Diana not only married into the British monarchy but was the offspring of a family, the Spencers, that is at least as old as the British royal family and considers itself in some ways to be rather grander. It is not rare in England to hear the Spencers' Englishness compared favorably with the "foreign" (German) background of the Windsors. The famous speech, given by Diana's younger brother, the Earl of Spencer, at her funeral in London, with its barely contained hostility toward his royal in-laws, moved many people at the time but was in fact an exercise of extraordinary hauteur.

So Diana had snob appeal to burn. But that alone would not have secured her popularity. Most of the people who worshipped her, who read every tidbit about her in the gossip press and hung up pictures of her in their rooms, were not social snobs. Like Princess Grace of Monaco, Diana was a celebrity royal. She was a movie star who never actually appeared in a movie; in a sense her whole life was a movie, a serial melodrama acted out in public, with every twist and turn of the plot reported to a world audience. Diana was astute enough to understand the power of television and the voracious British tabloid newspapers. And she consistently tried to use the mass media as a stage for projecting her image — as the wronged spouse, as the radiant society beauty, as the compassionate princess hugging AIDS patients and land-mine victims, and as the mourning princess crying at celebrity funerals.

However, like many celebrities before her, she found out that she couldn't turn the media on and off at will, as though they were a tap. They needed her to feed the public appetite for celebrity gossip, and she needed them for her public performance, but what she hadn't bargained for was that her melodrama ran on without breaks. Everything she said or did was fair copy. After deliberately making her private life public, she soon discovered there was nothing private left.

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