On the eve of my Fiftieth Birthday  (There!!  I said the number!  OK…people?)  I write about  my experience covering one of the biggest stories of our time..it occurred at a little past my life’s half-point (so far)…in a city where I have worked for three networks and in a country I have lived three times in my life….a bit peculiar since I have the most Irish of names.  London, England…I even lived in England the very day when Margaret Thatcher was almost killed in Brighton …and for one rare day in the last century when the USA Dollar was dead even with the Pound Sterling.  “Parity” they call it and that day I felt like an American millionaire.  But back to our story:  “The Day Diana Died.”

THE DAY DIANA DIED:  MY INNER MARY CLAUDE

“Brian, hold on. We are not sure yet”,  said “48 Hours” Senior Producer Gavin Boyle.    “We will make a decision soon. Brian, calm down!”   Gavin always sounded like a junior high school principal when he ordered you to do something.   He now helps run “CBS Sunday Morning” , and  like many of my brethren in television is also a friend.   He could’ve been mistaken for a priest.   A Jesuit no doubt,  right out of Fordham’s campus.   Rosy, Irish face, slight fiery temper, stern… but lovable.  He must be a great father, I always thought.

The “decision” they were making was where to send me: London or Paris.  Where would the story be centred  (note the British spelling)  by the end of the week when “48 Hours” would air.   Where would I best be utilized.  Sometimes, I cannot believe my life.  This decision took seven hours..but felt like seven days.  And yes, admittedly I might have called Gavin 83 times.  Per hour.  But I wasn’t gonna miss a foreign assignment, that often sought after glamorous trip, but not really that glamorous: the prize in network news.  It was 1997.  After Diana, for many in the news business foreign assignments would become rarer and more costly..and then ..just a dream.

Mary Claude Foster was a junior mentor of mine at CBS who got the foreign boondoggle method down pat.  She got a boondoggle trip once for 60 Minutes to the Phillipines back when you could get a 60 Minutes boondoggle trip to the Phillipines  (Not any more.)  But she taught me how to and NOT how to push for such an assignment.  But I digress.

I didn’t necessarily push for this trip.  I was nowhere near Europe the night Diana died.  I was lost in central Florida..driving in the dark holding my archaic old ridiculously gigantic Motorola cellphone as my best friends in television (and coincidentally, in life)  Theresa and DJ (who would eventually become showrunners themselves–  and very good ones I might add), kept me abreast of the latest.   “They think she’s dead,”  said Theresa.  “Oh, my God, Bri, get to a television!”

Well, the Mary Claude deep inside me sprung to action.  I didn’t just get to a television. I got to Miami, and the nearest airport with multiple flights to the biggest story of my life.  And I had my passport. I always carried my passport …a la Mary Claude.

So there I was in the Admirals Club (naturally) at American Airlines (of course)  in Miami holding not one, but two boarding passes for Business Class seats. One to London. Yep, and one to Paris.  Window seats, always.  Leaving 25 minutes apart.  Never in my life would I dream of such a moment…debate…choice…decision…quandary.  Of course I plunked down $8,000 dollars with my CBS Amex card for both tickets, causing quite the stir (and rare excitement they ever see) in the club.  The entire club staff (and a few other entertained travelers) were waiting with me…with group baited breath…  “ Well?   which is it???”, we all wondered nervously as we watched Tom Cruise call in in a live phoner on CNN.  Tom Cruise? Yes.

The clock ticked.  Buying the two tickets was producing strategy. On big, big things, with anchors or not, my rule was always: “eliminate all risks”.  “Make it happen” another rule.  Having both London and Paris travel plans was impressive to my bosses, as well as my inner Mary Claude.

“Mr. O’Keefe, we need a decision. London is leaving in 45 minutes and we can give that seat to another paying customer.”, a former flight attendant-turned Club Concierge said rather business-like.  I think her name was Sonia.  Of course, this was before 9/11 so you could hold two seats like that and yes.. I was probably Platinum. For. Life. By then.

I called Gavin one more time.  I remember now that he never had to call me!  Standing in the front reception area of the Admirals Club, there I was with about a dozen spectators, getting the news I wanted to hear.  “London”.  I remember the seat number.  8- A.  I had to run to the gate..the decision was so last minute.

And I was off.  Some other lucky person got their last minute upgrade to Paris.

I left Technicolor marine blue Miami and like in “The Wizard of Oz” Nine hours later, I was in grim, overcast black and white dreary, shellshocked and saddened London.. The city I loved where I had my first job in television at the BBC, where I studied abroad and where I’d eventually report to work for various months at a time for  CBS News and ABC News.  I had actually gone to London several times for “48” .  Whenever London was involved, they always sent me.  Producers Andrew Tkach and Mary Claude Foster and Claude Becker owned the rest of the world…which was fine with me since my foreign language skills were barbaric…at best. London:  where my inner Mary Claude thrived even before I met her.  I am not really making fun of Mary. She was one of the rare birds in the business who loved foreign news and traveling the world more than anyone I know.  Obsessed, maybe.  But people who obsess about what they do for work usually are very good at it. And she was.

It was surreal… the world was in a state of shock. And so was London.

Like something out of a movie.  Everywhere in Central London streets were closed. Pedestrians only. And the masses: teeming crowds for miles.  I recall a gloomy and overcast pall yet a palpable hurriedness. People openly sobbing. This wasn’t typical British behavior.  I remember the noise: the scuffling feet. Everyone frenetically going somewhere.  But held together, frozen still, paralyzed by one thing: grief.

Diana was dead.  Diana Spencer Hanover.  Princess Di.  H.R.H.  Who knew she would garner such a reaction and hit such a nerve.  I think in the last modern century, only two or three others grabbed humanity by the millions like she did: JFK, Evita and Pope John Paul II.

The wandering tearful crowds enveloped the central part of the city and almost …and I kid you not… almost every single person was carrying a bouquet of flowers wrapped in white paper. No lie. Unbelievable. Where did they get so much white wrapping paper…and flowers, I thought.  One mountain of bouquets and balloons famously adorned Kensington Palace, and became an image beamed around the world..an iconic photo of mass grief.  Kensington was where Di lived with “the boys” like real normal commoners.  Shopkeepers loved her. One little café she’d frequent eventually carried her name: Café Diana.  She’d sneak William and Harry out occasionally to meet homeless people and visit the McDonald’s down the street.  Seventeen years later,  I’d cover William’s wedding with Barbara Walters and I insisted we include that detail. Viewers love that stuff and so did Barbara.  I even located a photo of them waiting on line for their hamburgers.

The McDonalds story was not a myth and was why she was so beloved.  She was, as Janice Min has repeatedly instructed us in pop culture magazines today, like the rest of us.  The soccer Mom who happened to be mother of a future King. The doe-eyed victim in a love triangle mess in the famous Martin Bashir television interview.  There was only one other time that we had heard Diana’s voice and I remember it distinctly and  kept a copy of the videotape for years at two networks.  It was the skiing video.  I call it the “As a parent” videotape.  I believe it was Klosters. I’m not a skier but it was somewhere in Switzerland or Austria where the video-azzi posse were following her for the weekend and she had had about enough of the stalking that so horribly might, in a way, even led to her death.

The videotape is incredibly dramatic.  I think it was even pre-Dodi. She marches right toward the camera in a bright white turtle-neck sweater, earmuffs I think, and sunglasses atop her head, or in one hand, so she could look the cameraman straight in the eye:  “As a parent…. may I ask you to please give my children privacy..Please, please. We’ve given you opportunity for pictures already …”  She was almost crying. We couldn’t see her at all by the time she became even more pleading, even though the cameraman kept rolling.  Because she covered the lens completely with her winter-gloved hand. Pitch black darkness. As stark and deeply strong as her voice.

I can’t remember what pieces I produced that week but I know the Klosters video was in one of them. I was excited because once the show aired in the US… I was released from duty free to ramble around London, sleep and go home. But it was the night before the funeral.  I went back to the Sheraton Park Tower which was not my usual favorite hotel: The Meridien Piccadilly ((where for a show on Scotland Yard I lived for a month in a room so huge it had two bathrooms. I also shared an elevator ride with Betty Buckley, there for Sunset Boulevard…but to me she will always be  the second wife on “Eight is Enough”.))  But enough about me. And Betty.

Back to Diana and her funeral.  Sometimes in life as a producer your skills bleed into real life. So with a couple friends we planned to sleep outside on the Mall. With several million people.  We strategically planned the exact spot, just after the procession route where Diana’s coffin  would be joined by Charles, Phillip, William,  Harry and Charles Althorp, Diana’s brother (who years  later married the lovely Karen Gordon of Santa Monica who I profiled on GMA before she married him)   Good G-d,  I am starting to sound like Dominick Dunne.

The spot we picked was very close to St James Palace where the boys were hid and had spent the night before to be near the coffin. It’s where she was kept for the week in a room with one lone and I even want to say light blue light on.

With a Sheraton bathrobe and blanket we “slept” outside amid the masses.  I will never, ever, E V E R  forget that morning. Of course I didn’t sleep a wink. Nor did my friend Gary.

When her casket approached, the sound of horse hooves is all you heard despite the hundreds of thousands of people around us, collectively gasping for more than thirty seconds as she passed.   But there was one utterance I have heard in my head, over and over.  An older woman in the crowd, hollered in a grief-stricken welp: ”William, we love you!!”

Like an earthquake for everyone. William shook in his step and was startled….briefly losing his lockstep with the others.    His face was red with sadness and had a grim, tearful look.  He was no more than forty feet from me in the row across the Mall boulevard with the other men in Diana’s life.  We all gasped with him, almost to say, “Don’t scare William like that!!”  He kept walking.  But I’ll never forget the scared look on his face and  that a stranger would yell like that.  Not that he was mad, but just frightened in the silence of the horse hooves.

I wept that day for that vibrant dear poor woman who after 21,  lived an unbelievably  public life that she never really asked for…or really wanted.

That trip. That story.  More than a memory. A career milestone.  It was a test run for more to come.