Princess Di Reveals A Life Of Royal Pain

I came back to the flat and sat on my bed. “Guess what?”

They said: “He asked you. What did you say?”

“Yes, please.”

Everybody screamed and howled and we went for a drive round London with our secret. I rang my parents the next morning. Daddy was thrilled. “How wonderful.” Mummy was thrilled. I told my brother and he said, “Who to?”

Just when it seemed there was nothing new to say about Princess Diana, British journalist Andrew Morton released a revised edition of his 1992 biography of the Princess of Wales. He began writing just after her funeral, moved, he says, “by the people’s need for candor” and his own need to come clean.

“Diana: Her True Story” revealed her bulimia and suicide attempts and the ongoing affair between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. But it didn’t reveal the true source for the book. Although both the Princess and Morton denied it, it was Diana herself.

She taped responses to Morton’s written questions, read the manuscript and signed off on every page. Hers, says Morton, was the final word. “I wanted to make sure she was happy with what I’d done and that I’d gotten it right,” he said in a phone interview from New York. “Diana: Her True Story - In Her Own Words” (Simon & Schuster) includes 46 pages of transcripts.

Now, for those fascinated with Diana, there is nothing between them and her. No friend to spin for her or reporter to misquote her. Diana, in her own words, comes across as perceptive, obsessive, funny, sad, shrewd, prophetic and contradictory - grandiose and petty, painfully honest and blissfully unaware - and, above all, human, achingly human.

If she went skinny-dipping in the Thames, she couldn’t have revealed more.

So much has been written about Diana in the past 16 years that it’s difficult to remember what we knew and when we knew it. Morton says that before his first book, we still believed the fairy tale, sort of. The young Windsors were rarely together - he liked to read, she liked to shop - and there were rumors about separate bedrooms. Still, on their 10th anniversary, we assumed that even if they weren’t living happily ever after, at least they were behaving civilly.

“After you, Dearest.” “No, you first, Pet,” when they passed in castle halls. That sort of thing.

Then Morton exposed Charles’ cruelty toward Diana, how he left her to go riding after she threw herself down the stairs, how he taunted her, saying food was a waste because she’d throw it up. How she responded with depression and withdrawal and a growing reliance on psychics, spiritualists and astrologers. Her life, it turned out, was more grim than Grimm.

“If Diana would have died before the book had been published, many people wouldn’t have understood her,” says Morton. “The book changed the way people looked at Diana.”

This book will change it even more. She comes off her pedestal.

She becomes real - not a holy saint, but not a ditzy blonde, either. As she free-associates, she can be crude, as when she says she “(expletive) a brick” before her first stay at Balmoral Castle.

She can be casual, with a vocabulary filled with upper-crust British slang.

As a nanny, she worked for “velvet hairbands.” When she was upset, she “blubbed” her eyes out.

When Charles was angry, he was on her “like a bad rash.” Her mother didn’t abandon the family; “she legged it.”

Diana was an obsessive woman who dreamt of Camilla repeatedly on her honeymoon.

A clever manipulator who watched soap operas so she could chat with the masses. A shrewd interpreter of Di-mania: “They want a fairy princess to come and touch them and everything would turn into gold and all their worries would be forgotten.”

And a wickedly funny observer of the absurdity of her life.

Her therapists prescribed tranquilizers so they could sleep at night “knowing the Princess of Wales wasn’t going to stab anyone.”

A delivery date for William was postponed till “we found a date where Charles could get off his polo pony so I could give birth - very grateful about that!” She refers to her days as a princess as “the dark ages.”

She can be introspective. She knew her bulimia and selfmutilation were an attempt to “crucify” herself because she didn’t think she was “good enough.”

But just as often, she is unaware of her motives. The day after she slashed her chest and legs, she just happened to wear a V-neck and shorts when her sister came to visit.

Her goals were lofty - nothing short of revamping the monarchy and comforting the sick and the dying - but she wasn’t above a little low-level spying. She referred to love letters from Camilla to Charles without ever quite saying where she got them. (Even Morton admits they probably weren’t attached to the fridge with a magnet.)

And she frequently contradicts herself. On her wedding day she was “a lamb to slaughter” and “the luckiest girl in the world.”

Although Charles has said he never loved Diana, she saw it differently. Before their marriage, he was “obsessed” with her. But it was a strange kind of obsession.

Two days after their engagement, she went to Australia, and he never called, never even returned her calls. Their courtship, she admits, was “frigid, big F.”

But she doesn’t put all the blame on him. She was, she says, “very screwed up.”

Of all the Dianas that emerge from Morton’s book, the one who comes through most clearly is Diana the soothsayer. Almost from birth she felt destined for a special fate.

As a teenager she remained a virgin, ready “for whatever was coming my way.” When Charles proposed, she heard a voice saying, “You won’t be queen, but you’ll have a tough role.”

She wanted her epitaph to be: “A great hope crushed in its infancy.”

She wasn’t a candle in the wind; she was a neon heart with faulty wiring.

Why is everyone so angry with Andrew Morton? He seems like a nice enough chap. He has those pink-cheeked, schoolboy good looks - like James Hewitt, the riding instructor, and Will Carling, the rugby player - that Diana favored.

He was hand-picked by the princess when she decided to tell her story. She was looking for a way to go past the press directly to the people.

Morton had written some flattering stories about her, and she made contact with him through an intermediary. There was no formal deal between them, no written agreement.

She trusted him, and he vowed, “I would never let her down.”

Many of the journalists who wrote about Diana were a little in love with her. They called her “Blue Eyes.” Morton says he wasn’t smitten.

“I admired her,” he says. “I felt she was a very vulnerable, lonely, flawed human being, but with an enormous giving quality.

“She was good at getting into people’s souls, seeing what drives them and what bugs them. They responded to her touch, her cuddle, her kiss, her caress. She was emotional, intuitive, instinctive, ruled by her heart, not her head.

“But I didn’t love her.”

Diana thought exposing the emptiness of her life in the royal big house would help her escape, and it did. Shortly after publication, the Prince and Princess of Wales announced their separation.

She used Morton, with his more-than-willing consent.

And today, when there is no longer a need to protect her, he has published the tapes.

They’ve been received with hearty cries of “For shame!” The Windsors and the Spencers are, for once, in agreement: Morton has betrayed Diana’s trust.

Even her brother, a source for the first book, has condemned him and threatened to sue. Diana’s friends, such as Live Aid’s Bob Geldof, have called Morton a “loathsome creep” and a “vampire.”

The British Red Cross has refused the six-figure donation he pledged from his profits.

Morton calls the response a combination of jealousy, hypocrisy and misunderstanding.

“The tabloid press is trying to find a target after they’ve been attacked themselves,” Morton says. “And people are responding to misreports. One story that soured the mood said that I had sold the tapes in America, which is absolutely not true.”

Snobbery is another motive.

“I’ve been attacked because I’m a working-class boy made good,” he says. “Class still dominates in Britain. It’s pervasive and pernicious.”

Of all the criticism, the one he finds most demeaning is the comparison of him to Kitty Kelley, and “In Her Words” to Kelley’s “The Royals.” He says he has written “a major historical biography,” while she has turned out “make-believe.”

But she’s No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list, while he hasn’t showed up yet.

Still, Morton has the advantage in worldwide sales. His book is making publishing history in England while libel laws have stopped hers from being sold there. When it comes to money, they’re both doing OK.

Kelley received a reported $4 million advance. Morton, who made over $7 million on the first book, waived an advance and opted for, well, royalties.

Before Diana died, Morton had stopped writing about princes and princesses. He wanted to write about other kinds of people.

“I wanted to be known as someone who brings life to a life,” he says. “But I suppose I’ve become the Neil Armstrong of biographers. Nothing I do will ever top this.”

While little girls were dreaming about being a princess, Princess Diana was dreaming about being an ordinary girl who could go to the movies or take a walk without a fuss.

“I like it as normal as possible. … I’m not bitter, but it would be quite nice to go and do things like a weekend in Paris, but it’s not for me at the moment.

“But I know one day if I play the rules of life - the game of life - I will be able to have those things I’ve always pined for, and they will be that much more special because I will be that much older and I’ll be able to appreciate them that much more.”