Dying For The Age Of Diana

SHE DIED FOR A BLURRY PICTURE, A pointless snap from a speeding motor-cycle that might have appeared on an inside spread of Hello! or Paris Match or some other glossy of no consequence. It is unfair to the real Diana Spencer, by all accounts a nice person who used her fame well, that her death so symbolizes the emptiness of celebrity worship, the false faith of the end of the 20th century. Dodging tabloid photographers, she was doing her bit not just to preserve some privacy but to hold back forces that she helped unleash--forces of media intrusion that will now be subjected to an unprecedented back-lash. In a twisted way, she died in the line of duty, not to country but to the age she came to represent.

Historians are likely to judge that Diana's reign--and reign she did--owed its brilliance to the tranquillity of the times. With no global wars or cataclysm, no Hitlers or Churchills to dominate the public realm, we could turn our full attention to diversions of gossip and fantasy. We now routinely view image and spectacle as large with meaning, with old-fashioned substance suddenly the boring trifle.

The irony is that with the end of her short life, Diana may well achieve a political goal more substantial than that of all but a few politicians. The shock of her death is being likened to the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Clearly, the analogy seems overdrawn, their forever-young influences on popular culture notwithstanding. Diana wasn't president, and her death leaves no creative vacuum like that of an Elvis Presley or John Lennon. But just as Kennedy's memorial was the Civil Rights Act, Diana's could be ratification of a treaty banning land mines, not just in Britain (where her focus on this issue achieved results before her death) but in the United States, where skeptical senators may now have to contend with a new public groundswell. This could yet yield for her a reputation as a first-rank humanitarian as well as immortal icon of style.

If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, Lady Di launched at least a thousand covers, and hundreds of millions of newspaper and magazine sales. In the 16 years since her marriage she became not only the most famous woman in the world, but the only personality who consistently sold big in the global marketplace. While paparazzi are not a new phenomenon, Diana-as-prey took the game to a new level. Instead of three or four photographers trailing a celebrity, it could, in her case, be 30 or 40, each hoping for that six-figure shot. This created a strange and perhaps emblematic protocol of coverage: the president of France can stroll down the Champs-ElysEes undisturbed; a divorced ex-royal couldn't leave a restaurant without a high-speed chase.

Diana came to understand that the tabloids were simultaneously the bane of her existence and the source of her strength. In recent years, she not only developed working relationships with tabloid editors but learned to exploit publicity for her cause, be it skewering Charles or raising money for charity. One reason for her popularity was that the public essentially shared her splurge-and-purge attitude toward celebrity news. Readers buy it and bemoan it without fully confronting the contradictions. They want to inspect the clay feet of their heroes--then cry for the head of the sculptors.

Will this global hypocrisy market still work as it always has? In the short run, only a foolish publication would pay for gory pictures of the accident. To do so would risk a boycott. The more difficult question is whether Diana's death might change the tabloid culture permanently. In recent years, with global news proliferating, photographers have gone from being a minor annoyance that came with the territory of fame to being a major source of anxiety for public figures. As their private loathing of the press boils over publicly, it will likely find a ready audience among millions already fed up with the news media--any news medium. The distinction between tabloids and so-called respectable news organizations will be difficult to uphold in the recriminations that lie ahead, and for good reason. If there had been no accident and the motorcycle paparazzi in the Paris tunnel had obtained a good shot of Di and Dodi kissing, most of the world's newspapers would have tsked-tsked over the price paid for first rights to the shot--then published it themselves.