One such moment was the BBC’s interview last week with Diana, Princess of Wales. By the time the show had been broadcast by ABC in the United States, some 200 million people in more than 100 countries had watched the princess talk of bulimia, postpartum depression, self-mutilation, the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles, an affair, and, not least, the British monarchy and its future. It was riveting. “She won’t go quietly,” Diana said of herself, “that’s the problem,” and boy, is that ever true. She deliciously skewered her husband’s relationship with his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She admitted that she had had an affair herself, with a cad who later sold his story.: “I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” She openly doubted whether Charles would ever become king, and implied that her son William should succeed Queen Elizabeth–an astonishing suggestion.
Diana’s coup had been carefully planned, and kept secret from even dose official advisers. She had almost certainly been coached in what to say and how to say it. It was not a flawless performance: she protested that she didn’t like “being the center of attention” and that she had “never encouraged the media,” statements worth taking with a bucketful of salt. But at the same time, she displayed an unexpected pride in herself. “I am a very strong person,” Diana told Martin Bashir, her interviewer, and to cope with what life has thrown at her she has doubtless had to be. But mere bravery, foolhardy bravery, is boring. In a hundred little inflections of body language, by contrast, Diana married bravery to vulnerability. It was those unbidden moments-the occasional drop of the head so that a cloud of hair obscured her eyes, the little sniffs, the crooked smile, the unconscious way she touched her lips when talking of bulimia-that made this great TV.
Still, if that was all there was to it, why the fuss? Diana may have succeeded Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as Global Female Icon (Classy Division). But she is just 34; she has led a life of privilege and wealth; though she talks often of her work, her detractors, of whom there are many, would say that she has never held a real job. Why treat her story as anything more than a real-life soap opera?
At one level, because her honesty has Blown British establishment. She spoke of things one is not meant to acknowledge in upper-class Britain, land of the stiff upper lip and the pulled-up socks. One makes the best of a bad job. One doesn’t embarrass the servants. Especially if one has been to the manner born, as Diana undoubtedly was. No sooner had the princess said that “there’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it,” than the friends of Prince Charles (“the enemy,” Diana called them) attacked. “She’s talking in therapy jargon,” blustered Brodrick Munro-Wilson, a polo-playing chum of Charles’s. “She’s been brainwashed by therapists and now she’s trying to brainwash us.” Nicholas (Bunter) Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill, once Charles’s equerry, now a minister of defense, was hardly more gallant. Diana’s charges of royal efforts to shut her up, said Soames on television, were “the advanced stage of paranoia . . . toe-curlingly dreadful.”
But in postmodern Britain, where the scoop of the year was pulled off by an Anglo-Asian journalist, the splutterings of Brodricks and Bunters don’t count for what they used to. YOU FAT FOOL, the tabloid Daily Mirror called the 227-pound Soames, saying that the minister was “a legend in his own lunchtime.” And the British public, 21 million of whom watched the interview, had no trouble choosing between the princess and the establishment: in a MORI poll, 72 percent of them said that Diana had been treated badly by the royal family. When Diana said that she doubted if she would ever be queen, but that “I’d like to be queen of people’s hearts,” she knew what she was doing: she already is.
Within hours, Buckingham Palace had seen which way the wind was blowing. After a week of making dark threats against the BBC for (the nerve of it) granting Diana an interview without seeking permission from the royal household, the palace did a smart 180. “On the Princess of Wales’ public duties,” said a statement, “we will of course be talking again to the princess to see how we can help her define her future role and continue to support her as a member of the royal family”-a phrase that left observers wondering whether the “of course” or the “to continue” was the funnier component. Privately, palace courtiers were seething. “The monarchy,” one told NEWSWEEK, “is going to bend over backwards to give her everything she wants, but it will never be enough. Nothing will ever be enough for the Princess of Wales. Don’t you have an office for her in Outer Mongolia?”
In that strangled cry of despair lay a recognition by the royal family and their supporters that their world is in danger of crumbling. For three decades, the British royal family has made a pact with the Devil, willfully stripping away the mystique which had once secured their position in British life, turning themselves into just another gang of celebs, albeit with horses instead of Gulfstreams. Queen Elizabeth, overruling her advisers, allowed television cameras to watch her coronation in 1953, but the rot really set in with the 1969 film (ironically, also made by the BBC) “The Royal Family.” Unintentionally a kitsch classic, the film ushered in a period when the family were never off the TV screens. Weddings, walkabouts, polo, jubilees–they were everywhere. They thought they were popular, and they were-never more so than at the wedding of Diana and Charles in 1981, when Kiri Te Kanawa sang like an angel, and Diana, an ingenue aged just 20, walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral hauling an endless bridal train.
It was great while it lasted. But celebrities take risks. After a while, it gets boring to just go “Oooh!” and “Aah!” whenever you see them. More fun to knock them down-and easy to do so, if, like the House of Windsor in the ’80s and ’90s, you manage to look like a family so dysfunctional that, if you weren’t British, you’d be racing to the therapist. There was Charles, stiff and angst-ridden, talking to his plants; Princess Anne (divorced); Prince Andrew and his egregious, toe-sucked duchess (separated).
Above all, there was diana. The princess of the royal family’s dreams turned out to be a nightmare. She wouldn’t play by the rules. She was more popular than her husband, hardly a difficult feat, but one that he seems to have found hard to live with. She did not react with required equanimity to the discovery that he loved someone else – Camilla Parker Bowles. But above all, she wouldn’t give in. She encouraged her friends to cooperate with Andrew Morton, whose 1992 book “Diana: Her True Story,” exposed the full horror of the marriage. It was, she said, “very much a poker game, a chess game.” In 1992, after Morton’s book was published, she made absolutely sure that it was Charles, and not herself, who took the first steps toward a legal separation.
And she’s still at it. She’s still, she says, “a great believer that you should always confuse the enemy.” She made plain that she won’t ask for a divorce, leaving Charles in an impossible limbo. She continues to wash dirty linen in public, telling the world of her affair with James Hewitt, a former cavalry officer. She may protest that she has no intention of harming the monarchy itself, but its most fervent defenders know better. Says Harold Brooks-Baker, director of Burke’s Peerage, the blueblood form book, “How it’s possible for the monarchy to continue with an explosive charge like this in its midst, I do not know. She could destroy it.” For their part, Britain’s republicans are positively gloating over the actions of the princess. Stephen Haseler, chairman of the Republican Society, says, “We’re going to have warring camps in the royal family for some time to come, with the public supporting the antiestablishment figure. . . I’m very optimistic.”
Is that how it really ends up? Is time running out for Britain’s monarchy? It’s hard to think so. Republican sentiment is indeed on the rise. But the Windsors can still tug the old heartstrings; on VE Day this year, the Queen Mother, now 95, joined her two daughters, the queen and Princess Margaret, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in a reprise of their performance in 1945. Grown men wept. The Queen Mum is still adored; a day after the BBC announced their scoop, the nation worried itself sick over the old dear’s hip replacement. Above all, Prince William, the elder son of Charles and Diana, is growing up (next story). He’s already 13; in a few years’ time, it won’t matter what Diana says, but what he does. And the indications are that he’s a “good” Windsor, thoughtful and dutiful, a chip off his grandmother’s block. As Diana said, it makes little sense for her to seek to destroy an institution that is his birthright.
So what is her game, precisely? Part of it, undoubtedly, is to help others. In her candid revelations about postpartum depression and bulimia, Diana may do for those crippling, unmentionable illnesses what Betty Ford once did for breast cancer-force them into the daylight. Bulimia is particularly gruesome; those who suffer from it go on eating binges, and then throw up. As her marriage deteriorated, Diana went through this cycle four or five times a day for years. She didn’t get much sympathy: “they” (a pretty thin disguise for Prince Charles and his friends) “decided . . . Diana was unstable.” In fact, she was ill, and at least some of those in the field are thrilled that she has spoken publicly of her illness. Prof. Deborah Sharp of the University of Bristol, one of Europe’s leading authorities on postpartum depression, says Diana was “magnificent. It really does help when these rather secret ailments are discussed by public figures. You can hide bulimia. It just isn’t talked about.”
Beyond her immediate impact on other women, Diana told the BBC that she would like to be an ambassador for Britain, spreading love around. (“It whose behest? On what grounds do you feel you have the right?” asked Bashir, with some reason.) But it’s hard not to think that there is another agenda at work, one which, 15 years ago, few would have expected to be in the head of a girl who was portrayed as a rather dim baby doll. “I made the grave mistake once of saying to a child that I was as thick as a plank,” said Diana, “and I rather regret saying it.” Well, don’t worry: now we know you’re not.
In fact, there was no moment in her interview with Bashir more heartfelt than when she spoke not as a princess, not as a mother, but as a strong, intelligent woman. “It’s the strength,” said Diana, “that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it?” In The Times of London, Helen Kennedy, one of Britain’s leading barristers, spotted something that most others missed. “What we’re dealing with,” said Kennedy, “is a modern woman, a post-feminist woman of the ’90s who feels she’s got rights.”
This wasn’t how Diana was meant to be. In the fairy-tale version of royalty, she was meant to produce children-“an heir and a spare,” as they say in the British upper crust–enjoy muddy walks in the country, ride to hounds, be strong and silent, and remain that crucial two steps behind her husband whenever they appeared in public. She wouldn’t do it. It’s a late-century thing: strong women, with their own agendas, raising uncomfortable questions for old, set-in-their-ways institutions. And the British monarchy will never be the same again.
