Winter, as Charles Dickens knew, is the season of ghosts. The holidays bring memories of those who are no longer with us, reminders of those who cannot grace our tables — never more so than during the pandemic when the table is often a table set for just one.
TV, too, the great American unifier and divider, plays a role in this with sad but uplifting holiday fare and series that reopen old wounds while underscoring that the past is never really over, because it is part of the continuum that informs the present and the future.
“The Crown,” Netflix’s addictive-as-potato-chips series about the British royal family, is now in its fourth season, which brings us to the Diana years and a reappraisal of her, her legacy and what went so horribly wrong. Why does Diana, Princess of Wales, haunt us still? More to the point, why do we still haunt her — for it is the living who haunt the dead, not the other way around.
To be an icon is to offer a consistent physical look. If Diana’s fashion sense was mutable, as The New York Times’ fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman has noted — charting a trajectory from frilled and fringed sacrificial virgin to sleek, elegant woman in full — her presence was not. The shy but alluring downward tilt of the head and upward electric-blue gaze, the blond coif, the willowy figure bent low to embrace a child, the elderly, the sick, the disabled: These were the elements that quickly sketched Diana.
The last is the most important, for Diana’s physical beauty would be nothing without the emotional intelligence that Tina Brown describes in “The Diana Chronicles” (Doubleday, 2007) her acerbic, at times laugh-out-loud analysis of Diana and the tweedy royal circle to which she didn’t really belong despite having grown up on a country estate, Althorp House, in a family, the Spencers, that was older in British royal lineage than the Windsors.
What the dysfunctional Spencers suggested to Diana was that being useful to others was one way to try to be loved. (In “The Diana Chronicles,” she’s always jumping up to do dishes or ironing at friends’ houses.) It’s a fool’s errand — not the housework but the notion that being useful will lead to love — for love is a state of being, not doing. Nevertheless, the self-described “thick-as-a-plank” Diana came to realize that she could use her people skills to help others, becoming one of the first to touch someone who had AIDS, signaling a sea change in the response to that crisis.
But intellectual density cuts both way. People who are “thick as a plank” can also be sly and cunning. Brown presents a Diana — named for the protective but merciless Roman goddess of the hunt — who could freeze out those in the circle of her husband, Prince Charles, including his then mistress, now wife, the former Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall — and anyone else who threatened her self-protection. In that Jackie wannabe Diana really had more in common with another vulnerable blonde with a great gift for the camera, Marilyn Monroe. Like Marilyn, Diana was great children —with men, not so much. If Diana’s tactile, visual quality was perfect for the Oprah, MTV age, her championing of the powerless may be just what we need in a Trumpian time when they’ve been all but forgotten.
Brown, then the precocious editor of Tatler, gives us a succession of Diama men who were, however, each in his own way ambivalent about life with a goddess — forward-thinking but dithering, emotionally insecure and jealous Charles; dashing but opportunistic British cavalry officer James Hewitt; compassionate but limelight-loathing heart surgeon Hasnat Khan; and finally fun-loving but hapless playboy Dodi Fayed, who is described in the book as “sexually attentive, intellectually unthreatening and temporary.” Or as one woman tells Brown, “We’ve all had our Dodi Fayeds.”
How temporary would turn out to be his tragedy, Diana’s and, in a way, ours. Then it was easy to see her as a woman seeking love and self-determination, crushed by male power and indifference, felled by the press she also manipulated and a drunk driver. The truth is had she been wearing a seatbelt in the Paris tunnel, we’d be having a different conversation today.
But we’re not. And so in TV shows and movies like the upcoming “Spencer,” she’ll continue to speed away from us in our imaginations as we remember that we loved her so and wonder anew why that wasn’t enough.