Let me make clear right up front that I was one of those people who worshipped Princess Diana. I once described her in the pages of this magazine as "awesome." I have spent most of my adult life around stars, but I have rarely met anyone with greater star power than she had, that extra-special kind reserved for a very few, such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Marilyn Monroe, who continue to fascinate and make headlines long after they die. I had only one conversation of any consequence with Diana. I was introduced to her in London, at a party given by Vanity Fair at the Serpentine Art Gallery in Hyde Park in 1995. Before she even finished shaking my hand, she said, smiling warmly, making contact, "Don't tell me they've let you out of that trial." I was on a three-day leave of absence from the O. J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles. At that moment she was in the midst of her front-page divorce from the Prince of Wales, yet she seemed to be as up-to-date on the facts of the Simpson case as I was.

"He's going to be acquitted," she said matter-of-factly.

"Oh, no, ma'am," I replied. At that point I didn't think there was a chance in the world of Simpson's being acquitted.

"You wait," she said, holding up her finger.

I recount that incident here because of a letter of Diana's that has recently been brought to light by Paul Burrell, her former butler, whose trial for theft of some of the Princess's possessions I attended at the Old Bailey in 2002, at which he was acquitted of all charges after a last-minute jolt of the Queen's memory saved the day for him. What is so utterly riveting about the letter, written in Diana's rich-girl, fancy-school handwriting, is that in it she essentially foretells the manner of her death 10 months before it happened, in a slightly altered version, in Paris.

The swells of England, at least the ones I know, never got her the way the British people and the rest of the world did. As one of their own, a member in high standing of the British aristocracy, she embarrassed them. She was too popular, as if that were a vulgar thing to be. You could always detect a dismissive smile when her name came up. They let you know that she was crazy, although they used playful words like "loopy" and "nuts," or made the gesture of rotating a forefinger while pointing to the head. Never mind: what the crazy lady said in that letter was going to happen did happen 10 months later. "[Blacked-out name] is planning 'an accident' in my car, break failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry." It may have been nothing more than her imagination running wild, but now it can't be ignored. I've always thought of Diana as a sort of present-day Anne Boleyn. Boleyn became an inconvenient woman for King Henry VIII, and for that he had her beheaded. Totally innocent though Prince Charles doubtless is, there will forever be a dark cloud over his head for possibly participating in the 20th-century version of chopping off his inconvenient wife's head. And the story will not go away as long as there is breath in the vengeful and furious father of Dodi Fayed, the rich and powerful Mohamed Al Fayed, to whom the English will not give citizenship. From day one Al Fayed has believed that the double deaths were part of a conspiracy, and Diana's letter fits right in with his theory.

She had probably the biggest funeral in the history of the world. It was the do-not-miss television event of an era. Kings, queens, and other royals were there, but so were Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw. Elton John, one of the perennial top rock stars in the world, sang "good-bye, England's rose" to the tune of "Candle in the Wind." I'll always remember Mohamed Al Fayed walking down the aisle to his seat, probably already convinced that there had been a conspiracy behind the two deaths, orchestrated by Prince Philip. Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, who, it would turn out later, had been a shit to her in life, triumphed at her funeral with one of the most stirring eulogies ever heard, lashing out at the hostile, frozen faces of the royal family for their treatment of his sister. As drama goes, it doesn't get much better.

It's hard to resist thinking that, beneath her celestial tiara, Diana has a plan. My theory is that she's not going to rest until her son William becomes King of England in place of her ex-husband. That would be the ultimate put-down of the man who deceived her when she was 20, after she had married him for love. It was an inexcusable error on the part of the royal family—petty, mean, and snobbish—to take the title of Her Royal Highness away from Diana. She was loved in a way that no other member of that family was loved, with the possible exceptions of the Queen and the Queen Mother. But perhaps the stripping of her title is also part of her story, one more scene in the opera that will inevitably be written about her life.

Liza's wedding was one of the great sustained camp events.

I was in the Old Bailey on the day of the disruption and dismissal of the Paul Burrell case, when the Queen of England suddenly remembered she had had a conversation several years earlier with him, in the course of which he told her that he had taken some of Diana's possessions, which he was storing. I never believed her explanation. It was simply too pat. The very next morning Burrell was to have taken the stand, and the subject of the notorious Buckingham Palace rape tape, about which he had full knowledge, would certainly have come up in cross-examination. The purpose of the police raid on Burrell's house in January 2001 at seven o'clock in the morning had been to find the missing wooden box in which the tape was hidden. The police found the box, but the tape was not in it. During the search, however, 400 objects belonging to the late Princess were discovered, and their alleged theft by Burrell brought about his arrest and the trial that should never have been, having backfired so disastrously in the faces of the royal family. In Diana's foolhardy 1995 television interview with Martin Bashir, when she told of her affair with James Hewitt, she said that there had always been three people in her marriage: herself, the Prince, and Mrs. Parker Bowles. Now she will forever be the third person in their relationship, at least for as long as it lasts.

The story of the tape's origin, which was being told privately at dinner parties by some important people in the media when I was in England covering the Burrell trial, was that Diana, in her popular role of visitor to the sick and infirm, had gone to the hospital to visit a palace servant who had allegedly been the victim of a homosexual rape and also claimed to have witnessed a sexual act involving a member of the royal family. Imagine having this star of stars come and sit at your bedside for a little chat. She got him to tell her the story of what he had witnessed. What the victim was not aware of was that the Princess had secreted a tape recorder on herself. The resulting tape, which has come to be referred to as the Buckingham Palace rape tape, has given rise to several years of behind-the-fan whispering as to which member of the royal family was found in flagrante delicto.

Although this may appear to be a devious act on the part of the Princess, I must explain the rationale behind her behavior as it was explained to me, both at the time of the trial and again recently, without any change in detail. Apparently the Princess never intended to go public with the tape. It was, I was told, her insurance for her future life. She made her divorced husband aware that she was in possession of the tape, in which he was allegedly named. It was locked away in a box, and no one would ever see it unless she was not compensated in their divorce proceedings in a manner suited to the mother of a future King, or there was any lessening of her time with or influence over her sons. The valet who told the tale has since been publicly discredited for drunkenness and mental instability, but that's part of the game—a rape victim in high-profile cases is invariably accused of dishonesty and ulterior motives.

It was the formidable Mark Bolland, 37, for six years the deputy private secretary in charge of the Prince of Wales's public relations, who masterminded the rise of the Prince and Camilla Parker Bowles out of the toilet bowl into which they had been cast after Diana's death and orchestrated their acceptance. Each public appearance of the pair was thought out and planned. Their popularity gradually grew, and a new picture of the Prince as devoted father to his two motherless sons began to emerge. When Prince Harry was caught smoking pot, it was Bolland's plan to have Charles put his son in a halfway house for a day, to show that they were just like any other family dealing with a teenager's problems. As Bolland wrote in the Daily Mail, "Based on solid historical precedent, I take the old-fashioned view that the monarchy needs the oxygen of publicity to survive. Invisibility always breeds Republicanism—as they will find out to their cost." Bolland had his share of powerful enemies in the palace, and the time came for a cessation of his royal duties, although he remains on close terms with Camilla Parker Bowles, who is said by all who know her to be a charming and witty person. There's no need to worry about Bolland, who has formed his own public-relations firm, Mark Bolland and Associates. Chief among his clients is Lily Safra, the widow of the asphyxiated billionaire banker Edmond Safra, who is routinely referred to in the society columns as "the richest widow in the world." It was Bolland, during the trial of Ted Maher in Monte Carlo, who came up with the idea of having Lily Safra arrive at the courthouse in an S.U.V. rather than a Rolls-Royce.

Up until his acquittal, I liked Paul Burrell. I often had chats with him in the hallways of the Old Bailey. He was friendly, polite, and obliging. I talked to four of the Princess's closest friends—Rosa Monckton, Susie Kassem, Lady Annabelle Goldsmith, and Lucia Flecha de Lima, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador. All of them spoke highly of Burrell and of his great devotion to their friend Diana. After Burrell's acquittal, however, almost within a matter of hours, I think all the publicity went to his head, because for a brief instant he was a comet on the celebrity circuit.

Then he wrote A Royal Duty. It is not a cheesy book. Mostly, it's a very pleasant read, and in the long run it does honor to Diana, although Burrell has been accused by her sons of dishonoring her. People are now saying that the Princess had planned to fire Burrell when she returned from Paris. That could be true, but I think she would have changed her mind once she was in a better mood. She needed him too much.

C.Z. Guest was so well known as a figure in society that Time magazine once put her on the cover for being just that. Style is something you can't buy. Either you have it or you don't, and C. Z. Guest had it in capital letters. I can't think of a single person of her time who came anywhere near her. She found her look early—blond hair parted in the middle—and stuck with it. When her husband Winston Churchill Guest's fortune started to run out, as it so often does in families who have had their money for generations, C.Z. went to work. She started a cottage industry in gardening, writing a column and totally original books on the subject. Her close friend Cecil Beaton did the illustrations for the first book, and Truman Capote, whom she stood by when most of the people in her world stopped speaking to him, wrote the introduction. It was a shock to everyone who knew her when the word got out that she had cancer. Chemotherapy caused her to lose her hair, and she made no attempt to hide the fact as it grew back, short and spiky and as blond as ever. When her time came, she was at Templeton, her estate in Old Westbury, Long Island. Her daughter, Cornelia, with whom she was incredibly close, was in Los Angeles. Her son, Alexander, was at his home with his children. She called Robert Tartarini, a great family friend who lived in the guesthouse on the property and who sometimes escorted her and Cornelia to dances and openings, and asked him to drive her to her doctor in Manhattan. In the car she said, "I'm having a hard time breathing. I want to be tucked in next to Winston." Tartarini pulled into the parking lot at the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia and dialed 911. "There was no sound from her," Tartarini told me. "She just bowed her head, and she died."

Style is something you cant buy. C.Z. Guest had it in capital letters.

Her funeral was at the Church of the Advent in Westbury. In the entryway stood Alexander Guest with his 13-year-old son, Gregory, and Johnnie Leach, C.Z.'s majordomo, with her dog Mickey, a mix of Australian sheepdog and German shepherd. Long Island grandees and C.Z.'s artistic friends filled every seat. There were dozens of the scented candles named after C.Z. on the altar and on ledges beneath the stained-glass windows. The congregation sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the beginning of the service and "America the Beautiful" at the end. "C.Z. didn't want a eulogy," said William Ivey Long, the Tony-winning costume designer, so instead he read Truman Capote's introduction to her first book, which began with a quote from Raymond Chandler: "There are blondes, and then there are blondes." Three hundred people went back to the house for lunch. The day was bright and sunny and cold. Cornelia, without a coat, stood on the gravel driveway and greeted each guest.

It didn't come as a shock to me on October 22, 2003, when I read in the New York Post the mortifying headline LIZA BEAT ME and learned that Liza Minnelli and David Gest were getting a divorce. I met David Gest the night before the famous wedding, at the bridal dinner, given by one of Liza's two stepmothers, Mrs. Prentis Cobb Hale of San Francisco, the third wife of Liza's father, the great film director Vincente Minnelli. The event took place at Le Cirque, and Denise Hale had arranged it at one long table for 22 in the main dining room. For reasons unknown, the bride and groom were seated far from each other. I got there late because of a TV appearance, and dinner had started. Liza said, "Oh, you have to meet David. He's at the end of the table." I said to him, "How do you do?," and he answered by dropping the name of an old MGM contract player I know: "Ann Rutherford sends her love." Then and there, it occurred to me that this was not going to be a union of long duration.

The wedding itself was one of the great sustained camp events of the decade. Fifteen bridesmaids in black evening dresses, all in their late 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, including Gina Lollobrigida and Cindy Adams, preceded the bride up the aisle, where the groom waited with his best man, a sulky Michael Jackson, who was in one of his outré costumes. At the altar sat Elizabeth Taylor and Marisa Berenson, the matrons of honor, also in black. Elizabeth Taylor, wearing an unfortunate hat, had caused the wedding to be nearly an hour late by arriving at the church in her bedroom slippers, so a couple of those people stars have to do things like that had to rush back to the Plaza Athénée and find her shoes. After the minister pronounced the bride and groom man and wife, they tongue-kissed for what seemed like an hour and a half. I know a fake kiss when I see one, and all I kept thinking of was their breath, rather than any sexual stirrings in their loins. Later, Michael Musto, the gossip columnist for The Village Voice, wrote that my "appearance at the wedding cemented it as a crime scene."

A couple of months later, when I went up to Liza and David's apartment to be a guest on the pilot for their reality-TV show on VH1, I could tell that the bloom was off the peach. The evening and the show were disasters, and the series was canceled before it ever went on the air. I saw on the walls of their apartment that night some of the greatest Andy Warhols I had ever seen, of both Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli. What has happened to those treasures since Liza and David split I don't know, but a friend living in the building heard from a doorman that the apartment had been stripped down to nothing. "Even the built-ins were removed," he said. According to Gest's lawyer, Raoul Felder, he is living in Hawaii, suing Liza for $10 million, which she doesn't have, and suffering great pain from head injuries she inflicted on him, he says, when she was drunk.

Liza Minnelli has had an amazing life. Back in the 50s and early 60s, I used to see her mother at Peter and Patricia Kennedy Lawford's house on the beach in Santa Monica. One time I saw Judy there in deep conversation with Marilyn Monroe. Judy loved to entertain at parties, and I once heard her sing at the home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, her next-door neighbors. At a party my late wife and I gave in our house in Beverly Hills, Judy locked herself in our bathroom and either pinched or ingested every pill in the medicine cabinet. We had to call a locksmith to open the door.

In 1974, I attended Liza's second wedding, to the film producer Jack Haley Jr., given by Sammy and Altovise Davis at a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Liza's mother and Jack's father had been in The Wizard of Oz together. Everyone thought the marriage would last forever, but it was over in five years. I'm very fond of Liza's half-sister, the singer Loma Luft, from Judy's marriage to the producer Sid Luft. I was also a friend of Vincente Minnelli, and his third wife, the aforementioned Denise Hale, is still a close friend of mine, as is his widow, Lee Anderson Minnelli, whom Liza supports.

Ironically, while Liza's breakup was all over the papers, there was a new musical playing on Broadway called The Boy from Oz, about Liza's first husband, Peter Allen, the openly gay Australian songwriter and entertainer who started out as an opening act for Judy Garland. Both Judy and Liza are characters in the play, and the actress playing Liza successfully captures the intimacies of a woman in love with a gay husband who strays.

A couple of weeks after the divorce was announced, I watched Liza enter a party on Madison Avenue for the opening of the fur salon of Dennis Basso, the man who designed the white mink coat she wore to her wedding. As the crowd cheered, she got out of a limousine draped from her neck to her ankles in a silver-fox coat—exuberant, happy, laughing, wonderful. Over the years the tabloids have published more stories about Liza and her antics than about almost anyone else. Sometimes she's fat. Sometimes she's thin. Sometimes she's drunk. Sometimes she's sober. Sometimes she's on a walker. Sometimes she's dancing on tabletops. She's totally unpredictable. But she's Liza. And she's as showbiz as it gets.