Diana, Drawn to Reinvention, Received a Proposal from Across the Atlantic

In Charles Spencer’s new book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he gives a sibling’s perspective on the life and death of Princess Diana. Along with sharing stories about their childhood and some controversial comments about King Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer wrote that Diana once told him she was given an incredible proposition by an American politician.

"Carlos, do you think I would make a good American First Lady?" she asked the earl one day, using her nickname for her brother. Earl Spencer, a.k.a. Carlos, wrote that he was shocked, responding, “Christ—where's that come from?"

Diana, who had recently separated from The King (then Prince Charles), “explained that one of her many powerful, aging American suitors” was eager “to secure her as the ultimate trophy wife.”

The unnamed American went as far as to tell the late princess that “he was sure he could win the presidency if she would marry him."

Earl Spencer admitted that “the idea of the position” was more attractive to Diana than “the elderly would-be husband.”

"There was, I could see, a mischievous attraction to reinventing herself in a role that would make her enemies in the British Royal Family sick with jealousy,” he wrote, adding that Diana as First Lady would have ushered “in an era of glamour in the White House that surely would have surpassed even that of the Jackie Kennedy years.”

Whomever the suitor was, his offer had obviously been rejected, but the appeal of potentially living in America was something Diana held on to until the end of her life.

As author Edward White wrote in his book Dianaworld: An Obsession, the princess had a genuine appreciation for American culture and "long looked upon America as a place of immense glamour and excitement."

She went as far as "reportedly considering whether to purchase Julie Andrews's house in the Hollywood Hills" shortly before her tragic 1997 death, the author penned.