Welcome to episode one of When Diana Met. I'm your host Aminatou Sow. I host other podcasts. I have written books. But for the purposes of this particular podcast, I am a Princess Diana obsessive. And this is something that I hear over and over again from a lot of black women in the diaspora that are my age, mid thirties. It's something that we have inherited from our mothers. Thinking about Diana is a way to stay connected to my mom, who died over 16 years ago at this point. And it makes me feel closer to her. But it's also true that a lot of my work deals with demystifying power. I find it fascinating. It's also a very instructive lens when it comes to interrogating personal attitudes towards, I would say, almost everything.

So, yes, this is a show about Diana Spencer, the royal, the mother, the fashion icon, the philanthropist. But it really is a show about us, what our perceptions of her say about us. I mean, I certainly didn't know her. I've never met her. Very few people who speak about her publicly, it turns out, knew her privately. She died at 36 and she's frozen in time. We do not allow for dead people to be three dimensional characters. And in her particular case, there was just no way she wasn't going to be instantly beatified. I find it baffling. I find it curious. But ultimately, it is just so predictably human. I am really looking forward to speaking to other smart people who can offer their own personal and professional takes on why Diana embodied so many different things to so many different people. We'll also talk to people who met her, people who were in her presence. Through all of these stories, the stories of people who shook her hand, the people who looked her in the eye, the people who danced with her, the people who cut her hair we can start to get a clearer picture of who this woman was.

Welcome to episode one. When Diana met Camilla. So when I was thinking about the best meeting to kick off this podcast series, inspiration struck almost immediately. It had to be one woman and one meeting in particular, and I knew exactly who I wanted to discuss all of this with. I wonder what you think about the Camilla versus Diana rivalry, because the Camilla in question here is Camilla Parker Bowles. The charming, exasperated voice is my pal, Candice Cardy-Williams.

I don't think Camilla is in like, a great position. You know, I'll always know what she did. Like, I'll always know that she didn't care about, you know, little Diana's feelings.

She is one of the smartest, funniest people I know. Candice, like me, inherited her love of Diana from older women in her life. And Candice, predictably, has strong feelings about Camilla Parker Bowles. I, too, had very strong feelings about this woman. But that has changed with time. I'll talk about that later. But for now, let's check in with Candice, because let me just put it this way, you will never find Candice in the same room as Camilla Parker Bowles.

I think I was actually- I was invited to Buckingham Palace and she was like- for this literary thing- and she was going to be there. And I turned it down because I was A, I don't like the monarchy, but also-

Wow.

And my nan was like, oh, come on, like you- you've got to go to the palace. And I was like, No, because I don't want to have to meet Camilla because I will be rude and I would be rude. So I knew. So I was like, No, oh, my God, I forgot about that. Yeah. The invite was printed on this really fancy card, like special stamps. And I was like, No, she's going to- she's going she is going to be there.

A Diana ride or die. Wow.

Oh, like totally because I just think, like, I think that that's my thing. I'm always like, I don't know, maybe I'm not one of those underdog people.

Who doesn't love to root for the underdog? Unlike Candice, Diana had to be in the same rooms as Camilla. At the time Camilla Parker Bowles, who I want to be exceedingly clear, is not a villain, even though you are led to believe that at the time. And I have to confess, for a long time I thought that about her myself. Camilla Parker Bowles was Prince Charles's then married ex girlfriend. And he very, very, very, very much kept up a relationship with her throughout his life. But there is one meeting that has always held an outsized place in my imagination. Let me set the scene for you, because so much drama can be traced back to this one single meeting.

Here's the scene. It's 1981. We are in a fancy London restaurant, potentially a private room. The one thing that we know for sure is that the restaurant is called Ménage a Trois, which is unbelievable to me. That sounds fake. It's too on the nose. I didn't believe it. Fact check. It's true. Camilla is probably chain smoking. It's the eighties, someone in that room is chain smoking for sure. Diana is 19 years old. 19. She and Charles have just gotten engaged, so the whole world has seen her face. They know who she is. She has gone from obscurity to having her privacy completely stripped away from her. Charles, her fiance, is out of town on some official tour of Australia and New Zealand. Very convenient for him. Very inconvenient for the 19 year old fiance. She has to fend for herself in this new world. She doesn't really know the rules and the etiquette of the new family that she's in and she needs people to help. So imagine 19 year old Diana when Camilla, someone who has been introduced to her as a dear friend of her husband, invites her to lunch.

I don't really remember how this story came into my consciousness, but when I heard that Camilla, the ex, invited Diana, the fiance, to lunch, I remember being incensed by it and feeling that there was something particularly sinister about it. And it wasn't until recently that I started thinking about that differently. But before we go deeper on the lunch and my own journey with this story, I want to get more from Candice on her read on the rest of the royal family because she really gets it. The themes of her work revolve around privilege, male toxicity, and a host of other topics that make her a particularly careful observer.

It's interesting because the people that the people that I know, and my friends, we're aligned when it comes the royal family, we have no interest in anyone and we just we just love Princess Diana and our mums and our grandparents loved her too. And that's kind of as far as it goes for me and the people that I know, because, like "The Crown," I've only watched the series of Princess Diana in it. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm like, that's my that's my girl. And then I want to know what's going on and what happened. And then after that, I was like drawing a line. I don't need to see any more.

Right. Like, she's the main character of the entire- main character energy all the time.

She's the main character of the royal family before they were even a thing 100%.

You mentioned that your mom also has an affinity for her. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's a conversation that I think I have with every black woman I know in the entire black diaspora. Doesn't it matter where you're from, someone- everyone seems to have a memory connected to their mother with Princess Diana.

You know, mine is my mum, but also my nan. So you get a double whammy here. I remember living in my grandparents house and I was obviously very young and I was asleep and I woke up and I could hear this wailing throughout the house and I was like, something really bad has happened. And I was as a child, I was like, Oh, my gosh, oh my God. And I got up and my mum sort of like ran past me and I understood and I kind of gathered what was happening and my nan was crying and I was like, Oh my God, what could have happened? She was screaming and she's screaming. Screaming, she's dead. She's dead. And I was like, Who? Who's dead? What's happened to my nan was like, Diana. And it took me so long to realize that she was talking about someone we didn't know personally. And then I realized it's her. It's this, you know, as my Nan's guy like that was- and so that is like, I knew that Diana was like part of my family in a way that my nan has never cried for any person or anything with such great feeling since. So she's, she's part of the family. My nan has a picture of her in the living room.

Can you describe the picture?

It's a picture of her, she's- I mean, she just, you know, she was just gorgeous, isn't she? I think it's just like face hand on chin, gently, hair looking stunning, eyes popping. It's one of those looking very gentle. She was a cancer. So it's very, you know, outwardly very gentle. So that was, that's the picture.

That's amazing. What do you think that made your, your mum and your nan just so completely besotted by her? Like, what is the connection there?

You know what I think? I think it was the fact that she was outwardly to, you know, what we saw, I think Diana was very kind. She was clearly very kind. And there is something obviously about like racism, back in the day. My nan was of the generation that was like, we're going to come over in the fifties and sixties and we're going to assimilate, and then my mum's generation is the generation of like, we kind of know it's there and some people are going to like call us N---, but we're going to ignore it because we're just catching a vibe over here at this like lover's rock party, so that's cool. But Diana was someone who was like, I'm going to go to Africa, the nebulous Africa, and I'm going to actually hold black children physically to myself. And it was known that the royals wouldn't touch people, they wouldn't touch commoners. And yet Princess Diana was over there in this country that also we had understood for so long, we had been taught for so long was this place- was this place of extreme poverty and disease and if you're even touched down there, something would happen to you. But she went over that and she was kind and she was loving. And that translated into physical affection when actually she shouldn't have been doing that at all. And I think that that's wha- that is what my my family don't forget. And I think that's the thing that my nan always comes back to. She was like, sure, she was there. I think that's important that she was there. She wasn't commenting on it. And being like look at that poverty over there in Africa. She went there.

You mentioned that you watched that season of The Crown. And my experience of watching The Crown is that anytime something happens, I have to pause and Google that it happened. It just everything just seems either over the top or, you know, you're just like, what? What is this? And one such scene for me that was arresting was watching Diana meeting Camilla for that awkward lunch that they had. And, you know, she is 19. It's a right before her wedding. I just I remember feeling so scandalized and I think in the back of my mind I knew that that meeting had happened, but I had completely suppressed the memory. So I had to go back to investigate and there it is. The reporting is accurate that that meeting happened. Yeah. And I just think, you know, I just think of her as someone who is 19. She's so young, all of this- her life is about to change. She's marrying her first boyfriend. I- I just like I wonder what you think about that meeting because I, it was so shocking for me to, to know that it had happened.

Yeah, I think it's because the royals are F--- brazen, you know, I mean, they were just doing that. Well, she'll deal with it. What are you going to say? You can't- she's not- she's not that guy. She's not going to fight Camilla, you know what I mean? Camilla isn't going to fight her, it's all going to be very shady and very underhand. God, how awful. A horrible, watery situation.

A horrible, watery situation, indeed. Let's take a break.

Okay. Well, if we're ready, just to start, would you mind just saying your name and a brief bio?

Yeah. Andrew Morton, royal biographer, best known for writing "Diana: Her True Story" with her cooperation.

Andrew Morton is the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of Diana biographers, and his book is The Diana Gospel. All of the juicy details of this lunch and so much more are reported in there.

I've been writing books about members of the royal family for a decade, and I'd written a book on Diana called Diana's Diary, a frothy tale about how she spent her year. She kind of liked it. She knew that I was friends with some of her friends. She knew that I'd written positive, sympathetic pieces about her life in various national newspapers. And she knew that I was preparing a serious biography of her. And she asked a mutual friend, Would he be interested in an interview? Well, at the time it was flabbergasting because the most famous royal celebrity in the world didn't just give interviews.

So she reaches out to you through a friend. But after that, are you talking on the phone? Do you write letters, carrier pigeon, faxes? I don't know how things worked back then. So how do you keep in touch every day?

Well, we use an intermediary, a mutual friend called Dr. James Colthurst. And Diana started communicating with me through him. So from then, from then on, we started working together. But I was always at a distance from her for very practical reasons. I was a reasonably well known royal writer of six foot four. I couldn't exactly slide into Kensington Palace and ask a bunch of questions. So James had the perfect cover. He would pull up to Kensington Palace on his battered old bicycle. He'd have an old tape recorder and the in the basket, and he would go to her sitting room, chat with her, munch through a plate of biscuits and ask Diana a bunch of questions that I prepared. What emerged was a very vivid and very different story about Diana's life than the image that was then being portrayed of, of a happily married royal couple.

Okay. So we are in the early nineties. Diana and Charles have been married for about a decade. Can you believe it? I believe it, but they're also completely miserable. We know that by this point they're both having or have had extramarital affairs, most notably Charles with Camilla, the love of his life, and Diana with an Army captain named James Hewitt. They're also rumors of more, but who even knows? So Dr. James Colthurst, who is known to both Diana and Andrew Morton, is asking Diana questions on behalf of Andrew Morton during a very precarious time in her life. And she's admitting things that up until then, everyone else had just been guessing. Rumors were being confirmed, more rumors were being born very juicy and spicy, but also very scandalous. So this part is interesting to me because it's not clear whether Diana knew she was being recorded. Dr. Colthurst said that Diana actually took the microphone at times and clipped it to herself and answered the written out questions. And this is really one of those moments where I wish I had a first hand account of her own perspective.

So these conversations were recorded.

These conversations are recorded. And the first time I heard Diana speaking was in a- it was in the incongruous setting of a Workingmen's club in North London. James turned up with a tape and I put my headphones on and listened. And it was like entering a secret world because Diana was talking about bulimia nervosa, her eating problems. She was talking about this woman called Camilla Parker Bowles. Never heard of her. She was also talking about hurting herself, jealousy, rage and so on. It was a very it was a it was a vivid and very different portrait, a barely believable portrait. You may remember Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in "All the President's Men." It was the royal equivalent that here was Diana, kind of like the deep throat giving an intimate insight into her world. And I remember very well, even though it's, what, 30 years ago now, heading back home, catching the subway and, you know, standing well back from the platform edge because you never knew what was going to happen. It was like being. It was like being. It was like being invested with a secret. And the secret was one that, you know, could change your life dramatically. And in actual fact, it did.

You mentioned. Camilla Parker Bowles, for the people who have no idea can you describe her? What's her story? How is she connected to the royal family?

Yes, she was from a what you might call a land of gentry from a family that served in the forces. She was what's known as a debutante. She she was part of that society. Hunting, shooting, fishing, landowning gentry. And she'd dated Prince Charles for a time, at the same time that Camilla was dating a chap called Andrew Parker Bowles. He was eight years older than Camilla, far more experienced. Charles was rather wishy washy. And she chose Andrew.

Woo, Heartbreak Hotel. This is getting so complicated. Let's retrace our steps here. So Camilla ultimately chose to marry her other boyfriend, Andrew, over Charles while Charles was away for eight months serving in the Royal Navy. Cold blooded. But that man travels too much. This all happens in the early seventies. So you have to know that by the time Charles starts dating Diana in 1980. Ten years have passed since the Camilla heartbreak saga, where she chose someone else. But he and Camilla have remained really close over all these years. They check in on each other, they talk on the phone. They're doing all the things that to people who still love each other do but are married to someone else or dating someone else. Charles is even the godfather of one of her and Andrew's children. Their history together is anything but ancient, and it's really unclear how much of all of this Diana knows when she says yes to Charles's proposal or when she said yes to lunch with Camilla.

Do you remember the moment that you heard about the lunch between Camilla and Princess Diana?

So let me set the scene. So James would be, would take all these questions from me to Kensington Palace, sit down and ask the questions. And we were talking about Diana's first impressions of life in Buckingham Palace and at Clarence House. This was then the home of the Queen Mother, and it's where she spent the first few days after she'd agreed to marry Prince Charles. When she got into the room, there was a letter on the pillow and the letter was from Camilla. And it's said, you know, I know that Prince Charles is going away to Australia and New Zealand for a few weeks, which he was, let's meet for lunch and I'd love to see the ring. So they meet for lunch somewhere, I think it was in Knightsbridge. And Diana, you know, she was still just a very naive 20 year old, didn't know about the relationship between Prince Charles and Camilla. But this lunch, finally, the penny dropped. Camilla was into fox hunting. She asked Diana, will you be hunting? And she said, No, I don't, I don't ride. And she later realized that effectively that question was Camilla just trying to find out what avenues were there so that she could continue to contact Prince Charles.

I mean, I you're telling the story so calmly. The version that is running in my head is just dramatic. And I mean, like my eyes are popping out of my head. I was like, this is such a it is such a sinister move. You know, I think that there is it really boggles the mind that people behave this way, but people do behave this way. This is human behavior. It's just very intense.

It's all quite calculated. I mean, when you actually stand back and look at the whole scenario, the scales began to fall from Diana's eyes. There seemed to be this huge conspiracy, first of all, to protect her from knowing anything about Prince Charles's relationship with Camilla, but also the fact that, you know, she didn't really know Prince Charles. I mean, she was she was besotted with him. She loved the title. She loved the idea of being married, but she didn't know the man very well. And you could argue exactly the same for Prince Charles. He didn't really know the woman very well. So there's all kinds of crossed wires that took the royal couple down this this path.

Let's unpack all of this. Charles has stated that he and Camilla did not restart an affair until later in his marriage with Diana. Potato, potato to some of you who are listening at home. But Andrew Morton is saying that at the famed lunch with Camilla, it became clear to Diana that Camilla and Charles had their own private connection: former lovers, close friends, whatever they were, they would always be something. Diana was only now realizing this and probably thinking that she could not change it. Meanwhile, she and Charles barely knew each other. Well, you know, I mean, I think even about their their first interview together, the interview where they're, you know, like going through their engagement announcement.

Can you find the words to sum up how you feel today, both of you?

Difficult. And that's the word, isn't it, really?

He chooses all of the wrong words. To say that he is not excited to be getting married-

Delighted and happy. And I'm amazed that she's been brave enough to take me on.

And I suppose in love?

Of course.

Whatever in love means...

Well, if it was your own interpretation of what-

It means two very happy people.

It was just so apparent that he was not into it.

Whatever love means is his- is the phrase that will haunt him to his death. I have some sympathy for him in the sense that he's one of these kind of philosophical characters who's, who was perhaps asking at absolutely the wrong moment a philosophical question.

I think you are being very- you are being overly generous about this moment.

But I'm being generous, but I'm trying to understand it from a psychological point of view because it's also deeply dumb.

Do you know or think that Charles knew about this lunch?

Well, he was in he was in Australia and on a royal visit, but I'm sure he did. Yeah. I mean, he tried to do the right thing by Diana in the sense of, as he said himself, he didn't see Camilla. I always find that difficult to believe because there must have been rooms in his heart that were vacant for Camilla and that he never really forgot about her.

So here's a quick timeline for you. In 1992, Andrew Morton publishes his book and shocks the world. For the first time, we read about the romantic triangle between Diana, Charles and Camilla, confirmed. In 1996, Diana and Charles finally divorce. She will die the next year. In 2005, Charles and Camilla finally get married.

It's not your typical fairy tale romance, and it might not be your typical royal wedding.

This whole story has got the feeling of a- it's got an operatic quality about it. It's a star crossed lovers and a misunderstood romantic triangle.

And I know, except that the star crossed lovers end up together and one person is tragically dead. So it is a- it was a different take on the on the star crossed lovers story.

Well, the star crossed lovers are I would say, would be Charles and Camilla.

Camilla. Yeah, absolutely. They got their happy ending.

They got their happy ending. Diana never did. And that's the that's the tragedy of her life. The light at the end of her tunnel was the paparazzi flashlights in the Pont de l'Alma in Paris.

It has been months since I spoke to Andrew Morton, and I still think about his words here because it's complicated for me. On one hand, Charles and Camilla are married and by all accounts they look happy and they were destined to be. And I cannot imagine not finding the love of your life because of circumstances. And on the other hand, it is just so sad to know that love wasn't in the cards for Diana and Charles, even though she tried to make it work so hard and that she just died so young. But if her life tells us anything, it's that she received so much love and so much loyalty from many people who rooted for her from all over the world. It's just hard to tell whether she knew that herself. But people really did love her. People like Candice and people like Candice's legendary nan.

We've all experienced our own version of Diana's narrative in our own lives. We have all experienced absent partners, an ex that never truly leaves the picture feeling like an outsider feeling alone. These are just all very basic human emotions that everybody deals with, whether you are a member of the royal family or whether you are president of the United States, Hollywood celebrity, or just a regular person who listens to a podcast like me. There is something just a little bit comforting, and I use that word with with a lot of shame, almost. There is something cathartic and comforting in seeing someone very famous, someone very powerful, someone who was known, who seemingly does not want for anything at all, navigate life struggles alongside you. And I find myself wondering a lot about what we'd see from Diana if she were still alive. Sometimes it's really fun to imagine. Other times it's painful. I asked Candice if she ever thought about this.

Oh, I think she would be like a top philanthropist. I think she'd be putting her money and her time into good things. And I like to think that she'd be happy because I think that she'd be left alone. But then also, I don't know, because I think she would have seen what happened with her sons and she would have been like, Oh, my God, I think that would have been really hard for her. But I do think she'd be doing good things. You know that, right? You'd think that as well, right?

Mm hmm. She'd be at Barack Obama's birthday party for sure.

Oh, my God. And what would she be wearing? Oh, my God. Yeah, but I think that. And I think that she would have grown older gracefully. I do believe that.

Do you think there are any Camilla stans out there? Is there anyone who is, like, pro gung ho, like Camilla?

Probably. They probably are. I think so. Because, you know, they're just like as long as- because, you know, as long as Charles is- you know, Charles happy now. And, you know, they're still together, so it means that they were destined to be together. That's bullshit. But that's- see? I'm getting a bit wild. I don't want to, let me take it-I want to take it down. I'm going to take it down.

You don't have to take it down.

Two women fighting over a man is such a tired cliché, and yet it is a story that we hear over and over and over again for a reason, because we live in a world that is convinced that that story is true. It is so easy to lay the blame at the feet of Camilla and not the wishy washy prince who just couldn't commit. The institution is at fault. Sexism is at fault. People do make choices, but we are all living in the system that we make choices in. In the years since the story of the luncheon was smuggled out on that old tape recorder, it's been really easy for Diana fans to support her without having to interrogate the system in which these two women were pitted against each other. Just ask yourself, why wasn't there someone inside the palace that Diana can confide in? Why didn't someone, anyone tell her, Hey, you don't have to go to lunch with that ex. Like, I'll help you figure this stuff out. What the Camilla story tells me more than anything is that Diana was lonely and she didn't have any allies inside of the royal family. She would have to make them for herself.

Next time on When Diana Met.

Diana mothered in public, she hugged those boys in public. She had them between her legs. You mean they would sit on a bottom step and she'd have her her knees around. Well, that's. What about it does. But the royal family doesn't do that in public. But she did it in public.

When she met her own son, she was really met with the fact that this boy does not belong to her.

When Diana Met is produced by CNN Audio and Pineapple Street Studios. It's hosted by me, Aminatou Sow. Our producers are Mary Knauf, Tamika Adams and Erin Kelly. Our associate producer is Marialexa Kavanaugh and our editor is Darby Maloney. Mixed and original music by Hannis Brown. Our fact checker is Francis Carr. Additional support for the series comes from Ashley Lusk, Kira Boden-Gologorsky, Alexander McCall, Lisa Namerow, Robert Mathers and Molly Harrington. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Bari Finkel, Jennifer Weiss-Berman, and Max Linsky. Megan Marcus is the executive producer for CNN Audio.