FROM AN EARLY age Diana felt she could foresee her future, and all her self-prophecies concerned being loved by a man. Through this man she would also fulfil an important mission in life. By marrying “up” and bringing more honour to the family, she would win her father’s love and approval. The truth was that Earl Spencer had an especially soft spot for Diana, who to him had seemed motherless from such an early age. However, it was Sarah upon whom his hopes of a prestigious union were centred, Sarah who had one of the most lavishly extravagant coming-of-age parties since before the Second World War, and Sarah whose growing friendship with the Prince of Wales had filled him with pride.
Much has been written about Diana but she remains an enigma unless it is understood how strongly the idea of marrying well had been impressed upon her as a young woman, how conditioned she was to the concept that her husband’s status would be the measure of her significance. Also, she was “the girl who was supposed to be a boy” and her sex had disappointed her parents. Her musicality had impressed neither Frances nor Johnnie, nor were they unduly concerned about her poor scholastic achievement. Her swimming and diving proficiency had won her father’s praise when she was younger, but Diana was obsessed with the idea that if she did not marry a man of some consequence he would be disappointed in her and she would lose his love.
Diana was in conflict with herself: one half of her believed she was fated for great things, the other that she was unworthy of love, especially from her parents, for she was the third daughter they never wanted. Her self-loathing manifested itself in her belief that Sarah, Jane and Charlie were more worthy than her of parental approbation and in her need to perform for her siblings the most menial tasks. She did not express this attitude with her Mends at West Heath. She was popular with the other girls because “one felt Diana sincerely cared about you.”
In Prince Charles she had perceived something in the way he looked at her, the timbre of his voice, the touch of his hand on her shoulder, on the night of the hunt ball at Althorp, that signalled his attraction to her. With this realization came an overwhelming sense of guilt, for she knew that Sarah was anticipating a more serious relationship developing between Charles and herself.
Diana returned for her last term at West Heath severely troubled. Her headmistress, Ruth Rudge, recalled that she had been disturbed about her new stepmother. “Life will never be the same for any of us [the Spencer children],” she complained. A girl in her form said, “She seemed confused. She told me, ‘I don’t want to leave here because I don’t know what will happen to me then.’ ”
Her piano teacher, Penny Walker, found added passion in the way Diana threw herself into her playing. She seemed able to work through some of her emotional conflict in these sessions. After a lesson or practice session, she would be much more herself, giggling, taking the stairs in West Heath’s handsome entrance hall two at a time, or on occasion sliding down the grand, old, highly polished banisters. When caught in the act she was contrite. “She was a most polite girl, inclined to tales of fancy that one really could not call lies. They were often told to cover her true feelings and not to hurt someone else, I thought,” a teacher said.
The one place she appeared at ease was when she was helping out with a group of disabled children in a nearby hospital. She learned quickly that it was important to sit or crouch so that she could look a child straight in the eye, and these children would smile if she touched them or let them play with her hair or hold her hand. She understood the need for physical contact with another person.
Sarah, Jane and Charlie had all done well at school and Diana felt unable to compete. Her parents thought of her low self-esteem as just “Diana’s shyness,” which she would outgrow. She blushed easily, giggled nervously, would lower her head and glance downward at any compliment. “Sarah is the pretty one in our family,” she would say. “I’m just pretty hopeless.” But, in fact, she was growing into quite an attractive young woman with a slow, winning smile that could warm an unheated room on the coldest day.
A compulsive reader, she did not like to finish a book without there being another to begin. Romantic fiction remained a favourite, but she enjoyed English history, and especially since moving to Althorp. (“So much to learn. So much to learn,” she told a schoolfriend, who commented on the stack of books on her bedside table.) Also despite her shyness, she had an amazing command of bon mots and a sometimes surprising natural wit: at sixteen, when accused of being too naïve, she replied, “I’m too tall for much to go over my head and too well bred to admit I know what you’re talking about.”
In December 1977, she resat and again failed her O-levels. University was out of the question, and her parents were in a quandary as to what should be done with Diana. They decided to send her to the Institut Alpin Videmanette, a finishing school in Rougemont, Switzerland. A few days after Christmas at Althorp, she boarded a plane for Geneva. On arrival she was met by a representative of the school and, with several other girls returning to Videmanette after the holiday, took the overheated mountain train through the narrow Alpine passes to their destination.
Although it was only a short distance from the glitzy, international resort of Gstaad, Rougemont, which was in a French-speaking canton, had a rural feel. There were fewer boutiques and outdoor cafés, and no grand hotels like Gstaad’s Palace to draw the rich, famous and infamous. The British film star David Niven and the American writer and political pundit William Buckley both owned chalets in Rougemont, but Gstaad was where people went for glamour and excitement, where the Aga Khan hosted lavish parties, heiresses had affairs with ski instructors, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton made headlines as they fought and made up in endless rotation.
Gstaad was also the winter home of Le Rosey, one of the world’s most prestigious private boys’ schools, often called the School of Kings. The Institut Alpin Videmanette consisted of a series of charming, dark-wood chalets and was almost its female equivalent. At Videmanette, students were prepared for their social débuts and to become good wives and hostesses. Few went on to university or into professional careers, but a large number married extremely well.
The winter sun was strong and its reflection on the shiny-fresh snow was dazzling as the train trundled up the tracks to Rougemont Diana’s companions chattered away to each other in French and made no effort to speak to her in English. Her French was haphazard and her accent poor. The girls were clannish and she felt a complete outsider, even more so when they arrived at the school. She was one of the few new “older” girls, and one of only nine English-speaking students out of an enrolment of seventy-two. French was the language of communication at Videmanette, and Diana was told that she would be given a crash course in the language. She shared a room with three girls who were honour-bound not to speak English with her and not to answer her unless she spoke to them in French. The idea was that her desire to communicate would help her to conquer the language barrier. It was a method that often worked—but not in Diana’s case.
Her room, though accommodating four, was small, low-beamed and smelled of aged wood and wax polish, a sweet smell like dried flowers. Her bed was tucked under an eave and the bathroom ceiling was so low that she was unable to stand erect in it She suffered episodes of claustrophobia whenever she was in her room and kept out of it as much as she could. She made one good friend in Sophie Kimball. French took up the greater part of their class time, and they also had courses in cooking, dressmaking and the social graces—table-setting, writing invitations and thank-you notes.
The school had a lodge higher up the mountain where the girls were given ski instruction and allowed free time to practise the sport. Diana treasured the time she spent on the slopes, breathing in the cool, crisp air. She said that, so high up, she experienced something close to a true religious awareness. She could hear the sound of her own breath and she felt at one with the vastness that surrounded her. She mastered the basics of skiing and was moved to a more advanced group.
Skiing gave her a sense of freedom, but as soon as she returned to the classroom she was miserable. Videmanette had no music or dance classes and little access to English books. However, on Saturday afternoons, she took the train into Gstaad and walked from the station down the village’s bustling main street, cowbells echoing from the surrounding snow-covered hills, to Cadanau’s, a stationery and bookstore that stocked English books, magazines and newspapers.* She spent most of her weekly allowance at Cadanau’s, and on chocolate and a sweet bread that was a speciality of the area. The remainder went on postage. “I wrote something like 120 letters in the first month I was there,” she later recalled of Videmanette. “I was so unhappy there I just wrote and wrote,” to her mother and stepfather, to her father (almost always marked “personal” and never co-addressed to Raine), to Sarah and Jane and her grandmother, Lady Fermoy. All the letters mentioned her unhappiness, and impressed upon the recipients her need to come home, that she “felt out place,” that it was “just too claustrophobic,” and, worse, boring.
Diana rose in the icy dawn and with the other girls had yogurt, muesli and hot chocolate every morning. Then, weather permitting, they went up on the slopes to ski. In the afternoon there were cooking, dressmaking and French classes, which she thought a waste of money. School fees, she complained, were astronomical. “I’ve learned how to make eight different kinds of potatoes,” she wrote to a former nanny, “all of them with gobs of butter and cream.” She was not actually homesick. After all, she had been living away from home for years and in a society of youngsters who were all separated from their families and accepted it as the norm. She simply hated the school and she envied Sarah and Jane, now an assistant editor at Vogue, who lived such exciting lives in London.
In fact, Sarah had been going through a difficult period. Her early flirtation with the Prince of Wales had come to nothing. She had then entered into a relationship with Gerald Grosvenor, soon to be the 6th Duke of Westminster, one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors, but just when she had been expecting a proposal, he had become engaged to the beautiful Natalia Phillips.
Sarah was devastated, and during the summer and autumn of 1977 struggled with the onset of anorexia nervosa. Eventually she went of her own accord to a nursing home in Regent’s Park where she was placed under the care of Dr. Maurice Lipsedge, a specialist in eating disorders.
Anorexia may be an unconscious cry for help. It is also brought on by feelings of extreme guilt and self-loathing. Sarah had lost first the interest of Prince Charles and then was rejected by a man she had been certain was about to propose. She looked on this as a terrible failure on her part. The idea that she must marry “up” had been stressed even more to Sarah, as the oldest daughter, than to her two younger sisters. Eating disorders often emanate from a feeling of having no control over one’s life. Food—bingeing and denying oneself its pleasure and sustenance—is something the individual can control. At the moment Sarah was rudderless and desperately in need of a stabilizing influence, a way of putting order back in her life.
After several months under Dr. Lipsedge’s intensive care, she began to feel better. Her eating disorder had not disappeared, but she had gained enough control over it to leave the clinic. Shortly afterwards she went to watch Prince Charles play polo at Smith’s Lawn. Her dramatic weight-loss had given the fine-boned contours of her face a haunting beauty, and Charles found himself still attracted to Sarah. Their friendship rekindled and they began to see each other again. The Prince was certainly aware of Sarah’s recent medical history, but when Sarah told him she was cured, he found no reason to doubt her.
In February 1978, while Diana was writing pleading letters from Videmanette, Sarah joined the Prince of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester* on a skiing holiday to Klosters, Switzerland. Sarah and the Prince had been an “item” in the international press for several months and there was much excitement at Diana’s school about the possibility of her having Prince Charles as a brother-in-law. Apparently Sarah had expected a proposal during this holiday and when it did not come she was disappointed. “If Prince Charles asked me to marry him, I would turn him down,” she vowed impetuously to a reporter on their return to London. And then added—disastrously, “I wouldn’t marry a man I didn’t love, whether he was a dustman or the King of England.”
It was an extraordinary public statement, and Charles was wounded. Sarah’s chance to make a marital connection with the Royal Family had ended. “Sarah had well and truly blown it,” one observer comments. “She had humiliated the Prince and broken quite a few upper-class taboos in one fell swoop. Never frighten the horses. Keep things within your circle. Keep your mouth shut in public. And never, but never, speak to the press.”
She might have been brashly indiscreet and highly emotional, but she was also a canny young woman and there were things about Charles that set up an alarm signal in Sarah. At the same time as he was with her he was receiving several calls each day from a close woman friend, the glamorous Australian, Dale, Lady Tryon, who had been in love with him since they had first met aged twenty-five—and not at a Geelong Church of England Grammar School dance in Victoria, South East Australia, aged eighteen, as has been written elsewhere.
“We met at a Buckingham Palace reception which Anthony [Tryon] took me to in 1973. It was love at first sight for me.” Kanga, as Charles called Dale, was the daughter of Barry Harper, a wealthy Australian publisher, notably of Vogue. Charles later claimed that she was the one woman who truly understood him, and she had strong influence over some of his personal decisions.
Fresh and fun and not in the least awed by him, Kanga was ten months older than Charles, blonde, vital, with a mature, curvy body, and a flashing smile. She had suffered a painful childhood: born with a mild form of spina bifida, she had been unable to walk until she was nine and spent three years in hospital. She was a valiant survivor and seemed now to be making up for all the time she had lost as a child. But the Prince was not ready for marriage and she subsequently married Tryon (a merchant banker and Old Etonian friend of Prince Charles, known as Lord Ummm for the way he finished sentences), and remained in England. Two years after their wedding Charles was godfather to their first son, also named Charles. Kanga and the Prince remained for years the best of friends. The Tryons’ marriage produced four children and began to founder. Sarah concluded that Kanga’s strong feelings for Charles were the underlying cause and that he was not immune to the attractive Lady Tryon’s overtures. Sarah knew she would only be second best if their relationship continued—so publicly rejected him.
Diana, of course, knew only that Sarah was going through a difficult time, and that she might be able to help if she was closer to her. This gave Diana yet another reason to return home. Finally, she convinced her parents that Videmanette was (1) a total waste of money, (2) that she was learning only how hurtful and snobbish her peers could be, and (3) that as they served so many fattening things she had gained an enormous amount of weight in the short time she had been there and would probably end up obese if she stayed. That did it In April, after only one term at the Alpine finishing school, she returned to London and her mother’s flat as the family prepared for a great event
Jane was to be married to Robert Fellowes, fifteen years her senior. William Fellowes, his father, had been the Queen’s land agent at Sandringham and Johnnie and Frances had known their future son-in-law since his youth. Robert had been secretary to Prince Charles and was now assistant secretary to the Queen. It was not the prestigious marriage that Johnnie would have chosen for his twenty-one-year-old daughter, although Robert’s future, if lacking an old title and a grand house, looked promising.
“We have known each other all our lives,” Jane told the press on the announcement of their engagement, “and have gradually grown closer.” Diana was surprised at her sister’s choice, for Fellowes was rather stiff, conservative in his attitudes and dress, and had been described by an American friend as “a consummate company man.” But she was thrilled at the prospect of being a bridesmaid and pleased that Jane seemed so happy.
The couple’s wedding, in the Guards’ Chapel at the Wellington Barracks in central London, was a grand affair with a reception at St. James’s Palace attended by the Queen Mother, who arrived with Lady Fermoy, the Duchess of Kent, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Although Jane was too caught up in the excitement of being a bride to notice, Diana was distressed by the hostility displayed between her parents, and by Raine’s overbearing presence and insistence on being included in all the family photographs. There was one nasty moment when Raine’s voice grew defiantly loud when she was asked by a photographer to step aside “as Peter Shand Kydd had gracefully done,” for a picture of the wedding couple and their parents. (She finally obliged.)
After the wedding Diana went to Althorp, but living in a house where Raine was mistress grew increasingly difficult for her, and although Johnnie had given the newlyweds a cottage on the Althorp estate as a wedding gift, Diana did not feel she could intrude on Jane and Robert so soon after their honeymoon. Finally, it was decided that she could stay at her mother’s flat in Cadogan Place. Frances and Peter were in Scotland, but Violet Collinson would be there to look after her and Sarah was close by. She was given six weeks in which to decide what she would do next.
By the end of that time she had chosen to work as a mother’s help to six-year-old Alexandra Whitaker, daughter of Major Jeremy Whitaker and his wife Philippa, who were friends of the Shand Kydds. They had a charming house in Hampshire, called Land of Nod, and Diana loved caring for Alexandra, playing with her, ironing her clothes and generally being a good companion. However, when the summer came and with it, on 1 July 1978, her seventeenth birthday, she renewed her pleas to be allowed to live in London, perhaps with Sarah. Her older sister did not think this was a good idea.
The sister whom Diana had idolized throughout her life now saw her as a nuisance and a threat, for Diana was maturing into an attractive young woman. She took Sarah’s rejection to heart: “She very much wanted to move in with Sarah and her flatmate, Lucinda Craig-Harvey,” a friend says. “She was willing to do anything to make it happen—even took on the job as a char for her at a pittance. She worked for them three days a week—scrubbing floors, washing dishes, cleaning lavatories, ironing and straightening closets. Not that Sarah was ever mean to her in any way. But she did take advantage of her good nature and slavey instincts—which Diana did nothing to discourage. It was not an easy time for her—but, then, when was there such a time for Diana? I’ve known her since our days at Silfield. She always felt like a piece of flotsam, in the way of everyone she loved, and Diana’s need to give love was even greater than her need to receive it.”
She spent the summer working at a series of odd jobs—nannying, house-cleaning for Sarah and some of Sarah’s friends, moving back and forth between London, where she stayed at her grandmother’s or her mother’s flat, and Althorp where Raine was immersed in turning the estate into a lucrative enterprise. Raine came at her job with a driving, tireless passion and iron will that during her years in politics had caused co-workers, friends and enemies to compare her with Margaret Thatcher, who was now leading the Conservative Party. Raine had “the same iron self-discipline, same determination, same dauntless energy, same blithe disregard for opposing views,” wrote Russell Miller, The Times correspondent.
Johnnie was especially glad that Raine had dealt with the inheritance tax liability for him. She had sold, by agreement with the Inland Revenue in lieu of the debt, four Van Dycks, several portrait drawings by Gainsborough (commissioned by the 1st Earl Spencer), furniture from Spencer House in London and twenty pieces of porcelain (distributed to eight different museums).* Now she was ruthlessly sorting through Althorp’s other great paintings to select a number for sale to pay for the refurbishment of Althorp, which was opened to the public every weekend during the summer.
As châtelaine of Althorp, Raine had a vast, rich archive at her disposal. Beside paintings, furniture and porcelain worth many millions, there was a rare cache of silver and gold, a collection of original manuscripts by Mozart and Beethoven, drawings, rare books and property. During the next decade Raine sold treasures from all these categories. Even the Spencer family archives were sold, by private treaty, to the British Library for £1 million.
As yet, the children did not know how far their stepmother would go in her sell-off of Althorp’s treasures, but Diana was deeply hurt to see the great family portraits that she so loved dispersed, and Raine’s inclination towards gold trimmings and scarlet velvet offended her. Of the four Spencer siblings she was, however, the only one to contain her anger. “Sarah resented me,” Raine told newspaper columnist Jean Rook, “even my place at the head of the table, and gave orders to the servants over my head. Jane didn’t speak to me for two years, even if we bumped in a passageway.” Then she added, “Diana was sweet, always did her own thing.” Charlie had a penchant for cruel jokes, once taking a bet that he could throw Raine into the swimming-pool at a dance at Althorp when she was wearing a magnificent ball gown. Raine just managed to slip out of his grasp inches from the pool and ran into the house shaking and furious. The four felt that Raine was making Althorp look too gaudy—“just like a summer pudding.” But Johnnie approved of everything she did and believed that the children and the press were being unfair and vindictive towards her. “He was as besotted with Raine as Edward VIII was with Wallis Simpson,” an observer said at the time. “He could see no wrong in anything she did. And she was treated unfairly. Yes, art that had been part of a great collection for over two hundred years had been sold off. And yes, the house had a gaudy look to it. But people forget that when Althorp was built, gold gilt and deep-pile red and purple velvet were all the style. Raine was restoring it according to the fashion of its original state.”
Earl Spencer revelled in showing off Raine’s work in the house to visitors and would greet paying guests at weekends and show them round, giving personal comments as he went along. “These rooms are best in the evenings,” he often said, “when they are candle-lit Quite marvellous!” The house had been opened first in 1954 and there is little doubt that it needed a good refurbishing: Jack Spencer had refused to change or replace anything, and almost no major repairs had been done in decades. “We decided to put up the scaffolding very soon after [we married],” Raine told Nicholas Wapshott of The Times. “We got the show on the road right away, no hanging about.”
Diana bristled at Raine’s brash way of putting things and her cloyingly coy manner with her father. “Johnikins!” Raine would say and glance at him seductively. His children and hers were seldom in the house as the same time, but when they were there was no love lost between them. Barbara Cartland visited frequently, powdered, perfumed and permed, wearing extraordinary clothes, mostly in bright pink. Mother and daughter resembled each other: both had a strong personality, both were high achievers—but the mother had a softer way with her, born of another and more gentle age perhaps. Diana still read her books and was pleased to see her.
In mid-September 1978, Diana spent the weekend near Sandringham at the family home of her childhood friend Caroline Harbord-Hammond, the daughter of Lord Suffolk. On Monday morning, 18 September, when all the guests were gathered for breakfast in the dining room, someone casually asked after Diana’s father.
Something mysteriously overcame Diana and she replied, “I’ve got this strange feeling that he’s going to drop down and if he dies, he’ll die immediately otherwise he’ll survive.” The room grew silent.
“Surely that can’t be so,” the woman said nervously.
Diana looked so upset that the subject was dropped. “Next day the telephone rang,” Diana told Andrew Morton, “and I said to the lady, ‘That will be about Daddy.’ ” It was. He’d collapsed. I was frightfully calm, went back up to London, went to the hospital, saw Daddy was gravely ill.” She was told that he was going to die, but she clung to her premonition that he would survive as he had not died immediately.
When he woke on that Tuesday morning Earl Spencer had not felt well. He was alone in his bed as Raine had gone into London to do some shopping and to meet her mother for lunch at Claridges. He had a violent headache and took two Disprin, followed by a simple breakfast of tea and toast, then dressed and walked over to his office, which was in another building about a hundred yards from the house. Walking was no longer easy for him as he had gained an enormous amount of weight recently, which was dangerous, he knew, with his high blood pressure, and the remembered warnings of Dr. Dalgliesh. He made some phone calls and signed a few cheques. Still not feeling well, he told Richard Stanley, who managed the estate, that he was going back to the main house. He had not gone more than a few yards when he collapsed. Stanley ran to him. Johnnie was ashen and having trouble breathing. Stanley said he would go for help, but Johnnie would not hear of it, so Stanley helped him to his feet. The two struggled towards the house. The butler seeing them approach ran to assist and Dr. Dalgliesh was called.
Johnnie had suffered a major stroke, and was taken to Northampton general hospital, a fifteen-minute journey by ambulance. On arrival he was unconscious. Within an hour Raine was by his side as doctors fought to save his life.
All four children converged on the hospital: Diana arrived from Norfolk, Charlie from Eton, and Sarah and Jane from London, to find Raine in full charge. By the next morning Johnnie had declined into a deep coma. His condition was complicated by the onset of pneumonia. Raine had him moved by ambulance to the National Hospital in London, where great advances with stroke patients had been made. Johnnie was placed on a life-support machine, and then had immediate, delicate and risky brain surgery.
He survived the four-hour operation and was returned to his room, but a discordant, tense atmosphere had settled on his family. He was still unconscious, in a critical condition, and Raine blocked the door to his room, refusing to let anyone enter. She took a bed at the hospital and was by his side constantly willing him to pull though. Their exclusion made the children furious, but Raine would allow no one but medical staff to enter his room, convinced that any outside influence would adversely affect him.
“She wouldn’t let us see Daddy,” Diana remembered. “[Sarah] took charge of that and went in sometimes to see him. Meanwhile, he couldn’t talk because he had a tracheotomy so he wasn’t able to ask where his other children were. Goodness knows what he was thinking because no one was telling him.”
Raine only once said anything negative that related to Johnnie’s condition, and that was addressed to a hostile, teenage Charlie who had been exceedingly curt with her. “If your father dies,” she told him, “I will be out of Althorp completely, the next morning.” Then she disappeared back into her husband’s room and the door closed with some finality behind her.
Still unable to communicate, Johnnie was transferred to the intensive-care unit at the Brompton Hospital in South Kensington where it was believed he might receive better long-term care. He was on the critical list for three weeks, unconscious and on life support. Once again Raine ordered that his children should not be allowed into his room. She claimed to friends that “The girls [the sisters] used to shout at her” at Johnnie’s bedside, and she “did not need teenagers throwing tantrums.” Diana insisted this had never occurred. But the damage done to family relationships with Raine during this time would be irreparable.
For several months Johnnie was unable to speak. Raine would sit by his bed, holding his hand, “hour after hour, week after week,” Johnnie later recalled, “holding my hand and talking about our holidays and my photography, things she knew I liked … She used to shout at me sometimes, bless her. “Can you hear me?” she’d yell. I nodded because I couldn’t answer. She was always there at my side and I could feel her great strength, her determination that I should live even when the doctors said she must lose me. Raine won.”
Diana was devastated by this tragic family drama. Never as verbal in her anger as her sisters and brother, she contained her deep resentment of Raine. By November, though her father had begun to show signs of improvement, he still could not speak and remained in the Brompton Hospital.
Before her father’s stroke, Diana had started cooking classes at a school in Wimbledon with no particular idea of how she would use what she learned. It had been at her mother’s suggestion and the classes were attended by other daughters of wealthy parents who were looking for something to occupy their time until the right marriage proposal came along. The other alternative had been a secretarial course, which Diana thought she would hate. The choice was obvious to her: she liked cooking and eating, and especially loved rich cream sauces—and was fined for constant sampling of the dishes she was preparing.
While her father remained in hospital, Diana stayed in London at her mother’s flat, commuting to the cooking school and returning each evening to the hospital to sit outside her father’s room. None of the family had attended any social gatherings during the first weeks of his illness, but in October Diana had received an invitation to a party in honour of Prince Charles’s thirtieth birthday, on 14 November, to be held at Buckingham Palace. Sarah was also to attend; her romance with Charles was over but the two remained friends. Sarah was puzzled as to why Diana had been invited and Diana herself could not explain it. She knew only that she had been thrilled to receive an invitation.
Fearful that she would anger Sarah by accepting, Diana asked her sister if she would mind. Sarah reluctantly agreed that she could go. It never seemed to have occurred to Diana that she had been sent her own invitation apparently because the Prince had wanted her to be present and that Sarah had no right to make that decision for her. She had no escort for the dance, and as she had gained weight between the cooking classes and the junk food she had eaten keeping vigil in the hospital, she had no dress that fitted. She went on a crash diet for a week but when she realized she had lost only two pounds, she grew desperate, terrified that her “pudgy look” would embarrass Sarah, that no dress could cover the ugliness of her body. Yet, somehow she knew that, despite her weight and her father’s precarious condition, she must go to the party. For the next two weeks she dieted, lost weight and got into the dress she had worn for a party to celebrate Jane and Robert’s engagement.
Diana was not exactly Cinderella going to the ball, but the evening had a romantic, prophetic tinge. She claimed she “wasn’t at all intimidated by the surroundings,” although she thought Buckingham Palace “an amazing place.”
It is, indeed. In many ways it is a monstrous, antiquated museum with interminable, unheated corridors. But there is a cold magnificence to it, a sense of history, of a privileged world. The state apartments and banquet rooms were all on the ground floor, which even so had to be reached by an imposing stone staircase, overlooking the rear gardens. There were 350 guests and well over thirty liveried footmen ministering to them. Massive floral arrangements surrounded the dance-floor. When Diana entered with Sarah and her escort, she was greeted by Prince Charles, who stood flanked by his equerries. At his side was his current ladyfriend, the blonde, bubbly film actress Susan George, who exuded a kind of kittenish sexiness as she glanced at him.
Charles seemed pleased to see Diana. He stared quite boldly at her daring neckline as she curtsied. “You’ve grown,” he said, and smiled.
“Oh, I hope not, sir,” Diana is reported to have replied.
There was no further contact between them during the evening, but Diana danced with several unattached young men. She had a true grace and a way of making her partners seem far better dancers than they were. “Had a very nice time at the dance,” she later commented. “Fascinating.” She had fallen under the spell of majesty.
Charles remembers her at this time as a bouncy, fun-loving teenager. His life, in contrast, had become highly pressured. The Queen, his country and the media were expecting him to find a bride as he had said he would by his thirtieth birthday.
The difficulty was that Charles was in love with one married woman and unable to live without another.
*Heidi Yersin, the headmistress at the Institut Alpin Videmanette added that, “Diana only ever went to the cinema [on Saturday afternoon] with the girls. They were allowed to go into Gstaad and meet up with the boys [from Le Rosey] but Diana never accompanied them.”
*Richard, Duke of Gloucester: only surviving son of Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who was brother of King Edward VIII and King George VI. The present Duke of Gloucester is married to the former Birgitte van Deurs.
*The Van Dycks were sold individually to the Tate Gallery, Albert de Ligne, Prince of Brabaçon and Arenberg, to the National Gallery, Viscountess Andover and Lady Elizabeth Thimbleby, to the York City Art Gallery, Penelope Wriothesley, wife of William, 2nd Lord Spencer, and Rachel de Ruvigny, to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Gainsborough portrait drawings were sold to a private collection.