Years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was
she "the people's princess," who electrified the world with her
beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy
neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?
Only Tina Brown, former Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, England's
glossiest gossip magazine; Vanity Fair; and The New Yorker could possibly give
us the truth. Tina knew Diana personally and has far-reaching insight into the
royals and the Queen herself.
In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female
cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Diana's
sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but
finally came to terms with, and bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who
concealed wounds of her own. Most formidable of them all was her mother-in-law,
the Queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla
Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix,
and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity
culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.
Tabloid Princess
By CAROLINE WEBERJUNE 10, 2007
Admittedly, I’m biased. On July 29, 1981, when Lady Diana
Spencer married Prince Charles, I was in London with my family. I was 11, and
like millions of people, I couldn’t get enough of the “Shy Di” fairy tale: ugly
(O.K., gangly) duckling meets handsome (O.K., gangly) prince and becomes
luminous royal swan. In the new couple’s honor, I spent a month’s allowance on
wedding memorabilia. My prize purchase was a Diana coffee mug with a
wide-brimmed ceramic hat. “Only the girls are going in for this lot,” the sales
clerk grumbled. He might have been talking about the fairy princess myth
itself. Sometimes against their better judgment, women the world over were
entranced by the prospect of untold leisure, unequaled glamour and redemptive
metamorphosis that this particular myth promised. Ladies, let’s be honest: who
really among us hasn’t dreamed of becoming a princess?
With “The Diana Chronicles,” Tina Brown breathes new life
into the saga of this royal “icon of blondness” by astutely revealing just how
powerful, and how marketable, her story became in the age of modern celebrity
journalism. Indeed, while Diana named Camilla Parker Bowles as the third party
in her unhappy union, she might also have mentioned a fourth: the media. “She
was way ahead of her contemporaries in foreseeing a world where celebrity was,
so to speak, the coin of the realm,” Brown writes. “An aristocrat herself,
Diana knew that the aristocracy of birth was now irrelevant. All that counted
now was the aristocracy of exposure.” And Brown offers an insightful, absorbing
account of the pas de deux into which, to her eventual peril, Diana joined with
the paparazzi.
As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker,
Brown certainly has the authority to examine the Princess of Wales as a
creation and a casualty of the media glare. Perhaps not incidentally, Brown’s
own years in the spotlight were bookended by Diana’s rise and fall. In July
1981, Brown appeared as a “royalty expert” on the “Today” show’s coverage of
the Wales wedding. Then the editor of the British gossip magazine Tatler, Brown
recalls that “the wedding did for the sales of Tatler ... what the O. J.
Simpson chase did for the ratings of CNN. It put us on the map.”
After Diana’s death in August 1997, Brown again placed the
magazine over which she presided — this time, The New Yorker — “in the middle”
of what was still “the biggest tabloid story in the world,” by publishing a
special issue devoted to the princess’ memory. Brown stressed the dramatic
difference between the Windsors’ self-styled identity (“local, modest,
unsurprising” guarantors of British tradition) and Diana’s (global superstar,
unapologetically “shrewd ... at press relations”). The conflicted relationship
between the two had been, the historian Simon Schama noted in the same issue, a
“wedding of the past and the future: the Radetzky March meets the Tatler cover
girl. ... But, as it turned out, the past and the future couldn’t get along.”
What’s more — as Brown’s book demonstrates, and as the recent film “The Queen”
has also made clear — the future was bound to win, even if it claimed its own
leading avatar in the process.
In fact, Diana’s conquest of the camera was bittersweet from
the start. In February 1967, when she was 5, her mother, Frances, began an
extramarital liaison that led to her parents’ acrimonious divorce. Diana’s
father, Johnnie Spencer, retaliated against Frances by gaining custody of the
children. But his stiff-upper-lip reaction to the trauma (“speaking in words of
one syllable ... and sitting morosely for hours staring out of the window”)
made him ill-suited to handle its effects on his offspring, for whom he was
able to show affection only by taking “amateur movies and still photographs” of
them. As a result, Brown notes, “Diana grew up associating the camera with
love,” and striving to give it what it appeared to want in return. Her brother,
Charles, told Sally Bedell Smith, a previous biographer, that when Johnnie was
filming Diana, “she would automatically sort of make gestures and strike
poses.” Honing her star power became, Brown observes, the bereft little girl’s
“own way of surviving.”
In theory, this was useful preparation for her relationship
with Prince Charles, which first made it into the newspapers in September 1980.
By this time, the British press was in a full-scale backlash against “the
culture of deference” that had long dominated its society pages. Since Rupert
Murdoch’s acquisition of “the prurient News of the World” in 1969 and his
reinvigoration, a year later, of The Sun “as a rollicking, up-yours tabloid
featuring bare-breasted pinups every day,” England had entered a “racier media
age” in which the staid House of Windsor “was acquiring the stale, curdled
taste of a British Rail cheese sandwich.” Because “pictures of a middle-aged
Princess Margaret churning grandly around the dance floor in her caftan in
Mustique hardly moved product” — and Brown should know, having trumpeted that
princess’ “Mustique mystique” for The Tatler — “the guessing game of the Prince
of Wales’s love life was the sole excitement for the media.” And what
excitement it was. The prince was Europe’s most eligible bachelor, and his
romantic exploits became fodder for an increasingly rapacious media machine.
Before Diana, Charles had tried to evade the tabloids’
scrutiny by bedding married women, “because the need for secrecy made them
‘safe.’ ” But when he began appearing publicly with Diana — the 19-year-old
debutante with a “soft, peachy complexion” and legs that seemed “to extend up
to her ears like Bambi” — secrecy ceased to be an option. The paparazzi went
wild for the girl who was not only (as an aristocrat, Protestant and
self-proclaimed virgin) an ideal royal bride, but also a magnificently photogenic
subject. Notwithstanding her “Shy Di” nickname, born of her habit of glancing
up coyly at the camera from beneath batting eyelashes, Diana proved “a natural
at giving the press what they wanted”: gorgeous pictures. “One by one,”
according to Brown, “the hack pack fell in love with her.”
Winning the affection of the press was not, however, the
same thing as winning the affection of Prince Charles, as Diana would soon be
devastated to learn. One of the more striking revelations in “The Diana Chronicles”
is that it was the media just as much as the royal family — ready for Charles
to stop dithering and settle down — that propelled him into marriage with a
woman he didn’t love. A former royal-watcher for The Sun told Brown: “We really
got behind Diana and pushed her towards him. I am absolutely convinced that we
the media forced Charles to marry her.”
The prince’s heart belonged to his married girlfriend,
Camilla Parker Bowles (now his second wife), but as heir to the throne, he was
neither encouraged nor expected to follow his heart. The problem was that the
tabloids — and Diana, who consumed them avidly — insisted on a different story
line: He’s in Love. Other biographers have attributed the subsequent unraveling
of the Waleses’ marriage to Charles’s cruelty (Andrew Morton) or Diana’s mental
illness (Sally Bedell Smith), but Brown chalks the disaster up to the bride’s
naïve belief in a tabloid fiction. She and the media became partners in
ignoring the warning signs from the groom himself, like his now notorious reply
when, receiving news of the couple’s engagement in February 1981, a BBC
reporter asked Charles if he and his fiancée were in love: “Whatever ‘in love’
means.” Amazingly, Brown points out, “the print press literally erased” the
phrase “from their accounts. No one, it seems, wanted to break the spell.”
Least of all Diana, who answered the reporter’s “love” question with a giggle:
“Of course.”
The bride was in for a rude awakening. And though most of
the Waleses’ sordid domestic drama has already been covered at length
elsewhere, Brown perceptively highlights the media’s starring role. Once
married to Charles, Diana chafed at playing second fiddle not only to Camilla
but also to Queen Elizabeth. While still a newlywed, she was deeply offended
when Charles offered his mother a drink before her. “I always thought it was
the wife first — stupid thought,” she complained afterward. Brown observes that
first offering drinks to an older woman — queen or not — “was only basic good
manners” and concludes: “Stupid thought, yes, or maybe something worse: the
onset of superstar entitlement. ... Six months of adulation from the press had
begun to reshape Diana’s worldview.” Offended by the Windsors’ failure to
appreciate the qualities everyone else seemed to admire, she turned
increasingly to the tabloids to nourish and sustain her.
To that end, Diana became a master of press manipulation,
regularly leaking tips and planting stories about both herself and her enemies.
She also understood the incomparable power of the image, which led her, at the
height of her problems with Charles, to pose for a photograph alone in front of
the Taj Mahal, “the monument to marital love.” In one of the book’s many new
interviews, John Travolta tells Brown about his legendary dance with Diana at
the White House in 1985: “I thought, She not only knows who she is, she knows
what this is — and how big this is. She was so savvy about the media impact of
it all.”
Yet Diana’s savvy had its limits. For although her
public-relations wizardry enabled her repeatedly to upstage and — with the
tell-all interviews she did in 1992 and 1995 — humiliate the Windsors, it did
more than just give the monarchy an appealing, “human” face. By inviting the
press to share in her most intimate experiences, the princess abolished every
last vestige of celebrity privacy. And by providing the press with picture
after dazzling, salable picture, she stoked “the media’s inexhaustible appetite
for celebrity images.” In an extended meteorological conceit, Brown observes:
“The sunshine of publicity in which Diana would at first be happy to bask,
posing and smiling for the cameras, grew steadily hotter and harsher. As the
superheated imperatives of an invasive press bumped up increasingly against the
milder human necessity of privacy, scattered rains gave way to drenching gales
and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes. ... Diana herself had
accelerated the climate change that ended up making her life literally
impossible.” Mistakenly, she thought she could “control the genie she had
released.”
But the genie pursued her to the end, right into the Pont de
l’Alma tunnel in Paris, where a high-speed paparazzi chase culminated in the
princess’ death. Lying unconscious and badly wounded in the wreckage of a black
Mercedes, Diana continued to inspire the frenzied photographers. As the picture
editor of The Sun confessed to Brown, that very evening he initially agreed to
pay £300,000 to one of the shutterbugs who had followed the Mercedes into the
tunnel for snapshots of its mangled blond occupant. “Even as Diana struggled
for life,” Brown writes, “she was being sold as an exclusive.”
Caroline Weber, whose most recent book is “Queen of Fashion:
What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” is a frequent contributor to the
Book Review.
The put-upon
princess
Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles takes the familiar tales and
translates them into racier dialect, says Catherine Bennett
The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown
Catherine Bennett
Saturday 23 June 2007 23.51 BST First published on Saturday
23 June 2007 23.51 BST
The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown
496pp, Century, £18.99
Luckily, perhaps, Princes William and Harry appear to have
inherited their family's ancestral indifference to books. It is on the press
and television that they focus, writing recently to Channel 4 to complain about
the documentary Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel: "a gross disrespect to
their mother's memory". Memories of Andrew Morton, with whom their mother
had colluded, may also explain why similarly pained - if futile - rebukes are
rarely levelled at literary scavengers.
Asked by the princes' secretary "if it were your or my
mother dying in that tunnel, would we want the scene broadcast to the
nation?", a Channel 4 executive might reasonably have replied that his
intrusions were as nothing compared with the rogue psychiatry and whiffy
speculation that has become almost standard in books about Diana, including
such classy additions to the genre as Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles. In
which we find the outgoing prime minister's exclusive reassessment (she taught
us "a new way to be British") sharing the same capacious bucket as
Brown's relentlessly smutty guesswork. "To keep her company," Brown
leers, "there was always what she called 'Le Gaget', the tiny vibrator one
of the staff bought for her in Paris as a joke."
Like most of the Chronicles, the existence of "Le
Gaget" was previously advertised in a first-generation Diana book (Ken
Wharfe, 2003), already rifled by Sarah Bradford for her authoritative 2006 biography,
Diana. Contrary to the claims of novelty circulating before publication,
Brown's solitary contribution to the archives appears to be the disclosure that
the teenage Diana once behaved like a carnivorous Goldilocks, picking all the
meat out of her employer's stew.
For the rest, Brown's novelties are confined to changes of
emphasis, and to speculation, none of it enough to modify Bradford's
compassionate portrait of a dreadfully isolated young woman, whose problems -
once you appreciated the misery caused by her mother's exit and her
stepmother's equally sudden arrival, the ghastliness of her entire family, and
the fact that she was only 20 when Charles and his fellow conspirators started
telling her she was mad - seem far from being of her own making.
Then why - if it wasn't for the £1m reason - did Brown
volunteer for this massive anniversary cuts job? She has nothing illuminating
to add, and seems neither to have liked Diana nor to have found her all that
interesting. At Tatler magazine, edited by Brown at the time of the royal
engagement, the uneducated princess was apparently considered a pitifully naive
"sociological throwback", impressing Tatlerites only with the
"tameness of her set". There was "no sign of Lady Diana Spencer
or her ilk", Brown emphasises, at a party once attended by her own, much
faster circle. "The definitive end-of-decade social event of the 70s was
the riotously eclectic fancy dress party in Hampshire to celebrate the 40th
birthday of Nicky Haslam, the fashionable decorator ... 'You can always tell a
gentleman by the quality of his drugs,' an exuberant Lord Hesketh told me as we
stood in line for the buffet."
Regrettably, Tina must break off here from her own, very
promising, memoirs and return to translating Morton/Burrell/Jephson/Bradford
into a racier dialect that renders lovers "shag mates" ("today's
terminology", she assures us), has Dodi's driver putting "the pedal
to the metal", Charles preferring "gags over shags", and the
effect of Diana's glamour on "cafe society" being to "turbo
charge" it.
Even the tragedy of Diana's later years evidently looks a
little parochial, from Brown's demanding, transatlantic perspective. Maybe a
sprinkle of Hollywood glamour? "While the world was thrilling to the
spectacle of Diana's life as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical," she
writes about Highgrove, "her home life was becoming more like something
out of Hitchcock. Under a King and I façade lurked a Rebecca-like sinister
melodrama ... the shadow of Rebecca is never far away." Just outside
Chippenham, to be precise. For the benefit of American readers Brown includes a
variety of topographical notes, possibly based on memory.
"Gloucestershire", they learn, "has a very wet climate.”
For their part, English readers of this simultaneous
translation are schooled in the significance of Diana's disco dance with John
Travolta. Her arrival in Brown's world was "an iconic moment ... There was
a Hollywood dimension now to Diana's glittering fable of the shy girl who
married a dashing prince."
Not for the first time, an iconic photograph would be a
bonus. But there are no pictures in the Chronicles, even though images of the
acutely self-conscious Diana are, as Brown affirms, key elements in her story:
"In an iconic photograph," she writes of the Diana-Hewitt polo trophy
presentation, "their eyes meet ..." Presumably Brown requires this
austere, picture-free eminence from which to pour scorn on lowlier chroniclers
- "the paps waited like hyenas" - without being labelled a
flesh-eater herself.
As for Diana's wretched complicity with her snappers, Brown
explains that her father's fondness for amateur photography meant that
"Diana grew up associating the camera with love". At the same time,
the girl was reading too much Barbara Cartland, "leaving her spiritual
bloodstream permanently polluted with saccharine". A diagnosis that may be
as accurate as any of Brown's other aperçus: "Gloucestershire people have
to be one of two things - hunters or gardeners." Perhaps she was away for
Fred West.
Largely on the basis of his charming appearance, our expert
concludes that in William, Diana's "legacy is in good hands". Really?
Even though William's father is a helpless whiner, his grandmother a grimly
repressed survivor and his Windsor grandfather a bully? His mother was
abandoned, for life, by her own, twice-divorced mother (who finally turned to
the bottle), humiliated by the palace post-divorce, after which she endured
only romantic disappointment before being violently killed, whereupon
15-year-old William's uncle provoked a blood feud with his grandmother, and his
father resumed, with indecent haste, his courtship of the woman who had haunted
and tormented Diana all her adult life - and has since made this shameless creature
into William's stepmother. Interviewed last week, Prince William said he
thought about his mother's death every day. It would be like something out of
Philip Larkin, if only it wasn't true.
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