‘Di’-ing inside
Princess’s secret tapes revealed
Back in 1992 — three years before her death at age 36 — Princess Diana made a number of private video recordings with her speech coach.
These recordings, full of Diana’s many criticisms of Prince Charles as a suitor, husband and lover, are about to gobsmack royalobsessed Britain.
Between voice lessons, Diana answered a series of personal questions “in a remarkably frank manner,” the Sunday Times of London says of the tapes, to be excerpted on British TV next Sunday in a documentary called “Diana in Her Own Words.”
She sums up their first kiss with one (non) word: “Urrgh!” And how’s this for frank: When she confronted her errant husband over his infidelity, Charles told her, “I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”
At the height of her wedded misery, Diana sought advice from the queen.
“I don’t know what you should do,” she said Queen Elizabeth responded. “Charles is hopeless.” Diana poured her heart out to the speech coach, Peter Settelen.
She was stunned, she said, by Charles’ curt answer when asked by a television interviewer, on the day of their engagement, whether they were in love.
“Whatever ‘in love’ means,” Charles had answered.
“That threw me com- pletely,” Diana says on the video, the Times reports.
“I thought: what a strange answer . . . God. It traumatized me.”
She’d met with Charles only 13 times before their marriage.
“He wasn’t very consistent with his courting abilities,” Diana said.
“He’d ring me every day for a week, then wouldn’t speak to me for three weeks. Very odd. I thought, ‘Fine. Well, he knows where I am if he wants me,’ ” she said.
There would be little in the way of wedded bliss. Sex life? What sex life? “Once every three weeks — and then it fizzled out,” Diana complained in the videos.
In some of the most moving clips, Diana describes how the royal family blamed the marriage breakup on her bulimia.
“I was rejected,” she said. “I didn’t think I was good enough for this family, so I took it out on myself . . . I chose to hurt myself instead of hurting all of you.”