THE PRINCESS OF HEARTS

By NANCY GIBBS and PRISCILLA PAINTON

It takes nothing but fate to be born a princess; how much harder it is to become one. Maybe one reason we could not take our eyes or our hearts off Princess Diana was that she made it so easy to claim her as secretly, subversively, one of our own.

Grace Kelly proved America could dress up, go to the ball and come back with a prince. She left Hollywood and found royalty. Diana crossed the other way, dancing with John Travolta at the White House. She was the next chapter, the princess who insisted, with the innocence of a New World conqueror, that love could be brought into the royal chamber. Hers was another American revolution, which said we don't want to shed this crown, we want to reinvent it. She was an entrepreneur, not content to marry the title but apparently determined to live it.

Diana played out an old American fantasy, the real-life fairy tale. She was setting about the job of living happily ever after, a goal her sad-faced royal in-laws never seemed even to entertain, and so we rooted for her. It helped a lot that we knew so little. We could make her anything we chose, and her evolving image often said more about what we wanted than about who she was.

When we met her in 1980 she was shy Di, with the streaked pageboy and lanky limbs backlighted through the thin flowered skirt. She was all raw material, charm and skin and a curtsy, the kindergarten teacher who could cross the street without stopping traffic. She would never be a perfect beauty, so the fun was watching her become a great one, the bones and the bearing taking shape before the cameras, as though by an effort of will.

But she seemed to know, maybe before we did, that there was more to playing the part than looking it. She began as a feminine icon, not a feminist one, abiding by history's demands: producing heirs, cutting ribbons, walking a conspicuous three paces behind the times. A few years and a thousand talk shows later, she became the Princess Victim, bulimic, suicidal, betrayed by a caddish paramour with a tell-all book, trapped in a loveless marriage. But that image too was fleeting, replaced by a very '90s portrait of a shrewd operator, better at public relations than all the palace spear throwers. By the time she agreed to a divorce, she had embraced the American notion that marriage is more about self-fulfillment than sacrifice or lines of succession. She had built up such reserves of public sympathy by this time that even as she lost her status, she kept her stature.

All along, she seemed to be saying that true royal behavior--courage and grace--was a gift possessed by outsiders. Like the Queen Mother before her, she won people's devotion by remaining devoted to them. As a princess, she embraced the baby with AIDS. But in her solo career, she sold off her evening wear at Christie's for charity, visited lepers in Indonesia, explored minefields in Bosnia. And the message she sent was a radical one: you don't need a palace to be a princess. You may even need to leave it to become one.

The end of the story, it turns out, is all about sacrifice. She may have escaped her marriage in search of love, but there was no escaping us. Her grip on our imagination was too firm, the bounty on her head too high. By choosing to continue with her duties, to go where she was needed and drag the spotlight with her, she gave up any chance of ever driving quietly through Paris on an August night.