PROLOGUE
The sun was setting as they drove west from the strip, and the two men in the car were squinting behind their sunglasses. Eventually, there was but a fleeting gold band on the horizon, and Richie Morley, who was behind the wheel of the Jag, observed how the vista never grew old—it was one more reason why he lived here—and then he took off his shades and tossed them into the caddy in the wide vehicle’s door. Behind the car, the first garish lights from the casinos great and small were making their nocturnal birth, a twinkling aureole that indiscriminately beckoned the damaged and the dreamers alike.
Morley never suspected this was a hit until the passenger beside him pulled the gun. The guy told him to slow down and keep both hands on the wheel. Morley watched from the corners of his eyes as the fellow reached into the glove compartment and retrieved the handgun Morley kept there. Richie himself had never killed a man. Once, he’d had a guy on his knees, and he’d stood behind him and pressed his own Beretta into the fellow’s nuchal ridge—the concave space where the occipital knob meets the spine, a bit of anatomy Morley had looked up out of curiosity when he’d gotten home—but he hadn’t killed him. He wasn’t a killer.
He wondered now how he would talk his way out of this, and the wheels were turning. He’d say whatever he had to say to see the sun rise tomorrow, and deal then with whatever compromises he’d made or whatever he’d given away.
When they reached the sightseeing pull-off on the two-lane road, he started haggling. Suggested he could talk to his brother about selling his shares in the casino, the Buckingham Palace. Said he didn’t know how important the casino was to them, and now that he understood, he was happy to make a deal, and he knew his brother, Artie, would be, too. But that ship had sailed. Next, he offered his crypto seed phrase, but the fellow beside him said, “Your password? What makes you think we don’t already have it?”
So, finally, he begged, pleading, while wishing to God he had a wife or kids that he could use as leverage. Please, you gotta spare me: I got two kids. But he didn’t have children. All he had was a brother, and he supposed someone else right now was taking him out, too.
“Richie,” the guy told Morley, “no one is going to kill you because you won’t sell the casino.”
The hit man had selected a pull-off that was paved so he wouldn’t leave footprints when he exited the Jag.
“Then why?” Richie asked, his voice quavering.
“Because you’re a fucking FBI informant. Because, Richie, you’re a rat.”
And there he ended it, putting a bullet into Richie Morley’s temple at point-blank range. He used Morley’s own gun he’d taken from the glove compartment. Then he put on plastic gloves, unbuckled Morley’s seat belt, and wiped off the parts of the car he’d touched while riding beside him. He swabbed off the handles inside and outside the vehicle, as if he were working at a high-end carwash and the detailing mattered. He put Morley’s gun half in the dead man’s hand.
But he didn’t touch the great Rorschach of blood on the headrest or adjust Morley’s skull, which had whipsawed unexpectedly and come to rest against the window. He sent the text—empty air, no words—that signaled it was done and to send the car to retrieve him. In the distance, he heard coyotes howling.
Then he stood by the side of the road and waited, watching the constellations appear in the darkening sky, hoping no other drivers would stop, curious about the Jaguar in the pull-off and whether the driver needed assistance, until after he was gone. None did.
He was back in Las Vegas thirty-five minutes later, and he ordered a steak and wedge salad at the casino that the Morley brothers, one dead, one alive, still owned, and was brought a chunk of iceberg lettuce drowning in blue cheese dressing and topped with fried onion rings from a can. The salad was, he thought to himself, an indication of just what an absolute trash heap the Buckingham Palace had become. If they didn’t have that crazy woman re-creating Lady Di in their showroom? They’d have nothing, nothing at all.
PART ONE
I’ve seen grown-ups go bitchcakes. Full-on toddler tantrums, screaming and yelling and throwing shit. It’s scary. It’s embarrassing. Who does that when they’re not, like, three years old?
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER ONECrissy
Luck.
It transcends the craps tables and the slots. It’s the fulcrum around which all stories spin: The chap who misses the plane that augers into a mountain because—and it seemed like bad luck at the time—his taxi had a flat on the way to the airport. The aspiring actor with a West End or Broadway belt who shares her chairlift with a casting director one chilly afternoon at a ski resort. The fellow who has what should be the stroke that kills him, but the blood vessel in the deep recesses of his brain happens to burst in a hospital lobby—he’s leaving when it ruptures, he’s on his way to the parking garage—because his mother has just died three floors above him, and so the fact that he is in the O.R. in minutes means that he lives and has a full recovery. Had the tsunami of blood swamped his gray matter ten minutes later, after he had retrieved his vehicle and started back to the hotel where he had been ensconced the previous three days, waiting for his mother to expire, he would have perished in traffic. He might even have taken someone with him to the other side, blacking out and slamming his car into some unlucky pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Las Vegas is a city built on luck. None of us, even when we are breathing our last, understand fully the role that chance will have played in our lives, the ways that what we supposed was good luck prevented us from experiencing better luck, or the ways that a small misfortune saved us from a far worse one.
The truth is, I laugh when someone says about a book, Oh, that’s an unreliable narrator. Aren’t all narrators unreliable? Who in bloody hell remembers anything, much less what people said at a casino at two or three in the morning? The whole idea of a first-person novel makes my head spin. And a memoir? Someone trying to share with you their childhood and regaling you with things their parents said when they were eight years old? That’s barmy.
Because memory is fungible and we lack the omniscience to understand what role chance has played in our lives.
So, let’s begin with this: this story isn’t about my childhood. I don’t want to talk about my childhood.
And I won’t.
Instead I’m going to tell you what happened in Las Vegas, and I’m going to tell you everything as best I can, but my best is hampered by the fact this all occurred when I was doing two shows a night, channeling a dead princess, sleeping until lunchtime, popping a bit too much Adderall and Valium (yes, both), and periodically—like that princess—purging over a jet-black toilet. (Fine, I flirt with an eating disorder, just like that princess, which my therapist says is one of the reasons why I do what I do for a living. I wonder what, pray tell, was her first clue?) It was the late summer of 2022, though late summer means less in Las Vegas than it does in much of the world. Charles was about to become king and Camilla the queen, though if you’d asked me that August whether I thought I’d need to rewrite moments in my show in September because Elizabeth would go the way of all flesh—even a monarch subject to no earthly authority bends her knee to God—I would have said no. The woman, it seemed to some (probably to Charles), was going to outlive us all.
Ukraine had no plans to surrender, though Kharkiv and Mariupol were rubble.
As was the ruble. The word oligarch had, with cause, morphed from a straight line about yachts and statuesque hookers to a shorthand for corruption and moral turpitude. The pandemic was endemic. We lived with it the way we lived with the flu, except some nights I would peer into my audience and see more masks than on others. But this was Las Vegas, and so the vaccinated and the unvaccinated mingled and gambled and tried to live in a bubble in which the possible end of the world, triggered either by a virus or a madman in the Kremlin, could be ignored for a couple of hours. A night. A weekend.
Cryptocurrency was exploding from the preferred tool of libertarians and renegades, Bitcoin bros and niche investors, raw meat eaters and dark web madmen, into the next big thing in, it seemed, every blockbuster television commercial and streaming TV series. The bubble had not yet burst, in other words. But the crypto exchange FTX was soon to go belly-up, and Sam Bankman-Fried would be arrested in the Bahamas soon after that.
I had, by then, stopped sleeping with the senator. Some families grew closer in the pandemic, and others, like John Aldred’s, fell apart, people falling away like petals from a dying rose. But the senator and his wife never publicly separated and had, in fact, reconciled about the time they were getting their first booster shots, and I supposed that no one other than the two of us, his key Vegas staffers, his driver, and a few people at the casino—such as the two brothers who owned the place—knew that we had been an item for not quite half a year. (So, I suppose, a lot of people knew. But Las Vegas is a world known both for ostentation and discretion.)
This story is, at its core, a tale of two sisters. The sisters are from Vermont, not an especially diabolical little world, which may explain their naivete. Our naivete. But maybe not. You could argue that grown-ups in their thirties should know better, but how many adults, in the end, only make what we like to call good choices?
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, ...
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