THE PEOPLE’S PRINCESS
the fairy-tale quality of the wedding and reinforced fantasies about the beautiful dewy-eyed Princess and her Prince Charming.’
But in private, Diana felt that she was living a nightmare. In another of her taped interviews for Andrew Morton (a former tabloid journalist to whom she gave her clandestine co-operation), she said that between her engagement and her wedding day: ‘I had shrunk into nothing.’ The Princess was referring to her dramatic weight loss, but it also appeared that her public’s adulation left her feeling empty inside, rather than validated – although some of those who knew her have also speculated that the more attention was bestowed upon her, the more she craved it, to fill up an inner void. Diana’s voice, in her tapes for Morton, sounds strangely flat (an unsettling effect that is heightened by her use of the third person), and almost disassociated from the intensely personal experiences that she was describing, including disturbing incidents of self-harming and suicide attempts. ‘The public side was very different from the private side,’ she said on one of these tapes. ‘They wanted a fairy princess to come and touch them and everything will turn into gold and all their worries will be forgotten. Little did they realise that the individual was crucifying herself inside, because she didn’t think she was good enough. “Why me, why all this publicity?”’
In these words, perhaps, lies her tragedy, and the ambivalence and duality that make Diana so unknowable. Indeed, she seems to me less like a romantic heroine than a character from a Gothic novel by Daphne du Maurier, such as the unreliable narrators or other protagonists in Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. There are any number of different ways that one might interpret her motives; and we can read her story as that of an innocent victim, just as easily as someone driven to dangerous acts by more sinister forces. At times, the Princess hated the intrusion of the press and loathed the paparazzi, and yet she was also prepared to collude with them, to cast herself in the best possible light or to score points against her husband (a man she had loved and lost).
As the daughter of divorced parents – her mother had left her father, Viscount Althorp (later the 8th Earl Spencer), when Diana was eight years old – she had lived through the uncertainty and instability of what she later described as ‘a very unhappy childhood’. It may or may not be a coincidence that during these tense early years, whenever her father photographed the young Diana, she always appeared to be a natural in front of the camera – able to flash a smile or strike a pose, however strained she was feeling. Yet when she recalled her earliest memories of being on show – and the clothes required for the occasion – it was a distressing memory, exposing the rift between her parents. ‘I remember the most agonising decision I ever had to make,’ she told Morton. ‘I was a bridesmaid to my first cousin, and to go to the rehearsal I had to be smart and wear a dress and my mother gave me a green dress and my father a white
dress and they were both so smart, the dresses, and I still can’t remember to this day which one I got in, but I remember being totally traumatised by it…’
Later, she was better able to express how she felt via her choice of outfits – most memorably, in June 1994, when she wore what would be dubbed her ‘revenge dress’ on the same evening that Prince Charles’ interview with Jonathan Dimbleby was broadcast, in which he admitted to his love affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. (The Princess teamed a chic little black dress with Manolo Blahnik high heels, polished red nails, glossy blonde hair and a sparkling smile.)
Three years later, Diana made the decision to auction a substantial quantity of her wardrobe (79 cocktail and evening dresses) in aid of her chosen charities; and as The New York Times commented after the successful event at Christie’s in Manhattan – which raised $3.25 million – ‘the clothes trace her metamorphosis from frilly princess though the “Dynasty Di” years to the woman on her own in the sleek column dresses of the 1990s.’ The highest bid – of $222,500 – was for the midnight-blue velvet gown that the Princess of Wales wore when she danced at the White House with John Travolta in 1985; and this will be among a collection of her most iconic garments displayed at a forthcoming exhibition at Kensington Palace, entitled ‘Diana: Her Fashion Story’.
The setting of the exhibition gives an added poignancy – the Princess lived in an apartment at Kensington Palace from the time of her wedding until her death, and her oldest son, Prince William, now has a family home there. Early in the morning after Diana’s death, flowers and handwritten notes began to appear at the gates of Kensington Palace, and in the next few days, more than a million bouquets were left. I was among the legions that went there, on an evening when thousands of mourners had gathered outside, many of them lighting candles in memory of Diana. A long queue of people stood in line, quietly waiting to sign a book of condolences for the Princess; some of them were weeping for a woman they had never met, yet whose loss they felt deeply.
It was the strangest of times – febrile, uneasy, with heightened emotions overriding traditional British reserve. Perhaps because my own sister’s death was drawing closer, any sadness I felt about Diana was more to do with the awareness that her two sons had lost their mother far too young, just as my sister’s children would soon do. But I also felt a troubling sense of distance from the mourners around me, and wondered what it was that Diana represented, and why she was already being transformed from a celebrity into a saint.
There are those for whom Diana continues to be the quintessence of modern stardom: dazzling in life, remote in death, part of the mysterious pattern of a dark firmament in which we seek to discover meaning. But in the end, I prefer the tribute that has been chosen by the gardeners at Kensington Palace, who are creating a white garden in Diana’s memory this spring, planted with English roses, scented narcissi and a carpet of forget-me-nots… ‘Diana: Her Fashion Story’ is at Kensington Palace from 24 February (www.hrp.org.uk/kensington-palace). With thanks to Historic Royal Palaces.
Catherine Walker, 1994
When Diana arrived at Versailles for a 1994 Unesco charity event, resplendent in this black velvet gown with a beaded halter-neck, Pierre Cardin remarked: ‘This is the home of the Sun King of France; now we have the Sun
Princess of Versailles.’