Forever Young
The transfiguration of Princess Diana.

By Mark Steyn, columnist for the National Post
August 25-26, 2001

Editor's note: On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana was killed in car crash. "Forever Young" appeared in the September 11, 1997, issue of National Review.

n the early Eighties, back in my disc-jockey days, the program director called us all in and announced revisions to the Death of the Monarch procedure — a grand name for what was the more or less just a dusty tape of solemn music sitting within easy reach in every radio and TV studio in the Commonwealth. It was felt that we needed to distinguish between core Royals — the Queen, the Queen Mother — who merited the full back-to-back-requiems treatment, and peripheral minor duchesses, for whom something melodious but respectful like "Greensleeves" or Pachelbel's Canon would suffice. Painstakingly, we worked our way down the list, until someone asked, "And what about the Princess of Wales?"

"Oh," said a voice from the back of the room, "just bung on the new Wham! Album."

As things turned out, by the time she died 15 years later, George Michael had left Wham!, citing artistic differences, and the Princess had left the Royal Family, apparently for much the same reasons. But, otherwise, my friend had proved surprisingly prescient. There is no protocol covering the sudden, violent death of the beautiful ex-wife of the heir to the throne, but broadcasters throughout Her Majesty's realms reached a quick consensus.

In Quebec, where I happened to be that Sunday morning, radio stations lapsed, en masse, into the likes of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" and Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" — lachrymose ballads by Di's rock-star pals about others who had died far too young: in Clapper's case, the infant son who plunged to his death from the star's Manhattan apartment; in Elton's, Marilyn Monroe, that other tragic, doomed blonde "icon," whose cult seems likely to prove a mere warm-up to Diana's. in between songs, listeners called up, sobbing, to hail Diana as the people's princess, an "angel of mercy," a "saint," a "beacon of light in a dark world," and then to denounce the Prince and the rest of the heartless, dysfunctional, untouchy-unfeely family who had been so resentful of her healing powers.

The radio hosts, also tearful, heartily agreed and then invariably played Bryan Adams's "Everything I do (I Do for You)." In taking her leave of us, the Princess of Wales had finally, triumphantly slipped free of the last restraints of Royal convention: in ways no Death of the Monarch procedure could ever devise, it was a fitting send-off — the same peculiar combination of intensity, sincerity, and tackiness as the Princess herself.

Somewhere in the attic, I still have my copy of the Death of the Monarch tape, even dustier now. But I don't suppose I or anybody else will get a chance to use it. Diana's death transformed her own image, but it also transformed her former in-laws. And, just as Elton and Sting so effortlessly supplanted Mozart and Beethoven, so, in the days that followed, protocol after protocol came tumbling down. On Britain's palaces, no flag is flown unless the Sovereign is in residence, and then only the Royal standard. As the Queen and her family were at Balmoral, the flagpole at Buckingham Palace was bare. But, day by day, the crowds milling around what they had begun to call the "ice palace" grew more and more affronted by it, and on Thursday the Queen caved in, ordering an unprecedented Union Jack run up the pole of her empty residence just so that it could be lowered to half-mast to appease the mob.

Commonwealth governments around the world, equally uncertain what to do with their flags, phoned the Palace for advice, and were promptly abused by columnists and call-in shows for consulting the reviled House of Windsor rather than the people. By the end of the week, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Prince of Wales had been flushed out of their castle and forced to walk around outside the gates, inspecting the mounds of flowers and trying to look sufficiently distraught. For their pains, they were denounced by disaffected subjects back in London as "hypocrites…makes yer sick, dunnit?"

A revolution took place in Britain that first week of September. Unlike the ones in France and Russia, the masses did not rise up and kill the Royal Family. Instead, they have determined to subject them to a living death — in which everything they say, everything they do will be measured against Diana and found wanting; in which they will be stalked forever by those big, reproachful, kohl-ringed eyes. After the divorce, the Royal Family's strategy with the Princess of Wales was to sit her out, in the sure knowledge that, over time, her public would drift away, and she would come to seem a pathetic figure, as did the Duke of Windsor and, far more quickly, the Duchess of York — and object lesson for Royals in how to be too human.

From the Palace's point of view, it seemed a safe enough bet: in July, the Princess had been seen comforting a weeping Elton John and his lover at the grisly memorial service for Gianni Versace; in August, in between Mediterranean cruises, she had returned to Britain for what she hoped would be a quiet consultation with her favorite psychic — for which, in order to avoid drawing attention to herself, she landed in the middle of her clairvoyant's small Derbyshire village in a helicopter accompanied by her millionaire playboy Arab lover, whereupon she was spotted by a little girl with a camera whom she told to go away.

Eventually, the Queen's courtiers reasoned, all but hardcore Diana groupies would weary of this sort of thing. At some point, all soap operas exhaust themselves, as their zigzagging plot twists come to seem increasingly arbitrary, implausible, and unmotivated. What none of those wily courtiers foresaw was that the erratic hairpin bends of the Princess's last months were careening toward one spectacular blowout of a series finale. A few days before her death, Earl Howe, a Conservative foreign-affairs spokesman, attacked her as a "loose cannon." Well, she's a fixed cannon now — forever young, forever tragic, forever beautiful — and she's firmly targeted on Buckingham Palance.

— The first battleground was the funeral. As Entertainment Tonight — these days a more reliable guide to Royal engagements than the Court Circular — put it, "From Elton John to George Michael, new details on who's been invited…" Traditionally, "who's been invited" to a Royal funeral is a list made up of His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, the Earl of Ulster, His Excellency the Governor-General of Papua New Guinea, the High Commissioner for Tonga, the Lord Chamberlain, Silver Stick in Waiting, etc. But let's face it, compared to your favorite pop stars, they're just a bunch of yawneroos. So, instead, the Queen found herself having to invite Elton John. He announced that he'd be singing "Candle in the Wind," his ode to Marilyn now rewritten as an ode to Diana. In place of "Goodbye, Norma Jean," it would now begin "Goodbye, England's rose…"

What happened in Paris that Saturday night is, for a society determined by precedent, bewilderingly unprecedented. Royals have been killed in accidents before — the Princess died a quarter-century almost to the day after poor forgotten Prince William of Gloucester's plane fell from the skies in an air race. But no Royal death has been so bizarrely attuned to the spirit of the age. August is the "silly season" in the British press, and this year, the Princess had done her bit for her chums in the media, embarking on a dizzying summer romance that sent Fleet Street into full-scale remarriage speculation and brought an extravagant array of her lover's ex-girlfriends tumbling out of the cupboard. A good time was had by all.

On the very last day of the silly season, when the Queen's subjects woke to the news that Diana was dead, it seemed in some strange way the best plot twist of all. "I didn't think it was real," a friend told me sadly. Most Diana stories aren't: the soft-porn video, allegedly taped by MI-5, in which she and Major Hewitt enjoyed what Fleet Street calls a "romp," ran for days in the London tabloids and even on national TV news bulletin before it was revealed to be just a couple of look-alikes in a sketch for a comedy show. And, as the day dragged on, many TV viewers half expected a similar "retraction," or "clarification." Only gradually did people realize that their queen of hearts had, in fact, had only one, and its ruptured pulmonary vein could not be put together again. "I didn't feel sad at first," another woman told me on Tuesday. "But I can't stop crying now."

And so the grief intensified, and the bereavement-junkies multiplied, and Diana, Princess of Wales, gradually metamorphosed into what one tribute outside her home called "Our New Saint Diana, Canonized By The People If Not By The Pope." Before her death, Diana was a complicated figure, offering something for everyone: there was the slightly dim supermodel and the Royal rock groupie; the tireless super-mum and the vulnerable single mother; and, best of all, the manipulative suicidal bulimic neurotic with the highest staff turnover in London. Death streamlined her: now there was only the luminous angel who walked among her people bestowing love.

A man with AIDS said he would have been dead two years ago had Diana not touched him; a three-year-old visited by Diana while in a coma had a miraculous recovery and has now left his best teddy outside Kensington Palace; a nine-year-old treated for heart disease said that Diana had visited her ten times and had offered to do the family's washing if they'd just drop it round at the Palace. For some, a world without the Saint was too much to bear: there were reports of at least two "Diana-related" suicides.

No one could doubt the sincerity of the people's reaction. But their sincerity did not make it any less repellant. The supposedly reserved, bloodless Brits had, like the Princess, swallowed wholesale the vocabulary of American Oprahfied psychobabble, a depressing enough prospect. But they had fused it with the brutish vulgarity of modern British mass culture to create a truly horrible mutant: aggressive empathy. Their message to their Sovereign was in essence: If you can't come out and feel our pain, we'll give you some of your own to feel. Through a spokesman, the Queen protested to the British people that she was not indifferent to their grief.

Hang on: She's not indifferent to grief? The Queen, who had known Diana Spencer since she was a little girl, has to prove that she grieves as much as people who have never met her? On the one hand, the masses disdain the paparazzi for intruding into the privacy of their beloved Princess; on the other, the masses are quite happy metaphorically to storm Balmoral and intrude on the most private moments of all — the right of a family to grieve in their own way for someone close to them. In the week after Diana's death. The moral decay of the British people plumbed new depths. At least the paparazzi, in their own crazed fashion, were seeking something objective: a photograph of two lovers canoodling. The mournerazzi who flooded London were demanding only that those who knew the real Diana sign on to the approved myths: Diana was the queen of hearts, her mother-in-law is a Queen with no heart; Diana was a warm mother, Charles is a cold father. Were they? Who really knows?

Once upon a time, we were more mature: we knew enough to know we didn't know the Royal Family. You don't have to go back a century, just to that long-ago day before yesterday before Lady Diana came along. In the years immediately after the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, the Royal Family were more popular than ever — and no one knew a thing about them. In popular mythology, they could muster a trait apiece — the Queen Mother was supposed to like to play the ponies, Princess Margaret was rumored to be a bit of a tippler — but even these had no reliable confirmation: in her 97 years, the Queen Mum has barely uttered three words in public; no one outside her circle knows what her voice sounds like.

But we all know Di. Like millions of others, I was a Close, Intimate, Personal Friend — that is to say, I met her briefly three and a half times. The "half" was a chance encounter at Launceston Place, a restaurant near our respective pads in Kensington: she was there to lunch with an old pal, I to lunch with my editor; obviously, we had both asked for discreet tables, so they had seared us back to back at the end of an otherwise empty room. We didn't say much apart from a quick "Hello" and her apologies when she put her chair on the back of my trailing coat and tugged my own seat out from under me.

I liked her girlish voice and orgasmic giggle. I know it doesn't compare with the personal note she sent to Barbara Walters, which Barbara has been reluctantly revealing for the first time every hour on the hour on ABC. But I mention it because the Princess wasn't known for physical comedy, and you'd have thought that some of the diners in the adjoining room might have paused at least to note the incident. But they couldn't have cared less. We left at the same time: outside, the street was deserted; she got into her car and went home.

My point is a simple one: she wasn't always being hounded. It's not difficult for anyone to live a relatively undisturbed Royal existence. Almost everyone apart from Diana did. But a conventional Royal life wasn't enough for her. Elton John's rewritten "Candle in the Wind" spoke of how "your footsteps will always fall here,/ Along England's greenest hills." If so, it'll be the first time since her schooldays. She never showed the slightest interest in England's greenest hills — or, anyway, not when compared to Switzerland's whitest alps and the Caribbean's sunniest beaches and the Côte d'Azur's swankiest yachts. When her friend Versace was murdered, it was said that he had fused the worlds of fashion, rock, and movies. The Princess fused the worlds of fashion, rock, movies — and Royalty. What mad self-destructive ambition.

When Tony Blair, with his usual brilliant opportunism, dubbed her the "people's princess," it was by implication a rebuke to those other, chillier, remoter princesses, I wonder whom he had in mind. The Princess Royal? She had worked for years for the Red Cross and Save the Children, earned herself a place on the British Olympic team, and yet never gets into People or Enquirer. Or the Duchess of Gloucester? Princess Alexandra? These women preside over dozens of charities, many of them unfashionable ones without photogenic moppets or cadaverous young men; they serve as colonels-in-chief of regiments in boring places far from the paparazzi's lenses, like Saskatchewan; and in return receive nothing very much apart from the Solomon Islands Independence Medal (the Duchess of Gloucester) or the Canadian Forces Decoration (Princess Alexandra).

— You can blame the photographers or the drunk driver or an irresponsible lover; you can even blame the French, under whose aegis Diana is not the only Royal (Aly Khan, Princess Grace) to die in a spectacular crash. But the Princess chose the life she led.

As a means of modernizing the monarchy, did it work? At the time of her death, the Princess of Wales was the most recognizable woman in the world and especially popular on this side of the Atlantic. One newspaper crowed that she was the "Queen of America," but, of course, she wasn't: America is a Republic. In the countries over which she had once hoped to reign as Queen — everywhere from Jamaica to New Zealand — the Diana years coincided with an astonishing rise in republican sentiment. The real story of her legacy is that the week before her death, support for the monarchy in Britain fell for the first time below 50 percent; the week before that, Australia announced the start of a process to examine options to become a republic by year 2000. A pin-up, even a saintly one, isn't enough. Indeed, Diana's tabloid popularity and tabloid life made serious discussion of the merits of monarchical government almost impossible. It will be the same in death.

"The English people need a light in their dark little tunnels," the Princess said, with exquisite condescension. "I'll be that light." But monarchy is not supposed to be a "Candle in the Wind." As the winds of the change swirl all around, it is supposed to be a rock, not a rock song; it represents the deep, ancient roots of society — something all the more important in a present-tense media culture. Far from taking the monarchy into the twenty-first century, the Princess has virtually ensured that it will die with the twentieth. If we must canonize her, make her Patron Saint of Republicanism.