Diana in Search of Herself (36 page)

During a February ski holiday in Klosters, Diana and Fergie drew attention to themselves by jokingly pushing each other around on the ski slopes, causing the
Daily Mail
to pronounce the two women “
undignified.” In subsequent months, Diana blurted out to a group of reporters that she was thinking of taking a “
black lover”;
she smirked while reviewing a parade of cadets at Sandhurst; and, during Ascot, she and Fergie poked a rolled umbrella into the backside of Lulu Blacker, a friend of Fergie’s.

But it was Diana’s public flirtatiousness that drew the most pointed comment—beginning on her Klosters holiday, when “
sexy” Diana danced at discos without “grumpy” Charles. Unknown to the press,
Diana’s bulimia had again become acute, and each evening in Klosters, she was calling James Hewitt to complain about her loneliness and declare how much she missed him.

Two of the men in Diana’s company that winter became the subject of endless conjecture in the coming year: Guards Major David Waterhouse and banker Philip Dunne. Both were introduced to Diana by Sarah Ferguson, and they were part of the lively new set that formed around the Princess.
Waterhouse and Dunne were solid establishment figures. Dunne’s parents, Captain Thomas Dunne, Lord Lieutenant of Hereford and Worcester, and his wife, Henrietta, were great friends of the Queen. Dunne’s sister Camilla, who also became friendly with Diana, married Nicholas Soames’s brother Rupert. Waterhouse was the son of Hugo Waterhouse, a Life Guards major, and Lady Caroline Spencer-Churchill, the sister of the Duke of Marlborough and a friend of the Queen’s as well.

The tabloids went into a frenzy over Diana’s behavior with Philip Dunne during the wedding reception for the Marquess of Worcester and actress Tracy Ward in June 1987. Diana spent the evening dancing wildly with an assortment of partners including a “
mystery fat man” later identified as David Ker, a happily married London art dealer. Most conspicuously, Diana danced with Dunne. According to the tabloids, she was seen “running her hand through [his] hair and planting a kiss on his cheek.” Charles left the party at two
A.M
. (“
stormed off” by one account, “
in a huff” by another) after spending his time talking with former girlfriend Anna Wallace. Diana continued dancing until dawn, and for weeks afterward, the press went into overdrive probing the nature of her relationship with Dunne.

There was something almost too showy about subsequent sightings of Diana with Philip Dunne and David Waterhouse—at concerts, films, house party weekends, and fashionable London restaurants. She was deeply entangled with James Hewitt, and titillating press reports about a string of other men served as a convenient diversion. Still, as one of Diana’s friends observed, “Diana lit a fire that occasionally burned out of control.”
The tabloids castigated Diana for being a “tease,” a “flirt,” and a “pampered
princess” who “loves being the center of attention.” The hacks also made life miserable for Dunne and Waterhouse, combing through their lives in forensic detail—to the point that Waterhouse declared to
The Sun
, “
We are
not
having an affair.”

Although the press paid greater attention to Dunne, perhaps because he was better looking, Diana was actually quite close to Waterhouse, who happened to be in James Hewitt’s regiment. In his book on Charles, Dimbleby singled out Waterhouse among Diana’s friends during this period as a “
frequent visitor to Kensington Palace, arriving accompanied by his dog to spend long hours with the Princess.”
Waterhouse also visited Diana at Highgrove when Charles was away. Hewitt was jealous of Waterhouse, and Diana “
repeatedly tried to reassure [Hewitt], telling him over and over that she and David were just friends,” according to Pasternak.

The tabloids were so preoccupied by the Wales marriage that they barely acknowledged much of what Charles and Diana did in their official roles,
which especially galled Charles, who grew less tolerant of Diana’s fixation on her press coverage. His irritation at her distress over negative articles became a major source of friction between them. Charles refused to read what he considered rubbish—although aides gave him abridged briefings on the coverage—and
accused Diana of encouraging the tabloids by paying such close attention to them. In a letter to a friend, Charles railed about the “
positive hurricane of self-righteous, pontificating censorious claptrap in the newspapers.”

By the autumn of 1987, both Diana and Charles were profoundly unhappy.
They spent several weekends at Highgrove with Diana’s mother, who helped persuade the couple to keep their marriage together and Diana to comport herself more properly in public.
A group of advisers to Charles outlined the terms of a proposed truce: that the couple continue with separate but discreet social lives while they worked harder to present a united front through more joint engagements.

Diana later said she had her own epiphany that fall about the need to erase her image as “
Disco Di,” the femme fatale. After making what she called “
so many cock-ups,” she told herself, “Diana, it’s no good, you’ve got to change it right round, this publicity. You’ve got to grow up and be responsible.… You must adapt to the position and stop fighting.” Diana had decided to “
rediscover the real Diana Spencer.” She and Charles settled on an arrangement she described to astrologer Penny Thornton as giving each other a “
comparatively civilized ‘space’ ”: She would use Kensington Palace as her base, and he would use Highgrove as his.

The Waleses’ new resolve was on display the following January during a trip to Australia for the country’s two hundedth anniversary. “
They were back in sparkling form for the first time in almost a year,” the
Sunday Mirror
declared. Diana took the trouble to learn Australia’s national anthem, which she sang heartily, as Charles, who did not know the words, “
glanced affectionately at his wife as he tapped along to the beat.” James Hewitt, watching the royal couple on television as they danced together, felt mystified that Diana could seem so happy with the man he believed “
she now hated with a vitriolic intensity.”

The trip seemed to benefit Charles and Diana, at least temporarily; on their return to England
they appeared to their staff more calm and civil in private than they had been. But for Diana, periods of peace couldn’t last long: When she and Charles traveled to Klosters for their third skiing holiday in the Swiss resort, Diana’s bulimia was again severe. She was on the phone constantly to Hewitt, who sensed her mood was “
worse than her usual melancholy.”

On the afternoon of March 10, 1988, Diana and Fergie were together in their chalet, Diana ill with a cold and Fergie, who was four months pregnant, recovering from a spill she had taken earlier in the day. During a run down some little-used slopes, Charles and his friends Hugh Lindsay and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson were caught in an avalanche. Charles escaped without injury, but Lindsay was killed, and Palmer-Tomkinson was gravely injured with multiple fractures.

Charles acted heroically, staying by Palmer-Tomkinson’s side, digging her out of the snow with his hands, holding her head and talking nonstop to keep her conscious until the rescue helicopter arrived. But when he returned to the chalet he was shattered. As Diana recounted the day’s events to Penny Thornton, she had offered to comfort Charles, but he wanted to grieve alone. Instead of accepting his reaction as the predictable way he would deal with such strong emotions, Diana felt rejected. “
He just pushed me aside,” Diana told Thornton, who recalled, “She felt that if Charles had fallen into her arms … their relationship would have turned round completely.”

Diana took pride in the fact that she organized the logistics of their return to England. “I felt terribly in charge of the whole thing,” she recalled.
She insisted that they take Hugh Lindsay’s body home immediately to his widow, overruling Charles’s arguments for staying longer. Diana viewed her ability to make decisions and take control as a signal that she could fight Charles’s effort to make her feel “
so inadequate in every possible way.”

The tabloids used the occasion to praise Diana and condemn Charles anew.
IN THE MIDST OF GRIEF, OUR FUTURE QUEEN STOOD TALL
, read the headline in the
Daily Express
. “
We cried for Prince Charles, who wept for himself,” the
Express
said. “But nobody patted Diana on the 26-year-old back she held so straight…. Unlike her husband, she hadn’t been able to join in the struggle to save their friend.… Diana has suffered in silence from her
apparently now emotionally frozen husband, who has turned less to her than into his own private grief … At Klosters she showed … inner strength.”

The message could not have been lost on Diana, who read every word in the tabloids. In her own mythology, the Klosters tragedy took on outsize importance: “
the beginning of a slow process of awakening to the qualities and possibilities which lay within herself,” wrote Morton. Diana did deal effectively with people in distress, so her reaction to the accident was quite natural, just as those around her rose to the occasion. But her imagination magnified her actions to symbolize the confident and capable woman she wanted to be. After the weekend in Klosters, she was no more mature than she had been before, and her general behavior didn’t perceptibly change, but she did feel she had achieved something, even if it was at Charles’s expense.

Back in England with Hewitt, Diana wept and vented, and for the first time turned her anger toward her lover instead of Charles. She and Hewitt were at his mother’s home in Devon for the weekend when she felt he was ignoring her during a lunchtime picnic.
She lashed out, saying he had tired of her and considered her inadequate. When Hewitt explained that he was only trying to rest, she ran across the fields in a fury, and Hewitt didn’t pursue her. She eventually returned in a sullen mood. Only after fulsome reassurance from Hewitt—she was the “
most beautiful woman alive” and “of course he found her attractive”—did she settle down.

In recalling this period, Diana maintained that her years of bulimia had not affected her looks.
She said that her skin hadn’t been damaged, nor her teeth, despite years of acid from her forced vomiting.
But by 1988, people had begun to notice that underneath heavy makeup, her complexion appeared rough and unhealthy. Those particular observations didn’t make it into the tabloids, but after only glancing references to her figure for more than a year, the press began noting that she was again “
painfully thin, almost gaunt.”

In the spring of 1988, Diana “
suddenly woke up and realized what I was going to lose if I let go.” Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew actually jolted her awake by intervening with the sort of decisiveness Diana needed. After Diana finally confided in her old schoolmate about her bulimia, Carolyn warned that her gorging and purging were draining her system of vital minerals. Carolyn gave Diana an ultimatum: If she did not immediately call a doctor, Carolyn would call the press and tell them the entire story.

The threat worked. Diana phoned Dr. Maurice Lipsedge, a psychiatrist based at Guy’s Hospital in London who dealt frequently with eating disorders. It had been five years since Diana had abandoned her last round of
therapy, but she had a connection to Lipsedge, who had treated her sister Sarah. Diana was reassured by Lipsedge’s combination of sympathy and directness; she considered him a
“sweetheart, very nice.” When he asked her how many times she had tried to commit suicide, she blithely told him “four or five.” She agreed to his proposed treatment—an hour of talk therapy once a week, plus books to educate her on eating disorders. Lipsedge’s approach seemed effortless to Diana, who recalled that he promised she would be better in six months if she learned to keep her food down.

Diana told Andrew Morton in her 1991 interviews that her therapy with Lipsedge made her feel “
born again,” and her bulimia had “
finished” in 1989. In the next breath, she acknowledged that she still
suffered from the symptoms in 1990 when she binged and purged every three weeks instead of four times daily. The sad reality was that Diana gave up on Lipsedge, as she had with her previous therapists, in a matter of months. The eating disorders persisted, along with her other symptoms of psychological problems.

Oddly enough, in the spring of 1988, no one seemed to fully consider the example of Diana’s sister Sarah,
who only overcame her eating disorder after checking herself into a clinic for a six-week stay. But residential treatment was not an option for Diana, who feared the stigma of being considered mentally ill, and whose high profile guaranteed that word of her condition would be leaked and sensationalized by the tabloids.

Chapter 14

I
nherently wary of psychiatry, Diana could not bring herself to make the long-term commitment required for effective therapy. But she knew she needed help dealing with her mood swings, depression, and self-destructive behavior, and after she dropped Maurice Lipsedge, she began shopping for easy salvation in the alternative-therapy bazaar.