Diana in Search of Herself (32 page)

In 1985, the Waleses still presented a united public front—even carrying on with playful kisses after polo matches—but they now seldom socialized together. From the earliest days of their marriage, Diana had shown little enthusiasm for entertaining, primarily because she lacked confidence as a hostess. Diana tended to avoid people who seemed too clever. She took to complaining about the “heavies,” the Foreign Office and political types who dutifully talked to her about issues when she landed next to them at dinner. Her self-consciousness in unfamiliar settings even extended to children’s parties. “She would hardly bother to say hello to the mothers,” one of her friends said. “If she was in a good mood she would talk to the nannies and play with the children. If in a bad mood, she would just play with the children.”

Diana and Charles began showing the first signs of following different paths in their private lives. Diana appeared at several parties on her own, where she seemed visibly more relaxed than in her husband’s company. At one weekend house party with old friends, she danced until four
A.M
. Afterward, the host, a captain in the Coldstream Guards named Richard Clowes, was reported to say that Diana “
was in sparkling form.”
Charles had also resumed seeing his exiled friends, including Nicholas Soames, the Brabournes, Romseys, Palmer-Tomkinsons, and even Kanga Tryon.
The rapprochement with Kanga conspicuously included Diana, who gave her blessing with a visit to the clothing boutique Kanga owned on Beauchamp Place, where she bought several dresses. Before long, the two women were
spotted having lunch together. Diana may well have had an ulterior motive, since Kanga was known to be “
blue with jealousy for Camilla” in her rivalry for attention from Charles, said London interior designer Nicholas Haslam. “
Camilla had a fallout with Kanga during the eighties,” said
Sun
journalist Stuart Higgins, who spoke to Camilla regularly.

At some point in 1985—it is impossible to know precisely—Diana decided to look beyond Charles for affection and support. In the late spring, a new bodyguard had come aboard, Sergeant Barry Mannakee.
He was an unlikely prospect for romance: slightly plump, with thinning brown hair and a working-class background. But he had a jocular personality, and he put Diana instantly at ease. She first drew close to him when he comforted her during bouts of weeping and depression. He described to another staff member how she had collapsed in tears before making a public appearance, insisting she couldn’t go through with it. He had no choice, he said, but to embrace and soothe her so she would stop crying and pull herself together.

Diana came to rely on his compassion, and she looked to him for approval when she was feeling uncertain. She often asked him how she looked: whether, for example, her jewelry was becoming or her dress flattering. He poured on the compliments, usually with an amused grin, and in front of the other staff they bantered about “fancying” each other. Diana flirted with him, listened to him attentively, and shared private jokes with him. Eventually they became intimate, and Diana was often alone with him at Kensington Palace, when she would dismiss the rest of the staff.

Diana was so smitten that a decade later she told Anthony Holden, a biographer of her husband, that Mannakee had been “
the love of my life,” the same words she had used to describe Charles in conversations with a few close friends. As Charles had already learned, involvement with Diana meant submitting to her overpowering possessiveness. In her fear of rejection, she believed that if she didn’t have someone’s total attention, she couldn’t count on him at all. Barry Mannakee was married and had two children, and although he sympathized with her neediness, he couldn’t give her the constant support she wanted. “Once it began, [Mannakee] was very distraught about being caught up with her,” a friend of Charles’s said. “She was so intense, and he found it very difficult to handle.”

The relationship between the guard and the guarded is, by definition, unusual, especially for a woman employing a male security officer. “It is intense and strange,” a friend of Diana’s explained. “The bodyguards knew the most personal things. They went with her to the dentist, and the doctor, and to Marks and Spencer to buy knickers and bras.” For that reason, their tenure was usually limited to four or five years, when they were reassigned by Scotland Yard to traditional police duties.

When Barry Mannakee was suddenly transferred to another job in July 1986 after scarcely a year, the staff speculated that he and Diana had become “too close,” as one courtier described it.
Mannakee had been warned by the senior protection officer, Colin Trimming, that his familiarity with Diana was unseemly, and he should put an end to it. Mannakee couldn’t control Diana’s behavior, however, and every time she spoke an endearment to him or gave him an affectionate squeeze, Trimming took note. Given the pressure Mannakee was feeling from Diana, his reassignment was for the best, because it defused a hopeless—and potentially explosive—situation.
Nevertheless, Diana was disheartened by his transfer.

For all the signs of familiarity witnessed by the staff, Charles knew nothing of Diana’s involvement with Mannakee at the time and only learned about it some years later. He was by nature incurious about such matters, in typical royal fashion. “
I don’t want to spy on [Diana] or interfere in her life in any way,” Charles wrote to a friend. Consequently, another friend said, “It is absolutely untrue that there was any cause and effect regarding his going back to Camilla. He went back to her for completely different reasons.”

On the question of why Charles resumed his romance with Camilla, Jonathan Dimbleby’s biography is considered definitive. According to former courtiers, Charles read the book line by line before its 1994 publication, as did his private secretary Richard Aylard, who checked all the facts. The book is indisputably Charles’s perception of events, with some shadings by Dimbleby.

By this account, Charles felt after five years that his marriage was beyond repair. Instead of diminishing, Diana’s rages intensified:
“There appeared to be a terrible conflict inside her that would suddenly erupt in anger or grief. As her public prestige soared, she grew correspondingly anguished in private.” Worn down by Diana’s ragged emotions, Charles finally gave up: “There was no specific incident that precipitated the end of the Prince’s effort to hold his marriage together; it collapsed gradually.… By 1986 their marriage had begun slowly to disintegrate.”

The most visible evidence that Charles had, according to Dimbleby, “
started to withdraw the support which … had drained his reserves of sympathy and compassion” came during their tour of Canada and Japan in May 1986. Diana had virtually no appetite and seemed unusually tense; Charles was more brooding than ever. Picking up signs of their disaffection, the Canadian press had turned hostile, calling Charles “
bat ears” and accusing Diana of having a “
plastic smile.” Diana and Charles were visiting an exhibition in Vancouver when Diana suddenly fainted. As she slid to the floor, she was caught by two men on her staff, who helped her into a nearby room to be revived by a physician and several aides. “
I didn’t know anything
about fainting,” Diana said, although by her own admission she had fainted numerous times during pregnancy.

Diana later spoke bitterly of Charles’s insensitivity: “
My husband told me off,” she said, when he rebuked her for not withdrawing to a private room when she began feeling faint. She also said he insisted she go out later in the evening to avoid speculation that she might be seriously ill. While Charles’s behavior didn’t strike their aides as blatantly cruel, they did detect, in the words of a former Palace official, “for the first time a real lack of sympathy. It was obvious that something had gone from the relationship. He wasn’t that caring, and he had been before.”

The Waleses’ domestic staff also noticed a new chill.
“Even together,” Dimbleby wrote, “they were apart.” Diana and Charles had been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some time, and
they kept different hours as well, she retiring early, he staying up late, listening to opera and doing paperwork. Now, when Diana fled to her room from the breakfast table in tears, Charles declined to follow. They arrived at Highgrove in separate cars; Charles would come a day early and depart on Mondays, while Diana would leave with the boys on Sunday afternoons, often weeping so hard she could scarcely say good-bye. After an altercation with Charles, she would retreat into silence for several days, or she might blister members of her staff in frustration. Sometimes Diana slammed the door in Charles’s face or called him names. At other times, she would unexpectedly run to embrace him while he was busy in his garden; when he didn’t reciprocate immediately, she would retreat in despair. Small wonder that the staff took to shouting “storm stations” or “hard hats” when they sensed trouble coming.

At the nadir of his “
desperation,” Charles wrote to a friend in 1986, “I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage … longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is.… This extraordinary drama has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy.” In his paroxysms of introspection, Charles blamed himself for the failure. “
I never thought it would end up like this,” he wrote to a friend. “How could I have got it all so wrong?”

Charles turned to Camilla at that point because, according to Dimbleby, she offered “
the warmth, the understanding and steadiness” that “he had never been able to find with any other person.” For her part, Camilla was still coping unhappily with her chronically unfaithful husband, and still in love with Charles. The relationship rekindled with telephone calls, which led to Camilla’s visits to Highgrove, typically with her husband or other friends of Charles: “The opportunities to be alone with each other for any length of time were infrequent. That they loved each other was not in any doubt.”

Had Camilla simply disappeared from Charles’s life, she might have faded from his imagination. But one of the odd consequences of jealousy is
its elevation of the object of that jealousy. With her constant complaints and questions, Diana kept Camilla in Charles’s thoughts. He was married to a woman beloved by the entire world, yet she was fixated on a rival who was older and less beautiful, as if she saw something in Camilla that Charles had missed.

Charles understood the extent of Diana’s obsession; Camilla had become the “canker” in his marriage. Yet Charles took up with Camilla, well aware that the relationship could cripple Diana’s tenuous hold on stability once she figured out the situation—as she surely would. Charles knew all too well that Diana had good antennae, and that she eavesdropped and opened mail. Perhaps Charles believed he had no other options, but his decision to resume his intimacy with Camilla took him down a dangerous path.

It wasn’t long before Diana confirmed her long-standing suspicions. In her somewhat cryptic answers on
Panorama
, she said that in 1986 she had
“knowledge” of Charles and Camilla “from people who minded and cared about our marriage.” The household at Highgrove had caught on fairly quickly. Only the security officers knew at the outset, but
other staff understood their boss’s destination when he went out on Sunday nights for dinner. He dispatched his loyal manservant Paddy Whiteland to deliver notes, flowers, chocolates, and other gifts to Camilla’s home, and Camilla’s housekeeper kept a tally of Charles’s visits, which she passed on to the Highgrove groom.

Diana also said she noticed “
the change of behavior pattern in [her] husband, for all sorts of reasons that a woman’s instinct produces.… It was already difficult, but it became increasingly difficult.” Although Diana didn’t yet mention Camilla by name, she began voicing her unhappiness. “It was into the mid-eighties before she started talking,” one friend recalled. “In 1986, it was mostly the lack of ability to communicate with Charles or get the sympathy and understanding she needed.” When Diana first met astrologer Penny Thornton that March, she referred to Charles’s affair with “
a certain woman.” Diana contacted Thornton at a moment, she said later, when she felt “I’ve got to get out. I can’t bear it any longer.” Around this time Charles wrote to a friend about Diana’s unhappiness: “
It’s agony to know that someone is hating it all so much. It seems so unfair to her.”

Diana told Thornton she wanted to escape “
the whole royal ‘setup,’ ” but Thornton dissuaded her from leaving. After reading Diana’s chart and talking with her for four hours at Kensington Palace, Thornton advised Diana to stop “
berating Charles for seeing another woman” and to “make a friend of her opposition.” Her advice was sensible though futile, given Diana’s mental state, but she did succeed in defusing the crisis. Later that evening, Thornton heard from Sarah Ferguson, who had introduced her to
Diana, that Prince Charles was grateful for her help. It turned out that Diana had packed her bags that morning before meeting with Thornton.

Diana’s certain knowledge of Charles’s affair with Camilla was “
pretty devastating,” she later said. Her bulimia became “rampant,” and she was consumed with “a feeling of being no good at anything and being useless and hopeless and failed in every direction.” She would later confide to one of her future lovers, James Hewitt, that she had been “
terrified” that her bulimia would be discovered when she fainted in Vancouver. On a holiday that summer with King Juan Carlos of Spain and his family, Diana felt exhausted and “
spent my whole time with my head down the loo.” She recalled feeling resentful of Charles because the king and his wife Sofia “were all so busy thinking Charles was the most wonderful creature … and who was this girl coming along?” Showing further evidence of confusion about her identity, she recalled knowing “there was something inside me that wasn’t coming out, and I didn’t know how to use it, in the sense of letting them see it.” At Balmoral afterward, Diana’s new sister-in-law Fergie couldn’t help noticing Diana’s disturbing symptoms: “
She was teary and reclusive and out of sorts.”

When Diana had her portrait painted that summer, she was vibrating with tension. Sitting periodically for portraits was a ritual for every member of the royal family, and Diana had already been painted seven times in the five years since her marriage. In early 1986,
Richard Foster had spent sixteen hours painting her and had found her surprisingly uncertain about the sort of image she should project. Only months later, Diana was posing again, six one-hour sessions with Emily Patrick, who was disconcerted by Diana. “
She was tense down to the very nails,” Patrick recalled. “She never stopped moving … and she always wanted to talk about dieting.” To Patrick’s trained eye, it was obvious “Diana was uncomfortable with herself and was hiding so much it was difficult to do a good portrait”—a problem encountered by other artists as well.