Remembering Diana, 10 years after: 'If Diana was celebrity heroin, Victoria Beckham is methadone and Paris Hilton is bad coffee.' Quentin Fottrellindulges himself
'Diana, Princess of Wales, 36, Dies in a Crash in Paris."
It's a pretty simple headline about a pretty - and some would say - simple girl. It was how the late edition of the New York Times reported the death of the most famous woman in the world.
If she wasn't the most famous woman by the time her heart stopped beating on the operating table of that hospital in Paris on August 31st, 1997, she was now.
Nobody would steal that crown. Not Camilla. Not Madonna. Not Mother Teresa, though the old dear gave her a good run for her money. Not even Jackie Kennedy, who was a brunette, grew old and married her own Dodi Fayed, Aristotle Onassis. Certainly not Jackie's daughter-in-law, who was blonde. What was her name again? Oh, yes. Carolyn Bessette, America's also-ran princess.
There was another, spookier headline in an earlier edition of the same paper, still on a news-stand on 42nd Street the morning after the night before: "Dodi Dead, Di Injured". It was dripping with treacle-like poignancy and a thousand more unanswerable what-ifs. (It would also have made a great souvenir.)
Meanwhile, TVs across the world beamed the wreckage of shattered glass and twisted steel, the remnants of Diana's Mercedes-Benz in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris. Even the wreckage, a bit player in this epic royal tragedy, refused to go quietly. It flickered petulantly under the glare of the paparazzi flashbulbs like a giant, mortally wounded firefly stubbornly refusing to die.
We may have overdosed on TV specials on E4 and the Biography Channel, and magazine pull-outs, but it's these mundane newspaper headlines that retain their potency today. Diana had conquered the American media and, as her middle-class celebuspawn Victoria Beckham will tell you, America is the world.
While poring over the newsstands in New York the day after she died, a passer-by shouted, "Boo-hoo!"
How annoying and insensitive, but how embarrassing too. This was an opportunity for all of us, who were left behind, to finally step into the limelight ourselves and play out Diana's last scene in a collective act of public mourning. But this jerk wasn't going to play along.
Landing at Heathrow Airport from New York, it was a different story: a nation in the grip of Dianamania. (There were a few exceptions: Brian Sewell, art critic of The Evening Standard, had penned a spiteful piece, comparing Diana to a brood mare, which was spiked and only published a year after her death. Sewell was told to take a holiday.)
Emerging from the Tube to see the sea of flowers at Kensington Palace, and say thanks for the memories, the scene was crazy. Crowds poured on to the street, as police kept order. Groups of teenage girls sat in cafes biting their pens as they struggled over what to say in their sympathy cards, cards that would never be read. Two scowling bikers with shaved heads walked towards the palace.
They looked like trouble. But each carried a dainty bunch of flowers.
It was the silence that people remember most from that fateful week of the long faces. The silence on the buses and on the Tube as shell-shocked commuters were drip-fed stories about the Royal family's lock-down in Balmoral, the public's disbelief that the flag at Buckingham Palace was not flying at half-mast, questions about Al Fayed's driver Henri Paul and, of course, the great paparazzi witch hunt of 1997.
At Kensington Palace as dusk fell, there was deathly silence as people milled about, except for the sound of children. We were mourning a woman who had helped us dream of a life beyond desk jobs and kitchen sinks. Diana had, by proxy, fulfilled our fantasies.
And now we felt sorry for ourselves: she had died on us and taken those fantasies with her. Like Grace Kelly - a society girl, movie star, but only a minor royal - Diana was that rare triad of shy society girl, glamorous celebrity and princess.
She was a sort of silent movie star too, until her Panorama interview.
Like a three-in-one detergent, she didn't only wash the drabness out of your life, she made it smell of English roses and sparkle too.
One billion people watched her marry Prince Charles on July 29th, 1981. The dinner ladies in Cherry Orchard Hospital stopped rattling their trolleys to watch the young girl wave from her carriage.
"Aw!" one dinner lady said. We Irish took ownership of her too.
Celebrities want our money. Princesses, especially renegade princesses like Diana, want our love. Got a lay-about son or brute of a husband? Try Diana to remove those grubby stains from your life.
It's true what her brother said: she didn't need any royal titles. As long as there were cameras, she could radiate her particular brand of magic from afar.
As a result, we watched Diana's life unfold as if on our own home videos. The nanny in the transparent skirt looking coyly through her fringe, the birth of her boys, the kiss-that-never-was when she turned her face away from Charles after a polo match, the leaks about her crumbling marriage, the tell-all books and American-style TV confessionals, the "rampant bulimia", as she told Martin Bashir in 1995, Charles's long-term affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana's with James Hewitt (et al), her evil stepmother "Acid" Raine, her haughty, distant mother Frances Shand Kydd, the gowns, her ability to single-handedly revive John Travolta's flagging career by dancing with him at the White House and, of course, the endless photo opportunities with the sick and indigent.
And yet, we were told, she wanted her children to grow up normal. Swoon! Just like us.
If you look at pictures of Diana from the mid-1980s, with her skinny frame, off-the-shoulder gowns and diamond tiara resting on her bouffant, she looks like one of those Franklin Mint dolls mass-produced after her death. So delicate, you could pick her up and play with her.
Our collective grief was not unlike losing a beloved doll. It was quite enjoyable really. It wasn't the ugly, personal grief when an actual loved one dies and you feel physical pain, the kind that makes you throw up or cry yourself to sleep at night.
This grief is beautifully infused with sad memories and thwarted aspirations cherry picked from our own lives. It is a cathartic and shows we belong to a global community. But, of course, we get over it!
Even after 9/11 or reading about genocide in Darfur, we return to our own humdrum lives. We always remain at the centre of our own universe.
THERE is no myth surrounding Diana's sainthood, either. That's not why we have cooled on her in recent years. That beatific bubble burst a long time ago.
The American actress Fran Drescher said after meeting her, "Who likes a bitchy princess?"
We do.
Nor was Diana's memory tarnished by a re-evaluation of her bad hair days, neuroses, menacing phone calls to the art dealer Oliver Hoare with whom she was obsessed, Squidgygate or her paranoid belief that one day she'd go up in a helicopter and it would explode. (She wasn't wrong there, was she?)
Saints are boring. Beatified Mother Teresa may be on her way to sainthood (with her slightly unsettling Xanax smile intact) but it is a myth that Mother Teresa's death a week after Diana's was a final act of humility. Final act of backing into the spotlight, more like it!
Diana was upfront about her hunger for fame, love and men. She got her royal nails into rugby beefcake Will Carling, for Chrissakes.
We're not as upset simply because life goes on. The Daily Express tests our patience with persistent coverage of the conspiracy surrounding her death, the mysterious white Fiat and alleged altered account of that night by "Trevor Rees-Jones, The Only Survivor of the Crash that Killed Diana, Princess of Wales" (because that is what his obituary will read in years to come).
The Express's incessant stalking is unseemly and does make the Diana story lose its lustre.
The intoxication we felt at her arrival in the dreary 1980s in those funny little hats has worn off.
Like all drugs, we liked the escapism, which is why many British now cringe at the national hysteria that followed her death.
If Diana was celebrity heroin, Victoria Beckham is methadone and Paris Hilton - arguably the world's most famous blonde in 2007 - is closer to bad coffee.
We still take the odd hit, though. TV networks, publishers and manufacturers of china plates, commemorative coins and figurines are churning out Dianabilia for the 10th anniversary of her death. So we're obviously not that over her.
And let's not forget the reason why Camilla backed out of Diana's memorial service: because public opinion - and, yes, the tabloids - were against it.
Like Marilyn Monroe, who also died at 36 under suspicious circumstances, Diana was frozen in time in her prime . . . and just as she was harnessing her celebrity in Angola to crusade against landmines.
Marilyn has her movies and photographs, Diana her newsreels and photographs.
But there is another, more selfish reason why we have weaned ourselves off Diana.
"Has it really been 10 years since her death?" you hear people ask, shuddering at the thought. We once bathed in the reflection of her glamour and beauty.
A decade on, we are all a little older and a little jowlier. Diana may be immortalised and ageless. But we, as this anniversary reminds us, are not.