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So, kiss me goodbye and I’ll try not to cry,
All the tears in the world won’t change your mind.
I sing it with a handheld mic, alone in a spotlight stage left in the emerald-sequined mermaid dress that Catherine Walker designed for Diana, while the video behind me shows Charles and Camilla growing old together after the princess has died and the two of them have wed.
Then the lights come up, and I return front and center to talk about the things that I—well, Diana—lost after the divorce, such as the title. This meant that Diana, in the last years of her life, was supposed to curtsy to even her two sons.
That night when I finished the song and hit my spot and started to speak, I saw Betsy, Marisa, Frankie, and a fellow I didn’t recognize in the second row. For a flicker I lost my focus, because strawberry blond is still blond, and there was my sister—a woman who could have been Diana’s sister—in the house. I supposed it was Frankie who had found a scalper with seats or some muckety-muck of great importance at Futurium knew how to get hot tickets for sold-out shows. (Or, yes, lukewarm tickets for off-the-strip eccentricities such as mine.) I hadn’t registered precisely what Marisa was wearing before turning to regain the thread, but I saw a lot of skin. The theater could be chilly, and the idea passed through my head, I hope she’s warm enough, which are five words one almost never puts together in Las Vegas. As I sank back into my role, I did so with foreboding, because I knew they were going to want to come backstage after I finished.
* * *
Bud McDonald told me that my sister wanted to visit my dressing room with three other people. I nodded: I’d seen it coming. Bud had met Betsy when she had come to the show previously. He went to retrieve them, and soon there was another rap on my door and there they were. Bud knew the drill and said he’d be back in five minutes, which most backstage guests understood to mean that five minutes was their window with me. Then he was gone, and Frankie was introducing me to a rather handsome fellow from Newport Beach in a ball cap and boat shoes named Tony Lombardo. I couldn’t tell what he thought of the show, but Frankie was babbling about how moved he was and how much he loved it. Meanwhile, Marisa was staring at my vanity like it was Shoplifting Day at Sephora. She was wearing a tight yellow dress with spaghetti straps thinner than the straps for her bra—which I wasn’t sure she needed—and heels so high she was almost Betsy’s and my height.
“Squidgy,” Marisa said. “Is that really a word?”
“It is,” I said. I knew where this was going. “It means kind of squishy and gross. Imagine a frog’s skin.” She had heard the word in that moment in the show when I milk it. I have fun with the word because of its wondrously onomatopoeic qualities.
“Why did that man call Princess Diana that if he liked her?” she continued.
“Don’t your close friends have nicknames for you?”
“I don’t have close friends,” she said, her tone flat. “I don’t have any friends. I move around too much.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.
“One of my rugby buddies from college still calls me Kegger. You know, as in a beer keg,” Frankie volunteered, desirous of being helpful and moving the subject away from a foster child’s ineffably horrible life and back to the nicknames of the rich and the royal.
“There you go,” I said. “Sometimes we know where a nickname comes from and sometimes we don’t. But that man who called Diana ‘Squidge’ and ‘Squidgy’ cared for her. As Princess Diana says in that part of the show, she viewed it as a term of endearment.” That man was James Gilbey, heir to the gin empire. He and Diana had been recorded surreptitiously on the telephone. In my opinion, the best part of the call—what was called Squidgygate at the time—was the moment when Diana referred to Charles’s disagreeably entitled blood kin as his “fucking family.”
“Your sister told me how you got into this whole Diana thing,” Frankie said. “Man, I had no idea how much I’d love it. You got pipes.”
I tried to put aside my sister’s lunatic conjectures about why I did what I did, and recalled Yevgeny Orlov’s reaction to the show. Men were always surprised by how much they enjoyed it.
“Men suppose I’m an acquired taste,” I said. “I’m not. I’m considerably more potato chips than oysters or asparagus.”
“Hey, now, I like oysters,” said Frankie. “And, yeah, potato chips. Bring on the trans fat!”
“You will do well in Las Vegas.”
Betsy hadn’t said anything since they’d come backstage, and I considered asking her how she was settling in, but Marisa picked up a tube of my Clarins eye makeup remover. “Whoa,” I said, “that stuff is gold,” but she ignored me and squeezed some onto her fingers. Betsy took the tube and the cap from her and handed them back to me. I plucked a tissue for Marisa for her fingers.
“Can I ask you a question?” Tony Lombardo said.
I shrugged.
“Would you ever do your show for Futurium?”
A part of me felt a bit puffed up: he had been circumspect in his opinion about my performance, but, apparently, he liked it. Still, this was an absurd request. “Like what, a pep rally? I’d be the talent at some corporate retreat?”
“More of a party thing. Not really for employees, because we don’t have so many. We’d pay you. Obviously. Our pockets are deep. Maybe we’d do it in West Palm Beach. Or Grand Cayman. I have a British friend who’s there a lot. Oliver Davies, and he has a crazy thing for Princess Diana.”
“Really? How old is he?”
“Not old. Maybe sixty, sixty-two. He met her in 1995 when she went to Moscow. He was a young guy then, working in the British embassy. They went to the children’s hospital and the Bolshoi together. They were, you know, hand in glove for two days. You get my drift.”
I wasn’t sure whether hand in glove was meant to be suggestive, but it felt that way. In any case, his idea was a nonstarter. I wasn’t the clown at a kid’s birthday party.
“That’s all very nice. I’m flattered. Thank you. But I’m sorry: I don’t do private appearances. I do this show in this theater. That’s the only place you will find it. Ever,” I told him, adding that ever both for my benefit, and out of loyalty to the BP. I was still trying to reassure myself that the death of the Morleys wasn’t the death of my show. After I’d spoken, however, I wondered if I had gone too far and I’d angered this Tony Lombardo. Yes, it was a ludicrous ask, but that was still no reason to poke the beast.
