Diana in Search of Herself (27 page)

Camilla spoke reliably about Charles and Diana, and she became a trusted source for Higgins, who protected her by keeping their relationship confidential. “Our relationship was two ways,” said Higgins. “We had some long conversations. She was trying to really gauge whether the press was on to her [and Charles], so it was a question of her keeping in touch, too.”

It is conceivable that Diana heard the sort of conversation she described to Andrew Morton. She had a disconcerting tendency to listen at doors, and Charles, for all his public restraint, often spoke and wrote with great affection to his close friends. “He has a habit of saying things like ‘Masses of love,’ ‘I adore you,’ and ‘Whatever happens I’ll look after you’ if someone has been going through a hard time,” said a friend of Charles. In Diana’s turbulent state—and given her predisposition to imagine the worst—she could have jumped to the conclusion that Camilla was the recipient of such endearments when they were completely innocent. Alternatively, the exchange might have been Diana’s own invention; the circumstances of the conversation she described could only have occurred some years later, because
Charles was reported to have purchased his first cordless phone in August 1986.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, Diana’s imaginings had a profound impact on the relationship, and on her own behavior, which took an alarming new turn in Scotland during the autumn of 1982: She began to injure herself with sharp objects.
By Diana’s later description, she tried to cut her wrists, and she slashed her arms and legs using a lemon knife with a serrated edge as well as fragments of glass from windows she broke. A series of these incidents occurred at Balmoral, the most dramatic of which took place when Diana and Charles were once again on their own at Craigowan. As an indicator of how rapidly her mood could shift, she seemed quite calm when the couple first arrived. In a letter to a relative on September 21, Diana remarked, “
We are now installed [in the lodge], which is marvelous and very relaxing.”

The provocation for her violent actions, she later said, was her feeling that
“no one’s listening to you.… You have so much pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help.” The intent was not “attention-seeking”; rather, in her confusion, “I was actually crying out because I wanted to get better.” It was her
“desperate cry for help,” she said, because she wanted “people to understand the torment and anguish going on in my head.” She also
“didn’t like” herself and felt shame “because I couldn’t cope with the pressures.” She didn’t characterize her actions as suicide attempts, although they were portrayed as such in the press when Morton’s book disclosed them.
Diana did later say that she had tried to commit suicide a number of times without naming the specific incidents.

Self-mutilation is one of the most severe symptoms of mental illness, and “cutting” is the most prevalent form, accounting for nearly three-quarters of cases.
According to a 1986 survey, ninety-seven percent of self-mutilators are women. Mental health professionals generally agree that such self-destructive behavior is seriously pathological and requires
prompt and thorough psychiatric evaluation—and frequently hospitalization.

Self-injury sometimes accompanies bulimia, but
more often indicates an even more wide-ranging psychological disorder. It springs from depression and hopelessness, and—as Diana indicated—is a desperate plea for rescue, a way to demonstrate the extent of internal suffering. Even more disturbingly, self-injury can signal someone’s wish to experience pain as an alternative to numbness.
One 1986 study of self-cutters showed that they knew when to stop because after a certain point they felt soothed. Twenty-three percent of those in the study experienced only moderate pain and sixty-seven percent little or none.
When self-injury occurs in front of someone else, there is usually a corollary intention to punish that person.

Diana enacted some of her self-mutilation in Charles’s presence, implying that he showed a lack of concern by failing to understand the reasons for her actions. Based on what she later told them, Diana’s friends judged Charles even more harshly: Morton quoted one who asserted that Charles’s “
indifference pushed her to the edge.” But Diana’s distressing behavior greatly worried Charles, who shared his anxieties with a few of his closest friends and advisers. Fearful of leaks, he was extremely careful about confiding such explosive information. “
The trouble is one day I think some steps are being made uphill,” he wrote in a letter to one of his confidants on October 10, 1982, “only to find that we’ve slid back one and a half steps the following day.… This afternoon a heavy feeling descended.”

After Charles consulted with his confidants and talked with Diana, they agreed that she should undergo psychiatric counseling. (Neither the Queen nor any other member of the royal family was privy to these discussions.) Charles was still unaware of Diana’s eating disorders, so the impetus for treatment was her self-mutilation. As a friend of Charles explained, “They were at a loss and knew she needed psychiatric care. They wanted to do something, but bulimia wasn’t the buzzword.”

On October 17, a week after Charles’s letter confessing his despair about Diana’s condition, he took her, along with William and the nanny, to London so Diana could begin treatment. She did not return to Balmoral that fall. As Charles had done a year earlier when he urged Diana to find professional help for her depression and mood swings, he showed that he considered her symptoms serious enough for special care.

The day after Charles and Diana left for London, James Whitaker reported in the
Daily Mirror
that Diana had been depressed at Balmoral following two-and-a-half weeks of rain.
After “complaining and sulking,” Diana had announced that she wanted to go to London to shop and see her friends, provoking a “blazing row” with Charles. Her abrupt return to London “caught many royal aides on the hop.” Andrew Morton followed in the
Daily Star
along similar lines, describing Diana as “
bored to tears” in Balmoral and adding that she was “reported” to be on a “shopping spree” at Harrods.

Over the following months, these small drumbeats became an extraordinary cacophony, beginning on November 13, 1982, when Diana committed an inexplicable faux pas by showing up late at the annual Festival of Remembrance at Albert Hall, a solemn occasion presided over by the Queen and other members of the royal family. (“
No one, but no one, is EVER late for the Queen,” Whitaker thundered.) Prince Charles had already announced that Diana was “unwell” and wouldn’t be attending, when Diana unexpectedly turned up looking out of sorts. It was clear to everyone around them that a fight between the royal couple had preceded her arrival. “I will never forget it,” said a woman who was sitting in an adjacent box. “Diana and the Prince of Wales had a row right there. I wanted to pinch Charles and caution him that someone might be able to read lips. Prince Philip was looking daggers at Diana. It was agonizing.” The following day the tabloids were full of comments on Diana’s gaunt appearance and flustered demeanor.

It took the two tabloid rivals, James Whitaker and Harry Arnold, to make a leap that set off a whole new round of speculation. Each of them put several elements together: Diana’s “unpredictable” behavior at Balmoral and the Remembrance event, her weight loss, her sister Sarah’s battle with eating disorders. The conclusion: Diana was suffering from anorexia nervosa.

IS IT ALL GETTING TOO MUCH FOR DIANA?
asked a
Daily Mirror
headline over a November 15 story by Whitaker, who noted that Charles was so concerned, he went “
out of his way whenever possible to join Diana for lunch.” Whitaker also stumbled on fresh evidence of Diana’s compulsive tidiness when he quoted a “family friend” (
later revealed by Whitaker to be Diana’s press secretary, Vic Chapman) who said, “
If … her shoes are cleaned, she wants them put back precisely in line in her cupboard. She is obsessed that everything and everybody around her should be perfect.”

In his report the same day, Arnold said Prince Charles was “
seriously concerned” and had “taken top medical advice.” Both Arnold and Whitaker were onto something, although they had offered only a partial picture by highlighting anorexia, and Arnold didn’t know what sort of medical help Charles had really sought.

Almost immediately, other newspapers ran stories in which a Buckingham Palace spokesman denied that Diana was suffering from anorexia and said she was “
fit and well … and in sparkling form.” The most emphatic disavowal came from Nigel Dempster, writing several days later in
The Mail on Sunday
. Dempster scolded
The Sun
and the
Mirror
for running
speculative stories that exaggerated the “
inevitable stresses” of the Waleses’ marriage. He went on to undercut his own denunciation by listing various signs that Diana was “cracking,” quoting a member of the “inner circle” as saying “quite simply she has freaked out.” Dempster continued, “My sources tell me that the Princess has become so disorientated by the type of exposure that she may have to seek psychiatric assistance.”

These pronouncements sparked a wave of stories discrediting Dempster. Andrew Morton wrote in the
Daily Star
that Dempster was just
a “sniper” and dismissed such “professional knockers” as “wide of the mark.” Several days later, the
Daily Express
ran a piece headlined
LOOKING GOOD, FEELING GREAT
that described Diana’s “
new lease of enthusiasm and energy” as she undertook thirteen official engagements in three weeks, on her own for the first time. “It was Diana herself who decided that the time was indeed right to make her solo run,” the paper reported.

The amazing denouement of this surge of overheated coverage was an appearance by Dempster on ABC’s
Good Morning America
in early December 1982. Barely two weeks after his plea to the tabloids to “give her a chance,” Dempster launched into a vicious tirade, calling Diana a “fiend” and a “monster.” “Diana is very much ruling the roost,” he said. “Charles is desperately unhappy … 
because Fleet Street forced him into this marriage.” Sixteen years later, Dempster was as confident of his information as ever. “
I got it straight from one of Prince Charles’s staff,” he said.

Predictably, his tabloid competitors furiously denounced him. The
News of the World
called his remarks “
the greatest howler of all time for the balding 41-year-old columnist.” Yet within weeks, the same tabloid returned to the fray with an account in early 1983 that said Diana was “
near to tears much of the time … and her quick temper never far from the surface.” Her basic problem, according to the tabloid, was that she could not handle being left alone, leading to concern that “she might well be heading for some kind of breakdown.”

Andrew Morton countered the bad news once again, this time with six pages in the
Daily Star
dismissing the “
nonsense” about Diana “teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown.” Charles has, Morton wrote, “acted as her guide and mentor. [He] is very seldom away from Princess Diana for any length of time.” Morton based his account on a “heart-to-heart talk” with a “reliable source close to the Palace”
whose pattern of speaking was virtually identical to Michael Shea’s, the Queen’s press secretary. According to this authoritative source, Charles and Diana had “occasional spats” and “a few fireworks.” “It’s a rumbustious marriage,” said the source, who also emphasized that Charles and Diana were “very fond of each other.”

With that final burst of positive spin, the press frenzy subsided. But Diana, who took her coverage all too seriously, had been badly battered.
She was hurt that the press had called her names and admitted that she “
did take criticism hard.” “One minute I was a nobody,” she recalled, “the next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of the family, and it was just too much for one person at that time.”

The Spencer family was noticeably absent during Diana’s acute psychological crisis. As Diana said, “
None of my family knew about [my bulimia, self-mutilation, suicide attempts] at all.… I never leant on anyone”—a sad admission of the distance she felt from her parents and siblings.
The public squabble between Frances and Johnnie about their divorce had hurt and embarrassed Diana, who held her mother responsible for generating the bad publicity. Even before then, relations between mother and daughter had cooled. Her mother was busy with her own life, splitting her time between Scotland and her farm in Australia. “
I am a firm believer in maternal redundancy,” Frances had told the
Daily Mail
in June 1982, shortly after William’s birth. “When daughters marry they set up a new home, and they don’t want mothers-in-law hanging around. They should be free to make their own decisions and maybe to make their own mistakes.”

While Frances’s sentiments reflected her own confidence and independent spirit, they revealed how little she seemed to understand her daughter, given the reports of Diana’s unstable behavior that began leaking out of the royal household only weeks after the marriage. What Diana needed—as she later told her friends—was unconditional support and reassurance from her mother.

Johnnie Spencer told his cousin Robert that Diana had been “upset” after William’s birth by the “constant attention.” But Johnnie’s view of his daughter’s situation was as clouded as Frances’s, though in his case by the certitude of being a Spencer. “
I know the royals can appear to swallow people up when others marry in,” he said in a 1983 interview, “but that could never happen to us. We can cope with the pressures.” Little grasping how confused his daughter was most of the time, Johnnie affirmed his belief that Diana would prevail as Princess of Wales because she “knows her own mind.”

During the flurry of speculative articles about Diana’s health, James Whitaker quoted “
a close member of the Princess’s family” who revealed, “I am extremely worried about her.… I can’t say for sure that Diana has anorexia.… Somebody at some time has to sit down and talk to her.” Some years later, Whitaker dropped his pledge of confidentiality by naming Diana’s sister Sarah as his source. “
She told me then they were very, very worried,” he said. “I couldn’t name her at the time.” By Diana’s account, neither Sarah nor Jane seemed to offer more than perfunctory sympathy. Although Diana considered Jane “
wonderfully solid,” she said that if she
called with a problem Jane would say, “ ‘Golly, gosh, Duch, how horrible, how sad and how awful.’ ” Sarah would reply along similar lines: “Poor Duch, such a shitty thing to happen.”