Important Note: This piece was written by Duo-Tone. Please give her the props she deserves.
Tomorrow’s the day! Vast numbers of us anti-classist (or so we like to believe) Americans will gather ‘round our television sets at an absurdly early hour to wallow in the biggest Princess event in decades.
Despite Diane’s bone-chilling testimony, we still embrace the fairy tale. To attain Princess-hood is to hit the happily-ever-after jackpot: true love, every need met, everyday worries banished and every day filled with good deeds, public adoration and the delicious bounty flowing from the best-ever all-access pass, not to mention pots of money, beauty, leisure—and a castle. Celebrity doesn’t get better than that.
William and Kate are perhaps grateful for the protocol that allows Heads of State to be excluded. The Obamas will not be in London. The Royals, old hands at using Princess rituals to beat back anti-Royalist sentiment, are wise to avoid Princess competition.
Mrs. Obama has become the glamorous emblem of America’s optimistic dream of itself, an American Princess whose obvious intelligence and impressive CV add a welcome note of modern-woman gravitas to the familiar Princess template. Her stature, her confident self-possession, those arms and oh yeah, her blackness attract every eye. She is nobody’s background player. By comparison, the undeniably winsome Kate is minor league.
Kate (good luck, Royals, in getting the rest of us to call her Catherine) is not without raw talent. Nine years with William, and she has avoided so much as a single inadvisable public word. But what, exactly, differentiates her from tens of thousands of other attractive British girls of William’s approximate age? Right schools, right place, right time: all engineered by Mama, if the gossip is to be believed. We have here a lesson in social climbing, its efficacy but also its limitations. By this time tomorrow, she will stand atop Britain’s social ladder. She will be, technically, a Princess. But the real, riveting and fabulous thing? The jury is, most definitely, still out.
The Brits do have an advantage over us in that they manufacture technical Princesses on a pretty regular basis. If this one or that fails to cut it (Princess Anne, anyone?), there is always another in the pipeline. Most First Ladies, popular and beloved though they may become, are, by the time they get to the White House, too matronly to qualify. We try, on the occasion of their marriages, to elevate Presidential daughters to Princess-hood, but the attempt convinces no one and the ride is inevitably short. It’s been a long wait since Jackie Kennedy.
A Princess, whether of the Royal or the FLOTUS variety, is the sparkle-dust on her husband’s mission. She is to spread the sparkle via myriad personal appearances, generally in the name of causes that mix high-mindedness with blandness into a perfect elixir of inarguable virtue. She is a public-relations drudge, under relentless scrutiny and always, always, one very short misstep away from kicking up a shit-storm.
One might have expected that OPM (Our Princess Michelle. If you say it aloud and think “narcotic”—well, isn’t that among the signal effects of the Princess fantasy?)—anyway, we might have expected that a woman whose mover-and-shaker career within Chicago’s power circles predates her husband’s political rise might betray a bit of irritation over the constraints that come with her White House job. But there has been nary an indication.
Of course the first responsibility of a Princess is to look good. OPM’s mix of fashion-y, edgy labels with what the British call High Street style is, by established standards of Washington-woman wear, revolutionary. In a town where frumpy is code for “serious”, Mrs. O. is an unabashed clothes horse, code for “frivolous.” Her look disarmingly burnishes the fiction that she is just the little lady. No gender-blurring pants-suit uniforms for her; no prim jackets in blaring see-me-in-the-crowd colors. Michelle wears skirts and dresses. She wears prints. She wears cardigans and bold costume jewelry. Her wardrobe, softer and more overtly feminine than the Washington-woman norm, never reminds us of Hillary, or Laura Bush, or in fact any other Washington female.
She has her nay-sayers, of course. One right-wing fashion blog, racism showing, abbreviates her name to MOO and, thin lips pursed, touts Talbot’s as the pinnacle of good taste. This may be a clue to understanding why none of those Republican ladies are Princesses.
Subversively, paradoxically, Michelle O’s “I do not make policy!” mufti becomes a statement about her own individuality and influence. She is different. She dresses differently. She looks subordinate to no one.
If I sound besotted, I confess. I liked Michelle during the campaign, and I liked what I heard about her from politically astute friends in Chicago whose professional lives intersected hers. But it was a brief encounter in Washington, last May, that got me thinking about what life is like for a Princess down in the trenches, day after day.
Sporting a wrist band marking me as among the security-checked select, I was near the end of a photo line at a Democratic Party event. For an hour and a half, we shuffled forward, eventually turned a curtained-off corner and, one slow tread at a time, proceeded up a short flight of steps to the platform where OPM had been standing for as long as we had been shuffling. Inching closer and closer, I watched the metronomic rhythm: introduction, “hello”, handshake, picture. Thirty seconds, no more and no less.
It was a chilling sight. For numberless hours every week, I realized, OPM is detailed to this physically taxing, mind-numbingly monotonous but crucially important routine. Each of us Greeted Ones is pretty much guaranteed to retail our own story of meeting the Princess, in detail and forever. The tales circulate. Bad reviews can cost votes. Positive notices solidify support and sway fence-sitters. Simply put, it is OPM’s job to make people feel good. To accomplish that, she must create a perfect, ready-to-tell moment for every single one of the thousands who pass before her.
When, finally, it was my turn, OPM took my hand in both of hers, smiled warmly and said “How nice to see you!” with such evident openness and spontaneity that for a moment, I thought she had mistaken me for someone she actually knew. Goosed into some weird stratosphere of excitement, gentle Crasstalkers, I launched into a bizarre “someone I know knows someone you know” burble. It cannot have been the first case of mind-melt OPM encountered that week, or even that day. No problem for the pro. She laughed, made a sweet joke and expertly twirled me into photo pose, her arm around my waist, mine around hers. Flash, flash. Done and done. Thirty seconds. A crappy job, superbly executed.
Kate appears charmingly ordinary and accessible. But glamorous and ineffably special? Star quality? We have yet to see it. What about the day-to-day rigors of Princess duty? And for a lifetime! Holy cow. It is hard to imagine what sort of woman would willingly take this on as a permanent gig. Bless her heart.
