IN HER OWN WORDS: PAIN OF A PRINCESS
It was 1991 inside Kensington Palace that Diana, Princess of Wales, decided to wrest control of the way she was portrayed and tell her own story. She would record a series of audiotapes about her life, and the inner turmoil she was suffering, just 10 years after her fairytale wedding to Charles, Prince of Wales.
The fairytale was no longer and she enlisted the help of her longtime friend Dr James Colthurst to help her tell the world about how and why the fairytale was falling apart.
Those tapes were subsequently passed to journalist and author Andrew Morton, who used them as the primary source for his bestselling 1992 book Diana: Her True Story.
Now, as the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel approaches on August 31, Morton is rereleasing the book as Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words, with a new foreword and encompassing the transcripts of those desperately sad audiotapes.
Extracts from the book and transcripts of the tapes Diana made in 1991, revealing her innermost thoughts and torment, as her marriage to the Prince of Wales crumbled, are being serialised in the UK’s Daily Mail. The book paints a portrait of a fragile young woman struggling to cope with the scrutiny of being thrust into the world spotlight as Princess of Wales.
Transcripts reveal her torment at her husband’s betrayal with Camilla Parker Bowles, to whom he sent a bracelet with their pet names for each other only days before he wedded Diana, how Diana’s eating disorder, bulimia, started soon after the pair was engaged and how her first suicide bid occurred soon after her own wedding.
On the tapes Diana pours her heart out to Colthurst, the intermediary who helped the tapes come into existence and then passed them, with Diana’s consent, to Morton.
In a 2004 interview with NBC, which had obtained clips from the tapes, Colthurst told how he had ridden his bicycle to Kensington Palace with a briefcase and, under the guise of lunch, had taped Diana. .
Morton wrote this week that he had interviewedi d the Princess by proxy, giving his questions to Colthurst who did six tape interviews with the Princess. The interviews provided a glimpse into Diana’s private world and reveal a lonely, tortured soul, haunted by her husband’s lover and a feeling that her own qualities were never revealed.
Of her wedding day, July 27, 1981, Diana told how she looked, in the church on her big day, for her rival, Camilla Parker Bowles.
“As I walked up the aisle, I looked for her (Camilla). I knew she was there, of course,” Diana said, telling of her love for Charles and how she couldn’t take her eyes off him. On the way out of the church she eyed Camilla.
“Walking back down the aisle, I spotted her – pale grey, veiled pillbox hat, saw it all, her son, Tom, standing on a chair. To this day, you know – vivid memory.”
And she revealed the heartache of her honeymoon, where Charles brought along a series of books by philosopher and adventurer Laurens van der Post, which he read and they analysed over lunch each day. The second part of the honeymoon was on the Royal Yacht Britannia. “By then, the bulimia was absolutely appalling: four times a day on the yacht. Anything I could find, I would gobble up and be sick two minutes later – very tired. So, of course, that s 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. I was so tired, for all the wrong reasons.” The couple moved to Balmoral in Scotland for the third stage of their honeymoon and the torment continued.
“I dreamt of Camilla the whole time. I was obsessed by Camilla totally. I didn’t trust (Charles) – thought every five minutes he was ringing her up, asking how to handle his marriage.”
By October, Diana had become thin and made the first o of her suicide attempts.
“I got terribly, tet terribly thin. People st started commenting: ‘Y ‘Your bones are shs showing’. By October I was in a very bad way. I was so depressed and I was trying to cut my wrists with razor blades. It rained and rained and rar rained. I came down e early (to London) to se seek treatment, not b because I hated B Balmoral, but because I w was in such a bad way. Anyway, I came down here. All the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of came, trying to sort me out. Put me on high doses of Valium and everything else.”
Diana revealed in the tapes that the bulimia had started the week after she and Charles were engaged.
“My husband put his hand on my waistline and said, ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered something in me. And the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate. I remember the first time I made myself sick. I was so thrilled because I thought this was the release of tension. The first time I got measured for my wedding dress I was 29 inches around the waist. The day I got married I was 23.5 inches. I had shrunk into nothing from February to July.”
In the tapes Diana tells that finding out she was pregnant with William was a godsend.
“In those days, my greatest pleasure was that I was lucky enough to have a baby on the way.”
She was desperate to make Charles proud of her, battling through morning sickness and her bulimia, and meeting demands to continue her royal duties in a tour of Wales.
“People tried to put me on pills to stop me from being sick. I refused to risk the child becoming handicapped as a result. So sick, sick, sick, sick, sick. And this family’s never had