Diana 1961-1997: Death of a Princess

She lived a fabled life and a cautionary tale, a princess of irreducible splendor yet one who bore testimony to the commonality of loneliness and heartbreak. On the day 16 years ago that Charles, the Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared, here is “the stuff of which fairy tales are made.” That fairy tale ended even before their divorce was announced, a love story that was false, it was shown, from the very beginning. Diana emerged scathed, but she had other causes to tend to–her sons, the sick, the war-ravaged, her own heart. The marriage was dead, but long live the princess.

And now she is gone.

With her go the hopes of a world that had turned her life into part of its own projected biography, a fragile hope for a happy-ever-after even in the face of adversity. To many, her struggles blended into the hobbling steps of this 20th century as it limped toward some vague promise of millennium. The crash in Paris that took her life and that of her rich playboy friend Emad (“Dodi”) al Fayed is a tragedy so overpowering that it becomes a torrent of feelings. There is no clear significance. There is only loss.

Beyond that there is guilt–that our desire for her was so strong that it set birds of prey to stalk her. Paparazzi. Even the word has claws.

And now she is gone.

There was little sound for the first two minutes after the crash except for the hoarse wail of the mangled car’s horn. The noise emanated weakly from both ends of the tunnel on Paris’ Place de l’Alma–from the east end, which the black Mercedes with the silver trim had entered just moments before, moving at least twice the 35 m.p.h. the local traffic laws allow; and from the west end, where the narrow tunnel opened onto a spectacular view of the left bank of the Seine. On the still busy streets above–where the lights of the Eiffel Tower had yet to be shut off for the night–the muffled sound of one car horn might not even be noticed.

But seconds earlier there had been a tremendous noise. Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, visitors from San Diego, were walking near the mouth of the tunnel when they saw the car enter, feverishly pursued by a swarm of motorcycles and scooters, then heard what sounded to them like an explosion. Just inside the 660-ft. tunnel, the car struck the concrete divider that separates the eastbound lanes from the westbound and then apparently cartwheeled, rolling over a full 360[degrees] and spinning around nearly 180[degrees].

When Richardson and Luz ran into the tunnel, they saw the car facing back in the direction from which it had come, its roof crushed, its windshield smashed and its air bags deployed. The chauffeur, killed instantly, slumped over the wheel, the weight of his body pressing the dead car’s horn. In front of the wreck, a paparazzo–the last Diana paparazzo–raised his camera and began to snap. “When I ran into the tunnel, he was already there,” Richardson said. “I could see that his equipment was far too sophisticated for a tourist.”

It took only minutes for the Paris police to arrive, cordoning off the area with red- and-white crime-scene tape and leaving the lights of their cruisers flashing as they rushed into the tunnel. The officers broke into two groups: one headed straight for the wrecked car, the other fanned out to nab the photographers believed to have caused the accident. There were more than seven paparazzi thought to have been involved in the high-speed pursuit, and at least five were still in the tunnel. All were quickly arrested and led out in manacles. When they emerged, the crowd that had begun to gather jeered, and one cuffed cameraman was even set upon and beaten before police could hustle him away.

Back in the tunnel, the scene was a grim one. Almost the instant the second group of officers reached the car, it was clear that the chauffeur and Al Fayed, both sitting on the vehicle’s left side, were beyond help. Diana and her bodyguard, however, both on the right, appeared to be clinging to life.

“We knew it was somebody messed up bad,” says Michael Walker, another American tourist whose taxi passed the wreckage, where he stopped to gawk and take pictures. “It was a bad accident. The car was crushed and tilted up against the wall.” The taxi driver thought he saw a blond-haired woman sitting in the backseat of the car, gasping, crying.

As the onlookers watched, the rescue team cut through the buckled roof and doors of the Mercedes, removed the two survivors and rushed them by ambulance to a public hospital, the Pitie-Salpetriere, one of the best in the city. On the way, paramedics examined the wounded princess and found her condition grave. She was suffering from extensive chest injuries, a massive wound to the left lung and numerous broken bones. Her blood pressure barely registered on the rescue team’s instruments.

When the ambulance reached the hospital, the emergency-room physicians found that Diana was alive–just barely–but that the injuries had caused extensive internal bleeding. For more than two hours they struggled to stabilize her, eventually opening her chest and applying direct massage to her heart. But the loss of blood and the system-wide trauma proved too much. At 4 a.m. Paris time, after two hours of massaging Diana’s unbeating heart, doctors declared the princess dead.

Diana’s family was outraged at the circumstances surrounding her death. Her only brother Charles, the current Earl Spencer, bitterly declared, “I always believed the press would kill her in the end. Not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death, as seems to be the case.” He added, “It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, has blood on his hands today.”

As for Diana’s former in-laws, they kept a regal silence. Members of the royal family, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, vacationing with his sons–her sons–William and Harry at Balmoral Castle, were notified by phone. None made any public statement.

Actually, for several weeks, Britain’s first family had been maintaining a studied silence on the topic of Diana. Almost a year to the day after a final divorce decree ended her arid marriage to Prince Charles, the princess had exploded back onto the pages of the tabloids, on the arm–and in the arms–of the wealthy Al Fayed. The photographs were the purest paparazzi stuff–grainy images furtively snapped through telephoto lenses the size of bazookas. The story they told, however, was unmistakable. After years of smiling bravely and brittlely by the side of a man she was no longer in love with, the princess just may have found one she did love.

Diana Spencer and Dodi al Fayed had been indirectly linked even before they were romantically linked, mostly as a result of a long-standing friendship between their fathers, the late Lord Spencer and Mohamed al Fayed. The children of these men met 10 years ago, when the younger Al Fayed and Prince Charles played on opposing polo teams. It would not be until this summer, however–after a brief, bad marriage for Al Fayed and a long, bad one for Diana–that the two would be free to see each other socially.

The courtship began correctly enough in mid-July, when the senior Al Fayed invited the princess and her two sons to vacation with his family at his villa in St.-Tropez. It may or may not have been mentioned that the younger Al Fayed would be there as well, but it was clearly understood. Tabloid reporters began scenting a story when they learned that Diana and her children would be spending a holiday at the home of the elder Al Fayed, a man sniffed at by the British elite. They descended, pursuing the two families wherever they went. Diana, no longer smothered by palace protocol, at last was able to give as good as she got. Racing up to reporters in a speedboat, she reportedly declared, “You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do.”

Diana later denied making the statement, but she did not disappoint. Rumors flew of an engagement to be announced this month. The following week she joined Al Fayed at Paris’ Hotel Ritz–one of the many properties owned by his father–then left with the son for a five-day vacation aboard his family yacht in the Mediterranean. Photographers tagged along for that vacation as well, hurrying home eagerly with fuzzy photos of the princess and her maybe beau rather unremarkably kissing. One tabloid boasted that it had paid $200,000 for those pictures–a bounty that may have driven the celebrity hunters wild. Several days later, back in London, Diana was once again seen with Al Fayed, lingering with him for several hours over a late dinner at one of his apartments.

For most royal watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, such a public and unapologetic courtship was sign enough that Diana was finally putting her palace past behind her. But it was only last week, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, that she made clear how completely she was cutting her emotional ties both to the life she had led and the press that had made it the trial it was. “Any sane person,” she said forthrightly, “would have left [Britain] long ago.”

But how could she truly leave when, for the past 16 years, she in a sense embodied Britain, proving that despite the demise of empire and the weight of history, the country was capable of youth and vigor and charm. By blood she too, and not just Charles, was descended from James I, the first Stuart King. And, after generations of imported brides and serendipitous successors, she was the first Englishwoman to marry an heir to the throne in more than 300 years. She was a testament to the tenacity of the island, a nation that could make princesses as well as bear them.

The world watched as Charles and Diana cooed and wed. The stodgy House of Windsor had survived the scandal of an irresponsible King who gave up his throne for the woman he loved by going into industrial public service mode. Now, in Diana, it had the warmest smile, the most soulful eyes, and the public obsession with her began. As the princess who would be Queen, Diana could turn the world’s passion for her into compassion for others, whether they were the homeless, AIDS patients or casualties of land mines. Even as the press would prove a scourge, she knew it was a weapon to be wielded–for good as well as for byzantine dynastic dealings. But she was serious about doing good. In her interview with Le Monde, she declared, “Being permanently in the public eye gives me a special responsibility–to use the impact of photographs to get a message across, to make the world aware of an important cause, to stand up for certain values.”

Yet, in Diana’s case, public and private lives intersected with the verve of soap opera–for that was indeed what she had married into, a very grim fairy tale that had come true. When she walked down the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral on July 29, 1981, to take the hand of her prince, there was no inkling of a doomed denouement. How could there be? The bells that pealed in celebration drowned out any fears of future trouble; Britain and the world beyond it rejoiced. Here indeed was a union to gladden hearts.

Nobody, not even her former husband, will be able to pinpoint exactly the moment when the marriage began to fall apart. Yet even before the couple uttered their marriage vows, Diana clearly had concerns about the upcoming union. She had tearfully protested to Charles after she opened a package that contained a gold bracelet he intended to give to Camilla Parker-Bowles commemorating their relationship. Just before the wedding she called her sisters to lunch and asked them if she might still be able to get out of it. “Your face is on the tea towels,” they famously replied, “so it’s too late to chicken out now.”

That reluctance to become part of the House of Windsor Inc. explains the wistful, enigmatic smiles of those early married years. For this princess, no mattresses could mask the kernel of resentment at being plunged into a role for which she had never been prepared and from which there appeared to be no escape.

She did her duty. She produced an heir–and, as the saying goes, a spare. The palace sent her abroad to represent her country, and she did it with such panache that the Prince of Wales began to look like the junior partner in the royal enterprise. Although Charles himself had exhorted his young bride to “just look ’em in the eye and knock ’em dead” on their wedding day, it was clearly unsettling for him when she did just that. For a while there was little hint of the troubles ahead. The royal couple danced cheek to cheek at the White House and embraced tenderly between Charles’ chukkas on the polo field. Even their disparate interests seemed captivating, as if dancing Di with her flashy friends and flashier clothes somehow complemented older, stuffy Charles with his easel and paints and his kilt-clad kinsmen.

But somewhere along the line the magic departed and the demons moved in. After William’s birth in 1982, Diana suffered postpartum depression and succumbed to bulimia. Her son, she confided to friends, was the only joy in her life. She kept smiling for the cameras because, as she later explained, “we didn’t want to disappoint the public.” So did Charles. As he had declared on their wedding day as he bent to kiss his new bride at Buckingham Palace, “We do this sort of thing rather well.”

Not well enough. By 1985 the marriage was clearly in trouble despite strenuous denials from the palace. Health problems aside, Diana was clearly feeling the strain of living in a goldfish bowl–and getting very little support from her husband or the rest of the royal family. During a visit to West Palm Beach, Fla., that year, Diana flirted with polo players while her husband looked the other way. Later, during a visit to a London hospice, she let slip a telling comment. “The biggest disease this world suffers from,” she complained, “[is] people feeling unloved.”

It didn’t matter that the people loved her to distraction–theirs and hers. The price of that relentless affection was the constant limelight, the prying lenses of the paparazzi and the febrile speculation in the tabloid press that her marriage was in trouble. By the mid-1980s, the Waleses were beginning to go their separate ways, not only in private but in public. By the time the royal couple visited Toronto in 1991, they could no longer conceal their estrangement.

Back home the feuding and sniping multiplied. “Shy Di” became “Sly Di” at the hands of Charles’ propaganda machine. The princess, by now a seasoned manipulator of headlines as well as hearts, gave as good as she got. As she herself warned in an interview even as the divorce papers were being prepared, “she won’t go quietly, that’s the problem.” In Andrew Morton’s 1992 Diana: Her True Story, she revealed–by way of close friends who briefed the author, presumably with Diana’s consent–that her suspicion of Charles’ longtime relationship with Parker-Bowles had driven her to a suicide attempt while she was staying at Sandringham Palace during Christmas 1982. Charles accused her of crying wolf and prepared to go riding, prompting Diana to hurl herself down the stairs.

Shortly after the Morton book appeared in August 1992, Britain’s Sun newspaper printed the transcript of phone calls monitored back in December 1989 between Diana and a man who affectionately called her “Squidgy.” In it she described her marriage as a “torture,” and gave vent to her feelings about her royal relatives, whom she described as “that ___ family.” Four months later, Prime Minister John Major announced the Waleses’ official separation. Divorce followed in 1996.

“We both made mistakes,” Diana conceded in an interview she granted as the feuding escalated. By the time their marriage ended, both had found solace in the arms of others, although Diana’s confessed infidelity with riding instructor Captain James Hewitt allegedly came only after her husband had resumed his old affair with Camilla. “Irreconcilable differences” was the catch-all phrase used in the divorce petition that brought the fantasy to a finish. But those were clear from the start. Looking back, it seems impossible that the shy 20-year-old in the sumptuous fairy-tale dress could somehow have seen a future with the dutiful, tweed-clad monarch in waiting. As she told friends during the troubled years of her marriage, “One minute I was a nobody, the next minute I was Princess of Wales, mother, media toy, member of this family, and it was just too much for one person to handle.”

Despite the divorce, the war of the Windsors was expected to go on. After all, Diana was the mother of the heir to the heir. And when her son William became King, how could she not wield influence as the unofficial, uncrowned Queen Mother? Everyone saw the battle as inevitable, a British Gotterdammerung with Windsor Castle as a potential Valhalla. Indeed, as if an augury, the Queen’s country residence caught fire in 1992, a year she called an annus horribilis.

But the final battle will not take place. There may have been omens of tragedy, visible now in retrospect. Charles had been caught in a terrifying paparazzi attack himself barely a month before Diana was overwhelmed by hers. On Aug. 9, while he was visiting the Spanish island of Majorca, photographers weaved in and out of his convoy, forcing the Prince of Wales, his broken right arm in a sling, to hold on to the overhead handgrip of his Mercedes limousine as it hurtled down the road in a 10-mile mad chase. He lived to be in bad humor.

Diana did not. Britain woke to find its darling dead, stolen away during the night by an inexplicable fate. Prime Minister Tony Blair, on the way to a church service in his northern constituency of Sedgefield, was close to tears. Said he: “We are today a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and warm human being. Her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, but she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and comfort.” He added, “She was the people’s princess, and that is how she will stay in our hearts and memories for ever.”

She was the princess of the world, a title no British monarch could claim. Many nations expressed shock and dismay, mourning in public more than politeness required. President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, still on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., were told of the accident while at a clambake. Later, a White House deputy press secretary phoned the President with the news that the princess had died. “Hillary and I knew Princess Diana, and we were very fond of her,” the President said. “We are profoundly saddened.”

But what of the sons she loved and was prepared to sacrifice her happiness for? What of the heir she produced to save the dynasty–and to perpetuate her own spirit?

On Sunday, Diana had been scheduled to return to London and her two sons. She had always been a doting mother: at least some of her fury at paparazzi over the years sprang from a desire to protect her children. If her marriage had been a disaster, it was generally agreed that William and Harry were coming out remarkably well. Wills especially sometimes seemed preternaturally mature, his mother’s youngest adviser. The received wisdom–the received hope, at least–was that one day he might be the sort of attractive, level-headed heir who could repair his parents’ damage to the monarchy. In the meantime, as an official photo op with his father and brother two weeks ago at Balmoral attested, the tousled boy had turned into a striking young man, with Diana’s eyes and complexion.

He was just entering a period during which he might have moved somewhat from her orbit, both as an adolescent and as the center of royal training from which she was excluded. The process should have been a little sad, but exhilarating too. Instead, early on Sunday morning Prince Charles informed his sons that their mother was dead. Their last extended time with her had been as guests of Al Fayed in St.-Tropez in July. Vanished now was any prospect of William’s bittersweet maturing; the mother was from her son untimely ripped. The young, burdened future king of England, in what may be his first great totemic act, will grieve Diana’s death not only for himself, but for his country, and the world.

–By Howard Chua-Eoan, Steve Wulf, Jeffrey Kluger, Christopher Redman and David Van Biema. Reported by Scott MacLeod/Paris and Helen Gibson/London