Royal Rut: Tales that Prince Charles and...

Royal Rut: Tales that Prince Charles and Princess Diana have a storybook marriage are getting a little dog-eared. “I believe that the marriage is stone dead,” a source told People magazine. “I don’t think there is animosity between them. . . . They just don’t care anymore.” Royal watchers figured the duo hadn’t been together for 39 days at one point. Charles reportedly is talking to ex-girlfriends, and Diana watches the children and visits friends.

Royal Rendezvous: Viscount Althorp, Princess Diana’s brother, has confessed to an extramarital affair. Althorp said he spent a night with 32-year-old writer Sally Ann Lasson in 1986 and again last year. When the viscount, 26, learned that Lasson’s version of the affair was going to run in London’s News of the World on Sunday, he told all in Saturday’s Daily Mail. Althorp married Victoria Lockwood, 25, in 1989. The couple’s first child, Kitty, was born a month ago.

Cut the Candor: David Souter says candor doesn’t always pay. The newest Supreme Court justice told a lawyers group in Bedford, N.H., about an encounter with a “quintessential old geezer” who cornered him outside a market in Concord. The man looked at him with “Ancient Mariner eyes” and said: “You look like that lawyer.” “That’s because I am,” Souter responded. “The hell you are,” was the reply.

Name Carries No Weight: Commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf has already become a household name because of the Persian Gulf War. But there is another Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia. Sgt. Eric Schwarzkopf told U.S. News & World Report that he is indeed a second cousin of “Stormin’ Norman.” Does that get him special privileges? “No, sir. If anything, probably the opposite. The general doesn’t operate that way.”