Royal Flush : DIANA: Her...

This never would have happened if Prince Charles had married me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Diana, Princess of Wales. I stayed up all night to watch her wedding. I admired her metamorphosis from gawky upper-class frump to soignee fashion queen. I’m impressed that she made AIDS her pet cause, and I give her high marks for being a hands-on mother while her hands-off husband is blowing away grouse at Balmoral. I even concede that she looks better in a tiara than I.

Still, the princess portrayed in the three biographies rocketing up the best-seller lists--”Diana: Her True Story,” “Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows” and “Diana: A Princess and Her Troubled Marriage”--is a woman who needs to get a grip.

The books read like a marital spat that found its way into print; a battle royal of his-and-her publicists. Morton holds a bucket under the leaks from the princess’ side, Davies sops up the prince’s not-for-attribution inside dope, and Campbell, a former wife of a son of a duke, just tries to make herself look important. (Referring to Diana’s 28,500 diamond-and-sapphire engagement ring, she notes, “The women I know would be most put out if their fiances had been able to afford a truly decent ring and had the gall to fob them off with such an inexpensive trinket.”)

It’s a tossup as to which book is written the worst. Morton’s has the least shame, the best pictures and is the most entertaining. Lady Colin Campbell, a lesser twig on the royal tree, scores points for bitchy upper-crust gossip, and for attributions like “the aristocratic sister-in-law of a senior courtier.” The Davies book is not even worth reading under a hair dryer.

In case you’ve been on, say, Bandaneira, the remote Indonesian isle to which Fergie fled after dumping Prince Andrew (before she took up with Sly Stallone) and missed some of the juicier allegations, we now have it in print that: Diana wasn’t a virgin when she married Charles. She attempted suicide several times, most notably by throwing herself against a glass display cabinet (this has to be a first) and cutting herself with a lemon zester. And Prince Charles only lets his equine-visaged “confidante,” Camilla Parker Bowles, into his walled garden and his bed.

No matter who’s dishing dirt, Princess Diana comes across depressed and pathetic at best, and at worst, as a manipulative hysteric. The beautiful woman who played the most eligible bachelor in the world “like Nigel Kennedy plays the violin,” according to Campbell, and who Davies claims “has emasculated the Prince of Wales,” seems devoid of the most basic female survival skills.

Take the infamous bracelet episode, for example. Morton claims that shortly before the royal wedding, Diana opened a package that arrived at her Buckingham Palace office. “Inside was a gold chain bracelet with a blue enamel disc and the initials ‘F’ and ‘G’ entwined,” writes Morton. “The initials stand for ‘Fred’ and ‘Gladys,’ the nicknames used by Camilla and Charles, which Diana had been (made) aware of by friends. . . . In spite of her angry and tearful protests, Charles insisted on giving the token to the woman who had haunted their courtship.”

Angry and tearful protests? An alternative plan would have been to borrow his polo mallet, smash the bracelet and feed it to his favorite horse to make sure the depths of her feelings on this matter were not underestimated. And if on a holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht he had the insensitivity to hold forth “to dinner party guests about the virtues of mistresses” (writes Morton), few women would blame her for pushing him overboard, crown and all.

My friend Leon, the femme fatale equivalent of the High Plains Drifter, kindly shared her thoughts on how to curtail Camilla’s regular invitations to Sandringham and Balmoral. “Every time he was with that horse I would charge yet another thing that would make his mother, the queen, go crazy with the price--a Van Gogh, perhaps,” Leon said, “and I would give it to charity in my name. Or I would buy all the property next to Camilla’s country seat and turn it into an AIDS hospice.”

Diana, by contrast, seems to be the Princess of Passive Aggression. All three authors recount how Prince Charles, knowing that the press would go crazy if he allowed her 30th birthday to go uncelebrated, offered to throw her a ball. She turned him down, and when the big day arrived, she announced to the paparazzi in a martyred voice, “I’m going to celebrate my birthday at home alone with the only man in my life tonight: Prince Harry.” In retaliation, her husband’s friends leaked the truth to the doyen of royal gossip, Nigel Dempster.

Morton’s defense--”When Prince Charles first suggested the idea of a party, the Gulf War was in full flow. Diana believed strongly that planning such a party would be frivolous at a time when British troops were involved in the fighting”--is pretty lame when one considers that her birthday is in July, the war was over in early March and most guests would clear their calendars for a royal birthday fete.

Why not let him give her a party and invite People magazine’s last six “Sexiest Men Alive”? As my mother always says, “Take the bait and spit out the hook.” And speaking of spitting out, how could Diana authorize her best friend to tell a reporter that she’d been bulimic for 10 years because, according to Morton, “on one occasion, as the wedding day drew near, Charles put his arm around her waist and commented on what he considered to be her chubby figure.”

In all fairness, marrying into the Windsors, perhaps the ultimate dysfunctional family, is a nightmare any woman can understand. Talk about controlling mothers-in-law, imagine if she was the queen. Not only would you have to obey her every utterance, call her Ma’am and curtsy whenever she dropped by, you’d have to keep a stiff upper lip while her 17 yapping Corgis and Dorgis ripped apart your custom-made shoes.

And what if your husband had to agree with his mother all the time because he’d sworn undying loyalty when she made him the Prince of Wales? What if, as Davies recounts, “Once, after Charles had told (Diana) she looked ravishing in a plunging neckline, the Queen gently mentioned at dinner that the dress was a little revealing for a member of the Royal Family. Far from challenging his mother, Charles nodded his agreement”? Incidents like that make many woman homicidal.

Still, Diana should have been clued in on her wedding day, when the royal family was on the balcony and the crowds were yelling “Kiss her,” and Charles asked the queen’s permission before he did. And she would be wise to remember that not many mothers-in-law present their sons’ wives with a “huge sapphire and diamond brooch.”

Granted, it can’t be easy being married to a man who’s a real prince, not just one in his own mind. But despite the lurid revelations, Diana is still in a power position. “There’s one big plus in this that normal marriages don’t have,” said Dr. Joyce Brothers. “There’s a chance at the throne. Having no job for all this time, Charles is not about to throw away his only chance at employment.”

So if I were Princess Diana I’d shut up, show a lot of discretion, enjoy the open charge accounts and hang around.