14 DAY TRIAL // Being in the public eye means you can hardly go anywhere without being almost instantly recognized. Being a public person as loved as Princess Diana was is a guarantee that people will know you no matter where you go.
In her new book, “The Power of Positive Drinking,” comedienne Cleo Rocos details one particular night in the late ‘80s, when she and Freddie Mercury dressed up Princess Diana in drag.
The purpose was to get her out without having people know her. More precisely, the purpose was to get her inside a popular London gay bar, the Huffington Post writes, after seeing an excerpt from the book.
“In ‘The Power of Positive Drinking,’ comedian Cleo Rocos writes about how she, TV star Kenny Everett and Mercury disguised Princess Diana as a male model so that she could sneak into the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in south London. Dressed in an army jacket, black cap and sunglasses, Diana enjoyed a night out on the town, free of attention,” HuffPo says.
The trick worked, Rocos explains: though they feared they might be caught at any moment, nobody in the venue realized they were in the presence of one of the most mediated and beloved women of the moment.
The group was at the bar for only about 20 minutes but, apparently, the effort was well worth it.
“When we walked in... we felt she was obviously Princess Diana and would be discovered at any minute. But people just seemed to blank her. She sort of disappeared. But she loved it,” Rocos writes.
She explains that people recognized Mercury, Everett and herself, completely ignoring Diana who, this way, could walk up to the bar and order drinks.
“She did look like a beautiful young man,” the comedienne recalls. “She was always a very fit girl, so they might have thought, ‘There's a nice young man with pert buttocks’.”
Princess Diana was 27 when this happened. She died in 1997 in Paris in a car crash.