PRINCESS DI’S DESPAIR
Her miserable life exposed
It was the book that shattered the fairytale. When Diana: Her True Story was first published in 1992, its claims that the Princess of Wales suffered from an eating disorder and had tried to kill herself caused shock waves.
There was also outrage at the allegations Prince Charles had been cheating on his wife with his longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles. Author Andrew Morton was accused of making it all up and some stores banned the book.
But what nobody knew then was that Diana had collaborated with Andrew. A mutual friend, Dr James Colthurst, recorded conversations with the princess at Kensington Palace, asking her questions sent by Andrew, and the tapes were then handed to the writer.
Andrew later said, “When I first heard the stuff, I did think, ‘My God, this is going to create a firestorm.’” He also says it was ironic that a book written with “Diana’s enthusiastic cooperation was being piously boycotted on the suspicion it was a pack of lies.”
When Diana and Charles split up later that year, people began to realise the claims weren’t fabrications after all. However, it wasn’t until after Diana died in 1997 that the true extent of her involvement was revealed. Now, on the 20th anniversary of her death in a car crash in Paris, the book has been re-released, this time with the inclusion of direct transcripts of those interviews.
It is moving to read, in Diana’s own words, about the anguish she went through. She was well aware before she married Charles that he was still carrying a torch for Camilla. On her wedding day, as she walked up the aisle of St Paul’s, she scanned the crowd for one person. “I was looking for her [Camilla]. I knew she was there.”
In the tapes, Diana says she and Charles had had numerous discussions about Camilla. “I once heard him on the telephone in his bath on his hand-held set, saying, ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’
“I told him afterwards that I had listened at the door and we had a filthy row.”
She became bulimic the week after their engagement was announced in February 1981. “[Charles] put his hand on my waistline and said, ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off 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 was measured for my wedding dress, I was 29 inches around the waist. The day I got married, I was 23½ inches. I had shrunk into nothing from February to July.”
On the tapes, Diana talks about sobbing her eyes out two days before the wedding and having a bad bout of bulimia the night before.
“I ate everything I could possibly find, which amused my sister [Jane]. Nobody understood what was going on. It was very hush-hush. I was as sick as a parrot that night. It was such an indication of what was going on.”
She woke at 5am on the day of the wedding and was “very, very calm – deathly calm. I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter. I knew it and couldn’t do anything about it.”
The honeymoon was a disaster. By the time the newlyweds arrived on the royal yacht Britannia, her bulimia was “rife – four times a day. Anything I could find, I would gobble up and be sick two minutes later – very tired.
“So, of course, that slightly got the mood swings going, in the sense that one minute one would be happy; the next, blubbing one’s eyes out.”
The next stop on their honeymoon was Balmoral in Scotland, where they spent two months with the rest of the royals, and Diana felt as if she didn’t belong. “I was so depressed and I was trying to cut my wrists with razor blades.
“I got terribly, terribly thin. People started commenting, ‘Your bones are showing.’ By October, I was in a bad way.”
But she was also pregnant with Prince William, which she was thrilled about until she suffered chronic morning sickness. “We went to Wales to do our first visit as Princess and Prince of Wales. Boy, oh boy, was that a culture shock in every sense of the word.
“Sick as a parrot, it rained the whole time. I cried a lot in the car, saying I couldn’t get out, couldn’t cope with the crowds.”
Later on, she would throw herself down the stairs at Sandringham and attempt suicide five times. She would also begin an affair with Major James Hewitt, something she didn’t tell Andrew about.
“Looking back, Diana’s audacity was breathtaking,” says Andrew. “One is left wondering if she wanted to get her side of the story published first so she’d escape blame for the failure of her marriage.”
Andrew says Diana never regretted doing the book because it led to her being able to disclose the reality of her life and receive the support she’d craved for so long.
“Thankfully, Diana left her own searing testimony of what life was really like for her as Princess of Wales.”
‘I was very, very calm – deathly calm. I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter’