Andrew Morton

Andrew Morton lied for years about the origin of the royal biography that made his career, said Elena Nicolaou in Today.com. When Diana: Her True Story rattled the House of Windsor in 1992, Morton insisted that his subject, the Princess of Wales, hadn’t participated. But in 1997, following Diana’s death, Morton finally admitted that she had been his main source, covertly sending him tapes in which she revealed her husband’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. At the time, Morton was as surprised as anyone that Charles and Diana’s marriage was troubled. “I believed in the fairy story,” he says. Learning that the Windsors were suppressing the truth made Morton’s life briefly suspenseful. “Doing the biography was a royal version of All the President’s Men,” he says. “You saw danger in shadows. When you were on the subway, you stood back from the platform edge.”

Morton’s best-selling new biography of Queen Elizabeth II “hardly matches the explosiveness of Her True Story,” said Lauren Puckett-Pope in Elle. But how could it?

The queen so minimalized drama in her life that even Morton struggled to see her as more than a figurehead. “The queen is ingrained into your psyche from a very early age,” he says. “She’s on the stamps, on the money. So, as a biographer, you’ve got to step outside yourself, and it takes a while to understand that you are not writing about the official person; you’re writing about the human being.” Morton consulted on a recent episode of The Crown because he was a character, but claims to prefer leaving such fictionalizations to others. “Everything about the royals,” he says, “is about what lies behind the mask.”