The Star as Icon

AMONG STAR icons, Diana’s mug was pasted in the TV news on a weekly if not daily basis in a way no other mugs were. The public saw its snippets of her cradling AIDS orphans, lounging in bikinis behind stone walls, shielding her face, every nerve ending strained in fury against the onslaught of the glitterati. The more she was hounded, the more obvious her contempt, the more the voracious British public wanted more. Their sympathy ever profound, they also felt themselves entitled to ongoing royal action: this was a prerogative of their sense of public ownership of the monarchy, of their sense that it is theirs (even if they can’t join it). To paraphrase Groucho Marx, the only club I own is the one I can’t enter because they won’t have me: This is how I own it. The media taught the British public that with the cult around Queen Victoria and the public’s demand for her return from seclusion after her beloved Albert’s death. They wanted her to return from Scotland to Buckingham Palace, demanded it. Now the demand is for visibility, for media presence and then more media presence.

Apart from this daily fare of TV bite (Diana in Mozambique, Diana with Mother Teresa, Diana with paramour) Diana appeared only on marked, special occasions, which took on “iconic” value. Had she become a TV regular, her aura might have been eclipsed, with her turning into mere celebrity. However, the few occasions in which she figured for an extended period (as, for example, a guest on a talk show) were occasions that “coronated” her image. The word coronation is not fortuitous, for her wedding (July 29, 1981, St. Paul’s Cathedral) was ranked (by her fans) as among the most memorable events in TV history. Inside TV, “the magazine for women who love television,” put the wedding on its Top Ten Greatest TV Weddings of All Time list, which is surely a list composed in language that betters any talk show subtitle. More than seven hundred and fifty million viewers watched her arrive (a mere twenty years old then) in a glass coach, wearing an ivory-silk gown, with a twenty-five-foot train and ten thousand pearls. Charles wore his naval commander’s uniform. It was something right out of Cinderella. America would have called it Camelot, British style, except that Camelot was British until the media draped the Kennedy clan in that mantle.

In this she followed the Queen’s coronation, also avidly watched on television by nation and world. In the manner of such television specials the queen’s aura was confirmed through her TV-broadcasted wedding, giving all viewers the sense of watching a secret, special event from which they would otherwise have been excluded. This is because the event was singular, a media event, not the usual fare of TV. And it was because everyone knew the queen was on TV but not of it, that TV was being graced to carry her marriage live. It provided the excitement of viewer intimacy and confirmation of her aura through the sacred ritual of the marriage. This is the critical point: Diana, like her mother-in-law, soon to be ex-mother-in-law, appeared in extended programs only fortuitously on the home box, even if it haunted and hunted her ceaselessly (although not as much as the tabloids, which were worse). Her appearances could remain special, thus preserving her aura while adding viewer intimacy by a public consumed with knowing all about her, while also with keeping her apart. This formula, always potentially unstable, would probably have collapsed had she lived, married Dodi Fayed, inherited his ersatz kingdom, become yet another (as it were) of Grace Kelly’s Monaco brats or, worse, a production hostess in and out of television land (if that is the correct scenario).

The amazing thing is that Diana remained above TV even though she was of it in a way her mother-in-law was not, for she truly became soap opera queen (for a day) when she went on the talk show and told all. This transpired during her separation and divorce from Charles. At that point she had already become fair game, the object of endless speculation about her eating disorders, self-inflicted pain, and depressions. She was already stalked on-screen. In response she (and her publicists) took the decision to take charge of the box. She appeared only once in a talk show, which is critical, I think, to her retention of the aura of the screen (had she become a weekly sob story it would have gradually “degenerated,” I suppose). Appearing once retained the singularity of the TV appearance, its halo of media event, although it was pure soap, pure confessional, with her being questioned about divorce, children, her need to hurt herself by a respectful and subdued interviewer and she answering in a mood of anger and quiet desperation. It was a case of woman tells all, and there is no one better suited to describe that singular appearance than Andrew Morton, her biographer. It happened during the divorce, after the appearance of the first edition of Andrew Morton’s book, which Charles greeted as “the longest petition for divorce ever filed.” And the TV appearance, wildly successful, led to a rapid conclusion of the proceedings. After that she was determined to strike out on her own, and the cameras followed: to Mozambique, Calcutta, etc. When they were not hounding her, stealing photos of her bathing in a bikini without the top, rebroadcasting the past affair with Captain James Hewitt (by then he was already author of an award-winning schlock volume on their affair), they were busy seeking out her private life, her nudity, tears, acts of charity and beneficence, her every moment with her children. She had understood herself to be the Marilyn Monroe of the next generation.

She had also understood herself to be an actor in a pantomime drama not of her making, even exchanging pleasantries about it with Jeremy Irons, who, when he said he was taking a year off from acting, got this response from her: So am I. And now the actress of pomp and circumstance became a talk show heroine. In the words of Andrew Morton:

While every other member of the royal family, most notoriously her husband, had used television to promote their causes and latterly to talk about their private lives, Diana knew that she would never be allowed that freedom by the Palace. She had enjoyed countless approaches from the world’s most prominent broadcasters, including Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey, while in 1994 she was in detailed secret discussions about an ITV documentary of her life. In the end she reluctantly decided against co-operation, not only because Prince Charles was then working with Jonathan Dimbleby for his own programme, but also because of antagonism from couriers.

A year on, the increasingly beleaguered Princess decided to take matters into her own hands, secretly agreeing to be interviewed by Martin Bashir, a journalist attached to BBC flagship current-affairs programme, Panorama…. He soon realized that secrecy was essential if the project was to be a success…. Only by elaborate subterfuge would Bashir and his crew be able to record Diana’s words. They used special cameras so as not to attract attention when they arrived at Kensington Palace on a quiet Sunday in early November, 1995. As a precaution Diana had dismissed her staff for the day, knowing that she could not trust a soul….

This very British television coup … was a sensation…. The Princess, wearing striking black eye make-up, discussed her life, her children, her husband and her hopes for the future, with remarkable frankness…. She talked openly about her eating disorders, her depression, her cries for help, the enemy inside the Palace, and her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles. In a phrase that pithily captured the problems of her relationship with Prince Charles she said: “There were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded.” At the same time she admitted her own infidelity with … Hewitt, who had previously told the story of their affair in a book. “Yes I adored him, yes I was in love with him,” she said, adding that she had felt “absolutely devastated” by his betrayal when news of the book he had co-authored reached her ears. While casting doubts on her husband’s fitness to rule … she spoke of her own ambitions not just for herself but for her children and the monarchy. “I would like to be a Queen in people’s hearts …” The programme attracted the largest audience for any television documentary in broadcasting history.¹

A victory for herself, and a coup for television, grabbing a story against the bulwark of monarchy in a subterfuge worthy of Mata Hari, the whole thing natural, appearing in what seemed live time, and yet stolen (taped) in secret from royal houses. For once she was hunted but in control of the hunt, even doing the hunting herself in the language of confessional, using her haunted state to her own advantage. There she is, telling all, held close before her public like a rare butterfly, ordinary in her extraordinariness, victim in her privilege, a royal in a gilded cage, wanting out, wanting freedom, so that for the first time (since Edward VII abdicated for love, anyway) the entire public could identify with royalty as conflict, drama, humanity, the whole public could see the far away up close as a mirror of their lives, as opening intimacy out to them. Her appearance was critical in turning the drama of the monarchy into a TV serial, since it reflected back on the whole story. Her public could take pride in her, sympathize. This was a blessing. And so, in this unique case, the persona was not demeaned by the talk show but instead the film star quality became grafted onto the forms of TV intimacy and serial drama. Film aura, royal halo, and TV talk show did what they so rarely do: they alchemized around her.

November 1995 is when this television program happened. This was less than three years before her death. She would have in those three years time to divorce, vacation with Hewitt before a jungle of cameras, fall in love with Dodi Al-Fayed, stay with him at the Ritz, consider forming a production company with him, then get it to the aorta in the speeding car, hound-toothed journalists madly photographing her as she lay dying in the auto wreck, never calling for emergency, never stopping the click click click to help. Dodi Fayed had told his father he would propose to her that night at dinner, probably he did. What her life would be now, with this absolute nonroyal from the family that owns the portion of England not owned by the Dukes of Bedford and Marlborough is unknown. Would she have ended up making a film about the very paparazzi who instead “forced” her vehicle to speed out of control? Would she have become an ordinary TV presence, lost her aura? Would she have continued her charitable work? It is a story without an ending, like The Sopranos. What happened, happened, that is all, black screen, end of program, live drama of funeral. So the cult remains, transposed to the key of memory, dormant, gradually fading away, the star growing dimmer, since it no longer shines in front of the television camera or in public or in the tabloids, although the ten-year anniversary gave it momentary brilliance, and she retains millions of sad admirers.

One additional reason all mention of Dodi Fayed was “barred” from the Diana funeral was to keep form by refusing to dignify the miscegenation between royal and commoner, especially one from the Middle East with a darker skin. The condition of gifting this dead dame a royal funeral was that she was meant to remain royal in sensu stricto. Even Charles, Earl of Spencer, deleted reference to Fayed from the final paragraph of his penultimate draft. “And we thank Dodi Al Fayed for making her last weeks ones of happiness,” is how the earl’s text read before he expunged it.

What astonished and appalled the Queen (Elizabeth II) was that Diana was not simply out there in the media but a star, a figure of charisma in a system the Queen knew in her bones was more powerful than her own, monarchical “system.” Diana was traitor to the throne not only by divorcing Charles, but by doing it as the reigning Queen of the Media, a version of Queen of the Night with its own lineage, a lineage not limned by history but by star quality, melodrama, and media/public interest. Diana’s catapulting into this counterrealm, this enemy territory of royalty, this Tabloid Kingdom, happened not because Diana willed it. She was until the divorce disinclined and considered the media her enemy until the end. Rather, it crowned her in spite of herself. To be crowned by this system one does not have to like it: it thrives on the antagonism of its “royals,” since this generates melodrama. When Diana, at the moment of divorce, actually chose to let the media into her palace and then appear on TV to tell all, this was her symbolic crowning as media queen, monarch in a realm of royalty that was proven decisively stronger than the world of the monarchy. This Elizabeth understood, which was why she then agreed to appear, one week after the death of Diana, on TV to speak “condolence and sadness.” It was a way of putting up the white flag before a system stronger than her own. She did it to keep the monarchy intact.