Suffering, Photogenically

The paparazzi have been getting a hammering, which seems a mite unfair. War photographers get paid to go on snapping as people die and pictures of the semistarved in Ethiopia regularly win prizes without people angrily protesting that the emaciated child would probably have preferred a glass of water and a biscuit rather than a Leica shoved in its face.

To deflect the anger of someone who called up on Sunday morning to shower abuse on journalists, I joked that maybe the real blame should be laid to the British Secret Service and the land mine manufacturers, whom Di had been denouncing in recent months. Those photos of Dodi and Di kissing had probably sealed her fate, with right-wing elements in the Secret Service determined that the royal family should not be further tainted by even remote association with an Egyptian playboy. To my astonishment, my telephone caller took this suggestion with extreme seriousness, showing that everyone prefers a crime to an accident.

The British wanted a love story, and it began well before turning into vulgar soap opera, as so many love stories do. Too bad a good fairy wasn’t on hand to warn young Diana about the future that fateful day when Prince Charming knocked on her door.

In the end, she only truly seemed to come into her own when in the company of people in worse shape than she. At the sight of a person with AIDS or a maimed child, she would glow, as though the proximity of imminent death and suffering lent a steadying hand, a comfort to her fraught existence. No wonder she took such an interest in minefields.

As she bent down to embrace a little boy, oblong handbag elegantly raised to shield her cleavage from the photographers, it was obvious that she did not mind the paparazzi, in fact craved their constant attention, but on terms she hoped to be hers. That’s how everyone in show business wants it. Paparazzi gave her comfort and meaning, as surely as did her encounters with the dying and the maimed.