dedication; magic; frostiness

The six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand in March 1983 was a threatening experience for Charles's ego.

{excerpt - The Diana Chronicles, Tina Brown}

It confirmed the Princess as a global superstar and it scared her husband to death. There were 100 or more press on the tour from the UK alone, and 70 more photographers from France, Germany, America, and Japan. Daily Mirror photographer Kent Gavin observed that out of every 100 pictures he took on this tour, 92 involved Diana and only 8 showed Charles. "She is so popular," added Gavin at that time, "that she is in my lens from the moment she arrives at a place until the moment she leaves."

The tour had a serious political goal -- persuading the grumpy and increasingly Republican Australian continent that it still wanted a monarchy in the first place. The Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had just lost a landslide election to the Labour leader Robert James Lee "Bob" Hawke, who epitomized the churlish mood of the populace when he commented, "I don't regard welcoming them [Charles and Diana] as the most important thing I'm going to have to do in my first nine months in office." Regarding Prince Charles, he added dismissively: "I don't think we will be talking about Kings of Australia forever more."

Diana's magic turned the whole mood around. The crowds shouting her name were overwhelming, the tiara version of Beatlemania. In Brisbane alone, 400,000 turned out to scream for the Princess, bringing the city center to a dead halt. "I'd seen the corwds in Wales but the crowds in Australia were incredible," [photographer] Jayne Fincher said. ..."It was just a sea of people as far as you could see, not just on the land, the harbour was full of boats and people. And all you could see was the top of this little pink hat bobbing along."

...Diana wooed the Australians like a pro, hurtling with Charles between mob-scene walkabouts, glamour receptions, marathon dinners, making forty flights between Australia's eight states.
...What the Australians adored was Diana's lack of pretension, the opposite of colonial arrogance. The Princess's own intellectual insecurity was an unexpected asset. It made her head immediately for the underdog in any room -- the aged, the shy, the very young.

"She didn't speak to confident people half as easily as those who weren't," her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, has said. "And this was, in her case, a kind of battle that went on. She wasn't all that confident herself, she knew she had this gift with people and she used it wisely and generously. But in fact she felt going into a big room of people rather drawn to those who are feeling a bit nervous, rather as she was herself."

...The AP photographer Ron Bell remembers the elevator doors opening and Prince Charles stepping out with shining eyes: "Ron, isn't she absolutely beautiful?" he said. "I'm so proud of her." It was true -- Charles was smart enough to see what a stuning political asset Diana had become -- but he was also deeply disturbed by all the adoration coming his young wife's way. Its excess frightened him. You can see him still trying to figure out Diana's mystique in a letter from Australia to a friend dated April 4. "Maybe the wedding, because it was so well-done, and because it made such a wonderful, almost Hollywood-style film, has distorted people's view of things?"

...Victor Chapman, the press secretary on the tour, got used to late-night phone calls from Charles complaining about the scant coverage of himself in the press compared to the hagiographic acres accorded his wife. The Prince retreated into Jung's Psychological Reflections and wrote exasperated letters to his friends: "I do feel desperate for Diana," he wrote in his April 4 letter to a friernd. "There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly and I am quite convinced, mindless people photographing it...What has got into them all? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?"

...In Australia and New Zealand, Diana graduated to being a seasoned media sophisticate with the stamina and the charm repertoire of a big-time star. She mesmerized Bob Hawke and even extracted a curtsy from his wife, Hazel. By the end of Charles and Diana's tour, a poll in Australia found that Monarchists outnumbered Republicans two to one and...that was the point, wasn't it? The twenty-one-year-old Princess of Wales had proved she was a dazzling new PR weapon for the British crown.

...Diana's ballooning star power strengthened her growing independence from the Palace. At the end of the tour, the Princess was told by the Palace that the baby-in-tow format would not be allowed again. She responded by saying that in that case, she would not go on long tours. "Children cannot be left for that length of time at their age," said the Princess, who knew all about being left.

...Buckingham Palace was furiously competitive about the success of the Prince and Princess of Wales's Antipodean travels. The frostiness from members of the household toward Diana when she returned was obvious. No one said a word about how well she had coped, how superbly she had represented her country over six grueling weeks and turned around the Australian attitude to the crown.

Alan Clark, the patrician Tory MP and acidic diarist who died in 1999, believed that the Queen was more directly threatened by Diana than has previously been supposed. In an unpublished 1998 interview...Clark opined that ever since the Princess of Wales's wedding day, "When Diana said, 'I will' a great roar went up -- like the Middle Ages. This rang alarm bells for the Queen. Mrs. Thatcher and Diana -- these two women threatened her. Here clearly from the outset was a rival. Here was the embodiment of The Way Ahead. A walking icon who conformed to every convention that young people fantasized about." The Queen's men were especially irked by the BBC devoting a half hour of Sunday prime time to the Waleses' Australia and New Zealand trip, unprecedented coverage for a royal tour.
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[The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown.
Copyright 2007. Random House, New York.]

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