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D i a n a :
The anniversary of Princess Di's death brings yet another deluge of books seeking to make hay on the most covered event of all time.
"My God, what's happened?" Purportedly, these were the last words of Diana, Princess of Wales, when French medics in Paris finally got around to cutting her free from the car wreck that killed her on Aug. 31, 1997. The information comes from "Xavier G.," a fireman on the scene, and is reported with appropriate breathlessness by Christopher Andersen in his palace-rattling new book, "The Day Diana Died." All other last words are bogus, Andersen insists. You can forget about Diana entrusting the care of her children at the last minute to her sister Sarah, a story put forward by Mohammed Al-Fayed, the father of Diana's Egyptian boyfriend, Dodi, who also died that night and whose jeans, according to Andersen, were ripped open in the crash, "exposing his genitals." Forget, too, about Diana confiding to an ambulance worker that she was pregnant with Dodi's child. Andersen has the real poop, or so he says, access to witnesses, "royal watchers" and "confidential police files." The most sensational revelation in Andersen's book concerns not Diana, but her former mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, who supposedly phoned the British embassy in Paris when she heard about the accident and demanded to know "if there were any royal jewels among Diana's effects." "The Queen! The Queen!" the British consul general is alleged to have "blurted" to a nurse at Pitiè-Salpêtrière hospital, where Diana, too late, was taken for treatment. The information comes from the nurse, of course, not the consul: "Madame, the Queen is worried about the jewelry. We must find the jewelry, quickly! The Queen wants to know, 'Where are the jewels?'" Buckingham Palace has denounced the story as a "complete fantasy," along with everything else in Andersen's opus, adding that the royal family will be treating the book "with the contempt it deserves" as the anniversary of Diana's death approaches. Alas for the queen, there is nothing she can do to prevent Andersen or anyone from saying what he wants as the second wave of "Dianamania" crashes on all our heads like a giant tsunami, in a torrent of new books, documentaries, retrospectives and "investigations" designed to cash in on the collective grief that gripped the world at Diana's death. For the last year, the royal family has effectively been on probation, closely watched for any sign of callousness or indifference toward the People's Princess and sentenced to the task of displaying their emotions in public if they want to keep their jobs. (Prince Charles, in particular, scored major points this summer when he was photographed kissing Prince William goodbye as they left on separate flights for a holiday in Greece, demonstrating to the nation, as the Irish Times observed, "that at least one member of the House of Windsor has learned to hug.") The fact that little is actually happening in England to mark Diana's passing -- a garden here, a school prize there, a privately organized walk for charity -- is of no concern to the money men. Diana's funeral last September attracted the largest television audience in history, some 2.5 billion people, while Durrants Press Agency, which keeps track of newspapers and magazines around the world, reckons that "no other subject has ever received as much coverage as Diana's death and its aftermath." So it's tant pis for the royals if they don't want their dirty linen exposed anew. Starting this week, and for days after, every broadcast network and cable channel known to man will be airing tributes to Diana, hanging out "live" in London and Paris and reporting about -- what? Are the men in the pubs still weeping in their stout? Are the women who collect Diana dolls getting ready to fling themselves in the Seine? The royal family will be marking the anniversary privately at Balmoral. The Spencer family will do the same at Althorp, Diana's ancestral home, where she is buried and where a museum was recently opened in her honor. The only "news" in all this is that Diana's sons, William and Harry, will be with their father, not the Spencers, when the Black Day dawns. Even the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which channels millions of dollars to Diana's favorite charities, has no formal plans for the anniversary. The press is thus reduced to filing reports on a commemoration entirely of its own making, along with the rueful news that there is not the slightest evidence to support any of the "Di and Dodi" conspiracy theories that keep crazies awake on the Internet. In fact, there seems to be a movement in England toward "letting Diana rest," as Sir Elton John put it when asked what he planned to do on Aug. 31. (Answer: Nothing.) Recently, a pair of Sunday school teachers in England's West Midlands shocked the nation and their charges by telling them that "Diana is in hell," condemned to eternal damnation for her "lack of repentance" and "un-Christian lifestyle." The Archbishop of York has called on Britons to stop "wallowing" in their emotions, while the Archbishop of Canterbury, York's immediate superior, has said it's all right to remember Diana so long as you don't start worshipping her as a graven image -- a considerable feat in a country where her face stares out from every shop window on books, magazines, postcards, stamps, medallions, mugs and tea-towels. At least two movies about Diana's life are currently in the works, along with a musical version of her story, inevitably titled "Queen of Hearts" and ostensibly headed for Broadway. "What if he still loves her? What if it's all a sham?" Diana sings on her wedding day, gazing at Prince Charles' mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Camilla warbles back: "I'll show him I can wait, steadfast and true. I'll be mistress of his heart, though my blood isn't blue." A Diana "Death Tour" offered by a Paris hotel has been denounced as "unfeeling" -- for $25 you can ride from the Ritz Hotel through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel and thence to Pitiè-Salpêtrière; for an extra $67, you can do it in a black Mercedes -- but it's dry as dust in the hard news department, and the press reports for want of anything better that Diana is distantly related by marriage to -- Monica Lewinsky. "If nothing else," says New York genealogist Jon Speller, who tracked both ladies' charts, "this proves that it truly is a small world after all. They are two people from very different backgrounds who came to prominence in different ways, yet they share a connection." No wonder Christopher Andersen has created such a furor with "The Day Diana Died." It's the only Diana book on the market with a plausible claim to fresh information. Of the others -- and there have been dozens -- there's hardly one that anyone without a Diana obsession would actually care to read. It's a maxim among publishers that anyone who buys one royal book will buy them all, which is the only explanation for the current deluge of titles: "Diana: A Commemorative Biography," "Diana: Princess of Hearts," "Diana: The Lonely Princess Paperback" and so on. Most of these are gooey, whitewashed portraits aimed at what used to be called shopgirls, although Lady Colin Campbell, that dubious "royal insider," has weighed in with a warts-and-all biography, "The Real Diana," claiming that Diana had an abortion at one time or another and noting that Buckingham Palace hasn't seen fit to denounce her allegations. Two welcome additions to the groaning shelves are Michael Levine's "The Princess and the Package," which examines Diana's relations with the media, and the media's with her; and "Requiem," edited by Brian MacArthur, a collection of essays and personal reminiscences of Diana by everyone from Hillary Rodham Clinton and Simon Schama to Jan Morris and Tina Brown. But the cream of the crop is "Diana: Portrait of a Princess," a gorgeous, 224-page coffee-table book by royal photographer Jayne Fincher, which Simon & Schuster is marketing at the absurdly low price of $35. In more than 500 full-color photographs, "75% never before seen," Fincher chronicles Diana's life from the "Shy Di" days of the early 1980s to the moment she left Westminster Abbey on the final trip to Althorp. This is Diana as she was and always will be in the only realm that matters: sentiment and memory. Let the anchors make fools of themselves on the banks of the Seine. Let the former friends and former butlers say what they like about the princess they knew. Nothing can touch Diana now. She is permanent, melded forever with her own cherished image -- vivid, hopeful, laughing, caring and beautiful beyond belief. Better get used to it, folks: That's all she wrote. There's nothing else to report.
Peter Kurth lives in Burlington, Vt. He is a regular contributor to Salon.
Diana's unquiet death Salon's coverage of the princess's death.
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