Did Princess Diana Have an Eating Disorder?

We all look up to celebrities or at the very least, we’re intrigued by famous folks, especially those who’ve accomplished great things. But a new book, Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities (National Geographic Books), shows us that often there is indeed a fine line between genius and insanity and that often, celebrities have more than their fair share of troubles.

Was Abraham Lincoln sad or clinically depressed? Did Marilyn Monroe suffer from borderline personality disorder? The book answers some of these questions. Read on for an excerpt about Princess Diana’s struggles.

Princess Diana

The Diana-Charles fairy tale was rooted in an age-old fantasy modernized and glorified by Disney: A girl from ordinary circumstances meets her Prince Charming, falls madly in love, and is swept off to a castle, where she is anointed with a glittering tiara and lives happily ever after. “She rides to St. Paul’s as a commoner,” one of the television commentators remarked as Diana made her way to the church on her wedding day, “and she comes back as the third lady in the land.”

Diana, though, was no run-of-the-mill British citizen. The Spencer family crossed bloodlines with King Charles II and King James II and were leaders of the Whig aristocracy, which ruled England in the 18th and 19th centuries. When Frances Roche and John Spencer were married at Westminster Abbey in 1954, the queen topped their guest list.

Although Diana was born into great social status and wealth, her childhood was marred from the start. To begin with, she was a girl. By the time Frances became pregnant with Diana, she and Johnnie, as her husband was called, were under pressure to produce a male heir to inherit the Spencer title. The couple already had two daughters, and they had recently lost a son, John, within hours of his birth. Diana always believed her arrival to be a disappointment.

The Spencers did, finally, succeed in having a son, Charles, who was born three years after Diana. But by then their marriage had begun to unravel. Within a few years, it suffered irreparable damage when Frances admitted to an affair. In 1969, Frances and Johnnie were divorced, and Johnnie was granted custody of the children. A rotation of nannies hired to care for Diana and Charles did not sit well with the youngsters. “We used to stick pins in their chair and throw their clothes out of the window,” Diana later admitted. “We always thought they were a threat because they tried to take Mother’s position.”

There is no evidence that a single negative experience leads to an eating disorder, but adversity early in life can increase a child’s vulnerability. Diana, who was 6 when her parents separated, spoke openly about the anguish she suffered as a young girl. She recalled hearing her brother, Charles, “crying for my mother” at night. Too terrified of the dark to get out of her bed, however, she was unable to help. Her father was never able to talk openly about the divorce with his children, and her mother was often weepy, especially when it was time for Diana and Charles to leave after their weekend visits. “I remember Mummy crying an awful lot and every Saturday when we went up for weekends, every Saturday night, standard procedure, she would start crying,” Diana recalled. “What’s the matter, Mummy?” Diana would ask, and her mother would say, “Oh, I don’t want you to leave tomorrow,” a response Diana described as “devastating.” “It was a very unhappy childhood,” she said.

Like so many children of divorce, Diana felt jostled between her parents. She later described “the trauma of going from one house to another” during the holidays, and she worried about showing an uneven allegiance to one or the other. Even a seemingly minor fashion decision could erupt into an agonizing display of loyalty. When she was chosen to be a bridesmaid for a cousin’s wedding, Diana recalled, her parents gave her two different dresses to wear to the rehearsal: a green dress from her mother, a white dress from her father. “I can’t remember to this day which one I got in,” she said, “but I remember being totally traumatized by it because it would show favouritism.” She comforted herself with a menagerie of stuffed animals, which took up much of her bed. “That was my family,” she said.

People with eating disorders often have low self-esteem, a feeling of unworthiness, and this was clearly true for Diana. She often felt out of place and defeated by her inability to excel intellectually. She also felt “horribly different” in school, she later said, for being the only child with divorced parents. Although her elite boarding school was not known for its intellectual rigidity, nor were students expected to pursue college degrees at that time, Diana felt insecure about her capabilities. “At the age of 14, I just remember thinking that I wasn’t very good at anything, that I was hopeless,” she said.

Diana did manage to acclimate, make friends, and enjoy many nonacademic pursuits, including tennis, piano and visits with patients at a mental health facility. But she could never live up to her siblings’ academic achievements. “I longed to be as good as Charles in the schoolroom,” she said. Instead, Diana failed her O-level exams, the standard tests required for graduation, not once but twice—a shortcoming that the media delighted in sharing. She made fun of herself, too, once telling a young boy that she was “thick as a plank,” a comment that reporters served up with fanfare and which she later said she regretted.

Before her transformation from teenager to Princess of Wales, Diana enjoyed a few fleeting years of happiness as a single girl in the city. In 1978, the year she turned 17, Diana began living in London, initially working in temporary jobs as a nanny and waitress and then as a kindergarten assistant. She enjoyed the freedom of independence and reveled in the fun of sharing an apartment with roommates. “I loved that—it was great,” she recalled. “I laughed my head off there.” She did not, according to her accounts, indulge in serious romantic relationships with boys. “I had never had a boyfriend. I’d always kept them away, thought they were all trouble—and I couldn’t handle it emotionally,” she said. Whether or not her hesitation stemmed from her parents’ divorce is impossible to know, but the instability she felt after their breakup may have made her anxious about relationships. And there was another reason for holding off. In her interviews with biographer Andrew Morton, Diana said she believed that she was destined to marry someone important. As a result, she said, “I knew somehow that I had to keep myself very tidy for whatever was coming my way.”

And what was coming her way? A prince, a castle and a life that would exacerbate her emotional volatility and foster debilitating mental illness. A fairy tale combusted.

Reprinted with permission from the book Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities by Claudia Kalb, published February 2, 2016 by National Geographic.