Anwar Hussein/Wireimage/Getty Images
The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is warmly welcomed in Britain and elsewhere. A young couple deeply in love, a much-needed fillip for the royal family, a handsome prince, a stylish young bride and, in time, the patter of tiny feet—what’s not to like? In corporate terms, the Windsors are refreshing the brand. And everybody wants in.
Gossip columnists from Lake Louise to Louisiana are buzzing about who’s been invited to the wedding, and who’s not. Leaks have revealed old lovers of both groom and bride, new staff discreetly supporting both, and various chums of various older royals, present for various reasons, don’t ask why. One name did not appear on any list, or any roll call of the living for the last 14 years. But she’ll be there, invited or not. Who’d be more welcome than a mother at the marriage of her elder son? Hence the need of the young couple to call up Diana’s shade, and honour her plangent absence at the feast.
And hence the brilliant and simple idea to bring her back into the fold—by recycling the ring. Someone in royal circles foresaw this as a major part of the story—even in the “informal” Mario Testino snaps, the ring takes centre stage, almost eclipsing the two lovers. Formerly one of the most famous sapphire rings in the world, it had lain unseen and forgotten for a decade and a half. Bringing it to light was a startling and unexpected PR coup, which officially launched a new season of Diana marriage coverage. It gave the media royal permission to revisit every detail of her wedding preparations from the gown to the honeymoon, thereby recalling and enshrining Diana, princess of Wales at the highest point of her value to the monarchy, when she’d attracted huge affection as Charles’s bride, and before she undermined it by upstaging him.
As a strategy, it has worked spectacularly. Diana has been everywhere since the announcement, endlessly lauded. She was “inspirational,” Kate loyally declared, though what was left unsaid was why—one of the most uneducated women in the Western world, Diana left school with no qualifications but a fondness for romantic fiction, and her “fairy tale” story of marrying a prince set the cause of women back about 200 years.
Perhaps Kate meant what Diana called her “work.” Work is what you do when can’t get out of it. The Queen works, cutting ribbons, christening battleships and bleak housing estates, touring paint factories and opening motorways. She’s done it since she was 10, and nowadays Camilla does it, too. Whatever Diana did, it was not this.
But whatever Diana did, it’s not over either. Unassuming as Kate is, and graced with William’s full blessing, she has subsumed her unknown mother-in-law. The happy couple combine to evoke the best of Diana’s adult achievements; together, they recast her as the hopeful do-gooder, the ardent young bride. It’s enough that Kate joins the alleluia chorus with her own Diana hosanna, singing from the same hymn book as her prince. It’s noteworthy, too, that wherever Kate has appeared since the engagement, those who’ve turned out to greet her want to see both her and the ring. Photo op by photo op, she’s making the oversized and unchosen sapphire ring her own. The fact that it had to be resized to fit her hand made global news and shifted the focus—it’s her ring now.
So what follows? It’s all about laying Diana to rest. Her disordered life and dreadful death inflicted on “the Firm” a wound that has never healed. Her ghost has haunted the royal family ever since with its undying reminder of their fatal flaws and casual yet catastrophic cruelties.
For their part, the royal family doesn’t understand how Diana’s hold on the public has lasted so long. The raw elements of her life still exert a mythic power—the Cinderella, despised by her sisters, who becomes the Princess Bride, the Little Mermaid who denies her true nature at any cost, dancing on knives to win her prince and dying so he could be happy. Add to these poignant archetypes a face the camera loved—nobody fed the world’s pictorial fodder as Diana did—and the Princess Bride becomes an international star. Stir into this hectic mix her compulsive courting of the common people to create her peculiar constituency of the despised and dispossessed, a worldwide clan of wounded narcissists like herself, and it’s no mystery why the fascination with her persists.
Pages: 1 2
