Diana: In Pursuit of Love (9 page)

Yet, as she told Colthurst and, later, others in her intimate circle, she could not clearly remember if she had had any such conversation.

When she returned to Kensington Palace she contacted Sir Robert Fellowes and asked him what the Queen and Prince Philip were playing at. While he was sympathetic and told her that he had never realized how ‘awful’ her life was inside the royal family, he again confirmed that there was an incriminating tape of her conversation. More than that, he told her that the Prime Minister, John Major, had been informed and that she would be given a copy of the tape the following day. The next day Diana was understandably on tenterhooks as she waited for the axe to fall. But the Palace blade remained sheathed and the alleged tape was never made available to her. Instead, she was told later that, as the tape could not be used as evidence of her involvement with the book – the implication being that the recording had been made illicitly or its veracity was in doubt – the episode should be forgotten.

Shaken and disturbed, Diana now began to see the full extent of the opposition lined against her. If she wanted her freedom, she would have to fight, and fight skilfully. ‘I’m a threat, you see,’ she told her astrologer, Felix Lyle, ‘I’ve got to be very sprightly.’

She had succeeded in making herself heard. Now she faced a more difficult challenge, the search to find herself.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

The Comfort of Strangers

W
HEN
S
TEPHEN
T
WIGG
held Diana’s face in his hands for the first time, the feelings and emotions that emanated from his royal client alarmed him. He sensed, according to his notes, ‘a deep and abiding fear, flashes of intense anger, bordering on rage, crippling self-judgement, an extreme sadness, but most of all a profound sense of loneliness and overwhelming despair’.

Stephen Twigg, therapist, counsellor and masseur, first met the Princess in December 1988, when he went to see her in Kensington Palace. During the hour-long massage he gave her he saw the scars where she had disfigured herself and recognized, from his encounters with clients who were on the brink of taking their own lives, that here was a young woman in utter despair. ‘It was quite frightening as I have had experience in the past working with suicidal people,’ he said. ‘I could feel a woman who was definitely considering that life wasn’t worth carrying on with.’

He was so concerned that at their next session, when they felt more comfortable with each other, he invited her to make an affirmation, a powerful vocalization of faith in front of a witness. At his behest she repeated: ‘From this moment on I choose to be alive,’ a statement indicating a conscious choice about her life rather than a passive acceptance that life goes on. For the next seven years Twigg was on hand to observe those words become reality. His intervention had been successful. ‘He used to teach me
affirmations about myself [at a time] when I could never believe [in myself],’ Diana later acknowledged. ‘He said that if I wanted to get better I could. I never gave anyone else [that] credit.’

Twigg, who now lives in the south of France, was one of a disparate band of outsiders who, in the late 1980s, were admitted into her real life, charged with carrying the heavy burden of her unhappiness in secrecy. The astrologer Penny Thornton, introduced to Diana by Sarah Ferguson, was one of the first to see the flip side of the fairy tale, discovering a young woman who was ‘clearly angry, desperate, disappointed’, a far cry from the saccharine image of the popular photographic poses for the public. ‘She felt abused, rejected, betrayed, alone,’ said Penny remembering the first time she saw the Princess in her sitting room at Kensington Palace in 1984. ‘Prince Charles was the focus for much of that anger because she told me that the day before they married he told her that he didn’t love her. He told her that categorically.’

Another outsider to meet the Princess during her dark days was an acupuncturist, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, a former nun, who when she first met Diana in September 1989 saw a woman who ‘presented a very tormented landscape. Diana was very fragile, very low in energy and in extreme need of affection,’ she recollected. ‘Diana was constantly searching for love, for appreciation.’

Yet, bleak as Diana’s world presented itself, she had by the end of the 1980s, come a long way from what she called the ‘dark ages’ of her life inside the royal family: the time when she cut her body out of frustration; when she famously hurled herself down the stairs at Sandringham while pregnant with Prince William, because her husband had ignored her concerns about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles; and when her eating disorder was at its most pernicious.

A skiing tragedy at Klosters in Switzerland in the spring of 1988, in which a member of the royal party was killed in an avalanche, was a watershed for the Princess. Though suffering from flu, and shocked by the news of the death of a good friend, she was jolted into calm, sensible, decisive action. She packed their dead friend’s possessions and firmly discouraged her husband from
staying on to continue his skiing, insisting that they must accompany their friend’s body home.

Possibly emboldened by her own firmness – ‘I took charge there,’ she was to comment later – she sought to take charge of herself too, and, with a push from Carolyn Bartholomew, received medical help for her eating disorder. Not long after that, she was able to force a confrontation with her husband’s mistress at a party, remaining calm and self-controlled throughout. These achievements had combined to give her a greater sense of self-worth, a belief in herself that was bolstered and sustained by other affirmative actions, such as helping to nurse her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson, who eventually died of AIDS in 1991. Such shoots of personal recovery were nurtured by the reception she received from the public – she was particularly touched by the growing crowds of well-wishers who greeted her on public occasions – and by the stalwart support of a growing group of friends and advisers.

The publication of
Diana: Her True Story
in June 1992 blew open the secret little world of deception and illusion in the Palace and revealed to the public the millstone that had been carried for so long by those inside the freemasonry of the royal inner circle. As recounted in the previous chapter there was considerable anger and resentment within the royal circle at Diana’s ‘betrayal’, and among many people at the puncturing of the collective dream of monarchy; but there was also a deep sense of relief, amongst friends, courtiers and royal staff that the charade was over. In this epic drama of kings and queens, princes and princesses, the book was the literary equivalent of Gollum, the unlovely and unloved creature from Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, who none the less plays a critical part in resolving the titanic conflict between the forces of light and darkness. As crude and jolting as it was,
Diana: Her True Story
went some way to resolving a phoney royal peace that was causing crippling casualties all round.

Even before the book was published, lawyers from both sides of the marriage had been secretly negotiating a separation. The strain of maintaining the illusion of happy families had left everyone drained and exhausted, not least because the Princess, acutely
aware of the forces now ranged against her, had refused to go along with the pretence. ‘It’s so bloody dishonest, a damned farce,’ she declared repeatedly. That said, Prince Charles himself seemed to be dropping the charade, his behaviour becoming more blatant. In May 1992 the Princess went on an official visit to Egypt at the invitation of the President’s wife, Mrs Mubarak. The aircraft on which she was travelling had to make a detour to Turkey in order to drop off the Prince and his entourage, so that he could go on a cruise with some friends – one of them being Camilla Parker Bowles – while Diana went on to Egypt to carry out the tour solo. As the aircraft approached Cairo, she broke down in tears of self-pity, rage and sadness.

A Mediterranean cruise on board a yacht owned by the Greek billionaire John Latsis, which was unwisely billed as a ‘second honeymoon’ by Prince Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard, was an unmitigated disaster. Diana, who had only agreed to the holiday for the sake of her boys, was miserable and hated the pretence. She was, with reason, convinced that her husband was spending a great deal of time on the telephone to Camilla Parker Bowles, and she demanded to fly home early; this would have been very difficult to manage and she was eventually dissuaded by her bodyguard Ken Wharfe.

A few months later, in November 1992, it once again took the combined efforts of various courtiers – as well as considerable cajoling from James Colthurst – to convince her that she should go with the Prince on a joint tour of South Korea. As soon as the warring couple landed, their press secretary, Dickie Arbiter, waiting for them at Seoul airport, took one look at their body language and commented to a royal aide: ‘Oh, f—k, we’ve lost this one.’ Headlines referring to the sullen couple as ‘The Glums’ later endorsed his view. So when, on 9 December 1992, the then Prime Minister, John Major, announced the couple’s ‘amicable’ separation there was an audible sigh of relief inside the Palace.

The woman at the centre of the storm was calm, controlled and determined, brimming with humour and sunny spirits, a world away from the brooding malcontent of the autumn. In the days
following the announcement it was as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘I see you have bought yourself another German car,’ someone remarked on seeing her new Audi outside Kensington Palace. ‘Well, it’s more reliable than a German husband,’ Diana replied.

The impact went way beyond surface banter. Her bulimia, which tormented her in times of stress, was subdued; a sign of her inner strength and serenity. A triumphant three-day tour of Paris on her own, just before the announcement, had given everyone a tantalizing glimpse of how the Princess, unfettered and unencumbered, could perform on the world stage. ‘She glowed under the rapturous attention, responding as usual to the stimulus of public expectation by producing a flawless display of how to be a royal celebrity,’ her private secretary Patrick Jephson wrote in
Shadows of a Princess
. ‘Every gesture, every glance, every stop of every walkabout revealed a professional at the peak of her form.’ Exhilarated by her solo success and exulting in the heady sense of impending freedom, she enjoyed a late-night drive through the empty Paris streets with only her bodyguard Ken Wharfe for company. As they drove along the Champs-Élysées, she suddenly remarked, ‘By God, Ken,
this
is living.’

If the book had given Diana the chance to be heard, then the announcement, six months later, of the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales had presented her with the opportunity to be herself. Once the initial euphoria had subsided, Diana gradually came to realize that she faced a journey of self-discovery more challenging than anything she had hitherto encountered. ‘I am going to own myself now and be true to myself,’ she declared bravely. ‘I no longer want to live someone else’s idea of what I should be.’ Who was the person she saw when she looked in the mirror of her dressing room at Kensington Palace? Perhaps more importantly, who was the woman she would like to become? These were questions easier to ask than to answer. She had been barely out of her teens when she had married the Prince, inexperienced and impressionable (although perhaps not quite as malleable as Charles and his clique had hoped). As her friend and astrologer, Debbie Frank, pointed out, the days following her separation were
a time of re-evaluation and reassessment. ‘She had to really look at herself and where she was going. She only knew herself through her iconography, so she had to find out who the real Diana was.’

Diana was well aware that, because of her title and status, she had become a living icon, a real-life fairy-tale princess on whom the public could focus their hopes, and feed their starry-eyed dreams of princes and princesses. The famous photograph from the Spencer family albums showing the teenage Diana sitting engrossed in one of Barbara Cartland’s romantic novels demonstrated how far the young Diana was herself initially captivated by the idealized image of courtly love and romantic marriage. By the time of her separation, the spell had been savagely broken. ‘They [the public] are told there is this fairy princess with a bleeding tiara on her head and it is fairy-story stuff for them,’ she said bitterly during one of our interviews.

She had spent all her adult years in an institution where her life had been controlled – either by courtiers who managed her timetable and massaged her ego; by her bodyguard, who monitored her movements; or by the media, who defined her personality through bewildering distortion, unthinking contradiction and facile cliché. By and large, however, the media was the only day-to-day yardstick Diana had ever had to judge herself by.

‘The process of finding herself was very hard,’ James Colthurst observed. ‘For most of her adult life, decisions had been made for her – she was, to a degree, institutionalized. After the separation it became very much a question of her regaining control of herself and building momentum. The focus was always on trying to move
towards
something, rather than simply
away
from the royal family.’