![]() Her primary adviser in the matter of the infamous 1995 Panorama interview - which persuaded the queen that divorce was the only solution for the prince and princess - was Adrian Ward-Jackson, a London art dealer who had no inside knowledge of royal protocol. In addition to all her other problems, Diana had a habit of seeking advice from the most unsuitable sources. Like Jonathan Dimbleby, Charles's official bio- grapher, Smith thinks that Charles broke off with Parker Bowles before his marriage and resumed the relationship in 1986, when his marriage already had deteriorated. Smith also successfully refutes Diana's calumny that Charles spent the night before his wedding in the bed of Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana, however, turned on Hussey, convinced that she was in love with Prince Charles. Smith points out that Lady Susan Hussey, one of Queen Elizabeth's most trusted ladies-in-waiting, was assigned to tutor Diana. Diana bitterly insisted that her in-laws made no effort to show her the royal ropes. Smith demolishes as delusions or lies many of Diana's charges against the royal family, which she early on believed was plotting against her. When Charles had to leave her for official duties, the jealous princess fell into depression. While it cannot be said that the royal family has altogether escaped the misfortune of mental illness in its long history, the Windsors were simply the last people on earth capable of dealing with Diana's problems. "The royal family is not like us," a friend of Queen Elizabeth's is quoted as saying. Though coming from a family of courtiers, Diana badly misjudged what life would be like as the future queen of England. "In a sense, she was finished the day of the royal wedding," Colborne said. Smith paints a terribly sad picture of an unstable young woman whose destiny was sealed by her marriage. Diana began to cut herself with sharp objects, a sign of severe mental illness, in 1982. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, whose departure from the Spencer family after a love affair was traumatic for her youngest daughter, recognized the signs but chose to ignore them. ![]() came from total despair." Diana alternated between tears and silence, "her head buried in her hands." In the months before her marriage, she suffered from the bulimia that would continue to plague her. ![]() Indeed, Michael Colborne, an aide to Prince Charles and thus privy to what Charles called her "other side," observed that Diana's "mood swings were quite frightening in a nineteen year old. Her problems were not far beneath the surface. It is ironic that Diana's mental illness went undetected in the face of so much publicity. Diana's own parents and siblings, Smith writes, "had too much of a vested interest in a successful royal marriage to probe her feelings." Wisely, Smith avoids psychobabble by deferring a specific "diagnosis" until the end of the book - she proposes that Diana suffered from "borderline personality disorder" - and presents instead a narrative of the troubled princess's travails.ĭiana Spencer's torment and violent emotions shocked Prince Charles even before they were married, but by the time the future princess of Wales moved into Clarence House, the Queen Mother's residence, to prepare for her wedding, it was too late. In a book timed to coincide with the second anniversary of Princess Diana's death in Paris, Sally Bedell Smith provides a tantalizing peek into the living museum that is European royalty and a portrait of Diana as a mentally ill princess. ![]()
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