Princess Diana Part 3: The Affairs

This week, Diana swaps out her husband for a Horse Dude and Mike and Sarah act out other people's PG-13 dirty talk. Digressions include shoulder pads, Billy Joel and "Seinfeld" (twice!). There's a moment 55 minutes in that is going to make you feel very weird. As with previous installments, this episode contains detailed descriptions of disordered eating.

Here's the photos we talked about in this episode:
https://rottenindenmark.org/2020/10/11/princess-diana-part-3-the-affairs/

Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch

Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase

Transcript

Princess Diana Part 3 

Sarah: I feel like all Chris Christie has ever wanted is for Bruce Springsteen to like him. And in trying to get him to like him, he has made himself one of Bruce Springsteen's natural enemies.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we talk about women about whom it can be said, “She's so lucky she's a star, but she cries, cries, cries, in her lonely heart thinking if there's nothing missing from my life, then why do these tears come at night?”

Mike: Is that, “Hey, Mickey, you're so fine”?

Sarah: That is Lucky by Britney Spears. A song that I think it is, even when I was a preteen, I was like, why are they having her sing this even if it appears to be true?

Mike: I am Michael Hobbs, I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post. 

Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall, I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. 

Mike: And if you would like to support us and/or hear us talk about Carol Baskin for nearly an hour, sign up on Patreon, at patreon.com/yourewrongabout. 

Sarah: We also talked about how we both wanted to date Anthony Perkins, and other topics.

Mike: It's partly Baskin content and partly Perkins content. 

Sarah: It's a Baskin/Perkin swirl. We're very proud of it. 

Mike: And of course, if you don't want to support us, that's chill too. 

Sarah:I don't like this false binary here. I think that people are supporting us by listening to us. Even one time, even if you listen to half of an episode and you're like, eh, these people say like too much and turn it off. You still supported us, ha-ha.

Mike: And today we are talking about Princess Diana for the third time. Act three. 

Sarah: How many times is this going to be? I'm guessing five or six. 

Mike: I’m aiming for five. So this episode, we're basically going to talk about the rest of the marriage. And then next episode, we're going to talk about the divorce. And then next, next episode, we're going to talk about her death and the wild conspiracy theories around her death. 

Sarah: Okay. I'm excited as your, as your thesis advisor, I say full-steam ahead.

Mike: Do you want to catch us up with where we are with Diana? What's happened so far? 

Sarah: As your thesis advisor I think that you should just bring me a little boxes of chocolate and be confused about when my office hours really are, but sure. 

So when we last left, Diana, she had just provided the Royal family with an heir, Prince William. And was wildly unhappy and lonely, I believe it's fair to say, in her marriage to Prince Charles. And has made several suicide attempts and is also struggling with bulimia.

Mike: And this episode, like last episode, is going to have some extremely rough descriptions of Diana's eating disorder. 

Sarah: And when last we left her, it seems like he was having a hard time, but no one could conceive of the idea that she might possibly be having a hard time.

Mike: Right? I mean, one of the things that has struck me as I've continued to read about this marriage is, this is an upper-class society with a million rules, right? They have all this stuff about how you should dress when you should dress a certain way. It's all very formal. And yet when it comes to intimate relationships, they're operating without a roadmap. We as human societies create these elaborate rules for kind of seeming like things are okay, and how to form relationships and not embarrass ourselves with people that we barely know. And yet when it comes to forming relationships, close relationships with people that we do know, there aren't a lot of social guidelines.

Sarah: And on top of that, I think it's harder to address the problem because there's so much pressure to sort of maintain the front required of a national symbol and also like, how can you seek therapy or whatever you need if like, I assume, you need people to be sworn to confidentiality and then trailed by James Bond for the rest of their lives.

Mike: Totally. And you can't trust anybody around you either. I mean, one of the things we're going to come across in this story is the fact that all of their staff is selling secrets to the newspapers. So even when they're indoors, they can't be honest about what they're actually feeling. They can't display anything that looks like conflict because it will literally be in the paper the next morning. But so instead of an inseparable meta comment to begin this episode, we are going to start with something we've never done before. We are going to do a table read of a phone conversation between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

Sarah: Oh my God. Okay. I think I know what conversation this is. I'm so excited.

Mike: Do you know what happens in this call? 

Sarah: Yes, because I think it's the only romantic thing I've heard of Prince Charles doing, and I've always been his defender on this cause because people were always like, “That's so gross. That's so unseemly.” Whatever. And I was like, it's great. This seems to be his true nature, sexually. And he's embracing it and verbalizing it, which was very impressive.

Mike: What did he, what did he say?

Sarah: What he said was that he wished he could be one of Camilla Parker Bowles' tampons. Yes. I wish I could live in the warm Temple Grandin squeeze machine of your vagina. 

Mike: But so what we are going to do is we are going to read the transcript of the infamous call, where you were going to play Camilla, I am going to play Charles, and we are going to put this tampon comment in context. Because in context, it is completely different than the way it's been portrayed. 

Sarah: Really?  Okay, let's do it.

Mike:  So check your email. I just sent this to you.

Sarah: Santa has been to my stocking. 

Mike: So this was recorded on December 17th, 1989. So their affair has been restarted for six years at this point, they restarted in 1983. So these are two people who are quite comfortable with eachother. 

Sarah: Yeah. They've been sleeping together for like the whole eighties almost.

Mike:  Yes. He’s seen all of her shoulder pads. And the transcript starts kind of in the middle. So it's going to be a little bit confusing at the beginning, but we're just going to read the whole thing. Are you ready? Okay, here we go.

“He was a bit anxious, actually.”

Sarah: “Was he?” 

Mike: “He thought he might've gone a bit far. Anyway, you know that's the sort of thing one has to be aware of and sort of feel one's way along with, if you know what I mean.”

Sarah: “You're awfully good at feeling your way along.”

Mike: “Oh, stop. I want to feel my way along you. All over you, and up and down you, and in and out. Particularly in and out.”

Sarah: “Oh, that's just what I need at the moment.”

Mike:  “Is it?”

Sarah: “I know it would revive me. I can't bear a Sunday night without you.”

Mike:  “Oh God.”

Sarah: “It's like that program started the week. I can't start the week without you.”

Mike: “I fill up your tank.”

Sarah: “Yes, you do.”

Mike: “Then you can cope.”

Sarah: “I'm all right.”

Mike: “What about me? The trouble is I need you several times a week.”

Sarah: “Mm, so do I, I need you all the way all the time.”

Mike: “Oh God. I'll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier.” 

Sarah: “What are you going to turn into a pair of knickers? Oh, you're going to come back as a pair of knickers.”

Mike:  “Or God forbid a Tampax. Just my luck.”

Sarah: “You are a complete idiot. What a wonderful idea.”

Mike: “My luck to be chucked down a laboratory and go on and on forever swirling around the top. Never going down until the next one comes through.”

Sarah: “Oh, Darling! Oh perhaps you could just come back as a box.”

Mike: “What sort of box?” 

Sarah: “A box of Tampax so you just keep going, repeating yourself. Oh, Darling. Oh, I just want you now.”

Mike: “Do you? So do I.”

Sarah: This is adorable! I already thought it was cute and it's so much cuter. 

Mike: It's so cute, dude. 

Sarah: I'm almost annoyed at how cute Prince Charles is in this.

Mike: I know, it's like very PG-13 sexual talk.

Sarah:  Yes! II love how he's like, “I want to live inside your trousers”. So I can be like a tiny man who fucks you every morning.

Mike: And it’s also, this whole conversation is taking place in a phone call where they're basically running logistics for like, how are we going to have sex in the next week. They're like, “Will this country house work?” Or like, “No, this other person's out of town. We can use their house.” So it actually makes sense in the middle of a call about logistics that he would say, “Oh, it would be much easier if I just lived in your pants the whole time”. 

Sarah: I love how you're defending Prince Charles by being like, listen in context my client had every reason to speculate about being a tiny man who lived in his lover's trousers. And I'm team just, like, listen, people need to be allowed to fantasize verbally about being their partner's tampons. It's fine.

Mike:  Any level of dirty talk as far as I'm concerned is like perfectly fine, right? Anytime that I hear people like tittering about this phone call, I'm always like. Really? Like your dirty talk would stand up to national scrutiny?

Sarah: Right. Other people's dirty talk is always hilarious. Like I remember when Steve Croft from 60 minutes got busted for sexting or whatever, he was having an affair, I think. But all of the leaked communications were really cute. It's very, like, “I'm so excited to have sex with you”, basically in so many words. 

And it's frustrating to me when we have sex scandals and people are treated - and I think the Jim Baker case is an extreme example of this - where like we act with the same amount of outrage and horror if people are having these sorts of like sweet sexual conversations that get leaked or having like cute affairs. The same way that we judge something really horrible. Like we can't tell the difference in American mainstream media, between adultery and sexual assault. 

Mike: Right. And also the conversation goes on for like 20 more minutes. And what strikes me about the conversation is just like, this is a portrait of like a pretty functional relationship. What sticks out to me isn't the “dirty talk”. These are just two people who seemed to really like each other. The reason why it starts in the middle is because the first 10 minutes of the call are him reading a speech to her. Because he's writing a speech and so it was like, “Hey, what do you think about the speech of mine?” And he reads long sections of it to her. And then she asks, you know, what was the last speech that you gave? He's like, “Oh, you know, it was in Norwich last Wednesday” or something. And she's like, “Oh, can you send me a copy, that sounds interesting.” It's just two people that are just like, vibing. 

Tina Brown sort of frames this in her book as like, you know, he's getting sex from her and she flatters his masculinity. Like she's pretending to be interested in his speeches to boost his ego and like, maybe, but also, it just seems like they really like each other. I think the sex obviously is a component, but it really feels like this is what he's not getting at home. He is just getting somebody who seems to really likes him, and he really likes her.

Sarah: I also feel like Prince Charles appears to be someone who's capable of putting his energy into sort of growing and maintaining and gardening, to use a vocabulary he understands, one relationship, and this is the relationship. And like he knows he's not doing the work. Like he knows that he has two gardens and one is this beautiful hot house full of melons and orchids. And one is like this dying patch. And he's like, I'm putting in hours, don't bother me.

Mike:  This is like an act of infidelity. He's lying to Diana. The whole thing is gross and immoral. And I wish that all of these people were mature enough to just admit everything.

Sarah: I'm more bothered by the fact that she's in such a difficult position in terms of having married into the Royal family. Like my thinking on this is like, if you can't restrain yourself from sharing all your genuine warmth and human connection with your longtime mistress, and if you can't cultivate a real connection with Diana then fine, you can't control that. But you did this, you created this princess, you brought her into this world, you decided it was a good idea to propose to her. This is like adopting a dog and then it has some behavioral issues and you're like, whatever, I'm just going to crate it. You know, it's just like, I don't care if people have affairs as much as how I care about how living things treat each other. I feel like he has the resources to figure out that he bears a responsibility to her for bringing her into this very difficult world that he knows to be difficult, because it seems like his life has been a big bummer in a way that he's aware of it.

Mike: And there's an interesting duality here too, whereby all accounts, it seems like he has a very functional relationship with Camilla, and his relationship with Diana is unbelievably dysfunctional at this point. He's, one of the comments, this is really bad. One of the comments that shows up in Andrew Morton's book is that, because he knows that she's struggling with bulimia, there'll be sitting down at a dinner and she's like, “Oh, this looks good.” And he'll be like, “Isn't that just going to come up later? What a fucking waste.” 

Sarah: There is literally an episode of Seinfeld where George Constanza is dating a woman who he suspects of being bulimic. And he says that, but even George Costanza knows that you would never say that to someone's face. He says it to Jerry.

Mike: It is this fascinating portrait to me, of how the chemistry between two different people can make somebody an absolute fucking monster in one relationship, and kind and generous in another relationship, at the same time. You know, this oftentimes gets sort of blamed on the woman. Like, what is it about Diana that made him act this way? No, I think that there's something about the relationship between the two of them that just starts off on the wrong foot. And that wrong foot just gets bigger and blistery-er, and wartier, and more gangrenous over time.

Sarah: Oh God, thank you, Mike. 

Mike: I thought you would enjoy that.

Sarah: But like, yeah. I feel like relationships can take us to places that we never imagined ourselves in. And I think also just like being in a state of emotional deprivation and not feeling like you're stuck in this partnership with someone with whom you have no emotional connection. Emotional starvation makes us do pretty intense things, as much as any other kind of starvation. 

Mike: Yeah. So we have fewer outfits this episode, but we do have some outfits. Would you like to see them? 

Sarah: Oh yes.

Mike:  Like last time I'm going to make a blog post with all of these and leave a link in the description. So, Skype machine. This one is out of context; I'm interested to hear what you think it is. 

Sarah: This is wonderful. Okay. So this is a beautiful, dramatic black and white shot of princess Diana on the left and some dancer on the right. They're doing like jazz hands. I mean, I would say maybe Bob Fosse, but there's not enough gloves or shrugging. Princess Diana has a happy expression and she's caught mid-motion. Like her skirt is sort of billowing around her legs in a way that suggests how much motion there is in what they're doing. And it's a really beautiful shot. It's lovely. So she looks like she's dancing with somebody and having a good time. 

Mike: So this is 14 months after she has Prince Harry. As a sign of how bad the marriage is, even going into this pregnancy, she finds out in December of 1983 that she's pregnant. Both her and Charles want a girl. She finds out in April that it's a boy, but she doesn't tell Charles until after Harry's born. 

Sarah: Oh, wow. Huh? That's intense. 

Mike: So the performance that you are seeing in the picture there happens at the Royal Ballet in December of 1985. There's this thing at the Royal Ballet where it's a night of sort of hi-jinks, they'll do sort of sketches and Stephen Fry will come and do like a voiceover thing. 

So Charles and Diana of course go and they're sitting in the Royal box. Two-thirds of the way into it, Diana leans over and she's like, “Uh, sweetie, darling, please excuse me to go to the tink tink room” or however, whatever euphemism they use for go to the bathroom. And then about five minutes later, the curtain on the stage goes up and she is in the dance company. What Charles doesn't know is that for the last couple of weeks, she has been rehearsing with the Royal Ballet, a dance to Billy Joel's Uptown Girl.

Sarah: Ohhhh! That’s the best! She is the most uptown of all the uptown girls. 

Mike: Well, they do this entire routine and they, you know, she used to teach ballet. She danced ballet for many years. Like, she's good at this, so she gets nine standing ovations. And as she's getting these standing ovations, she does like a little curtsy to the Royal box.

Sarah: That's so cute. I love that. 

Mike: But then he is like pretty publicly kind of a dick about it. There’s a reception afterwards where he is seen sort of not really congratulating her the way that like a husband should be. Like, “Oh my God, sweetie. That was amazing!” Like this could be such a cute moment. The way that she describes it to Andrew Morton is that he was mad at her for being, “undignified, too thin, too showy”. Right? This is not behavior becoming of a Royal dignified.

Sarah: You know what’s not dignified? Freezing your wife in public is undignified, you utter, utter, Chad. 

Mike: Tina Brown describes it, and I think that she's kind of on to something, he also feels left out. Because last year they actually did a comedy skit together. And so all of a sudden, because her star is rising and she is, there's a poll that comes out around this time that shows that she's by far the most popular member of the Royal family, she's sort of secretly done this thing with the Royal Ballet and didn't really invite him. 

Sarah: Because it was a surprise! It’s a surprise!

Mike: It’s totally understandable to me that his feelings would be hurt. And it's also very understandable to me that he would not be capable of describing it to her in those terms.

Sarah: Yes, because he's a little handshaking lad. 

Mike: You can Imagine a conversation between them where he's like, “Look, this was really special to me last year. And it's one of the few things that I get to do every year where people think that I'm fun.”  But he's not capable of describing it to her in those terms. So what she hears is, “it's too showy, it's too undignified, how dare”. It ends up being this thing that could have been like a milestone of communication, but ends up being a milestone of just resentment.

Sarah: Yes. He used Billy Joel for resentment. 

Mike: It's also, I mean, what fascinates me about this incident too, is he knows there's cameras at this reception. He can't fake his way through this incident and just be like, “Sweetie, that was amazing, I was delighted”. Just from a pure media perspective, it's incredible to me that he can't make a display of wonderment.

Sarah: Show the kids that you love Mommy. It's weird to me that, Princess Diana marries into this family and immediately understands, as any female celebrity would, that it is her job to create emotional compositions for people. And Prince Charles, who has been doing this for his whole goddamn life, has never figured that out. And like, because he's a man, like that's obviously less required of him, but that's still his job. What does he think he does? Does he think that he's governing a country?

Mike:  Tina Brown calls it a ‘political tin ear’. He doesn't seem very good at anticipating what stories will be or how things will look. There's an incident later where Prince William gets in an accident. He's playing with another kid and he accidentally gets hit in the head with a golf club. And so, you know, it’s a head injury, they have to take him in for scans. I think there's a minor surgery involved. And so as all this is happening, he's being transferred from one hospital to the other, et cetera, Prince Charles keeps a social engagement to go see the opera with a bunch of European diplomats that are visiting the UK. You know, his excuse for this in the biography is that like, well, you know, it was scheduled, there wasn't much I could do because we're just waiting to get results.

Sarah: He's like Ben Affleck in Gone Girl.

Mike: Oh, totally. Exactly. It's like, there's fucking journalists at an opera. You're going to go see fucking Tosca when your son is in surgery? Of course there's a million headlines the next day of like, What Kind of Father Does This? And it's like, do you not get that you're a public figure?

Sarah: And so Diana's also extra fucked because whenever she does something that people respond positively to, he gets jealous. And whenever he does something inept that makes people dislike him, he's like, “Why do people dislike me?” And then she also, I assume, has to suffer for that.

Mike:  And there's the one bit of revenge that I love on this. There's an incident where he breaks his arm in some sort of polo accident, he's in the hospital. There's like six weeks of physical therapy, it's like a long recovery period. And during this period, there's all of this speculation about, how did he really, he break his arm?

Sarah: Isn't it embarrassing enough to break your arm in a polo accident? 

Mike: This is bananas. So he's sort of out of public life for a while, which also sparks a bunch of speculation. His idea is to hold a press conference with a fake arm, with a hook at the end of it. So he was going to tell the press that he had a fucking, he lost his arm, and he was going to be using a fake arm. And then he was like, in some dramatic fashion at this press conference, he was going to like rip off the fake arm and be like, “See, I don't have a fake arm. I'm actually fine.” And that was going to show the press how dumb they were.

Sarah: That's so bizarre, that suggests that he really hasn't learned how to do the basics of what he does. 

Mike: And it's like, you don't think that's just going to make it worse, Tiger? You don't think they're going to be meaner to you after that, dude?

Sarah: I'll trick them into treating me better by doing something really bizarre in front of them and giving them an amazing story to talk about for days and days.

Mike: Yeah, that makes me look like a huge fucking doofus. So what Diana does, she instructs his staff. She's like, look, just get him the fake arm. And then on the day of the press conference, pretend that you lost the fake arm. 

Sarah: That's so smart. 

Mike: And so they do this whole thing where they get him the fucking hook arm. And then like an hour before the press conference, they're like, “Oh God, we, we must've left it in the trunk of a car. We don't know where it is.” And it's like, oops, guess you better just give a normal fucking press conference. And that's what he does. 

Sarah: That's really smart.

Mike:  Because he's dead set on this. Like you can't talk him out of these absurd ideas. 

Sarah: No. And you can't be like, “Charles, that's a bad idea.” 

Mike: She gets the kinds of images that she has to produce to remain popular, and he just has no idea. There's also a very weird loophole. One thing that starts happening, even as she becomes really popular, she's the People's Princess and everybody really likes her. The press still speculates that she's having an affair constantly.

Sarah: I mean, that's just like an evergreen accusation.

Mike: Yeah, sure. Where she sits next to a guy named David Waterhouse at a David Bowie concert. And it's actually, she's there with this guy, David, and someone else. So it's her and two guys. And you know, like when you're sitting between two people, you'll kind of turn to one and talk and then turn to the other and talk like normal humans do. The tabloids take a photo of the three of them and crop out the third guy and make it look like she's seeing this David Bowie concert with this David guy.

Sarah: They really buried the lead. They should have speculated about her and David Bowie. 

Mike: But then what's amazing is there's all this constant speculation of her with dues. There was, she had to cancel a lunch with Terrence Stamp, who's like kind of an advisor of hers, like speeches and shit. But she has to stop hanging out with him in person because there's all this speculation about Terence Stamp and her having sex.

Sarah: I mean, it is kind of a great celebrity pairing, to be fair. 

Mike: But what's amazing is, of course as this is happening, Charles is sleeping with Camilla. And Charles and Camilla are not being all that fucking subtle about it. Diana will drive away from their country home, and then like 15 minutes later, Camilla's car will arrive. And yet, nothing appears in the paper of Charles and Camilla for years.

Sarah: I smell a big fucking rat.

Mike: It sucks. As I was reading these various sources, I noted down all of the euphemisms that they used for Camilla. In the newspapers they'll talk about Charles was seen on a beach in Turkey with his female confidant, Camilla Parker Bowles. Another one says extra marital chumery, like, what does that even mean? 

Sarah: That's when you go out on a boat and you have sex with someone you're not married to, when you throw out a bunch of innards and you try and attract a shark. 

Mike: But it is just like a bizarro world thing. There's just constant speculation about her and no speculation about the thing that he is actually doing. Okay. Are you ready for another photo? This is what she's wearing on the day her marriage ends, not legally, but functionally. 

Sarah: Wow. That's a very specific occasion to dress for it.

Mike: But look how nice she looks.

Sarah: Yeah, no, she looks gorgeous. It's a white dress. It’s a very white dress, shoulder pads, a tight waist. It kind of blouses out in front and a big Pearl necklace.

Mike: Do you want to make any metaphorical significance of the fact that she's wearing something wrapped around her neck so many times on such a terrible day?

Sarah: People can try to make comparisons. You can do those. 

Mike: So this is her at Expo 86 in Vancouver, Canada. This is essentially rock bottom for her eating disorder. Although she doesn't actually get help for the eating disorder for two more years, she basically hasn't eaten in three days. And so halfway through the day she puts her arm on Charles's shoulder and she whispers, “Darling, I think I'm about to disappear.” And she faints. And of course, you know, a million people rush into action. They get her to the hotel room and then after she sort of gets stabilized, she and Charles in the hotel room, get in a huge fight. He insists that she shows up for the formal dinner that night. 

Sarah: Oh my God, Charles.

Mike: I think this is very Interesting. And this goes into what we talked about last week, about fame being abuse. So his argument for ‘you have to show up for this big formal dinner tonight’ is, if you faint in public and then you don't appear that night, that is going to fuel weeks of speculation.

Sarah: Listen to the man behind the great hook arm caper.

Mike: But he says, if you faint during the afternoon, and then you show up at a formal dinner and things look fine, they're going to drop this.

Sarah: It's like you're right, Charles, you and your family know all about emotional health and the media. You've never been wrong before about either of these things. 

Mike: I do actually think that he's correct. If you faint and then you don't appear in public life, that's going to be fucking weeks of speculation and it's going to be miserable. But she doesn't need a media strategist right now. She needs a husband. 

Sarah: Right. But my question is like, is that the first and only thing he says to her?

Mike: I mean this is the thing, because she tells this in Andrew Morton's book as, he's basically rolling his eyes at her and saying like, you're paying dramatically, why do you have to make everything into such a disaster? Like, why do you have to turn everything to shit? And then in his biography is where we get the argument that like, oh, I was doing this for like press management purposes. So I think she's probably getting both messages.

Sarah: You got to hand it to Charles. You know, he never sat back and felt sorry for himself for the fact that when he was a little child, all his friends were Oxbridge dons. And look how great he turned out. He's very good at his job. And he's a good husband and no one thinks he's a ridiculous posho who talks to plants all day and dreams of being reborn as a tampon. And there's nothing wrong with that, but he's in the wrong lane of work. 

Mike: But this is an interesting  moment to me, because this is basically the moment when both of them give up on even trying.

Sarah: Yeah. There is often a moment like that. It's like a simultaneous orgasm.

Mike:  She experiences this as the last draw, as in, no matter how fucked up I am, I cannot get him to care about me. Like there is no extreme that I can fall to where he will just shut the fuck up and like help me out. He experiences this as, no matter how much support I give her, no matter how much I do for her, she's still super fucked up. This is from his abysmal biography published in 2017, “Diana disliked nearly everything her husband loved. His country pursuits, his polo, his painting, his gardening. She had come around somewhat on opera, but had little use for Shakespeare. She was indifferent to architecture, alternative medicine, the environment”.

Sarah: Oh my gosh. She was indifferent to architecture?

Mike: I know,  he's filtering all of this through his interests. It's also not true that she's not interested in alternative medicine. That's another interesting thing. because she's doing acupuncture and Tai Chi and meditation. She's actually interested in this stuff and he easily could have connected with her on it if he had tried asking, “Sweetie, what are you into?” 

But so what's amazing is after this event, they have this really kind of dark and depressing marriage where both of them are dedicated to producing images for the newspapers and nothing else. So on sort of official trips, they have separate hotel rooms when they do these like official diplomatic tours of Bulgaria or whatever. And at events they have to seem like they're arriving together. So they start running these absurd logistics so that they can stay completely separate as long as possible. And then meet somewhere like 10 minutes before the event and then like walk into the event like arm in arm.

Sarah:  Oh my God, this is like Parent Trap level logistics. 

Mike: This is from the Andrew Morton book “As a close friend, commented, she seems to dread Charles' appearance. The days when she is happiest is when he is in Scotland. When he's at Kensington palace, she feels absolutely at a loss and like a child again. She loses all the ground she has built up when she is on her own”. 

So she experiences being around him as just a nonstop, belittling experience. There's a scene where they're on some ambassador trip to Qatar or something, and they're speaking to some high up government official or something. And the three of them are chatting and this government official guy asked Diana like, “Oh, what are you looking forward to about Qatar?” And she has like a schedule, she's like going to visit orphanages. She's like doing stuff. And she sort of takes in a breath to start telling this guy all the stuff that she has on her schedule, and Charles just says like, “Oh, she's shopping. She's mostly shopping”, and then goes back to what he was talking about. And of course she can't really contradict him in public. So she's like, yep, just doing the shopping.

Sarah: I can see why the public was so fascinated by them because she's so compelling as a public figure. And so charismatic and any kind of royal marriage is interesting, but also there's just the fact that like the public can tell when people hate each other and are pretending that they don't. And like the tension from that is like intense. 

Mike: There's a million photos, too,  of them sitting in a car. And you can just see like the stone of silence between them. They just look so miserable. I think it's like a World Cup soccer match where they sit next to each other for 90 minutes and do not look at each other or exchange a word. 

Sarah: Oh God, I didn’t know that it was that bad. I didn’t know that like, they were just not communicating for a lot of their marriage. That's so stressful.

Mike:  So the next photo I'm about to show you is of Princess Diana with a gentleman.

Sarah: Ooh. Is that a polo player or a jockey or something? 

Mike: He's like a horse dude. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's a horse dude. Yeah. That's the official term. 

Mike: He's a household cavalry for Buckingham Palace. 

Sarah: I did not understand this country.

Mike:  I feel like ‘horse dude’ is a more accurate description. He's like in charge of the horses. He's like a former army guy who did horse stuff, and now he's in charge of the Buckingham palace horses.

Sarah: Okay. Yeah. He's the, yeah, he is the horse dude. Yeah. He's a very cute horse dude. 

Mike: Isn't he? 

Sarah: Yes. And she appears to be giving him a silver chalice with a little horse on top. And so she's wearing a cute, it's kind of like one of Julia Roberts has outfits in Pretty Woman. She's got a black, polka dot tank top. And so she's presenting the silver chalice to the horse dude. And he's got the expression that you would expect on a horse dude. He's being given a silver horse chalice by a beautiful princess. 

Mike: And, uh, what color is his hair, Sarah? 

Sarah: I knew it. I knew, I knew, I knew that people would speculate about this. I knew it. You filthy, filthy meanies. He has ginger hair. 

Mike: Yes. But bonus debunking. There's all kinds of speculation that he is the actual father of Harry, but she didn't actually start sleeping with him until two years after Harry was born. 

Sarah: Oh. But they did have an affair though. Okay. 

Mike: Oh yes, sorry. I was getting to that.

Sarah: Yes. Okay. I feel like it's more okay to speculate about parenting. If like there, if he isn't just some random, you know, man, she gave a goblet to one time.

Mike: No they had numerous sexes, but they didn't have sex before Harry was born. Also there's also extremely unconvincing photos of sort of his face next to Prince Harry's face and like, look at the evidence and they'll highlight like his nose shape and his like cheek height or whatever. And it's like, so unconvincing, like, it just looks like an adult male. 

Sarah: Right? Well, I mean, the thing is that, like, there just isn't that much diversity of facial features between human beings. We just all kind of look like each other. 

Mike: You could basically take a front way shot of Prince Harry, and a front way shot of like William hurt, and they would probably look quite similar. Like they're both like white middle-aged dudes. Like it's not, it's not totally out of the ordinary that they would have similarities. 

Sarah: Wow. Prince Harry is middle-aged. I have to digest that information.

Mike:  But so this man's name is James Hewitt.

Sarah:  James Hewitt, the horse dude.

Mike: He is her second affair. Were you aware of this? 

Sarah: No. Who is her first affair? 

Mike: Her first affair is with a guy named Barry Mannakee, who is one of her security guards. It's still not clear whatever happened, but she does admit in these sort of lost Diana tapes that from 1984 to 1986, she had a huge crush on one of her bodyguards. You know, Tina Brown, as usual, is very interested in the sort of P in the V aspects and did they have sex? But it's very clear that she had like some sort of emotional affair with this person. He, you know, as her bodyguard, he spends an incredible amount of time with her. And, you know, she cries a lot. She's someone who is struggling with a lot of issues. And so, you know, she'll go out and do these events with people, and then she'll kind of come back to the limousine exhausted and he'll sort of cradle her while she sort of recovers. This is someone she’s very close with.

Sarah:  She has to get emotional support from somewhere.

Mike: Exactly. And she's not getting it from anywhere else. One of the quotes in Andrew Morton's book is from a friend of hers who says “He really had the hots for her. He acquired all these cashmere sweaters, all of a sudden”.

Sarah: That’s so good, I love that! That's lovely. That’s so cute.

Mike: That's so you can tell something happened. 

Sarah: Yes, she's like, I need you to have a soft sweater when I'm crying on your sweater. 

Mike: Yes. Tina Brown quotes three different people saying this was a full-blown affair, but I don't know if that's all that important. It clearly was an emotional affair. It clearly was like a romantic relationship on some level. 

Sarah: So like maybe there was sex, but it seems like the primary importance of the relationship in her life was giving her this sympathy, and empathy, and emotional warmth.

Mike: I think he's probably super-duper smitten with her. I mean, it's also something kind of amazing, you know, she's so beautiful. She's so famous. She's so luminescent. And yet everyone in her life is so cold to her. Right. She doesn't get warmth from the Royal family. She does get warmth from her husband. And so just the fact that this guy was really into her.

Sarah: And she's getting gas lit all day. because she's like, aren’t I lovable? And all the people in her immediate interactions are like, not really.

Mike:  It makes sense that you would latch on to the first guy who's nice to her and clearly is smitten with her and makes her feel beautiful. And so in 1987, Barry  Mannakee gets transferred to some other regiments, something, something, he gets transferred out of the palace. So basically all of a sudden, overnight he disappears. And then this is wild, he fucking dies. He gets in a motorcycle accident on May 22nd, 1987. He is riding on the back of a friend's motorcycle, and a 17 year old girl pulls out of a side road and hits the motorcycle, and he dies.

Sarah:  Oh, that's terrible. That's really terrible. 

Mike: What’s very unfortunate and sucky about this, is that there's speculation that he was murdered. And it appears Princess Diana, she eventually becomes much more paranoid than she is now. It appears that she believed that he was murdered, that like a hit was taken out on him. 

Sarah: I mean, that makes sense that she would find that believable. He's like, well, everyone's being real hostile to me and has been this entire time. So like, why not? Why wouldn't they, who knows.

Mike:  There's also the mother of the 17-year-old girl gives an interview to the Daily Express where the headline on the story is, Why I believe Diana's Lover was Murdered. But this poor woman talks to Tina Brown and says, “I don't think that he was murdered, the paper completely made that up. I specifically said, make sure you don't print this as a conspiracy theory story”. And then this conspiracy theory article comes out. So like British tabloids, great work, everybody. 

There's also a really chilling moment. The way that she finds out that he's been killed is Prince Charles tells her. It's pretty likely that he knew just because like gossip goes around the Royal palace, like COVID-19. And so Charles sort of maliciously is like the one to break it to her to see what her reaction is. Or he's totally fucking clueless. And it's just like, Oh, Hey fun fact, do you remember that bodyguard? So apparently they're on their way to the Cannes Film Festival and he tells her, and she just has to be like, “Hmm, that's too bad, he was a good body guard”, and has to hold it all in until Charles isn't around. 

Sarah: Oh no, that's terrible.

Mike:  But so after Barry gets transferred, before he dies, Diana starts her relationship with the horse dude. And this goes on for five years.

Sarah:  Oh, wow. It's nice that she has some steady horse dude stuff. 

Mike: So this is what Tina Brown says about Diana's affair with James Hewitt. “Indeed from beginning to end, it was Diana who ran this affair. She was as much in control of its pace and rhythms as she had been out of control of the pace and rhythms leading up to her marriage. This would be her romantic pattern from now on. Forget the modest blushing, she would do the initiating. There were a few men bold enough to make the first move on the Princess of Wales. The affair took place on her schedule and on her turf, Kensington Palace and Highgrove when Charles was away”. 

Sarah: Wow. Princess Diana, the Sharon Stone years. 

Mike: I know it's kind of dope. She meets him, I guess he's at Buckingham Palace for some sort of horse logistics meeting. He walks out of the room and he looks down the stairs and there's Diana at the bottom of the stairs, holding her shoes in her hands and barefoot, and just chatting to some friends. He looks at her, she looks back, and I guess she just sees him and is like mmm, and starts asking around. I mean, she really goes for it and is like, who's the horse dude that's like around, like he has big beefy thighs, like what's his deal. And so she finds out who he is and invites him to a party and then saunters up to him at the party and is like, hello. She said something along the lines of, “I've always resisted learning to ride horses because it's something my husband does. It's never really been my thing. But I think now is really the time for me to learn to ride horses. Do you think you could give me lessons?” 

Sarah: Hm. This guy is like Billy Baldwin in The Ssquid and the Whale. So this is a Baldwin horse dude, a little horse Baldwin centaur.

Mike:  And so he starts giving her riding lessons she's way into it. Apparently she'll start sort of taking trips away from these country homes. She'll like drive into London, like two hours, have a lesson with him and then drive back to these miserable, freakishly cold country houses.

Sarah: Horses are just sexy. Like everything about horses and horse culture is sexy. 

Mike: And you get to say the word ride a lot, and staunch, and haunches.

Sarah:  Try to not have an affair with someone hot and who's teaching you to ride a horse. All right, you're killing me, Mike. Let's move forward. Let's press on. 

Mike: So according to him, they are hanging out in Buckingham Palace after one of these lessons, and she reaches over and kisses him.  

Sarah: More like Fuckingham Palace.

Mike: And then they start this affair that goes on sort of off and on for five years. And it seems like it's quite productive. I mean, like she likes him, she brings him around the kids. 

Sarah: You really are a project management. You're like the incidents of sexual acts appears to be quite high. 

Mike: He seems kind of like her sex idiot. She likes him and she's enjoying herself, but it also doesn't seem like a sort of a soulmate situation.

Sarah: No, you don't want to have a soulmate when you're stuck in a cold marriage and you're feeling powerless. She needs just like a lovely horse dude to have sex with. 

Mike: Yeah. In 1989, he gets posted to Germany. She tries to pull strings to sort of get rid of this appointment. It's not clear if Charles had anything to do with the appointment, but he gets sent to Germany and that's basically the end of the relationship. They try long distance. She sends him letters. She sends him magazines in the mail. She sends him Playboy, Penthouse, and Horse & Hound. These are his reading material, I guess, but once he's out of her orbit, she doesn't like really keep a candle burning for him necessarily. 

This is super fucked up. Eventually he sells his story to the tabloids and somebody writes a book about their love affair. And he eventually writes a memoir and then she just cuts him off and never speaks to him again.

Sarah: Yeah, that's rough. That kind of a betrayal would be really damaging if that was the first relationship that you tried to have after entering into this also very damaging marriage. 

Mike: It sucks. All right. Next picture. We're blasting through these.

Sarah: Oh, wow. I love this picture. This is a lovely page. This reminds me of the wedding in Working Girl, these outfits. So I believe I'm looking at a picture of Princess Diana with the lovely Sarah Ferguson or as I know her, “Fergie”. 

MikeL Yes, my lovely lady lumps. 

Sarah: So they're both wearing little suits and Fergie has big puffy shoulder pads. It's an electric blue suit. And then she has black leather gloves on, it's honestly very hot. Yeah. And Princess Diana is looking at her with the happy, laughing face. And she's holding the hand of a little boy who I imagine is likely William or Harry. 

Mike: I also just love this photo because it's just the perfect encapsulation of their relationship. Because they're in all of this like Royal shit, they're wearing like 18 layers of taffeta. Right? Like it's very formal and yet they're giggling about something.

Sarah: Oh yeah. No, it's beautiful. It looks like a genuine moment between two friends.

Mike:  What do you know about Fergie, actually? 

Sarah: I know Fergie guested on the double episode of Friends where everyone goes to London and Ross marries Emily. So I primarily know her for her work on Friends. No, I know that she married into the Royal family and I think it was just like sexy royal, I feel like was her reputation. 

Mike: Do you know how she knew Diana? 

Sarah: I bet they were at school together or something like that. 

Mike: Close, they are fourth cousins. So they were like in each other's orbit as kids.

Sarah: That's cute. 

Mike: And then they sort of reconnect when Diana is 19 and Fergie is 21. Diana is actually the way that he got into the Royal family because Diane is having a party and she seats Fergie next to Prince Andrew, Charles’s brother. In 1986, Fergie marries Prince Andrew. And she kind of becomes like a partner in crime with Diana. Like I think of it as sort of like a Ghost World situation. These two women who just feel like outcasts, even though by any other standard these are both of course very upper-class women, but compared to the Royal family, they're basically Daria from MTV.

Sarah: They’re goths. The takeaway is that Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson are goths. 

Mike: Okay. Finally has someone to sort of giggle with at all of the absurdity of Royal life. She becomes kind of a mentor to Fergie. Like the person that Diana never had was like, “Hey, here's how this works.” 

Sarah: Oh, it's like Molly Brown and Titanic. Remember when Jack gets all the silverware and she's like, “Start from the outside and work your way in.” 

Mike: Exactly. It really is a breath of fresh air for Diana to finally have “normal person” and one of her cousins, somebody she's known from childhood, to be at these miserable Balmoral six week long periods, right? 

Another reporter tells Tina Brown that he saw them sort of doing all of their Royal duties at some party. And then within 15 minutes, they both just sneak out the back barefoot because they both think that the whole thing is stupid. 

Sarah: That's lovely. 

Mike: But then eventually there's a wedge between them. First of all, the press  loves the narrative of a cat fight. So the press starts taking silly, dumb little things that happened between them and blowing them up. This is what Tina Brown says, “It became fat Fergie against wonderful Diana. Her dress was often compared negatively to Diana's”.

Sarah: Who has an eating disorder!

Mike: I know. And also she has way more money. And like, this is something that happens a lot with the Royal family, is that the Royal family themselves are reading what is in the paper. And then it affects the way that they treat each other, which then feeds into what ends up in the paper. So it's like these sort of self-fulfilling prophecies. So this creates this like pretty fake rivalry between Diana and Fergie. But then after a while of this, it becomes a real rivalry. 

Also, this is also very like Ghost World-ish, Fergie starts enjoying herself in the Royal family. She sort of starts bonding with the Queen. She starts doing riding, like sort of covered buggy stuff with Prince Philip, who I guess is into that. And Tina Brown says “The Queen liked her new daughter-in-law because she was a country girl, a real one this time, with an unfeigned passion for riding derived from a childhood on the Hampshire horse show circuit. A friend of the Queen’s told her biography, “The Queen was very fond of Fergie. She liked the way she used to sit with her legs apart, making jokes.” And the queen starts having lunch with Fergie sometimes and Diane is like, well, she never wants to have lunch with me. It's one of those things where it's like, you think that your friendship is based on sort of look at these idiots, we're the goth kids like smoking cigarettes out behind the middle school. And then this person starts to sort of be one of the people that you've kind of been making fun of. 

Sarah: Yes. There's like a million Disney channel original movies about just this phenomenon.

Mike: She’s transforming into everything that Diana can't be. And also, even though Diana is very skeptical and kind of angry at the Royal family during this period, she still wants their acceptance. 

Sarah: Don't you love how these exact same family dynamics could happen anywhere on a smaller scale. Like this is in-laws stuff, with really expensive clothes and really expensive sets.

Mike: Yeah. It's also, this is dark, it's also kind of like mental health stuff. In that Charles starts making little comments to Diana, like, “Well, Fergie’s really happy at Balmoral, why can't you be more like Fergie?”

Sarah: Uh, pit them against each other Charles, that'll improve things. I don't know why I'm referencing Seinfeld so much lately, but Charles should do the opposite of all of his instincts.

Mike: Oh, God. I just, this is like supporting someone with depression 101. Don't make facile comparisons like, “Why can't you be happy like your sister?” Because you're not only poisoning that person against you, you're also poisoning against the other person. So of course, Diana starts to kind of resent how bubbly Fergie is and how much Fergie enjoys, what are still to her extremely miserable periods at this big ass cold house in Scotland.

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s like your friend comes to a new school and then they maybe become a prep. 

Mike: I know this. I literally did this in freshman year of high school. It's so painful to read about. It's like, yeah, you start to hate this other person because they make different choices. But it's not that it's the system.

Sarah: Yeah. That's the prep-rearchy. 

Mike: This is what's so amazing to me is that, one of the more shocking things about reading Andrew Morton's book about Diana is how much time she spent alone on a lot of nights, because she's so drained from meeting 500 people that day and shaking a million hands. She'll just hang out by herself and watch EastEnders. You know, you imagine these like big celebrity lives and they're like out doing things and on the party circuit all the time, but this is what Diana says in Andrew Morton's book. “I swam every day. I never went out at night. I didn't burn candles at both ends. I got up very early in the morning on my own, to be on my own. At nighttime I went to bed early.” 

Sarah: Yeah, that sounds nice.

Mike: And then Andrew Morton says “Her greatest luxury in life was to sit down with baked beans on toast and watch television. That's my idea of paradise.”

Sarah:  Okay. Speaking as an introvert myself and saying that once again we are speculatively using the introvert theory of Princess Diana. If your job is meeting and greeting thousands and thousands of people and constant interactions, being in the public eye, doing all the ceremonial stuff, being in situations where you're being seen by hundreds or thousands of people or the media is following you. I think you need a ton of recuperation time. So like, I don't think that princess is the ideal job for someone who is of a constitution where like princessing means that they just need to be sort of like lying on their backs, watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast. But also that's to say that, that sounds to me like a perfect evening. And I think I will do that tonight.

Mike: Yes. You deserve it because you were extroverted and you recorded the show with me for three hours and then you're exhausted. And so it's sweatpants time.

Sarah:  It's true. I'm always very tired on show days. You and I, we've talked about this. We were are both laid flat we record because yeah. And I think that's introvert exhaustion, so yeah. 

Mike: Yes, so I don't know. I think it's so interesting. I mean, we hear so much about, you know, Elton John was friends with her, and various celebrities are friends with her, and it sounds like most of these friendships are like pretty shallow. They'll have lunch once a month or something, but it doesn't seem like she has close relationships. She's also becoming much less trusting at this time, generally. 

Sarah: Yeah. And how many times has he been snitched on or spied on, right? Like why would you trust anyone? It's like, if you're this continually surveil, like that would really mess with your head. 

Mike: She's also estranged from her own family. So this is from the transcripts of Andrew Morton's book and he doesn't include this in his book, I think, because it's just so out there mean. She's talking about her mother's marriage with the sheep farmer guy is breaking up at this point. So she says “She wanted him out of the house, so he went. He was a bit of a manic depressive and a drinker. And when mom heard that he'd fallen in love with another lady, she went spare. I used to ring her up and she'd cry down the telephone. I'd tell her, you know, mom, you've had two goes at marriage and you can't get it, right. You've got to look at yourself. I'm stuck in this one and I'm worse off than you. She didn't like that. You must let me cry. You must let me cry. So I said, you can cry as much as you like. It's good to cry, but you're not getting any sympathy from me.” Which is mean, dude, it's so mean.

Sarah:  I feel that this is really reminding me of the Anna Nicole Smith story. Because I feel like, one of the lessons here is looking at marrying this obscenely wealthy, fancy man and being like, yeah, I think that I understand the situation going into it and that I can benefit from it. And just underestimating the swirling maelstrom that you're about to be caught by. And because this, this funnel that you can't get out of.

Mike: And that often manifests itself as really mean behavior. 

Sarah: Yes. The people who need our help are often very mean. 

Mike: Yeah. Yes. And the things that you hate the most about yourself or the things that you recognize in other people. And so she sees her mom doing this and like, Oh, another failed marriage, mom, get it together.

Sarah: Also it's a way of not recognizing yourself and maybe like, talking to that aspect of yourself in a way that you don't see as that.

Mike: There’s also, this is super fucked up and I thought about not including this, but it feels like really disingenuous not to include this. There is an incident, her brother, young Charles, is getting married. And so they all go back to the old house to sort of get ready for this marriage and there's a couple of days of activities and rehearsals, et cetera, et cetera. And she sees her mother and her father are in the same place. She doesn't see that that often. And both her father and his wife, Diana’a step-mother,  Raine Legge, pretend that they don't see her mother. Like literally look through her and they're sitting at the same dinner table and they won't speak to her and she won't speak to them. And Diana just gets livid. She's like, what the fuck is this? Why are you acting like children? Why do you have to act like all of this is real. Like, this is an absolutely ridiculous way to behave when all this is like a decade in the past at this point. And so I guess she sort of confronts Raine about this and they're shouting at each other and she fucking pushes Raine down the stairs. 

Sarah: Wow. Wow. Wow. That's an, and this is like an old lady, right? Like an old Raine at this point. 

Mike: And people talk about like bruises. 

Sarah: Wow. She pushed an old lady down the stairs.

Mike: It’s so bad. 

Sarah: It's funny because like, this is the kind of behavior that when people do this, if they're poor, it's like, they get accused of being white trash. Because like anyone but the rich and fancy who do this get accused of like subhuman behavior. It has to do with them being like, not the correct kind of person. But like, everyone does this. This is just what people do. Like this is like, I mean, not everyone pushes an old lady down the stairs, but this is proof that it doesn't have to do with any kind of classification aside from like, are you a human pushed to extremes? Great. It’s so cartoonish it’s terrible! She pushed an old lady down the stairs!

Mike:  I know. It's unbelievable. 

Sarah: Goodbye. England's Rose, you pushed an old lady down the stairs.

Mike:  I read this in Andrew Morton's book and then in Tina Brown's book and then in the fucking Prince Charles biography. And I was like, I don't know if I want to believe this, like this it's such extreme behavior. Like surely, we're misinterpreting something. This is a transcript of Diana. This is Diana's own words.

Sarah:  She says, and then I pushed that bitch down the stairs. 

Mike: Literally she says “My stepmother and I ended up having this row and I pushed her down the stairs which gave me enormous satisfaction. My father didn't speak to me for six months”. She fucking did it, dude. There's no like, Oh, was it really some steps? Or like there's different accounts of it. And who can say, it's like, nope, she fucking pushed an old lady down the steps dude.

Sarah:  Most of the time the people that we have the most extreme, horrible behavior towards, the people we're most likely to snap in a violent way towards, like our family and like people we've known for years, and people we're intimately connected to. And like, yeah, I don't know.

Mike: That's I can't, I can't say anything intelligent about it. I'm just like, yep. It fucking happened. We need to incorporate that into our view of Princess Diana. 

Sarah:  As with a lot else here, it's also like extremely childlike behavior. 

Mike: It’s so immature. It's so also I cannot get over this quote. What she says, she said to Raine before pushing her was, “We've always hated you. You've ruined our family life. I hope you're pleased about that.” And it's like, it's not Raine that did this. 

Sarah: No, it just makes sense that someone would like that would put all their anger at everything and the anger that their dad deserves, and that like the whole situation deserves, and like being born to this fucked up family whose behaviors you realize you have replicated exactly as if living some kind of curse deserve. It's like, let's channel it all into this old lady. Oh yeah. This is like a Cops episode. Right? But it's just that we're in like a different genre of the tabloids story, so she gets to just tell her biographer about it.

Mike: So we're going to leave Jerry Springer. I have two more photos for you. This is a very famous photo that you've probably seen before. Bloop.

Sarah:  No, I haven't. No. 

Mike: Can you describe it? 

Sarah: Yeah. Princess Diana is sitting in a chair. She's wearing a lovely blue dress and she's shaking hands with someone who is facing away from the camera, and has a big pair of glasses on. It looks like they might be in a hospital room. But yeah, I can't see who it is. 

Mike: Yes. This is the first image of princess Diana shaking the hand of someone with AIDS. It is 1987. And one thing I never knew about this photo that is so moving to me is there was so much stigma around AIDS at the time, it's deliberate that you can't see this guy's face, because he didn't want his loved ones to see who he was. So there's 12 people that she's visiting in this hospital wing and he is the only one that will allow himself to be photographed even from the back. That's the environment that this handshake is taking place in. 

Sarah: Yeah. And she's the one who's able to show her face. Because she's the fucking Princess of Wales. So she's like bigger than AIDS stigma. Yeah. 

Mike: We talked so much shit about raising awareness on the show, but this is one of the most effective acts of raising awareness in philanthropy history, because there's so many myths around HIV at this time of how you can get it, who is safe to touch. I mean, this did so much to normalize people living with HIV. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like, just from a practical perspective, like if you see the Princess of Wales taking what you perceive as that kind of a risk and are like, maybe it's fine. You know, it's the kind of thing that you can quote statistics all day, you can tell people facts all day, but like there are these mammalian responses where like, you really must first create a system where there is such a thing as a princess. And then get a picture of a princess shaking hands and looking happy to be in the company of someone who is HIV positive. 

Mike: I mean, this becomes one of her big issues. Obviously it's something she's very famous for now. It appears that she got interested in this issue because her friends kept dying. She knew a lot of people in the world of dance and art, writers and actors. And, you know, this was to the extent that she had sort of close friends. These were all people that were sort of in the arts. And so in the early 1980s, AIDS is just ripping through the art community and she's losing friends. And there's a lot of closeted gay men at the time that are working for the palace. And Prince Charles’s secretary dies of AIDS. She has the feeling that this is sort of all around her. And so she starts going to AIDS hospices. 

And another really interesting thing is that she starts bringing William and Harry with her. She'll do this thing where she's on the way to a hospice care center or a homeless shelter, and she'll just sort of tell them like, “This is how a welfare state works”, especially with homeless shelter. She would always tell them that like, we are extremely lucky and these are normal people and they're in hard times. Like you need to not be afraid to touch these people. You need to not be afraid to be close to these people. There are people just like you and me.

Sarah: Also I feel like bringing children into these photos, these public images of interacting with people with AIDS like that again, is like very powerful public messages. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. That they're safe to be around children.

Sarah: And not just children but Royal children. Like these are the Royal babies. These are the most valuable little toddlers that can be conceived of. And just like the optics of, you know, not just demonstrating the safety of the interaction, but showing the value of someone by bringing the Royal children around them. It's interesting. I mean, I feel like, again, like this is her correctly understanding the system she's in and the power that she has and then using it well.

Mile:  Yeah, it seems like it's almost a compulsion for her. I mean, it seems like a major way that she gets self-esteem. 

Sarah: I mean, if I pushed an old lady down the stairs, I’d want to do some good things for other people.

Mike: I mean, there's a really interesting scene where, you know, the Royal family has this sort of country home that is the next-door neighbor to the house where she grew up. Sometime after her family moves out of it, that old Manor house gets turned into like a facility for adults with developmental disabilities, just like people who are handicapped living in this big building. One afternoon she's just curious, no cameras, no press, no anything. She just like wanders down and knocks on the door and he's like, “Hey, can I meet the people who live here?” This seems like something that she was interested in doing like as a person, this wasn't, I mean, of course there were photo ops in these things, too. But it wasn't like she had to have the press there ready for these moments. It's like she would just go and do it. 

There's also things, when Charles breaks his arm in this polo accident, she goes to the hospital and you know, there's not much to do, he's sleeping, whatever. She wanders down the hall and she ends up hanging out with his family where the wife has fallen into a coma and she just starts visiting them every day. And eventually the wife dies, and she goes to their house and has dinner with them. This is like months later, she remembers them. It's really fascinating to me because I always assumed that there was some level of cynicism in her doing this kind of philanthropy, but it seems like it's something that she has to do or something that's a big part of her self-conception.

Sarah:  Yeah. It's very dark that we correctly assume that if someone famous is doing this kind of photo op philanthropy, that it's like primarily cynically motivated.

Mike: It’s  also a very interesting teamwork thing because according to Charles’ fawning biography. So take this with whatever size salt grain you want. He's doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff. Like he's not good at, you know, visiting people in hospice and shaking hands, that's not his forte, but it's apparently he is extremely good at raising money and like identifying causes where he can actually help. So I guess at one point he's interested in conserving Romanian villages. Because Ceausescu is bulldozing a bunch of old villages.

Sarah:  Because he wants to save vampires. 

Mike: I think he fucking read about something in a fucking magazine article. My understanding is like most rich people, philanthropy is based on fucking magazine articles that they read, or like people they bump into at the guacamole at conferences. Like it's not done in any kind of systematic way. And so he gets it in his head and he raises $70 million to preserve Romanian villages. It's interesting to me that neither one of them were canny enough to see that there are huge limitations on what Princess Diana can achieve by like going to places and shaking hands. Right? Like raising awareness is extremely limited in a lot of circumstances. And also, Prince Charles is good at this behind the scenes stuff. So I wish that like there had been a conversation of like, look two completely different aspects of philanthropy appeal to us. So why don't we team up and try to have the most impact that we can. But their marriage was so destroyed at this point that they couldn't even have a basic conversation of like, “Hey, how can we maximize this?”

Sarah: And if they're seeing themselves as competing with each other, like in this basic adversarial situation then like, why would you want to do something where you could be mutually helpful to each other? That would be terrible. 

Mike: Then this is the thing that he sort of belittles it because he's like, well, you're not really having any impact, you're just going there and meeting people. And she's just like, oh, well, you're just raising a bunch of money, but you're not actually doing anything with like hearts and minds, because honestly, to change government policy on HIV, you do have to do some hearts and minds shit. Like this stuff actually works on changing the minds of policymakers, and policy is what you need to solve social problems. So like, they're both right in their way. 

Sarah: It's funny that like Prince Charles has this amazing asset and he refuses to use her, you know? And it's like, someone's given him a Stradivarius and he's using it to prop the door open.

Mike: And so there's this really moving scene in Andrew Morton's book, where one of her friends named Adrian Ward Jackson, he's sort of a gallery arts guy. He's on a bunch of boards of a bunch of arts institutions. He gets HIV and she visits him. It's not quite every day, but it's definitely every week. He lives in this sort of one bedroom apartment in Mayfair and she'll just like pop over for an hour or two on afternoons, sometimes with William and Harry and just hang out with this guy, who's basically wasting away from late-stage HIV. You know, he only wants a few people around him when he dies, and he decides that he wants her to be one of them. And so he gives her a special pager so that no matter what she's doing, she will be there when he starts to fade. And so she's up at Balmoral it's August of 1989 and she gets this page. All the flights are down, she can't get a private jet, so she drives eight hours back to London to be with him in his last days. And she is. 

This is from Andrew Morton's book, “Diana was at the opposite end of the country. She drove 600 miles South through the night with her police protection officer. Her abrupt departure did not go over well with the Royal family who were assembled in Scotland for the annual reunion. In her rush Diana had failed to observe protocol and ask the queen for the customary permission to leave.” 

Sarah: Oh my God. Friend is dying of AIDS, got to get the Queen's permission to leave the country house. 

Mike: And then, “During the following days, it was insisted that she returned promptly. The family thought that a token visit would have sufficed and seemed uneasy about her display of loyalty and devotion, which clearly went far beyond the traditional call of duty”.

Sarah:  Oh, fuck them all.

Mike: It’s absurd to act as if this is some sort of deficit, like you missed whatever fucking hunting on a Sunday afternoon to go visit your friend as he fucking died. Like what? There's also drama about her attending his funeral because Royal family members are not supposed to attend the funerals of commoners. So she has to like lobby to go to this guy's funeral. And apparently she just puts her foot down and she's like, fuck you, fuck this, and just goes to the funeral. 

Sarah: Cause like, what are they going to do? Like arrest her.

Mike: Exactly. Fuck you. And also she understands public affairs in a way that they do not. And having the princess crying at the funeral of someone with AIDS is actually very good for the cause, like this humanizes AIDS.

Sarah: It’s amazing that like, you know, aside from the political reasons that I think should be readily apparent to people, you know, that this is something that is a positive for the Royal family overall, I guess like, let her do it. It's gonna make you look good. There's also the fact of like, someone is actively dying in this story. Can you people not see that? Like what are you preoccupied with? What's more important than that?

Mike: I know. What is the value that you're preserving at this point? Right. So last thing I'm going to show you. We are going to end with another table read. Did you know that there is also a sext tape of Diana? 

Sarah: I think I knew that vaguely, but I don't know who it's with. 

Mike: These are known as the ‘Squidgygate tapes”, because Squidgy is a term of endearment in Great Britain. And the man that she's talking to calls her “Squidgy”. I think it's like 32 times or something. And so these tapes leak eventually during the divorce. So check your email again. 

Sarah: Oh, you sent me Squidgy tapes. 

Mike: It's rough, dude. I wanted to sort of begin and end the episode symmetrically with these tapes, but fucking hell, this tape is so boring. It’s unbelievable how boring it is. 

Sarah: It'll be like, Michelle Remembers. Do you want to be Gilbey or if you want to be Diana?

Mike: You should be Diana because you're a lady.

Sarah:  Okay. I guess I felt, I feel like Diana is a pretty, meaty role. So I thought maybe you would like to play her since you know so much about her.

Mike: No, Diana is the least meaty role. This is a conversation with a man named James Gilbey, who she is having an affair with. And during this conversation, it is so palpable that she's just not into him at all. She is distracted, at one point he asks her to turn the TV down and she refuses. 

Sarah: So this is like reading people's text transcripts, where they're like writing ‘K’ to each other a lot.

Mike: And he's so into her, but she is just like, yeah, I guess…

Sarah:  You have to capture that in Gilbey, in your portrayal of Gilbey.

Mike: So, okay. I'll start.

Sarah:  I'm excited. 

Mike: “What have you had on today? What have you been wearing?”

Sarah:  “A pair of black Jodhpur things on at the moment, and a pink polo neck.”

Mike: “Really looking good?”

Sarah: “Yes.”

Mike:  “Are you?”

Sarah: “ Yes.”

Mike: “Dead good?

Sarah: “I think it's good.”

Mike: “You do?”

Sarah:  “Yes. Yes.”

Mike: “And what's on your feet?”

Sarah:  “A pair of flat black pumps.”

Mike: “Very chic.”  

So before we get to the next excerpt, it feels like to me, like he's trying to push it into dirty talk. Like “Where are you wearing?” And she's just like, Yeah, I like it. It's fine. I look fine. Right? Like she's not really playing along. And then he just switches to logistics and he's like, Oh yeah, what kind of shoes? Okay. So now we have another excerpt. This is toward the end and it's like even more depressing. 

Mike: “Oh, Squidgy. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Sarah:  “You are the nicest person in the whole wide world.”

Mike: “Pardon?”

Sarah: “Nicest person in the whole wide world.”

Mike: “Well, darling, you are to me too, sometimes”.

It's so, uh, it's like you wanted it to be parallel to the Charles and Camilla one where it's like, Oh, they found someone they like. 

Sarah: Yeah, I did. I wanted it to be a sexy, squidgy tape.

Mike: It goes on like this. She's not listening to him. He makes kissing noises, the tabloids try to make this sexual, because at one point he mentions, I haven't jerked off in four days or something. And she's like, Oh yeah, it's been raining, or something like that. Like something completely diversionary.

Sarah: She's sitting there indifferently while he's like a little dog humping her leg, basically. She's just like, I'm trying to eat these beans. 

Mike: The only thing that's actually interesting about this is the way that it was recorded. This is a phone call that takes place on New Year's Eve of 1989. And in 1990, one of the tabloids comes to her and says, we have a recording of you with James Gilbey doing sex talk and stuff. And so she becomes convinced, correctly, that her phone is tapped. What's amazing about this is the tabloids, contact her and say, we have this tape, can you confirm that it's you? She gets wildly paranoid about this and then she doesn't hear anything. So she basically exists in this mode of like, there's proof that I'm having an affair that is going to come out, but I don't know when it's going to come out.

Sarah: Wow. That's terrifying. 

Mike: This is also a time when she's gaining a lot of confidence. So one of the things that happens, this is actually terrible. They go on a skiing holiday and there's an avalanche. And one of the people in their party dies. And I guess she sort of leaps into action about the various diplomatic things that have to happens. Because like they have to get the body back and it's in Switzerland, so like there have to be ambassadors involved in these kinds of conversations. And she realizes that like, she's actually good at this. She's always been cut out of this by Charles. And she's always had this inferiority complex about her intellect. And during this time when Charles is basically shell shocked, because this guy died trying to save him, successfully. And after this is over, she's like, Oh, I'm actually like, maybe I'm not as stupid as I thought I was. Maybe I'm actually pretty good at this job. 

Sarah: Oh, finally.

Mike: And, in 1988 she starts to see somebody about her eating disorder. 

Sarah: Oh my gosh. Thank God. 

Mike: So one of the few friends that she's kept from her previous life, a woman named Carolyn Bartholomew, she says, “Look, the reason why you are so depressed, the reason why you're so tired, the reason why you don't have any energy during the day, It's your fucking eating disorder, you're not getting vitamins.” 

Sarah: She's not getting calories.

Mike: I don't know how I feel about the ethics of this, but she says, if you don't get help for your eating disorder I’m going to go to the press.

Sarah:  Oh wow. 

Mike: And I’m going to tell them everything. And it works, Diana finally starts seeing a doctor about her eating disorder.

Sarah:  And how does that go? 

Mike: So this is an excerpt from Andrew Morton's book, “For the next few months he visited her every week. He encouraged her to read books about her condition, even though she had to read them secretly, in case they were seen by her husband or members of staff, she found herself inwardly rejoicing as she turned over the pages. ‘This is me. This is me. I'm not the only one’, she told Carolyn.”

Sarah:  Oh my God, she thought she was the only one?

Mike: I know. He finally correctly diagnoses that the problem is not like her being broken as a person. The problem is that she's in this terrible marriage. This is fascinating. She doesn't end the bulimia, but she gets it much less severe than it had been. However, it still spikes whenever she goes to Balmoral. So there's something about, sort of these intense periods when she's with Charles, she's with the Royal family, that put her in this desperate state. 

Sarah: Yeah. Again, this is why British country house books are most interesting when there are murders involved, because then people have to talk to each other.

Mike: Another thing that she does now, that she's gaining some confidence and she feels like the eating disorder is sort of starting to get under control. Is she confronts Camilla.

Sarah:  What happens? Where does that happen? 

Mike: There's a birthday party that Charles invites her to sort of as a formality, because he knows that she doesn't really like his friends, but she's like, yeah, I'll go, see you there at eight. And he's like, Oh, okay. So they show up to this party together and she realizes within, you know, 10-15 minutes that he's gone. And then she looks around the room and Camilla is gone too. And she's like, okay, fuck this. She goes down the stairs. She finds them, not like making out or anything, but just like sitting and having an intense conversation on a couch. She comes in and she's like, “Charles, leave, me and Camilla need to talk.” And he's like, eh, what are you going to talk about? And she's t-t-t-t, talk just us girls, and sends Charles upstairs. So she turns to Camilla and says, I know what's going on between you and Charles. And according to her account, Camilla says to her, “You've got everything you ever wanted. You've got all the men in the world falling in love with you, and you got two beautiful children. What more do you want?” And Diana says, “I want my husband”.

Sarah:  And then they threw each other into a lily pond.

Mike: And then mud just pours from the ceiling and they start wrestling. Tina Brown doesn't trust this account.

Sarah: Because once again, the dialogue is too good.

Mike: Yeah, it’s very good dialogue. So maybe this happened, maybe it didn’t. I mean, it's quite clear that she did confront Camilla, but we don't know what really happened in that exchange. It's also interesting to me that she says, even in her own account, “I want my husband”, because it doesn't sound like she does actually want her husband.

Sarah:  It's similar to the situation with Raine. She's blaming Raine for everything that went wrong in her family and not placing the blame with her dad, who at least deserves much more of it. And with this it's like Prince Charles would be treating her like garbage with or without Camilla around. But like, it's easier to hate Camilla if you want to believe there's some hope for your marriage or your situation, which like maybe she still does. 

Mike: Yeah. That makes sense.

Sarah:  Also Camilla is choosing to have an affair with her husband and has been doing so for years and years.

Mike: Right, it’s not great. The combination of this growing confidence in herself and growing paranoia and alienation from the Royal family makes her start to make moves to get out. So she starts thinking about how she's going to escape.

Sarah:  I mean, here's a bigger question. If the Royal family believes that like you have to marry a virgin, then how do they feel about divorce? How recently have members of the Royal family started getting divorced and like, because it seems like monumental. And also if you can't go to a commoner's funeral, how are you going to get divorced? 

Mike: I mean what she's worried about, and this drives all of her sort of anger, paranoia, everything she does during the actual divorce, which we're going to talk about next episode, is that she's afraid that they're going to take her kids. Because remember what happened with her mom? 

Sarah: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And this is a more extreme situation.

Mike:  Because there's heirs involved.

Sarah:  And the sense of being humiliated by someone saying, “Actually, I don't want to keep doing this.”

Mike: Yeah. She has a very reasonable fear that if she tries to leave Charles, they will get really ugly. She knows that it's going to be a battle of public opinion if she tries to leave this marriage. And so she wants to get her story out. And so she starts fishing around. And she finds Andrew Morton and she starts sneaking him tapes. 

Sarah: How does she find him?

Mike:  He wrote a fawning biography of her before. Like she very deliberately found a journalist that everything he writes is shitty to Charles and good to her. So she chooses obviously the most fawning journalist who's going to basically print her transcripts almost verbatim and not challenge any of her narratives, which is what he does.

Sarah:  Mm Hmm. Access journalism.

Mike: I wish she  would have picked a female journalist. I don't know. I wish you would have picked a better journalist. 

Sarah: I wish she hadn't pushed Raine Legge down the stairs. You know, we all do our best. 

Mike: Yeah, I know. And so next week's episode is going to start with the publication of his book. And the day after his book is published, they have their first conversation about separating. 

Sarah: Wow. Oh my God. I am really excited. I want to watch this marriage fall apart like wet toast. I'm excited, and I really don't know what's coming. I mean, I know they end up being divorced. But  yeah, I really, Oh boy, we all deserve a soap opera, Mike, thank you for giving us one.

Mike: We all deserve a soap opera and baked beans on toast and EastEnders. 

Sarah: Yes, let’s all have big beans on toast tonight. 

*Uptown Girl by Billy Joel plays*