Diana is the confident one

Press, 30 July 1986, Page 16

Diana is the confident one

Friends say five years of marriage have worked wonders for “shy Di,” now a tower of strength to Charles.

Pale and shaking, Lady Diana Spencer hurried from the television studio and into a waiting car.

“I made a complete mess of that, didn’t I?” she said, and, without waiting for an answer, burst into tears. It was the winter of 1980. Prince Charles and his 20-year-old fiancee had given their first joint TV interview. Diana was later to tell friends: “It was the most awful ordeal of my life.’’ Certainly, she was shy and awkward, blushed at questions, fluffed her answers and clutched her fiance’s hand throughout the interview. Afterwards, Diana was determined that such a thing would never happen again — and it hasn’t. Now, as she celebrates her fifth wedding anniversary, the change in her attitude to television is startling. She is now regarded as the most natural, most accomplished, TV performer in the royal family (though the new Duchess of York seems likely to rival her). The change hasn’t come easily. Diana has had private videos made, has studied film of her public appearances, and has consulted pundits like jour-

nalist Sir Alastair Burnet on interview technique.

A 8.8. C. executive told me: “She is absolutely ruthless in her criticism of herself. She knows she used to drop her head and let her voice tail away. And she always looked at her husband for reassurance before she answered a question. “All that has changed. She’s brimming with confidence on TV now. If anything, Charles is the nervous one.”

Five years of constant self-criticism have transformed Diana from an easily-ruffled country girl into an assured and polished public performer. Says a close friend, who has known her for more than ten years: "The change in Diana is quite astonishing. Marriage has worked wonders. She is, nowadays, a very charming, very determined person, who frequently gets

her own way. “She is an absolute tower of strength to Charles who, in private, is dogged by self-doubts. He probably depends more on her than she does on him although, of course, he’d never admit it.” From the time Charles brought his bride-to-be to Balmoral in the late summer of 1980, the Queen and Prince Philip warned Diana that royal protocol was difficult to learn, and that they would do everything they could to help her.

Although the royal family had known Diana since she was a child, they were unprepared for the blast of fresh air that blew in from the outside world when she became a royal daughter-in-law.

There was the classic moment on the morning of July 29, 1981, when she stopped the hearts of 500 million television viewers with a passionate kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony with her husband of only a few hours. Such a gesture would have been unthinkable when her new mother-in-law married the handsome Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten in the infinitely more staid social climate of 1947.

To the world, that balcony kiss showed that Diana was very much a bride of the 1980 s — deeply in love, and not afraid to show it. But friends knew that the speed with which the former Lady Diana Spencer had been propelled from comparative obscurity into the high-pressure world of the royal family had already taken its toll.

Privately, she wondered if she would be able to cope with marriage to the man born to be king. Only 72 hours before her big day, Diana had left a polo match in tears after press cameramen closed in on her while she was watching Prince Charles play. Charles commented later: “The occasion was too much for her.” Despite the fact that she muddled her husband-to-be’s name at the altar and called him Philip

Charles Arthur George (instead of Charles Philip), she rose magnificently to the awesome pomp of her wedding day. And there can be no doubt that Charles’s parents breathed a sigh of relief that the heir to the throne had chosen a bride who possessed all the right credentials. The Spencer family had connections with royalty

that went back centuries. Diana’s grandmother, Lady Fermoy, is a longstanding friend of the Queen Mother, and her father is a friend of the Queen. Diana herself has never been a stranger to royalty. As children, she and her sisters and brother had played at Sandringham with the children next door ... Prince Charles and Princess Anne! The heated swimmingpool at the family home was a great attraction for

the young royals, and the two families called on each other regularly.

Today, Diana is remembered with great affection at her first school, Riddlesworth Hall, as a girl who “excelled at games and was awfully sweet to the little ones.” After Riddlesworth, Diana went to boardingschool at West Heath, Kent, where headmistress Ruth Rudge said: “Diana is a girl who notices what is to be done and does it, willingly and happily.” She was also a thoroughly modern girl who wanted to be independent. She worked as a part-time cook and nanny, eventually landing a teaching post at a Pimlico kindergarten.

But her free-and-easy world did not extend into Buckingham Palace. She soon discovered that no member of the royal family ever “drops in” on a relative without first checking by phone that the time is convenient. Prince Charles, when living at home, for example, always rang up his mother or father before crossing from his side of

Buckingham Palace to theirs to see them. And the young woman whose first instinct on greeting friends and relatives is to fling her arms round them and kiss them had to learn restraint. In public and in the presence of courtiers, she must curtsy to the Queen and, at all times, call her “Ma’am.” There were times, too, in the early days, when the lessons Diana learned from the Queen and the Queen Mother weren’t always remembered, as on that September day when Diana was at the Braemar Games in Scotland with the royal family. As the National Anthem was being played and everyone stood to attention, she giggled, laughed and talked to a friend.

The Queen, only a few feet away, gave her daughter-in-law one of those stares of disapproval which, in the words of one who has experienced them, are “capable of knocking a guardsman off his horse.” The Princess of Wales got the message. She promptly stopped talking and laughing ... and has never allowed herself such a slip again. If marriage has disciplined Diana, it has had a similarly dramatic effect on Charles. No longer

does he have that nervous little tic that used to make his cheek-bones twitch. The constant turning of the signet ring on his little finger is now a distant memory. A close member of his staff says that Charles “considers the private moments he spends with his family more important than anything. “Today, he can close his own front-door and share his problems with an always-sympathetic wife — which is something that, even after five happy years, he still finds miraculous.” To Diana, who worries about her husband’s almost obsessive preoccupa-

tion with the world’s problems, home comforts are the least she can provide. For the young woman, who, after the Queen, is now the most popular member of the royal family and an assured and relaxed woman of the world, has no doubt about her most important role. “First and foremost, I’m a wife and mother,” she says. “That must always come before anything else.” —Features International

‘Brimming with confidence on TV’

“Privately she wondered if she would be able to cope with marriage to the man born to be king.”