Princess Diana and Jackie Kennedy had much in common. Their parents went through bitter divorces, they each had what seemed to many to be marriages that could be defined as ‘arranged’ to men who were 12 years older, they became much-scrutinised public figures when they wed, and both were popular with women as well as men. And while the family (known internally as the ‘firm’) into which Diana married was the ancient British royal family, its latest dynasty was the Windsor dynasty, a dynasty not actually that much older than the Kennedy one.
In 1985, Diana and Prince Charles travelled to Washington to open a show celebrating centuries of British upper-class art patronage. The American socialite Bunny Melon invited the royal couple to her Virginia estate to meet some young blood: perhaps not absolutely blue blood, but certainly well-connected blood. John F Kennedy Jr and Caroline Kennedy were there (Caroline and Diana may have had a macabre connection of their own; it is possible that the same IRA bombers who in 1975 narrowly missed murdering Sir Hugh and Lady Antonia Fraser – and Caroline, who was staying with them – may have also planned to kill Charles and Diana in 1983).
Jackie left the children to mingle for a while before popping downstairs to meet Diana. It was to be the only time these two iconic figures ever met and while it would be nice to know what they chatted about, those who were there are not telling (blue blood means silent tongues).
We do know, however, that Diana admired Jackie, and Jackie, to begin with, admired Diana, though she later described Diana as having ‘disemboweled herself in public’. The Kennedy biographer Jay Mulvaney points out that whereas Jackie adopted a British stiff-upper-lip approach to the fact that her husband reeked of other women, Diana went in for an all-American public quiver. (Arguably, however, Diana’s love life never caused a national shock comparable to that delivered to Ireland by Jackie when she married Onassis in 1968, and grown women wept in the Irish streets at this desecration of the Kennedy myth).
What Happened Next
Diana wept when Jackie died in 1994, and Mulvaney quotes Diana as describing the older women in a letter of condolence to Caroline and John as a ‘role model’ for bringing up children in public (John died in a plane crash in 1999). Both Diana and Jackie were also fashion leaders, but both also used fashion as protective armour. Jackie’s words to a designer: ‘Protect me – I am so mercilessly exposed and I don’t know how to cope with it’, applied to them both.