DIANA, SURROGATE PRINCESS

THERE'S ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING A LITTLE SORDID about the very concept of Princess Di. It's not just that she bats her eyes at us from every tabloid, over cover lines like "The Men Who Fight to Share Her Bed," or that she's been "Dibbs" and "Squidgy" to a succession of aristocratic hunks. It's not even her claustrophobic, body-centered life-style, divided as it is between colonic irrigations and workouts and the endless trying on of clothes. The problem with Di, and the root of the British royalty's entire crisis, is that the only honest description of her occupation would have to be "hired womb."

As the royal couple celebrated the third anniversary of their separation last week, it must have been painfully clear to even the most common of commoners that Diana wasn't selected for the princess job on the basis of intelligence or loyalty or wit. The qualifications were simple: she had to be a presentable Protestant from the upper class and a virgin. The last criterion has to do less with morality than with the purity of the product. She was, to put it crudely, enlisted as a breeder, charged with the job of transmitting the Windsor genes from Charles to his eventual replacements--"an heir and a spare," as some British delicately describe her sons, the little princelings.

Every member of a royal dynasty shares, to some extent, the same degrading destiny. It was Charles' great-great-great- grandmother, Queen Victoria, who famously advised a daughter to survive the act of love by closing her eyes and concentrating on the British Empire. Marriage in this crowd is a patriotic duty, not a pleasure; and the consort--Philip in the case of Elizabeth, Di in the case of Charles--has always been in a rather awkward spot. In Di's case, the indignity was compounded by the fact that Charles already had a woman for purposes of companionship and love. Camilla Parker Bowles was his real partner, Diana just a means of reproduction.

Not that it's easy to feel sorry for Di, since she's paid infinitely better than anyone else in the same line of work. A surrogate mother in the U.S. gets about $10,000 for the nine-month-long job of transforming some fellow's sperm into a viable infant--an amount Di could easily blow on cashmeres and facials in an afternoon. And while the surrogate mom gets shown to the door as soon as the baby's delivered, Di lingers on, posing for photographers and visiting hospices, at an allowance of up to $4,000 a week for clothing alone.

The odd thing, given her three sessions a week with a world-renowned feminist therapist, is that she doesn't seem to grasp how thoroughly dehumanizing the princess business really is. Her interview on bbc last month was full of husky-voiced self-pity and dewy gazes from a coquettishly down-tucked head. But there wasn't the slightest awareness that her problems go beyond an adulterous husband and an emotionally disabled mother-in-law. She even seems to think the reason Charles dislikes her is that she outshines him at what she calls their "work," meaning presumably the daily round of ribbon cuttings and charity dinners. But can't she see that her work is over, and was the moment the nanny whisked the babies from her arms?