Would Princess Diana still be alive if she had moved to America?

Karen Brooks Hopkins was there when Princess Diana dazzled New York City.

In February 1989 – by then her marriage to Prince Charles irrevocably damaged – she flew to the United States for what would be her first solo trip, ostensibly to promote British industries.

She attended an event organised by Dawson International, a Scotland-based clothing firm, visited a famous store at the Rockefeller Plaza, and secured international headlines when she visited a centre for poor families on the Lower East Side, and a hospital in Harlem where she hugged a child who had Aids.

Yet, perhaps the most singular, flashbulb moment occurred when she attended a touring production of Falstaff, by the Welsh National Opera, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Amid a sea of well-tailored black outfits, recalls Hopkins, then the BAM’s president and chief fund-raiser, the British princess shimmered in a white gown.

“There was a gasp” she tells The Independent. Even Donald Trump was impressed.

As the 25th anniversary of her death in a Paris car crash approaches next week, Hopkins and others recall the princess’s New York visit as the moment she stepped onto the world stage, without her husband, and in what would soon be seen as a moment of independence from – if not stark defiance to – the royal family.

Three years later, the couple would separate, Diana later telling an interviewer that there were “three of us in this marriage”, a reference to Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s former girlfriend with whom he was having an affair. (In truth, there were four in the marriage, given Diana was herself seeing Captain James Hewitt.)

The breakneck-paced, three-day visit, for which she flew on Concorde, has received fresh attention given that it features in season four of The Crown. It has also relit speculation as to her purported desire to relocate to the United States with her sons, cast off the royal family’s grasp, and try and reduce exposure to the paparazzi.

Such a course of action would, of course, later be followed by her youngest son, Harry, and his wife, Meghan Markle, who have sought to establish a life away from an institution allegedly beset by cruelty and heartlessness, finding sympathetic ears in the likes of Oprah Winfrey.

“Actually they’re following in Princess Diana’s footsteps,” the princess’s one-time butler, Paul Burrell, told CBS News two years ago, when Harry and Meghan left Britain and moved, first to Canada, and then California.

“I remember she set out in her sitting room, the plans of a home in Malibu, California, the former home of Julie Andrews, and she said to me ‘I’m buying this house and buying this house to give William and Harry a new perspective on life’.”

He said he believed Diana would have approved of the decision, though sad to see her sons have fallen out.

“She would embrace Megan and Harry and tell them ‘Do your thing. Do what makes you happy’.”

As it was, that property, a Tuscan-style villa in the Paradise Cove area of Malibu once lived in by Andrews and her husband, Blake Edwards, was bought in June 1997 by Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, for $7.5m. The property, set on a five-acre estate, was where they reportedly planned to base themselves after they married.

That summer, after newspapers published an image of Diana and Dodi kissing on a yacht in San Tropez, American model Kelly Fisher, then 30, would sue Fayed, alleging he had already proposed to her, sobbing at a press conference organised by celebrity attorney Gloria Allred.

“No one’s daughter deserves to be treated as my daughter was,” said Fisher’s mother, Judith Dunaway.

Whatever plans Diana and Fayed may have had for that home, they were all dashed in an instant.

In the early hours of Aug 31 1997, the pair were fatally injured when a Mercedes S Class, being driven recklessly fast by Fayed’s chauffeur, crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Fayed and his driver, Henri Paul, were declared dead at the scene, while bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was injured but survived. Diana was taken to hospital and died several hours afterwards. She was 36.

Xural.com