Actually, The Crown Rules.

Peter Morgan figures out the tragic last day, Elizabeth Debicki takes you inside Diana.

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            I didn’t care about Diana until I saw Elizabeth Debicki in the sixth and last season of The Crown. But sometimes, I had to pretend,

In 1989, Tina Brown sent me to London to write about Diana, who was still Princess of Wales and the most famous woman in the world.

Tina was obsessed with Diana, I was not.

Tina was the editor of Vanity Fair, I was not.

I had a tax bill , Tina paid upon delivery.  

               I had neither the experience nor the cunning for stalking journalism. I hovered clumsily across the street to watch Diana drop off her sons at school, hoping I’d catch an impression of her that would set off a relatable thought . On the second morning , I was on the brink of catching a clue to her inner truth as she darted up the school’s steps, when a pair of uniformed policemen made it plain I had to leave.  

                There was no access, either to Diana or to an insight that would allow me to use words about her that hadn’t been used before.  I duly circled the outer edge of Diana’s periphery – people from her charities, a gossipy friend of a friend of a friend courtier who received me at home by the dim light of lamp set on a table in the next-door room -- but learned only one thing.

Mara Berni , the owner of Diana’s favorite Italian restaurant San Lorenzo, trusted me because I had been a regular at San Lorenzo since I was a teenager. Mara, who had mystical inclinations and a tendency to tell the future unasked, told me Diana was a saint.

A saint, yes. She consoled and she healed. She had touched Aids patients with her bare hands.

Mara said, “Don’t tell anyone I said it, but Diana is really a saint.”

I told Tina Brown that Diana was a saint, but I couldn’t say who’d told me, couldn’t prove it, and, in any case, this was not the kind of information Tina Brown could use.

I wrote a mediocre piece about Diana and was paid upon delivery; Tina went on to edit The New Yorker and write a book about Diana.

            In 1997, I arrived early at the family reception after Gianni Versace’s funeral , and found myself almost alone in his palazzo with Diana. She put us intimidated strangers at ease, told us which canapés to choose—the grey caviar, not the black—and confided that her car had been tailed at high speed by the press all the way from the airport .

A month later, Diana and Dodi al Fayed bobbed over the Mediterranean, pink paparazzi bait aboard a yacht. I wondered what she was doing in that scenario on that yacht with that playboy, and was surprised to feel a pinch of  envy.  

           And then five minutes later, it seemed, she was incomprehensibly dead in a Paris tunnel, and the world mourned.

             Despite Tina Brown’s excellent book about Diana, and all the books I didn’t read, Diana Spencer, Lady Di, remained apart, more a kind of mind-dumpling than a person, an aggregate of received ideas in a broth of yearning protected by a thick crust of opinion, information, speculation, worship, re-evaluation. Headlines about bulimia, self-harm, the Revenge Dress, a self sustaining loop of dead gossip. There was no access to the person she’d been .

But thenThe Crown began on Netflix back on November 4th 2016, four days before Trump acceded to the White House. The British press has spent those seven years of five seasons being loudly appalled at the liberties taken with royal truth, but it’s because of those liberties, those tweaks and bends to the facts-as-they-are-known, that The Crown has solicited sympathy and emotion even from those Brits who want to abolish the monarchy.  

The Crown is conceived and written by Peter Morgan, whose gift for taking liberties to sculpt present history into effective drama has created its own genre . The Crown was possibly conceived when Stephen Frears (now knighted into Sir Stephen Frears) directed Helen Mirren (now Dame Helen Mirren) as Elizabeth II in the film of Peter Morgan’s The Queen.

        Aspirations are not considered healthy in the UK, and sympathy for the Royals , if you’re not related to them, is a lower-middle class thing. The hard-line working-class attitude to the monarchy combines disgust and rage, but once the rungs have been scaled just enough to set off pretensions , the Royals are worshipped.  

Thus, non-Brits have a easier time ; they can watch The Crown as a foreign soap opera that triggers neither the shame of class insufficiency nor rage at the entitlement.

The Crown has deployed tricks to keep us interested in this family: changing the casting every few seasons according to the ages of the characters, so that the tentative young Clare Foy Queen Elizabeth was paired with Matt Smith Prince Philip, who became Tobias Menzies to Olivia Colman’s Queen before maturing into a bristly old Jonathan Pryce.  

                   But the last two seasons of The Crown had seemed miscast : Olivia Colman’s fabulous dreadnought Queen Elizabeth was replaced by Imelda Staunton’s more ordinary version (less grand, worse hair). The tender Josh O’Connor Prince Charles was replaced by the sour Dominic West Prince Charles, and the darting Emma Corrin Diana became Elizabeth Debicki Diana, who did not fully register in season 5.

                     But then came Season 6.

So far, Netflix has only streamed the first four episodes, which might be enough. The Diana story is so well told that you’re pulled into the emotional heart of matters you were too cool to care about.  

              Season 6 opens in the summer of 1997. Charles prepares a grand party for Camilla’s 50th birthday, and Diana accepts Mohamed al Fayed’s invitation to bring William and Harry on his yacht for a Mediterranean holiday.

Then al Fayed summons his playboy son Dodi, who is three weeks away from marrying an American model . Dodi hurries to the yacht , where his father presents ‘the Princess of Wales’ as his chance to win his approval and half the business. Dodi will do anything to please his father.

                 Diana is written as a tragic pawn , the virgin chosen to produce the heir and a spare who becomes, post divorce,  the foreign businessman’s lever into British legitimacy . But she’s played by Debicki as a seasoned adept at the game of social charm, of getting along with people. She’s neither a dupe nor a hysteric, and while giving the world a spectacle of duty-free high-flying jet-set love, she’s trying to hold on to her reality.

When I watched Elizabeth Debicki’s prodigious feat of transformation, I fell into Diana, to see the world as she did. Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana moves through the rooms, hallways, courtyards, cabins and decks of these episodes with embarrassed grace , mortified at having turned out to be so famous, but also playing with the press.

You see discomfort, the holding fast to her sons for her sense of self , and safety, her love for them. The way Debicki’s Diana listens— to her sons, to Charles, to Dodi —you see the intensity she gave the ill, the dying, those she consoled: as if the paying attention and listening reassured her, as if she soothed her fears by giving loving advice in the vocabulary she had paid to learn from shrinks and psychics.

     Yes,  Debicki does all the things we saw Diana do in photographs -- lowers her chin and engages the world looking upwards from the bent head, but she brings Diana’s history of learned behavior to those mannerisms, that attitude . You see nano-seconds of impetus towards flight or protest quickly stilled by the self-control she had had to learn. There is a cheery social affect, a cheeky worldliness, and an unfailing politeness that might just be the thing that killed her.

         While Charles celebrates Camilla under a tent in the wind and rain of Highgrove, and the Queen disapproves from the gloom of Balmoral Castle, the incongruous relationship between Diana and Dodi proceeds onboard the polished, slippery yacht, in the sight of innumerable cameras.

Diana is the casual one; Dodi has everything at stake, and grasps at the promise of a ring marketed under the name Dis Moi Oui —“Tell Me Yes”.

      There’s a brief scene on the yacht , Diana on the phone with a woman in England—either a psychic or a  therapist, it wasn’t clear to me—who advises her to cut this holiday short and hurry home to be there for the return from Scotland of her sons.

She acts on the advice, a decision that sets off Dodi al Fayed’s frantic attempt to catch the prize before it escapes him, and leads to the utterly fucked-up Paris stopover on August 31, 1997.  

              The scenes of the Paris trip are brilliant. I’ve never before seen such a tightening drama built on changes of plans, misfires, redos, backtracking, attempts to fix what was never was. The arrivals to, and departures from, Dodi’s father’s hotel, the cars and drivers, the crowds and the paparazzi, the jewelry store, the cursed mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, the hotel dining room, the suite and all the interstitial spaces contain and mirror the despair of Dodi’s grasping chase, and Diana’s immobilized despair at being chased. There is no master plan, only missteps that build into the fatal Plan B compromise. And that is a terrifying idea.