Diana: In Pursuit of Love (10 page)

The weeks following the official announcement of the royal couple’s separation were, to put it mildly, stressful, as members of the royal family closed ranks and a perceived whispering campaign started up against the Princess of Wales – and against the Duchess of York – while the Queen lamented her
annus horribilis
. Diana had to get away.

The much-needed tonic was provided by a sun-drenched holiday with her sons on the Caribbean island of Nevis in January
1993 – ‘You saved my life,’ she told Ken Wharfe, who had organized the break. Back at Kensington Palace, it was now time for her to take control of her life.

Like any injured animal, the Princess needed a safe refuge where she could lick her wounds in peace. She had resisted urgings from Prince Philip and others to move out of the former marital apartment at Kensington Palace and into the much smaller and semi-derelict apartment no. 7. As far as she was concerned she wanted to be surrounded by the familiar, even though many of the memories were painful. Also painful was the division of the spoils, including in some cases the disposal of the staff, a number of whom were made redundant while others were moved. Prince Charles’s under-butler at Highgrove, Paul Burrell, and his wife Maria, a housemaid at Highgrove, for instance, moved to Kensington Palace, and very reluctantly too. The feeling was mutual – the Princess instinctively distrusted the loyalties of anyone who had ever worked for the other side.

As her slimmed-down staff settled down, every scrap of her marital past was being scrubbed, brushed and painted over. Charles was history. Everything of his, from the Prince of Wales carpet to his antique lavatory, was removed and the Princess asked her interior designer friend Dudley Poplak – who had helped her decorate the Kensington Palace apartments twelve years before, in the weeks ahead of her marriage – to freshen up a number of rooms; she even talked about asking another of her friends, Gianni Versace, to design distinctive uniforms for her staff.

Diana also brought in a New Age healer, Simone Simmons, to exorcize and cleanse the negative energy from her former marital home, as well as an expert in feng shui to reinvigorate some of the rooms. ‘I feel as though I have died here many times,’ she explained sadly. While it would take much more than new wallpaper and a coat of paint for Diana to forget her unhappy past, it was a start. From the purchase of a new double bed to the slightly risqué cartoons in the downstairs loo, there were signs of new beginnings.

It was a similar, if less exhaustive, story at Highgrove House, where another interior designer, Robert Kime, was giving the
Prince’s country seat a makeover, to remove traces of the Princess’s original decoration.

Diana’s London home, while still a place of much sadness and anger, was – even though she called it a prison – at least a safe refuge. This secure base helped her body to heal, which was important as for most of her life her body had been her master. In the first months of her newly single life she demonstrated consistent control over herself, in particular over her eating disorder, bulimia nervosa, which had plagued her ever since she joined the royal family. As this illness involves feelings of control, now that she had more control over her life the bulimia had less control over her – as opposed to the early days of her royal career, particularly when she stayed at Balmoral and Sandringham with the rest of the family, when her bulimia was at its most intense. As the prospect of a life of her own grew, the Princess was able to speak lightly of the disorder. When she refused to attend a shooting party on the Sandringham estate with her husband in November 1992 – a decision that precipitated the separation – she remarked to Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, ‘Nicholas Soames [the Conservative politician and rotund grandson of Winston Churchill] can eat all the food they have brought for me. I’d probably only have sicked it up anyway.’ That she could now joke about her illness with staff showed how far she had come. Her appetite now was for life rather than binge eating. Even on the occasions her bulimia returned it was more as a sporadic coping strategy than an endemic problem.

In other areas, the Princess gradually and consistently moved away from the days where her body controlled her life, slowly weaning herself off her dependencies. Thus she replaced the sleeping pills in her medicine cabinet for sessions with a sleep therapist who monitored her oxygen levels; and she went for colonic irrigation to deal with her inner rage rather than, as she had done in the past, cut and mark her body. In time, colonics would be replaced by kick-boxing sessions with Keith Rodriques, the husband of her therapist Chryssie Fitzgerald, although Diana’s bodyguard did not share her enthusiasm for visiting Rodriques’ seedy basement gym in the rundown East End of London. While
her endless experimentation with New Age therapies – from casting runes and sitting under copper pyramids to sitting in a stone circle and absorbing energy from the sun – became widely derided, they were part of a long, haphazard process of healing, not to say self-absorption. The absurdity of some of her experiments was not lost on Diana. When her detective Ken Wharfe encountered her ‘wired up as if for a NASA launch’ in a treatment room in Beauchamp Place he asked her quizzically, ‘Are you enjoying that, ma’am?’ From the tangle of tubes and wires she retorted with cheerful irony: ‘It’s very therapeutic.’

A more conventional form of therapy was Diana’s daily exercise routine; apart from her regular workouts being physically invigorating, they gave her a powerful feeling of being in charge of herself. When her fitness coach Carolan Brown was first introduced to her in 1990, Diana exhibited all the classic signs of insecurity and low self-esteem. Her shoulders sloped, making her chest look droopy, her chin jutted out, and rather than looking up at her coach she peered at her through her blonde fringe. More surprisingly for a young woman celebrated for her fashion sense, Diana wore shapeless T-shirts and baggy shorts as if she were ashamed of her body. Over the next few years, particularly after the separation, she worked on her body, gaining self-confidence as she developed a toned torso that she allowed herself to be proud of. Indeed, she reached the point where she was actually prepared to reveal it to strangers. Wearing nothing more than a flesh-coloured Lycra thong leotard, she offered to see Carolan out after a workout session at Kensington Palace. As Carolan and the Princess made their way into the courtyard, Diana’s next-door neighbour Princess Michael of Kent, and the art historian Sir Roy Strong came out on their way to the Chelsea Flower Show. As they prepared to drive off Diana made idle chit-chat, all the while slyly amused at the impact her display had had. ‘It was showing off in a way,’ Carolan commented, ‘but it was much more than that. When I first met Diana she could never have done it. It was a sign that at last Diana felt comfortable in her own skin and wanted to enjoy her new-found confidence in her body.’

While she worked to control her petulant body, Diana also sought to expand her mind, displaying the same kind of voracious appetite for knowledge that she had once shown for food. She was a curious, and for many an unsettling, combination – a sophisticated woman of the world able to discuss death and dying with the Archbishop of Canterbury one minute, yet innocent of the ways of the world. A socially accomplished woman who could face a sophisticated cocktail party and say to her companions: ‘Hold your nose and dive in’, she had never been to a pub or a bar on her own, and neither could she boil a pan of pasta. ‘She had a sheltered upbringing and was very immature when she married,’ Dickie Arbiter, the press secretary she shared with Charles, pointed out. ‘She went from one fantasy world to another.’ Yet as the dust settled surrounding her separation, the upper-class girl who left school without a significant academic qualification demonstrated a wide, if untutored and unselective, breadth of reading. This student princess was as experimental as any undergraduate, cherry picking from an eclectic range of texts. She herself remarked, ‘I’m going to be amused by people’s reactions to the titles of the books.’ From pious texts by the philosopher Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, New Age books on tarot cards and the I Ching, medical books such as
Gray’s Anatomy
and the seminal
Fat is a Feminist Issue
by the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, Diana displayed her growing and continuing interest in the spiritual, medical and psychological. According to Debbie Frank, ‘She read anything she could get her hands on. Some things she found hard to digest, but she wanted to find out why she was in this position, how she could help herself and others in times of difficulty and stress. She didn’t want to be a victim who was out of control any more.’

While Diana was the first to admit that she was no academic, she was using her growing knowledge to change and control the vision she had of herself, to see herself less as a helpless victim and more as a woman empowered and energized. ‘Diana is on a voyage of discovery at the moment – she is discovering who the real Diana is,’ observed Stephen Twigg.

As part of that journey, she acted on the advice of her osteopath Michael Skipwith and made an appointment to see Susie Orbach,
whose work on the female psyche, particularly in relation to eating disorders, has gained international repute. It was a brave step, especially as a central feature in the pathology of bulimia is to deny that one has a problem. As Susie Orbach is the first to say, therapy is no easy option. She did not present a professional shoulder to cry on during the hour-long sessions at her clinic in Belsize Park, North London, in the spring of 1993. ‘Therapy makes you look at who you are,’ she says. ‘It’s not about saying, “You are fine” or about reassurance and consolation. It’s about asking who you are and why you act the way you do.’ These are demanding questions, but Diana now felt that she could ask them of herself.

Indeed, the Princess even felt able to articulate and explore these questions on a more public stage when, in April 1993, she agreed to make the opening address at the first London conference on eating disorders. She had done her homework for the speech and had written sections of it herself. As a result, while she was intensely nervous beforehand – ‘I could do with a gin and tonic,’ she told the psychiatrist, Dr Bryan Lask, who had organized the conference – she was for once truly speaking from the heart. ‘I have it on very good authority that the quest for perfection in society can leave the individual gasping for breath at every turn,’ she said, not afraid to own to her problem. She went on to call bulimia a ‘shameful friend’ and described childhood feelings of ‘guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem creating . . . a compulsion to dissolve like a Disprin and disappear.’ Her speech, personal, perceptive and revealing, was a startling departure for a member of the royal family. Most important for Diana, she was the one who was in charge of her thoughts, her words and her voice.

‘Not bad for a whore!’ yelled a voice as she left the conference, still flushed with adrenalin and nerves.

For a moment the Palace officials accompanying the Princess were aghast, but Diana explained through ecstatic giggles that it was her speech trainer, the actor Peter Settelen, who in his work with her, had used role play, which included impersonating people from all walks of life. Indeed, his influence was typical of the informal, rather haphazard way people came into the Princess’s
life. Just before Christmas 1992 Diana had asked her fitness trainer for her verdict on how she had delivered a recent speech that had been broadcast on BBC Radio Four. ‘Rubbish,’ came Carolan’s unvarnished reply. ‘You sounded like a ten-year-old with a little-girl feel-sorry-for-me voice. If you want to make a powerful speech it has to sound like you mean it.’ Carolan lost no time in recommending her friend Peter Settelen as coach, and while he was taken on to train the Princess in the art of speech delivery it was not long before – much to Patrick Jephson’s irritation – he added speech writing to his royal duties. By mid-1993 he, Stephen Twigg and James Colthurst were involved in her speeches, sometimes in competition.

There were other ways in which the Princess sought to present her new self to the world – a new hairstyle and a new wardrobe of sophisticated business suits made their appearance, while she chose to release portraits of herself by her favourite photographer, Patrick Demarchelier, that would display the fresh face of a determined, self-confident young woman who was eager to address serious issues and move on with her life.

But these were only images; the real-life Princess was still prone to doubt, depression and anxiety as she faced an uncertain future. She was, as one friend noted, ‘very tidal’. For every business suit she wore, she also appeared in public in severe black outfits, as if in mourning. In a woman who was acutely aware of her public image – ‘They [the public] don’t want to see me looking dowdy; they want to see me out there doing my thing,’ she told Ken Wharfe – the plain and sombre garments gave an indication of the continuing struggle in her heart and mind. It was not long before the tabloids were criticizing her dress sense, censure that hit a raw nerve. ‘Dowdy, am I?’ she snapped at one hapless tabloid royal correspondent after a spate of stories were published, caustically commenting on her gloomy wardrobe.

It was left to James Colthurst to broach this thorny subject over lunch at Kensington Palace. Diplomatically, Diana’s old friend told her what, deep in her heart, she already knew – that the public wanted to see a bright and colourful princess. Surprisingly, she accepted his comments, and for a period there was the
amusing situation of the world’s most famous fashion plate asking a man who thought that ‘haute couture’ was a brand of up-market porridge for suggestions on her wardrobe. In reality what really changed her mind was the argument that a new, brighter look would also confuse ‘the enemy’ – Prince Charles’s camp – who were silently cheering her public difficulties at that time. Indeed, the Prince would throw a fit of petulant anger every time he saw a prominently displayed newspaper photograph of Diana. ‘He’s simply got to learn to grow up some time,’ commented one courtier.