“They’re tolling the bells at Buckingham Palace,” The Guardian wrote. In her review for the Los Angeles Times, “The Bottom of the Royal Barrel,” critic Margo Kaufman eviscerated both Dimbleby’s autobiography and Morton’s sycophantic follow-up, Diana: Her New Life, while Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote, “If you didn’t know the names of the famous ex-couple portrayed in these two books, you’d think they were just another pair of guests on Oprah or Donahue: victims of dysfunctional families and a bad marriage, who are given, alternately, to bouts of self-pity and New Age searches for meaning and self-esteem.”īut more ominously for the crown, the press also started to question Charles’s fitness to be king. The Guardian called it “a foolish and sorry authorized version,” and the Daily Mirror labeled it “the prince’s crowning act of treachery.”
Reviews of the autobiography were scathing, as its contents were called the whining complaints of an out-of-touch, privileged man. According to Dimbleby, once they were married, Charles discovered his young wife was a bulimic who indulged in “self-pity” and mercilessly ridiculed him. In the book, Dimbleby described Charles as “an individual of singular distinction and virtue.” He also claimed that Charles had been pressured to marry Diana by his father, and would have been happier as a bachelor if he had not had to produce an heir to the throne. In addition to sitting down for private interviews, Charles had given Dimbleby access to his numerous diaries and letters.
“Absent Dimbleby,” Brown posits, “Diana would have never planned her retaliation by agreeing to give an incendiary, irrevocable interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC’s Panorama program.”īut worse was to come on November 4, 1994, when Dimbleby’s authorized Charles biography, The Prince of Wales: An Intimate Portrait, was published. While headlines around the globe screamed that Charles was indeed an adulterer, his estranged wife, Diana, began to lay the groundwork for her controversial 1995 tell-all interview with Martin Bashir, who, it was later discovered, used forged documents to obtain the interview.
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