The Fame Lunches Page 6
Fashions in therapy come and go, and the age of Prozac is unlikely to be receptive to a man whose emphasis was on psychosocial forces rather than on biological ones. The fluctuations of the zeitgeist, then, are partly to blame for the turn against Bettelheim and his colorful, time-consuming—not to mention costly—form of Freudianism. (The prescient Bettelheim saw the writing on the wall, noting in 1980 that “all is drug-related research and treatment and nothing longer than the ninety days the insurance pays for.”) But there was also the weaknesses of the man himself, beginning with his own crippling sense of fraudulence. In the end, no single explanation can account for a figure so deeply divided within himself as Bruno Bettelheim was. Immensely commanding, yet personally wounded to such an extent that he never believed his own press, fabricated or earned, he would always be split between the therapist who could intuitively respond to the angry child and the self-promoter who tried to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Bettelheim’s imperfections—in particular, the fact of his suicide—seem to have inspired a state of collective negative transference among those who once looked upon him as Father Knows Best. Finally, though, there is no minimizing his presence on the American scene. Many recriminations and counterstatements later (a third biography is in the works), it seems to me that he will be remembered, down the long curve of history, for his pioneering uses—rather than abuses—of power. As the world moves on to other agendas—to the cloning of sheep and the fine-tuning of neurotransmitters—the sort of dynamic and sustained treatment that Bettelheim advocated seems less and less likely to serve as a clinical model. And more’s the pity: he paid a supremely lucid form of attention to children who were once considered unreadable, and fought ferociously to bring them out of emotional exile and back into the world.
HUNTING DIANA
(PRINCESS DIANA)
2007
There are stories that grip our adult imaginations with the same unrelenting moral force that fairy tales have for young children; they take hold in that place in our brains where we are still unsealed, still open to a feeling of wide-eyed wonder at the vicissitudes of being human. Such collective narratives speak to abidingly primitive wishes and needs, providing vital lessons in the creation of a durable identity in a fearsome and unreasonable world.
The life and times—and, perhaps most significantly, the untimely end—of Princess Diana is one of those stories. Its sway over us goes beyond its particulars into that imaginative space wherein we dream dreams of ourselves writ large: locked in passionate embraces that last forever and embarked on grand adventures that never go awry. At its heart lies an essential mystery, which is the conundrum of personality: why someone is unavailingly the way he or she is, charismatic (Princess Diana) rather than stodgy (Prince Charles), say, or endearingly lovelorn (Di) rather than merely pathetic (Charles). It touches as well on the unpredictability of that unyielding element known as fate, which enters by the gate when we aren’t looking. Why her and him together, we wonder; why that pair of legs (hers) and why that pair of ears (his); why couldn’t he, why didn’t she; and again, why did he, how could she. Most of all, we wonder—as though they were our siblings or friends—why they didn’t think to ask our advice, even if it wasn’t ours to give.
The young woman at the center of this saga was, as one biographer described her, “a Gordian knot of contradictions: impossibly glamorous yet disarmingly self-effacing, bold yet riddled with self-doubt, worldly yet naive.” Diana called herself “thick as a plank,” and there have always been sniggering disbelievers who doubt that her brain ever stretched to accommodate anything other than the blandishments of pop psychology and the chicest, least politically aware sort of do-goodism. (These detractors are mostly of the smart-ass Brit variety, like Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. In his name-dropping memoir, Experience, Amis claims that Diana’s favorite poem was a piece of “harmonial Victorian rubbish,” when in fact she seems to have frequently dipped into Wordsworth and Yeats for inspiration. Hitchens, meanwhile, has ventured to call her a “bimbo” and make fun of her friendship with Mother Teresa.)
For others of us who looked on, however, it became clear soon enough that although she originally came across as a shopaholic lacking in book smarts (she didn’t attend university and was a fan of her step-grandmother Barbara Cartland’s dime-a-dozen romances), Diana was a person of considerable complexity equipped with outsize emotional intelligence and native wit, examples of which abound in any biography of her one happens to pick up. She described Charles’s love of hunting expeditions—a passion he passed on to his boys—as “the glorious Windsor pastime of killing things.” Similarly, showing more than a smidgen of self-awareness, she mocked her own mercurial character by warning her staff, “Stand by for a mood swing, boys.” And she could turn rapier mean when crossed; after she maneuvered the resignation of Charles’s trusted valet three months into their marriage, she dismissed the man with a withering rejoinder when he tried to discuss his future employment prospects: “Why don’t you read the weather? It takes only two minutes a day.”
As the tenth anniversary of her death approaches (she would have been forty-six had she lived), Dianamania has resurfaced with greater force than ever. This pandemic of affection for the vulnerable blond beauty with the spectacular figure and the showstopping violet-blue eyes has never entirely subsided, of course, as is evident by the appetite for conspiracy theories that continue to arise about her death. (Why did her driver take the more circuitous route from the Ritz hotel, one that snaked through an accident-prone tunnel? What about her eerily prescient description of her death—“My husband is planning an ‘accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury”—ten months before the crash?) In the most gothically detailed of these accounts, The Murder of Princess Diana, Noel Botham argues that Diana was a potent combination of globe-trotting humanitarian and mentally unstable ex-royal, who threatened both the powerful arms lobbies with her anti-land-mine crusade and the throne with her press cachet and crackpot romances. (A woman scorned is one thing; a princess scorned, it appears, is another. Paul Burrell, Diana’s doting butler, noted in his bestselling memoir, The Way We Were, that he saw his newly divorced “boss,” as he somewhat irritatingly calls Diana, “put a collection of china that bore the Prince of Wales feathers into a garbage bag, then smash it with a hammer.”) Although investigations by the French and British governments found no foul play, a documentary titled Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel ran on English television in June, and a full jury inquest into the accident will begin in October.
Such dark murmurings aside, this summer brings a boom in all things celebrating Diana: Her sons, William, twenty-five, and Harry, twenty-two, planned a star-studded concert for July in honor of her birthday and a memorial service in August. Her image is gracing magazine covers once again, and several new books will be weighing in, adding to the groaning shelf load of memoirs, anti-memoirs, hagiographic portraits, and exposés already in existence. Far and away the most serious of these offerings—and the most buzzed about—is the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s kaleidoscopic The Diana Chronicles. Superbly researched and artfully structured, the book is also compulsively readable, thanks in no small part to its cliff-hanging chapter endings. This in-depth examination of one Anglo blond icon by another Anglo blond (demi-)icon largely succeeds in elevating the narrative of “shy Di” into the nuanced stuff of Shakespearean tragedy rather than the bold-type headlines of tabloid fodder. That it does so despite its flaws—its occasionally hissy asides (on, say, Charles’s lackluster performance in the sack or Camilla’s nursery advice to her mother-deprived lover to “pretend I am a rocking horse”) and its somewhat wearying imputation of the importance of money to a woman worth about thirty-five million dollars when she died (Brown insists that what Diana was seeking as she entered her thirty-seventh year wasn’t love so much as a “guy with a Gulfstream”)—is a tribute to the author’s firm hold on her subject. It speaks as well to her engag
ement with the various subtexts of class snobbery, psychological damage (both Charles and Diana had bleak childhoods), and Machiavellian machinations that swirled around the unfolding drama.
As one of those caught up in the Diana saga from its heady beginnings—I wasn’t much older than she, which made it all the easier to project myself onto her tabula rasa—I remember exactly where I was when she got married in a blaze of televised glory. I was staying at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate New York, or, more precisely, squatting in an empty house nearby, equipped with a TV, that belonged to a friend of the late essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison—the only other inhabitant of the colony besides me remotely interested in watching the nuptials. The two of us looked on raptly as Lady Diana Spencer, a blushingly gawky and purportedly virginal—or, as Brown puts it in The Diana Chronicles, “plausibly intact”—girl of twenty was swept up in majestic, historical events and in the enormous twenty-five-foot train of her bridal gown. Brown, who was editor of Britain’s prestigious and smart-alecky Tatler magazine at the time and had been hired by the Today show as its “on-air royalty expert,” points out in her book that the Emanuels, the husband-and-wife team Diana chose to create “The Dress,” so miscalculated the size of the train that there wasn’t enough room to lay it out in the eighteenth-century glass coach that Diana rode in with her father, Earl Spencer. This oversight created a disastrous visual when the future Princess of Wales alighted. “The first glimpse,” Brown writes, “made it look like a bundle of old washing until the two designers leapt forward and unfurled it like a billowing, creamy flag.”
I recall with equally pointillistic detail where I was when the news broke that Diana had been in a violent car crash: at my parents’ beach house, enjoying a peaceful end-of-summer weekend. My seventeen-year-old daughter still remembers that I burst into tears upon hearing that she’d died. The astonishing outpouring of public grief that followed—which was condemned by Queen Elizabeth (or “Mama,” as her daughter-in-law incongruously called her) as an unseemly show of touchy-feely behavior in the film The Queen—didn’t come as a surprise to me. I too had begun to feel protective of Diana, who always seemed to be looking for a port in a storm, first seeking to cuddle up to the robotic, shut-down family she’d married into, and then looking for love in all the wrong places.
I met Tina Brown (who was my “boss” at The New Yorker for five years) for lunch on a sunny Friday afternoon in May to discuss The Diana Chronicles. In the hope of stirring up a storm cloud of interest, the book’s publishers had “embargoed” it, and Elle had to sign a confidentiality agreement before I received my bound manuscript. I raced through the mountain of pages the moment it arrived, propelled by the deftness with which the main plot, interspersed with absorbing digressions, was laid out.
Along the way to tracking Diana’s ascent, hollow triumph, rude fall, and gradual reincarnation as a figurehead in her own right, Brown fills us in on the intricacy of the palace rituals, the convolutions of the pedigreed mating game that led to the choice of Diana as a suitable consort and “breeder” for Charles, and the hitherto-undissected allure of Camilla. (“Hers is one of those direct, country-house personalities that specialize in instant candor.”) Brown gives a trenchant analysis of the fading aristocratic Sloane Ranger class from which Diana sprang: “Lady Diana Spencer came from the last batch of privileged British girls boarded out in agreeable, undemanding schools and allowed to leave qualified for nothing beyond the quest for a suitable husband … It’s not cool anymore for upper-class girls to be as directionless as Diana was in the 1970s.”
The book begins moments before the crash, with Diana emerging from the back of the Ritz in Paris wearing a “tight expression” of displeasure; the paparazzi, Brown notes, had stalked her with greater impunity after the divorce “transformed her from protected royal princess into free-floating global celebrity.” It circles back, almost five hundred pages later, to the aftermath of the crash, when Diana’s corpse lies waiting to be reclaimed under a sheet in a room at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. “Her eyes were closed,” Brown writes, “but her unblemished face was so beautiful. Just as in life, she had sustained injuries that showed nothing on the surface.” I’d finished reading the book early in the morning of the day Tina and I were to meet, reluctant to let it go, tears in my eyes.
Although Tina and I had bumped into each other during the years since she’d left The New Yorker, I was restruck upon seeing her by the aura of brisk, focused energy she exuded. She was wearing Chanel sunglasses and a leather jacket and had just returned from what she called a “Zen week” at the Golden Door spa. Newly adhering to the strict pre-book-tour diet she had been put on by one of the city’s “tough love” diet coaches (who, like everyone in New York, is partly known for being known, having successfully terrorized the already-thin publicist Peggy Siegal and several other of the chattering glitterati class into dropping pounds), Tina ordered carefully and picked judiciously at her food; in a mere two weeks she’d already lost eight pounds, she explained, and was intent on shedding twelve more.
As Tina and I caught up on our lives, I could see why she and Princess Diana had often been compared in the press, yoked together as two charismatic and profoundly flirtatious British products. (Brown adroitly captures Diana’s famous conquering look, her way of fetchingly “smiling under fluttery lashes,” which she apparently employed on her father while still a little girl riding around on a tricycle.) There are, of course, more differences than similarities, beginning with their intellectual assets and going on from there to their psychological profiles. Tina has an Oxford-trained, rapid-firing mind; she is capable of being intrigued by almost any subject if it is presented seductively enough. Diana, as Brown somewhat Waspishly reminds us, had “an aversion to books” and was drawn to the consolations offered by the healing arts and lowbrow troubadours such as Michael Jackson. Then, too, while Diana’s charms seemed to be directed equally at both sexes, I’d always found Tina’s warmth to be beamed primarily at men.
On a deeper level, Diana’s character was marked by traces of the tentativeness created in her by her largely unparented childhood. “Acutely attuned to the radar of disaster,” as Brown describes her, Diana had listened in on her parents’ shouting matches since the age of five from her hiding place behind the door of the drawing room at Park House in posh Norfolk. “During her marriage to Prince Charles,” Brown notes of this resilient habit, “she was always listening at doors, as she had as a child, seeking confirmation of the worst.” Park House, a gray stone mansion that had been leased to Diana’s father by his scheming mother-in-law, Lady Fermoy, happens to be a guesthouse on one of the Queen’s estates. (In the exhaustingly intertwined fashion of British blue bloods, Lady Fermoy also was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother and would eventually be one of the prime movers behind Diana’s marriage.) Diana’s mother, Frances Fermoy, from whom Diana inherited her looks, especially her mesmerizing eyes, “bolted” with another man from her resoundingly bad marriage to Johnnie Spencer when Diana was six, taking with her whatever gaiety had existed and losing custody of her four children to their father.
Tina, on the other hand, has the confident manner and feisty style of someone who was encouraged and loved in her youth. Despite her own Diana-like fascination with celebrities and skill at the media game (at which she pronounces Diana “the most artful practitioner”), there is an aspect of Brown that owes more to the British upper-class women of the prewar generation—whom she characterizes as having been “tough as old boots”—than to Diana’s troubled and very contemporary personality, which sought to find salvation in bromides of self-transformation and believed in the power of the heart over the mind. Sympathetic and nuanced as Brown’s account is, one can also detect an undertone of exasperation on her part with the insecurities of a young woman who inexplicably failed to realize the impact of her own allure on Charles, notwithstanding his attachment to (as it turns out) two mistresses: Lady “Kanga” Tryon and Camilla Parker Bowles.
“A more self-assured girl than Diana,” Brown writes, “might have perceived that it was she who held all the cards in this contest. She could have seen Camilla off if she had chosen wiles instead of tears, sexual artfulness instead of sexual jealousy, but sadly, she was too young to know how.” One might argue that she was not only too young but also made of different, more fragile material than either her biographer or her competition.
“She was never good,” Tina tells me, “with women who threatened her—unless they could offer her maternal advice.” As a waiter hovers, Tina and I avidly analyze Diana as if she were still alive, as though, indeed, she were a friend who might still be deciphered and rescued from her own destiny, if only she were less “thoroughbredish,” less “damaged.” “You’ve got to be incredibly tough to have that job,” Brown says. “You’ve got to have the hide of a pachyderm.” We go on to discuss her untreated postpartum depressions (“She was undermedicated,” Brown suggests. “She would have been fine on Lexapro”) and her “crazy oscillations,” the way she veered between “reckless courage” and an abiding sense of narcissistic injury. “When Charles pushed her,” Brown muses, “she read it as belittlement. She always ended up abject. We all know women like that,” she adds. “When it comes to men in their lives…” The sentence trails off. Brown has no reason to clarify any further because Diana is a recognizable type, one of those girls lost in a great yawning loneliness whom we think we understand from novels like Madame Bovary. Not to mention our own secret identification with them.