Princess Diana, Tab Hunter, and Me
In 1997, when news came of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, I was sitting in the chair of a beauty shop getting my hair dyed. An arriving patron walked through the door breathlessly and announced, “I just heard on the news that Diana got killed in a car crash in Paris.” She didn’t have to say which Diana; the single name was enough. The room erupted in shocked gasps and horror, as if a friend had died. I, too, was shocked and horrified, but not to the extent of everyone else. I thought, without the nerve to say, “But she’s not real.” To me, her death was like that of a character in a story, of an image on a television screen. I had read how she touched people and also found her appealing, but she did not seem like a person. Clearly, the other patrons saw her as real as someone they had just had dinner with.
I have often been mystified by this fascination with celebrities. In fact, I may be the only person who has never seen the Kardashians on television, but only on tabloid and magazine covers at grocery store check-outs. I am clueless about their appeal. This lack of interest goes back a long way, to when I was in eighth grade and riding the school bus. With our hormones newly turned on, we girls used to read movie magazines and giggle on the way to school. I could giggle with the best of them for a little while, especially about the gorgeous Tab Hunter, but then got tired of it. I thought it all a little sad, in fact, knowing as I did that Tab Hunter was never going to take me out on a date, even if I had been allowed to go. I wanted a real, gorgeous boy to take me out on a real date.
Yet now I find myself watching, even binging, on season four of The Crown, on Netflix. The talented Emma Corrin brings Diana to life in a way that newsreels and television clips of her activities never did at the time. Her inner life was never evident, at least not to me. As interpreted in “The Crown,” however, Diana is a complex human being, full of contradictions, alive. She even becomes more than real, archetypically real, like the fairy-tales of the Princess locked in the tower, or Cinderella abused by a wicked step-mother, or Little Red Riding Hood sent out into the dangerous woods. She is trapped in the maw of the royal family, who are determined that Charles marry and start producing an heir and a spare, and trapped, as well, by the Spencer family, who are looking after their own interests. She is the young innocent caught up in the net of corruption and her own fairy-tale illusions. At an immature eighteen, what girl would not want to marry a prince? Probably me, too.
The genius of “The Crown” is to show Diana not only as an archetype but also as a real teenage girl, quickly disillusioned but unable to escape, and then as a real woman caught in a miserable marriage, with her husband attached to another woman. The series shows all the players caught up in a system larger than themselves, required to keep the monarchy going at great cost to their deepest feelings. There is something of Greek tragedy, and superb theatre, in the role that all the characters, even the celebrity and monarchy-besotted public, are fated to play in a chain of events that can only end badly.
So now I join the rest of the world in fascination with Diana. But I can let the current Tab Hunters and the self-promoting Kardashians remain as celebrity images, flat and unreal.
