Today's Evil Beet Gossip

Newsweek Gets Creepy for What Would Have Been Princess Diana’s 50th Birthday

A photo of Princess Diana and Kate Middleton on the cover of Newsweek

Check out that cover, huh?  Yeah, I’m sure that didn’t make anybody feel weird at all.  It totally looks like an appropriate choice from all angles.  For sure.

Princess Diana would have turned 50 on July 1st of this year, so, of course, Newsweek thought it would be fun to talk about all the things she’d be into nowadays, and how she would feel about everything going on in the world.  You know, if she wasn’t dead.  Cool, right?

What she would look like: 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.

Her love life: Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Al-Fayed’s hopeless unreliability. After the breakup I see her moving to her favorite city, New York, spending a few cocooned years safely married to a super-rich hedge-fund guy who could provide her with what she called “all the toys”: the plane, the private island, the security detail. Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She’d have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host, or a globe-trotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men.

Her stance on Kate Middleton: And Kate, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge? How would Diana have handled her son’s steadfast affection for a woman other than herself? 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.

On one hand, I can see where this article would be a neat little tribute, but on the other, much larger hand, it creeps me out, and it creeps me out real bad. I hope William and Harry don’t read Newsweek on the regular, because can you imagine?

Where do you guys stand on this: is it cute or completely wrong?

7 CommentsLeave a comment

  • The picture is fairly creepy, but the article is *really* creepy. Speculating about her love life (in a not-altogether-flattering way), etc. just seems disrespectful.

  • Totally inappropriate and insensitive, but not surprising. Newsweek has now whored itself out to sensationalism in order to boost their very weak sales.

  • this is really disrespectful, dont think Prince William and Harry would be pleased reading about their dead mothers would be love life, this article is in very bad taste!!!