Magic in the Daylight

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Charles, who had previously projected a kind of steady, Urquhart-plaid personality, seemed to pick up some more dash, as if he were beginning to realize rather belatedly what his sporting friends would happily have told him: that he had made a damned lucky catch.

Charles did not always appear to think so; not at first anyway. When he and Diana posed on the back terrace of Buckingham Palace on their engagement day, he acted as if he had made a wise choice, a becoming choice, but perhaps not a compelling one. "Are you in love?" asked a reporter. His fiancée beamed, blushed and said yes. The Prince's answer: "Whatever love means"—a remark of rather too much objectivity, hinting at even a touch of weariness.

"My impression was that they had scarcely spent very much time together," remarks Anthony Holden, whose biography of the couple, Their Royal Highnesses: The Prince and Princess of Wales, was published in England last month. "They hadn't spent as much time as any of us might have done with the person we were going to marry." Off on a five-week tour of Australia and New Zealand, Venezuela and the U.S., the Prince saw his Lady's face on newsstands and TV screens all around him and spoke to her frequently by phone. "It was the ultimate case of absence makes the heart grow fonder,' " insists Holden. "He was falling in love with her from a distance, and I think it is quite clear this thing is going to become a genuine love match."

If that is true, one wonders only what took the Prince so long. He was lagging far behind the media and the public, which wasted no time in elevating Lady Diana into a stellar attraction. Movie stars have become princesses before. Never, however, has a Princess looked so much like a movie star; certainly no Queen-to-be has ever done so much for a pair of blue jeans. Lady Diana's seemingly paradoxical quality of patrician funkiness has caught the spirit of a generation that fancies itself a little more romantic than those of the '70s and '60s and acts, at least outwardly, a good deal more conservatively. She is already widely imitated—the hair, the clothes, the ruffled collars —but never duplicated. Certainly the reason is that she is unique, as thousands of desperate Di-clones and all the merchants who minister to them have discovered.

By the early evening of the wedding day, London's D.H. Evans should have a copy of the bridal gown in its Oxford Street window. The knock-off is the work of Ellis Bridals, which turns out copies "whenever there is a royal wedding," according to Brenda Ellis, 33, granddaughter of the firm's founders. "We simply reproduce the dress so the public can have it. It's the same thing now."

Well, not quite. The Ellis cutters and sewers will be making use of new technology: a video-tape machine with a pause button. "When we get a good picture of Lady Di," Ellis says, "we can freeze it." Elk's reports that 200 of the copies have been ordered so far. "Every shop in England that has a royal window wants one."