When the book appeared, the royal family could not figure out how Morton had managed to interview Diana, whose every step was controlled by the palace. In fact, Diana had approached Morton through a mutual friend, James Colthurst.
After seeing her suffer for 10 years in the marriage, Colthurst knew that Diana was bursting with unhappiness at Charles, and suggested the book idea.
"She was going to say something anyway," Colthurst said. "She had the choice of doing it as a loose cannon, or controlling the outcome, which she was able to do with the book."
Diana, Colthurst, Morton and the publisher conspired from the beginning to keep things secret, and the three men often met clandestinely in out of the way places to cloak their project.
Colthurst, who carried questions written out by Morton and a tape recorder on his visits to her home at Kensington Palace, said Diana needed little encouragement to talk. He sometimes rode a bike on the visits, and had easy access to the quarters as an old friend.
"She just started at the beginning of her childhood and kept going," Colthurst said in the NBC interview. "And it was obviously something she wanted to do."
Morton said Diana had been "conned" and "lured" into the marriage and the palace.
In Thursday's program, Diana also talks about the birth of William and Harry in 1981 and 1984, and her desperate unhappiness and postnatal depression passed off by Charles as "crying wolf." She tried to commit suicide during one of the pregnancies, throwing herself down the stairs. Another time she tried to slit her wrists.
"My husband made me feel so, ummm, inadequate in every possible way so that each time I came up for air, he'd push me down again," she says.
The final blow, she said, was his reaction to the birth of Harry, whose red hair "horrified" him and who disappointed Charles because he was a boy.
"Charles had been hoping for a girl. Suddenly as Harry was born, it just went bang down the drain," she says.
"`Oh god, he's even got red hair,'" Diana quotes Charles as saying.
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