Word: princess
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...salacious news about someone else, for a change, brought no lasting respite for the beleaguered House of Windsor. Up popped a transcript of an alleged telephone conversation between Diana, Princess of Wales, and a male friend on New Year's Eve 1989. He calls her "Squidgy" and repeats, "I love you, I love you." She mentions the "torture" of her marriage and agrees to a meeting with her phone partner "next Tuesday," under guise of a visit to her acupuncturist. True? Who cares, when 40,000 Britons paid $22 each on the first day to call a special phone line...
Morton's is the headliner because his sources include Diana's brother Charles and Carolyn Bartholomew, a close friend. It may be that the impetuous princess, despairing of the prince's love, got sick of all those saccharine tomes and decided to get her real story out. The result is avidly pro-Diana. But was it worth it -- publicizing the distasteful bouts with bulimia, the pitiful suicidal gestures, the shouting matches in which she shows up as a fishwife...
There is no evidence that the princess or her intimates had anything to do with the other biographies. For admirers of Prince Charles, Campbell's is the choice. Her sources are something of a mystery, but the citations are unintentionally hilarious: "an aristocrat whose brother-in-law is a senior courtier," "a titled schoolmate of Diana's," "a famous socialite." Davies' is the most balanced account but also the vaguest. The books read as if written in haste, and they contain many discrepancies...
...outlines are clear enough. Neither the prince nor the princess got much parental love. The best part of Morton's book is the simple, affecting account by Diana's brother of their childhood, ruptured when their mother ran off with another man. Prince Charles saw his mother an hour a day -- 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at night. If she was around...
...Campbell's book Diana is the schemer and Charles the hapless one: "She knew he wasn't a scrap interested in her, but she also saw that he was vulnerable." Diana got herself invited to royal occasions by making friends with Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret's daughter. Whatever the reality was, Diana expected that when they were married, her husband would devote a great deal of time to her. She was cruelly disappointed. Charles was chilly, his routine masculine and inflexible...