By ELLEN TUMPOSKY SPECIAL TO THE NY DAILY NEWS
LONDON - Five years after Princess Diana's death, her name is still in the headlines, but there are signs the public is beginning to forget the woman once called the world's biggest star. 'I think that her memory is fading. It's very sad, and I find it very difficult to understand. I think it shows the British public is very fickle,' said Judy Wade, who writes about the British royal family.
Wade noted only a small number of people now leave bouquets at Kensington Palace on Diana's birthday and on the anniversary of her death in a Paris car crash on Aug. 31, 1997.
'Maybe people are cherishing her in their hearts, but there's no outward evidence of it,' Wade said.
Those who do leave bouquets tend to be unbalanced fanatics, in the view of royal biographer Robert Lacey. 'The inscriptions are clearly the work of disturbed people. There's something necrophilic about it,' he said.
During the elaborate public celebrations in June of Queen Elizabeth's 50 years on the throne, Diana was never mentioned — though she did appear briefly as a cardboard cutout on one parade float. Still, Lacey said, the jubilee events reflected Diana's impact on the royal family.
'You would not have seen a pop concert in the grounds of Buckingham Palace had it not been for Diana,' he said.
The public's anger at the royals' apparent indifference in the days after her death led to a sea change in the way the royal family presents itself to the public.
In the last five years, Diana's former in-laws have aped her common touch, with the queen having tea in a housing project and visiting the set of a popular soap opera. And when the 101-year-old queen mother died on March 30, Prince Charles spoke emotionally on TV about his grandmother.
'The royal family is immensely the better for what they learned from Diana,' Lacey said. Visitors continue to stream to the museum at Althorp, the ancestral home of Diana's family, the Spencers, but donations to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund are down — though the fund has pledged $75 million in charitable donations since her death. Only last month, an official committee finally agreed on a public memorial to the princess, choosing an oval stone ring filled with water, designed by American Kathryn Gustafson, to be built in Hyde Park in London.
Vivienne Parry, a former trustee of the Memorial Fund, called it 'a puddle,' adding, 'It does absolutely look like one of those show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, not a national monument at all.'
Parry believes the British establishment has encouraged the dimming of Diana's memory for its own reasons — partly to promote Charles' paramour, Camilla Parker Bowles, who is more and more of a public presence, appearing this summer with the prince at a royal garden party and at the jubilee concerts.
'It feels, among ordinary people in Britain, that Diana has been airbrushed out,' Parry said.
The princess — who would be 41 if she had lived — still holds sway with the media, which have given big coverage to the latest tell-all book by former royal bodyguard Ken Wharfe. 'Diana: Closely Guarded Secret' dishes the dirt on Diana's affairs with army officer James Hewitt and upper-class art dealer Oliver Hoare. It tells how Diana filled a briefcase with $24,000 in cash for Hewitt to buy a sports car, and how Hoare was the first lover to ever please her physically.
Wharfe also reveals that the princess once jumped 20 feet off a hotel balcony in Austria while on vacation with her sons, William and Harry, then returned in the early morning hours demanding to be let in.
Despite such tacky revelations, many believe Diana's real legacy is her work for charity. 'The work she did for AIDS, leprosy and [amputee victims of] land mines did more to destroy prejudice and ignorance than any other human being of the 20th century,' Wade said.
As for Diana's iconic status, Parry predicted the princess' luster will endure. 'She'll be like a Marilyn Monroe. There will be a time when her memory fades a bit, then she'll come back stronger than ever.'
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