An Utterly Alternative History for The People’s Princess
I’m watching the 4th season of ‘The Crown’ in two episode batches every Sunday night with my sister-friends, Alison and Angela. As Angela said when posed with the question of whether Diana Spenser should just have cancelled her wedding to the royal philanderer when she discovered his continuing deceit, “3500 guests! Pretty hard to pull out days before!!”
But what a spectacular act of protest directed at rolling royal bullshit if she had. She’d need a pretty air tight back up plan though — perhaps running away to join the circus, or to America to become a hippie artist feminist celebrity best friend of the Black Panthers or the Rolling Stones — like Maggie Trudeau.
That would have been spectacular. She could have done protest performance art in her tutu at alternative performance art spaces, like PS 122 in NYC, and marched in anti-war/anti-mines demonstrations in D.C. with Artists’ Call. She could have joined forces with Gloria Steinem and Bella Absug to promote the ERA, had a scandalous lesbian love affair with Angela Davis, got arrested for chaining herself to the White House fence, in her tutu, and satirized Phylis Schafly and ‘Real Women’ organization wearing pink and a pill box hat.
Or she could have gone through with the wedding, waited until she’d borne the two princes, then said ‘screw this,’ or British equivalent (considerably ruder), divorced her philandering royal husband, and THEN run away to the circus that was 80s America, having procured lavish custody, secret service protection, and financial allowances. She could have married Hilton Braithwhaite, the great African American photographer poet/philosopher, after Angela Davis divorced him, and had tons of little Brown kids to be half siblings to Harry and Crown Prince whatsisname.
She would never have met Dodi, and her ghost would never have had to suffer the indignity of having Dodi’s dad erect a tawdry posthumous shrine to their affair and tragic deaths in the basement of Harrod’s.
Alternatively, in a manner that would have been great for royal scandal theatre, she could have been a runaway bride. It would have been difficult to effect an escape from the altar in that dress though. She would have had to have hacked off the train with a razor and tossed in the face of those in the first row of the groom’s side, as she dashed back down the altar into the arms of … ?
Perhaps a rogue Navy helicopter pilot, who had promised to fly her to Marrakesh in return for one kiss, he having become besotted with the captive bride-to-be when he spotted her in the window of her lonely Buckingham Palace exile on the eve of the wedding, smuggling a missive to her via his cousin, an upstairs palace maid who was sympathetic to the future princess’ misery and very romantic at heart. In Marrakesh, she would be sheltered in the bosom of his fiercely loyal, rebellious Berber clan and smuggled away to their impregnable hidden tribal stronghold in the Atlas mountains, far beyond the reach of either diplomatic envoys or military attaches.
There she would eventually wed the young and handsome Navy pilot, who will have quit his military career in favour of assisting Diana in her mission to minister to the needs of the women and children of Africa, with generous donations from the socially conscious Rausing heiresses of the Tetrapack fortune, Lisbet and Merit. They would, of course, live happily ever after, and do so still, defeating world poverty and discrimination against the vulnerable of the planet, including the environment, one step at a time.
