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.