Queen of mysteries any way you read her
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
TEN years later, what I recall most vividly is the stench of the flowers on the way up Exhibition Road a few nights after Diana's funeral I was assailed by a sweet, sickly, cloying odour of dankly rotting blooms. My nasal reverie may be the most concise summary of Diana: a festering lily, not as Elton John sang a candle abruptly snuffed out.
In her Panorama interview she prophetically threatened that she would not go quietly. A decade after her death, she is still not silent. Or rather her proponents and detractors continue to jabber and exchange insults on her behalf. Recent books about the self-appointed queen of hearts suggest that the wounded, compassionate Diana was a mentally unstable slag, a spendthrift wag and a bigot whose politics were far to the right of Mrs Thatcher.
Caught in the argument, Diana no longer controls her own image, as she did with such cunning when she was alive. In the photographs Mario Testino took a few months before her death, now on exhibition at Kensington Palace, she expertly projects the contradictory persona that beguiled us, shy but sly, vulnerable but implacably glamorous. At the time she was shedding official encumbrances by auctioning off dresses worn on stuffy ceremonial occasions telling, as royalty for Diana was about costume, not constitutional duty.
In Testino's photographs she dispenses with gloves, bares her feet and, almost scandalously relaxed, lolls on a sofa. The woman can be seen emerging from the constraints of a role that cramped her. No longer relying on rank and its haughty distance, she had begun to perform for our amusement, like every other celebrity.
Diana remains mysterious, as is the prerogative of mythic beings. Her brother began the myth-making process at her funeral, when he said that the goddess after whom she was named had turned in her case from huntress to hunted. It was a smart point, but also a mendacious one: Diana teasingly beckoned to the paparazzi who pursued her and knew that her power depended on them.
Myth, according to Jean Cocteau, is a lie that becomes the truth, whereas history is truth that becomes a lie. During the past decade, Diana has undergone both transformations, so it's not surprising to find her as the pretext for two new novels, 12:23 by Eoin McNamee and The Accident Man by Tom Cain, both set on the day of her death and about a sinister global conspiracy.
In a few of Testino's photographs, Diana seems to be dematerialising, vaporising into a haze: a blonde on a white sofa. In Stephen Frears's film The Queen there are only snatches of TV news film while the other characters obsessively discuss her. In the recent Channel 4 documentary The Witnesses in the Tunnel, she disappeared behind a grey blob, which obscured the body the doctors were trying to resuscitate. Her minders in McNamee's 12:23 reduce her to a target, tersely and dismissively referred to as "Spencer". On her final day she is tracked through Paris by a hitman hired by arms dealers who resent her campaign against landmines.
Cain's thriller, The Accident Man, relies on the same paranoid hypothesis of assassination: accidents are philosophically intolerable because they make our world a playground of chance, whereas conspiracies pleasingly restore intention and localise blame.
Ultimately McNamee's dying goddess floats off into the sky. Perhaps this is where she always belonged: Piers Morgan, who got to know her when he edited the Daily Mirror, marvelled at her hysterical self-obsession and decided that she lived on "Planet Diana". Celebrities are almost extraterrestrial creatures, and as doctors prod and manipulate Diana's body in the crashed Mercedes, McNamee says that she resembles "an unknowable being, an entity with a domed forehead" like the aliens who supposedly landed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
The images for which she knowingly posed objectified her. Do we have any inkling about her subjective life? McNamee dares to write a brief monologue for his heroine as she mopes in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz. But the novelist proves unable to penetrate her head, which may indeed have been a vacant place; he can only describe her studying her image as she stands "in front of the gilt-framed mirror in the bedroom".
Burrell valiantly attempts to supply Diana with some mental furniture in his latest cooing, cloying memoir The Way We Were. As everyone knows, Diana flunked all her exams aged 16 and cheerily boasted of being "thick as a plank". Burrell, however, insists: "She was a deep thinker." It's a pity that, when giving details, he equates her capacity for "introspective analysis" with her habit of "spending hours on the telephone".
With camp followers like Burrell, Diana needs no enemies: naively besotted, he seems unaware that most of his stories show her in a less than flattering light. Not content to feel the pain of others, she appropriated their tragedies. When the journalist Dominic Lawson's wife gave birth to a stillborn child, Diana insisted on burying the baby in her walled garden at Kensington Palace. To me it sounds like a monstrous impertinence, since it means that the site can now never be visited by the parents. After the ceremony, Diana disclosed her devious private agenda. The illicit interment was her way of ensuring she would go on haunting the Windsors and fascinating posterity: "People will find this baby one day and say it was mine."
The most inadvertently damaging of Burrell's stories is about Diana's desire to move to America. Prosecuting the scheme, she took up with the New York financier Teddy Forstmann, "a politically well- connected billionaire" who offered her "a lifestyle with private jets". Like a Lady Macbeth of Sloane Square, she considered Forstmann "capable of running for office". She made premature plans to redecorate the White House living quarters and dreamed of presiding as "the new Jackie O". Diana, as this bizarre project suggests, could be a killer. Eventually she iced the candidate, having decided that he was too old for her.
Television advertisements for Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles have described her as one of Diana's confidantes; actually their meetings were few and rather formal. Nevertheless, as an unrivalled analyst of society's hissy subtexts and the ruthless politics of fame, Brown gets closer to understanding her than any other biographer. The book, packaged in flaming and fabulous pink, beadily scrutinises its subject from the other side of the Atlantic. Brown, who went to New York to edit Vanity Fair in 1984 and has been there ever since, treats royalty with an expatriate's liberated exasperation. She chuckles over the pedantic protocols of Buckingham Palace, where "tea trays for members of the royal family have their own personal map", showing how the milk jugs and sugar tongs and jam pots must be placed; she moans when describing the fusty antiquity of Balmoral, where Diana spent her time vomiting while Cherie Blair, allergic to the fur and feathers of the stuffed hunting trophies on the walls, pitifully sniffled.
From all this Diana, like Brown, is a refugee. Brown applauds her plan to move to America and says she could "only ever feel at home in the culture that invented fame the size of hers".
Some besotted admirers regarded Diana as a divinity. For Brown she was a diva, which is the next best thing: the personification of imperious whim and "superstar entitlement", propped on spiky stilettos.
At the end of her book, Brown quotes a conversation with Tony Blair, who praises Diana for showing us "a new way to be British". Blair, elected a few months before Diana's death, tried to modernise the country and failed. In Brown's estimation, Diana did a better, swifter job of it. After her separation from Charles, she capriciously revolutionised her office, modelling it on a Madison Avenue ad agency. Here she "set about administering her celebrity like a global brand, promoting and conserving the Diana franchise". Brown shrewdly observes that Diana based her power on a "three-way marriage of commerce, society and philanthropy", a corporate phenomenon that in the London of the 1990s was "new and directly Diana-related". This is the most acute and original section of her book: as a sleek expert on media relations and the media era, Brown can only gawp at the way Diana abandoned royal neutrality and approached public appearances as "a CEO whose distinctive marketing concept is the personal touch".
Diana was an eager convert to the American creed that expects life to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy, so it's sadly apt that Brown, describing James Hewitt's seamy sale of erotic confidences, should allude to Fitzgerald's elegy for the disillusioned hero of The Great Gatsby: "Foul dust floated in the wake of all Diana's romantic dreams." Because Brown herself is busily pursuing happiness, slimness and celebrity on the other side of the Atlantic, it doesn't occur to her to wonder whether the American dream might be a meretricious illusion. Observer
In her Panorama interview she prophetically threatened that she would not go quietly. A decade after her death, she is still not silent. Or rather her proponents and detractors continue to jabber and exchange insults on her behalf. Recent books about the self-appointed queen of hearts suggest that the wounded, compassionate Diana was a mentally unstable slag, a spendthrift wag and a bigot whose politics were far to the right of Mrs Thatcher.
Caught in the argument, Diana no longer controls her own image, as she did with such cunning when she was alive. In the photographs Mario Testino took a few months before her death, now on exhibition at Kensington Palace, she expertly projects the contradictory persona that beguiled us, shy but sly, vulnerable but implacably glamorous. At the time she was shedding official encumbrances by auctioning off dresses worn on stuffy ceremonial occasions telling, as royalty for Diana was about costume, not constitutional duty.
In Testino's photographs she dispenses with gloves, bares her feet and, almost scandalously relaxed, lolls on a sofa. The woman can be seen emerging from the constraints of a role that cramped her. No longer relying on rank and its haughty distance, she had begun to perform for our amusement, like every other celebrity.
Diana remains mysterious, as is the prerogative of mythic beings. Her brother began the myth-making process at her funeral, when he said that the goddess after whom she was named had turned in her case from huntress to hunted. It was a smart point, but also a mendacious one: Diana teasingly beckoned to the paparazzi who pursued her and knew that her power depended on them.
Myth, according to Jean Cocteau, is a lie that becomes the truth, whereas history is truth that becomes a lie. During the past decade, Diana has undergone both transformations, so it's not surprising to find her as the pretext for two new novels, 12:23 by Eoin McNamee and The Accident Man by Tom Cain, both set on the day of her death and about a sinister global conspiracy.
In a few of Testino's photographs, Diana seems to be dematerialising, vaporising into a haze: a blonde on a white sofa. In Stephen Frears's film The Queen there are only snatches of TV news film while the other characters obsessively discuss her. In the recent Channel 4 documentary The Witnesses in the Tunnel, she disappeared behind a grey blob, which obscured the body the doctors were trying to resuscitate. Her minders in McNamee's 12:23 reduce her to a target, tersely and dismissively referred to as "Spencer". On her final day she is tracked through Paris by a hitman hired by arms dealers who resent her campaign against landmines.
Cain's thriller, The Accident Man, relies on the same paranoid hypothesis of assassination: accidents are philosophically intolerable because they make our world a playground of chance, whereas conspiracies pleasingly restore intention and localise blame.
Ultimately McNamee's dying goddess floats off into the sky. Perhaps this is where she always belonged: Piers Morgan, who got to know her when he edited the Daily Mirror, marvelled at her hysterical self-obsession and decided that she lived on "Planet Diana". Celebrities are almost extraterrestrial creatures, and as doctors prod and manipulate Diana's body in the crashed Mercedes, McNamee says that she resembles "an unknowable being, an entity with a domed forehead" like the aliens who supposedly landed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
The images for which she knowingly posed objectified her. Do we have any inkling about her subjective life? McNamee dares to write a brief monologue for his heroine as she mopes in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz. But the novelist proves unable to penetrate her head, which may indeed have been a vacant place; he can only describe her studying her image as she stands "in front of the gilt-framed mirror in the bedroom".
Burrell valiantly attempts to supply Diana with some mental furniture in his latest cooing, cloying memoir The Way We Were. As everyone knows, Diana flunked all her exams aged 16 and cheerily boasted of being "thick as a plank". Burrell, however, insists: "She was a deep thinker." It's a pity that, when giving details, he equates her capacity for "introspective analysis" with her habit of "spending hours on the telephone".
With camp followers like Burrell, Diana needs no enemies: naively besotted, he seems unaware that most of his stories show her in a less than flattering light. Not content to feel the pain of others, she appropriated their tragedies. When the journalist Dominic Lawson's wife gave birth to a stillborn child, Diana insisted on burying the baby in her walled garden at Kensington Palace. To me it sounds like a monstrous impertinence, since it means that the site can now never be visited by the parents. After the ceremony, Diana disclosed her devious private agenda. The illicit interment was her way of ensuring she would go on haunting the Windsors and fascinating posterity: "People will find this baby one day and say it was mine."
The most inadvertently damaging of Burrell's stories is about Diana's desire to move to America. Prosecuting the scheme, she took up with the New York financier Teddy Forstmann, "a politically well- connected billionaire" who offered her "a lifestyle with private jets". Like a Lady Macbeth of Sloane Square, she considered Forstmann "capable of running for office". She made premature plans to redecorate the White House living quarters and dreamed of presiding as "the new Jackie O". Diana, as this bizarre project suggests, could be a killer. Eventually she iced the candidate, having decided that he was too old for her.
Television advertisements for Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles have described her as one of Diana's confidantes; actually their meetings were few and rather formal. Nevertheless, as an unrivalled analyst of society's hissy subtexts and the ruthless politics of fame, Brown gets closer to understanding her than any other biographer. The book, packaged in flaming and fabulous pink, beadily scrutinises its subject from the other side of the Atlantic. Brown, who went to New York to edit Vanity Fair in 1984 and has been there ever since, treats royalty with an expatriate's liberated exasperation. She chuckles over the pedantic protocols of Buckingham Palace, where "tea trays for members of the royal family have their own personal map", showing how the milk jugs and sugar tongs and jam pots must be placed; she moans when describing the fusty antiquity of Balmoral, where Diana spent her time vomiting while Cherie Blair, allergic to the fur and feathers of the stuffed hunting trophies on the walls, pitifully sniffled.
From all this Diana, like Brown, is a refugee. Brown applauds her plan to move to America and says she could "only ever feel at home in the culture that invented fame the size of hers".
Some besotted admirers regarded Diana as a divinity. For Brown she was a diva, which is the next best thing: the personification of imperious whim and "superstar entitlement", propped on spiky stilettos.
At the end of her book, Brown quotes a conversation with Tony Blair, who praises Diana for showing us "a new way to be British". Blair, elected a few months before Diana's death, tried to modernise the country and failed. In Brown's estimation, Diana did a better, swifter job of it. After her separation from Charles, she capriciously revolutionised her office, modelling it on a Madison Avenue ad agency. Here she "set about administering her celebrity like a global brand, promoting and conserving the Diana franchise". Brown shrewdly observes that Diana based her power on a "three-way marriage of commerce, society and philanthropy", a corporate phenomenon that in the London of the 1990s was "new and directly Diana-related". This is the most acute and original section of her book: as a sleek expert on media relations and the media era, Brown can only gawp at the way Diana abandoned royal neutrality and approached public appearances as "a CEO whose distinctive marketing concept is the personal touch".
Diana was an eager convert to the American creed that expects life to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy, so it's sadly apt that Brown, describing James Hewitt's seamy sale of erotic confidences, should allude to Fitzgerald's elegy for the disillusioned hero of The Great Gatsby: "Foul dust floated in the wake of all Diana's romantic dreams." Because Brown herself is busily pursuing happiness, slimness and celebrity on the other side of the Atlantic, it doesn't occur to her to wonder whether the American dream might be a meretricious illusion. Observer
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