Authors: Clive James
Who was she? She was us. That was her secret and her nemesis. All of us must spend our lives fighting the internal battle between what we are and what people want us to be, and many of us are
handicapped in the struggle by a deficient or fluctuating sense of what we are. But Diana was unusual, even among the stricken, for a sense of self that within a single hour could wink out to
nothing or expand to embrace the world. As I said in my obituary – from the viewpoint of
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
, it was the only real boldness in the piece – I suspected
quite early on in my fleeting acquaintance with Diana that she was mentally unstable. It has sometimes been put to me since then that if I knew that about her I should have had nothing to do with
her. I can think of two answers, the first more obvious than the second. The first answer is that her living presence had the same effect as some of Botticelli’s models obviously had on
Botticellli, who might well have been at his most serious when he conceded that Savonarola was right to want his pictures burned, but was at his most human when he behaved as if the beauty before
his eyes was a heavenly mandate to get painting immediately. In my trade I meet a lot of women who are renowned for looking perfect. Diana didn’t look that, but she did look alive. She looked
like life itself. To the argument that no man of sense would have thought twice about her if she had been a check-out girl in Tesco, the only possible reply is that she would have been the
classiest thing to hit Tesco since bottled water.
But as the late Sir Kingsley Amis might have put it, she
wasn’t
a check-out girl, was she? No, she was the Princess of Wales. So I bathed in her starlight the same as any other
man who got the nod. And once admitted to her acquaintance, there could not have been many men who wanted to be rid of her before she wanted to be rid of them. She was too fascinating, and was made
even more so by one’s awareness that she knew how to be fascinating, and was working the trick as a baseball pitcher might keep his arm in shape by throwing rocks at a tin can. If Ortega was
right to say that a man flirts so as to make the public woman momentarily reveal her private personality, then Diana knew how to reward flirtation, and the reward became only the more precious as
you realized that a different private personality was being revealed every time. The lights were on, and everybody was at home. She was an all-star cast of knockout troublemakers: Bathsheba,
Salome, Helen of Troy, Circe, Medea, Dido, Messalina, Francesca da Rimini, Lucrezia Borgia, Mary Stuart, Catherine the Great, Lola Montez, Thérèse Raquin, Anna Karenina, Marie du
Plessis, Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Aimée Semple McPherson, Mildred Pierce, Eva Peron, Betty Blue, Betty Boop, Jessica Rabbit. You were looking at the inspiration of literature from the
beginning of history, and she had never read a book. Try not being fascinated by that.
The second answer, the less obvious one, is the one worth expounding, because an awful lot of pious rhetoric has been lavished on the pretence that it had no substance. As many protean
personalities do, but to a degree made irresistible by her beauty and position, she had the gift of reflecting a man’s best self back to him. At one level it was part of her gift for
deception, and what
that
gift was like when it was working against you I hate to think. (It certainly worked against her: when she realized what her charm could do to disarm an editor, she
made the supreme mistake of believing that she could manage the press, as if a fire could be put out with selective squirts of petrol.) But at another level it was enchanting, because she
couldn’t have made it work with so many people unless she was genuinely receptive to the possibilities of life, having so many of its creative impulses within her own soul. There was always
an easy thousand words to be written – some of the name columnists on the Diana beat were paid for the words at a pound each – about the remarkable extent to which she was uneducated.
Few ever wrote about the remarkable extent to which she was educable. She must have had a natural feeling for words, for example, because by the time I knew her she had taught herself to speak with
verve and to the point. She had read, and continued to read, nothing except hocus-pocus, but apart from the occasional malapropism she was a pleasure to hear.
At her funeral service, the melody that best reflected her later tastes was the work of Verdi, not Elton John. She came a long way in her appreciation of music, and the best inference was that
this was because she was a born listener, just as she was a born dancer. It was often pointed out that she had no idea of how dedicated a real ballet dancer’s life has to be. I suspect that
she had a very good idea, and regretted that she had found out too late, or anyway had begun in the wrong place. (The old Irish joke whose punchline is ‘I wouldn’t start from
here’ applies exactly.) Deborah Bull’s marvellous writings are now with us to make clear what the life a real dancer has to lead is like, and incidentally they tell us about the sort of
background from which she has to emerge. It is rarely an aristocratic one. Diana’s upbringing could scarcely have been more inimical to any kind of concentrated effort. All the more
remarkable, then, that she became so appreciative of concentrated effort in the short years of her adulthood. It was one of the forces that combined to pull her apart. She couldn’t see a
doctor in action without wanting to be his nurse. She envied anyone with a vocation. You could call it bubble-headed dilettantism if you liked, but to assume that it was part of some sophisticated
pose was a failure of the imagination. For those bent on her destruction in print, it would have been more accurate and thus more useful to call her naïve. Though she had the con
artist’s deadly knack of assessing a stranger’s character from how he spoke and stood, she would take his role in life at his own estimation, and captivate him by being in awe of it. No
doubt there is something crazy about a woman who can’t meet a ditch-digger without letting him think that she harbours a frustrated dream of digging ditches. But ask the ditch-digger what
he
thinks. He thinks that she has flattered the life into him.
Of the harm she could do there is still no full telling, and I rather hope that we will never be told. But of the good that was in her there is not enough said. Writers shame themselves who
devote their valuable skills to calling her charitable impulse a grandstand play. It is true – this can never be said too often either – that the kind of charity work Prince Charles
does is a hundred times more demanding of time and discipline than anything his dizzy wife ever attempted. But with this talent as with any other, the Gods are erratic in how they dish it out, and
they gave Diana the talent to visit the helpless with an injection of the Holy Spirit. How much she did with that talent is open to question. I suppose her compassion for landmine victims would
have carried more conviction if she had cared less for the genius of Gianni Versace. But there should be no doubt that her damaged psyche carried unusual powers of sympathy. They couldn’t do
much to help her – turned inwards, pity was one of her most lethal enemies – but they could do wonders for other people, a category which surely included, at least in the early stages
of a liaison, those men who were granted the dubious blessing of her intimacy. In retrospect, redeeming features in Dodi Fayed are hard to find, but it is a safe bet that when he was near her he
was at his best. She probably saw something in him, and got him to agree. It was the key to her way with the men in her life, most of whom, we should remember, have honoured her memory by keeping
their counsel. The poor, damned James Hewitt was the exception, not the rule. (Even Will Carling
tried
to shut up, but found that the press pack was rather heavier, and faster on its feet,
than any other pack he had ever faced: he must have thought that Jonah Lomu had been cloned into a regiment.) She overestimated Hewitt as she overestimated everyone, a tropism typical in those who
lack self-esteem. Part of her downfall was that all her geese were swans. But Hewitt was unique in taking revenge on her for her credulity. From the men she cared most about we have heard nothing,
a silence whose full fortitude is hard to estimate from outside. Only Prince Charles, subject to overwhelming pressure, has said so much as a word, and all who wish him well can only hope that he
never feels bound to say another. The men who know most have said least, and the man who knows everything has said almost nothing, and that’s how it should be.
I never knew anything except the pleasure of her company, but perhaps I should say here why I was reluctant to talk even about that. I was and remain a part of the press, so there is no point in
my trying to high-hat the whole institution. I would like to think that writing thoughtful articles in my own house is a higher activity than sticking my foot through the door of someone
else’s, but in the long run investigative journalism is the foundation of a free press, and a free press is something I am for, out of political conviction. I just don’t believe that a
free press should be free to investigate the private lives of people who are in the limelight for any other reason except, through election or official appointment, their consent to public
accountability. The argument that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear was heard in Salem, and is always repudiated by its proponents at the moment when attention shifts to them. By
force of circumstances I had that much worked out long before I met the Princess of Wales. In the 1980s I wrote and presented a TV series called
Fame in the Twentieth Century
, and it
necessitated a lot of reading that didn’t show up in the final script. I was reading about the phenomenon of modern celebrity, and how it affected lives. It emerged, progressively and
inexorably throughout the century, that there was a paradox in the very nature of a free press. It was a free press that shielded the democratic societies from the murderous tyranny of the
totalitarian ones, but it steadily came to exercise a tyranny of its own, just as pervasive if much less violent. People became trapped by what was written about them, and they were never more
trapped than when they thought they were guiding the process of publicity by cooperating with it. The best they could do, by doing so, was to become riders on the storm.
So when I first lunched with Diana in a public restaurant, my first thought was for my own welfare. Already enjoying the questionable privilege of a small measure of celebrity of my own, I knew
the phone would start to ring that same afternoon, and I knew that anything I said would go straight into the database, to be quoted from in any context from then on, especially if the context was
unfavourable. From the minute I sat down I was already cast in the role of Eats With Princesses. For the sort of commentator for whom ‘antipodean’ is a long, hard, funny word, anything
I said on the subject would be grist to the mill. So for my own sake I resolved to keep my trap shut. But there was an additional element, and a much more important one. I was already appalled by
the sheer amount of what was being written about her, whatever its nature. Not all of it was nonsense, but even the sensible stuff was part of an avalanche. Silence might have been a small gesture,
but sometimes a small gesture is the only meaningful one you can make, especially when you are afraid. And I wasn’t just afraid of having my own small name attached to her big name, in the
way that superannuated Mafia button-men, their achievements forgotten, find themselves remembered for their connections with Frank Sinatra. I was afraid of the storm. I didn’t want to be part
of it. I was afraid of what it had already done to her, and of what it would do next.
The only significant thing I left out of the obituary was that I counselled her against going to America. When she raised the subject of how Jackie Kennedy had managed her later life, it
wasn’t hard to guess what was going on in the Royal head. I told her that Jackie Kennedy had, to a certain extent, been able to choose privacy; that the same choice would never be available
for a runaway Princess; and that she would need a private army, because the sidewalks of New York were very wide, and it was a long walk between the front door and the limousine. I all but told her
what was really on my mind, which was that if she went to the United States she would almost certainly be assassinated. To say so at the time would have sounded like paranoia. Alas, it sounds less
like that now. All I was wrong about was where the storm was taking her. It wasn’t to America, it was to Paris and the tunnel.
Anyway, the phone rang most days until her death. I suppose it would have rung less often since if I had kept to my rule and gone on saying nothing even when she died. The only excuse I can
plead is shock. My answering machine filled up with messages from every publication and television channel: some of the names I knew all too well. People whose attentions had helped drive her to
the wall were begging my help in decorating her coffin with their cheap wreaths. There were calls from Australia, from America, from Hong Kong. What it must have been like for those whose
acquaintance with her amounted to more than a few short hours, Christ only knows. Not to respond was easy. It has been just as easy since. But on that awful day after the night Diana died, a great
natural psychologist made it hard. Tina Brown called from Long Island and told me what she hoped I would do. When I said that I couldn’t possibly, she read my voice and asked what else I was
going to do for the next few days.
It was the right question. Like so many others, I had been surprised by my own wretchedness and needed distraction from it with a job of work. Much has been made since of how the country and the
world went mad in a self-regarding ecstasy, a populist frenzy that threatened the rule of reason. There is truth in that argument. The devastated Royal Family had a right to their seclusion.
So-called popular opinion had no business hauling them out of it, although it was my impression that it was the press, and not the people it presumed to speak for, who stormed the gates. There is
even something in the admonition that bigger tragedies happen every day. There is something, but not, I think, all that much. It is all too true that less illustrious victims are taken by the hour
in circumstances inconceivably more cruel, and that there have been times when much younger ones have been taken by the million. But anti-populist oracles seldom consider the possibility that the
people might already have known all that. Nor, if they knew all that, were they necessarily weeping at such a brutal reminder that sudden death, if it could come for her, could come for anyone, and
thus for them. To believe they were weeping solely for themselves, you have to believe they were all selfish. My own bet, based on my own experience, is that the much-derided masses felt the pain
of losing someone they loved.