Mother. Activist. Lightning rod for all our personal and political discontent. Tabula rasa on which we project our fantasies. Princess. Born July 1, 1961 in Norfolk, England. Died September 23, 2024 in New London, England, of diabetes, aged 63.
For many of her waning coterie of fans, the release of Trials and Truffles, known as Diana's "comeback album" even though she had not previously recorded any songs, was the moment when the Princess jumped the shark. Rammed the beanpole. Epically failed. EltonJohn-Otron1,236,748's piano and backup vocals and Bernie Taupin's lush orchestration couldn't cover up the fact that she had a thin voice and a variably certain grasp of vocal harmonics.
This was after she had ballooned to 350 pounds, so you would have thought her voice would have deepened, arising as it did out of that cavernous chest. But, no, you would have been wrong.
Personally, I thought Trials and Truffles was a brilliant attempt at personal redefinition by a woman whose grotesquely demeaning public image needed the kind of makeover that couldn't be accomplished by a reality television show. The fact that her singing was…idiosyncratic just made the whole thing more poignant. Or, some combination of sadness and chutzpah implied by the word "poignant."
Fifteen years and two sons into her story-book romance with Frog Charles, their marriage turned out to be a sham (without a wow), and Diana and Charles were divorced. Diana, known as the People's Princess because any of the people could own her action figure for just $49.99, was actually the sympathetic figure in the divorce; it was Prince Charles who came off as distant, unemotional and, well, to be honest, a bit of a putz.
A year later, Diana was in a car accident with her lover, millionaire playboy Dodi "Bruce" Fayed. He died instantly; she received multiple fractures, including damage to her spinal cord that would cause her pain for the rest of her life, but she survived.
They say the drugs she took to combat the pain were to blame for her weight issue. I say that there was no "issue" to the "weight issue:" Diana was better off as a porker. At 78 pounds, she represented all that was wrong with a system where women were rewarded for having waists in negative numbers; at 350 pounds, she was much more representative of the people who adored her.
They also say that the drugs were responsible for the worst decisions that she made after the accident. Saying, "But, you know what the darkies are like," in a BBC interview where she was supposed to be talking about crop rotation certainly did not help her reputation. That I can buy.
Then there was the time she made a Public Service Announcement telling people that they should not panic and work with our alien overlords for a smooth transition to alien rule. Most of her surviving fans abandoned her at this point, although telling people how futile resistance was was, at the time, a credible political position.
The Christmas special, where Diana sang "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" with a chorus of aliens in tripods singing backup behind her was, to be sure, a bad move. Still, we all thought human civilization was doomed; I doubt anybody in her position would have done any differently.
In any case, the microbes did their work, our alien overlords were vanquished and society was rebuilt, so, despite the deaths of over a billion people, the story did have a happy ending. For humanity, if not for Diana.
Of course, after civilization returned with the reconstitution of tabloid newspapers, the rumours that Diana had had an affair with one of the aliens began to surface. As ugly as the rumours were, the very public knowledge that she had had affairs with such people as painter Edgar Degas, actor Ian McKellan and comedian Christian Finnegan made the rumours seem credible.
After you've slept with a comedian, there are no depths to which people won't believe you can sink.
If Diana, Princess of Wales had never lived, Tina Brown would have had to invent her. I don't know what that means, either, but I appreciate its profundity. Some people say that she would have been better off dying in the car crash with Dodi Fayed. However, in being herself she showed us pieces of ourselves that by themselves would not have had such an important impact on society itself, and we must always love her for that.
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is the author of 27 books, including No Logo, Seriously, Dude, Enough With the Logos and For Christ's Sake, I'm Not a Brand! She remembers The People's Princess with fondness.