-Caveat Lector-
>From Slate.CoM
"" And since by the ironclad laws of yellow journalism the famous have to be
famous for something, Diana became the universal symbol of individual
suffering, the victim of unfeeling institutions everywhere. ""
> Diana, You Ignorant Slut
> By Judith Shulevitz
> Posted Thursday, September 2, 1999, at 2:52 p.m. PT
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>
> Culturebox's first thought on reading Diana: In Search of Herself, Sally Bedell
> Smith's deliriously mean-spirited (though boringly written) catalogue of all the
> ways the late fairy-tale princess turns out to have been troubled, trite, and
> exasperating, is that the British public didn't get its money's worth from the
> girl. During her marriage, according to The New York Times , Diana cost her
> subjects $3,287 a day ($1.2 million a year). Much of that paid for clothing,
> cosmetics, hair styling, physical and speech training, health care, beauty
> treatments, fancy vacations, and a private staff--all legitimate expenses for a
> state official whose job it is to be a professional celebrity. (Why the British
> would pay their royals to do such a job is another question.)
>
> If you go by Smith's account, the rest must have gone to: 1) a surprisingly
> large number of cell-phone calls--up to 20 a day per person--to a surprisingly
> large number of lovers; 2) alternative therapists--astrologists (three),
> spiritualists (including a clairvoyant who put her in touch with her
> grandmother), a tarot card reader, an energy healer, a hypnotherapist, an
> "anger-release" therapist, colonic irrigationists, osteopaths, chiropractors,
> reflexologists, aromatherapists, shiatsu and tai chi chuan experts,
> acupuncturists, and a "mind-body" therapist, the last a former tax accountant
> who gave her massages and diet advice; 3) more conventional forms of treatment
> for sleeplessness, eating disorders, paranoia, and self-mutilation, including an
> episode in which she slashed her arms and smeared the blood all over the walls
> of an airplane; 4) lunch at fancy restaurants to which she secretly invited
> tabloid reporters so she could drop by their tables and leak whatever she wanted
> to appear in their publications the next day.
>
> When you think about it, Item 4 probably is in the job description for an
> official celebrity, which brings us to Culturebox's second reaction to this
> book: that the British got everything they paid for and more. Smith's Diana was
> an ill-educated, impulsive woman who spent her adult life reeling from what
> Smith dubiously diagnoses as a borderline personality disorder. (Culturebox
> knows as little about psychiatry as Smith does, but she knows wild analysis when
> she sees it.) Whatever the cause, Diana was depressed, secretive, paranoid,
> dissembling, self-loathing, desperately needy, and unable to sustain close
> relationships.
>
> Yet she was also the century's most popular royal personage, a fact that now
> seems not at all unrelated. When you know how unstable Diana was, you grasp that
> it was her lack of self-control that fueled the media's obsession. She got our
> attention because she was cute, but she held it because she gave the paparazzi
> so much to work with--all those unchecked expressions of slyness or shyness or
> vulnerability or boredom, all that Sturm und Drang about needing her privacy.
> Tabloid editors put her on the cover day in and day out because eating disorders
> and fainting fits made good copy, not out of sympathy with her charities. And
> since by the ironclad laws of yellow journalism the famous have to be famous for
> something, Diana became the universal symbol of individual suffering, the victim
> of unfeeling institutions everywhere. Others might have found the attention
> devastating, but Diana must have been relieved to find in the public eye the
> unflagging concern, pity, and sense of drama Smith says the princess demanded,
> and failed to get, from Charles. Diana only ever had one loyal suitor--the
> public--and she quickly figured out how to win its favor, cultivating tabloid
> reporters while complaining about their impertinences, figuring out more often
> than not what to wear and say and how to upstage the other royals.
>
> It was strangely easy for her to outfox the palace. No rational being, no one
> concerned about shoring up a marriage or maintaining a position in society,
> could have predicted what move Diana would make next. She leaked stories that
> put her in a questionable light. She collaborated with a tabloid reporter,
> Andrew Morton, on a royals-bashing biography that made divorce Charles' only
> option. She defied everyone she knew, including her own press secretary, to go
> on television for a notorious 1995 interview in which she came off as wildly
> self-pitying and un-self-aware. She flaunted her relationship with Dodi, the
> no-good son of a corrupt and authoritarian father. But Diana never cared much
> about being a princess. She cared about being a celebrity, and her public
> responded to her devotion by canonizing her: Saint Diana of Bathos. You'd have
> to be mad to court such a fate, but luckily, she was.
A<>E<>R
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