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DIANA IN SEARCH OF HERSELF: Portrait of a Troubled Princess, by Sally Bedell Smith. Times Books, 451 pp., $25.
IT'S PROBABLY a blessing - and not a coincidence - that Sally Bedell Smith's balanced and exhaustive biography of the late Princess of Wales appears a full two years after Diana's death. Not only must it have taken time to accumulate the thousands of details contained in this book and to place them in some perspective; but had such a frank and complicated analysis of the princess appeared earlier, Smith might have felt the need to hire herself a bodyguard.
The Diana who appears here as a manipulative and deeply troubled woman is sure to disturb and outrage the millions of book buyers bent on lionizing her and, necessarily, demonizing her former husband, Prince Charles. Had Smith's version gone up against the dozens of quickie hagiographies that flooded the market in late 1997, one can only imagine the hordes who would have felt it incumbent upon them to shoot the messenger.
Which is not to say that "Diana In Search of Herself" is a hatchet job, or that Smith - noted biographer of such other controversial figures as CBS founder William S. Paley and courtesan-to-the-stars-turned-Democratic-party-honcho Pamela Harriman - has an identifiable bias. And it's not as if she has turned up much new information: She revisits, in much detail, the divorce of Diana's parents, which undeniably traumatized their...