BY ANDREW ROSS

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SPECIAL DIANA PACKAGE: SEPTEMBER 2, 1997: The haunting of the House of Windsor By Christopher Hitchens In death, Diana will cause more problems for Britain's royal family than she ever did in life. "They destroyed her" By Andrew Ross Camille Paglia discusses how cruel intrigues and sexual psychodramas in the House of Windsor undid Diana AUGUST 31, 1997: Blood on their hands By Jonathan Broder The paparazzi may have been to blame for Princess Diana's death -- but they had an accomplice. Diana: Victim of love By Susie Bright Till the very end, she kept picking the wrong man From huntress to hunted By Andrew Ross Camille Paglia talks about the glorious rise and "tacky end" of Princess Diana

You said that Diana's end was "tacky -- to die in the car of a gigolo playboy in flight from the Ritz." Whose fault was it -- the paparazzi who are sitting in a Paris jail? Does the tabloid media, like Diana's brother said, have blood on its hands? I'm sorry, but I don't see it that way. It was via the tabloids that the world fell in love with her. Yes, I hope that the paparazzi are hung. I was very cheered to hear that one of them was beaten by passers-by and I hope that they are brought up not just on manslaughter charges but on murder charges. But I feel that there is blood on the hands of the House of Windsor. The real people who are responsible ultimately for this accident are everyone in the House of Windsor from top to bottom, the royal family to the bureaucrats, who did not realize they had on their hands this incredible -- Crown jewel? Crown jewel, who brought the monarchy up to the present. Everyone commented at the time of the wedding, with thousands of young people crowding the Mall (by Buckingham Palace), that this was the future of the monarchy, that with its acquisition of Diana, the monarchy had restored its modernity. Instead, its treatment -- its mistreatment -- of her, and all of the sordidness that has happened afterwards may mean the end of the monarchy. It's extremely pivotal. The enormous loss of prestige and loss of confidence that people have in the monarchy comes directly from the way the royals treated her. They were ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous about it. In what way? She showed all the good will in the world to be part of that institution, the House of Windsor, but they never offered her the kind of help that she needed. She was a person who needed a tremendous amount of emotional support. Instead there were all these petty jealousies that ultimately destablized her -- she was already frail psychologically -- and they were just profligate about it. They destroyed her, and it all led to this. But did she not sow some of the seeds herself -- especially by this constant kind of shadow-boxing with (Charles' consort) Camilla Parker-Bowles? It seemed that so much of what Diana did -- including being photographed in an amorous embrace with Dodi Fayed -- was aimed at upstaging Parker-Bowles. Your theory is very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some competitive theater going on there; it makes a lot of psychological sense. You also have this theme of betrayal, a fairy tale heroine, Snow White, who became a victim of conspiracy by the evil queen. Or you've got the "Portrait of a Lady" story -- innocent young girl as victim of a shadowy older woman in league with a male and so on. So our hearts went out to her because we felt she was utterly out of her depth in trying to maneuver against these two old-guard constellation of enemies -- the House of Windsor and this malign woman from Charles' past. A Grimm fairy tale. I think it unsettles people that Camilla Parker-Bowles seems so unbeautiful. There's something kind of witchy and harridan-like about her. If she had been a very alluring model or someone of conventional female attractiveness, I think people might have felt, well, now Diana is a mother, it often happens that the husband begins to stray. But to see Charles fall under the sway of this woman without any conventionally appealing female attributes implied to us that there was some strange psychodrama going on in Prince Charles' unconscious. That in some way, what was she -- a shadowy image of his own mother? It felt like this unsavory, decadent stuff was going on in the House of Windsor. and there was this fresh-faced English rose who was being polluted and contaminated and trapped. And one wanted to help her, to go to war for her in some way against those who insulted her. And along came her knight in shining armor, Dodi Fayed. Look, everyone wanted her to be happy but it was clear that she never did find the inner resources to survive on her own. I do feel that this final relationship was infra dig. Diana's involvement with this rather soiled Dodi Fayed reminded one of Hollywood analogies -- Lana Turner's daughter stabbing the mafioso. In the end, Diana's life seemed to veer towards the squalid and the sleazy. And you cannot blame the tabloids for that. Once we get over the immediate shock, maybe there will seem to be a certain inevitability about the manner of her death -- like those of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. We'll look back on it and say, "Yes, this made sense." I'm also reminded of Aly Khan, the famous playboy who another innocent, Rita Hayworth, married and was betrayed by. I think if Diana had married this guy (Dodi Fayed), I think she would have ended up with the kind of disappointment that Rita Hayworth suffered. Aly Khan was killed in a car crash as well. But this is also quite different. This isn't on a country road, where, for example, James Dean and Grace Kelly were killed. This is coming from the Ritz, at midnight, being driven by a man from the Ritz who was not only clearly incompetent but also, as it now turns out, was massively drunk, careening through Parisian streets at a rate of speed that could have killed others, not just those in the car. And what was the point of it? Just give them some photographs. We're not talking about a private vacation. She's in Paris; she had dinner at a public place. Yet there was this kind of S&M game played with pursuing paparazzi, which put everyone in danger. We're just very lucky that other innocent people weren't killed and maimed by this madness. Perhaps Diana did us all a favor by dying when she did, at 36, with her beautiful image frozen in our minds, before she got older and went even further downhill. That's very persuasive. We look back at James Dean and he's crystallized as how he looked at that moment. "Giant" had just premiered a day or so earlier, and it was one of his greatest performances. On the other hand, Bob Dylan, if he had died in that motorcyle accident in the mid-'60s, we would remember him then at his artistic height, rather than now, dragging himself around the world, abusing his own songs and lyrics. What would have been the next thing for Diana? We do know that her death is primarily a loss for her sons, aged 12 and 15. Her loss comes at such a critical point in their lives and is just a horrendous blow for them. Sept. 2, 1997 Join the discussion on Princess Diana's death in Table Talk.