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And while it is the Vermonters in the story who were the ones who grew up in a land that some months was a world of frigid, impenetrable sand dunes of snow and cold that could turn exposed skin the color of cornflowers, it was everyone else, it seemed, who had ice in their veins.
Do I make this sound like a fairy tale? It’s not. I was never a real princess.
Yes, I can be glib. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s so much easier to be glib than sad. If I ever succumbed to history and sadness, I fear the tears would be an alluvion.
And, I know, I am among the lucky ones.
* * *
My name is Crissy Dowling. That is my official moniker for SAG and Equity—the unions—and what you will find on my credit cards. I could have grown into Christina, my given name. Or I could have been Chris.
But, instead, I became Diana. Not with my friends and family. But with the Nevada paparazzi and sometimes with my creepier hookups. (And given that I work and live in a casino, the epic creepiness of some of my hookups is unparalleled. Moreover, you have to have certain proclivities to hit on dead royalty, so a lot of the men who are drawn to me fully expect that if I talk dirty in bed—which I usually don’t, because two shows a night is my max—I’ll sound like Emma Corrin or Kristen Stewart or Elizabeth Debicki. But, yes, I do let men call me Diana when, forgive me, we’re having a proper good shag.) I am also, on occasion, Diana with my agent, Terrance Pelletier. Terrance was a friend from college who was the Svengali who first pulled the strings and created the Las Vegas “legend” that is Diana.
Please hear the sarcasm in my voice when I use the word legend. Certainly, there is nothing legendary about the off-the-strip casino in which I perform.
But it was Terrance who saw that I had more than a passing resemblance to Diana Frances Spencer—aka Diana, Princess of Wales, first wife to Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne when they wed—and suggested it would be a shame to waste such windfall genetics. I left my old agent and signed with him. We were six years out of college, and I had a rather nice career going: lots of two- and three-line guest appearances on NCIS and Law and Order, and a steady stream of two- and three-month gigs at two- and three-hundred-seat houses off Broadway. I think I was the Emily Webb that John Mulaney loved in Our Town, but I’ve never met John, so this could be rubbish. For the record, I know I was the Sister Mary Leo in a Nunsense revival that inspired a deliciously filthy Nikki Glaser joke about nuns and bondage and a ballerina’s toe shoes. Terrance and I reconnected at a party in the East Village. The Diana show grew from downtown party act to performance art to road show to Vegas nightclub eccentricity. It was Terrance who convinced the UK-themed Buckingham Palace Casino that a Diana tribute show was just the ticket. They tried me out at a ten p.m. slot, following an eight p.m. comic who’d been there longer than I’d been alive, and my show—forgive this boast—became one of the off-the-strip must-see eccentricities if you were of a certain age. Soon I replaced the comedian, who, it turned out, was a bit of a groper and needed to go. When everything began to unravel in the late summer and early fall of 2022, my little cabaret had been running five nights a week, two shows a night, at the casino’s theater for seven years—minus, of course, the Year That Satan Spawned (2020) or the weeks when I was on vacation or when my sister and I were burying our mum or the Tuesday night after the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival massacre. But I even went onstage the night I am going to tell you about when I was hoping like hell not to get arrested and trying like hell not to get killed.
A few years ago, East Coast friends tried to persuade me to return to New York when they were casting the Diana musical on Broadway. I was tempted. But I think after being Diana in my cabaret for so long, I would have been crushed if I flew east to audition and they went with another actor who looked less like her, sounded less like her, and simply knew her less. I knew Diana as well as anyone who didn’t actually know her, if that makes sense, and I think quite possibly better than many people who did. And, very likely, the Broadway producers would have wanted someone who grew up in Britain, even if I had made the effort—which they did. They went with a very talented Brit, and that’s fine.
The fact is, I liked my life in Las Vegas. I liked my world at the Buckingham Palace, even if it was the antithesis of an actual palace.
And with my hair dyed and properly styled, I am Diana. My British accent is impeccable. When Naomi Watts, Emma Corrin, and Kristen Stewart wanted to resurrect Diana’s unique way of speaking, they all used the same dialect coach. I had no such luxury, and learned to replicate her distinct pastiche of privilege and—likely cultivated—lower-brow cockney. (The trick is to swallow the final t periodically.) Meanwhile, when I am singing, I am reminiscent of Petula Clark, the 1960s British pop star known best for “Downtown.” Onstage, I walk a standup tightrope between heartbreak and hilarity. It’s rather like watching Madame Tussauds’s wax figure come to life, the princess one moment regaling her audience with what it was like to wear a wedding gown with a train that seemed to stretch miles, and then sharing with them the despair when it became clear that the Prince of Wales was always going to love Camilla Parker Bowles more than me.
Or her.
Some days even I got confused. Or nights.
My Vegas Diana talks openly of her bulimia, and no one in the audience suspects I am speaking of my own firsthand struggles: they simply savor the soul-piercing sadness of it all. But not for long, because then I reel them back in with a joke about the first time Diana heard her father-in-law call the queen of England by his pet name for her: “Cabbage.” Cabbage is a very funny word to my audience demographic. Most of the people who come to my show are between the ages of fifty and embalmed.
I have now spent years joking and singing about all things Diana except, of course, the car crash. I never go there. Too ghastly. It’s the elephant in the room that is kept behind the curtain but still makes everything work. Bulimia is fine—though, in truth, it is less fine now than it had been when the tribute cabaret first opened. Now, the show begins with a voice reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth telling the audience that some content might be disturbing, before reminding them to silence their cell phones before the princess arrives. But the audience never hears the words Paris, tunnel, or Dodi Fayed.
Never.
It isn’t simply that discussing her actual death is a bit of a buzzkill; it would place me—Diana—in some strange, untenable purgatory. Am I speaking to my audience from beyond the grave, or am I but an impersonator? The former would be ridiculous, and the latter would take a wrecking ball to the theater’s fourth wall. I know most of the better sort of tribute entertainers in Vegas—even such also-rans as Blond Elvis and Tighty-Whitey Conway Twitty—and one of the things we who perform in homage to the dead (and to pay the rent) agree upon is this: if you’re bringing someone back to life for that person’s biggest fans, it’s bad for business to kill that soul in the third act.
* * *
I was a year younger than Princess Diana had been when she died when it became clear—to use what I’ve come to call Palace Speak—we had a situation. Having a situation is rather like when the Roomba vacuums over the dog shit on the carpet, but we royals don’t say shit. We don’t, in fact, shit, period. Nor do the corgis. That’s a fact, too.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of Diana’s death, August 31, was two weeks away, and given what I had experienced past years on that date and the reality that the cabaret had grown even more popular, I was confident that soon I would be awash in bouquets and the theater would look like the largest florist in Las Vegas. A few years ago, when I saw where this was going—the avalanche of cards and letters on the anniversary of the car crash—I started stashing the memorabilia and trinkets in my dressing-room closet, and created an Etsy shop, Diana’s Castle, to resell it. The gist of the cards fans gave me was simple: thank you. Thank you for bringing Diana back to life. Or they were letters addressed directly to Diana by people who either loved her or loved what she represented: an amalgam of decency among the indecent, humanity among the inhumane, vulnerability among the invulnerable, and—yes—unrequited love. I gave the money I made to a very particular teen shelter.
So, it was August 17. That morning, when I’d looked at myself in a mirror bordered by a filigree of faux-gold flecks, I thought I looked thirty years older. I didn’t, not really, and I figured I could do this for at least another fifteen years, thank you, Botox. The cabaret was in the Buckingham Palace’s 150-seat venue, and my show had grown from forty-five to sixty minutes and the band from a single piano player to a trio, two of whom sang backup on “Downtown” and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.” The biggest change, however, was the revelation that was Nigel Ferguson, a waiter at the casino’s Irish pub whom I had spotted one night a year or so earlier while I was drinking alone at the bar. It was the day the senator had told me that he and his wife were going to try again and our dalliance—for me it was more, for him it was (alas) only that—was over. I had wished him well, done my two shows, and gone for a drink. Nothing maudlin about it.
Nigel was taking a young couple’s order and slouching rather like the Prince of Wales, and his ears had the prince’s Dumbo-in-launch-mode mien. He was in his midthirties. When he started to share the order with the bartender, his accent was Scottish, and so I studied him carefully.
“Can you sing?” I asked.
“A bit,” he said, smiling sheepishly, his head bowed rather like Charles. Then softly he crooned, “I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,” while the bartender made a martini and a gin and tonic. He could sing more than a bit. That was clear. And most of my audience couldn’t tell the difference between Scottish, Welsh, and Irish accents. Hell, he could have spoken like an East End boy, and a lot of the crowd would have thought it was the King’s English. Yes, the Buckingham Palace casino had a British theme—it always felt to me sort of like the Excalibur meets Hogwarts, except much lower rent and a lot more secondhand smoke—but like every Vegas casino, the theme was mostly an architectural facade. Oh, our “fantasy” burlesque show was “The Six Sexy Wives of Henry VIII” (thank God that king had only had six wives, because we couldn’t have afforded a seventh stripper or fit one on that stage), and we had an ice-cream parlor called “William’s Milk-Shakespeare.” We had darts in our “pubs.” But every casino has the same slot machines, sportsbooks, gaming tables, and concourses with restaurants and shops. Some (not us) also have grand auditoriums for the likes of Lady Gaga and smaller showrooms for the likes of me. The same discreet corridors or sections of the parking lots where a john could meet up with his or her escort. Some casinos were nicer and more elaborate than others, but it all came down to the same reality: you had to ensnare the souls from Kingman, Arizona, or Stamford, Connecticut, who were willing to drop eighty bucks in eight minutes playing video poker.
Terrance, who had relocated to L.A. years ago as he’d taken on other clients and his stable had grown, didn’t love the idea when I called him to tell him about Nigel, but it was my show and he came around. The cabaret was still Diana, Candle in the Darkness—we’d never been able to secure the rights to Diana, Candle in the Wind—but now Diana had company onstage periodically, other than her band. Nigel was especially moving toward the end of the reimagined show, when he was made up to look older, his hair thinned and powered white, and spoke to his ex-wife (ageless at thirty-six) about the ways he had wronged her and the things he wished he could do differently.
So, the situation—the news that greeted me like a cold shower that August 17…
I was at the casino’s swimming pool, bordered from the parking lot by a fake castle wall and fake brick turrets, lying back in my private cabana. (Terrance is a very good agent. In all fairness, there’d been a time when I’d had my booze comped, but when we did my last contract, the casino thought a cabana would cost them less money, and cabanas at the hotel begin at a hundred dollars a day—a fraction of what a cabana costs at a place like the Bellagio, but still a testimony to how much I once drank.) The cabanas look a bit like the tents from the Game of Thrones TV series, except they’re smaller, and it’s frowned upon when people fornicate inside them. I was sipping tonic water while flipping pages in the biography I was reading about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson—I am always looking for new material for the show, and Diana’s post-Charles exile from the royal family was reminiscent of that pair’s—when Nigel texted me that he was going to pop over. It was early afternoon, so I’d been up a solid two hours, one of which I’d spent here, the corner of the pool I viewed as my spot. You can see why I was in no hurry to return to a one-bedroom in Queens and resume my quest to be the next Patti LuPone or Kelli O’Hara, even if now I had to pay for my own buzz. The poolside music that day was the Studio 54 track: a lot of Bee Gees and Earth, Wind & Fire, but not so loud that it interfered with the guests’ ability to chat and flirt, or exacerbated the pain behind the eyes of those who were hungover. Sometimes I’d hear an extra-loud splash as someone cannonballed into the pool, but mostly I heard the low burble of conversation, the occasional raucous laugh, and Barry Gibb. The world there smelled, as it did always, of coconut sunscreen.
When Nigel arrived, he sat in the cabana’s other chaise, his feet on the coralline deck that surrounded the water, his knees at ninety-degree angles and his hands on his thighs. He took off his sunglasses. I kept mine on.
“You know, if you bent over, you’d be in the crash position,” I told him.
