Diana in Search of Herself (23 page)

Edwards read her body language correctly, because Diana was dreading Charles’s meeting with Camilla the next day. That Monday, as he was delivering the bracelet, Diana had lunch with Sarah and Jane,
and later recalled telling her sisters that she couldn’t go through with the wedding, to which they replied, “Well, bad luck, Duch, your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out.” Diana incongruously recalled being pleased by this response because her sisters reduced her anguish to a laugh. In such exchanges, Diana showed how she could shift quickly from a mood of serious distress to one of jocularity, causing others to feel puzzled about which signals they should heed.

Later, Diana and Charles went to St. Paul’s Cathedral for their final wedding rehearsal, this time under the television lights. Afterward she broke down again. “
The tension had suddenly hit me,” Diana recalled. “I sobbed my eyes out. Absolutely collapsed, and it was collapsing because of all sorts of things, the Camilla thing rearing its head.” Reinhold Bartz, the husband of Diana’s first cousin Alexandra Berry, later said that Diana’s distress
continued during a small reception in the early evening for family and friends. He said her “
eyes were swollen as if she’d been crying,” leading him to conclude that “she had cracked under the strain.”
At a grand ball given by the Queen that evening, Diana was all smiles once more as she and Charles greeted well-wishers at the top of a staircase.

That night, “
in the hours leading up to his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer, Prince Charles lay in bed at Buckingham Palace with Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles,” James Whitaker announced on the first page of a book he wrote about the Wales marriage in 1993. Calling Charles’s actions “the grossest deceit on his future wife,” Whitaker asserted that “Diana was simply there to make a marriage of convenience.” According to Whitaker, Charles had taken Camilla to his bed on Monday, July 27, while Diana slept at Clarence House following the Queen’s ball.

It was one of the most damaging charges made against the Prince of Wales, and, by all reliable accounts, it was wrong. Whitaker cited two sources for his information: an unnamed informer and Stephen Barry, who was dead by the time the book came out. But in his own book,
Royal Service: My Twelve Years as Valet to Prince Charles
, published in 1983, Barry had written, “
Buckingham Palace was totally unsuitable for anything secret to take place.” Michael Colborne, who was part of the team working night and day at Buckingham Palace to prepare for the wedding, said the assignation “
didn’t happen, that is for certain. It couldn’t have happened without a lot of people knowing. It would have been impossible—and suicidal. It was not in the Prince’s character to do something like that.”

Camilla was at the ball that Monday night with her husband, Andrew,
who later denied to Nigel Dempster that his wife had stayed at Buckingham Palace.
What’s more, Diana and Charles left the ball together, and she slept in her apartment at the Palace as usual, not Clarence House.
The following night, her wedding eve, Diana did move to the Queen Mother’s residence, and after the evening’s fireworks celebration,
Charles stayed up late to talk with Susan Hussey. As he looked out the windows of Buckingham Palace, Charles was “
in a contemplative mood,” according to Dimbleby. He was “not at all elated, but aware that a momentous day was upon him,” and he was “clear about his duty and filled with concern for his bride at the test she was to face.” When Charles was back in his room, he watched the people gathered on the steps of the Victoria Memorial, singing “Rule Britannia.” “
It really was remarkable,” he recalled in a 1985 television interview. “I found myself standing in the window with tears pouring down my face.”

Like the royal train fabrication, the prewedding assignation story leached into the mythology of the Prince and Princess, and Diana tormented herself by taking it to heart. As early as March 1986, when Diana first consulted astrologer Penny Thornton, she recounted a variation of the
story, saying that not only had Charles “
spent the night before the wedding with this woman,” but that he had told Diana, the same day, “categorically that he did not love her”—an assertion Diana would later disavow.

Diana was distraught the night before her marriage, although she hid her worries from Jane, who stayed with her at Clarence House. She had a severe bulimic attack, eating “
everything I could possibly find, which amused my sister.” Neither Jane nor anyone else could begin to grasp Diana’s problem. “It was very hush-hush,” Diana recalled. “I was sick as a parrot that night.”

Her wedding day was no less emotional. Diana’s later description was typically equivocal, one moment expressing happiness at the adoration of the crowds, the next saying,
“I don’t think I was happy.” She described her “deathly calm” and sense of dread as a “lamb to the slaughter,” yet said she was “so in love with my husband that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I just absolutely thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.” She remembered that she had concentrated on guiding her father—unsteady from the damage done by his stroke—up the aisle, but she also said she had been searching for Camilla. When Diana finally found her, she saw a “
pale gray, veiled pillbox hat, saw it all, her son Tom standing on a chair. To this day … vivid memory.” It was her only sighting of Camilla that day, because at Diana’s request, Camilla and Kanga Tryon had been excluded from the guest list for the “wedding breakfast” (really a luncheon) following the ceremony.

Years later, when asked about the worst moment of her life, Diana made a chilling comment about her wedding day: “
The day I walked down the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral, I felt that my personality was taken away from me, and I was taken over by the royal machine.” At a time when she might have experienced love, happiness, and exultation at her position in the world, she could only recall feeling utterly defenseless.

To family and friends, as well as to the press and the public, Diana projected an impressive serenity. Charles Spencer remarked that she was “
very composed … happy and calm.” Frances, who told her children after the ceremony, “Now we can go back to normal life,” also observed that her daughter seemed “
incredibly calm and unfazed by it all. I really don’t think she suffered any nerves.” But sharper eyes might have spotted a manic edge to her behavior. After the wedding breakfast, the photographs, and the appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony before thousands of well-wishers,
Diana paused on the platform of the Waterloo train station and impulsively kissed Sir “Johnnie” Johnston, comptroller to the Queen, and Lord MacLean, the Lord Chamberlain, the two senior officials who had organized the wedding. It was a distinctly unroyal gesture that, for all its poignant sweetness, summed up in an instant the unpredictability that would increasingly define Diana.

Chapter 9

C
harles and Diana spent a long stretch of time together at the beginning of their marriage—a two-week Mediterranean cruise on the royal yacht
Britannia
, followed by two-and-a-half months at secluded Balmoral, Charles’s favorite retreat. It seemed an ideal plan. Without the interruptions of Charles’s duties or the intrusions of the press, they could build their relationship and develop the shared values and interests that sustain a happy marriage over the years.

By all outward appearances, the cruise was a great success. As Diana wrote to her former nanny Mary Clarke, “
I adore being married and having someone to devote my time to.” When they boarded in Gibraltar, the newlyweds stood on the aft deck and waved to the cheering crowd, Charles holding Diana tightly. Lady Hassan, wife of Gibraltar’s chief minister, was touched that Diana was so overcome by emotion “
she was almost in tears.” The only other public glimpse was in Egypt, where Charles and Diana disembarked, smiling and waving, to dine with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and his wife—after which Diana unexpectedly kissed each of them good-bye.

Charles’s valet Stephen Barry, one of four private staff aboard, gave an eyewitness account of the couple’s days together that conjured tranquillity and harmony. They “
spent most of their evenings alone on the royal deck,” he reported, “and we never knew at what time they went to bed.” Charles and Diana often had “intimate” meals together in their sitting room and watched videos after dinner, including tapes of their wedding. Many days they went off to deserted beaches for picnics, swimming, and sunbathing. The crew of more than 200 men, noted Barry, at all times tried “to keep a discreet distance.” While Charles rarely left his deck, Diana frequently roamed around, giggling and chatting with the sailors and snapping photographs.
She joined in sing-alongs with the crew and once even played “Greensleeves” on the piano for the delighted men.

For reasons no member of the
Britannia
crew could possibly have fathomed, Diana was actually in a bad way.
When she and Charles were alone together, she would suddenly flip into different moods, from extreme anguish to extreme anger. Diana’s sporadic depression turned chronic, and, unknown even to Charles, her bulimia became
“appalling,” as she later described it, “rife, four times a day on the yacht.” Ironically, Diana fell apart when she was under minimal external pressure; the hacks couldn’t reach the royal couple, and she scarcely had to appear in front of crowds. (Diana later said she hated the strain of having to entertain the ship’s officers at dinner.) But the sharp contrast between her public and private selves that had emerged during the engagement now settled into a disturbing pattern.

Charles found it difficult to know what would set Diana off. With almost touching obliviousness,
he had brought a stack of books for his enjoyment and Diana’s edification during the honeymoon: works by Laurens van der Post, an elderly mystical philosopher who had become a guru to Charles, and by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, another of Charles’s favorites. Charles assumed that,
as with his sporting pursuits, Diana would enjoy sharing the books that he loved. On the second night, Charles produced his books, to the dismay of Diana, who called it the “
worst moment” of the honeymoon. By her account, his Pygmalion-style effort “slashed” her “tremendous hope” (for happiness, presumably) and created a “grim” atmosphere. According to Diana, Charles insisted on discussing his latest reading with her every day at lunch. Later, at Balmoral,
Charles would read aloud from van der Post and Jung. But reading aloud from treatises on spiritualism and psychology was far removed from Diana’s own marital reverie: “
the idealized bride, cooking suppers and darning socks for her husband.”

Charles was no intellectual, but he had developed a searching intelligence. He earnestly probed spiritual puzzles, dabbled in psychology, and enjoyed debating theories of environmental and social policy. He was fundamentally serious-minded, while Diana had superficial interests and no inclination to explore weighty topics. She also had an inferiority complex about her intelligence, and was easily cowed by bright people. “
When you began on abstract ideas,” recalled Archbishop Robert Runcie, “you could see her eyes clouding over, her eyelids become heavy.” But Runcie also grasped how to draw Diana out, an insight that eluded Charles and his family: “It was a matter of encouraging her through talk about people, about personalities, and she was very receptive to that.”

Still, even the gap in their intellects might have mattered little if Diana or Charles had been able to nourish the other. Both of them wanted the
marriage to succeed—Diana to avoid going through a traumatic divorce, and Charles to fulfill his duty. “Marriage is something you ought to work at,” Charles had said several years earlier. “I intend to work at it when I get married.” Yet neither had the temperament to accommodate the other’s needs. “
She didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand her,” said Michael Colborne. What’s more, Diana and Charles were far more interested in being understood than trying to understand.

Since his school days, Charles had savored solitude and privacy. He required a measure of tranquillity in his life that Diana couldn’t comprehend.
Diana had tried joining him in salmon-fishing at Balmoral, but was too impatient to endure standing for hours in a chilly river. Nor did she retain the tolerance she had shown during their courtship for sitting silently during his extended periods of quiet contemplation. On their honeymoon, Charles was perfectly content to stay in his cabin writing long letters or curled up with one of his books, reading. “
Diana dashes about chatting up all the sailors and the cooks in the galley, etc., while I remain hermitlike on the verandah deck, sunk with pure joy into one of Laurens van der Post’s books,” he wrote to one friend, unwittingly emphasizing the gulf between them.

Diana wanted Charles’s undivided attention, and misread his preoccupation as rejection. Such fears reflect a common anxiety, but only the most deeply disturbed would act out their worries the way Diana did: “
Anything I could find I would gobble up and be sick two minutes later.… That slightly got the mood swings going in the sense that one minute one would be happy, the next blubbing one’s eyes out. I remember crying my eyes out on our honeymoon.” Charles remained mystified by Diana’s mercurial moods, but he blamed postwedding nerves and assumed her misery would recede.