Diana: In Pursuit of Love (14 page)

During her marriage Diana had come to see Clarence House, then the home of the Queen Mother, as the source of all negative comment about herself, much of it emanating from her grandmother. Before the marriage Lady Fermoy had warned Diana about the dangers of marrying into the royal family – although Diana now realized that the real reason was because her grandmother did not feel that she was the appropriate match for Prince Charles. When the marriage turned sour it was her implacable opinion that her granddaughter should stay with Prince Charles in order to spare the royal family the embarrassment of a marital scandal. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie commented, ‘Ruth was very distressed with Diana’s behaviour. She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’d seen him grow up, loved him like all the women at court do and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.’

A fairly recent encounter, the year before, between the Princess and her grandmother showed Lady Fermoy in typical light. As the Princess of Wales was leaving Buckingham Palace after a tricky meeting with the Queen concerning her charity work, she met her grandmother, who upbraided her for daring to wear trousers to an interview with the Sovereign. Even though her trousers were well cut and very expensive, in the eyes of Ruth, Lady Fermoy she was little more than a ‘strumpet’.

So when Diana finally plucked up the courage to confront her
eighty-five-year-old grandmother, whose physical frailty did nothing to blunt her sharp tongue, it was a defining moment – the errant granddaughter taking on the powerful matriarch. While Diana had much to be angry about, given that her grandmother had refused to stand either by her own child or, later, her grandchild, she spoke more in sorrow than anger, telling her how disappointed she was that her own kith and kin had failed to support her during the marriage breakdown. It was a mature and considered approach and her formidable grandmother was embarrassed and shaken, not just by Diana’s courageous decision to raise such personal issues in the first place, but also because her behaviour was both even-handed and politely conciliatory.

At least, when, in July 1993, just a few weeks after their meeting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy died, Diana could feel some satisfaction in having reached an understanding, if not made peace, with a woman who had so affected her life.

It is significant that the Princess’s meetings with Raine Spencer and Ruth, Lady Fermoy both took place during 1993, the first year of her life on her own. It was a time when she was inevitably undertaking considerable spring cleaning, not just in her relations with her own family, the royal family and her circle of friends, but also in her endeavours, through intensive counselling, to reconcile and reinterpret her past through the eyes of an adult rather than the impulses of a child. Even so, while she gradually came to appreciate her mother’s sorrowful life – particularly the unresolved grief Frances felt following the death of her baby son John, an event which precipitated the breakdown of her marriage – Diana’s relationship with her mother remained uneven, complex and, ultimately, also unresolved.

Both sharp-witted, strikingly attractive and capricious; both displaying a superficial sociable cheeriness beneath which lay a deep-seated sadness, usually well-hidden – as Diana told us in one of the interviews, ‘However bloody you are feeling you can put on the most amazing show of happiness. My mother is an expert at that and I’ve picked it up. It kept the wolves from the door.’ Both taking solace in eating when troubled, the Princess and her mother
were more similar than Diana would ever have cared to admit. So too was the trajectory of their lives. ‘Two peas in a pod,’ declared her friend Vivienne Parry, who knows all the Spencer family. For all their disagreements, there was no denying the bond between them – ‘loving and trusting’ as Frances described it, even though it was not always visible – or the daughter’s admiration – sometimes grudging though it was – for her mother. When Diana reflected on how the Duchess of York’s father, Major Ronald Ferguson, had, according to Frances, asked her to marry him, it reminded her that her mother was one of the celebrated beauties of her era. ‘Mummy was quite special to look at when she was young,’ she commented. ‘She’s dynamite, not unlike Princess Grace in a funny kind of way.’ (It is worth noting that Diana formed an instant rapport with the former American actress when she met her, soon after her engagement to Prince Charles; and insisted that she should represent the royal family at Princess Grace’s funeral in Monaco in 1982.)

Times of closeness – such as when Diana, her mother, her sister Sarah and their children went to Necker Island in the Caribbean in 1989; when her mother visited her at Kensington Palace; or when she, William and Harry spent week-long holidays with ‘Granny Frances’ at her cottage home on the remote island of Seil off the north-west coast of Scotland – were, however, matched by long periods of distance and silence, a pattern that continued until Diana’s death. As her New Age healer friend, Simone Simmons, remarked of the mother-and-daughter sporadic get-togethers, ‘Diana wanted to be pleased to see her, not least because she was keen to talk through the unfinished business of her childhood. But these were troubled and uneasy encounters.’

An emotional ebb-and-flow is part of the Spencer family’s character: sharp, witty, and intuitive but with a reckless willingness to say or do the unsayable, a quality that is as careless of the consequences as it is of the feelings of those involved, whether family, friends or complete strangers. ‘They were a very volatile family,’ Vivienne Parry observed, ‘in that you could never be sure which one had fallen out with which other one. Yet they were close despite the fact that they constantly had rows and if an outsider criticized one of them it would be seen as an attack on them all.’

What regularly strained their relationship to breaking point was Diana’s feeling that ultimately she could never truly rely on her mother, whose interventions in her life, while ostensibly supportive, were unpredictable and often tactless. It was a pattern first established in the build-up to her wedding, when the princess-to-be complained that her mother was ‘driving her mad’ with her tears and moans about the strain she was under. (‘I tended to think
I
was the one under pressure because I was the bride,’ she later remarked.) That led to a period of some months during which Diana refused to speak to her mother – although Frances was on hand to offer advice and consolation during her difficult first pregnancy with Prince William. And while Diana appreciated the way her mother fiercely supported her at Prince Harry’s christening, when Prince Charles grumbled that he had wanted a girl and had carped about the baby’s red hair, she was less happy when Frances wrote to her husband criticizing him for going to the opera in 1991 while Prince William was undergoing surgery for a head injury following an accident at school, leaving Diana to cope on her own. The Princess, fortunately, intercepted the letter, which presumably her mother had told her about, and disposed of it before Charles had a chance to read it.

Again, during the fateful summer of 1992, when Diana’s own life was in turmoil, her mother’s erratic and impulsive behaviour gave her real cause for alarm. When Frances called in a state of deep distress, accusing her youngest daughter of abandoning her and threatening to harm herself, Diana was so concerned that she sent a panic-stricken message to James Colthurst, who had to leave a board meeting abruptly to help her deal with the family crisis. His advice to Diana to keep her mother talking for as long as possible until she had calmed down eventually worked.

By another unhappy coincidence, in April 1996, just as the Prince and Princess of Wales were finalizing their divorce, Frances Shand Kydd was arrested for drink-driving and subsequently banned from driving for a year. Diana, who had Old Testament views on crime and punishment and believed that drink-drivers should be disqualified for life, felt that her mother had once again let her down, and, particularly at a time when she
herself was under critical stress. Tragically, their tidal relationship ended at the low-water mark after Frances was interviewed for
Hello!
magazine in May 1997. In the course of the conversation, she remarked that it was ‘wonderful’ that her daughter had relinquished the title of Her Royal Highness: ‘At last she is able to be herself, use her own name and find her own identity.’ Diana considered her remarks, which of themselves seemed blandly supportive of her daughter, hurtful and unnecessary, especially as the Princess had made a vain last-ditch appeal to her brother-in-law, the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to keep the honorary title. The initial altercation between the two women widened into an unbridgeable rift after, according to Paul Burrell, her mother phoned her at Kensington Palace and launched into a tirade of slurred abuse about the men her daughter was seeing. While Mrs Shand Kydd has disputed Burrell’s account, she acknowledges that the Princess refused to accept her subsequent phone calls and returned, unopened, her mother’s letters. Even the butler’s attempts to act as an unbidden go-between came to naught. They never spoke again.

While the Princess acknowledged her mother’s virtues as well as her faults, and came to realize that she had not willingly left her children when her marriage broke down, in her heart Diana could never escape the childhood trauma of abandonment and loss. ‘Everything in her tormented psyche turned on what had happened to her at the age of six, when her parents separated and left her to a loneliness that nothing could cure,’ wrote her friend, the Australian-born author and television presenter Clive James.

During the Princess’s last meeting with Debbie Frank in July 1997, shortly before her death, she went over the story once again, underlining her almost visceral need for solace, succour and safety, a desire that was manifest in the numerous substitute mothers and surrogate families that she collected during her life.

Distant from her own family and increasingly alienated from the royal family, during the 1990s especially, the Princess increasingly turned to a collection of older women who, while strong independent characters, came from different societies or were only on the
fringe of the British Establishment. In the mid-1980s Mara Berni, who, with her husband Lorenzo, was the owner of the famous San Lorenzo restaurant, was the most significant maternal figure in her life; the expansive Italian mother something of a spiritual guide, reading her tarot cards, recommending clairvoyants and interpreting her stars. They fell out for a time when la Signora Berni invited Diana to the opening of a new dress shop and failed to tell her that there would be photographers present. While that friendship waned, as so many did, the Princess formed bonds with others, notably Lucia Flecha de Lima, Annabel Goldsmith, Hayat Palumbo and Elsa Bowker, all of whom nurtured, supported and comforted the Princess during the years following her separation. Sophisticated, worldly-wise and outside conventional circles, they provided a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the life she had hitherto been leading. At the same time, these mature women were conservative, cautious and constraining in their advice – both Lucia Flecha de Lima and Lady Palumbo, for example, were opposed to her collaboration with my 1992 biography.

The oldest of Diana’s substitute mothers was Elsa Bowker. They had first met in 1993 when Lady Bowker was already well into her eighties. She had been a close friend of Diana’s Spencer grandmother, and also of Raine Spencer, and the Princess was immediately attracted by her exotic background. Born in Egypt to a French mother and Lebanese father, Elsa married a British diplomat, James Bowker, and spent much of her life travelling the globe. ‘She liked my way of living, my experience and she could tell me everything,’ Lady Bowker recalled before her own death.

It was in 1990, as her marriage was collapsing, that the Princess met Lucia Flecha de Lima, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to London. They did not fully cement their relationship until Diana made an official visit to Brazil with them the following year. ‘I loved it,’ declared Diana. ‘I was on a high from the day I arrived to the day I left.’ For a woman driven by her emotions, a country of such sensuous sensibilities immediately appealed. The Brazilian Ambassador and his wife represented those values of warm, sensibility family togetherness, an exuberant Latin-American susceptibility as well as a solid Roman Catholic faith, conservative,
certain and secure, to which the Princess, in her search for stability and security, was naturally drawn. A mother of five and grandmother, Lucia, who was twenty years Diana’s senior, not only opened up her home to the Princess but on occasion her bedroom. After her husband Paulo Tarso had left the marital bed Diana would jump in and join her just like a little girl. ‘She was one of the family and we came to treat her like our own children,’ Lucia told the
Daily Mail
in November 2003. ‘I think it gave her a sense of belonging that she did not have elsewhere. I know I was a mother figure to her and she was like a daughter to me. Diana just became another one of the family.’ The Princess even had her own room at their London residence in Mayfair’s Mount Street where she would join them for weekends. ‘At my house Diana was a girl in trouble and I would listen to her and give her advice if she wanted it. Mostly I listened.’

When Paulo was posted to Washington in November 1993 and her surrogate family left her, Diana was bereft. It did not help that their move coincided with the resignations of her detective Ken Wharfe and chauffeur Simon Solari as well as with her decision to withdraw for a time from public life. None the less, the friendship continued to flourish, and the Princess visited them regularly, on one occasion meeting Hillary Clinton with Lucia, another time flying to Washington especially to visit Paulo when he was recuperating from a heart operation. While she enjoyed her holidays with them, it was the fact that Lucia was always there at the end of the telephone to offer support and counsel that Diana most valued.

If the Princess was emotionally simpatico with her Brazilian family, then she adored the bohemian if very well-bred chaos of life with the Goldsmiths. Even though Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a daughter of the eighth Marquess of Londonderry, is from Diana’s social milieu, the fact that her flamboyant husband James, the late food billionaire, lived in England with her and openly in France with his mistress, put the family on the wilder shores of social convention – this spoke to the rebel in Diana, who perhaps felt more at ease with those who lived beyond standard social norms. That their daughter Jemima married Imran Khan, the former
Pakistani cricket captain and, latterly, politician, added to the family’s glamour. At least twice a month the Princess joined this larger-than-life family for a chaotic and very rapid Sunday lunch, often bringing Harry and William along to play with the Goldsmith children. On these occasions she was at her most relaxed and giggly, bantering with James, when he let her get a word in edgeways, chatting with staff, helping with the dishes and swimming in the pool. ‘My home was simply the rock or the haven that she could turn to for escape, where she knew she would never be betrayed,’ Lady Annabel wrote after Diana’s death.