On Wednesday night I went to see Corruption at Lincoln Center.
Written by JT Rogers and directed by Bartlett Sher, the play unspools the chilling true saga of Rebekah Brooks. With her mop of red Renaissance curls and steely ambition, Brooks became the favorite lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch. She got in trouble more than a decade ago in the phone-hacking scandal in Britain – before she zoomed back to the top of the Murdoch empire.
The British newspaper editors and politicians trying to stop the journalistic corruption leaned into the New York Times back then and its reporters Don Van Natta Jr, Jo Becker and Graham Bowley to help them break the story.
Brooks, played by British actor Saffron Burrows, was the editor of News of the World, and she gives an ode to tabloid journalism in the play. But the moral is about amorality; the story underscores the viciousness and lack of decency of the British tabloids in the hacking scandal.
I thought of that when I watched the video of Catherine, Princess of Wales, sitting on a bench amid daffodils, telling her heartbreaking story of a cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy. Cancer is a very personal thing, and how you tell your children is the most personal of all. But the 42-year-old princess known as Kate is a public figure saddled with an insatiable press corps.
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Princess Diana’s sons blame that ravenous behemoth for hounding their mother. “How much more blood will stain their typing fingers before someone can put a stop to this madness?” Harry demanded in a written witness statement in the trial against the Mirror Group Newspapers tabloid publisher last June, about phone hacking and other invasions of privacy.
It is not clear that Kate’s moving statement will satisfy the scorpions of Fleet Street, who are eager to learn what kinds of cancer Kate and King Charles have.
I did a story on the British tabloid reporters and photographers in 1993 when I was covering Wimbledon and they were hot on the trail of rumours about a romance between Barbra Streisand and Andre Agassi. They proudly called themselves Rotters, after the tenacious German dogs Rottweilers.
I asked my go-to person on the monarchy, Sally Bedell Smith, who has written many books on the family and who writes the Royals Extra Substack, if the Rotters would keep going until they uncovered the type of cancer the wife of the future king of England has and what led her to the hospital in the first place.
“I think they’ll have to leave her alone,” Smith said. “The palace will make sure they leave her alone. It would be ghoulish if they followed her to treatment. I hope they will show common decency, which maybe they don’t have in great supply. I hope they will stop speculating on all sorts of dire and ludicrous things.”
She said the palace came down hard on the papers when William and Kate were dating and Rotters were following Kate everywhere and again when their son George was younger and the paps hid long-lens cameras in the trunks of cars.
Smith said that her palace sources had been “trying to come to grips to manage this maelstrom of opinions and speculation and vicious theories” and now, upon learning of Kate’s cancer diagnosis, they are “in a state of shock”. Smith noted that more than the tabloid press, the royal counsellors are worried about social media, “which is much, much harder to control”. Internet sleuths, who doggedly investigated Kate’s doctored photo until she confessed, are not likely to be satisfied until they dig up all the intimate details.
I wondered if Harry and Meghan – who wished Kate “health and healing” in a statement – would now have to pitch in on royal duties.
“Kate doesn’t need Harry and Meghan to console her,” Smith said. “She has her parents and a sister, and she’s very close to King Charles.” Smith added that “Meghan has announced she is going down a very different road, starting a new brand with the most bizarre name” (American Riviera Orchard). Smith made headlines in London papers recently when she compared Meghan to Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, saying the two women (American divorcees who upset the royal apple cart) were both “very narcissistic, very controlling, very dominating”.
Smith said that the heroine of this grim period for the royals is Camilla, the former scorned woman. “She’s been unbelievable,” the royal biographer said. “One day she’s on the Isle of Man, the next day Northern Ireland, looking cheerful, taking good wishes to Charles. Someone in the crowd noted that men were difficult patients, and Camilla laughed and said she was doing the best she could.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times