From huntress to hunted

Camille Paglia talks about the glorious rise and "tacky end" of Princess Diana.

By Andrew Ross

Aug 31, 1997 | along with millions of other Americans, Camille Paglia stayed up, bleary-eyed, through the night in 1981 to watch the fairy-tale marriage of Diana Spencer to the future king of England. In 1992, she wrote an influential piece about "Diana the huntress" for the New Republic (reprinted in Paglia's book of essays, "Vamps and Tramps"), which royal family chronicler Andrew Morton praised as the first serious examination of the princess' growing cultural significance. The following year, Paglia presented a respectful special on Diana for Britain's Channel 4, at a time when "informed opinion" saw the princess as scatty at best and a loose cannon at worst.

For much of the past 24 hours, Paglia has been glued to the television screen again, switching between channels, watching the bulletins and the specials and the endless replays of a crushed Mercedes being hauled away from a tunnel by the River Seine. Salon talked with Paglia about the wretched death of a young, once-glorious icon.

At its core, what was Diana's appeal?

She was a new kind of woman who came along at a time when feminism seemed to have redefined woman as simply the white upper-middle-class professional with an attache case. It was her freshness, her femininity, her desire for marriage and children, her glamour.

How important was her glamour? At first, she seemed more like an awkward schoolgirl.

She communicated with her body. She managed to make the world fall in love with her through her body language alone. She'd been trained as a dancer. Her body movements and her grace and her style, getting out of cars, looking fantastic in her clothes. And we watched her evolve so swiftly from a shy, fresh-faced English rose into a sophisticated glamour queen.

Was there a moment when the duckling became a swan?

On her first public occasion out with Charles after they were married, she wore this magnificent black, very decollete ball gown -- which we later learned had horrified Charles. She got out of the car and there were these camera shots from above as she was going up the grand staircase of this opera house, and we saw this magnificent bosom spilling out of this gown; it was an enormous break from the shy virgin. That was the moment when we first saw her ability to manipulate her own charisma and to flirt with the world media in the way that only great stars of Hollywood and popular musicians have been able to do -- Madonna, of course, and also Dietrich. There was this Madonna-Dietrich level of manipulation. The press became her ally against the fuddy-duddy British establishment; she was frozen out by the bureaucrats and the House of Windsor, so she turned to the media to get her view out and her personality felt. The world stage of the media became her avenue of expressiveness.

But there was a price to pay.

Yes, she let the genie out of the bottle, which then devoured her, and ultimately led to this disaster. When I wrote in the New Republic how "Diana the huntress" was now paralyzed in the world's gunsight, I just felt that there were troubles ahead. And indeed she began to spiral out of control.

When?

I think that's pretty clear in the past couple of years, when you've seen a series of misjudgments -- one of the greatest being to entrust her life and her safety to this scumbag Dodi Fayed and the people around him, who are all incompetent idiots. After all, she was under their care when this crash happened.

As she changed, did your feelings change towards her?

Yes. I thought that having accepted the responsibility of being the mother of the future king of England, that perhaps self-actualization should not always be her aim. And I felt that there began to be a dizzying oscillation betweeen the fast-track life of the European beau monde and the very ostentatious displays of her charity. There was something increasingly artificial about it. She has a genuine human touch with people, and when she embarked on these compassionate missions it seemed that she genuinely felt them. But as time went on, I felt there was an increasing staginess or rigidity -- and desperation -- in this yo-yo pattern she was involved in.

What might she have done differently?

I personally feel that once she separated from Charles, she could have gotten the media off her back by undertaking a more reserved lifestyle. If she had comported herself in a very reserved and dignified manner, the world would have continued to be interested, but we wouldn't have seen this mad obsession. It seems as if she felt that she could stop the media frenzy, like a magic formula, by simply saying the words, "OK, I'm done with that now, I've made you pursue me all this time, now the chase is over." She began to waste her enormous gift. At one point she had said that a fulfilling job is better than a man to give your life meaning. I wish she had pursued that avenue, because I think this is a very tacky end -- to die in the car of a gigolo playboy in flight from the Ritz.

Next Page: "They destroyed her"
How cruel intrigues and sexual psychodramas in the House of Windsor undid Diana

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