Royalty Even A Yank Could Love America Warmed To Common Touch

Princess Diana’s hold on the American imagination is proving at least as tenacious in death as in life.

The reasons are varied, according to experts in the fields of psychology and pop culture, who note that Americans long have been fascinated with the British crown - and with celebrity everywhere.

“We’ve always been hung up on the Brits,” said Jack Nachbar, professor emeritus in the department of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “Though we fancy ourselves democratic - and fought a revolution - we feel culturally inferior. And, in the 20th century, we are hung up on celebrities. Those two things met perfectly in Princess Diana.”

Beyond the American fascination with fame, fortune and royalty, there seemed a particularly keen interest in Diana - the fairy princess with a common touch, the regal lady who left the impression that, if it were possible, she would have everyone over for a couple of brews in Buckingham’s back yard.

“Diana exemplified the ordinary person and the princess and carried off that dual role with grace,” said Donald Weatherley, a psychologist at the University of Colorado. “We were fascinated with a person pulled out of the masses who becomes an acceptable kind of royalty.”

It was Diana’s reputation for decency that seemed to resonate especially in the United States.

“Not only would she present herself as a fairy princess but she was a good princess, too - the good mother, the beneficent person who worked for causes and visited hospitals,” said Fredrick Koenig, a social psychologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. “Her appearance in the living room through television provided a glow for the day.”

If members of British royalty often seem to Americans distant, disdainful and intellectually arrogant, Diana seemed OK.

“She’s never said anything important, nothing profound,” said Marshall Fishwick, a specialist in popular culture at Virginia Polytechnic and State University. “She had no real philosophy and was almost embarrassingly open, frank and vulnerable.”

But those were precisely the qualities that made Diana irresistible to many on these shores.

“Americans like someone who comes in and tells it the way it is,” Fishwick said.