Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Will Loretta Lynn Sing at the Royal Wedding?

The first Royal Wedding I can recall watching on TV was Princess Margaret's, in 1960.

My very first ever gay husband and partner in insufferable precocity and I took one look at the freshly coiffed and titled Lord Snowdon and smiled delightedly at each other, wriggling with pleasure at the acuity of our budding and insufferably precocious babyGayDar.

Hours passed, and still we sat there, held in the enchanted thrall of the snowy image on the little black and white TV, thrilling to the Voice of All Events of Great Import, Winston Burdett.

We knew The Story. We knew that Margaret's Real True Love had been Group Captain Peter Townsend, but she couldn't get married unless her sister The Queen said she could, and her sister The Queen couldn't because Peter was divorced, and, and and...

(Walter Cronkite, in those days, was the Voice of Things that Happened, but to voiceover anything involving crowned heads, popes, or requiring frequent repetition of the word "catafalque," it was Winston who slapped on the oversized headphones and went to work).

I'm going to fast forward past a handful of also-rans in the Royal Wedding Pageant, the matches of various non-Windsors and a few minor Windsors and Windsor-adjacents, not only because my fingers would get really tired (as would your eyes if you even tried to read it all), and not only because the Windsor ones are likely to be more familiar to most of you, but because let's face it, the British royal family gives awesomer wedding than anybody.

So fast forward to 1973. Alas, Prinnie Royal Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise's wedding to future ex-husband Captain Mark Phillips was something of a disappointment. Anne's dress is best described as "quintessential WindsorWear," and PrinnieRoy being deep in the throes of her "dispense with all that" mode, the whole thing ended up being pretty blah. Mark even turned down a title. That was all the Story there was to be gotten out of that one.

All remained quiet on the Windsor wedding front until 1981, when the firm beat its own personal best several times over and set the bar not only for weddings, but any and every kind of royal/papal/catafaulque-havin' occasion you can think of.

Prince Charles, having been commanded by his true and undisputed Queen, and her own true and undisputed lovable old bigot of a mother (who held in equal disdain anybody who was not directly descended from Queen Victoria, herself, or both) to obtain forthwith the services of a uterus, finally put on the itchiest of all his royal uniform jackets and on July 29, dutifully married the hapless 19-year old docent of a functioning female reproductive system indicated by the Queens Elizabeth.

The pedigree of Doctor-Certified Virgo Intacta Lady Diana Spencer was, it was archly murmured in certain circles, at least marginally, and possibly even somewhat, more authentically royal than the rather fanciful lineage of the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg- Glucksberg-Saxe-Coburg Gothas, at least relatively, with some even going so far as to suggest that the Spencers' hereditary titleage might be just a little more hereditary and a little less, um arbitrarily decreed.

Diana also got points for being at least a distant enough cousin from one side of the blanket or another, to effect some needed expansion in the Royal Gene Pool, which had, over the years, become just a smoosh limited, and as a result, had produced, um, Prince Charles.

From the minute that big ol' wrinkly dress, with its big ol' wrinkly 25-foot train was de-clowncar'd from the Crystal Carriage and wrestled to the ground by poor little India Hicks, it was on like Donkey Kong!

Every female viewer from the age of two to a hundred and two, whether she admitted it or not, even to herself, wanted to be that blonde girl, who, like Scarlett O'Hara, was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm, as were women who saw her on that day. In that dress.

Of course we all realize now, with the clarity of hindsight, that it was just a particularly adjective-rich chapter in a very sad and sorry tale, made all the sadder by its utter lack of uniqueness.

While the pomp and spectacle and glitter have yet to be even seriously challenged, much less duplicated, by even Vanisha and Amit, the exact same Story was told, over and over, day after day, all over the world, as it has been since the beginning of time, albeit usually sans crowns.

The creative license whimsy of some biographers notwithstanding, there are really no parallels between The Story's Charmilla and Abdication subplots.

It's safe to say that 9 out of 10 historians surveyed agree that David, known popularly as the Duke of Windsor, and briefly as Edward VIII, is typically painted as something of a wuss.

Yet he was able to overcome his wussiness enough to ball up, call the bluff of an entire government, a centuries-old religious institution, and a full battalion of medal-encrusted, lorgnette-wieldin', crown-wearin' old farts and fartesses, and renouncing the very throne upon which he sat, take to the airwaves and proclaim himself liege man of life and limb to his heart's Queen, a sort of proto-Real Housewife from Baltimore named Wallis Simpson.

While the Act of Settlement of 1701 may ostensibly have been all about preventing the unthinkable possibility that a papist buttock might descend upon the British throne, that wasn't the only agenda. The gene pool thing had already become something of a concern, and while ActoSet closed some sectarian doors, it discreetly opened some very generously-sized windows.

It was, therefore, not Mrs Simpson's US citizenship, nor even her lack of a royal title, that constituted the actual constitutional impediment to England's acquisition of a Queen Wallis, but the fact that she was a divorcee, and in 1936, the Church of England had a zero-tolerance policy on divorce.

Because the sovereign is the titular head of the Church of England, a divorced person couldn't be "received at Court," meaning they couldn't even receive an invitation to the Royal Party Barn, so the question of an heir to, or occupant of, the throne marrying one was a non-starter.

Between 1936 and 1970, when Charles met and fell in love with Camilla Shand, several things had changed, including things like Prime Ministers, Archbishops of Canterbury, and the Church of England's official position on divorces and people who got them.

Even if they hadn't, Camilla, though her virgo intacta boat had probably been sailed for a minute, had neither married nor divorced anyone, Charles was not King, and there was nothing to say he couldn't be if he didn't dump his boo.

In fact, the only people who objected to Camilla were a handful of fusty old relatives with a penchant for brightly colored coat-dresses, but Charles lacked the testicular fortitude to stand up to this (literally) toothless opposition and marry the woman he loved.

Anyone who is inclined to read the Duke of Windsor for trash will not suffer from scarcity of material. He was a bigoted asshat, and those who strive to defend him from accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer are invariably reduced to arguing that he was too stupid to comprehend that Hitler was a way worse bigot.

In the area of girlfriend-related absence of balls, however, which Prince of Wales wears the wuss crown is a matter of public record.

Oh, but we were not talking about all that. We were talking about the Mother of All Royal Weddings, and the vision, forever engraved in our collective consumer consciousness, that was Diana.

What neither we nor she knew was that while gloriously arrayed as The Ultimate Princess Bride, she was, in fact, a Traditional Sacrificial Virgin. That was the secret part of The Story. At least for a while.

Her secret was that like the Shameful Saga itself, she wasn't a bit unique. Her appeal lay, not in the glamorous gowns, or the glittering jewels she wore, nor the pageantry that became the backdrop of her life, but in her accessibility.

The covert marketing operatives who do these things had them some skillz. They knew, as most of us know now, that identifiable and accessible will trump pure aspirational every time. Adam DiVello, when casting for Laguna Beach, did not cast his net for the most beautiful girl in the local high school. Being a Royal Family consultant-grade marketing genius, he chose Lauren Conrad, and the rest is history.

The cheeks of sweet young blonde girls do turn a very pretty shade of pink when they blush, they do have an endearing way of ducking their heads and lowering their lashes and casting shy, sidelong glances. Thus, Diana was first and foremost, familiar.

Every person who ever saw her, in person or on TV, had seen all those things before, in a neighbor, daughter, a niece, a classmate, a girlfriend. There was not one single high school or college, attended by three or more young blonde girls, that could not boast at least one "Diana lookalike."

Hair salons turned out dozens of them daily. Like LC, Shy Di became aspirational because she was ordinary.

All that changed when she grew up - into a woman who was most extra-ordinary, who turned the trite old narrative into whose pages she was so unceremoniously plopped, into an epic that though chilling and tragic, was unique, because it was her very own, and because she, too, and in her very own way, was a marketing genius.

Diana's wedding was so over-the-top and iconic that it was all we were thinking about when Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson. Who among us can honestly say that we remember that dress, hmm? Yeah, that's what I thought. Footnote to The Story. Maybe a sidebar for the first 50 years or so.

Though Prince Edward's marriage to Sophie Rhys-Jones earned itself a place alongside Prinnie Anne's in the Royal Wedding Hall of Boring Shame, Ed might have had the right idea - why even try to compete? It's not his Story.

In 2005, eight years after the accidental assassination of the sweet blonde girl who grew up to present a very real threat to some very profitable industries, Charles' handlers and management bent over backwards to avoid occasion for any comparison to his first wedding, an impossible task, though it turned out being way more about contrast than compare.

At his first wedding, a billion hearts chorused awe and adulation. At his second, a billion shoulders shrugged an overwhelming chorus of indifference.

The only thing that kept it from the Boring Shame Hall was The Story.

At last, thirty-five years after he should have done it, Charles stood at the altar and pledged his troth to the woman who had inexplicably hung onto it through heartbreak, marriage, bearing and rearing of another daddy's babies, and divorce.

Few romantics were hopeless enough to be moved.

Many young people grumbled that they didn't see much sense in people bothering to get married when they were that old, and a hefty chunk of old people gruffly replied that in this particular case, they didn't see much sense in it either.

It smelled an awful lot like a sort of minor contingency afterthought.

Should the Queen prove to have inherited her life expectancy gene from her father instead of her mother (who died in 2002 at age 206 or thereabouts), and precipitously die without warning or enough advance notice to allow for even a fast-track abdication, the country would then be left in the awkward position of having to choose between a reigning sovereign openly cohabitating with a mistress - in the era of TMZ and telephoto lenses, or a Royal Wedding starring a reigning sovereign and a divorcee with whom he had been openly cohabitating.

Having officially established, some time ago, an unofficial Royal Family position of mild embarrassment on subjects like Edward VII and Mrs Keppel, no one wanted to be the one to decree that one would be preferable. Or not.

A pretty subtle distinction, to be sure, but in a culture where subtle distinctions are both obsession and art form, as Tony Soprano would say, "Whatcha gonna do?"

So a deal was cut, and an Archbishop appeased. One wedding today in return for an agreement of no crowning anybody Queen in case Something Terrible, all deities forbid, were to happen tomorrow.

If such rumors are fact, it's overkill seldom seen outside the Pentagon marketing office, a caution whose abundance is rivaled only by restaurant waste.

It's been extremely unlikely for a while now that Charles will ever be King.

As the Queen stands poised to sail into her 85th summer, in apparently excellent health, this would seem to indicate that she will, in fact have inherited her mother's longevity, and that the chances are good that she will continue to reign over us for at least another 15 years or so.

Charles is already in his sixties, but this alone would hardly be an impediment to his making what is, after all, a lifetime covenant, at least in doctrinal terms.

The real issue is that Charles hasn't been very popular since he - well, practically since he hit puberty. As soon as he became a teenager, it became apparent that he is blessed with neither the telegenic charisma of his son, nor the iconic stateliness of his mother.

Any inclusion of a young Prince Charles in lists of Cute Boys compiled by teen magazines in the 1960s was done, if at all, out of pure courtesy or as an afterthought, and most frequently both. A courteous afterhought.

If you were Adam DiVello, holding an open casting call for a love interest for Lauren Conrad, and a young Prince Charles walked in, unless you knew he was Prince Charles and you were open to a whole new direction for The Hills, you'd be yelling "NEXT" before he dropped his headshot on the folding table.

He is neither handsome nor charming, neither an inspiring speaker nor possessed of quick wit. He's solidly and stolidly unappealing and dull.

Yet such is the strength of loyalty and love of the monarchical tradition among the vast majority of the British public, that all that might have been forgiven - even today, in the information age, where "reading well" on TV can trump a multitude of sins and failure to do is the only unforgivable one.

Sheer respect for the institution and the history it represents might have been enough to make Charles not only an acceptable and accepted monarch, but a popular one.

As was the case with his grandfather, George VI, his very bumbling imperfection might have endeared him to his subjects, much in the same way as Diana's blushing EveryGirl endeared her to the world even before she had sat through her first class in "media relations."

And back we come to The Story. We have no way of knowing whether Charles ever wanted to be King. All we know is that he probably won't be, because The Story will have rendered the idea infeasible.

The only reason England has a monarchy today is because enough of the British public is pleased enough with having a monarchy - and pleased enough with the monarch - to keep on paying for it.

Unlike warlords and captains of industry who operate above such petty considerations as public opinion, the British royal family, like celebrities everywhere, owes everything to it.

Diana attained a level of public popularity unprecedented, not only in living memory, but in the history of media. Even years after her death, she's in a category all by herself.

As a character in The Story, she's the innocent Princess victim. And Charles is the villain, the Evil Prince, who deceived her, shamed her, defiled her, and doomed her.

He's the anti-monarchist's Dream King.

It may have withstood nearly a thousand years of wars, and plague, murder and famine and intrigue and warming pan babies and Oliver Cromwell, but it was Diana to whom the head that wears the crown was obliged to bow that day in August, when newspapers blared, in Second Coming Type "SPEAK TO US, MA'AM!"

Her Majesty may have thrown up a little bit in the Royal Mouth, but she did it. She did it because it was her duty. She did it because, according to her deepest beliefs, the monarchy is a sacred trust that must be preserved. So she went out there and she preserved it. But she wasn't preserving it for Charles.

She will have realized long ago that if the crown ever sits on her son's head at all, it will rest there only for the time it takes to draw up the papers to get it onto the butter-yellow and oft-over-gel'd locks of Diana's son, Diana's heir. That's what she bowed to.

And That's The Story of this Royal Wedding.

It's got nothing to do with all that gushing and simpering about Kate Middleton having an ancestor that worked in a coal mine, entertaining though that is to watch. (Yes, I'm easily amused, and I own it. Embrace it, even).

They've stopped short, but only barely, of hauling Loretta out of retirement and flying her over to sing "Coal Miner's Daughter" from the choir stall in Westminster Abbey.

(We probably should shut up about that now and not give them ideas).

The Story of the young couple themselves would put a meth head to sleep. Boy meets girl in college. Boy dates girl. Boy takes break from girl. Boy gets back together with girl and proposes.

I mean, whoa. Stuff like that just never happens.

Kate Middleton, whose striking and most intriguing resemblance to Lauren Conrad may be pure coincidence and entirely unrelated to marketing, seems like a very nice woman.

At 28, she's hardly a blushing young ingenue, and having lived with William for at least some of the eight years they've known each other - and they've known each other in the regular people sense - none of this stuff about random Moments of Destiny in some field some place.

I give her props for wasting very little time in going on public record to squash the crap about keeping a poster of Wills on her bedroom wall before she'd ever met him, or since she was 12, or any of the various Faux Stories that have been preceding Royal Weddings ever since the one about little Princess Lilibet gazing out at her little boat-rowing cousin Prince Philip-of-Greece-but-only-because-Greece-had-recently-borrowed-their-royal-family-from-Denmark.

What Kate will do with her cultural bully pulpit remains to be seen. She's not obligated, frankly, to do anything with it.

There would be no shame in her simply living what she will have now instead of a life producing the requisite quantity of issue, doing her share of the ribbon-cutting and charity event appearing, and trucking along like that until it's time for her to be fitted for her Mother of The Whatever gown for her kids' Royal Weddings, and those of her grandkids' after that.

Those who expect her to "follow in the footsteps" or "carry the flag" of Diana don't realize what they're saying, and will be horrified if they ever do, so let's hope they don't. Nor could Kate ever do such a thing, even if she were "troubled" enough to aspire to it, which I certainly hope she isn't.

In this Royal Wedding, the Story isn't about Kate. She's just the bride.

The Story of this Royal Wedding, like the Story of the monarchy itself, is the same as it was in 1981.

Diana's son, who will be the next King, is getting married. And The Story goes on...
 

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