The door was on the second floor of Kensington Palace in the private apartments numbered eight and nine and it had a simple brass lock. On the night staff later described as the worst, that lock was turned from the inside at approximately 11:00 in the evening. What happened next was heard, not seen. A housekeeper passing in the corridor stopped because the sound did not match anything she had encountered in service to the royal household.
It was not weeping. It was not an argument. It was a single sustained sound, half scream, half something else. Coming from a woman who had locked herself away from every person who might have helped her. The housekeeper waited. She did not knock. The household had standing instructions about the Princess of Wales and her private hours.
And those instructions were that she was not to be disturbed unless she rang. She did not ring. The sound continued for perhaps 3 minutes and then stopped and the corridor was silent again and the housekeeper continued on her rounds because there was nothing else in the protocol of that house that she was permitted to do. This is the central image.
A young woman, 26 years old at the time of one of the earliest such incidents, the most photographed human being on the planet, the future mother of a king, standing or kneeling or lying on the other side of a door she had locked herself. Screaming into a pillow or into the empty air of a room hung with chintz and family portraits.
While the staff she paid to care for her stood in the corridor and did exactly what they had been told to do, which was nothing. The door was the boundary. On one side of it stood the institution, the marriage, the children’s nursery, the cameras waiting in the courtyard, the equerries with their clipboards, the dressers preparing the next day’s wardrobe.
On the other side stood a woman who had run out of language for what was happening to her, and who had discovered that the only sound that fit her circumstances was a sound she could not make in public. The image of Diana that the world held in 1987 was already complete in its outlines. The shy nursery school assistant who had blushed under a cardigan in the autumn of 1980 was by then a global phenomenon whose dresses were studied frame by frame, whose hairstyles dictated salon appointments from Tokyo to Sao Paulo,
and whose presence beside her husband had the quality of a sun beside a candle. Charles, 14 years her senior, looked diminished in photographs in a way no Prince of Wales had ever looked diminished before. She drew the lens. She drew the crowds. She drew increasingly a private resentment from a man who had been raised to believe that the lens, the crowds, and the future belonged by right to him.
What the public did not see, and what the household saw without being permitted to acknowledge, was that the woman behind the door was assembling herself each morning out of pieces that did not quite fit. The bulimia had begun in the engagement. The self-harm, the cutting with razor blades, the throwing herself down a flight of stairs at Sandringham while pregnant with William.
The breaking of a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace and the use of its shards. These were not the actions of the woman whose photograph sold magazines. They were the actions of the woman who locked the door. This is the gap. Not the gap between virtue and vice, which is the cheap gap, the tabloid gap. The gap that matters is the gap between what a human being is permitted to show and what she is required to feel.
Diana spent 17 years inside that gap. And the door she locked alone was the only place she was permitted to live without observation. The staff who heard her did not betray her. They came forward, most of them, decades later in measured tones, in books and in legal testimony, and in the long sequence of inquiries that followed her death.
And what they said was almost always the same. They had heard. They had known. They had been forbidden to act. They had carried what they heard for the rest of their working lives and many of them carried it still. The story that follows is not the story of a victim because Diana was not, in the end, a victim. She was a woman who learned, very late and at very great cost, to use the lens that had captured her as a weapon against the institution that had captured her first.
But before she learned that, there were years. And within those years, there were nights. And within those nights, there were doors. This is the story of those doors. It is the story of what was heard through them. And it is the story of what the household, the family, the press, and the country chose to do with what they heard, which was, for a very long time, almost nothing at all.
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To understand why a young woman ended up locked behind a door in Kensington Palace screaming where the staff could hear her, you have to understand the world she had been delivered into and the bargain she had unknowingly signed when she said yes to the question put to her in the nursery of Windsor Castle in February of 1981.
She was 19 years old. She had finished her formal education without a single O level to her name. She had worked as a cleaner for her sister, as a nanny for an American family, and as a helper at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, where the photograph that made her famous was taken.
The sun behind her legs, the cotton skirt, the toddler on her hip, and the smile that the photographer Arthur Edwards later said was the smile of a girl who did not yet know what a photograph could do. The Spencer family she came from was not a minor family. The Spencers had been at court longer than the Windsors. Her father was the eighth Earl Spencer.
Her grandmother had been a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. The house she had partly grown up in, Althorp, contained one of the finest private art collections in England. By blood and by upbringing, Diana was an aristocrat of the first rank, and this was, in the calculation that produced her marriage, the central qualifying fact.
The Prince of Wales required a bride who was Protestant, who was titled, who was suitable, and who, in the formulation that became famous and that originated with his great uncle Lord Mountbatten, possessed a quality of which he could be reasonably certain. She qualified on every count. What she did not possess, and what no one in the family she was marrying into thought to ask about, was any experience of love returned.
Her parents had separated when she was six in a custody battle so bitter and so public that the journalists of the day had reported on it as a society scandal. Her mother had left. Her father had retained custody, and the children, Diana and her younger brother Charles in particular, had grown up in a house full of staff and absent of intimacy.
She had cried in the night for her mother, and the nanny had told her to stop crying. She had, in her own later account, learned very young that strong feeling was something to be packed away in a place no one would look. She also told biographers, repeatedly and consistently, that she had grown up with a conviction that she was meant for something significant, and that she would not marry any ordinary man because some other future was waiting for her.
The two facts coexisted. The girl who packed her feelings away had also, somehow, kept alive a private and almost mystical certainty that her life mattered. Into this temperament, in the summer of 1980, walked the Prince of Wales. He had known her vaguely for years. She was the younger sister of a girl he had briefly dated.
He had visited her family home. He noticed her that summer, sitting on a hay bale at a barbecue at Petworth, where she said something kind about how lost he had looked at his great uncle’s funeral 2 months earlier. Mountbatten had been killed by the IRA in August of 1979 and Charles had been devastated. >> The kindness in a setting where almost no one was kind to him without an angle registered.
He began to ask her to things. The courtship that followed was conducted under the gaze of a press pack that had decided within days of identifying her that she was the one and would not let her go. She was hounded outside her flat in Coleherne Court. Photographers lay in wait outside her kindergarten. She cried more than once on her own doorstep.
The palace declined to intervene. The courtship, such as it was, consisted of perhaps a dozen meetings over the course of 6 months. They were never alone together for any extended period. They never lived together. They never, by every credible account, slept together before the wedding night. He proposed to her in the nursery at Windsor Castle in February of 1981.
She giggled because she did not know what else to do. He asked her if she was sure. She said she loved him. He, in the moment that became infamous when he repeated it to a television interviewer 6 months later, said, “Whatever love means.” She thought he was joking. She also, somewhere underneath that, knew he was not.
There was another woman. Camilla Parker Bowles, married since 1973 to Andrew Parker Bowles, had been Charles’s lover before his marriage, during the years of his naval service, and during the courtship of Diana herself. Diana had met Camilla. Camilla had quizzed her over lunch at menage a trois in Beauchamp Place about whether she intended to hunt, a question whose meaning Diana later realized had been a question about whether she would be at Highgrove often enough to interfere.
Diana had said she did not hunt. Camilla had been satisfied. The territory was secure. The wedding took place on the 29th of July, 1981. 750 million people watched. The dress, by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, was 25 ft of ivory silk taffeta and antique lace, crumpled almost beyond recovery by the carriage ride.
She walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral on her father’s arm. Her father, who had suffered a stroke and could barely stand. And she muddled the order of Charles’s names in her vows, calling him Philip Charles Arthur George instead of Charles Philip. The world found this enchanting. She had been crying for days.
On the honeymoon, aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, she discovered a photograph of Camilla in her husband’s diary. And she discovered cufflinks engraved with two interlocking C’s that her husband was wearing. And she asked him about them. And he told her the truth, which was that they were a gift, and that the friendship was important to him, and that she would have to accept it.
The bulimia, by her own account, was already well underway by then. It had begun in the weeks after the engagement, when she had moved into Buckingham Palace and discovered that almost no one in the building had any interest in her or any time for her. And that her future husband was frequently away.
And that the empty refrigerator and the empty hours and the gathering dread of a wedding from which she now believed she could not extricate herself had nowhere to go inside her except into food and then out of it. She had gained weight then lost it spectacularly. Her waist on the wedding day was 23 inches. She had been measured for the dress months earlier at 26.
The dressmakers had taken it in repeatedly. This was the woman who walked through the doors of Kensington Palace as the Princess of Wales in the autumn of 1981. She was 20 years old. She was pregnant within weeks. She was by the standards of her own emotional life already broken. And the institution she had married into had by long custom and by deep conviction no apparatus for noticing that a member of the family was unwell.
The Queen, by every account, was kind to her but uncomprehending. >> Prince Philip wrote her letters that were, depending on whose account one reads, either bracingly honest or witheringly cruel. The Queen Mother, whose sympathy might have changed everything, gave her none. Camilla remained in the picture. Charles, baffled and resentful, retreated to Highgrove.
The staff watching said nothing because saying anything was not their function. The first specific incident that the household carried as a private warning and that surfaced years later in the testimony given to Andrew Morton for the book that detonated in 1992 took place at Sandringham in January of 1982. Diana was 3 months pregnant with William.
She had come to her husband at at top of the staircase to ask him to spend the day with her instead of going riding. He had refused. She had said she felt desperate. He had walked away. She had thrown herself down the staircase. She was found by the Queen Mother who reacted by Diana’s later account with a kind of frozen disapproval that suggested the appropriate response to the scene was to pretend it had not happened.
A doctor was called. The baby was unharmed. Charles, when he returned from his ride, went to see her and then went to dinner. The staff who carried her to her room and who cleaned the bruises on her thigh and her stomach over the following days were instructed by the household to make no mention of the incident to anyone.
And they did not for 10 years. What had happened at the top of that staircase was a young woman attempting, in the only language available to her, to communicate the size of what she was feeling. She did not, by every credible reconstruction, intend to kill herself or the child. She intended to be seen. The throwing of the body down the stairs was a form of speech.
The response, the silence, the doctor, the dinner, the instruction to the staff was the institution explaining to her, in the only language available to it, that this form of speech would not be acknowledged. She would have to find another. Over the next 10 years, she would try several. The cutting with razor blades came next.
The throwing of a lemon slicer at her husband. The breaking of a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace and the use of its shards against her own arms and chest. Each of these episodes was witnessed by staff. Each of them was buried. The institution’s preferred form of management was the management of appearance.
And appearance in 1982, in 1984, in 1986 remained intact. The photographs continued to be marvelous. The tours continued to be triumphs. The princess on the cover of every magazine continued to smile. The second incident the household carried, and the one that established the pattern for what was to come, took place during the official tour of Australia in the spring of 1983.
Diana was 21 years old. She had insisted, against every precedent and every wish of her husband and his office, on bringing the 9-month-old William with her. The compromise reached had been that William would be based at a sheep station called Woomargama in New South Wales, and that the prince and princess would fly back to him between engagements.
The tour was the first overseas tour Diana had undertaken as a senior royal. She did not know what she was doing. She was photographed in every city in Australia, and the crowds that came out for her, 12 deep along the streets of Brisbane, 100,000 in the center of Sydney, were larger and louder than any crowd the prince had drawn in his life.
He noticed. The staff noticed. The reporters noticed. By the third week, the dynamic was unmistakable. The crowd on her side of the street would cheer when the car door opened. The crowd on his side of the street would groan with disappointment. He would make the joke that he had only one wife.
He could not split himself in two, and the crowd would laugh, and his eyes in the photographs would not. One evening in Sydney, after a state reception at which he had been the unmistakable center of every photograph, she returned to the suite they were sharing at the Wentworth Hotel. The valet was in the corridor. The dresser was preparing the next day’s outfit in the room adjoining.
Diana went into the bathroom and locked the door. The dresser heard her vomiting, which was not new. The dresser had heard her vomiting in three cities by then. What was new was what followed, which was a sustained sound of weeping that did not stop. The dresser stood outside the door for what she later estimated as 20 minutes.
Then she went to find a member of the household. The member of the household told her that the princess was tired, that the prince would handle it, and that she should return to the wardrobe. The prince, when located, was on the telephone to England. He did not come up for an hour. By the time he did, the bathroom door was unlocked, and the princess was in bed with her face to the wall, and he did not, in the account the dresser later gave, sit down beside her or speak to her.
He undressed in the dressing room and went to bed in the second bedroom of the suite. And in the morning, they appeared together at breakfast with the press, and she smiled, and she gave the journalists 10 minutes of her time, and she was, by every report filed that day, radiant. The dresser, who had heard what she had heard, said nothing for 30 years.
The pattern visible in the Sydney bathroom would recur, with variations, in almost every city Diana visited during the tour years. The pattern had three elements. The first was a public performance of extraordinary success, more successful than the prince’s, generating a level of attention and adulation that no member of the royal family had ever before received.
The second was a private collapse, almost always involving food. Either the binging and purging that the bulimia required or the refusal of food or both, and often involving weeping, locked doors, and the kind of physical distress that staff were trained to notice but forbidden to discuss. The third was the next morning, in which the performance resumed without interruption.
And the staff who had heard what they had heard the night before were obliged to behave as if the princess they were now dressing was the same princess they had photographed the night before, when in fact she was a woman who had spent the intervening hours dismantling herself. In Auckland, on the leg of the tour that followed Australia, a different kind of incident occurred.
Diana had agreed, at very short notice and against the advice of her private secretary, to visit a hospital ward for children with terminal illnesses. She had no preparation. She walked in with the press pool behind her and was led to the bed of a 4-year-old girl whose mother was sitting beside her holding her hand.
The girl had been told that a princess was coming and had been given a tiara of paper foil to wear. Diana, on the account of the ward sister who was present and who repeated the story in an oral history project decades later, sat down on the edge of the bed, removed the paper tiara, kissed the child on the forehead, and then took off the small gold cross she was wearing around her own neck and placed it in the mother’s hand.
She stayed for 45 minutes. The schedule had allowed 10. The press were kept outside the ward. When she emerged, her mascara had run, and she had not repaired it. The photograph of her leaving the hospital with the smudge of black under her right eye ran in newspapers in 12 countries the following morning, and it was the first photograph in which the world saw, openly and without retouching, that the Princess of Wales had been weeping.
The palace press office requested that the photograph be withdrawn from future use. It was not. What the ward sister also remembered, and what she said in the oral history, was that as Diana was leaving, she had paused at the door of the ward and turned back. And she had said to the sister, very quietly, that she did not know what she was supposed to do with the things she was carrying away from the bed.
The sister had not known what to say. The princess had then composed her face and walked out into the corridor and the cameras. And the smile that appeared was the smile that the world recognized. The sister had said in the recording that she had thought at the time that the princess was a woman who had been given the wrong job by an organization that did not understand her, and that the job was killing her in slow and barely visible ways.
The sister had been 31 years old at the time of the visit. She had carried the impression for the rest of her career. The third incident that established the pattern, and the one that the household senior staff would later identify as the moment they understood the marriage could not be saved took place at Highgrove in the summer of 1986.
Diana was 24. She had been married five years. She had given birth to Harry the previous September. The relationship between her and Charles had deteriorated to a point at which they were communicating largely through staff. And the staff had begun to receive notes from one to the other that they were obliged to deliver across rooms in which both principals were sitting.
Camilla Parker Bowles was by that summer a fixture at Highgrove on weekends when Diana was at Kensington Palace. And on certain occasions, she had been a fixture at Highgrove even when Diana was there, which both Diana and the staff knew. On one such weekend in July, Diana came down to the drawing room before dinner and found her husband on the telephone.
She lifted the extension in the next room and listened. The voice on the other end was Camilla’s. The conversation was the kind of conversation that two people who have been lovers for 15 years conduct in the secure belief that no one is listening. Diana put down the extension and went upstairs and into her bedroom and locked the door.
And she did not come down for dinner. The butler knocked. She did not answer. The prince was informed. The prince ate dinner alone and went out into the garden. The butler went up again at 10:00 and again at 11:00. There was no answer. At midnight, the butler tried the door and it was still locked. And he could hear from the other side the sound of a woman crying in a way that he later described to a colleague as the worst thing he had ever heard in 22 years of service.
He did not break the door down. He had no authority to break the door down. He sat in the corridor on a chair until 2:00 in the morning when the crying stopped, and then he listened until he heard the bed creak, and then he went away. In the morning, she came down to breakfast and ate a slice of dry toast and went riding with the children, and she did not refer to the previous evening, and neither did her husband, and neither did the butler.
The butler retired in the early 1990s. He spoke about the night at Highgrove only once to a researcher in 2003 and only on condition that his name not be used. A fourth incident occurred at Balmoral in the autumn of the same year, and it involved not a locked door, but an open window. The household was assembled for the annual stay in Scotland, the long performance of Highland family life that the Queen regarded as the central restorative function of her year, and that Diana regarded as a slow ordeal.
She had been there 4 days. She had been seated at meals next to her husband, who was speaking to her only when protocol required it. She had walked alone in the afternoons. She had begun to lose weight again at a rate that her dresser, who was responsible for her clothes, was finding difficult to keep up with.
On the fifth night, after dinner, she went to her room on the second floor and opened the window and sat on the sill with her legs hanging out into the air. The drop to the gravel of the courtyard was perhaps 30 ft. A footman in the courtyard, smoking a cigarette he was not supposed to be smoking, looked up and saw her.
He did not call out because he was afraid that calling out would startle her, and because he was equally afraid that he was not supposed to have seen what he was seeing. He stood in the shadow of the doorway and watched. She sat on the sill for what he later told another member of the staff was 40 minutes. She did not jump. She did not move.
She looked up at the sky and down at the gravel and out at the hills, and eventually she swung her legs back into the room and closed the window, and the light in her room went out. The footman finished his cigarette and went to bed. He told the story in the staff sitting room at Balmoral only to one other person, the head housekeeper, who told him to forget what he had seen and to mention it to no one.
He did not mention it for the rest of his service. He spoke of it finally to a writer in 1999 after the princess was dead, and he said that he had thought about that window for 13 years, and that he did not know, even after she was gone, whether he had done the right or the wrong thing by remaining silent. The pattern of the locked door and the silent staff and the morning performance continued through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, but during this period something else began to happen that altered the
equation. Diana began, very cautiously and with great calculation, to use the lens that had captured her against the institution that had captured her first. The first instance of this was modest. It was the dance she She with the dancer Wayne Sleep on the stage of the Royal Opera House in December of 1985 as a Christmas surprise for her husband.
She had rehearsed it for weeks in secret at Kensington Palace. She had chosen the music, Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl, which her husband regarded as common. She had appeared on stage in a silver satin slip and bare feet and had performed 8 minutes of high-kicking choreography in front of an audience of 2,000. The audience had given her eight curtain calls.
Her husband in the royal box had been visibly displeased. He had told her on the drive back to Kensington Palace that the performance had been undignified and that she had embarrassed him. She had cried in the car. She had also, by the time she reached the palace, understood something that the dance had taught her.
She had understood that she possessed an asset that he did not possess and that the asset was the eye of the public and that the eye of the public was a thing she could direct if she chose in ways that would not require his permission. The understanding deepened slowly. It was not a strategy at first.
It was an instinct and the instinct produced a sequence of acts, each more visible than the last, by which Diana began to construct a public identity that was not the public identity assigned to her by the palace. She visited a hospice in 1987 and held the hand of a man dying of AIDS without gloves at a moment when the British press was running headlines about the disease as a divine punishment and when most public figures would not enter the same room as a sufferer.
The photograph went around the world. The Queen, by the account of an aide present at a subsequent audience, asked her if she had considered the consequences for the family of associating the crown with such people. Diana said that she had considered the consequences.
