Diana in Search of Herself by Sally Bedell Smith

Author:Sally Bedell Smith [Smith, Sally Bedell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-82203-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

When Diana and Charles shared a “cozy supper” at Highgrove to mark their tenth anniversary on July 29, 1991, Diana had already embarked on an enterprise that would have profound consequences for her and her marriage. Two weeks earlier she had begun a series of tape-recorded interviews for Andrew Morton’s book. “She thought she was a wise soul,” her friend David Puttnam said, “and she thought she was a clever game player … I don’t think she was…. I think it was just pure instinct…. Once or twice she got it horribly, horribly wrong.”

Besides her fixation on exposing Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana was still apprehensive about the Squidgy tape. She had also been hearing reports that some of Charles’s friends were calling her the “mad cow” (after a brain disease causing erratic behavior) at fashionable dinner parties, and she sensed what her friend Vivienne Parry called “a huge amount of hostility … from those within the Palace … not just the royal family but those in the establishment at the Palace.” Parry said Diana believed there was a “whispering campaign: This woman is a cracked vessel. This woman is potty. This woman is a danger to the royal family.” Diana later told her friend Roberto Devorik that she had even approached the Queen and Prince Philip for help during this time, only to be told that “everything was in her imagination and she should consult a psychiatrist and maybe go to a psychiatric cure.”

Diana told friends that she believed the Queen should have intervened to end Charles’s affair with Camilla and to help Charles and Diana stay together. Diana’s frustrations were understandable, but her expectations were unrealistic given the nature of the royal family. “I don’t think Camilla was regarded as a big threat in the royal family,” a source close to the family said. “It is easy with hindsight to say, ‘Why not send them away [by arranging to transfer the couple to a foreign military post]?’ Really, the royal family saw an impossible marriage and figured it was better for Charles to have a shoulder to cry on. But no one thought it would break up the marriage. They thought that for centuries the royal family and the aristocracy had had mistresses, and people went on with their marriages and their duties.”

In the summer of 1991, Diana felt that “the lid was being put down on her,” Morton said. “She was terrified she would be publicly labeled an impossible lunatic,” one of her friends recalled, “and if so, she could lose a fight over custody. She was terrified of character assassination and angry that some of her own hanky-panky would be released without the extent of Charles’s infidelity revealed.” Still suffering from bulimia and depression, Diana was “at the end of my tether,” as she said on Panorama.

By unhappy coincidence, Diana sat for another portrait—her tenth—during this period, and the artist, Douglas Anderson, could not avoid capturing what he called her “horrible sadness” on canvas. It was “the very worst time,” he recalled of her five sittings over several weeks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.