Diana Affair Speculation Sets French Tabloids Ablaze

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By BRUCE CRUMLEY / PARIS Bruce Crumley / Paris – 2 hrs 1 min ago

"I wish that you love me," says Patricia, Princess of Cardiff, whose mangled English is one of the few notable differences between her character and the real-life Diana, Princess of Wales. Her would-be lover is French President Jacques-Henri Lambertye - drawn, it seems, to closely resemble real-life former President ValÉry Giscard d'Estaing. "I still hear her saying it in English," the writer reveals. "It's not my memory reminding me of it, but her voice." The florid romantic tale, titled The Princess and the President, might have passed largely unnoticed into the annals of pulp fiction were it not for the fact that its author is former President Giscard himself. Although the author remains silent amid the media furor, some newspapers have covered the book as though it might be a thinly disguised kiss-and-tell.

On Monday, Sept. 21, French daily Le Figaro ran an entire page about the book ahead of its Oct. 1 release, prompting immediate international coverage. Little wonder: Le Figaro did its best to help jolt public interest by hyping the enigma of whether the obvious similarities between the lovers referred to in the title and Giscard and Diana hinted at a real-life affair between the author and the British princess who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

"Fiction or reality?" Le Figaro asked in a headline alongside a November 1994 photo of a tuxedo-clad Giscard being gazed upon by a glowing Diana during a charity event. "Only the former President holds the key to this troubling story." So far, the former President isn't telling.

In the book, the 83-year-old Giscard traces the histoire d'amour between Lambertye and Princess Patricia. During a G-7 meeting at Buckingham Palace in the 1980s, the enchanting royal admits to the Frenchman she has thrown herself into charity work to escape a bleak married life. "Ten days before my marriage, my future husband told me he had a mistress and that he had decided to continue his relationship with her," she confides to her smitten presidential admirer - who drops the statesman act and goes French on her.

"I kissed her hand," Lambertye continues, "and she looked at me questioningly, her eyes now slate-colored and widening as she bowed her face forward."

Eventually Lambertye makes his first overt move by holding Patricia's hand during a train ride back from a 1984 D-Day anniversary ceremony in Normandy. Similar expressions of hand endearment follow, before the pair open the seriously carnal chapter of their affair in a presidential chÂteau in Rambouillet - where Giscard himself used to hold hunting expeditions in the surrounding woods.

"The ritual of the hunt was always the same," Giscard writes in yet another juxtaposition of his history and his novel.

And if such blurring of lines between imagination and reality were not enough, Giscard starts the novel with the epigraph "Promise kept." Myriad press reports of the book have paired that opener with final lines of the tale, in which Patricia tells Lambertye, "You asked my permission to write your story. I grant it to you, but you must make me a promise ..." Such subtlety is usually administered with a sledgehammer.

But could such an affair have actually happened? Certainly not in the way the book describes, because Giscard had been voted out of office and into semiretirement by 1981 - the same year Diana's royal marriage launched her rise to international stardom. However, press reports speculate over whether he could have been hinting at a postpresidential liaison by describing his fictional President's affair while in office - unfounded speculation fanned by Giscard's remaining tight-lipped.

Many pundits are alleging that the timing - and questionable taste - of Giscard's book is driven by the fact that fellow former President Jacques Chirac will publish a memoir of his own political career next month. Enduring hatred between the two men stretches back to the mid-1970s; each has waged a campaign of electoral war and political brawling against the other ever since. The Princess and the President, some pundits say, is Giscard's newest attempt to steal the limelight from his nemesis.

"Giscard wants to divert attention from Chirac's book and doesn't care how low he has to stoop or ridiculous he looks doing it," says commentator and humor writer Bruno Gaccio. "Giscard occupies the media with a laughable novel as Chirac rolls out the story of his life in politics."

However, Gaccio suggests French machismo may also be at work. "People always speak of [fellow former French President Fran[ce {c}]ois] Mitterrand and Chirac as great ladies' men, and [current French President Nicolas] Sarkozy went out and married a top model, but who refers to Giscard as a seducer?" Gaccio asks. "No one - so he's decided to do so himself, with a story whose leading lady is no longer around to debunk it."

Perhaps, but if initial press attention is matched by book sales, Giscard will laugh all the way to the bank. If so, expect inquisitive observers to watch for any sign of him forking over some of the proceeds to Diana's charities.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090923/wl_time/08599192545900

[samanthajane13]

How Diana Transformed Britain
By CATHERINE MAYER

The British have always been good at silence — at family meals spent wordlessly; intense emotions expressed through a hand on the shoulder — but on Sept. 6, 1997, they surpassed themselves. London, the big, braying capital, was stilled as over a million mourners of Diana, Princess of Wales, kept vigil along the route to Westminster Abbey. The hush amplified the sounds of the cortège as it set out from Kensington Palace: the rumble of wheels on tarmac, the clopping of horses' hooves, and a bell that tolled at listless intervals. But as the procession came into view, turning out of the palace gates onto the public road, a shriek pierced the morning air: "Diana, my Diana!" and then a despairing wail: "We love you, Diana!" Britain's customary stoicism had been overwhelmed by raw, unbridled grief.

It has become commonplace in the decade since Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, to say that the festival of mourning which culminated in her extraordinary funeral marked a transformation — the moment when the old British virtues of reserve and silent suffering, of "mustn't grumble" and "could be worse," gave way to publicly expressed catharsis. The People's Princess had unlocked hearts, reordered values, presided at the triumph of emotional intelligence over cold intellect, of compassion over tradition.

The truth is harder to pin down, as tricky as the Princess herself could be. If Diana mattered, her significance rests in a series of interlocking social and political revolutions in a nation with a disproportionate impact on global culture, high and low — revolutions in which she participated, part unwitting catalyst, part canny activist.

This October will see the resumption of the inquest into her death by the British courts, the third inquiry to examine her fatal car crash in Paris. But even before these proceedings are concluded, there is little real doubt that Diana's death was precisely what it seemed to be at the time: a tragic accident.

Ten years on, Diana is still the world's most famous Briton, but many of her own compatriots don't seem sure if she did much more than wear designer dresses and shift a lot of tabloids. So here are a few incontrovertible facts. Diana shook up the British monarchy and speeded its modernization. She helped to tear down prejudices about AIDS. She raised awareness of eating disorders. She coalesced opposition to land mines. These are pretty hefty achievements for a woman of little education who mocked herself for being "thick as a plank." Add to these a more dubious accomplishment — her skillful manipulation of media images — and it's clear why, a decade after her death, Diana remains an inescapable presence in British life: mostly, but not always, benign; a restless and seductive ghost. It's time to peer into the many corners she still haunts.

Modernizing the Monarchy
When 19-year-old Diana asked Charles if he loved her, her churlish fiancé replied "whatever that means." Yet the Windsors thought they knew about love. It looked like patriotism. It was respectful and waved flags. It didn't sob on the streets or scream like a teenage girl glimpsing her rock idol. The quiet affection of the British people for Queen Elizabeth II has barely wavered during her 54-year reign. There was a low ebb early in 1998 — Diana's legacy — but even then the monarch's popularity rating dipped no lower than 66%. It's now 85%.

Of course, there has always been dissent: some 18% of Britons have called for the abolition of the monarchy since MORI, a polling firm, first began gathering opinions on the royals in 1969. That figure seemed as impervious to change as the Queen's fashion sense. Then Diana died and, for one week, republican numbers swelled.

The Queen never gives interviews — a wise policy that has helped to preserve the fraying mystique of royalty. But as her subjects wept on the streets and dying flowers carpeted the sidewalks, Elizabeth's Trappist vow looked either boneheaded or stone-hearted. Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to the Queen, Charles and Diana who was responsible for the media arrangements for Diana's funeral, says it was neither. "The Queen was always going to pay tribute to Diana," he says, but she planned from the outset to make her broadcast shortly before the funeral. "There was a furor because she was at [the Scottish castle] Balmoral and not down with the sniveling mobs in London. [But] William and Harry needed her more than hundreds and thousands of people keeping Kleenex in business."

Yet while the Queen and her immediate family kept their grief to themselves, there was a whiff of revolution beyond the palace gates. The U.S. academic Camille Paglia, speaking two days after the Paris car crash, foretold the fall of the house of Windsor. "With its acquisition of Diana, the monarchy had restored its modernity," she told Salon.com. "Instead its treatment — its mistreatment — of her ... may mean the end of the monarchy." Not so. As soon as the Queen walked among the mourners, support for ditching her plunged to historic lows. It was as if Britons had peered into the abyss of republicanism and drawn back in horror. The royals had learned a lesson too, says Robert Worcester, MORI's founder: "The monarchy realized that it stands or falls on public opinion." That realization has informed a program of stealthy reform that has made the monarchy, by almost imperceptible degrees, more professional. The Queen agreed to change the rules on primogeniture to allow her female descendants equal rights in the succession to the throne. Her children took stock and decided they had better justify their existence to the outside world.

Granted, their options for doing so are limited. In her charitable work, Diana set a standard that's hard to equal. She ignored the prevailing prejudices and fears about AIDS to clasp the hands of sufferers, and embraced leprosy patients in Indonesia. Arbiter remembers a visit to a home for the blind where Diana noticed that an old resident was crying: "She asked what was the matter and he said, 'I can't see you.' So she took his hand and put it on her face." Charles still doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but it's increasingly evident that it's in the right place. His Prince's Trust organization raises a good deal of money for charities helping young people, and he's gaining respect for his stance on environmental issues, as mainstream thought catches up with views he's propagated for years.

In other ways, too, Diana lives on in her family. Charles has visibly stepped up to the task of rearing their boys, not in the model of his own upbringing, but just as the Princess would have wanted. William and Harry see how much happier their father has become. Charles' visible contentment has also helped to turn around public opinion, once set firmly against Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, his second wife and longtime lover. Just before Diana died, MORI asked in a poll if Camilla should become Queen; only 15% supported the idea. By April of last year, that figure had grown to 38%. Voices in the British press have fulminated at plans for the Duchess to attend a memorial service for Diana later this month; there's some sympathy with this view, but little sign of a real backlash. With no small irony, the ideas the Princess popularized — the pursuit of personal happiness, compassion for human weaknesses — have helped the cause of a woman she detested.


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Unbuttoning Britain
Diana had been brought up in about as old-fashioned an environment as was possible in the last quarter of the 20th century, but nothing could have prepared her for the antiquity of palace life. Britain had been postimperial for more than a generation, which meant that the values associated with empire (or with its rulers) had long lost their edge. By the time she married it was already — and especially in London — a place less homogeneous, more multicolored than it had ever been, and far less deferential to the Victorian virtues that the royal family represented. Yet in the royal household, those virtues — and that deference — held sway. The new Princess could not fit in. Her rebellion, inchoate and self-destructive at first, reverberated far beyond the palace walls. Tina Brown, the latest of Diana's biographers, relates asking former Prime Minister Tony Blair if Diana had found a new way to be royal. "No," Blair replied. "Diana taught us a new way to be British."

Blair's party, New Labour, had been given power by electors who were reviewing their values. After the brash, moneymaking 1980s came the hangover of the early 1990s. Britons were searching for spiritual and emotional succor. That didn't make them deep. They set increasing store by celebrity. Success was measured by the ability to find fulfillment. It was a confessional age. Even before the country convulsed in grief for its lost Princess, Brits were eager to let it all hang out — at least by comparison with their grandparents and great-grandparents. If you doubt that, consider this passage in The Ascent of Everest, the account of the first conquest of the mountain in 1953, by John Hunt, who led the expedition. Hunt is describing the return of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to camp after summiting. "Everyone was pouring out of the tents, there were shouts of exclamation and joy. The next moment I was with them: handshakes — even, I blush to say, hugs — for the triumphant pair."

Diana led the charge for emotion and the unembarrassed displays that now routinely go with it: from hugs and kisses to public tears. Unlike her remote royal in-laws, she touched the people she met, literally touched them, and bought their trust with a coinage she had in endless supply: her most personal thoughts and feelings. That's partly because her unhappiness drove her humanitarian impulses. Arbiter says, "She always championed the downtrodden" because she was attracted to their suffering. "She was a bit of an ambulance chaser, with the best of intentions." She also experimented with different therapies that encouraged her to unburden, if not necessarily in public. The comedian David Baddiel, whose novel Whatever Love Means begins on the day of Diana's funeral, sees her as an exponent of "a degraded version of therapy culture," a self-help addict who couldn't stop spilling her guts. She "didn't know who she was but gained an identity through her messiness, through her lack of identity, by splattering her lack of identity on the walls of our culture," he says. "People chimed with that."

After her separation and divorce, Diana's efforts to redefine herself took on an edge of urgency. She had given up her patronage of most of the charities she once represented. She fantasized about becoming the wife of one of her boyfriends, a heart surgeon called Hasnat Khan, and living in anonymity. Yet she could never hope to become normal. Instead she became a celebrity. Then came Dodi Fayed.

Though friends say he was just a distraction, her choice of two Muslim boyfriends looked set to test how deep the tolerance of New Labour's Britain would go. This much is plain: she had long since escaped or shed the attitudes of many white Britons. After her death, Trevor Phillips, a black Labour politician who now chairs Britain's Commission for Equality and Human Rights, told Newsweek Diana "embraced the modern, multicultural, multi-ethnic Britain without reservation." Unlike most Europeans, she had "no flinch, no anxiety about race ... for nonwhite Britons, she was like a beacon in the darkness."

Wayne Sleep, a ballet dancer and media personality, got to know Diana well and remembers her "poking fun at aristocracy." In her final years, she mingled less and less with her own class, preferring instead the company of the self-made aristocracy of entertainment and fashion. The members of this élite were from different countries and cultures — gay, straight, black, white and united by fame. In Blair's Britain, they could expect invitations to 10 Downing Street, not always because of their talent. (Britain may have shrugged off its forelock-tugging subservience to the ruling classes, but in Cool Britannia money and celebrity counted.) Diana fitted into this new world perfectly. She wasn't seen as posh. She was one of the people. By example, she reassured them that anyone could be a star. All you needed, she seemed to imply, was the chance to display yourself to the world. After all, she'd done that more than once herself. In 1985, at a gala evening to celebrate Charles' 37th birthday, she left the royal box and appeared on stage, shimmying with Sleep. Charles was appalled. Diana's scheme to please him may have come undone, but she had helped Britain to unbutton.

From Fairy Tale to PostFeminist
Imagine this: Diana is still alive. She's a well-preserved 46, with a new boyfriend and an apartment in Manhattan. Is she popular? Maybe. A legend? No way. By dying young, Diana ensured her immortality. Better dead than wrinkled.


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Celebrity culture is cruel, but especially to women. "One of the characteristics of celebrity culture is that you first build someone up and then you write about their downfall," says German writer Tom Levine, the author of a book on Britain's first family. "If Diana had lived she would have been going on that up-and-down train." Her last summer was already something of a downward ride. A slight weight gain set the press speculating she might be pregnant. She wasn't, and such close attention could not have been easy for a bulimic. But her public admission of her eating disorder in a 1995 interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC had encouraged hidden sufferers to seek help. Her life reflected many of the concerns of ordinary women — their weight, their relationship troubles — and by talking openly she also eroded the stigma attached to failure. Even a Princess battled the bulge, even a beauty lost her husband. Diana was criticized for her "American style of emotionalism," says feminist writer Naomi Wolf, but her approach actually represented a liberation theology in hidebound Britain. "It was very radical. She didn't just talk the talk, she walked the walk."

That was not the fate feminists predicted when the news of her engagement to Charles broke. The feminist magazine Spare Rib ran an article headed "DON'T DO IT DI". This slogan, rendered as a lapel button, became a fashionable accessory for the thinking woman. "On 29 July 1981," wrote the British journalist Beatrix Campbell of the fairy-tale wedding in St. Paul's Cathedral, "the deceitful and depressed engagement ended when this thin, wan, whiter-than-white woman walked down the aisle, propping up the aged patriarch who had got her into all this ... Her ivory silk wedding dress was a shroud."

By the time Diana died, however, many feminists had read her struggle against a sclerotic system as a parable of empowerment. Paglia dubbed her an "incredible superstar." That she was, but she would never have located herself in the feminist firmament. She wasn't interested in gender equality. She fought against a patriarchy because it was old-fashioned and restrictive, not because she repudiated its male values. The Princess was one of the first and most potent symbols of the "girl power" celebrated by the Spice Girls with their mildly predatory allure and celebration of girly friendship. It was a neat fit for Diana, with her close women friends and her troubled search for a mate. What Royal Spice really, really wanted was not at all radical: to love and be loved.

The Political Princess
Diana's body was transported to Westminster Abbey on a gun carriage. Arbiter says that's a detail of Diana's funeral that troubled Blair's communications chief, Alastair Campbell, and his team. The vehicle had been chosen because, unlike a hearse, it would be open to the crowds. To the palace it also seemed appropriate: Diana had, after all, been the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of six regiments.

Yet Diana's last, passionate campaign was distinctly unmilitary: she called for the abolition of land mines. She had visited Angola with the British Red Cross in January 1997, angering some Conservative MPs, who thought she was showboating. Peter Viggers, a Tory member of the Commons Defence Select Committee, said: "This is an important, sophisticated argument. It doesn't help simply to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is." Undaunted, Diana spoke at a conference on land mines and made a second fact-finding trip, to Bosnia.

Few would have predicted such engagement from the plummy girl who emerged onto the public stage in 1980 as Charles' latest squeeze. The royal wedding in 1981 — with Diana's endless train, the pages and flower girls, the choirs and coaches — was widely seen at the time as a reaffirmation of tradition in Britain, a throwback to an age when nobility and pomp held the nation in thrall. That it should have taken place during Margaret Thatcher's first term only added to the idea that Britain was becoming a more conservative society, and that Diana, the girl from the old aristocracy who had married into royalty, epitomized it.

Yet the Princess was never in tune with the Iron Lady. "Who is society? There is no such thing," Thatcher told Woman's Own magazine in 1987. "There are individual men and women and there are families." Thatcher's bracing doctrine of personal responsibility was always at odds with Diana's faith in the power of redemptive understanding, of allowing the weak to be weak. Her belief system very much included an entity called society, which rejected and marginalized people. "Someone has got to go out there and love people and show it," she said in her BBC interview.

By the time the Princess died, Thatcher was long gone, her pallid successor John Major was vanquished and Blair was in 10 Downing Street, with a huge popular mandate to build a more inclusive, caring Britain. That agenda echoed Diana's. The Princess had two secret meetings with Blair before his election. According to Alastair Campbell's recently published diaries, she told the intermediary who set up the meetings that "she would like to help [Labour] if she could." Diana had certainly made her mark on Campbell, who recorded that the Princess "had perfect skin and her whole face lit up when she spoke and there were moments when I had to fight to hear the words because I'm just lost in the beauty." Today Campbell has a more sober assessment: "She was very small-p political. I have no idea if she would have ended up taking some kind of unofficial role with a Labour government, but I am sure she would have found a way of harnessing her own skills and popularity to the sense of Britain as a more modern and compassionate country."

We will never know if she would have achieved such a dispensation. But the fact that she was — undeniably — on occasion manipulative, deceitful and self-centered should not blind us to the fact that, during her 17 years in the limelight, she had grown as Britain had grown, changed as Britain had changed, and that by the time she died she had something increasingly vital to offer. Arbiter recalls a strange, muted, mournful night after the Princess died when he encountered a group of wheelchair users on their way to lay flowers at Kensington Palace. "They were saying, 'Who's going to speak for us, now?' They had a point. The disabled: who's going to speak for them? The AIDS patients: who's going to speak for them? The drug addicts, the down-and-outs, the homeless, the elderly? She was their voice and drew attention to their plight." Arbiter pauses. "She'd have made a good Queen, you know. But that's it. She's gone." Gone? As anyone who knows anything about the strains that make up modern Britain will tell you, that is very far from true.


http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1650830_1650834,00.html

[samanthajane13]

The Saddest Fairy Tale
By HOWARD CHUA-EOAN

[editor's note: This story was first published in a limited-edition commemorative special issue of TIME in 1998.]

Once upon a time there was a little girl who learned she had been expected to be a boy. So intent were her parents on having a son that she had to wait a week after her birth to receive a name, the Honorable Diana Frances Spencer. Two older sisters and the brother who eventually arrived had royal godparents, but her father and mother picked commoners — rich ones, certainly, but untitled nevertheless — to swear their faith for her at the baptismal font.

Her first memory was of plastic, a warm synthetic smell touched off by sunlight on her stroller. She also remembered visits to the churchyard grave of the child her parents conceived just before her, a boy who lived barely 10 hours. Had he survived, she often wondered, would she have existed? Or would her mother, having produced a male heir, have left her husband for another man sooner than she actually did, breaking up the family before Diana could be born? She wished she were her oldest sister, the firstborn, the star of the family: smart, extroverted, unafraid to greet their hated stepmother with an insolent burp. At nine, Diana would bravely declare that she would marry only once — and only for love — and never, never divorce. But even as she said that, she stared out, as she would often do, from beneath her bangs, never quite looking anyone in the eye. For her parents, once in love, were no longer.

Once upon another time this little girl would grow up and fall in love and marry a prince and grow so happy for such a splendid moment that the whole world paused to marvel and rejoice with her, falling in love with Diana in love. The sunshine of her shy smile outshone royalty. she became the most famous woman on earth. But she learned quickly that though she had become a princess and borne her husband an heir, she could never truly become his queen. And when she died, suddenly, the day after the 36th anniversary of her christening, the world, still in love, stopped for a very long moment to grieve.

Why did so many mourn her so, and why do they mourn her still? Was it because the feats and foibles of British royalty have always been such an integral part of the world's story — and because Diana acted out the latest chapters in Britain's thousand-year-old soap opera with such compelling charisma, with such a facility for manipulation and melodrama? Was it just that: the flawed heroine vanishes, and we are bereft of narrative? Or was it because her unexpected end gave emotional resonance to the profuse and sometimes conflicting details of her intensely scrutinized life, uncovering omens through tragic retrospective, inchoate but nevertheless consoling proofs of destiny and meaning? Or perhaps all of that is not quite the heart of the grieving. Perhaps the mourning was over something simple yet profound, something cosmic yet common...

What cannot be denied is that in the beginning there was majesty, that fascinating natural resource of her homeland, a country celebrated by its greatest bard as "this England ... this teeming womb of royal kings, fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth." Still, majesty is a concept that requires re-enchantment every generation or so — and in this time the spell was Diana.

Her mother-in-law, the Queen, had once worked the magic. Elizabeth had continued the task thrust upon her father, purging the dynasty of the scandal that had threatened to ruin it, brought on by her irresponsible playboy of an uncle, who shirked duty and gave up the throne for a forbidden marriage. Elizabeth furthered the reconstruction of the Windsors by making the clan work, making it the inspiring exemplar of ideal family life, albeit one adorned with crowns and tiaras. Elizabeth would serve. She would persevere. She would be dutiful. She would obey.

And then came Diana, the girl chosen to refresh the line, to bear its heirs, to be the new smiling face of the family. Despite the stately filigree Elizabeth had embroidered onto the Windsor facade, Diana found the dynasty dysfunctional, uncertain of its work, in truth more a firm than a family. Diana tried to serve. she tried to persevere. She tried to be dutiful. But in the end, she would not obey.

This disastrous turn of events nevertheless failed to dissipate popular fascination with the British royals. Indeed, it intrigued the world even more. For was this not to be expected of the line that had leavened history with domestic dramas both delicious and dolorous? Henry VIII and his six wives; the rivalry of a Virgin Queen and her all too lusty Scots cousin; the madness of George III and the cupidity of his sons; Victoria and the brood she produced to rival the Hapsburgs, marrying, marrying,marrying all over Europe.


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Diana's catastrophic dalliance with the Windsors reverberated with history. It seemed as if the marriage and bitter divorce of Charles and Diana were inevitable evolutionary steps in the centuries-long intercourse between the Spencers and the Crown. For not only did the Spencers trace their descent from the same kings the Windsors claimed as ancestors, but in the 17th century alone, four of Diana's forebears were royal mistresses: Charles II was linked to three Spencer women, his brother James II to one. In the 18th century, Georgiana Spencer, the daughter of the first Earl of Spencer, scandalized the country not only with her many infidelities but also with her affair with the Prince of Wales, who may have been the father of one of her children. The same pathetic prince, after being abandoned by Georgiana, would pursue her sister Henrietta, who spurned him amid a comic seduction. In this century, a Prince of Wales again paid court to a Diana forebear: Lady Cynthia Hamilton, who chose instead to become the wife of the seventh Earl of Spencer and thus Diana's grandmother. The prince eventually turned to the American divorcee Wallis Simpson — and had to give up his throne for the woman he loved. What if Lady Cynthia had married the prince? The more cogent question is: Should not her decision have served as warning to her granddaughter to avoid a royal marriage?

History and its omens hovered around the marriage of Charles and Diana like uninvited guests bearing ill tidings. Tradition called for a wedding in Westminster Abbey. But Charles did not want to marry in Westminster, preferring St. Paul's Cathedral. He pointed out that a royal marriage had once been celebrated in the old St. Paul's: in the 16th century, Arthur, Prince of Wales, had married his Spanish bride Catherine there. It was an acceptable precedent — but an unfortunate one. Arthur died before the marriage was consummated, and Catherine, a prize because she was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was eventually wed to the new English heir, becoming the unhappy first of Henry VIII's six wives.

As for Diana, she wanted to avoid Westminster for reasons of personal history: her parents were married there in 1954. At that wedding, the Bishop of Norwich told the couple, "You are making an addition to the hoe life of your country on which, above all others, our national life depends." It turned out to be a blessing without efficacy. Indeed, the opposite was visited upon the Spencers. Diana wanted no part of that unintended curse. And so Charles and Diana were married in St. Paul's — in the end, a futile dodge.

The personal history of Diana before the Windsors was, of course, a premonition of the life of Diana the princess. In 1982, the year after the royal wedding, the journalist Penny Junor was almost apologetic about writing the biography of a 20-year-old "who has spent 19 of those years in almost total obscurity." What kind of life could possibly be told? And yet the details she related then possess a fatalistic glow now, hinting at the troubled Diana who would emerge over the next 15 years. While admiring of its subject, Junor's book nevertheless draws attention to Diana's imperfect virtues. "Diana was a compulsive washer," Junor wrote matter-of-factly, before cataloging how, in boarding school, Diana would not let a day go by without bathing, no matter how late it was, sneaking into the bathroom after lights were out even though it was strictly forbidden by the school, which allowed the girls to shower only three times a week. "She also had a compulsion for washing clothes" — and did more washing than any other student at school When she had time to visit her sisters, Diana would do their laundry too. After her marriage, she would write to an ex-nanny saying, "I do get annoyed at not being able to do my washing and general ironing." At nine years old, she was dusting the nursery to keep a less than thorough nanny out of trouble when her father came to check the room. Goodness may explain some of this fastidiousness. But only some. After all, this girl became the woman who admitted to bulimia and a regular program of colonic irrigation.

The child Diana, like the adult princess, had a capacity for drama and a penchant to seek comeuppance — locking a hated nanny in a room where she would not be discovered till evening, throwing the underclothes of an au pair onto the roof of the house and watching with glee as the items were rescued. She was an indifferent student: she froze at exams, was terrible at French, even did badly at needlework. But her limitations would serve her well. A penchant for popular culture and romance novels cultivated what many would later praise as her "common touch," her ability to talk to ordinary people about things they cared about. In school she was recognized as a do-gooder and received seldom-awarded prizes for helpfulness. As a teenager, she learned quickly that loving children was not the same as being able to care for them. She took her training as a kindergarten teacher very seriously.

She was aware of how things failed to work — even things inspired by love. The infidelities and disappointments that befell her family were proof enough. Her mother lost custody of her children because the court saw fit to punish her for adultery. Her father chose to marry a woman his children detested. Diana knew what it was like to be six years old and unable to explain to her friends why her mother was no longer around, how even her most courageous front could snap in a fit of anger. She knew what it was to be caught crying in secret. But she wanted to get family right. And when, one day, her prince came, she believed she had her opportunity, risked all, stumbled into the very nightmare she had sought to escape — and lost.

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." that declaration comes down to us from the magisterial heights of Tolstoy. But it is a false one. The happy family is a protean myth, shifting shape with the fashion of the times. The reality is that every unhappy family is alike. And, alas, unhappy families abound, trapped in cycles of aspiration and disappointment, of love and loss. The most augustly unhappy family in the world thus becomes a spectacular mirror for us all.

That is what is at the heart of our grief: simpler and yet more profound than a fascination with splendor; cosmic and yet as close to us as our parents, our brothers, our sisters, our children. In the ruins of Diana's life, we see the shadows and anxieties of the lives we are trying to build together — as husbands, as wives, as sons, as daughters. We shudder over our sorrow for Diana as if we were caught in paroxysms of self-pity. In embarrassment, we deny. In truth, we recognize.

Gerard Manley Hopkins voiced the emotion perfectly: Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed ...
It is the plight we were born for. It is ourselves we mourn for.


http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1650830_1650872_1653713,00.html

[samanthajane13]

Diana's Butler Defends Himself
By Jumana Farouky/London Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008

The man under questioning called the proceeding a character assassination. And, in a sense, he was right — that was the whole point. On the last day of his testimony at the inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed, former butler Paul Burrell was forced to defend his credibility against an army of lawyers intent on, if not destroying it, then at least giving it a good beating. But early on it became clear that this was not going to be the courtroom drama everyone had hoped for. Instead, there was back-pedaling, name-calling and quibbling over semantics — in other words, a whole lot of nothing.

Today it wasn't just Michael Mansfield, lawyer for Dodi's father, Harrods boss Mohamed Al-Fayed, that Burrell had to answer to. Richard Keen — the lawyer for the parents of Henri Paul, the driver who also died in the 1997 crash in Paris — and Ian Croxford, representing the Ritz Hotel, Paris, the starting point for Diana and Dodi's fateful journey, also got in on the act. Questioning him one after the other, they all seemed to be trying to prove the same thing: there are three sides to every story — Paul Burrell's, Paul Burrell's, and the truth. Using his books and articles and transcripts of his earlier testimonies, they spent the morning quoting his own words back to him, pointing out discrepancies between what he had said back then and what he was saying now.

Burrell's biggest about-face had to do with his feelings on Diana's relationship with Dodi. On the first day of his testimony, Burrell had told the court that nobody minded them being a couple, a statement that takes a bite out of Mohamed Al-Fayed's claim that they were assassinated to stop them getting married. But Mansfield opened to a page in Burrell's 2003 book A Royal Duty, and read out a passage that indicated some people did mind — including the former butler himself. In the book, Burrell describes a conversation he once had with Diana's good friend Rosa Monckton about Dodi. "We must do something about this one," Burrell told Monckton. "He is not right for her."

Burrell — exasperated but calm — relented, saying yes, it was true that he had been worried about the Princess entering a relationship so soon after her breakup with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan. Especially since Burrell was convinced she still loved her ex. "I wanted what was best for her," he said. "And I was concerned also for Dr. Hasnat Khan... I was concerned about how he would feel, knowing that he was desperately in love with the Princess and knowing she was desperately in love with him." (Khan has played a starring role in this inquest, but only through the stories of other witnesses; there's no confirmation yet when, or even if, he'll be taking the stand.)

Later, Burrell also told the court that the Queen had her own reservations. In a private meeting with the monarch a few weeks after Diana's death, Burrell said, the Queen admitted to him she thought Diana had been "overexcited" about the romance with Dodi. And when Mansfield asked if Burrell agreed that "the establishment" thought Diana's closeness to the Al-Fayed family was "an alliance made in hell," Burrell said he did. By the end of questioning, it seemed that the only people who didn't mind Diana and Dodi being a couple were Diana and Dodi.

As the game of "he said, he said" continued, Burrell also had to take back a statement he'd made earlier about the "friendship ring" Dodi had given Diana. In A Royal Duty, he wrote that, after a conversation he'd had with Diana about the ring a few days before the crash, he hadn't seen or spoken about it ever again. But, in fact, he had picked up the ring along with Diana's possessions after she died. He had decided not to mention that fact in the book because "I didn't feel I had to at the time." Things got ludicrous when Keen accused Burrell of rewriting history: "Isn't this the sort of thing that got Stalin into trouble?" (Burrell could only shake his head in disbelief, but anyone walking past the court annex would have heard roars of laughter coming from the journalists and inquest-watchers inside.)

By the end, the man who had told the court on his first day that he knew Diana's "every waking thought" was reduced to conceding that "I'm not sure I knew her better than most, but I knew her very well." Still, there's no denying that Burrell knows more stories, secrets and details about Diana than the court could hope to hear in three days. If he knows anything that proves the conspiracy theory surrounding her death, he's not telling. But, then, maybe — just maybe — there's nothing to tell.


http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1704353,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-world-related