Prince Harry's much-publicized interviews with Anderson Cooper and Tom Bradby aired on opposite sides of the Atlantic on Sunday night, ahead of the Tuesday release of the British royal's memoir, Spare. The book was leaked last week and portions of the interviews had already been teased in advance of their airing, but there was still more than enough for news outlets to cover from the sit-downs. Seven quotes:
- On whether he cried when his father awakened him to tell him his mother, Princess Diana, had died: "No. No. Never shed a single tear at that point," Harry told Cooper. "I was in shock, you know? Twelve years old, sort of 7:00—7:30 in the morning early. Your father comes in, sits on your bed, puts his hand on your knee and tells you "There's been an accident." I—I couldn't believe." In the book, he writes that his father told him, "They tried, darling boy. I'm afraid she didn't make it." Charles, he says, did not hug him.
- On his reaction to her death: Harry told Cooper and Bradby that for a long time, he believed his mother may have faked her own death and would reunite with him and William eventually. At 20, he asked to see the police file because, he says, he wanted "Proof that she was in the car. Proof that she was injured. And proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs—photographs of her lying half dead on the back seat of the car." He says he only cried once, at her burial, and that he felt "guilt" that he was unable to cry while greeting weeping mourners at Kensington Palace the day before her funeral. (He later recreated Diana's fatal drive.)
- On his time in the military: "I was a really good candidate for the military," he tells Cooper. "I was a young man in my 20s suffering from shock. But I was now in the front seat of an Apache shooting it, flying it, monitoring four radios simultaneously and being there to save and help anybody that was on the—on the ground with a radio screaming, 'We need support, we need air support.' That was my calling. I felt healing from that weirdly." (He says he killed 25 Taliban fighters.)
- On his coping mechanisms: "It was obvious to us as kids the British press' part in our mother's misery and I had a lot of anger inside of me that luckily, I never expressed to anybody," he told Cooper. "But I resorted to drinking heavily. Because I wanted to numb the feeling, or I wanted to distract myself from how… whatever I was thinking. And I would, you know, resort to drugs as well." (He says he used cocaine, magic mushrooms, and weed.)
- On Camilla: He says the royals communicate by leaking information to the press, and he believes his father and stepmother, Camilla, sometimes leveraged him and William to get themselves better coverage in the tabloids. "If you are led to believe, as a member of the family, that being on the front page, having positive headlines, positive stories written about you, is going to improve your reputation or increase the chances of you being accepted as monarch by the British public, then that's what you're gonna do," he says of Camilla specifically.
- On his family's 'mistrust' of Meghan Markle: He says it was based on "the fact that she was American, an actress, divorced, Black, biracial with a Black mother. Those were just four of the typical stereotypes that is—becomes a feeding frenzy for the British press." (He admits he was probably bigoted himself before meeting her.)
- On the real villain: He tells Bradby he doesn't "recognize" his father or brother these days, but still hopes for a reconciliation. "We’re not just talking about family relationships, we’re talking about an antagonist, which is the British press, specifically the tabloids who want to create as much conflict as possible. The saddest part of that is certain members of my family and the people that work for them are complicit in that conflict."
The full transcript of the Cooper interview is
here; the Bradby transcript is
here. Next up for Harry: appearances on
Good Morning America on Monday, and
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night,
Vulture reports. (More
Prince Harry stories.)
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