DIANA, SURROGATE PRINCESS

By Barbara Ehrenreich

THERE'S ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING A LITTLE SORDID about the very concept of Princess Di. It's not just that she bats her eyes at us from every tabloid, over cover lines like "The Men Who Fight to Share Her Bed," or that she's been "Dibbs" and "Squidgy" to a succession of aristocratic hunks. It's not even her claustrophobic, body-centered life-style, divided as it is between colonic irrigations and workouts and the endless trying on of clothes. The problem with Di, and the root of the British royalty's entire crisis, is that the only honest description of her occupation would have to be "hired womb."

As the royal couple celebrated the third anniversary of their separation last week, it must have been painfully clear to even the most common of commoners that Diana wasn't selected for the princess job on the basis of intelligence or loyalty or wit. The qualifications were simple: she had to be a presentable Protestant from the upper class and a virgin. The last criterion has to do less with morality than with the purity of the product. She was, to put it crudely, enlisted as a breeder, charged with the job of transmitting the Windsor genes from Charles to his eventual replacements--"an heir and a spare," as some British delicately describe her sons, the little princelings.

Every member of a royal dynasty shares, to some extent, the same degrading destiny. It was Charles' great-great-great- grandmother, Queen Victoria, who famously advised a daughter to survive the act of love by closing her eyes and concentrating on the British Empire. Marriage in this crowd is a patriotic duty, not a pleasure; and the consort--Philip in the case of Elizabeth, Di in the case of Charles--has always been in a rather awkward spot. In Di's case, the indignity was compounded by the fact that Charles already had a woman for purposes of companionship and love. Camilla Parker Bowles was his real partner, Diana just a means of reproduction.

Not that it's easy to feel sorry for Di, since she's paid infinitely better than anyone else in the same line of work. A surrogate mother in the U.S. gets about $10,000 for the nine-month-long job of transforming some fellow's sperm into a viable infant--an amount Di could easily blow on cashmeres and facials in an afternoon. And while the surrogate mom gets shown to the door as soon as the baby's delivered, Di lingers on, posing for photographers and visiting hospices, at an allowance of up to $4,000 a week for clothing alone.

The odd thing, given her three sessions a week with a world-renowned feminist therapist, is that she doesn't seem to grasp how thoroughly dehumanizing the princess business really is. Her interview on bbc last month was full of husky-voiced self-pity and dewy gazes from a coquettishly down-tucked head. But there wasn't the slightest awareness that her problems go beyond an adulterous husband and an emotionally disabled mother-in-law. She even seems to think the reason Charles dislikes her is that she outshines him at what she calls their "work," meaning presumably the daily round of ribbon cuttings and charity dinners. But can't she see that her work is over, and was the moment the nanny whisked the babies from her arms?

The real loser seems to be that perpetual kinglet, Prince Charles, and here again it's hard to muster much sympathy. By his own account, he lacked the courage to reject a loveless marriage; once in it, he lacked the discipline or grace to try to make it work. Instead of rebelling against his mother and the institution she represents, he seems to have turned his bitterness against his hapless bride. So the revenge Di now seeks fits all too well. If she succeeds in her campaign to have the crown bypass him and go directly from Queen Elizabeth to young Prince William, Charles will turn out to have been no less a reproductive "vessel" than Di herself--a royal stud.

It's time for the British to realize that successful breeding isn't always consistent with "family values." After all, the only humane solution would have been to let Charles run off with Camilla long ago, leaving a test tube of sperm behind in Buckingham Palace. His mom could then have distributed it among hundreds of female volunteers in a kind of genetic Bake-Off--with the throne then being awarded to the most boring and phlegmatic child that resulted. The next step would be to take away the royals' allowances, which amount to $15 million a year for the lot. Princess Di, for example, likes visiting the sick, and she'd undoubtedly feel a whole lot better about herself if she had a job as a nurse's aide.

But as an American, what do I care? Every time I read about one of the princesses getting her toes sucked, I marvel once again at the wisdom of our own Founding Fathers. Maybe they couldn't foresee that in 200 years or so the British royal line would dissolve in farce. Maybe they thought the madness would end with the notoriously bonkers George III. But they knew there was something inherently wrong with the idea that political power resides in a strand of DNA, or that the fate of a nation--or even just its self-respect--should depend on the sexual proclivities of a handful of overpaid layabouts.