Articoli correlati a Diana: The Last Year
The best-selling biographer and author of Decline and Fall of the House of Windsor chronicles the pain, promise, and joy of the last year in the tragically short life of Diana, Princess of Wales. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
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L'autore:
Donald Spoto is the author of fifteen books. Among the most famous are his biographies of Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, and Ingrid Bergman, as well as The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, which won the Edgar Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year in 1984. His The Decline and Fall of the House of Windsor is a best-selling history of the Royal Family from Victoria to Diana. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.
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It would take the pity of God to get to the bottom of things.
-Enid Bagnold, The Chalk Garden
September 1996
With their divorce final by the end of August 1996, Charles and Diana were free to pursue their own lives and intimacies more openly, whereas before they had to exercise caution.
Even if he had been inclined to indifference about his own publicity, the newspaper reports of September 1 would have startled the Prince. A national survey reported that 54 percent of Britons said Charles must abdicate his claim to the throne if he were to marry Camilla Parker Bowles; 77 percent believed Charles lacked sufficient public respect to be an efficient king; and 79 percent said flatly they would not accept Camilla as his queen. Contrariwise, people were overwhelmingly sympathetic to Diana, who had been mistreated by the Windsor clan from day one and was now legally separated from them. But to his great surprise, Charles was enthusiastically mobbed by cheering crowds in Germany. After speaking at a summer engineering institute about the links between ecology and architecture, Charles stood on a balcony and waved to the smiling students below. "He's in very good spirits," one of his staff told the German press. "He goes down very well in Germany, but we certainly didn't expect this."
As summer turned to Autumn, Diana kept a low profile. She canceled a portion of a hectic speaking schedule drawn up for the season, preferring instead to have quiet evenings with a few friends and to bring her boys from school to Kensington Place for weekends of movies and picnics. But she was not isolated from the pain of others. At precisely this time, Diana began the habit of frequently slipping out of Kennsington Palace late at night and arriving unannounced a few minutes later at the Brompton Hospital. There in the deepest quiet of the night, she astonished the nurses by asking them to bring her to the loneliest and sickest patients, who must often have thought they were hallucinating when they opened their eyes to see the Princess of Wales sitting quietly at the bedside. Adele McCaffrey, who was among the staff there, recalled the many visits Diana made without fanfare.
This sort of thing simply was not done by members of the Royal Family, who always appeared according to carefully orchestrated and scripted panoply. Diana was turning up not only at ballets and school openings but also, unheralded, in AIDS wards and cancer clinics, where she hugged babies and embraced adults.
And to her rounds she brought a refreshing sense of humor. Jonathan Grimshaw, at the Terrence Higgins Trust, recalled Diana's lack of royal protocol. Approaching the door of an AIDS hospice via the pebbled driveway, she had caught an annoying stone in her shoe. "The first thing she did inside," said Grimshaw, "was to pull the stone out of her shoe, hand it over with a smile and say, 'I think this belongs to you.' We had been terribly nervous, but she broke the ice immediately."
Her friends now were not the old landed gentry or the titled, mustached bores she knew as a child. She was drawing near to all those in need. "Nothing gives me greater joy than to try to help the most vulnerable members of society," she said a few days before her death. "It's my one real goal in life--like a destiny. Whoever is in distress and calls me--I'll run at once, wherever they may be."
It would be easy, in these mean spirited times, to cast a critical, suspicious eye on activities and words like these, especially from a beautiful and desirable woman who lived in a cocooned world of luxury and abundance, who constructed a social world entirely according to her own tastes and who never knew any material deprivation. However, cynicism is out of order precisely because, since 1993, most of her attention went into direct contact with the people benefiting from her favorite charities--not merely board meetings, dinners and fashion shows--and because she troubled herself to visit the most unfortunate and shunned members of the modern world, wherever they may be.
Diana went, especially in the latter part of her life, where very few people wanted to go. It may be fashionable to loan one's name to a respectable charity dinner, but it was quite another matter to embrace African babies covered with AIDS wounds and Indian patients with leprous sores; to cradle children with terminal cancer and then to maintain contact with their grieving parents; to send handwritten notes to families shattered by sorrow at home and afar; to condemn openly the senseless border wars defended by politicians as "matters too complicated for the Princess to understand." Such an enormous and impressive network of concerns places her on the level of a real missionary, not the doyenne of paper foundations.
As for her fame, she was ruthlessly on target: "Always being in the public eye gives me a special responsibility--specifically, to use photo opportunities to send a message, to sensitize the world to an important cause or to defend certain values. People ask if I am an ambassador or a minister without portfolio. I prefer to define my role as that of a messenger."
If Diana was serving only the cause of her own publicity, she chose a remarkably ineffective means to achieve that. She knew only too well that real sacrifice, translating good intentions into hard work, is often maligned for the simple reason that people are made uncomfortable by being challenged. Not everyone has the time, the forum, the strength or the gift to devote to such extravagant good works, but everyone has the opportunity and the mandate to do something: that was what she wanted to communicate. Fund-raising dinners and charity fashion shows were fine as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough for her.
There were perhaps two main, ardent desires motivating Diana: she wanted a glamorous and exciting life, but she also wished to transcend it by a deeper commitment to causes and things that really matter. Here she is, photographed with Gianni Versace at his autumn fashion show; and there she is, filmed with Mother Teresa in one of the poorest sections of New York. Diana is the link between those two worlds--between merely temporal values and the eternal concerns. She had one beautifully attired foot in the world of glamour (the glitter that mirrors self-love) and the other sensibly shod foot firmly planted in the world of unconditional compassion (which reflects divine love). When she died, she was working out the perennial battle for ascendancy that wages every soul.
Real goodness of spirit, for perhaps every human being, lies not in achieving what the medieval mystics called heroic sanctity; it lies in acknowledging that there is always conflict, that one is always doing spiritual battle. The recognition that this is so--that one is always at work, never fully achieved--takes courage, one of many admirable qualities Diana possessed in abundance.
This is why it is foolish to ask whether she performed good deeds out of undiluted altruism or for her own emotional benefit--as if anyone could ever act from entirely pure motives. " Only God is love right through", as Thomas Moore famously said. The rest of us do what we can with our mixed reasons, trying, when we can, to bend selfishness into benevolence.
By September 1996, Diana's charity work had become a genuinely spiritual endeavor, as if by attending the fear and pain others endured she could deal more bravely with her own. You could say she was doing the royals one better, for it was in her role as the Princess of Wales that the family first moved her into the stream of their official good works. Little did they imagine how she would take to the tasks, affecting for good the institution that had rejected her, which was, ironically, the institution to whose fealty her sons were destined.
"You might say of her," commented the respected Daily Telegraph columnist Lord Deeds during the last year of Diana's life, "that she lost a husband and a position and is looking for a serious role. She remains in my mind, extremely important because she is a very big influence in the life of Prince William, about whom she thinks a great deal, of whom she's very proud, and of whom she wants to make something very worthwhile. She wants to set an example to her sons--her older son in particular--which may produce a more sympathetic person. I think compassion is what she's trying to bring to her son's life." Diana did not, she made clear before and behind the scenes, wish William and Harry raised in the same frigid and authoritarian tradition that had bled so much of the humanity from their father's family. Several hundred years ago, civil war might have attended her style, let alone her late substance.
One striking example of Diana's empathy was evident that September when she attended the funeral of a student she had met at the Brompton Hospital--Twenty-seven year old named Yannis Kaliviotis, who had suffered from cystic fibrosis and was brought home to Greece for burial. Diana traveled with her friend Suzy Kassem (also a hospital visitor) to the island of Evia, where she was deeply moved by the devotion of the boy's family, for they would not allow the international press access to the church, nor would they permit photographs of them with there famous visitor.
She was grateful for what she learned about true religious dedication, Diana told Hillary Rodham Clinton at a White House breakfast that same month, within days of the Greek sojourn. Diana had agreed to attend a fund-raiser for breast cancer research, and she would not let exhaustion and a patch of the blues prevent her. "From where I sit," Diana said in her remarks at the dinner that evening, "I sense that the real fight against breast cancer has just begun. That is why I was so happy to accept this invitation from Kay (Graham) to share this evening with you." She then read a short verse that had special m...
-Enid Bagnold, The Chalk Garden
September 1996
With their divorce final by the end of August 1996, Charles and Diana were free to pursue their own lives and intimacies more openly, whereas before they had to exercise caution.
Even if he had been inclined to indifference about his own publicity, the newspaper reports of September 1 would have startled the Prince. A national survey reported that 54 percent of Britons said Charles must abdicate his claim to the throne if he were to marry Camilla Parker Bowles; 77 percent believed Charles lacked sufficient public respect to be an efficient king; and 79 percent said flatly they would not accept Camilla as his queen. Contrariwise, people were overwhelmingly sympathetic to Diana, who had been mistreated by the Windsor clan from day one and was now legally separated from them. But to his great surprise, Charles was enthusiastically mobbed by cheering crowds in Germany. After speaking at a summer engineering institute about the links between ecology and architecture, Charles stood on a balcony and waved to the smiling students below. "He's in very good spirits," one of his staff told the German press. "He goes down very well in Germany, but we certainly didn't expect this."
As summer turned to Autumn, Diana kept a low profile. She canceled a portion of a hectic speaking schedule drawn up for the season, preferring instead to have quiet evenings with a few friends and to bring her boys from school to Kensington Place for weekends of movies and picnics. But she was not isolated from the pain of others. At precisely this time, Diana began the habit of frequently slipping out of Kennsington Palace late at night and arriving unannounced a few minutes later at the Brompton Hospital. There in the deepest quiet of the night, she astonished the nurses by asking them to bring her to the loneliest and sickest patients, who must often have thought they were hallucinating when they opened their eyes to see the Princess of Wales sitting quietly at the bedside. Adele McCaffrey, who was among the staff there, recalled the many visits Diana made without fanfare.
This sort of thing simply was not done by members of the Royal Family, who always appeared according to carefully orchestrated and scripted panoply. Diana was turning up not only at ballets and school openings but also, unheralded, in AIDS wards and cancer clinics, where she hugged babies and embraced adults.
And to her rounds she brought a refreshing sense of humor. Jonathan Grimshaw, at the Terrence Higgins Trust, recalled Diana's lack of royal protocol. Approaching the door of an AIDS hospice via the pebbled driveway, she had caught an annoying stone in her shoe. "The first thing she did inside," said Grimshaw, "was to pull the stone out of her shoe, hand it over with a smile and say, 'I think this belongs to you.' We had been terribly nervous, but she broke the ice immediately."
Her friends now were not the old landed gentry or the titled, mustached bores she knew as a child. She was drawing near to all those in need. "Nothing gives me greater joy than to try to help the most vulnerable members of society," she said a few days before her death. "It's my one real goal in life--like a destiny. Whoever is in distress and calls me--I'll run at once, wherever they may be."
It would be easy, in these mean spirited times, to cast a critical, suspicious eye on activities and words like these, especially from a beautiful and desirable woman who lived in a cocooned world of luxury and abundance, who constructed a social world entirely according to her own tastes and who never knew any material deprivation. However, cynicism is out of order precisely because, since 1993, most of her attention went into direct contact with the people benefiting from her favorite charities--not merely board meetings, dinners and fashion shows--and because she troubled herself to visit the most unfortunate and shunned members of the modern world, wherever they may be.
Diana went, especially in the latter part of her life, where very few people wanted to go. It may be fashionable to loan one's name to a respectable charity dinner, but it was quite another matter to embrace African babies covered with AIDS wounds and Indian patients with leprous sores; to cradle children with terminal cancer and then to maintain contact with their grieving parents; to send handwritten notes to families shattered by sorrow at home and afar; to condemn openly the senseless border wars defended by politicians as "matters too complicated for the Princess to understand." Such an enormous and impressive network of concerns places her on the level of a real missionary, not the doyenne of paper foundations.
As for her fame, she was ruthlessly on target: "Always being in the public eye gives me a special responsibility--specifically, to use photo opportunities to send a message, to sensitize the world to an important cause or to defend certain values. People ask if I am an ambassador or a minister without portfolio. I prefer to define my role as that of a messenger."
If Diana was serving only the cause of her own publicity, she chose a remarkably ineffective means to achieve that. She knew only too well that real sacrifice, translating good intentions into hard work, is often maligned for the simple reason that people are made uncomfortable by being challenged. Not everyone has the time, the forum, the strength or the gift to devote to such extravagant good works, but everyone has the opportunity and the mandate to do something: that was what she wanted to communicate. Fund-raising dinners and charity fashion shows were fine as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough for her.
There were perhaps two main, ardent desires motivating Diana: she wanted a glamorous and exciting life, but she also wished to transcend it by a deeper commitment to causes and things that really matter. Here she is, photographed with Gianni Versace at his autumn fashion show; and there she is, filmed with Mother Teresa in one of the poorest sections of New York. Diana is the link between those two worlds--between merely temporal values and the eternal concerns. She had one beautifully attired foot in the world of glamour (the glitter that mirrors self-love) and the other sensibly shod foot firmly planted in the world of unconditional compassion (which reflects divine love). When she died, she was working out the perennial battle for ascendancy that wages every soul.
Real goodness of spirit, for perhaps every human being, lies not in achieving what the medieval mystics called heroic sanctity; it lies in acknowledging that there is always conflict, that one is always doing spiritual battle. The recognition that this is so--that one is always at work, never fully achieved--takes courage, one of many admirable qualities Diana possessed in abundance.
This is why it is foolish to ask whether she performed good deeds out of undiluted altruism or for her own emotional benefit--as if anyone could ever act from entirely pure motives. " Only God is love right through", as Thomas Moore famously said. The rest of us do what we can with our mixed reasons, trying, when we can, to bend selfishness into benevolence.
By September 1996, Diana's charity work had become a genuinely spiritual endeavor, as if by attending the fear and pain others endured she could deal more bravely with her own. You could say she was doing the royals one better, for it was in her role as the Princess of Wales that the family first moved her into the stream of their official good works. Little did they imagine how she would take to the tasks, affecting for good the institution that had rejected her, which was, ironically, the institution to whose fealty her sons were destined.
"You might say of her," commented the respected Daily Telegraph columnist Lord Deeds during the last year of Diana's life, "that she lost a husband and a position and is looking for a serious role. She remains in my mind, extremely important because she is a very big influence in the life of Prince William, about whom she thinks a great deal, of whom she's very proud, and of whom she wants to make something very worthwhile. She wants to set an example to her sons--her older son in particular--which may produce a more sympathetic person. I think compassion is what she's trying to bring to her son's life." Diana did not, she made clear before and behind the scenes, wish William and Harry raised in the same frigid and authoritarian tradition that had bled so much of the humanity from their father's family. Several hundred years ago, civil war might have attended her style, let alone her late substance.
One striking example of Diana's empathy was evident that September when she attended the funeral of a student she had met at the Brompton Hospital--Twenty-seven year old named Yannis Kaliviotis, who had suffered from cystic fibrosis and was brought home to Greece for burial. Diana traveled with her friend Suzy Kassem (also a hospital visitor) to the island of Evia, where she was deeply moved by the devotion of the boy's family, for they would not allow the international press access to the church, nor would they permit photographs of them with there famous visitor.
She was grateful for what she learned about true religious dedication, Diana told Hillary Rodham Clinton at a White House breakfast that same month, within days of the Greek sojourn. Diana had agreed to attend a fund-raiser for breast cancer research, and she would not let exhaustion and a patch of the blues prevent her. "From where I sit," Diana said in her remarks at the dinner that evening, "I sense that the real fight against breast cancer has just begun. That is why I was so happy to accept this invitation from Kay (Graham) to share this evening with you." She then read a short verse that had special m...
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- EditoreThree Rivers Pr
- Data di pubblicazione1998
- ISBN 10 0609803883
- ISBN 13 9780609803882
- RilegaturaPaperback
- Numero di pagine220
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ISBN 13: 9780609803882
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