Diana, You Ignorant Slut
Culturebox's first thought on reading Diana: In Search of Herself , Sally Bedell Smith's
deliriously mean-spirited (though boringly written) catalog of all the ways the
late fairy-tale princess turns out to have been troubled, trite, and
exasperating, is that the British public didn't get its money's worth from the
girl. During her marriage, according to the New York Times , Diana
cost her subjects $3,287 a day ($1.2 million a year). Much of that paid for
clothing, cosmetics, hair styling, physical and speech training, health care,
beauty treatments, fancy vacations, and a private staff--all legitimate
expenses for a state official whose job it is to be a professional celebrity.
(Why the British would pay their royals to do such a job is another
question.)
If you go by Smith's account, the rest must have gone to: 1) a surprisingly
large number of cell-phone calls--up to 20 a day per person--to a surprisingly
large number of lovers; 2) alternative therapists--astrologists (three),
spiritualists (including a clairvoyant who put her in touch with her
grandmother), a tarot card reader, an energy healer, a hypnotherapist, an
"anger-release" therapist, colonic irrigationists, osteopaths, chiropractors,
reflexologists, aromatherapists, shiatsu and tai chi chuan experts,
acupuncturists, and a "mind-body" therapist, the last a former tax accountant
who gave her massages and diet advice; 3) more conventional forms of treatment
for sleeplessness, eating disorders, paranoia, and self-mutilation, including
an episode in which she slashed her arms and smeared the blood all over the
walls of an airplane; 4) lunch at fancy restaurants to which she secretly
invited tabloid reporters so she could drop by their tables and leak whatever
she wanted to appear in their publications the next day.
When you think about it, Item 4 probably is in the job description
for an official celebrity, which brings us to Culturebox's second reaction to
this book: that the British got everything they paid for and more. Smith's
Diana was an ill-educated, impulsive woman who spent her adult life reeling
from what Smith dubiously diagnoses as a borderline personality disorder.
(Culturebox knows as little about psychiatry as Smith does, but she knows wild
analysis when she sees it.) Whatever the cause, Diana was depressed, secretive,
paranoid, dissembling, self-loathing, desperately needy, and unable to sustain
close relationships.
Yet she was also the century's most popular royal personage, a fact that now
seems not at all unrelated. When you know how unstable Diana was, you grasp
that it was her lack of self-control that fueled the media's obsession. She got
our attention because she was cute, but she held it because she gave the
paparazzi so much to work with--all those unchecked expressions of slyness or
shyness or vulnerability or boredom, all that Sturm und Drang about
needing her privacy. Tabloid editors put her on the cover day in and day out
because eating disorders and fainting fits made good copy, not out of sympathy
with her charities. And since by the ironclad laws of yellow journalism the
famous have to be famous for something, Diana became the universal symbol of
individual suffering, the victim of unfeeling institutions everywhere. Others
might have found the attention devastating, but Diana must have been relieved
to find in the public eye the unflagging concern, pity, and sense of drama
Smith says the princess demanded, and failed to get, from Charles. Diana only
ever had one loyal suitor--the public--and she quickly figured out how to win
its favor, cultivating tabloid reporters while complaining about their
impertinences, figuring out more often than not what to wear and say and how to
upstage the other royals.
It was strangely easy for her to outfox the palace. No rational being, no
one concerned about shoring up a marriage or maintaining a position in society,
could have predicted what move Diana would make next. She leaked stories that
put her in a questionable light. She collaborated with a tabloid reporter,
Andrew Morton, on a royals-bashing biography that made divorce Charles' only
option. She defied everyone she knew, including her own press secretary, to go
on television for a notorious 1995 interview in which she came off as wildly
self-pitying and un-self-aware. She flaunted her relationship with Dodi, the
no-good son of a corrupt and authoritarian father. But Diana never cared much
about being a princess. She cared about being a celebrity, and her public
responded to her devotion by canonizing her: Saint Diana of Bathos. You'd have
to be mad to court such a fate, but luckily, she was.
