Shudder-inducing fanfic of the week: The new issue of Newsweek features a story called “Diana At 50: If She Were Here Now,” by none other than Tina Brown. The digital artwork on the cover reanimates Diana so that she is walking alongside daughter-in-law Kate Middleton, who is gazing adoringly at the People’s Princess and ignoring the fact that if this is really happening, Di is a zombie. The Atlantic Wire asks, “How Creepy Is Princess Diana’s Ghost on the Cover of Newsweek?” Answer: Very!
Since Diana would have turned 50 this week, on July 1, Tina Brown, aka Lady Evans — journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of the biography The Diana Chronicles — describes what the Princess of Wales would be like were she still with us:
Still great-looking: that’s a given. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, with her cornflower-blue eyes and striding sexuality, was a handsome woman to the very end. Fashionwise, Diana would have gone the J.Crew and Galliano route à la Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.
Brown thinks Diana would have been remarried, twice, and would have moved to New York. And, because you were wondering, here’s how should would have handled her first-born son’s new wife:
The rising public adoration of Kate would have afforded Diana some tricky moments. Pleased, yes. But, like Frances Shand Kydd-who, days before Diana’s wedding, suddenly burst out, “I have good long legs, like my daughter”-Diana would have had to adjust to a broadening of the limelight. Her edge over Kate, of course, was her own epic of princessly suffering, which would always make Diana’s story more interesting. (“Happily ever after” will never have the same allure to the press as “It all went horribly wrong.”) Diana, rejoicing in her flawless Spencer pedigree, would have positioned herself as a firm defender of the Middletons against the palace snobs and ostentatiously made Carole Middleton, Kate’s dynamic mother, her new BFF.
In another photoillustration image accompanying the piece, Diana is holding an iPhone.
It’s definitely fun and interesting to entertain visions and fantasies of what might have been. But Diana wasn’t just a princess and an icon. She was a mother. And while Prince William surely wishes his mom could have been alive to see him married, would he really want her and his wife to be thrown together in a Photoshop Of Horrors on newsstands across the globe?
Diana at 50 [Newsweek]
Diana At 50 Joins Kate Middleton On Controversial ‘Newsweek’ Cover [Entertainment Weekly]
How Creepy Is Princess Diana’s Ghost on the Cover of Newsweek? [Atlantic Wire]
Newsweek Imagines Diana Aged 50 With Her Admiring Daughter-In-Law Kate… In Article That Claims The Botoxed Princess Would Be Facebook Friends With Camilla [Daily Mail]