The royals - Kitty Kelley [144]
The eating disorder was seeded in the wreckage of her parent’s marriage, which had thrown her oldest sister, Sarah, into anorexia. As a young woman, Jane had starved herself to the frightening weight of a child, until her family forced her to seek help. Diana, too, reacted to her insecurities by secretly starving herself. But then she caved in to her hunger cravings and ate several bowls of cereal with sugar and rich Guernsey cream. She devoured bags of soft jelly candies, followed by vanilla cookies lathered with white frosting, which she quickly threw up.
She had moved into Buckingham Palace a few months before the wedding so she could learn the royal routine, and when Charles was traveling, she ate alone. Most of her meals were served in her room. At first she left her trays untouched, which concerned the chef, who felt he was not pleasing her. After he began asking, she flushed the food down the toilet.
“She nicked so many boxes of Kellogg’s Frosties from the pantry,” said royal reporter Ross Benson, “that one of the footmen was accused of stealing and nearly lost his job. Diana stepped forward then and admitted she was to blame.”
At first no one believed her. The staff was not ready to accept the image of their future Queen as a glutton who regularly gorged and vomited. “The picture of Lady Diana wrapped around the porcelain chariot—no, no, no,” said a member of the royal household with a shudder. “That was inconceivable to us.” The staff refused to see any dark shadows beneath the sunny exterior. “You’ve no idea how sweet she seemed—on the surface,” said one of the Palace maids. “The few flashes of temper we saw we put to wedding jitters and worked harder to be of help.” The staff did not believe that Diana was the culprit consuming the missing food. Even when she admitted it, they thought she was protecting a footman previously suspected of petty theft. They did not accept what was happening until the upstairs maids, who cleaned Diana’s suite, reported evidence of her throwing up in the bathroom. Even then most of the staff did not accept it.
As Diana began losing weight, she increased the pernicious cycle of bingeing and purging until she was going through it five times a day. Within three months she’d lost twenty pounds. Charles was unaware of the problem because he was not with her all day every day.
For five weeks during the spring of 1981, he traveled on previously scheduled visits; he toured the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, where he explored the possibility of a real job. The Queen and Prince Philip had been concerned for some time about the way Charles flitted from one cause to the next without direction. “He never sticks to anything,” complained Philip, who once blamed his wife for being an inattentive mother. At a private dinner party attended by an American, Philip jerked his head toward the Queen and referred to Charles as “your son.” Both parents despaired whenever he made impassioned statements about the jobless, the homeless, or the penniless. The Duke of Edinburgh, especially, had no patience with his son’s concerns for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. “He wrings his hands like an old woman,” said Philip after one of Charles’s speeches. “Why can’t he leave the weltschmerzen to the vicars?” Philip warned Charles not to become embroiled in politics and not to comment on “sacred cows” like the Church of England and the National Health Service. He said the one institution that could be insulted was the press—”I’ve relished doing it myself,” Philip said—but nothing else. Charles ignored his father’s advice. As Prince of Wales, he resented being cast as a pitchman for Britain. He wanted to be taken more seriously than a salesman who dressed up in gold braid and waved. “I’m not good at simply being a performing monkey,” he said. His father disagreed. He thought Charles was perfect in the part.
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