One month A D D How can we make sense of the enormous outpouring of affection for the late Princess Diana? An Englishman takes stock
Bergonzi, Bernard
Bernard Bergonzi ONE MONTH A.D.D. (After Diana's death) With the passing of the years, I find the temptation I most have to resist is not lust or wealth or power, but cynicism. I had to struggle...
...he is a patently sincere man, but he is also very calculating...
...It then, I hope, is sober realism rather than cynicism to point out that her death and instant apotheosis saved her from this fate...
...But then there were calls for the beatification of Eva Peron after her death...
...But I think it will remain, albeit in the simpler style of the Scandinavian or Dutch or Spanish monarchies...
...I thought, too, of Eva Peron, and of the spectacle of her funeral in the movie Evita...
...I had to struggle hard during the extraordinary events in Britain that followed the death of Diana, Princess of Wales...
...my resistance to cynicism faltered, and I found the song from the soundtrack, "Oh what a circus, oh what a show" running through my head...
...All this was reported on television and there was a strange symbiosis, or closed loop, between the masses and the media, so that people when interviewed and asked what they were feeling, replied in phrases they had already heard on TV...
...It was as if the house across the street had suddenly collapsed, with lives lost...
...On the face of it, the mass of the people responded very differently, even weeping in the streets, or so the media reported...
...his tycoon father who owns Harrods and the Paris Ritz, is regarded as a malign figure on the fringes of British public life...
...the heroine dies in a car crash in Paris, together with her latest lover...
...The Queen and Prince Charles were reckoned to have responded very inadequately...
...Diana was active in supporting good causes, but so are many less-publicized figures, and I personally find it hard to think of someone who possessed 500 ball-gowns as a saint, though that is not to say that she isn't one...
...So many of them felt they knew Diana intimately, though all they knew were images and sound-bites and more or less scandalous stories from the press...
...A few people were able to resist it, expressing their dissent and distance from the dominant mood in occasional newspaper columns and letters from readers, and they were, I suspect, more numerous than the media wanted to admit...
...He is reckoned to have hit just the right note in his responses: The address to the people was heartfelt-the presentation of Diana as a "people's princess" went down well-but it had been discussed with his press secretary first...
...yes, I thought, this is a strong if predictable ending to a painful, but romantic story...
...Here we are brought up against the workings of the star system, and Diana had not long been dead before she was compared with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean...
...some belittling remarks actually appeared in the Sunday newspapers a few hours after her death...
...The BBC and the other networks have been prepared for years for the death of the Queen Mother, who is now well into her nineties, and newscasters have their black ties with them at all times...
...If she had, I think the union would have been as unpopular as that of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis in the United States...
...The question they (and I) asked was: How can people profess such intensities of feeling for someone they have never met...
...It was reported that Diana wanted to marry Dodi...
...Though I felt sadness at her death, it was of the limited, formal kind that is likely to arise when one hears that a woman in her thirties whom one has never met has died suddenly leaving behind two young sons...
...The death itself was, in the deepest sense, a truly shocking thing, the sudden disappearance of one of the most familiar features of the environment (some popular magazines had her face on the cover for almost every issue...
...However involved with media reactions, the extravagant public emotion seems to have been genuine...
...subsequent reactions have been that it was excessive, reminiscent of the public obsequies for the leaders of the former Soviet Union...
...Some of the most effusive journalistic tributes were prompted by guilt, for Diana had been getting a bad press just before she died (the indispensable satirical magazine Private Eye has published a revealing range of "before and after" comments...
...they were already in the press and could not be recalled...
...Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, came out of the tragedy very well...
...So when Diana died this well-rehearsed program moved into action...
...Again, I risk cynicism by saying that the Queen was probably caught up in the confused emotional state of someone whose personal enemy, whom she regards as having damaged everything she believes in, has died a sudden, violent death...
...It is this that makes him such a formidable politician, whose honeymoon with the British people is proving remarkably long-lived...
...One of the most curious and distasteful aspects of the aftermath was the linking of Diana and Mother Teresa, who died a few days later...
...The monarchy is much less popular than it once was, and republican sentiments are growing...
...God in his love and wisdom will have decided...
...Blair deflects cynicism...
...So, we hear, when the Queen Mother does die she will have a rather simpler send-off...
...both were seen as saints in their own way...
...Yet though I was shocked I was not particularly surprised...
...Mass hysteria" is a harsh phrase, but it seems appropriate...
...Thousands of mourners queued for hours to sign books of condolence, people milled round Buckingham Palace and other royal residences, and masses of flowers piled up outside public buildings in London and elsewhere...
...I didn't really understand it, and insofar as I did, I found it troubling...
...Bernard Bergonzi writes from England...
...In the fickle movements of public opinion, some people are down and others are up...
...Diana's mental stability was questioned and her affair with the Egyptian playboy Dodi Fayed was scathingly discussed...
Vol. 124 • October 1997 • No. 18
