Sally Bedell Smith's biography gives us a nutty and emotional Princess of Wales, while Martyn Gregory offers a young woman who just wanted to be an Islamic-style wife -- although not Dodi Al-Fayed's -- and do good in the world.

Oh, please, stay with us, Diana

DIANA IN SEARCH OF HERSELF: Portrait of a Troubled Princess

By Sally Bedell Smith

One must admit great weariness deep deep in one's soul at the prospect of yet more books about the erstwhile Princess of Wales. What more can be found to say about her? Who on earth would read them? Why?

Yet more continue to emerge from publisher's offices everywhere, in seemingly unending supply, and the writers themselves are not all hacks with a quick buck in mind, or at least the quick buck, in some cases, is not always the entire motivation for their work. Martyn Gregory, a much-awarded investigative journalist for Britain's Channel 4 (notably the newsmagazine Dispatches ),in Diana: The Last Days, meticulously reviews the Princess's final hours and the ensuing accident investigation in order to prove that she was not assassinated, that she was not pregnant or about to marry Dodi Fayed, and that this was not the love affair that would change Diana's life forever.

Gregory is furious at Dodi Fayed's father, Mohammed, for using the Princess's death to advance his own various nefarious causes, and on the impressive evidence he musters, he is right to be so.

Sally Bedell Smith, in Diana in Search of Herself, provides us with what will inevitably become the definitive biography of the Princess. Bedell Smith is a respected chronicler of the very rich; her biography of William Paley was widely regarded as accurate, fair and brave, and her biography of Pamela Harriman was only ignored because she had been scooped by a slicker, more sensational and livelier version. The fact that she writes as if she is angling for a lifetime of dinner invitations to Highgrove with Camilla Parker-Bowles, ought not to deter us from a serious consideration of her work. It seems inevitable that Prince Charles's version of events will define history. He is, after all, almost certainly going to be King and he is, finally, a more substantial individual than Diana.

Furthermore, as Smith makes clear and as many reasonable people have always suspected, Diana Spencer suffered from borderline personality disorder, which was triggered when she became Princess of Wales and was immediately hounded by press, public and society. She was an admitted bulimic who indulged in dozens of alternative therapies, sometimes consulting two or three astrologers at the same time, sometimes staying on the telephone with them for up to eight hours a day. She suffered from intense mood swings and she was pathologically jealous of Charles and Camilla.

According to Bedell Smith, Diana had no reason to be jealous, although she does not prove this, rather only reports on what the Prince's friends and employees said. By the time Charles returned to Camilla, Bedell Smith says, Diana was in the arms of her army officer, James Hewitt. Charles made a huge effort in this marriage. He left Camilla for Diana; he wanted to be in love with Diana. But she was so nutty he could not tolerate her. We have heard this before, from far less reputable sources, couched in hysterical or excessively romanticized fashion.

Bedell Smith makes a reasonable case that the Royal Family did help Diana adjust to her new status, that she was trained and cosseted and brought along. The writer attempts to prove that Charles worked very hard at integrating this charming, doe-like creature into his life, and that for a while they had moments of happiness. But Diana was so possessive, so jealous, so ill-informed and spoiled, so overwhelmingly suffocating, that the Prince couldn't love her. He couldn't, in fact, wait to get away from her.

This is just a little too much of a reclamation project to be entirely believable. Bedell Smith has an unfortunate habit of writing like the smartest girl in class, with little or no sympathy for those whose lives are determined by their emotions. Yet the fact remains that emotion, for many women, is the ground of their being. Feeling good and safe is better than knowing or understanding, especially when you have two very young children in your arms.

Diana Spencer was certainly one of the women whose life was determined by emotions, and that is one of the many reasons she was so popular. Quite a few women are like her, and those who aren't know how easily they could be. That Bedell Smith misses this fundamental fact indicates a smugness that reads very much like lack of compassion.

Martyn Gregory's book is notable for several reasons. The first is the quality of his research. In fact, this book could be used to teach students just how to conduct a proper investigation, establish the credibility of sources, and weigh and judge the information. Gregory credits his sources at the bottom of every page, something almost unheard of in popular non-fiction. He has chased down every goofball theory and theorist, interviewed the principals, read the reports, talked to the investigators and pinned Mohammed Al-Fayed (commonly described in London as "friendly and evil") to the wall.

Diana died because Al-Fayed hired a chauffeur, Henry Paul, who was a drunk, who was not licensed to drive the car he was driving; because Al-Fayed and Dodi concocted (on the telephone that night) an arrogant and stupid plan for leaving the Ritz Hotel; and because Al-Fayed did not order the backup with which members of the Al-Fayed family commonly travelled. Gregory makes clear that the only reason Diana was in Paris that weekend, and vulnerable to the huge press pack trailing her, was that Al-Fayed wanted her to visit the Duke of Windsor's villa. The next month, Sotheby's was auctioning off the contents, and he wanted a little of her glitz and publicity to spin the auction further. Every red herring, conspiracy theory and sobbing tabloid outburst (all of which Gregory quotes and dates in an appendix) has been meant to deflect the public from the clear awareness that above anyone else, Al-Fayed is responsible for the death of the Princess.

Which raises the question: What was the Princess doing with these people? Perhaps the most telling thing about Diana was that in her last few years, she was deeply attracted to the life of the Islamic wife. She fell in love with a married Islamic art dealer, who did leave his wife, albeit temporarily, then for two years conducted a serious affair with a Pakistani heart surgeon, who finally refused to marry her because he could not bear the press attention. She traveled to Pakistan to court his mother, where her new best friends became Imran Khan and Jemima Goldsmith Khan.

She looked at houses in South Africa (far from the United Kingdom press and near her brother) and into getting her lover a job through heart surgeon Christian Barnard. These were not the actions of a woman without purpose, direction or grit. Diana, in her last years, faltered often, but she knew what she wanted and it is easy to guess, from her actions, what this was: More children, a tight, close marriage, stitched up in a suffocatingly close family structure, behind very high walls, dressed, like Jemima Khan, in unphotogenic veils, periodically emerging to do good works.

When her heart surgeon broke up with her, Dodi was her rebound choice, a man who might be able to withstand the press attention, at least just for long enough so that she could have a proper boyfriend when Charles threw Camilla a very public 50th birthday party.

But Bedell Smith and Gregory make clear, from their close reportage, that for Diana, Dodi was a fling; they were a temporary match whose weaknesses were eerily twinned, but Diana was bent on having a serious life, with a serious man, and doing good, serious things. It is our tragedy that she was not permitted to show us how she'd manage it.

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson, who also writes the Wednesday Fifth Column for the Facts & Arguments page, once covered the Royals for Time magazine.

Recently Back in Paper

Diana: The Secret Years , by Simone Simmons with Susan Hill, Ballantine, 226 pages, $9.99

. London "energy healer" Simmons became a close friend and confidante of Diana's after the divorce. Here she tells about the post-Charles years, Diana's lovers, her feelings about Camilla and the Royal family, and her incognito forays into Hampton Heath and the jazz clubs of Soho.

The Day Diana Died , by Christopher Andersen, Dell, 381 pages, $9.99

. "The final days. The startling revelations. The untold story." British journalist Andersen does his best to live up to the dust-jacket billing. He seems to have interviewed everyone connected to the fatal accident of Aug. 30, 1997 (where were you when you heard?), and examines in detail the events leading up to it and the rumours that abounded after. The paperback includes new material.