A G-STRING MADE A DIFFERENCE
How Ballet Helped Diana Grow
‘Shy Di’ gained poise and confidence from dance lessons, her teacher says in a new memoir
Do we really need another memoir of Diana?
Twenty-seven years after her death, we’ve had books by her butler, housekeeper, bodyguard, hairdresser, “psychic and alternative healer,” and by one of her lovers.
Other accounts have come from friends, journalists, royal hangers-on, and people who recall Diana’s life in books about their own — most notably, her son Prince Harry.
None of them is called Diana: I Wrote About Her for the Money. But that might be a more accurate title for books by some of their authors, who purport to want only to set the record straight and reveal, as the title of one has it: The Real Diana.
So I was surprised by how fast the pages of Anne Allan’s Dancing with Diana flew by. They were much easier to take than the hours I once spent trudging through a memoir Barbara Bush wrote in the voice of the White House spaniel, Millie.
Anne Allan was a dancer and ballet mistress with the London Festival Ballet when she received what was in effect a royal command from a lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. She was to teach the…
