Originally posted by Elise,LadyofLancaster@Oct 23rd, 2003 - 2:59 pm
Diana, Princess of America?
NEW YORK (AP) -- She was a princess, yes -- the perfectly wrapped package of British royalty, complete with tiara, shining eyes and an all-too-photogenic smile.
But the United States found other, very U.S. reasons to watch, if not adore, Diana. Here was a woman who battled an eating disorder, attempted suicide, stole jet-set kisses and finally divorced her prince and became a single mother.
The things that so piqued British traditionalists made Diana's life resonate on the other side of the Atlantic, where foible so often augments halo and fairy-tale lives so often melt into dysfunction.
"We knew in this country that the Cinderella story was no longer supposed to be true," said Shari Roberts, a Penn State University assistant professor who studies how her countrymen perceive celebrity.
"Then we saw her. She was a princess for the post-feminist generation."
In the United States, the "People's Princess" made a lasting impression. Disappointed by latter-day Kennedys, left without vicarious royal glitter since Princess Grace, many looked to Diana as their princess by proxy.
"It's like we've lost one of our own political figures," said Joni Van Vliet, 18, of Bend, Oregon.
From the early years when they imitated her hairdo by the thousands, U.S. women watched Diana closely as the shy, big-eyed 20-year-old married Prince Charles. They watched her grow into a poised socialite, then a wilful activist who hugged AIDS patients and denounced landmines. When she visited the United States, they flocked around her.
"Not since Jackie O had someone come along who was accessible, had the common touch and married a prince," said Carol Wallace, managing editor of People Magazine.
"I think Americans are always captivated by how the other half lives," she said.
"And the unravelling was fascinating, too. It made her even more relevant to Americans."
British royalty, of course, has fascinated the United States from the revolution-era days of George III through Edward VIII's 1936 abdication to marry U.S. divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson.
And when actress and Philadelphia socialite Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956, the United States won a stake in royalty that it lost when she died in a 1982 automobile accident. And of course, there were the Kennedys, Jackie and Jack, the royalty the United States so wanted to crown.
The obsession has continued. Diana's gowns were auctioned for charity in June in New York City. And just last week, hundreds of U.S. women entered the "Dress to Di For" sweepstakes -- a cable-television contest to win a $40,000 black silk gown worn by Diana during a 1992 visit to India.
"When Americans try to come up with metaphors for explaining ultimate celebrity, we keep coming up with royalty," said Richard Gid Powers, who runs the American Studies graduate program at the City University of New York.
"We invent Kennedys and Elvis Presleys and kings of pop and kings of soul," he said.
"It's one of those things that you can try to give up but there's about 10,000 years of momentum to consider."
Diana had U.S. ties as well: A great-grandmother was born in New York in 1857. Her distant cousins, said Boston genealogist Gary Roberts, who has traced her ancestry, include presidents John Adams and Franklin Roosevelt, actors Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and writers Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"A piece of her was definitely American," Roberts said.
"It reinforced our special relationship with her."