Diana in Search of Herself (72 page)

Borderline personalities are notoriously difficult to treat. They are frequently misdiagnosed, and they tend to move from one therapist to the next, as was the case with Diana.
Antidepressants such as Prozac can ease some symptoms, but borderlines usually don’t take medications as prescribed, at least in part because they view pharmacotherapy—as Diana did—as a form of “mind control.” For therapists, treating a borderline can be arduous. The mistrust and inconstancy of the disorder can erode the therapist’s professional confidence, not to mention his patience. As a result, the borderline is considered by many in the mental health professions to represent “
a kind of ‘Third World’ of mental illness … indistinct, massive, vaguely threatening.”

On one level, Diana grasped how close to the edge she lived.
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham wrote that Diana had once been asked if she gambled. “
Not with cards,” Diana replied, “but with life.” Such moments of clarity were rare. Most of the time, Diana was too troubled to find appropriate care on her own. Nor was anyone around her able to take charge. Given the complexity of her problems, it would have taken someone of keen understanding, great patience, and unwavering love to keep her on a helpful therapeutic course. The royal family were incapable of dealing with Diana, and her own relatives weren’t up to the task. “Her mother wasn’t there, and for her father everything Diana did was perfect and wonderful. He wouldn’t say boo to a goose,” said a relative of the royal family. In the view of Charles’s former aide Michael Colborne, “
Most people look at it as if it was her fault, but it wasn’t. Everyone contributed to her downfall.”

Under the right circumstances, Diana could have been helped. She needed to be in a structured and predictable environment, out of the limelight, away from the media’s deifying praise and flashes of criticism. She probably could have benefited from practical therapy that avoided delving too deeply into analyzing the past and instead concentrated on managing her symptoms. Borderlines require years of therapy, but they can learn new emotional reflexes in order to deal with stress and relate better to others.

From the time she entered public life, Diana conveyed her vulnerability with her eyes, her gestures, her speech, and her touch. Alongside her beauty, this evident fragility made her a star. Once the breadth and depth of her emotional struggle became known, she struck an even deeper chord: She became the fairy-princess version of the troubled everywoman.

Diana had a certain kind of strength as well. Even under the most extreme pressure, she did not seek a hermit’s retreat. Her hunger for the love of her public may have accounted for at least some of that determination to keep going. But she also had a willfulness that prompted her to buck royal proprieties, whether it meant roller-skating through the halls of Buckingham Palace or publicly hugging and kissing the sick and dying. Her defiance won her an even larger place in the public’s heart.

Diana talked about a sense of destiny, her need to achieve good by fulfilling a role she had trouble defining. Although her identity was fractured, she kept to her quest and seized opportunities, sometimes willy-nilly, to do her bit for society. But Diana couldn’t sustain her good works for the simple reason that her own problems consumed so much of her time and energy. As one of her former aides said, “Her life was her drama, and I am not really sure she could move beyond that.” Yet, given the extent to which Diana was ruled by her inconstant emotions, the wonder is that she accomplished as much as she did.

A Note on Sources

T
his book was based on interviews with 148 people as well as numerous books and articles in newspapers and magazines. Sixty-eight of the individuals I interviewed asked to remain anonymous, and though these sources contributed significantly to the book, they do not appear in the chapter notes. All quotations excluded from the chapter notes are from these confidential interviews. In citing periodicals, I have listed only publication names and dates. Conversions from British sterling to American dollars were based on International Financial Statistics (tables of foreign exchange rates) from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Computations of current dollars compared with values in past years were based on the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index.

ABBREVIATIONS

Publications

Books

Works cited more than several times will be abbreviated as follows:

Television Programs

Miscellaneous

1
   
The Sun
created a sensation: Sun, 5/21/91

2
   “misread her friendliness”: DM, 3/18/91

3
   “Set on separate”: ST, 5/12/91

4
   “She would tailor”: B-SS, p. 107

5
   after her death, friends: MOS, 9/20/98; Interview with Anthony Holden

6
   “Sometimes she appeared to”: Interview with Robert Spencer

7
   “she had decided to radically”: DM, 9/1/97

8
   “My feeling was at that time”: Interview with Richard Kay

1
   Diana was driving:
McCall’s
, 10/84

2
   “bizarre”: Tribute by Earl Spencer, 9/4/97, Westminster Abbey

3
   “She needed to be royal”: NYT, 9/3/97

4
   “They look so wondering”: ST, 12/30/84

5
   “She has a sympathetic”: WO, 4/9/88

6
   “People adore her”: SuTel, 12/30/84

7
   “I am much closer to”:
Le Monde
, quoted in DT, 8/27/97

8
   “I don’t go by”: Pano, p. 34

9
   “thick as a plank”: Ibid., p. 12

10
   “brain the size of a pea”: DM, 9/24/86

11
   “She was an entirely”: Interview with Paul Johnson

12
   “she could appear to be talking”: Interview with Nicholas Haslam

13
   “My friend Paolo”: Ibid.

14
   “The time spent alone reviewing”: Ibid.

15
   “If you have a mind that doesn’t”: Interview with David Puttnam

16
   “I always used to think”: MOS, 6/1/86

17
   “If she would say we will”: Interview with Roberto Devorik

18
   “levelheadedness and strength”: Tribute by Earl Spencer

19
   “honesty”: Ibid.

20
   “She had real difficulty”: B-AM1, p. 82

21
   “At least once … she lied”: TNY, 9/15/97

22
   “I would ask her whether”: ITV-Doc

23
   “The nice side of her”: Interview with Nicholas Haslam

24
   “Her dark side was that”: SuTel, 9/7/97

25
   a color tabloid modeled: Andrew Neil,
Full Disclosure
(1996), pp. 96–98

26
   “Slowly she is adjusting”: DM, 11/7/83

27
   new “maturity”: A sampling of articles includes DM, 4/18/83; DS, 6/30/83; DM, 11/7/83; DS, 7/1/85; DS, 2/24/87; Sun, 6/23/87; DM, 6/10/89

28
   “We would speak for”: B-SS, p. 34

29
   “ghosthopped”: B-SS, p. 23

30
   “You could see how she”: Interview with Dr. Michael Adler

31
   “There was a tremendous fight”: Interview with Elsa Bowker

32
   “If you look through the record”: Interview with Richard Ingrams

33
   “We felt we had a responsibility”: Interview with Max Hastings

34
   “It is an undisputed fact”: DM, 12/28/97

35
   “the paradigm unhappy woman”: WP, 9/5/97

36
   “publicly and bloodily fought out”: ES, 12/19/92

37
   “watched her parents publicly”: DM, 11/18/92

38
   “a fierce custody battle”: MTV:
Biorhythms
, 8/31/98

39
   only attracted discreet notices: DT, 4/16/69; ES, 4/15/69. A survey of newspaper archives for the periods from 12/13/68, when divorce proceedings were initiated, to 4/15/69, when divorce was granted, turned up no other coverage. There was a similar silence during the comparable period in the divorce of Peter and Janet Shand Kydd, and in July 1971, when Diana’s mother reopened custody proceedings.

40
   “It was clear to me he did not”: B-JW, p. 178

41
   “Prince Charles has finally fallen”: DS, 1/27/82

42
   “three of us in this marriage”: Pano, pp. 14–15

43
   “From the beginning, Diana”: Christopher Anderson,
The Day Diana Died
(1998), p. 41