by Frank Owen <body> <pre> A useful antidote to the lachrymose hysteria surrounding the death of the Princess of Wales is a chillingly prophetic book that came out last year called Dicing With Di, by two British paparazzi, Mark Saunders and Glenn Harvey. In a perfect illustration of the predatory nature of celebrity worship, Saunders and Harvey are described on the jacket as "Britain's most celebrated--and deadliest--paparazzi photographers. Like the big-game hunters of another age, these two are specialists. They photograph only members of Britain's royal family--especially Princess Diana.î In sharp contrast to the picture of Di as a saintly figure, Saunders and Harvey depict her as a royal fruitcake. (After all, this is a woman who allegedly made 300 nuisance phone calls to an alleged former lover, art dealer Oliver Hoare.) They nicknamed her "the Loon," and her hysterical outbursts on the street directed at the press became known as "Loon attacks." They portray a woman barely in control of her emotions, a walking contradiction. One minute, she's bitterly complaining about press intrusion, the next she's holding secret meetings with favored writers, or tipping off photographers when she takes her sons on outings to amusement parks, or attending a closed meeting with Red Cross officials with a camera crew in tow. That Diana actively courted fame, there can be little doubt. Her medium was, and remains, the camera. What the authors called her "instinctive desire for publicity" was well illustrated on the night that Prince Charles confessed to adultery on national television. Seizing the media moment, Diana turned up at a high-profile party modeling an exact replica of an outfit Charles's mistress Camilla Parker Bowles had previously worn, right down to the pearl choker. Surely she was aware that next morning's tabloids would feature pictures of herself and Camilla side by side. And the comparison would not be flattering to the horse-faced Bowles. The most shocking episode in the book is the time the Princess turned from hunted to hunter and attempted to ram the photographers' car during a high speed chase. "I could see Diana's face in the rearview mirror," Saunders writes. "She looked possessed. She was driving with only one hand, with the other gesturing wildly at me. Her car remained just millimeters from me....At about 120 mph, I lost her and managed to slip into the middle lane. Diana sped past, mouthing obscenities as she went." According to initial press reports, 120 mph was also the speed that Diana and Dodi were going when they hit the wall of the Paris tunnel. With hindsight, it's easy to see how this hunter got captured by the game. The sadomasochistic nature of celebrity worship is clearly shown in Dicing With Di. Much fan behavior and media coverage of celebrities is subconsciously or openly hostile toward stars. The love/hate relationship Di had with the press mirrors the love/hate relationship between fan and star. Paparazzi are really a cross between superfans and assassins. And as John Lennon figured out, the two are sometimes indistinguishable. British critics Fred and Judy Vermorel have filled two books with fantasies of fans, many of whom dream about seeing their idols maimed, or crippled, or dead. Celebrities are often threatened by fans. An academic study that examined the rumors of Paul McCartney's death that swept the world in 1969 concluded the base of this tall tale was "an eerie and embarrassed longing that the story be true." Celebrities bear some of the blame for fostering a system that promises what it can never deliver. Stars fill our heads with their images, and appear to us as intimate friends. But they make the same pledge to millions of people. Stars invite us to come close, and then retreat behind a wall of security. No wonder frustration builds, and love trips over hate, obsession into violence. To paraphrase Nietzsche: Without cruelty, there is no media feast. Much has been made in the last week of Princess Diana's good works on behalf of various causes --AIDS, homelessness, leprosy, land mines. Notwithstanding the fact that the rich and useless often turn to charity to give their lives meaning, one of the great myths of the late 20th century is that the association of celebrities with social problems provides some sort of solution. Call it Live Aid syndrome. This 1985 Wembley concert was attended by Charles and Diana, who was unofficially crowned there as our pop Princess. The funeral service last Saturday at Westminster Abbey looked a bit like a replay of Live Aid, what with Elton John performing his retooled version of "Candle in the Wind" and Live Aid veterans like Sting, George Michael, and Richard Branson in attendance. How fitting that the charity album planned to commemorate Diana would resemble a reissue of Live Aid. The Vermorels coined the phrase "consensus terrorism" to describe the evangelical mood at events like Live Aid, whereby goodwill is hijacked and the public conscripted in an aggressive campaign that allows no dissent. You'd have to be a real heartless bastard not to want to shelter the homeless or feed the hungry. And you'd have to be a really cold-blooded asshole not to subscribe to the dominant view that Di was a living saint. With her death, a cult has become a global religion that brooks no heresy. Thorny Throne An Inconvenient Woman by Linda Stasi Diana, Princess of Wales, was quickly becoming the world's most inconvenient woman-to her former husband and in-laws anyway. In fact, you could say she was a real royal pain in their collective rear. Not since Katherine of Aragon refused Henry VIII's fervent wish that she shut up and disappear so he could fool around has a wife caused so much trouble in the palace. Not since Wallis nailed Edward has sex caused the world's most dysfunctional family so much public grief. This time, though, the princess was the one holding the royal flush. In fact, Diana theoretically had the ability to bring down the monarchy simply by staying alive and holding tight as the world's most popular wronged woman. (Who after all wants to support a bunch of deadbeats with bad taste in mistresses, when there's a perfectly perfect princess available?) At the least, Diana the Dish could have prevented Charles the Boring from comfortably marrying Camilla ''the Rottweiler.'' Why? Because everybody loves a pretty face. And everybody in the world loved the prettiest face of them all-Diana's. With all that inbreeding, beauty was one commodity in incredibly short supply in Buckingham Palace before Diana's good-looking genes won out. Take Prince Charles, for example. Strip him of that Savile Row suit, put him in overalls, and he would look like he stepped right out of Deliverance. Diana, on the other hand, was not only gorgeous, but kind, and fun, and she gave the royals the one thing all their dough couldn't buy-incredibly handsome heirs. But most dangerous, not to mention distasteful, of all, to the royal family, at least, must have been Diana's relationship with that, that, merchant's son, Dodi Al Fayed. Why, the playboy boyfriend was practically another race, for God's sake! Did you honestly believe that the future king of England was going to be allowed to live (part of the time anyway) in the household of (yikes!) a Muslim! A Muslim whose uncle is the infamous arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi? Not in this lifetime. But sex has always been a killer for British kings. It started with Henry VIII, who so royally screwed everything up, no pun intended, that he had to create a whole new religion so he could get divorces and screw around without reporting to the Pope. If it weren't for his mistress, Anne Boleyn, there might never have been a Church of England. You'd figure after nearly 500 years of sex problems in the palace that Prince Charles should have learned something from history. Even in the 1500s, when kings had jobs other than showing up at the openings of supermarkets, commoners hated royal mistresses who knocked out the first wife. Charles-take note: The same commoners who stayed away in droves from Anne Boleyn's coronation flocked to her execution. But that was then, this is now, and a future king just can't chop off a princess's head when she has an affair or gets on his nerves. Look, even emotionless Charles was probably upset when his subjects got mad at him for wanting to become Camilla's ''tampon.'' But he must have been deeply depressed when they were even madder at him when Diana got caught in having an affair! In the end, the real problem with the inconvenient Diana was that while she could do no wrong in the eyes of the people, she could do no right in the eyes of her coldhearted husband. Now she's no longer a problem. What's still a problem, for me, anyway, is believing that a Muslim mogul's number-two security man got so tanked before driving his boss's son and Princess Diana that he spun out of control in one of the safest cars built today. But then again, sometimes even the most inconvenient woman dies conveniently. </pre> </body> </html>