The death of a celebrity, particularly a death as terrible and tragic as Diana’s, creates a puzzle: Millions of ordinary people–people who never in real life come within miles of the icon’s orbit–feel inexpressible grief, as if someone close to them had died.
The conjunction is crazy, but the grief is genuine. And that is what makes it so puzzling. How many of those who left that ocean of bouquets at Buckingham Palace had ever exchanged a word with Diana, or even a glance? In fact, they knew her only through her image in the tabloids and television, which are now despised and reviled by the very people whose every connection with Diana was created and sustained by the same tabloids and television.
How to account for this outpouring of grief? At one level, she seems the ultimate example–a pure laboratory culture–of the empty celebrity, famous for being famous. After all, John Kennedy, to whose death Diana’s has all too often been compared, led the Free World (and very nearly blew it up). John Lennon, another celebrity martyr, created a new music. Diana did . . . what?
She had beauty and grace and elegance. She was a stunning fashion plate with a few charitable causes and 43 covers of People Magazine. But what did she do? Historians of the future, noting that her funeral was the grandest in Britain since Winston Churchill’s in 1965, will wonder. Churchill saved Western civilization, at times almost single-handedly. And when he wasn’t doing that, he wrote two of the greatest historical works in the English language. How did Diana, beautiful and charming and little else, rise in popular consciousness to Churchillian proportions?
One answer is that in a media age you do not have to be Churchill to become myth. Beauty, charm, presence and shrewdness–the stuff of celebrity–will do. Hence Evita Peron. Hence Marilyn Monroe. Hence Elvis, who, 20 years after his death, is a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and the object of a reverence that approaches the religious. (Recent tabloid headline: “Elvis tomb found empty.”)
The movies have trained us in the extraordinary and historically unprecedented human experience of sharing a dream with a company of strangers. The worship of celebrity (more often than not, film stars) takes this communal mind-meld to the waking hours, to the level of mass daydream. In its most extreme manifestation–the feeling of a personal connection with public figures in fact utterly remote–celebrity worship is a kind of mass psychosis.
The enormous (and, in the media, at times monstrous) public display of grief over Diana is in part attributable to the usual confusions of celebrity worship. But only in part. Because Diana did actually do something–two things, in fact–without ever having set out to do them.
First, she stood up to the royals. They recruited her as a pliable ingenue, and she ended up besting them. She defied their rigidities and cruelties, and in the end, transcended the very royalty that had tried to dispose of her.
This is not, mind you, Natan Sharansky standing up to the KGB. But it is something. And it creates an identification with a reality–a mixture of fortitude and pluck–that is more than just infatuation with image. She stuck it to them. We admire those who stand up to the establishment, particularly those who do so against the odds and win.
Second, she suffered. Not extraordinarily, but paradigmatically. She was “the paradigm unhappy woman of today,” observes Simon Jenkins of The Times of London. “She was a spokeswoman for those with impossible husbands, worried about their appearance, wrestling with divorce, careers, children, trying to match impossible expectations.”
Which helps explain this otherwise curious phenomenon: The full flowering of her fame came not with her wedding but with her divorce. It was as the woman wronged, but who ultimately finds her way, that she made her mark. For all the shallowness of her tastes and companions, suffering gave her a depth and a seriousness. Her confusions and sorrows and successes gave a generation of women, also struggling with the burdens of liberation, a kind of standard-bearer.
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Again, this is not the stuff of Marlborough or Wellington. But a media age tends not to produce a Wellington. It tends to produce a Travolta, who, in one priceless post-crash TV moment, offered his fullest services–“I want to be there for them . . . and I mean that literally, 24 hours a day”–to the grieving Princes Charles, William and Harry.
At a time when media and celebrity turn a riot of self-reflecting mirrors on public events and public people, it is consoling to think that all is not insubstantiality. Diana was kindly and tough and vulnerable. These simple attributes merit genuine sorrow for a life cut short.