You're Wrong About - Princess Diana Part 5: The Crash

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

“You can be a hot mess express and still leave the world better than you found it.” In the final episode of our series, we talk about Diana’s untimely death and the everlasting conspiracy theories surrounding it. Digressions include RPGs, Madonna and Tickle Me Elmo. This episode contains spoilers for the movie “The Queen.” Here's the photos and clips we talked about in this episode: https://rottenindenmark.org/2020/11/09/princess-diana-part-5/Support us: http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420Where else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

They just feel that she has stolen their job and is better at the thing that they're supposed to be best at, and she's not even from here. Welcome to You're Wrong About, where every story has to come to an end. Awww. You're already putting us in, like, an elegiac mood for this one. God, I've been saying that word elegiac in my head, and I have genuinely no idea which one of us is right. Well, we know that I am perfect at pronouncing things. That's true. I think history tells us.

It's probably you. Yeah. I am Michael Hobbs. I am a reporter for Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic. And if you want to support the show and hear cute bonus episodes, you can go to patreon.com. Or perhaps you are cute enough already.

Yes. And you don't need to do any of those things, and we support that also. And today, we are denowing our Princess Diana series. Yeah. I'm bummed. I know. I'm kind of bummed, too. We've been doing this for a while.

I know. And it's also adorable that we thought it was going to be frivolous at first. I didn't think that. You thought that. I know. I meant me, but I said we, because I wanted to make you part of my little conspiracy, but it's not true. Thank you. This is a story about a family where people push old ladies down the stairs, which is

pretty universal. You know what I think? I think it's frivolous and not frivolous at the same time. And I think that's one of the reasons why people are engaging with it, especially now. Like it's a complicated, difficult time. It's nice to consume a story where people are behaving in ways that are recognizably human, and yet are wearing beautiful, expensive clothes while they do so. So I think we just explained soap operas as a phenomenon.

That's nice. And Greek myths. I also think that all of us are frivolous and non-frivolous. I think all of us have frivolous quote unquote frivolous interests and quote unquote serious interests. Yes. The division of stories into frivolous and important is very silly. All of us right now are Amy living through the Civil War, wondering if she will be kissed

before she dies. Oh yeah. One of the things that perhaps we are prone to a mannequin about ourselves is that in important historic times, we would like be unhindered by our day-to-day human woes and foibles. And I think this is a time for Americans to certainly realize if we haven't yet that like that's not true. In this fascist apocalyptic epidemic, we're still defined by being lonely and horny and

wanting macaroni and baked beans on toast. But I mean, all of this goes back to something I've actually been thinking about a lot this week. I remember reading about a French trilogy of films years ago. Each movie in the trilogy was a different genre, a romantic comedy and then a suspense thriller and then a relationship drama. And all three of the films had the same characters. I mean, in all of our lives, we are in different genre stories.

And I think it's really noticeable in this story because the first episode of the series is kind of a romantic comedy. There's kind of like a comedy of manners thing. You know, she's going to the opera with her grandma and this weird guy with ears and it's awkward. It's kind of a funny story at first. Yeah, there's a little bit of a Julius Stiles movie in there. Yes.

And then the middle two episodes are sort of like this Noah Bombach movie of just broken ass people being mean to each other. Yes. And then this episode ends up being basically a true crime story. She is now really the archetypal victim of a true crime narrative, right? She's this hot white lady and this terrible thing happens to her. And then there are years of people talking about her with her as a sort of tangential character, kind of like a Laura Palmer type of figure.

She's also like Laura Palmer and that she's someone who we all collectively killed. Oh. I'm now getting into my first real memories of Princess Diana, which is that I was vaguely aware of her right before she died, like in 1996. Then when she died, what I remembered was just this endless, just amazing, astounding outpouring of public grief. I remember it as before 9-11, it was kind of our generations where were you when you heard JFK got shot.

That's true. It was just a massive deal. I was trying to watch Rugrats at the time. Do you want to catch us up to where we left her? Yeah. She has finally gotten divorced from Prince Charles. She had just ended a relationship with a doctor who she had been seeing for a couple of years. Well, I'd basically kind of gotten him to break up with her by being photographed in the company

of another gentleman named Dodie Elfayed. Yes. And so she was seeing him apparently in the last month of her life, which was August 1997. Yes. She is killed on August 31, 1997. So we also talked last week about another confusing thing, which is that she announced that she was resigning from public life. Yes, exactly.

Like she was just trying to have a more chill existence. Trying to spend more time with EastEnders. But so I'm about to send you the first photo of this episode. Okay, I'm ready. And as usual, we are going to put all these in a blog post and link it in the description under this episode. Wow. She looks great.

Right. Don't you think she looks like Natasha Richardson? Oh, yeah, a little bit. Right? Especially the gams. Yeah. She has a big ass, looks like a diamond necklace, a sparkly blue dress and shimmery tights, and also baby blue shoes that have also kind of a sheen to them.

She's just like very sparkly. This is the opposite of the mom jeans look. She's like full glam here. I don't know. I would actually say it's a continuation of the mom jeans look because when mom jeans goes out, she wants to be a big sparkle. She's also doing some championship clutching here because none of her clothes, of course, have pockets.

Yes. In like every photo you ever see of her, she's always holding something in her hand. Yeah. Well, she can't get a purse because that's the queen's thing. Yes. So she has to have a clutch. So where is this? This is where we are beginning our story.

Okay. It is June 3rd of 1997. So this is her arriving at a performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Ballet. This is where she bumps into Mohamed Al Fayed, who is the owner of the Herod's department store. She has known him for a while. He's basically her father's age, and Mohamed Al Fayed and her father have been buddies for a while.

He also, for years now, has been organizing late night after the store closes shopping excursions for Diana at Herod's because she can't just like go there and shop like a normal person. Okay. Can you explain what Herod's is for people who don't know? It's okay. I have a beef. I have like a 20 year long standing beef with Herod's because when I lived in London,

I only went there once and they made me take my backpack off. It's just a super-duper-duper posh department store, and I guess wearing a backpack is un-posh or something, but they make you carry around your backpack like some sort of chump the entire time you're walking around there. So I was in there for like 15 minutes and I couldn't afford anything anyway, so I left. That's ridiculous because the point, okay, because I have not been, but isn't the thing with them that they're fancy and they have everything, right? Are they like the Neiman Marcus of England?

It's basically the aristocracy supply store. Interesting. So he owns the place. They have known each other for years. It's becoming kind of a joke between them that every summer he will invite her on holiday with him and his family. So it'll be like, oh, we're renovating this castle in Scotland and we're all going to go up there for three weeks.

You should take the kids and come with us. She never says yes to these invitations, but it's just kind of an inside joke between them like, oh, are you going to invite me to go this summer? He's actually a fascinating guy in that he grew up in a extremely modest family. His mother was a public school teacher in Egypt and he's now, I believe, more than a billionaire or at least a hundred millionaire. And for our purposes, there's really two things that we need to know about Muhammad al-Fayed. The first is that he's fabulously wealthy.

He's kind of one of those rich people that everybody knows that he's rich, but no one quite knows specifically what he does. Like the Kennedys. He started out doing like import-export stuff in Egypt. And then somehow he rode the huge boom in Dubai. Four years, Muhammad al-Fayed has basically been like a middleman, kind of a fixer between rich business interests in London and rich business interests in the Middle East. He also starts early in the 90s, starts doing property development.

So he develops, importantly, the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which is where Diana will eventually die. So the second thing to know is that he fucking hates the British establishment. From the very earliest days, he is convinced that everyone in upper-class British life is Islamophobic and is deliberately locking him out of opportunities and sort of the upper crust social set. Wow, sounds like a paranoid guy. I know.

I mean, later on, a lot of the conspiracy theories around Diana's death will be like the royal family's Islamophobic. And it's like, yes, like that is not, like that belief is not conspiratorial at all. I'm shocked, shocked that there is a gambling at this establishment. So his main evidence for this is that starting in 1995, the British government will not grant him citizenship and they won't tell him why. Bitches. For their part, the British establishment basically says that the dude is sketchy.

Is he sketchy? Oh yeah. Okay. Actually is extremely sketchy. I mean, someone who makes their money and import, export, you know. Yes. There's a scandal in 1994 where he's paying MPs to ask questions of the prime minister in parliament, which is like something you're not supposed to do.

He's giving other MPs free rooms at the Ritz. Oh my God. I think his main beef with the British establishment is that, you know what, I'm sketchy, but Richard Branson is sketchy. Prince Charles is sketchy. Name me a billionaire who is not fucking sketchy. Yeah. Is that not justice?

This also, I think importantly, is what attracts him to Diana because Diana is a member of the establishment, obviously, but she's also an outsider to the establishment. She's also just very nice and lovely and they chat. Like she'll stop by his office in Harrods when she goes shopping and they'll chat for an hour. I think that he has sort of strategic motives for getting closer to her, but I think he also just likes her as a person too. So I don't want to make him seem like this cartoon supervillain.

He seems like a nice guy with a nice boat who's made his money in a few unethical ways, which describes a lot of people. So back at Swan Lake, she has bumped into Mohammed Al-Fayed and sort of in this jokey way, she's like, ah, where are you going on holiday this summer, Mohammed? And he's like, you know, me and the family are going to send Trepey on my big ass yacht. We're actually bringing two different yachts. If you and the kids want to come, it would be a great holiday. That sounds nice.

But he actually doesn't really know where to take the kids for holiday this summer because all of these country homes that she would normally take them to, they're sort of tainted by like the Charles and Camilla having sex in them stuff. So she's kind of flailing and she's like, this actually sounds great. Fuck yeah. The way that he presents it to her is like, times are kind of tough right now. Why don't you just come and get away from it all? I love how you're explaining this in this very like this, this is an inexplicable choice

she made way. And I'm like, listen, I'd go out on his yacht right now if he asked me. So she agrees. And on July 10th, 1997, she goes down to San Trepey. And this leads us to our next picture. This one's like a little medley. So I assume these are paparazzi photos. Yes.

This is actually a very Carol Baskin look that she has. She's wearing a one piece bathing suit that is simultaneously leopard print, tiger print and maybe cheetah print. I think I see three different big cat prints. Yes, that's known as a Baskin Neapolitan. Yeah. And she's doing a beautiful dive too. Like she I think she has good form in my expert opinion is someone who watches diving

briefly every summer Olympics. Yeah, she looks great. So the picture on the lower right becomes very important later because it sparks a lot of speculation that she is pregnant. Oh, really? Because people are fucking terrible. Well, I mean, honestly, I think that like the best policy about the potential pregnancies of other people is like, unless you see a baby coming out of them, don't assume anything.

Unless they are crowning at the time of your conversation. Yes. So the idea is like she's pregnant, so they killed her. Yes. All right. A lot of the conspiracy theories depend on this idea that the royal family wants to kill Diana because she is pregnant with Dodie's baby and Dodie is a Muslim. The royal family through this entire story has seemed to me to be like stunningly out

to lunch and inept about everything. And like, do you think it's credible that they have anyone killed the stage in the game? Like, do you think that they're even that relevant? I mean, these people cannot get heeding in their castles. I don't think that they're assassinating their daughter-in-law. It's really a Dolores Claiborne situation, right? Because like, you kill some princes in a tower, you don't get punished, time passes, and then you get blamed for the thing you didn't do.

The only evidence that she is pregnant is this photo. And just after she gets to Santa Pei, the photographers unfortunately find her. There's these paparazzi that basically hang out in Santa Pei in August because a lot of celebrities go there and they just hang out like looking for whatever celebrity they can find and when they find them, they'll just sort of attach themselves to these celebrities and take pictures of them for the rest of the summer. We later find out that Diana made arrangements with some of the photographers after they find her that she'll kind of go over to them and she's like, look, you got 30 minutes.

Take as many photos of me as you want in 30 minutes and then leave me the fuck alone for the rest of the day. And they're like, yeah, that sounds fine. At one point, there's like this scrum of press and she's just chatting back and forth. What are you up to this summer? How are things? Whatever. And they chat for sort of 10 minutes.

And one of the things that she says is you'll have a big surprise coming soon with the next thing I do. I know. Which I'm sure meant that she was gonna like open a paint your own pottery studio or something like that. The current theory is that she was opening a chain of hospices. Oh, no. I know.

Diana. She also later in August, she talks to a journalist and says that she's planning on retiring from public life sort of even more. She's like Fleetwood Mack. She just keeps going on farewell tours. Basically. But it's really, I mean, it's a very vague announcement. And keep in mind, she has not met Dodie Alpha yet yet.

So the idea is that she would be coyly hinting at announcing the fact that she's pregnant with the baby of her ex-boyfriend. I guess. Who she just had a really sad breakup with. I know. Also, like it's funny because before you mentioned pregnancy rumors, I was looking at these pictures and thinking to myself, I hope that this body reflects maybe a story where Diana has stopped so actively battling with her body she's been doing for her whole life and is just sort

of enjoying what it is, which is beautiful and strong and adult. And does what she needs it to do. I mean, this is a perfectly normal body for a 36-year-old woman to have. And also that she's being photographed, like being active, jumping around, diving. The other piece of evidence for this sort of deep, dark conspiracy thing is a handwritten note that people find after her death. So in the note she says, I'm sitting here at my desk today in October longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high.

This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. Someone is planning an accident in my car, break failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry. It's pretty smoking gun-ish. Yeah, it's very specific. What's amazing to me, the most amazing thing about this to me, the handwritten note, you can find it online. It's not difficult to find.

And they truncate her last sentence. The sort of excerpt of this that goes around is they're planning an accident in my car in order to make the path clear for him to marry. That's what you always read. What she actually wrote is that they're going to kill her in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy. So the reason why everybody cuts off the last word of that sentence is because it reveals that Diana's pretty fucking paranoid and she's paranoid about a bunch of stuff that isn't

true. Right. This is at the time when she thinks that Charles is sleeping with his nanny. Right. Because it's her being simultaneously right and wrong. Yes. And the reason why she predicted this in particular is remember her security guard who died in a motorcycle accident.

Right. Right. So all of that is to say, A, she's not pregnant, B, she goes on this holiday and she's having a blast. It sounds like her kids are enjoying themselves. She's enjoying herself. It's private. The press is kind of bothering her, but it seems like she's managing it quite well.

So she goes out to throw out some chum, do her chores, and then she comes back in and plays backgammon or whatever. Exactly. So then, faithfully, on July 16th, Doty Alphaed arrives. I have spent all week reading various biographies of Doty and there's a really interesting Vanity Fair article about him and Tina Brown talks about him in her book and every account of him describes him as this weird non-entity. So this is from the Vanity Fair article.

He rarely read a book and expressed few opinions or interesting ideas. He wasn't someone who was the life and soul of a party, a friend says. He would sit and observe. One of the things that attracts Diana to Doty is that he has a very similar upbringing to her. He grows up in one of these households that is materially very privileged, but emotionally utterly bereft. So one of the details that is in Tina Brown's book is that when they go back and interview

his relatives about what he was like as a kid, a lot of his relatives don't even know where he was living. They're like, I think he was in Egypt that year or maybe he was in a villa in the south of France. Like he's just a little traveling bachelor when he's eight. There's also a story in the Vanity Fair article that his friends throw him a 30th birthday party and in the midst of this like poppin' bottles type birthday party, he sits down and he gets kind of morose and his friend is like, what's going on, Doty?

And he's like, no one's ever thrown me a birthday party before. Wow. He also ends up accidentally producing the movie's Chariots of Fire and Hook. How did he accidentally produce Hook? I'm imagining him like being knocked out of a window and falling through several awnings and then into a hook meeting. Metaphorically, yes. Essentially, his dad chips in, I think it's three million bucks to the production of Chariots

of Fire and then the movie ends up getting made and Doty is the one that gets the producer credit. But everybody who worked on the movie is like, he didn't really visit the set. At one point they ask him, do you have any input on the script and he's like, make sure it's funny and smart and they're like, okay, Doty. That's kind of really good advice. This is what Vanity Fair says. Doty Fayette was a 42-year-old man child with a lavish monthly allowance by most accounts

$100,000. He was charming and generous, but his good intentions couldn't dislodge his reputation for reneging on commitments and creditors. Doty was accused of failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent, wrecking rental properties, selling film rights he didn't own, and neglecting to pay attorneys, doctors, repairmen, and even his projectionist. One account from model and actress Tracy Lind, alleged that during their affair they fought like children, trading pushes and slaps.

She also claimed that he once threatened her with a 9-millimeter Beretta. I don't like that for Diana. At the time that she meets him, he's involved in all these weird legal battles. He's getting sued by American Express over some random stuff. He's suing his own ex-girlfriend for living in a condo that he gave her, but then he tries to get the deed back. He's also engaged to someone else when he meets Diana. He's engaged to a model named Kelly Fisher.

So he is also a hot mess. He's a huge hot mess, dude, but in these various accounts too, because we know Diana well enough at this point, you can also see why Diana likes him because, first of all, he has basically the same childhood as her. He is great with her kids, which is really important to her at one point in Central Bay. He rents them a nightclub so that they can go dancing and not have any press there. That's very cute. He also activates her rescue complex.

This is from Andrew Morton's book. His sensitivity was attributed to the calamities he experienced in his life, namely the deaths of his mother whom he adored and several other close relatives. This combination of suffering and sensitivity was attractive to Diana, who reacted with an intuitive reflex when she saw pain in others. Diana has a type. Rich sad guys who are old and emotionally incompetent. This is exactly what attracted her to Prince Charles.

He's this rich dude who I need to rescue. She also, I think this is really moving actually, and this only shows up in Andrew Morton's book. When she's on this holiday in Central Bay with Mohammed and Mohammed's wife and Dodie Al-Fayed and all their kids, it's her first glimpse of an upper crust family that's really warm with each other. Diana. All of her experience of rich people in families in her social set are these royal family adjacent

type people where it's really formal, and then she's with this family on a yacht, and they're just sitting at the dinner table, hair still dripping from going swimming that day, and it's chill. You can just sit there in a bathing suit and snack. Because they're like the slightly shady Nouveau Rich, so they don't, you know. It's totally old money versus new money. She's all of a sudden in this family where it's like, I feel like I fit in with these people because on material things, like, oh, my yacht broke down yesterday, what a bummer,

we can relate, and also, they're just fucking nice, and they have feelings that they are comfortable expressing. We also know that Diana has a history of getting super infatuated with people. She's just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her. Yes, we don't actually know that much about what happened on this holiday and how they got together, but we know that after he shows up in Santa Pay, they pretty quickly fall in love and get infatuated with each other. And he's minus the defining things of her husband, it seems like, which are like being

cold and having a weird fraught relationship with his parents, where like, does he want to be king? Because like, his mom has to die for that to happen, but that's a stressor. So they overlap in Santa Pay for a couple days, I think it's four or five days. She comes back to London. He sends her a bunch of pink roses upon her return to Kensington Palace. The following weekend, this is total infatuation stuff, they have a sex weekend in Paris. Sex weekend.

Where he picks her up in a helicopter and he doesn't tell her where he's taking her. Nice. And then he flies the helicopter to the Ritz Hotel in Paris and it seems they like barely leave the hotel for this entire weekend. I think that if you're taking someone somewhere and you're not telling them where they're going, there is like one place you're allowed to go and it's the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Is sex holiday a euism or is this what like the Daily Mail calls it? This is a me-ism.

Okay, great. Because we know from Tina Brown's book that she likes sex, which is chill. I love sex holiday as a phrase because to be clear, I would like to promote its usage as much as I can. Yeah, it's basically just like a stage of the relationship. Like with death, there's denial, anger, bargaining, whatever. With relationships, there's like meeting, sex weekend, IKEA. Then on the 31st of July, they go on another yacht holiday.

This is like three days after they get back from their sex holiday. I mean, they're like really into each other. They just fuck off on this yacht again for a week. That's lovely. I love this detail. This is from Andrew Morton's book. According to a stewardess who served them, their nights were filled with champagne and caviar, Frank Sinatra, George Michael, and the English patient soundtrack on the stereo

and passionate embraces under an inky, star-filled sky. That's lovely. I hope that they listen to freedom. So it's just like two boomers hanging out. Two yacht boomers. So I'm going to send you another photo. This time, I'm going to send you two. These are ultimately the photos that on some level kill her.

Oh, God. Okay. Sunday Mirror, August 10th, 1997, 60p. World exclusive, the one they all wanted. Then the big headline says, the kiss. Then it has a very grainy picture of presumably Princess Diana from the back and Dodie Elfayette. Interestingly, you can't really tell who either of these people are or what they're doing. It's clearly taken from space, right?

It's so grainy. Yes. Then the sub-headline is, now Dodie flies off to buy an engagement ring for Diana, locked in her lover's arms. The princess finds happiness at last, inside 10 pages of the most sensational pictures ever. And then there's a lottery ad. And then I also sent you the inside spread.

I do not think these are the most sensational photos ever to be clear. The most sensational photos ever were taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Okay. The headline is Princess in Love and it's pictures of them on a yacht, mostly from the back. And they're not doing anything. They're hugging. I know.

They're sitting around and then she's pointing at something and he's looking at it. And he has so much chest hair that it looks like he's wearing a very deep cut tank top. That's a plus. But I would not call them sensational. I would call them invasive and boring. What these photos do, and the reason I say that they eventually kill her, is that they completely transform the economics of photos of Princess Diana. Huh.

So for the last couple of years, she's single and a photo of her shopping, a photo of her attending an event, these go for a couple hundred pounds, a couple thousand pounds, right? If it's really sensational or she's yelling at a photographer, maybe 30,000 pounds or something like that, right? The photographer who takes these photos sells them for two million pounds. Oh my God. It's nuts. What can you do with two million pounds in 1997?

You can buy a great number of Tickle Me Elmos on Cosmo.com. He takes them on the seventh, but there's three days of negotiation with all the tabloids about rights. There's one paper by First Day Rights, then the next one gets three days later rights. They're in such high demand, one of the other tabloids makes a computer recreation of them because it can't get rights to the photos themselves. I cannot begin to express how boring these photos are to look at. It's mostly butts.

It's just butts. Remember what we said in the first episode, that it's not about the photos in the tabloid. It's about the narrative that the photos are an example of. Right. And it's about having new data points because we're seeing inside her love life. We're excited because she doesn't know she's being seen. She's being candid. There's one shot where she's sitting very unladylike and splayed because she's on a

fucking boat in the fucking ocean. Yeah, it's like more information in this gossipy story that everyone in the country is addicted to. And so overnight, the number of paparazzi that follow her around quintuple because, hey, I can get a photo of the two of them together and sell it for two million bucks. The next couple weeks of their relationship are basically them trying to avoid the paparazzi in London. And then on the 22nd of August, she leaves London for the last time to go on their final

cruise together. We have on August 29th, this is the day before they die in the car crash, Mohammed says that Dodie called him and said that he was thinking of asking Diana to marry him. We also have extremely consistent reports from Diana's friends that they would tease her like, oh, you're seeing this guy, I hear wedding bells, whatever. And she'd be like, oh, no, I'm not getting married again. Are you fucking kidding me? I just got out of a marriage.

There's no way I'm going to get married again. So in principle, she was not looking to get married again. But maybe she would have made an exception for Dodie. We don't know. It doesn't seem he ever got the chance to ask her to marry him. It is kind of nice that if you have to die suddenly, then in a state of infatuation is one of the better states to be in. I mean, this to me is one of the small graces of the story that she does appear to have

died at really one of the happiest points of her life. They seem to be blissfully in love. They're still in the throes of infatuation. They're still high off their sex weekend. Whether it would have gone anywhere or whether it was just Summer Lovin had me a blast. She had a fucking blast. Yeah. Summer dreams rip at the seams, Mike.

So now we get to the day that she dies. OK. I don't know. I can show you a photo, but it's going to be really fucking depressing. I mean, it's taken of her while she's alive, right? Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Is this the last photo taken of her? I mean, it's the last sort of like full body photo taken of her. There's various photos taken through the car windows. But this is the last sort of where it looks like Diana photo. I know. I know. She looks cute. Yeah.

She looks a little bit haired. Yeah. She's not in a great mood when this photo is taken. We'll talk about it. So she's striding into the car. It looks like she's in a hurry. She looks like she's aware of being photographed and is in a studied way ignoring the cameras. It just looks like this is a moment like a million other moments of her life.

That's the thing. That's what I thought when I first saw it too, that there must be many more photos like this that we've never seen because they're sort of quotidian and it's like her not in a great mood getting into a car. Like this is a hundred pound Diana photo, right? Yeah. This is one of the cheapos. Yeah.

So I spent all this week reading various accounts of what actually happened this day. So most of this is based on a book called Death of a Princess, which is an extremely thorough examination of what actually led to her death and everything that happens in the aftermath. And then also there's the British inquest into her death, which is 900 pages long. This really is like KFK. My notes for this were originally 140 pages long and a lot of it was this sort of tick talk, what they did during the day, what they ate, who they saw.

And last night I just cut out a lot of extra detail. So if there's anything you want to know, ask me. But I'm going to race through this pretty quickly because honestly, these are just very standard day in the life of a celebrity and a very standard drunk driving car crash. Well, one of your pet things is that if we want to talk about like clear and present danger in our lives, we could be talking about cars and car accidents, but we never want to talk about it. And then when it happens in a high profile way, we're like, oh my God, who would have

suspected cars? Exactly. Yeah. So they've been on this yacht for a week. It is now August 30th. They're killed on August 31st, but it's 20 minutes after midnight. So it's sort of like an extension of August 30th. So August 30th is really the day in question.

At 3.20pm, they arrive in Paris. They had flown from Sardinia. They're getting off the plane and there's a huge cast of characters here, but we just need to know the four people that are in the car at the time of the crash. So there's obviously Diana and Doty are in the backseat. The driver of the car is named Henry Paul. He is the head of security for the Ritz Hotel. His job on this day is to go to the airport, pick up Doty and Diana and get them to the

Ritz Hotel safely. There is also a guy named Trevor Reese-Jones who is the personal bodyguard of Doty. He will eventually be the passenger in the car when it crashes. So the whole plan is they're on their way back to London, but they're going to stop by in Paris for a day because Prince William's birthday is next week and Diana wants to do some shopping. So they're planning to sleep at Doty's apartment because he has an apartment on the Champs-Elysées, but they want to stop by the Ritz first because Diana wants to get her hair done and Doty

has some business-y stuff to do. So they go straight from the airport to the Ritz. Doty runs out to a jewelry store where he is getting an engagement ring fitted. Oh, wow. So he's really getting serious. Yeah. All day, they're getting pursued by the paparazzi. At one point, there's 30 photographers outside of the hotel and 100 sort of onlookers because

when random people tourist and stuff see a bunch of photographers, they're like, oh, I'm going to wait here and see if a celebrity comes out. So they eventually leave the Ritz around 7 p.m. They go to Doty's apartment and there's already a shitload of photographers camped out at the apartment. They just sort of duck their heads down, get into the apartment. They hang out upstairs for two hours. The plan is they're going to go down to some fancy Michelin 7-star restaurant, something,

something, and then they're going to come home and crash at Doty's apartment. They've given up on the plan of shopping because they just can't leave the house. So they drive to this fancy restaurant. There's paparazzi all around the car and taking photos of them. They basically get to the restaurant and they see that it's just going to be a disaster. If they sit at this restaurant, there's going to be paparazzi outside taking photos of them the whole time and potentially sneaking in and it's just going to be a bad scene. So they're like, you know what?

Let's just go back to the Ritz. This is ridiculous. So they try to eat in the restaurant of the Ritz, but even in there, there's too many gawkers and they're like, oh, fuck this. So they just go up to a room and they hang out there for like two hours. It's now around 11 p.m. and they have to figure out how to leave. There's a hundred people outside and they're both just in a bad mood. One of the most amazing things about this is that we've had French investigation, a

British investigation. We've had documentaries. We still don't know how Henry Paul, the guy who was driving the car, how he got drunk. So basically his job was to get them from the airport to the Ritz safely. After they hang out at the Ritz during the afternoon, Diana gets her hair done. They leave. Henry Paul is like, well, my day's done. It's Saturday night.

I'm going to go. So he leaves and to this day, we do not know what he did in the next three hours. A later autopsy report will show that he has nothing, no food in his stomach, but he has the equivalent of eight or nine shots of whiskey. Oh, God. Wow. Okay. I really thought it was going to be like he had too much wine, but wow.

Why isn't he eating bread? Well, this is the thing. He didn't know that he was going to get called back to the Ritz. He had no idea they were ever going to come back to the Ritz. It's a Saturday night. I ain't got nobody. Yes. I got some money because I just got paid.

I'm going to have eight or nine shots of whiskey. The authors of the Death and Diana book go around to sort of his regular haunts because he has a lot of bars near his house that he goes to regularly and everybody reports that they didn't see him that night. However, all of these interviews are taking place after Diana has died famously in this car crash and nobody wants to admit I'm the bartender who gave him the whiskey that night. No.

One thing we do know is that one of the bars he goes to is a lesbian bar where he hangs out all the time. Oh. This is an excerpt from the Death of Diana book. I've known him for 20 years, says the bar's owner, Josie, 50-ish, blonde, tough-looking and a self-acknowledged lesbian. I love this. Leaning on the bar under a garish mural depicting nude women, he adds he was a nice guy, gentle.

Self-acknowledged lesbian is one of those very 90s phrases that gives away what it thinks of being a lesbian because that's like calling yourself a self-acknowledged con artist. Self-acknowledged diva, like kind of a shady thing that you're taking pride in being. So like, well done, 90s, you ruin everything. So we don't know where he is when he gets this call, but we know that he's had these sort of three-ish hours off the job. We know that he's been drinking. He gets a call from his deputy, the next guy down at the hotel and says, Henry, Dodie

and Diana are back at the Ritz Hotel and there's this massive scrum of paparazzi outside. Things are looking dicey. You might want to get back here. Let's call him Hank. He's like, Hank, you got to come back to work. Come back, man. So he does. So he goes back to the hotel.

He arrives around 10 p.m. He sits at the hotel bar with some colleagues. He has two more drinks. His job is still to get Dodie and Diana safely out of the hotel. So he somehow gets pulled into Dodie's plan. Dodie's plan to solve all this, he's like, what we're going to do is there's like our official cars that are out front. So what we're going to do is we're going to sort of ostentatiously have our official

cars leave the hotel and that way the paparazzi will follow them and then we will quietly leave in another car by itself out of the back. Like how Oge used to use AC as his decoy and give AC Cowlings his clothes to wear. It's not a great plan, but Dodie nominates Henry Paul to drive and Henry Paul is the head of security. He's not a chauffeur driver. He's not licensed to be a chauffeur driver. There's been other incidents where people have been like, hey, can you drive me?

And he's like, I don't have the license for that. But apparently Dodie either talks him into it or whatever mood he's in. He agrees to be part of this weird plan, even though this really isn't his job. I feel like it's a classic kind of rich person thing to do to like assign a job to someone who's a supervisor of some sort rather than realizing that the person whose job it is to do that would be good at it. Yeah, exactly. So it seems Diana for this whole thing is just very passive and it's just like whatever.

You guys figured it out. I just want to get home. This is bullshit. She's looking at the assortment of objects. She's clutching waiting for it to be over. So whatever happened, we know that that is the plan that they hatch. They drive the cars out of the front and Dodie, Diana, Henry and Trevor get in the car. That's the photo you just saw.

And so now we get to the crash. So they leave out of the back entrance, but there's three or four paparazzi back there that start following the car and then almost immediately someone tips off all the paparazzi in the front who are like, oh, Dodie and Diana just left out of the back. So all of the paparazzi that were previously in the front get on their motorcycles, get in their cars and rush around to this back route. It doesn't seem like Henry Paul was speeding super duper recklessly until they're driving through Paris.

They get to a red light and all of the paparazzi catch up to him. There's motorcycles around them. There's cars behind them and there's flashes going off. People are taking photos in the car and you can find these photos online. And so before the light, right before it turns green, Henry Paul guns it and just there's like a long straightaway leading into this tunnel and he just literally floors it. And it appears he was going somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred miles an hour when he entered the tunnel.

Oh, wow. It's bad. Your ability to anticipate what's in front of you with that speed is basically non-existent. So, OK, now we're going to talk about what actually caused the crash. For this, we have to do a little physics corner. So have you heard of something called the trampoline effect? No, I am familiar with trampolines. However, that's a start.

So, Sarah, if you are driving straight and then all of a sudden the road slopes downward. What happens? It depends on how fast you're going. Because if you're going at a moderate speed, your tires would stay with the road and you would stick with it. But if you were going, you know, depending on how much the road sloped and depending on how fast you were going and depending on like the suddenness of the road slipping downward, I can see you getting some air.

Literally getting air. Yes. Not only do you get air, but then after you get air, you crash back to earth, right? So there's sort of this feeling of less gravity and then there's this feeling of kind of double gravity. Gravity catches up and it's like, you thought you could get away from me. So this is known as the trampoline effect and it takes place even when you don't leave

the ground. So even if you're only going whatever 30 miles an hour and the ground slopes down and the car, you can kind of feel that, right, that the car kind of lifts up and then it sort of settles back down. So when the car lifts up, the tires have less traction. So in a lot of crashes, what happens is right when the car lifts up, you try to steer. The car doesn't really respond because there's not as much traction and you're like, oh shit. So you oversteer and then the car comes crashing down and then you have double traction and

then the car just veers off. So this actually explains a lot of crashes. So as you are probably predicting, what happens is this tunnel that they enter in Paris, as soon as you get into the tunnel, there is both a sharp dip downward and a left-hand turn. On a normal day, the speed limit in the tunnel is 30 miles an hour. Going 30 miles an hour, you barely notice this. The trampoline effect means nothing. If you're going 100 miles an hour, it means a lot.

There in the left-hand lane, in the right-hand lane, there is a white Fiat Uno. As the road dips and curves, Henry steers the wheel to turn along with the road and because the car has kind of lifted up off the ground at this point, he doesn't steer enough so he sideswipes the Fiat. So he hits the back corner of the Fiat and then as the car settles back to earth, he oversteers. There's these fractions of a second where he kind of skids and he slams on the brakes, but it's not enough.

And so in this oversteering, he ends up running head-on into one of the pillars between the oncoming lanes. Oh, God. So they hit the 13th pillar, the car crumples and you can see the square indentation of where this pillar goes straight into the front of the car. That's horrible. It's really bad. So I imagine that being like just you're looking at the car and then the car is crumpled

up like a tissue. They say because he slammed on the brakes and turning, etc., he hit the pillar at about 60 miles an hour. Oh, God. Nobody in the car was wearing a seatbelt. Oh, no. Originally reports were that the bodyguard was wearing a seatbelt, which is actually odd because bodyguards are supposed to exit vehicles quickly.

So the protocol is actually for them to not wear seatbelts, which seems bad and weird. But anyway, it turns out later, or at least the British InQuest finds that nobody was wearing a seatbelt. Nobody had been wearing seatbelts without have done anything if he had a pillar at 60 miles head-on. The driver would not have lived, Reese Jones did live, and Dodie and Diana probably would have lived. Okay.

One of the guys, the experts that looks at this later says that if you hit head-on anything above sort of 60, 80 miles an hour, the car, like the whole car disintegrates, whereas in 60 mile an hour crashes, oftentimes the rear of the vehicle is pretty intact. But there is a possibility that one or both of them would have lived if they had seatbelts on. I mean, it's not guaranteed that they would have. But you know, better odds. Wear seatbelts, everybody.

Yes. So I just want to talk quickly about the sort of the conspiracy theories around the crash. Yeah. Around this very ambiguous event where it's like, wow, like how could a healthy woman have died after a 60 mile per hour impact with a colonnade? So this is what the British inquest says. The vehicle was moving at excessive speed. The chauffeur did not regularly drive this type of vehicle.

The two toxicology analyses of the driver showed a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and the passengers were not wearing seatbelts. All the conspiracies aside, most people who are in crashes like this die. Yeah. A huge thing for me too is that this was not the normal route that you would drive. If you look at a map of the Ritz Hotel and Dodie's apartment, this is not remotely a straight line. In a crowded European city, it's not like LA or something where it's like this tic-tac

tow board of freeways. Paris is like a little rat king of like little windy streets everywhere. There's an almost infinite number of ways you can get from point A to point B. There's all these things of like, you know, somebody flashed bright lights in the tunnel to blind Henry Paul and that's why he crashed. And it's like, there's no reason you would think that they would even be driving in that tunnel. The timing is important.

It was only yesterday that Dodie started telling people that he was going to marry Diana and there's no evidence that he had asked her or that she sort of saw this on the horizon. So if the royal family, somebody wanted to kill them to keep Dodie out of the royal family, how would they even know and how would they have planned something this fast? Right. There's also the extremely basic thing that it really makes no sense to assassinate someone in a car crash anyway. It doesn't make a lot of sense to assassinate somebody in this extremely public way in

an accident to which there are dozens of witnesses. The lead up to it has dozens of witnesses. There's just too many moving parts. And also it double doesn't make sense because of all the time that they were spending on boats. So like in various interviews over the years, former like MI6 people, CIA people, whatever, they'll be like, it's actually pretty easy to assassinate somebody on a boat. You can get divers, you can attach an explosive to the boat, you sink it, and then the crime

scene is at the bottom of the ocean. Like it's actually much more easy to get away with that. I mean, I just feel like putting conspiracy theories into this suggests that there was a dearth of factors that we knew about and were partly responsible for in Princess Diana's life that could collaborate to kill her. And if you add fleeing from paparazzi to like someone is driving who shouldn't be driving and they go into the wrong tunnel at the wrong moment, at the wrong speed, that's enough. Like that's not suspicious that those things, you know, but it does feel to me like that's

the kind of thing that you come up with when like as a public who is invested in this woman's death partly because you have been supporting the industry that obtains images of her, then like you're to blame. Yeah, exactly. So Henry Paul is killed instantly. Doty is also killed instantly. Trevor Reese-Jones, he has extremely grievous injuries, which I am not going to describe because I accidentally read a sentence about what they were and it bunked me out, but he's

grievously injured. It takes him two weeks to wake up. To this day, he doesn't remember anything after they get in the car. This is kind of incredible that Diana is slumped in the backseat, but she has really no visible injuries. She has a trickle of blood going down her forehead, but that's it. It's kind of amazing. She has already internal bleeding, which nobody can see.

On the outside, she actually kind of looks okay. Well, she always looks okay on the outside, doesn't she? So the first person to reach her is a photographer who opens the back door either to take her pulse or to take a picture, depending on which account you believe. Why not both? Is I'm sure their response to that. We know that at the scene, he calls an editor for a British tabloid and offers him photos for £300,000.

This is like minutes afterwards. You know, when you call something ghoulish normally, that doesn't mean that you find yourself picturing literal ghouls. It's fucking gross, dude, I know. And they don't know that she's dead yet, but they at least know that she's grievously injured. Yeah. We'll have a discussion later about why didn't the photographers do anything.

The photographers, and I kind of understand this, they're like, we didn't know what to do and also moving somebody in one of these situations can be really bad for them and we're not fucking doctors. What most horror movies show you is people picking up someone who has clearly just suffered potentially a spinal injury and just yanking them around. Yeah. I respect the opinion of someone who sees what is clearly a serious accident and is like, I don't have training in this.

I don't know how to remove someone from a car crash. Yes. I don't defend their right to take photos of it, but I do defend their right to just not know what to do. Yeah. And then seven minutes after the crash, the ambulance arrives. Shortly after that, the cops arrive and start arresting a bunch of paparazzi. So there's these year-long manslaughter trials in France of the paparazzi that followed her

and took pictures. Yeah. Is this a good time to talk about their liability? I mean, there's the direct liability and there's the sort of indirect liability. The French authorities eventually clear all of these photographers of charges. What the judge eventually says in this case is that what you did was immoral and unethical, but it's not clear that it's illegal. It's that most unsatisfying thing where blame is really cut up thinly and spread across

different people. Exactly. There's the chance, there's the fact that he made poor decisions, there's the fact that Doty wanted him to drive for some reason, there's the fact that the paparazzi are there as usual, but it's stacked in from so many different directions that you can't seize on any one individual cause and feel satisfied that this is it. And people often say that there's no way he would be driving that fast unless someone in the car was telling him to go faster.

Potentially, Doty or Diana could have been like, hurry, hurry, hurry. Sure. We don't know. There's not satisfying human malice in this story. Exactly. There's not a culprit you can find and be like, you wanted her to die. Right. And also it's not clear that the French authorities picked up the seven paparazzi that were chasing

them most aggressively because they got to the scene 10 minutes after the crash and just were kind of arresting photographers willy-nilly. Right. When the people who've just implicated themselves might have decided it's a good idea to move on. Yes, exactly. So we don't even know if these are the right seven photographers to arrest. But then of course, then there's like the broader stuff of like, well, why was a photo

of her worth that much? Right? Why were they in front of the hotel in the first place? Then you get into all this like indirect stuff. Right. It's like who's to blame for fast fashion. We are. So essentially the ambulance comes, there's a doctor on the ambulance.

They very slowly move Diana out of the car. They have her next to the car trying to sort of stabilize her. They're really worried about moving her. Yeah, I would assume so. And so they get her gingerly into the ambulance. And then I guess it's like a five minute drive from this tunnel to the hospital where they're taking her and it takes them almost an hour because they're driving so slow because they don't want to go over any bumps and they stop a couple of times because she'll

sort of go into some sort of arrest and they stop, they administer things to try to stabilize her and then they get her to the hospital. So one of the very interesting conspiracy-ish aspects of this is the car crash was at 1225. She didn't get to the hospital until after 2 a.m. Oh, God. So there's a really interesting section in the death of Princess Diana book that talks about basically this entire thing hinges on the difference in emergency management practices between French authorities and American and British authorities.

So once again, if you want a conspiracy theory, you're going to go home feeling like you've got a rock trick or treating. Yes. So the French theory of car crash victims is known as stay and play. That sounds like something you do on a sex holiday. Right. The theory is you want to get people as stabilized as possible immediately because it is so risky to move people and there might be internal injuries that you cannot see.

So in car crashes in France, they will stay there with the victim for one, two hours getting them ready to move and then they will move them to the hospital. Interesting. Whereas in America and Britain, the theory is called scoop and run, that the risks of getting somebody to the hospital late far outweigh the risks of moving them. So even though it's risky to move people and you could exacerbate their injuries, it's really important to get them to the hospital ASAP. I'm annoyed that it's not a rhyming name.

There's various, like I guess this strikes a debate in the medical journals at the time between French doctors and US doctors about risks and our method is better and no, our method is better. But ultimately, like a lot of people are going to die no matter what you do. So like, yeah, perhaps that's why we haven't arrived at any kind of a consensus. It's difficult to measure. And also the biggest thing, the most important thing for our purposes is that there's nothing suspicious about the fact that it took Diana almost two hours to get to the hospital after

a car crash in France. Right. It's just French. It's like being, wasn't it suspicious that she had a loaf of bread under her arm? Right. It's like, no, it's cultural. Yes. So there are various debates over whether she would have lived if they had gotten her

to the hospital sooner and the death of Diana book says that they could have saved her, but then there's an update to the book 10 years later where they say, no, she probably would have died anyway. Who knows? Yeah. And her injuries had to be really significant. When they get to the hospital, they figure out the extent of the internal bleeding. So they take her to these specialist doctors and they do their best and it takes until

4 a.m. to declare her dead. There's just nothing they can do. So to return briefly to the conspiracy theories, at around 1 a.m., so around 40 minutes after the crash, someone on his team calls Mohammed and tells him, there's been a car crash, your son is dead, Diana is severely injured, and apparently the first thing he says is this was no accident. I mean, I can understand him having some of the same idea as the Princess Diana has. Exactly.

So from the earliest days, Mohammed al-Fayyed is one of the greatest boosters of Princess Diana conspiracy theories. And because his beloved son died in a really silly and unnecessary way and yeah. There's a Vanity Fair article in 2004 that covers a lot of the conspiracy theories and the journalist goes and meets with him. The journalist says, you've lost almost every legal action you've undertaken so far. Why do you persist? Fayyed's face darkens.

Do you have children? I nod yes. Put yourself in my position. Somebody snatches your son and slaughters him. What do you do? You have to get the bastards. I can't rest till I find out who did this. The tycoon's eyes suddenly well up with tears.

He stands and heads for the door. I'm sorry, he says, shaking his head. I have to go. This really becomes his life's work after 1997. And one of the things that's amazing is if you read the British Inquest Report, this 900-page behemoth, it's all based around claims that Mohammed al-Fayyed has made. It's like Mohammed al-Fayyed claims there was a bright flash. This is why it's not true.

Over the course of the next decade and a half, he pays private eyes. There's all these documentaries that come out that he participates in. He makes himself available to journalists. I mean, he is seeding this theory systematically that there had to be something more going on. He's Penelope waiting for Ulysses to come home, ravelling and unraveling his documentaries because if he stops doing this, then his son is just gone. And gone in this meaningless way.

He dated this lady. She was being pursued by the paparazzi and then he died in a drunk driving crash. The wrong person was driving on the wrong night. I think this case is very instructive for understanding sort of how conspiratorial thinking works. So one of the things that Mohammed mentions, this is in the Vanity Fair article, he says, there are serious unanswered questions. Why did it take medical rescuers nearly two hours to get the princess to a hospital?

Why did French authorities not make available tapes from surveillance cameras outside the Ministry of Justice and along the Mercedes itinerary? Why did MI6, which would have been alerted to Diana's presence, fail to come forward with what they know about the crash? These are all, by the way, totally answered questions. We know why it took medical rescuers two hours to get her to the hospital. He puts this stuff out over and over again and it's like, dude, there's answers to these questions available.

You're just not accepting those as answers. And also you can deny everything if faced with an explanation. The most fascinating example of this is that years after the crash, somebody somehow finds out that one of the paparazzi that was following Diana around when she was in San Tropez owns a white fiat and it's like dun dun dun paparazzi owns the white fiat and it turns out that he killed himself under very mysterious circumstances a couple years later. These poor people that work for the British inquest have to look into this and yes, it's true that he owned a fiat Uno at the time and it was white and the paint samples match.

Like match the white paint that was put on the fiat at the fiat factory? Yes. And literally any white fiat in the fucking country would match the paint. It's not like matching a fingerprint. Yeah. And fiat's are like economy cars, right? They're like a normal person car. Like there's a lot of fiat's at large.

Yes. It's like a Honda Civic or something in America. Yeah. That's exactly the comparison that I wanted to make. Yeah. It's like a Honda Civic. So like okay. There's also all this great shit that the fiat that he owned, he actually hadn't driven

it in two years in 1997. It was it was not, it didn't have wheels on it was at a junkyard. It's not even a functioning fiat Uno at that time and also he doesn't even live in Paris. He lives 90 minutes outside of Paris and there's no evidence that he was in Paris that night. They interview his this poor woman, his wife, who you know lost her husband to suicide and she says like, well, he had been having all this financial anxiety because his son was a race car driver and that's a really expensive hobby and he was running out of money basically and the press paparazzi industry was changing and becoming digitized.

And now that everybody has a cell phone that can take photos, celebrity photos aren't worth as much anymore. He's seeing that leaner times are coming and he's like, fuck my sons into race cars. Exactly. A famously unshady hobby shared by Michael Avenatti. If you look at anything like you could take any car crash in America and if you subjected it to this amount of scrutiny, I have no doubt that you would find things like this, like little puzzle pieces that are like, well, that's a little out of the ordinary, isn't

it? So again, I could spend hours talking about these. There's like a million of these little quote unquote discrepancies that when you look into them aren't discrepancies and also it just feels so perfunctory to debunk these things because it's like there's no alternate theory of the crime that makes any sense. So our last chapter is going to be about the reaction to Diana's death by the royal family. Have you seen the queen? Are you aware of this?

I feel like this is pretty well trod territory. I have not seen the queen because one of the things you know about me is that whenever people won't shut up about a certain piece of media, I cannot stand the concept of engaging with it. And the queen was a movie that people loved, like people were really into that movie. And I was like, OK, I care negative at this point. So I am fresh. OK.

Second to last photo. I have seen this, yeah, right. So we are looking at the scene outside the gates of Kensington Palace and like it is just a field of flowers and I'm sure other stuff. I see teddy bears. I see balloons. I see a lot of people who are sort of huddled together in a group, paying their respects. But just like and because of the way the photo is taken, you can't see where it begins or

ends. So it's hard to say spatially how big this is, but just like just a field of flowers. Yeah. And I actually know because I wrote a paper once where I was researching some Diana facts and one of them was that the under layers of flowers like became a layer of mulch because there were flowers on flowers on flowers. It's kind of lovely, actually. It is, yeah.

And actually, you can see that the balloon that is in the foreground is the Queen of Hearts. You see that? Yeah. So it's it's the scene outside Kensington Palace after her death and just the public tribute. I mean, it was a huge deal. Well, talk about the news breaking and like how did this hit people?

How did people react like all of that? So the news breaks at 4.41 a.m. on August 31st. So just 40 minutes after she's pronounced dead, basically. The royal family is told about 30 minutes before that Prince Charles gets a call. It wakes him up in the middle of the night. He gets up, but he decides not to wake up his children because he wants to figure out how to tell them. The first thing that has to happen is that Charles has to go to Paris to get her body.

There's some actually like very sad stuff here that apparently in the last couple of months of her life, they had been getting along pretty well. After the marriage is over and the negotiations and the lawyers and everything else, they can both finally start to mourn this marriage. There's this interesting scene right before they finalize the divorce where Diana invites him over to Kensington Palace for tea and they finally have a sort of like, well, we tried kind of thing like the way that you do with your ex where neither one of you are really trying to get back together.

But you're just like, you know, looking back on it together kind of like with whatever friendship is left. Yeah. Like things have calloused over and they're able to sort of see things as they were and maybe be like, we did not have a shot. Did we? Yeah, exactly. Like you can kind of bond over that on some level.

Right. There is like a really special thing that happens when like the thing that has been turning you against each other suddenly becomes the thing that you like bond over and commiserate about. Yeah. Something that you share basically. And she had actually sent him a cute note when this guy that he was obsessed with, remember Lauren's Vander post that he was reading her excerpts from this guy's miserable books.

Yes. He died and Diana sends Charles a nice note like, man, you must really be suffering. Like this guy was a mentor of yours and I know he's really important to you. Just want to say I'm sorry. Yeah, that's sweet. It's like a little Merry Christmas text from an ex. And that is like very unfraud. Yes, exactly.

So he flies down to Paris that day to get her body. This is from Tina Brown's book. The prince went into the room alone to view his former wife and death. At the moment Charles entered Diana's chamber, he was still calm and collected, but it was another man who emerged, a man utterly shattered by what was happening. He later told Camilla that seeing Diana's lifeless body was the worst sight I have ever had to bear witness to. I could only think of her as the girl I first met, not the woman she became and not the

problems we had been through. I wept for her and I wept for our boys. Trained all his life like the queen to transfer the expression of emotion to something other than its cause, the prince became agitated about a detail, the loss in the crash of one of Diana's gold earrings. No, she can't go without her second earring. He kept repeating distractedly. Oh, Charles.

I know. The royal family, you know, this happens in August when they're in the middle of their Balmoral holiday. So they're all up at their weird country home. Essentially, they make the decision very early that they are going to rally around William and Harry and give them whatever they need. The queen takes all the TVs out of the house so that William and Harry can't see what's going on.

They have this sort of sense when they're in Balmoral that it's just like a place away from politics. It's their vacation time and they just really are not paying attention to what is going on in the country. The queen's position throughout this period is basically that like, well, Diana wasn't a member of the royal family because she doesn't have her title anymore. It feels possible to me that without Malus, she's just like an incredibly callous person because she was raised according to this pointless set of beliefs.

The way that Tina Brown puts it is that she has been raised her whole life and so has Charles to see stoicism as the most important value. The thing you must do as a person for your duty is to not show emotion, to not have political opinions, to not make waves, to not say things unless you utterly must. So to them, this is, you know, the nation is in mourning, they don't need to hear from us. British culture is amazing and it sometimes feels like a weird RPG, you know, just with all the fox hunting and the weird use of language and the pub names.

Like, I feel like I'm being tricked into believing such a place exists. Well, this is the thing. I keep thinking they're responding like they're asking themselves sort of how would a fairy tale king respond to this in some imagined old timey Shrek time, not necessarily. What does the actual population of our actual country in actual 1997 need us to do? What do they want from us? The country is like, you're not saying anything and it's weird. It's just weird that what we consider to be a member of the royal family has just died

and the actual royal family is not doing anything. There's this huge controversy over, you know, obviously in London, all the flags are half masked and at Buckingham Palace, there's no flag at all. There's just this naked flagpole sitting there and it's like, excuse me, why would the one people who are supposed to care about this woman not be flying their flag at half-mast? Yeah, do they have a flag normally? Well, this is a thing. It's a bit of a year wrong about because everybody gets really worked up about this

and it, of course, becomes a symbol of royal callousness. But people who know all these protocol very well, what they point out is that it's not like a normal flagpole. It's this thing where they basically put up the royal sigil when the queen is in residence. But she wouldn't know because you don't even have one sigil. I know. It's like an out-of-office auto reply. Yeah, it's a vacancy, no vacancy sign.

It's literally never flown a Union Jack in the first place and it's never flown at half-mast because that's not what it does. Because I would be like, the queen is half here. This is actually a media-generated controversy that apparently there's this journalist that they're doing man-on-the-street interviews. They're talking to people who are in this morning period outside of Buckingham Palace. One journalist will ask people on the street, what do you think about the fact that Buckingham Palace doesn't have a flag at half-mast?

And of course, because people don't know because they're fucking normal ass people, they're like, I think it's bullshit. And then that shows up on the TV and then other people see it on the TV and they're like, this is bullshit. Do you think they're also like, Pack it in, boys. This is our last Diana Bonanza. We got to make it count. And there's a million other things like this.

There's the police won't let bouquets be placed outside of Buckingham Palace at first. They're like, man, that's a roadway. Man, you can't put bouquets here. And there's this thing where you can sign a guest book for Diana. And there's eventually a 12-hour long wait to sign it because there's only one. And so people are like, why don't you just have five or six that people can sign? And then they don't have to wait that long. But the royal family, for no particular reason, just like doesn't.

They're like, wow, that's not how it's done. It's like, OK. I never before realized how little they understand what other people think their job is. Yes, I know. And it's such a weird flex to be like, oh, she's not a member of the royal family, technically. And I don't think it's a flex. I think they're just bound by this ironclad sense of like, well, she's just not. Like, I know that everyone's sad, but she's just literally not.

And we're not going to do something bizarre just because the public wants it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's basically the stance. There's also this very pervasive sense of just bafflement among the royal family. So Prince Charles tells his biographer, I felt like an alien in my own country. Because he's like, well, none of these people knew Diane. And yet they're all really sad. It's so they just don't understand the concept of celebrity.

It's incredible. That's literally the only thing that you do. Yes. It's like it's celebrity, Charles. It's called a parasocial relationship. That's your you earn your bread and butter by doing the very thing that you fail to grasp here. Some of this is actually manufactured. And I think this is really important that in the days, like the hours,

days immediately following Diana's crash. And I remember this very vividly. All of the blame went on to the press. I remember that too. Yeah. The press itself has kind of an existential crisis during this period. Because everybody's mad at them, right? Like you were the ones selling these shitty up in space pictures of her.

Yeah. And we were buying them. But who can even remember that part? This is the conventional wisdom for the first sort of 72 hours. You have to guess who this quote is from. As much as I want to blame the press, we all have blood on our hands. All of us, even myself, bought these magazines and read them. Do you know who said that?

Fergie. Madonna. Oh, yeah. Well, that's very insightful. Good job, Madonna. Yes. Diana's brother, his sort of first statement of this, like as soon as he's called by the press,

he says, I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death. It's like, whoa, he's pissed. So what is the belief that they were like nipping at their heels, basically? Yeah. I mean, the original information that we had was that she was chased by the paparazzi and that she was trying to escape. And so then on September 1st, so this is like a day after her death is announced,

we get the toxicology report on Henry Paul. And immediately, because the tabloids want to deflect attention from themselves, all of the headlines are, oh, it's a drunk driver. The driver was drunk. Look how drunk the driver was. The driver was super drunk. This becomes a very useful narrative for them. Because then it doesn't matter that the paparazzi were chasing her.

It doesn't matter that the press had been hounding her for years. All of a sudden, whoops, it's just a bad apple. In the sun, they have a headline that says, die driver drunk as a pig. Pigs aren't characteristically that drunk. It's not even whatever. I mean, of course, the media itself has to be the one sharing this information so you can see why they would be getting a little bit excited about having an alternate theory that they could just use to describe the whole thing.

Yes, exactly. The royal family being aloof is another great narrative to distract from all of the anger at the press. Right. It's like the press didn't kill her. Her in-laws being rude killed her. Exactly, yes. These are some of the headlines that show up in the days after her death.

The Daily Express show us you care. The sun, where is our queen? Where is her flag? The Daily Mirror, your people are suffering. Speak to us, ma'am. A sun editorial says that empty flagpole at the end of the mall stands as a stark insult to Diana's memory, who gives a damn about the stuffy rules of protocol. Finally, all of this gets fixed.

This is the climax to the movie, The Queen, Spoilies. Almost a week has gone by on September 5th. The queen flies back to London. They do put a flag on the Buckingham Palace flagpole. They're like, fuck it. We've never done it before, but who cares? Just put it up there, get people to stop yelling at us. The queen does a walkabout.

She shows up at Buckingham Palace and shakes people's hands. There's this famous moment where she's shaking people's hands and somebody gives her flowers, and she's about to put them on the pile for Diana. And the person who gave her the flowers says, no, no, they're for you. It begins to humanize her. She then gives this very famous speech live, where the quote that comes out of it is, what I say now to you, I say as a queen and as a grandmother. And that was the first time she had sort of let that mask slip

and spoken as the head of a family rather than the head of a country. And we take what we can get with monarchs. It's not that big of a deal. But it's like, oh, she's speaking to us as a person right now, not necessarily only as the queen. Celebrity has changed in the time that she has been queen. She's been doing this for a long time. Perhaps people used to genuinely want her as a symbol

in a way that they feel differently about in the 90s. I mean, Diana's death was really a symbol then and now of all the ways that she had changed the monarchy, but also all the ways that she didn't change the monarchy and couldn't change it. This is from Andrew Morton's book. He says, those few days after her death captured forever the contrast between the princess and the house of Windsor, her openness, their distance, her affection, their fragility,

her spontaneity, their inflexibility, her glamour, their dullness, her modernity, their stale ritual, her emotional generosity, their aloofness, her rainbow coalition, their court of aristocrats. Wow. All of the themes that she had brought up were just like getting hammered into the British public at this time. Although interestingly, they dissipate quite quickly. I mean, once the queen sort of fixes it and she shows up in London

and she puts the flag up, most of the anger is actually gone. Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance, like maybe they just needed someone to get real mad at for a while. And so on the 6th of September, 1997, is her funeral. Did you watch this on TV? No. I'm sure there were lots of nine-year-olds who were compelled by this, but I'm pretty sure I was watching Alex Mack at the time.

So they didn't, they had never planned for this obviously because she's 36 years old, so they didn't know what would happen if she died. So they use the instructions, like the protocols that they have in case the queen mom dies. Oh, wow. So they're like, oh, let's just use that as a template. They're similar people. They have to extend the parade route because there's so many people

that want to watch the procession. So they have to sort of spread it out as long as possible. So that they parade her casket through town. Yeah, exactly. So she's in sort of this like open, it's not a hearse thing, but like a sort of stagecoach thing. Just like the wedding. There's this issue where sort of traditionally Prince Philip,

Diana's brother, and Prince Charles would all be walking behind her casket. And so that's how like the procession is going to work, that they're all these three men and the casket are going to walk through London. But Charles is afraid that he's going to get booed. Oh, Charles, suck it up. So they add William and Harry. Oh, oh. So he creates a boo shield with his children.

Exactly. And so he gets Prince Philip to talk them into walking in the procession. Wow. How do they feel about that? This is my like ultimate famous abuse thing. They're 12 and 15. And they're essentially as part of their whatever royal duties being forced to make a public display of mourning when their fucking mother dies.

It is so gross to me. And because their father is so afraid and just maybe not justifiably so, but like I don't think this is coming from apps. I don't think this is like the fake arm thing. Like this is not entirely out of nowhere. Is so afraid of getting booed by the public at his ex-wife's funeral that he has to use children as human shields. I just think whenever anybody has lost their mother,

they should not be having to think of how it will play in the press. And they should not be having to be used for these narratives of like, how is this going to affect my job, basically? It really sucks. However a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old want to mourn, it should be completely up to them. But then when you think about it, it's just as gross for Charles. Like Charles is just as much of a victim of this system as they are.

It's all abuse. It's all totally indefensible. Yes, it's very gross. The whole thing is gross. It's gross. Episode five, it's gross. So it is kind of cute that on the funeral procession to keep the kids from breaking down, Prince Philip is just telling them about landmarks along the way.

So he's just like, oh, that's a building where this thing was signed. How long of a walk is this too? Is this like miles? I mean, it's like an hour and a half. Oh, God. Yeah. Ugh, no. All right, so now we're going to watch a clip.

Okay, I'm ready. This is Diana's brother's eulogy. So there's some gossipy stuff. He sort of shit talks the royal family, and this becomes like a minor scandal. But I think the much more interesting part of his speech is when he's talking about Diana as a person. So that's what he's talking about here.

Okay. Three, two, one, go. There is a temptation to rush to canonize your memory. There is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities, not need to be seen as a saint. Indeed, to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being. Your wonderfully mischievous sense of humor with a laugh that bent you double.

Your joyful life transmitted wherever you took your smile and the sparkle in those unforgettable eyes. Your boundless energy, which you could barely contain. But your greatest gift was your intuition, and it was a gift you used wisely. This is what underpinned all your other wonderful attributes. And if we look to analyze what it was about you that had such a wide appeal, we find it in your instinctive feel for what was really important in all our lives.

Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected. And here we come to another truth about her. For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others, so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness, of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.

The world sensed this part of her character and cherished her for her vulnerability, whilst admiring her for her honesty. What do you think? It's really good. I mean, I didn't know her, so I don't know if this is accurate, but based on everything else I've seen and heard, it feels like he's trying and being somewhat successful,

at least in conveying who she was as a human being. Yeah. I think it's important when people die to be honest about them. I like his instinct not to canonize Diana and to see her as a person. Before she was a queen, before she was all this other shit, she was also a person and she was messy and she was also nice, and all of that complication is part of her legacy. Yeah, and we need to be able to remember that you can be a hot mess express and still leave the world better than you found it and be a light in people's lives.

It's important to wrestle that meaning away from, I think, the more frequently accepted idea that some people are just great, and we love them because they're great, and we're sad about them dying because they're great, and they're not like you because you're a hot mess express. It's like, no, she was one of us all along. I think there's like two interpretations of her legacy, one which I think is too cynical and one which I think is too naive.

The two cynical explanation is that something that I think both the royal family and world leaders and politicians and people in power generally learn from Princess Diana is that the illusion of authenticity is a great replacement for actual caring. I can see somebody looking at the kind of work that Diana did and be like, you know what, what we need to do is we need to go to this hospice and shake people's hands and get great photos and then fucking cut their budgets. How much can you get away with if you look nice in front of cameras and you have this display of authenticity?

So you think she inspired like a generation's worth of imitators who cynically appropriated the hollow yet effective version of her celebrity? Yes. I mean, one of the things I found very reassuring in the research for this is that there is no evidence that Diana was doing any of this cynically. Like you don't find behind the scenes that she was like rolling her eyes at people she met on these AIDS wards. Like all of the evidence is that she really did care about the kind of work that she was doing. And she opened the door for a different kind of person in power.

But once that door was open, then people who really were doing it cynically can rush through. I think that we have had this massive appropriation among people in power of the kind of authenticity that Diana had. People realized that they could fake that and that they had to fake that. That sucks. But then the naive explanation of her legacy is really that the most moral dimension of our lives is what we do with power. Wow. Can you embroider that on a pillow?

I mean, most of us don't have very much power and our power over other people is very limited. It's over our kids or it's over people who work for us. Or it's nothing like most politicians have. The person taking our order at the sandwich shop, notably. But what Diana did, she didn't have a lot of official power. But what she did have was the power of attention. She didn't really have to do this. I mean, the extent to which this sort of charity stuff, this was not something that

she had really been expected to do on the level that she did, right? She easily could have done one-tenth as much of this as she did and been fine in the eyes of the public. Yeah, and I think I grew up with the Diana model and assumed that this was just what royalty did, that they were just constantly holding children and going to where the landmines were. I mean, it feels like it's like she's like training a puppy. She's like, if I run over here, you're going to chase me. And it seems like those were her ambitions for later in her life if she had lived, right? She was working on a chain of hospices.

She was trying to expand how effective she was at these kinds of efforts. So I have one last photo. This is my favorite photo of Princess Diana and I have been saving it for the last thing we talk about. Here we go. Aw, this is super cute. Yeah, I love this. This is really great. This is her at an AIDS hospice.

She's chatting very intently with somebody and vibing, it seems like. Totally vibing. She's dressed like she is at a wedding. She's wearing a pearl necklace, pearl earrings, her heart of the ocean ring. She's got her shiny nylons and she's wearing a dress that is exactly like the dress-up dress that I had when I was six years old. It's like a very busy floral pattern and she looks like she's at a nice outdoor wedding and also has been a meaner of someone at an outdoor wedding.

Not a stressful one, a nice one. Like she looks like she has a little plate of half-eaten canapes just out of frame beside her. You know what it is? This is gossip pose. Ooh, yeah, it really is. She's sitting there with her legs crossed and she's like leaning her whole body toward this guy who she's talking to. And then she's talking to a guy who has the pallor of someone who's not doing very well.

He's wearing like a terry cloth robe and what looks like a hospital pant. He fits with the hospital setting, she doesn't. But it actually, it feels as if she has like airlifted him into this moment of being at a summer wedding with her and gossiping about something. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. And so I found this really moving description. This is someone describing a photo. This is not the photo in question.

I looked very hard for it, but I couldn't find it. But he's describing a photo that was taken of him and Princess Diana. So this is Tina Brown's describing a conversation she had with a NBC reporter. An NBC commentator recalls the reaction to Diana's death from a patient at an AIDS hospice outside London to which Diana had once brought William and Harry. I was sitting at a table with a gay gentleman in his early 60s. In the hospice cafeteria was a picture of him and Diana with another man and Diana was laughing hard in the picture.

I said to him, what the heck was going on that she was laughing so hard? And he said, well, I was so nervous and my lover who was very sick, he has since died, was sitting beside me. And it was all very strange and I didn't know what to say. I looked at her and I suddenly said, hey, you're a princess and I, I'm a queen. And he started to cry as he told me the story. And it suddenly connected with me that she was a symbol of letting it all go, letting all the bridges down, even in the midst of being a royal and being a celebrity royal.

She was the symbol of saying, fuck it, none of it matters. Love that for her. Yeah. And so I think that's a good thing for there to be a symbol of. Yes, of letting it all go. I'm just bummed. I just feel like once again, like if she were alive today, she would be like 59 years old. And just like there would have been so many more years of just this, you know,

just these visits and these conversation. And also it feels like she was someone who like felt genuine, like sustaining joy and connecting with another human being. And if that's what's driving you, then I don't think it can be fully cynical. I think there can be aspects of cynicism and sincerity operating at once, especially if you're in a very image centric field and you know how to anticipate, you know, how people are going to interpret your behaviors and all of that. But, you know, it just feels as if like this was something that was sustainable for her

and that she would still be doing today because it meant apparently as much to her as it did to anybody else. I think people want that in the same way when she gave that speech in Wales and she was really nervous, it connected people with her. Yeah. And when she's dealing with her own issues and she's acting out those issues by talking to other people and hearing about theirs, that's something people can feel. And so that's it.

That's our Diana series. That was Diana. That was Diana. You know? Yeah. I like her. She can stay. So in conclusion, carry on the legacy of this wonderful person by pushing an old lady down.

Don't do that. Don't do that. That's not it either. I think carry on the legacy of this lady by caring about people that you have power over and connecting with people who maybe are going through some stuff. 01:29:16,160 --> 01:29:18,560 And maybe you're going through some stuff too. Notice the power you have and teach it to chase you like a puppy to the places

where it needs to go. Yes, puppy powers. There it is.