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20 years ago this weekend, Princess Diana wowed Chicago in Northwestern purple

When Henry Bienen greeted Princess Diana at the foot of the Field Museum’s grand staircase during her visit to Chicago 20 years ago this weekend, he got a chance to inquire about that now-famous purple dress.

“I asked her, … ‘Did you wear purple because of Northwestern, or because of royal purple?’ ” said Bienen, who was then the university president and helped orchestrate the royal visit. “She just laughed. She never answered.”

Bienen had many exchanges with Diana during her first and only trip to Chicago, from June 4 to 6, 1996. They would continue to correspond until her death, less than 15 months later.

Like others who encountered the princess during that whirlwind visit, Bienen said he was struck by her charm, her humor and that she didn’t put on airs.

She had agreed to visit Evanston and Chicago to raise funds for the university hospital’s cancer center and a London hospital. He’d arranged the visit with the help from his friend Landon Jones, who was editor of People magazine at the time.

“Every time People did a story on her, their circulation went up,” Bienen said. Jones suggested Bienen invite the princess for a fundraising trip to Chicago, where she would also meet with students at Northwestern’s Evanston campus and tour Cook County Hospital.

“I don’t think she wanted another New York visit” but somewhere in “the center of the country,” Bienen said.

The trip had been pushed back once because of the media frenzy over the announcement months earlier that Princess Diana and Prince Charles would divorce.

Needless to say, when she arrived in town June 4, 1996 — first stop was a tour of a sculpture garden on the lakefront in Evanston before a reception at Bienen’s house — the media frenzy ensued, anyway.

The crowds “were three- and four-deep behind the ropes. I hadn’t anticipated (a crowd) that large and overwhelming,” Bienen recalled. “People were extremely welcoming, and the press was extremely eager.”

Then-Gov. Jim Edgar and his wife, Brenda, were among those who greeted the princess and still keep photos of the visit around their home. All the attention didn’t seem to faze her.

“I remember she worked that crowd,” he said. “For all the glamour that surrounded Princess Di, she seemed to be a very down-to-earth person. I had a whole different perception of her after that.”

Edgar recalled talking with Diana about her children and how her visit coincided with the Chicago Bulls’ championship run (the team beat the Seattle SuperSonics in Game 1 of the NBA Finals at the United Center the same night the princess attended the Field Museum gala).

“I told her to tell her sons they might be impressed you knocked Michael Jordan off the front page of the Tribune,” Edgar said.

Brenda Edgar brought a group of other governors’ wives to attend a luncheon with the princess.

“They were all on cloud nine,” Jim Edgar said, and “these were women who had met heads of state.

“We’ve always had famous people come to Chicago,” he added, “but she was kind of a combination of a famous person and a superstar. I don’t know of anybody today that you could try to equate to her aura and excitement. This was a big deal. About as big of a deal I can remember in Chicago.”

Bienen got to dance with the princess at the Field gala, as did talk show host Phil Donahue.

“She wore very high heels, and she was a tall lady,” Bienen said. “Friends asked me if I had shrunk six inches.”

Less glamorous was the tour of the hospital, where Diana asked to see an HIV ward.

Brendan Reilly, who was the hospital’s chief of medicine at the time, greeted her when she arrived. He said the building was packed with staff who brought their families to see the princess, and the hospital “never looked cleaner.”

“She initially came up to me by herself. She didn’t want the entourage,” said Reilly, who has a photo of the two of them walking with others through the halls of the hospital. She asked to meet some of the patients.

“She would kind of excuse herself from the entourage, push back the curtain and go in and actually sit on the bed with the patient and talk,” he said. “What surprised me was that someone who looked the way she looked and had the pedigree she had … She was comfortable with them, and, more remarkably, they were comfortable with her.”

One patient even asked if the princess had plans for that night. “He was actually hitting on the Princess of Wales,” Reilly said. Diana responded that she “had another engagement. She was absolutely fantastic. Regal is the only way to describe it.”

“Patients didn’t know (royal) protocol … and she didn’t care,” he said.

Throughout the visit, the princess traveled in a black Rolls-Royce, now owned by the Volo Auto Museum in the far northwest suburbs. A special exhibit of the car to mark the anniversary runs through Monday.

Vernon Smith, 80, of Lake Bluff, is the retired Rolls-Royce dealer who supplied the car.

Smith recalled getting a phone call from the British Consulate in Chicago and being told “a certain royal person” needed a vehicle. He later learned who it was.

“Being an Englishman myself, I was more than happy to accommodate,” said Smith, who had previously arranged for other members of the royal family to use Rolls-Royces while visiting the area.

Smith said he’d planned to be Princess Diana’s driver but had to go away on business so he arranged for a Northwestern University police officer to take his place.

Smith said he later received a letter from the princess, thanking him. He displays it in a plaque with a photo from her visit. And, two months later, he got a call from her secretary.

“Diana came on the phone herself and thanked me,” Smith said. “She said she was treated extremely well in Chicago.”

kthayer@tribpub.com

Twitter @knthayer