Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (11 page)

Those hopes, harbored by the royal family, the nation, the monarchy, and the world, would deflate soon after the wedding cake was cut. From the start, the union of Charles and Diana was taxed by the expectations and demands of royalty, a rushed engagement with little history between them, the rash hunger of the paparazzi, and the most proletarian of problems: another woman, Camilla Parker Bowles. Princess Diana struggled to connect with her husband, live up to the requirements of Buckingham Palace, and handle the reality that “there were three of us in this marriage,” as she famously said years later. Despite her popularity, her dazzling looks, and the accolades she earned for her sympathetic outreach to sick and dying people around the globe, Diana spent much of her time in the palace unhappy and even, at times, suicidal.

A princess is idealized as beautiful, glittery, and perfect, not prone to mental health disorders. Isolated and feeling gravely misunderstood, Diana found solace by turning inward. As she later admitted in a widely watched television interview with Martin Bashir, broadcast by the BBC in 1995, Princess Diana succumbed to self-injurious behaviors by cutting her arms and legs—and to the eating disorder bulimia nervosa, which she battled for years. She felt neglected, Diana said, at times when she needed support the most. She filled her stomach with food as a way to comfort herself. “It's like having a pair of arms around you,” she later recalled.

Did Diana's troubled marriage and the extraordinary expectations thrust upon her trigger her mental health battles? Or was she destined to turn on herself at some point in her life, even if she'd never set foot in Buckingham Palace? We will never know. What is clear, though, is that mental illness does not discriminate. “For all the status, the glamour, the applause,” Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, said at her funeral in 1997, “Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good
for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.”

T
HE
D
IANA
-C
HARLES FAIRY TALE WAS ROOTED
in an age-old fantasy modernized and glorified by Disney: A girl from ordinary circumstances meets her Prince Charming, falls madly in love, and is swept off to a castle, where she is anointed with a glittering tiara and lives happily ever after. “She rides to St. Paul's as a commoner,” one of the television commentators remarked as Diana made her way to the church on her wedding day, “and she comes back as the third lady in the land.”

Diana, though, was no run-of-the-mill British citizen. Born on July 1, 1961, at Park House in Norfolk, England, Diana Frances Spencer was the third daughter of Frances Roche and John Spencer, both of whom came from upper-crust British families. Frances's father, Maurice, held the title of fourth Baron Fermoy, an honor dating back to his family's Irish heritage; he was a close friend of King George VI. Frances's mother was the daughter of a baron herself, and served as Queen Elizabeth's lady-in-waiting for more than 30 years. The Spencer family, meanwhile, crossed bloodlines with King Charles II and King James II and were leaders of the Whig aristocracy, which ruled England in the 18th and 19th centuries. Diana's father served as personal assistant to both King George VI and Queen Elizabeth early in his life, and he would later succeed his father as the eighth Earl Spencer, an honorary title dating back to 1765. When Frances Roche and John Spencer were married at Westminster Abbey in 1954, the queen topped their guest list.

Although Diana was born into great social status and wealth, her childhood was marred from the start. To begin with, she was
a girl. By the time Frances became pregnant with Diana, she and Johnnie, as her husband was called, were under ample pressure to produce a male heir to inherit the Spencer title. The couple already had two daughters, Sarah and Jane, and they had recently lost a son, John, who died within hours of his birth. Diana, born just 18 months later, was declared a “perfect physical specimen” by her father, but she always believed her arrival to be a disappointment. They were “crazy to have a son and heir and there comes a third daughter,” she said in one of the famed tape-recorded interviews she provided to British journalist Andrew Morton, which were later printed in his best-selling book,
Diana: Her True Story
. “What a bore,” she imagined them saying, “we're going to have to try again.” The biographer Sally Bedell Smith speculated that Diana's psychological struggles may have stemmed from her very existence. “The nub of Diana's insecurity,” Smith writes in
Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess
, “was her nagging belief that had John survived, she would not have been born.”

The Spencers did, finally, succeed in having a son, Charles, who was born three years after Diana. But by then their marriage had begun to unravel. Theories abound about what contributed to the early stages of its demise: the pressure of producing a male heir; baby John's death; the ferrying of Frances to fertility doctors after Diana's birth to see why she was unable to produce a healthy boy; Johnnie's temper; Frances's restlessness with life in rural Norfolk. As with any relationship, there was likely a tangle of reasons. Both said later that they had simply drifted apart.

Within a few years, however, the marriage suffered irreparable damage. In 1966, Frances attended a London dinner party with her husband, where she met Peter Shand Kydd, a former sheep rancher in Australia and the wealthy heir to his father's wallpaper
business. One year later, after a group ski vacation in Europe and a series of secret rendezvous with Kydd in a rented apartment, Frances admitted to an affair and asked her husband for a separation. In 1969, Frances and Johnnie were officially divorced on grounds of adultery, and Johnnie was granted custody of the children, who would visit their mother on weekends. A rotation of nannies hired to care for Diana and Charles (their two older sisters were off in boarding school) did not sit well with the youngsters. When they didn't like them, “we used to stick pins in their chair and throw their clothes out of the window,” Diana later admitted. “We always thought they were a threat because they tried to take Mother's position.”

There is no evidence that a single negative experience leads to an eating disorder, but adversity early in life can increase a child's vulnerability. Diana's youth was not devoid of joyful experiences. Park House, which was leased to Diana's grandfather Maurice by King George V, was a rambling estate in the country where the Spencer children fed trout in the lake, swam in the pool, played in a tree house, and rode horses, according to biographer Morton. But none of that could make up for the turbulent aftermath of her parents' breakup and the loss of her mother's love and nurturing on a day-to-day basis.

Diana, who was six when her parents separated, spoke openly about the anguish she suffered as a young girl. In the reminiscences she shared with Morton, she recalled hearing her brother, Charles, “crying for my mother” at night. Too terrified of the dark to get out of her bed, however, she was unable to help. Her father, whom a friend later described as “crestfallen” about the end of his marriage, according to biographer Smith, was never able to talk openly about the divorce with his children. Diana's mother, meanwhile, was often weepy, especially when it was time for Diana and
Charles to leave after their weekend visits. “I remember Mummy crying an awful lot and every Saturday when we went up for weekends, every Saturday night, standard procedure, she would start crying,” Diana recalled. “What's the matter, Mummy?” Diana would ask, and her mother would say, “Oh, I don't want you to leave tomorrow,” a response Diana described as “devastating” for a young child. “It was a very unhappy childhood,” she said.

Like so many children of divorce, Diana felt jostled between her parents. She later described “the trauma of going from one house to another” during the holidays, and she worried about showing an uneven allegiance to one or the other. Even a seemingly minor fashion decision could erupt into an agonizing display of loyalty. When she was chosen to be a bridesmaid for a cousin's wedding, Diana recalled, her parents gave her two different dresses to wear to the rehearsal: a green dress from her mother, a white dress from her father. “I can't remember to this day which one I got in,” she said, “but I remember being totally traumatized by it because it would show favouritism.” She comforted herself with a menagerie of stuffed animals, which took up much of her bed. “That was my family,” she said.

People with eating disorders often have low self-esteem, a feeling of unworthiness and incompetence, and this was clearly true for Diana. Although she was a talented athlete—she excelled in swimming and diving and hoped to become a ballerina, until she grew too tall—she often felt out of place and defeated by her inability to excel intellectually. She also felt “horribly different” early on in school, she later said, for being the only child with divorced parents. Diana was sent off to a preparatory school, Riddlesworth, at the age of nine; three years later, she was accepted at West Heath, an elite boarding school that her older sisters had attended in Kent, England. Although the school was not known for its intellectual rigidity, nor were students expected to pursue
college degrees at that time, Diana felt insecure about her capabilities. “At the age of 14, I just remember thinking that I wasn't very good at anything, that I was hopeless,” she said.

Diana did manage to acclimate, make friends, and enjoy many of her nonacademic pursuits, including tennis, piano, and visits with patients at a nearby mental health facility. But she could never live up to her siblings' academic achievements. Her sisters did well at school, and her brother, to whom she felt closest, was a high achiever. “I longed to be as good as Charles in the schoolroom,” she said. Instead, Diana failed her O-level exams, the standard tests required for graduation, not once but twice—a shortcoming that the media delighted in sharing. She made fun of herself, too, once telling a young boy that she was “thick as a plank,” a comment that reporters served up with fanfare and which she later said she regretted.

Before her transformation from teenager to Princess of Wales, Diana enjoyed a few fleeting years of happiness as a single girl in the city. In 1978, the year she turned 17, Diana began living in London, initially working in temporary jobs as a nanny and waitress and then as a kindergarten assistant, where she thrived being around young children. For the first time, she enjoyed the freedom of independence. She liked socializing at restaurants and dinner parties, and she reveled in the fun of sharing an apartment with roommates. “I loved that—it was great,” she recalled. “I laughed my head off there.” She did not, according to her accounts, indulge in serious romantic relationships with boys. “I had never had a boyfriend. I'd always kept them away, thought they were all trouble—and I couldn't handle it emotionally,” she said. Whether or not her hesitation stemmed from her parents' divorce is impossible to know, but the instability she felt after their breakup may have made her anxious about relationships in general. And there was
another reason for holding off. In her interviews with Morton, Diana said she believed that she was destined to marry someone important. As a result, she said, “I knew somehow that I had to keep myself very tidy for whatever was coming my way.”

And what was coming her way? A prince, a castle, and a life that would exacerbate her emotional volatility and foster debilitating mental illness. A fairy tale combusted.

D
IANA MET
P
RINCE
C
HARLES IN
1977, when she was 16 years old and he was turning 29. Diana's older sister, Sarah, was dating the prince at the time—the two families had known each other through aristocratic circles—and Sarah had invited him for a pheasant shoot on the grounds of the family home in Althorp, where the Spencers had moved from Park House several years earlier. “I remember thinking what a very jolly and amusing and attractive 16-year-old she was,” Prince Charles later said in a formal television interview after their engagement. Diana's first thought about Charles: “pretty amazing.” He was, after all, the most eligible British bachelor—heir to the throne, next in line to be King of England. In her later reminiscences, however, Diana's assessment was far more blunt, tempered by her sister's relationship with Charles and her own lack of confidence. “God, what a sad man,” she recalled. “My sister was all over him like a bad rash, and I thought, ‘God, he must really hate that.' I kept out of the way. I remember being a fat, podgy, no makeup, unsmart lady.”