The Media's Princess Bride

Tomorrow will mark the tenth anniversary of the night the Princess of Wales died in a Paris car wreck while being pursued, as always, by photographers.

In my last years as an editor, Diana’s was the face that launched a thousand magazine covers, a Cinderella who rose to the height of celebrity after marrying Prince Not-So-Charming.

In less than a year, she transformed herself from a shy, somewhat chubby teaching assistant into the world’s most stylish woman, a never-ending feast for the cameras.

But it turned out to be more a Faustian bargain than a fairy tale. She did her part by giving birth to two heirs, but the price was a cold husband who preferred his former mistress, royal resentment of her popularity and constant sniping by the palace establishment.

Soon the couple was caught by cameras bickering on a ski slope, her cell calls were taped and made public, and finally after an unseemly royal divorce, she took up with the heir to the kingdom of Harrods department store.

Just before she died, People ran a cover story labeling Diana “the poster girl for Smart Princess, Dumb Choices” and characterizing Dodi Al Fayed as a “tomcat” and “a billionaire deadbeat.” Time ran a snippy item about the “fractured fairy-tale princess.” The Diana backlash was in full swing.

But as a cynic once said, in the media world death can be a great career move. The postmortem issue of People eulogized her “wisdom and strength” and announced a gift of $100,000 to the Princess Diana Fund for AIDS victims. Time memorialized her with two consecutive cover tributes. The magazines were best-sellers, of course.

Now once again there will be those glamorous images of her while two Princes mourn the mother they lost too soon, a sad reprise of the fairy tale that reflected no glory on all of us in late twentieth-century journalism.

Di and Buffy: Life Goes On

Mohamed Al Fayed is a grieving father and a businessman.

Ten years after the death of his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales, Al Fayed is still trying to prove they were killed under orders from Buckingham Palace by the British Secret Service with help from the C.I.A.

The lead item on Al Fayed’s web site reports his attendance at a court hearing to challenge the finding that the driver of his son’s limousine was drunk at the time of the accident.

Next to it is a report on the department store Harrods, with a photograph of Mr. Al Fayed, the Chairman, greeting Sarah Michelle Gellar arriving in a horse-drawn carriage to open the Summer Sale. The star of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Scooby Doo” was dressed in “a show-stoppingly sexy hot-pant suit by Jasmine di Milo, teamed with sky-high Louboutin heels.”

Grief is eternal, but life must go on.