For Princess Diana, life as a member of the royal family grew to be unbearable. While husband Prince Charles carried on an affair with his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, during the tail end of their marriage, Diana felt as though she needed to escape her prison and speak her truth. She did just that to biographer Andrew Morton, author of the 1992 tell-all Diana: Her True Story.
“It explained Diana’s feelings, her sense of isolation, her sense of being a prisoner,” Morton said in the most recent issue of People. “Once that leached into the popular imagination and people got to understand who she was as a three-dimensional character, then people responded to her.”
Diana supposedly felt so trapped in her situation that her interviews with Morton were carried out secretly via recorded tapes. She also asked Morton for her anonymity while he wrote the book. It was only until after Diana’s death in 1997 that Morton revealed Diana herself had been his inside source.
Morton stated to People, “You could see that people wanted the Diana monarchy, one that was more approachable, a bit looser. A little bit more empathetic to their own issues and problems.”
But some have said that Diana’s relatable character was what distanced her from the rest of the British monarchy.
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Never-before-seen tapes of Princess Diana talking candidly about her crumbling marriage were debuted in a 2004 U.S. documentary, which was later released in the U.K. in 2017 with the title Diana: In Her Own Words. In the tapes, recorded by her speaking coach Peter Settelen, Diana describes going to the Queen for advice on what to do about Prince Charles.
“I went to the top lady [Queen Elizabeth II], sobbing. And I said ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you, what do I do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do,’” Diana stated in the tapes. “And that was it. And that was help.”
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As Morton learned firsthand, Diana’s fairy tale melted into a nightmare. Luckily, she was able to tell her story before her untimely death.
