Diana in Search of Herself (31 page)

Other tabloids saw the relationship differently, with one calling Diana “
the real ruler” and Charles “
a thoroughly henpecked husband.”
The Sun
said that Diana was a “
prima donna,” and a “woman of steel” who didn’t “seem to give a damn” if she humiliated her husband in public. “No man can have tried harder to please a woman,” Harry Arnold and Judy Wade wrote. “She must allow the man who will one day rule the country to rule the roost.”

In April 1985, the royal couple spent two weeks in Italy, where the crowds thronged to glimpse Diana, and the Italian press covered her relentlessly. Charles was transported by what he called Italy’s “
great flights of human spirit,” and the
Daily Mail
optimistically predicted that the trip would make Diana “
more of a companion to Charles in the intellectual sense.”
Diana, however, was less than enthralled, though she hid her lack of interest behind her poise and her smiles. Touring a garden in Florence, Charles spotted Diana walking toward an archway and shouted, “
Mind your head.” “Why?” Diana cracked. “There’s nothing in it.” Charles found himself resenting Diana’s popularity, but
he buried his insecurity in the beauty of the art and architecture around him.

Before the Waleses left England, the tabloids had speculated about the small fortune Diana was spending on her wardrobe for the Italian trip. Then, when she wore too many familiar outfits, the press called her “
secondhand Rosa.” The Italian fashion critics declared her “
unsophisticated,”
especially her collection of what one commentator called “
heinous hats.” But the public, primarily women, couldn’t get enough of Diana’s procession of new looks. She was like a paper doll come to life, playing dress-up to feed women’s fantasies.

As the press and public came to view her as a fashion avatar, she
indulged in ever-more daring surprises—an ankle-length fuchsia, pink, and turquoise silk dress in the style of a dressing gown, a silver lamé dress that upstaged Joan Collins’s, a specially altered black dinner jacket from Charles’s closet, a backless dress with a string of pearls “
the wrong way round,” and one of her most dramatic inspirations: a $3 million emerald-and-diamond choker that she wore across her forehead as an Indian-style headband. “She would go out and do things to court press attention,” a former Palace adviser said, “whether it was wearing something new and outrageous rather than an old dress, there would be something flashy and different and stylish. She knew how to play it.”

These stunts attracted applause, but they also created a perception of frivolity and exhibitionism. “
Being a princess, even if you marry into the royal dynasty, means more than creating an image,” huffed
The Times
. Diana grew more insecure and ambivalent about how she was perceived, even complaining to her friend Roberto Devorik when she was complimented for being beautiful or chic. “
She said, ‘Why don’t they say what a beautiful human being I am?’ ” he recalled.

In all the hullabaloo that winter and spring, the press missed an important development in the life of Diana and Charles: the quiet departure on January 1 of Charles’s aide Michael Colborne after ten years of service.
Colborne had been a solid support to both Waleses, mainly because he knew how to be responsive without overstepping the invisible royal barrier, especially with Diana. But his position inevitably made him a referee between warring parties, which sapped his enthusiasm for the job. The turning point had actually come during the Canada trip in mid-1983.

One day, when Charles was out on his official rounds, Diana remained behind on the
Britannia
and asked Colborne to meet her. She was lonely and wanted his company—a role he had played many times to keep her calm. After completing some arrangements for Charles, Colborne spent the afternoon with Diana. When Charles returned, he summoned Colborne to his cabin and exploded in anger, accusing his trusted aide of giving short shrift to princely needs. Charles wouldn’t be mollified by Colborne’s explanation that assisting Diana was in everyone’s best interests. When Charles ended his outburst, he opened the door to find a tearful Diana eavesdropping.

Although Charles later apologized, Colborne decided he could not continue. He was pained by Charles’s “
stress and disruption,” while Diana’s
behavior “seemed something out of a nightmare, beyond all reason and out of control.” Colborne resigned in April 1984, but Charles and Diana persuaded him to remain until after the birth of their second child. “
To both of them, my resignation was a bit hard,” Colborne said. “I didn’t realize it was going to upset him so much, and when she saw me going, she had the two children, her engagement calendar was filling up, and she couldn’t change him. She could see what was happening. She could see her future.”

By mid-1985, the word was spreading in aristocratic circles that the gloomy reports about the Wales marriage were more than just tabloid tittle-tattle. Princess Michael of Kent, a neighbor of the Waleses in Kensington Palace, was known for her indiscretion as well as her powers of observation. She also had an ax to grind, since Diana had supplanted her as the most glamorous royal. During an event at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Princess Michael unloaded some intelligence on museum director Roy Strong that took him aback. She called Diana a “
catastrophe” and expressed pity for “poor Prince Charles, who had bought Highgrove to be near his former girlfriends. Nothing was happy. Diana was hard. There was no pulling together, no common objectives, and it was misery for him.… And Diana has become a media queen, which only makes it worse.” Charles, Princess Michael told Strong, was “increasingly isolated, the Queen is withdrawn.” With some prescience, she characterized Diana as a “time bomb.”

Fed by leaks from assorted staffers, the tabloids kept dancing around the edges of the unraveling Wales marriage. The first serious doubts about the marriage were raised, ironically enough, by an American publication,
Vanity Fair
. Because the article was written by Tina Brown, then the magazine’s British-born editor in chief, it attracted instant attention back home. Essentially, the article pulled together themes that had run through the tabloids earlier in the year, added new information and provocative interpretation, and presented it all in a glossy package. Titled “The Mouse That Roared,” the story turned Andrew Morton’s earlier portrayal on its head, declaring Diana, not Charles, the “
iron mouse,” and concluding, “the heir to the throne is, it seems, pussy-whipped from here to eternity.” The article noted Diana’s “obsession with her image” and cautioned that her “adversary mood toward the press” was “the first stage in the removal from life that fame inflicts. The second stage is ‘Graceland,’ when the real world melts away altogether. There is a danger that this has started to happen to Diana.”

Buckingham Palace dismissed the story as “
nonsense,” and the tabloids predictably jumped on
“snobby
Vanity Fair
” for its “
astonishing,” “
amazing,” and “
horrid” attack, all the while meticulously detailing the particulars. The
Daily Mirror
, while denouncing the “
ratbag of gossip,” conceded
that “parts of it are very plausible, and it’s all too easy to believe.” The
News of the World
insisted that Charles was not a “
royal wimp,” but added its own evidence of further tension in the marriage. In the end, recalled Deidre Fernand, former royal correspondent for
The Times
, “
‘The Mouse That Roared’ had an impact, but people thought it wasn’t true, just bitchy New York gossip.”

Charles and Diana were sufficiently stung that they felt compelled to respond in a much-anticipated television program shown in late October. The program had been in the works since the previous summer, when Palace courtiers decided it was time for the couple to give an extensive interview to counteract stories circulating about their marriage; a companion documentary to be broadcast a year later would include footage of the couple at home and at work. The 1985 interview, conducted by Sir Alastair Burnet, touched on topics ranging from their public duties to their press coverage, from Charles’s eccentricities to Diana’s eating habits and taste in fashion.

Diana was almost phobic about public speaking, so Charles enlisted film director Richard Attenborough to coach her. (Earlier in the year, when asked to introduce a campaign on drug abuse education she got so tangled she could only blurt, “
Oh, gosh … well … er … fingers crossed.”)
Attenborough worked with Diana on how to move while on camera, how to sit attentively while being questioned, and how to speak slowly and clearly. To calm her nerves, Burnet gave Diana a full rehearsal.

Sitting side by side on a silk sofa, Diana and Charles appeared confident and charming before a television audience of 20 million. When asked if she had been hurt by the malicious reports on their private life, Diana looked directly at the camera and spoke revealingly of her anxieties:
“Well, obviously. You feel very wounded. You think, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t want to go out and do my engagement this morning. Nobody wants to see me, help, panic.’ But you have got to push yourself out.” Regarding the charge that she ruled the roost, Diana pleaded not guilty, admitting only to being a “perfectionist with myself but not necessarily with everyone else.” To dispel her image as a trendy airhead, she insisted that “my clothes are not my priority,” though she admitted, “sometimes I can be a little outrageous.” She also said, “I’m never on what’s called a diet.… Maybe I’m so scrawny because I take so much exercise.” Diana’s most important role, she said, was “supporting my husband whenever I can and always being behind him, and also most important, being a mother and a wife.”

Charles admitted to “becoming more eccentric as I get older,” but said his interest in alternative medicine reflected his desire to be “open-minded.” He responded most forcefully to critics of his effort to voice his outspoken views on architecture. The previous year he had given a speech blasting the “monstrous carbuncle” proposed as an addition to the National
Gallery—a vivid metaphor that led to a highly praised replacement design. “I just feel sometimes, not too often,” he said, “I can throw a rock into a pond and watch the ripples create a certain amount of discussion and hopefully to see whether something better can come out.”

Both Prince and Princess showed flashes of self-deprecating humor, Diana when she defended the size of her wardrobe for foreign tours by saying, “I couldn’t go round in a leopard skin,” and Charles by calling himself an “ancient old thing.” When Diana said she was learning sign language to communicate with the deaf, Charles interjected, “I shall look forward to her teaching me. She says I am deaf anyway.”

There was only one glimmer of mild irritation, when Burnet asked if they argued. “I suspect that most husbands and wives find they often have arguments,” Charles admitted. “But we don’t,” countered Diana. “Occasionally we do,” Charles insisted. “No, we don’t,” she said. The exchange was described as a “
friendly tiff” by the
Daily Mail
, but Diana’s insistent denial of such an obvious truth seemed peculiar.

Compared with her awkward, monosyllabic demeanor in the engagement interview, Diana appeared poised and articulate; if anything, she was slightly more voluble than her husband. All the tabloids awarded them high marks and drew extravagant conclusions about the state of the marriage. “
What a smashing royal couple they are,” James Whitaker wrote in the
Daily Mirror
. “There is no kinder, more considerate person in the world than Prince Charles.”
The Sun
declared, as if it were July 1981 all over again: “
Di and Charles are so very much in love.”

After their television triumph, the couple took another overseas tour, returning to Australia and visiting the United States for the first time. Charles and Diana gazed at each other as they danced to Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” in Melbourne. In Washington and Palm Beach, their dance partners stole the show: John Travolta and Clint Eastwood with Diana at the White House and Joan Collins with Charles in Florida (“
unbelievable cleavage…. Eye wander was a problem!” he wrote to a friend).

One of the more poignant moments in the Wales marriage occurred in late December, during the Christmas benefit for the Friends of Covent Garden at the Royal Opera House. The annual variety show featured Covent Garden performers doing offbeat singing, dancing, and theatrical routines. The previous year, Charles had made an engaging appearance as Romeo in a Shakespeare vignette, and this year, Diana had decided to surprise him by showing her own talent. “She was trying to please him,” one of her friends recalled, “to make him proud of her.” In October she contacted dancer Wayne Sleep, who at five foot two was eight inches shorter than Diana, and asked him to choreograph a duet with her to the Billy Joel song “Uptown Girl.”

Diana secretly rehearsed the routine, and at a designated time on the night of the benefit, she excused herself from the royal box. She changed from her red velvet gown into a clingy, low-cut white satin dress and appeared onstage with her diminutive partner as the audience gasped.
Their four-minute number drew applause at every step. Although Diana towered over Sleep, at one point he lifted her above his head and carried her twenty feet across the stage. Covent Garden photographer Reg Wilson called Diana’s performance “
provocative and sensuous.… She kept looking up at Charles. There was an enormous sense of fun between the two of them.” Charles was stunned, but he smiled and clapped enthusiastically through the eight curtain calls. Afterward, Charles told Sleep that Diana was a “
terrific” dancer, but privately, he had been discomfited by Diana’s Salome routine. “He was perhaps a little concerned about the decorum and felt she should have worn something different. The dress was a bit slinky,” a friend of the couple said. “She was trying hard to impress him, but possibly it backfired.”