and summer, she met Shand Kydd secretly at an apartment in South Kensington. “
Peter wasn’t responsible for our separation,” Frances later insisted. “If Johnnie and I had had a strong marriage, it wouldn’t have happened.” Others weren’t so sure. “
She fell in love with Peter Shand Kydd,” Robert Spencer said. “I don’t think she would have left Johnnie to be on her own.”

When Frances told Johnnie in the late summer of 1967 that she wanted a separation, he was thunderstruck. “
It was a terrible shock,” he said in 1981. “We had fourteen years together, and I was very upset—distraught.” Asked how many of those fourteen years had been happy, he said, “I had thought all of them, until the moment we parted.” Friends and relatives were equally astonished, because the marriage was considered a great success. One cousin entertained Johnnie and Frances shortly before Frances left. “I thought they seemed perfectly happy,” recalled the cousin.

Frances walked out in September 1967, but not as a “bolter,” as she has often been described in the tabloid press.
The day after her departure, with Johnnie’s blessing, Diana and her younger brother Charles, aged three, along with their nanny, joined Frances at her apartment in London. She had enrolled Diana in the Frances Holland School and Charles in a nearby kindergarten. The two older daughters, Sarah and Jane, were already away
at boarding school. Before Frances left, she explained to her four children that she and their father would have a “
trial separation.” “
It was something I put a lot of thought into,” Frances recalled.

Throughout the autumn of 1967, Diana and Charles shuttled to Norfolk on weekends, or their father came to London for visits. Andrew Morton later described Charles’s memory of “
playing quietly on the floor with a train set while his mother sat sobbing on the edge of the bed, his father smiling weakly at him in a forlorn attempt to reassure his son that everything was all right.” Frances acknowledged the pain of these meetings, saying, “
Of course there were tears … from all my children. It would be ridiculous to suggest that it [was] anything other than traumatic.” Yet she hastened to add, “It was better for them that we separated, as there was such an air of tension in the house.”

When the family reunited in Norfolk for the Christmas holidays, Diana’s father played his trump card. Without telling Frances, he had registered Diana and Charles at new schools near his home, after calling in his lawyers. According to Frances, “
He refused to let [Diana and Charles] return to me and applied to the court for their permanent return to Norfolk, and this was granted. The courts were closed for Christmas, and I could do nothing.”

“
I was devastated,” recalled Frances, who had no choice but to return to London once again—this time on her own. It was probably this highly charged second departure that fueled Diana’s memory of the footsteps crunching on gravel, the car door slamming, and the fading sound of the car’s engine, filling her with sadness, confusion, anger, insecurity—and guilt. Indeed, according to Diana’s friend and energy healer Simone Simmons, Diana “
always felt especially bleak at Christmas. The season reminded her of her mother’s departure.”

Events moved swiftly after Frances left for good at the end of 1967. She and Johnnie spoke “
only through lawyers,” said Frances. “I desperately tried to make contact personally, but it wasn’t fruitful.” On April 10, 1968, Peter Shand Kydd’s wife Janet was granted a divorce, with custody of their three children. The next day,
just two newspapers,
The Times
and
The Daily Telegraph
, carried brief accounts of the decision.
The Telegraph
ran four sentences, noting the cause as “
adultery by Mr. Peter Shand Kydd with Viscountess Althorp.”
The following June, Frances went to court with her own custody plea, which she lost.

That December, Frances filed for divorce on the grounds of her husband’s cruelty, an action that prompted one sentence in
The Times
. Johnnie quickly responded with his own petition charging her with adultery. It was Frances’s cruelty charge that led many journalists to conclude that Johnnie had physically abused her. According to James Whitaker, Johnnie
made his own counterclaim because he was “
fearful the details of cruelty to her would become public”—a puzzling notion, since the proceedings were closed, and there was no coverage of the case in the press. Whitaker further alleged that “Frances declined to give evidence of his cruelty because her lawyers advised her against doing so.”

Those who knew the situation have said that Frances’s charge was a standard legal device at the time. “
In those days, [an accusation of] mental cruelty was one of the more discreet ways to get a divorce,” said Fiona Fraser. More significantly, another member of the Spencer family said that Frances “only accused [Johnnie] of mental cruelty basically to blackmail him into a divorce that he didn’t want to give.”

Frances had no defense against the adultery charge; she had already been identified as an adulteress in the Shand Kydd divorce, which Peter had not contested. What she didn’t anticipate was Johnnie’s stubborn fight for custody of the children:
He summoned a string of character witnesses, including Frances’s mother, Lady Fermoy, in an extraordinary rejection of her own daughter. The more charitable view was that Ruth felt the children would be happier in the country than in London. Said one neighbor, “Ruth lived down the road, and she saw Johnnie a lot. I suppose she felt Frances had behaved badly.” Others saw a more insidious reason: Modestly born Ruth Gill couldn’t bear to see her grandchildren leave the prestigious embrace of the Spencers.

Neither the Spencer children nor their friends and relatives knew the specifics of the courtroom testimony at the time.
It was not until 1982, with the publication of more than a dozen biographies about Diana, that particulars of the Spencer divorce became widely known. The story of the bitterness between Diana’s parents spilled into the tabloids after Frances issued a statement to biographer Gordon Honeycombe, who wrote
Year of the Princess
, explaining why she was not a “bolter.” As the
Daily Mail
noted that August, “
Only now is the full story emerging of a family split that has produced the effect of Earl Spencer remaining close to his mother-in-law Ruth, Lady Fermoy.”

Diana and her siblings had learned in the mid-seventies what their grandmother had done. While Diana shared her mother’s hurt and resentment, she didn’t turn against her grandmother. One reason, according to a Spencer relative, was that the children “hardly knew [Lady Fermoy], anyway.” It was only well into Diana’s marriage, when Ruth Fermoy took Prince Charles’s side as she had with Johnnie, that Diana grew to hate her grandmother. “A courtier to the end,” explained the Spencer relative, Ruth Fermoy “wanted Diana to stay in the marriage, no matter how bad it was, in order to spare the royal family the embarrassment of a divorce.”