Diana in Search of Herself (35 page)

Diana’s romance with Hewitt intensified in the months after the evening at Kensington Palace, although its components remained essentially the same: long telephone calls, once or twice a day, which Diana filled with quotidian detail that Hewitt listened to without complaint. She solicited his comments on her clothing, and constantly asked for reassurance about her looks. According to Hewitt, Diana told him that she “
spent hours lying in bed at night dissecting her body, endlessly enumerating to herself its deficiencies, telling herself that she was not good enough.”

The relationship had an unhealthy imbalance, with Diana simultaneously clingy and controlling, as Hewitt willingly assumed subordinate status. “
I was with her because she needed me,” he recalled. “I was prepared to give up my life for her.… I could have been for her what Camilla has become for Charles, I would have accepted that supporting role.” This meant riding along with her mood swings to provide a “
release from the tension that characterized her daily life.”

Diana’s “
emotional roller coaster” frightened Hewitt.
In the beginning she would sit, as she had with Charles during their courtship, and watch Hewitt read—although she herself was disconcertingly unable to read because she was too excited and restless. The more time they spent together, the more mood gyrations Hewitt witnessed. Just when she seemed calm and balanced, she would be overcome by “
violent paroxysms of despair.” She generally hit bottom at the end of their weekends together, growing agitated at the prospect of his departure, which “
struck her as a form of rejection.”

Hewitt confided to his father that “
he had never seen anyone so distraught, so churned up … that he really feared that she might even take her life if he tried to end their relationship.” Perhaps most disquieting was the sense of detachment Diana had experienced since childhood: “
Often she felt as if she was perching on the doorstep of life peering in, an onlooker while everybody else … was a participant.” Six months into their affair, in the spring of 1987, she told him about her bulimia. Although Hewitt read about the affliction and tried to understand it, her “
lack of control” and “seemingly unmitigated greed” baffled him.

Hewitt responded to Diana differently than Charles, who tried to calm her down through cajolery, followed by irritation when he failed. Hewitt expressed his love and pledged to take care of her. In the short term, Hewitt’s approach helped Diana, who couldn’t help talking about him to her
staff. “She was crazy about him,” a former Palace adviser said. “He was a big support for her. He tried to make her feel better, to give her a good time with little things. She was happy with him, and happy is not a word you can use about her often.”

Yet over time, Hewitt couldn’t be as open with Diana as she wanted. When Diana would beg him to share the anxieties tucked behind his reserve,
he couldn’t reveal how shocked he was by her volatility, or how burdened he felt by the responsibility of keeping her stable. Diana could detect when Hewitt was withholding his feelings, which left her feeling defeated.

Hewitt was also more obtuse than Charles about Diana’s need for expert professional help. “
I view depression as a sign of weakness…. I believe in the stiff upper lip,” Hewitt once said. Psychological counseling was anathema to him. “
Some people go to psychiatrists or take drugs,” Hewitt said. Diana “needed love and support, she needed to know and be told that it would all be all right.”

Diana expressed her affection by showering Hewitt with gifts, including a diamond tie pin and a gold-and-silver alarm clock from Asprey, as well as countless articles of clothing; she would later boast to her friend James Gilbey that she dressed the army officer from “
head to foot. Cost me quite a bit.” Hewitt read her passages from Tennyson or Wordsworth and took to calling her “Dibbs.” Together they would read issues of
Country Life
and pick out dream houses. They periodically met for lunch at Diana’s favorite restaurant, San Lorenzo; he introduced her to his father, and Diana traveled to Devon for weekends with Hewitt and his mother. Diana’s West Heath friend Carolyn Bartholomew also knew of the romance and spent several weekends with the couple.

In the spring of 1987, Hewitt was promoted to the rank of major and moved to the Combermere Barracks near Windsor Castle. Diana continued to ride with Hewitt there, and brought William and Harry, then aged four and two, for a tour of the barracks. When Charles was away, Diana and Hewitt had assignations at Kensington Palace and Highgrove. These were risky encounters, since William and Harry might easily have come into Diana’s room during the night. The household and security staff felt as awkward about the situation as they did about Charles and Camilla.
At least one maid worried about what to say if Charles made any inquiries. He did not, a friend explained, because he “had a tremendous gift for not observing what was not desirable to observe.”

Hewitt believed that, during the first months of their affair, Diana still had not entirely given up on Charles, and that “
she would try anything to win
him.” During that period, some friends of Diana and Charles made efforts to patch up the marriage. Film producer David Puttnam and his wife, Patsy, were invited to several dinners that were “
an attempt by others to help the Prince and Princess by getting them out,” recalled Puttnam. “What was noticeable during those dinners was how hard Diana was working at the relationship, to be a good wife. She was affectionate, and she was trying hard to be special.”

But faced with what she perceived as continued rebuffs, Diana not only gave up,
she began to tell Hewitt she hated Charles. She also started to boycott dinner parties planned by her husband.
When their guests arrived, Diana would stay upstairs, leaving him to explain lamely that she was feeling ill and couldn’t join them. During a dinner for eighteen to honor patrons of the Royal Academy, Diana was spotted swimming outside while the group was having drinks. Charles didn’t display similar hostility toward Diana, only persistent anguish that his marriage had fallen apart so completely. “
That is the total agony about the situation,” he wrote to a friend in October 1987.

The fights between Charles and Diana grew less frequent as their chill hardened into a
cold war, stripped of basic civility except in the presence of their sons. At Highgrove, Diana would take vigorous swims each morning (even Hewitt couldn’t help noticing that swimming had become “
an obsession for her. Whenever she felt overemotional she would pound up and down the pool”) and
then retreat to her room to watch movies with the boys or talk on the phone while Charles lost himself in the garden.

If Diana and Charles had been tougher, they might have been able to publicly maintain the illusion of a happy marriage. But both were too sensitive—albeit in different ways—to prevent the stress from showing. As always, the press played a pivotal role. Simon Jenkins, editor of
The Times
from 1990 to 1992, said reporters sensed it was “
the biggest story they’d ever got. It was the love story gone wrong, and as we all know, the only thing that’s a better story than a love story is a love story gone wrong.” At this point, the tabloids assigned Diana her heroine role and began vilifying Charles in earnest. Lacking solid information about what was really going on, the tabloids relied on body language, hunches, and tips to launch a new wave of speculation about the Wales marriage. For five years, beginning in 1987, the press published what Jonathan Dimbleby called “
a version of the facts … which bore more than a passing resemblance to reality,” though many details were inaccurate.

The first significant clue came during an official visit to Portugal in February 1987, when the news leaked that Charles and Diana had taken separate rooms. Diana actually told Andrew Morton that the Portugal trip was “
the last time we were close as man and wife,” which seemed to contradict
her other assertion that the marriage “closed off” and “went down the drain” after the birth of Harry. In the following months, the press tracked the amount of time the couple spent apart, culminating in a thirty-nine-day stretch at the end of the summer.

Charles had resumed shooting and hunting, the pursuits he had previously renounced to please Diana, and he took an increasing number of holidays on his own—several trips to Italy, four days in the Kalahari Desert, a retreat on a Hebridean island to herd sheep, long sojourns at Balmoral. These escapes into solitude for thinking and painting
invariably prompted rebukes from Diana for abandoning her, and from the press for being a neglectful husband and father. After Diana and the boys returned to London from Scotland in September 1987, while Charles remained in Balmoral for three weeks on his own, some tabloid reports even
hinted unfairly and incorrectly that Charles was having affairs with two of his guests, Kanga Tryon and Sarah Keswick, the wife of Sir Chippendale Keswick, chairman of Hambros Bank, who were friends of both Waleses.

With his fortieth birthday a year off, Charles went into full retreat, according to Dimbleby, “
eclipsed by the Princess, resentful of the public adulation of her and wounded by the media’s contempt for him.” He became more temperamental, introverted, and gloomy—“
I can’t see a light at the end of a rather appalling tunnel at the moment,” he wrote one friend in the fall of 1987—and relied even more on his friends, “
unable to turn to his parents to discuss the misery either of his private life or his public persona,” wrote Dimbleby. As Charles said, “
When marriages break down, awful and miserable as that is … it is your friends who are most important and helpful and understanding and encouraging. Otherwise you would go stark, staring mad.”

Instead of turning inward, like Charles, Diana began to acquire new friends and new activities. She took up tennis and
tried to get Charles to build a court for her at Highgrove. When he refused—partly due to the expense, but also because a court would mar the aesthetic of his carefully planned gardens on the estate—she joined the exclusive Vanderbilt Racquet Club in London. For three years, she played a regular doubles game there with a group that included Antonia Douro, whose alliance with Camilla she had not yet discovered. Diana wasn’t good at the sport, and as with so much she took on, she lacked the discipline to practice and improve her skills with lessons; her aim was more to socialize in a place where the photographers couldn’t find her.

But Diana’s private life revolved primarily around Hewitt, whose presence soothed her, although his usefulness as a safety valve only worked when they were together: “
The very fact that she felt he relieved her of responsibility for herself meant that when he was not with her, her panic
could grow worse than before,” Pasternak wrote. “Sometimes her fear of coping with her own instabilities would grow so great, create such hysteria, that the only answer was to escape from herself. Then, she would frantically dial James’s number, eager to hear him, anxious for him to calm her and restore her balance.”

Diana’s instability was particularly evident in May 1987, when she learned that her former lover Barry Mannakee had been killed in a motorcycle accident, just a year after he had been transferred out of his job with the Waleses. As the royal couple prepared to leave Kensington Palace for an evening at the Cannes Film Festival, Charles and members of the couple’s staff learned about Mannakee’s death. Charles told her about Mannakee when they were alone in their limousine en route to the Northolt airport, where they boarded their plane in private. On the flight to Cannes, Diana wept inconsolably as Charles and her lady-in-waiting tried to comfort her.

A report by Penny Junor that Diana
“slashed herself” during the flight, requiring her dress for Cannes “to be adjusted to hide the damage,” was an exaggeration, however. If Diana had mutilated herself, the wounds were not apparent to her staff, and the long gown she brought for the evening’s festivities was singularly unadjustable: a pale-blue strapless chiffon that revealed her pristine arms, back, chest, and shoulders. She wore a matching pale-blue chiffon scarf draped softly across the nape of her neck and trailing down her back—not tied securely, as it might have been, to conceal telltale cuts. A small gust of wind or an inadvertent snag could have easily dislodged it.

The most striking aspect of Diana’s behavior was her ability to put on a sunny facade as soon as she reached Cannes. In fact, she was ebullient that evening when she met TV personality Clive James, master of ceremonies for the dinner. “
She was like the sun coming up,” James wrote. “Coming up giggling.” She mischievously flirted with James, laughing about the clips from Japanese game shows that he screened on his weekly program. “You are
terrible
,” she teased, then rapidly changed the subject as she glimpsed media tycoon Robert Maxwell across the room. “Ooh. There’s that odious man Maxwell over there. Don’t want to meet
him
again. Yuck.”

In the following weeks, Diana showed no evidence of lingering upset over Mannakee’s death, nor did the tabloids learn of her distress during the trip to Cannes. But beginning early in 1987, they did get wind of a series of incidents involving Diana that, taken together, indicated a pattern of disconcerting public behavior, some of it involving other men. By her own admission, she was trying on a newly exuberant, Fergie-like identity, but she was displaying her confusion as well. The commotion Diana created proved irresistible to the press.