Diana: Cinderella to Superstar

By Mort Rosenblum
AP Special Correspondent
Friday, September 5, 1997; 3:59 p.m. EDT

LONDON (AP) -- Lady Di lived it all: awkward
duckling to Cinderella to Princess Diana
Superstar, who took herself to the top with all
the grit of the Little Engine That Could. In
the end, she outshone a monarchy that struggled
to keep her in shadow.

Had she lived, Diana might have drifted from
the front pages toward the back, a royal
has-been seeking nonstop fun after hard work in
the spotlight. Now, it is bad manners even to
think that.

An entire nation, and a world beyond it, spent
a week saying goodbye. Mourner after mourner
said what might for a long time be true: ``She
was the most popular woman in the world.''

Partly, this came from genuine warmth. She
hugged and cuddled, not only her own two sons
but also anyone else's, whatever their color or
class, no matter if they had AIDS or leprosy.

For Britain, Diana was a phenomenon not seen in
nine centuries: a touchable royal. For everyone
else, she was a novelty: an English noblewoman
with a cheerfully unstiff upper lip.

Partly, it was by design. She met obstacles
head-on, with a plan. Diana recently told The
New Yorker she tried to convince the royal
family to hire professionals to soften their
image.

``They kept saying I was manipulative,'' she
said of her tradition-bound former in-laws.
``But what's the alternative? To just sit there
and have them make your image for you?''

From the beginning, friends and family say,
Diana's life was dominated by periods of tough
determination, with long lapses of
self-destructive freefall.

The Honorable Diana Spencer was born on July 1,
1961, to Viscount Althorp, later the eighth
Earl Spencer. Her parents wanted a boy and let
her know it. When she was 8, her parents
noisily split.

Diana endured what she called a wicked
stepmother. Gawky and shy, she felt overwhelmed
by a beautiful older sister, Sarah. She spent a
lot of time alone with the syrupy romance
novels of Barbara Cartland, her
step-grandmother.

At the end of her teens, she dropped out of
Swiss finishing school to live with friends in
London, free at last, even though she had to
support herself as a maid and nanny.

Her biographer, Andrew Morton, said the turning
point came when Diana asked Sarah for a lift to
London after a country weekend. Sarah refused,
saying an extra person would cost too much in
gas.

Diana was through playing Cinderella to two
older sisters, Morton wrote in ``Diana: Her
True Story.'' And he quoted her brother,
Charles: ``Suddenly the insignificant ugly
duckling was obviously going to be a swan.''

Soon after, the Prince of Wales noticed her,
and history took over. A year of courtship,
tender if tepid, led to the fairy-tale wedding
of the century, a grand spectacle of pomp and
puffy eyes.

But Prince Charles was aloof on their
honeymoon. Photos of his old friend and flame,
Camilla Parker Bowles, fell out of his diary.
He wore cufflinks she had given him: two ``C''s
entwined.

Then it got worse -- so bad that the frustrated
princess flung herself down a flight of stairs
and hacked at her wrists with a razor blade.
Charles, who was raised to hold emotion in
check, dismissed that with chilly disdain.

And Diana was public property. While she fought
to conceal pain and fear that brought on
bulimia nervosa, hers was the most photographed
face on Earth.

All of this emerged later, after eavesdroppers,
tattlers and disgruntled ex-servants explained
why the royal couple often seemed so hostile in
public. Meantime, Diana set about becoming a
legend.

Suddenly, the Princess of Wales seemed
everywhere. She stooped to comfort a kid in
Pakistan, then flew halfway around the world to
bolster charities back home.

Only the most curmudgeonly questioned her
humanitarian works, which focused on cancer,
AIDS, digestive disorders, children in trouble,
land mines and widespread poverty in the Third
World. Mother Teresa said after Diana's death,
and only days before her own, ``she was a very
good friend, in love with the poor, a very good
wife, a very good mother.''

Her life after dark was far more controversial.

The old pictures show some happy times with
Charles. In Australia in 1983, not long after
William was born, Diana and Charles gaze at
each other in lust. At polo, they nuzzle
tenderly between chukkas. Diana looked like a
woman in love.

But the two had separate lives, which grew more
separate by the year.

Diana's pals included the biggest stars,
singers and artists and bon vivants, who took
her out dancing and dining in London while her
staid husband preferred his estate in Scotland,
just down the road from Camilla.

Though hardly a playgirl, photographers caught
her in apparent flirtation with polo players
while Charles was on the field. Tender moments
with old male friends inspired fresh rumors.

Diana embraced fashion with a passion and wore
clothes well. The English, mostly, seemed to
like her look. But as with almost everything
about her new life and times, the reviews were
mixed.

``Her taste was uncertain and spotty,'' the
Paris daily Liberation wrote after she died.
One colored boater hat, it said, looked as if a
purple oyster had been sick on her head.

Safe inside Kensington Palace, Diana looked for
peace in Eastern philosophy, astrology and
meditation. She abandoned Cartland for the
earthier Danielle Steele, who sent copies of
each new novel.

The princess spent long hours on the phone,
confiding in old childhood friends and
sympathetic new ones. And it was the
telephones, finally, which blew scandal into
the open.

In 1992, an electronic eavesdropper produced a
tape from 1989 in which -- if it is real -- a
male friend calls the princess ``Squidgy.''
Intimacy was implied.

Not long afterward, Camillagate broke. The
Daily Mirror printed a telephone transcript,
allegedly recorded at bedtime a few weeks
before the Squidgy tape, between Charles and
Camilla.

``I'll just live inside your trousers or
something,'' the princess told his married
friend, and the conversation then grew more
explicit.

By then, Diana and Charles had officially
separated. A final split was inevitable.

Off on her own in Kensington Palace, Diana was
discreet enough to keep people guessing about
her private life. But, with lenses pointed from
every angle, there was plenty of guessing.

The summer fling with Dodi Fayed had yet to
define itself. They'd had fun in St. Tropez,
and he had just given her a gorgeous ring.
Their fathers were old friends.

And then, all of a sudden late at night in
Paris, it didn't matter anymore.

Details about Diana's life and times faded
quickly into a blur, a backdrop for something
bigger. Modern times needed a perfect princess,
a goddess, and she fit.

People who had stopped thinking much about her
stood for 11 hours to sign a register at St.
James's Palace or added yet more roses to the
wall of flowers on the gates of Kensington
Palace. Hundreds of millions worldwide are
likely to tune in to her funeral.

As might be expected, professional commentators
ran the full range, summing up Lady Di's life
and times.

For William Pfaff in the International Herald
Tribune, she was the well-meaning pawn of
royals whose own self-obsession led indirectly
to her death.

``She lived by publicity, and died by it,'' he
concluded. ``It is that which excites our pity,
and our terror.''

But, psychiatrists say, that leaves out a
symbolic role, which has little to do with the
person at hand. Whatever else she did, she
showed that royalty in a different age need not
be aloof.

Julie Burchill, writing in The Guardian, said
the princess might have become a joke had she
lived: ``Lady Diana Al Fayed, an Arab
merchant's bit of posh, endlessly sunning
herself on the deck of some gin palace hooked
up in the Med, toasting herself until her skin
lost its bloom and she lost her husband to a
newer model.''

But her death, Burchill said, has preserved her
forever at the height of her beauty, compassion
and power. If the royal family meant to
diminish her, they have failed utterly.

``Her brave, bright, brash life will forever
cast a giant shadow over ... our ruling
house,'' she concluded. ``We'll always remember
her coming home for the last time to us, free
at last, the People's Princess, not the
Windsors'. We'll never forget her. And neither
will they.''

    Copyright 1997 The Associated Press