Diana's star will keep shining

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Celebrities have died in car smashes before: Jayne Mansfield, James Dean, Grace Kelly. But an anonymous vox pop interviewee in the television coverage of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and their chauffeur in a car crash in Paris on Saturday night offered a more generous context. This, he said, is the most important event since the death of Marilyn Monroe.

"Diana's afterlife is only just starting," agreed columnist Suzanne Moore of London newspaper the Independent. "Forever frozen at the height of her beauty, Diana, like Marilyn, that other troubled goddess, will never die." Once more the media plays the easy game of creating icons, and airbrushes away the reality of the event.

There is also something deeply unpleasant about the way that Diana's death is portrayed as a tragedy, while the other people who died with her are treated as mere extras in her melodrama. They may be less immortal than she is but they are just as dead.

The endless gushing about the beauty and the sadness of it all also obscures the fact that Princess Diana, in the last few years of her life, actually figured out how to put her bizarre celebrity status to some use. Though it certainly took her a while.

"I'm as thick as a plank," the princess remarked 10 years ago, and she clearly believed that, whether it was true or not. She was, after all, raised in an aristocratic British subculture that preferred its women not to show more intelligence than their horses.

When the British royal family launched a hunt for 19-year-old British virgins from a good family (a scarce breed by the 1980s) to serve as child-bearer to Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, Diana did not even hear alarm bells. In a situation where most 19-year-olds would have fled screaming, Diana compliantly married a man 12 years her senior whose limited capacity for emotional engagement was already fully committed to somebody else.

We are all responsible for our own lives, however, and Princess Diana did not exercise due care. She was not very clever after the scale of her blunder became clear, either. Her escape attempts included bulimia, half-hearted suicide attempts and a five-year affair with a dim and greedy cavalry officer whose best line (delivered after he published a kiss-and-tell book in 1994) was: "What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I'm only good at two things, horses and sex."

Diana lived her adult life among narrow-minded, often nasty, people, always under the unblinking eye of the specialized media that feed off this sort of celebrity scandal. And right down to the end, she was addicted to the luxury and fame that came with her role.

On the day she died, the "people's princess" left a yacht in the Mediterranean and flew to Paris in a private jet. To do good? No, to have a good time (my parents would have called it a "dirty weekend") with the playboy son of a millionaire.

Fair enough. If we do not require lottery winners to give all their winnings away to the poor, then we should not demand it of people who accidentally become princesses. We have no right to impose different moral standards on them, either. All we can ask is that they sometimes use their wealth or fame for the public good.

Like many people who become addicted to fame, Diana had a symbiotic relationship with the media machine and a highly ambivalent attitude to it. Paparazzi are filth, and so are the editors who employ them, but depending on her mood and her agenda of the moment, she would either flee them or feed them.

So no moralizing about the way she lived, or the way she died. You pay your money and you take your chances. What is to her credit is that she figured out the system she lived in, and identified her own power within it, and then used it (occasionally) for purposes that went beyond her own personal interests.

She never acted entirely for altruistic reasons: the law of mixed motives always applies. Whether it was banning land mines or hugging AIDS carriers, her public support for good causes generally fitted into a strategy of public relations that also served her other interests -- especially her war with Charles and the royal family about his remarriage, her own status, and that of her sons.

The law of mixed motives applies to everybody: there are almost no wholly selfless actions. But there are less dangerous, more comfortable ways of currying public favor than making the media mob follow you to mine fields in Africa or the Balkans. The choices we make reflect our values, and toward (what she never suspected would be) the end of her life, Diana chose well.

More than 100 nations are meeting in Oslo this week to discuss a total ban on the production, possession or use of land mines anywhere in the world. It is a classic "outsider" operation: the idea was first promoted by the Canadian foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, and at first commanded little support even in his own department. It was firmly rejected by all the great powers.

But Diana picked the idea up and publicized it through high- profile visits to mine victims in Angola and Bosnia. It now stands a fair chance of winning the assent of everybody except the Chinese and the Russians at the final conference in Ottawa this December -- and Diana's media grand-standing has contributed as much to that result as the quiet diplomacy of Axworthy and many others.

We cannot take credit for our brains, our looks or our social standing, nor should we be judged by them. What counts is how we use the opportunities we have and, in the end, Diana used them well. It was not a worthless life, even if she must spend her "afterlife" being compared to Marilyn Monroe.