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But London's newspapers were only part of the journalistic fun house that Lady Diana Spencer wandered into so unconcernedly when she began her romance with Prince Charles and the rest of the world. Vast numbers of commoners, especially in countries that are safely republican, clearly are nostalgic monarchists, if only at the Cinderella level, and they like to read about royalty. Two magazines in Britain, Majesty and Monthly Royalty, and one in France, Point de Vue—Images du Monde, print stories about nothing else. Publisher Peter Shephard of Majesty, which is aimed at the fiercely royalist "granny market," said that his staid publication (1981 circ. 55,000) tried a mildly critical story on Princess Anne a few months ago, drew fire in quavering handwriting from irate readers and hastily returned to its usual reverence.
Until only a few years before Diana became a worldwide obsession, however, royal-watching was no more than a part-time, modestly profitable journalistic sideline, like writing about stamp collecting. Princess Margaret's doomed love affair in the mid-1950s with a divorced man, Group Captain Peter Townsend, and Grace Kelly's excessive wedding in 1956 were exceptions, early examples of royal-watching carried round the bend of lunacy, but each story eventually died a natural death after months of gorgeous blather.
Nothing of the sort is happening to the press frenzy surrounding the Princess of Wales, which shows no sign of dying either a natural death or one imposed by the exasperated Michael Shea. One reason may be that, at a time when television is creating no new personalities and movie actors labor to be anticelebrities, readers and feeders of the popular press in Europe and the U.S. are hungry for steady coverage of glittering personages. A succession of less than solemn stories has kept royals in the news: there was the pretty but too available Princess Caroline of Monaco and her succession of lounge lizards, The Netherlands' Prince Bernhard and his taste for Lockheed money, Princess Margaret and her unsuitable companions and, until two years ago, Prince Charles circulating among polo matches with an impressive succession of smashing young women.
Yet these are ordinary immortals, not superstars. Only Jackie Kennedy Onassis has attracted the kind of attention that now afflicts Diana. Some sort of strange myth-making or myth-breaking is going on, half real and instinctive, and half calculated and phony. Suzanne Lowry, a writer for London's Sunday Times, asks, "What is this endless fairytale we are all so avidly following, the press eagerly producing and the palace so concerned to censor, or at least edit? . . . What is a Princess? What is one for?. . . The best answer seems to be that a Princess is for looking at. Neither Diana, nor any other member of the royal family has much function when out of sight. Without press coverage, the royal family would be little more than rich, overdressed people in big houses."