Diana, Princess of Wales

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September 28, 2012 by longformaleveninggowns1

By 1980, Diana was considered a serious candidate for Princess of Wales. (Sarah had ruined her own chances by telling an interviewer, “I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether he was the dustman or the King of England.”) Buckingham Palace released news of the engagement on February 24, 1981. “I’m amazed that she’s been brave enough to take me on,” Charles said in their first TV interview; when the interviewer suggested that they must be in love, Diana said, “Of course.” Charles said, “Whatever ‘in love’ means.”

On December 9, 1992, Charles and Diana’s official separation was announced. In 1993, in the wake of his own taping scandal (inevitably referred to as Camillagate), the prince told the journalist Jonathan Dimbleby that he did not believe he had committed adultery; by December 1989, when his conversations with Parker Bowles took place, he had already considered his marriage over.

In 1977, Prince Charles, who was dating Diana’s sister Sarah, visited Althorp. Diana was there, too; “what a very jolly and amusing and attractive sixteen-year-old she was,” he recalled in their engagement interview. He invited both sisters to his thirtieth-birthday dance at Buckingham Palace, and, from then on, Diana and Charles met often at parties.

It seems unlikely that Diana’s memory will soon fade from the public mind. She would have turned 50 in July 2011. In April, Prince William (now H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge) married , whom he met when they were students at St. Andrews University in Scotland. The duke has insisted that the duchess, who is young, attractive, and a source of endless media fascination, be treated with respect and eased into her royal duties. He gave her the sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring his father had given his mother in 1981 because, he said, he wanted Diana to be kept “close to it all.”

In March 1997, photographed Diana for a Vanity Fair article promoting her charity clothing auction. “I wanted Diana dressed in eveningwear but in her mind to be wearing jeans,” he explained. “She looked so happy and fresh and sure of herself. It was just laughter and laughter and laughter and laughter and laughter.”

Diana’s parents divorced when she was six, and her father gained custody of the children, moving them to Althorp, the Spencer family seat in Norfolk. Diana (now Lady Diana Spencer; her father had become the eighth earl after his father’s death in 1975) left school at sixteen. After a brief course at a Swiss finishing school, she moved to London and worked as a nanny, a cleaner, and a kindergarten aide.

The following year, Diana gave an hourlong interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC1 news show Panorama. A major topic was her alleged affair with James Hewitt, her sons’ former riding instructor. When Bashir asked, “Were you unfaithful?,” Diana answered, “Yes, I was in love with him.”

Charles and Diana made an official visit to the United States in 1985, and Diana requested that John Travolta be invited to their White House state dinner. When the princess, in an off-the-shoulder midnight-blue Edelstein ball dress, danced with him, their photograph appeared everywhere. She had once again publicly overshadowed the prince.

The third daughter of Viscount and Viscountess Althorp—her father was the heir to the seventh Earl Spencer—the Hon. Diana Frances Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, at Park House on the queen’s estate at Sandringham. Lord Althorp had been an equerry to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II; Lady Althorp’s mother was a lady in waiting to the queen mother. The Spencer children—the Althorps’ son and heir, Charles (the queen’s godson), was born in May 1964—were frequent guests at Sandringham.

Diana made a few noteworthy fashion faux pas during the engagement. She was photographed in a long print skirt, not realizing that it was virtually transparent in bright light. When she and Charles attended the opera, her evening dress upstaged him with its cleavage-revealing plunge; it was also in black, a color the royal family reserves for mourning. British Vogue’s deputy editor, Anna Harvey, was called on to help her make more appropriate choices.

On July 29, 1981, 32-year-old Charles, Prince of Wales, married 20-year-old Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in a ceremony witnessed by 3,500 guests and about 750 million television viewers. In the five months since their engagement was announced, the bride had become an international media darling whose stardom would soon eclipse that of her husband, the future king of Great Britain.

As Princess of Wales, Diana was obligated to support her country’s fashion industry by wearing British designers, including Catherine Walker, Victor Edelstein, and David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who created her wedding gown—ivory taffeta and antique lace with a 25-foot train. (When Diana walked down the aisle at St. Paul’s, the gown was looking creased; but then, it had been stuffed into a glass coach.)

By their first anniversary, Charles and Diana were parents. Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales was born on June 21, 1982. The next year, Diana insisted on taking him along on a tour of Australia and New Zealand. On September 15, 1984, Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales—Harry—was born.

Prince Charles and Diana’s sisters brought her remains back from Paris via Royal Squadron. On September 6—after an unprecedented, international outpouring of grief for which the stunned royal family had been unprepared—the Princess of Wales’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey. Elton John sang “Candle in the Wind,” substituting “England’s rose” for “Norma Jean,” and Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, gave a fiery eulogy denouncing her treatment by her former in-laws.

“Do you think Mrs. Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage?” asked Bashir. “Well,” she replied, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” She added, “I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts . . . but I don’t see myself being queen of this country. I don’t think many people will want me to be queen. Actually, when I say many people I mean the establishment that I married into. . . .” The queen, who had not consented to the Panorama broadcast, was reportedly furious.

After the divorce Diana would no longer be Her Royal Highness. She would be, simply, Diana, Princess of Wales. Without state functions to attend (or the shorter Prince of Wales to stand next to), Diana could wear high heels and revamp her wardrobe. In June 1997, she auctioned off many evening dresses (including, for $225,000, the one in which she had danced with Travolta) and donated the proceeds, at Prince William’s suggestion, to AIDS and cancer charities. She had also become an anti–land mine activist, traveling to Bosnia and Angola for the Red Cross and the Landmine Survivors Network.

By the early 1990s, Charles’s long-standing affair with Camilla Parker Bowles was an open secret, but in August 1992 The Sun published taped 1989 phone conversations between Diana and a car dealer named James Gilbey. He called her Squidgy, and the ensuing scandal became known as Squidgygate.

That July, Diana began a relationship with Dodi al Fayed, whose father, Mohamed al Fayed, owned Harrods and the Paris Ritz. She and Dodi were at the Ritz on Saturday night, August 30, 1997; when they left, he ordered their driver to speed up to elude paparazzi. The car crashed in the Seine Tunnel. Dodi and the driver died at the accident scene, but Diana died in a nearby hospital at 4:15 a.m. on August 31.