Speaker 1: Guess what, Mango, what that will? So you know how
Speaker 1: tons of kids want to be princesses, right like there's
Speaker 1: Sophia the First and Disney movies. I know, you know,
Speaker 1: my my, my daughter, four year old Ruby actually wants
Speaker 1: none of that. She wants to be a professional golfer,
Speaker 1: she says right now. She's also been telling people she
Speaker 1: wants to be a professional t ball player. And uh
Speaker 1: and when she does ballet, it's honestly like less delicate
Speaker 1: and more aggressive than any stylent ballet you've ever seen before.
Speaker 1: Oh I love that, and I love Ruby's ideas. And
Speaker 1: you know what, I actually believe her if she wants
Speaker 1: to be a professional golfer, I believe she will be
Speaker 1: a professional golfer. So though, but anyway, I'm glad Ruby's
Speaker 1: got her own ideas. You know. The funny thing about
Speaker 1: history is that people have always looked up to princesses
Speaker 1: and you know, tried to imitate their style. And one
Speaker 1: really strange version of this was the Alexandra Limp. Have
Speaker 1: you heard about this? So? So the limp is named
Speaker 1: for the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Now, initially she had
Speaker 1: a scar on her next so she started wearing a
Speaker 1: choker to conceal it, and immediately all the fashionable women
Speaker 1: in society did the same thing, and overnight chokers became
Speaker 1: all the rage, which I guess makes a certain type
Speaker 1: of sense. We see this kind of thing happened. But
Speaker 1: but then when Alexandra had a bout of rheumatic fever
Speaker 1: that left her with this pronounced limp, so people actually
Speaker 1: started trying to imitate that too, and and they weren't
Speaker 1: being ironic with this, It just fascinating to read about.
Speaker 1: So they purposely started wearing mismatch shoes to imitate her walk,
Speaker 1: and then shoemakers even got in on the act. They
Speaker 1: started selling these one tall heeled shoe and one low
Speaker 1: shoe as a pair, so that you could get a
Speaker 1: little bit more of that natural Alexandra limp. I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculous. How long did this last for? I think
Speaker 1: it was maybe a season or two, And you know,
Speaker 1: most commoners thought that high society folk looked like idiots.
Speaker 1: But the BBC reports that there was a fashion journal
Speaker 1: that called for an immediate end to the trend a
Speaker 1: year or two after it started. I think instead they
Speaker 1: suggested quote. The skirt of the season, we are informed,
Speaker 1: is to clean closely round the feet in consequence, whereof
Speaker 1: ladies will be obliged to walk because if their feet
Speaker 1: were tied together. Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, No,
Speaker 1: it definitely isn't, but it does show society's obsession with princesses,
Speaker 1: or at least a certain kind of princess, and today's
Speaker 1: show is all about breaking that stereotype. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about princesses behaving badly, warriors, schemers, Charlatan's and
Speaker 1: a whole lot more. So let's dive in. Hey, their
Speaker 1: podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson
Speaker 1: and as always I'm joined by my good friend man
Speaker 1: Guesha Ticketer and sitting behind that soundproof glass wearing a
Speaker 1: shirt that just says inconceivable, which is a nice Princess
Speaker 1: Bride reference from Tristan over there. That's our friend and
Speaker 1: producer Tristan McNeil. Now, speaking of Princess Bride, do you
Speaker 1: know how that book was written? Mango, I don't so.
Speaker 1: The author, William Goldman, he wanted to write a book
Speaker 1: for his daughters and they were four and seven years old,
Speaker 1: I think at the time, and so he just asked him, like,
Speaker 1: what should it be about? And one set of princess
Speaker 1: and the other one said a bride, And so that's
Speaker 1: how I got his title. That's pretty fun, and it's
Speaker 1: perfect for today's show because it isn't really a safew
Speaker 1: princess story, right, yeah, I mean it's it's definitely one
Speaker 1: of my favorites, but but we should jump in. So
Speaker 1: today on the program, we've got an old friend and
Speaker 1: one of our favorite writers from our Mental Floss days,
Speaker 1: Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. Now, she wrote a book called Princesses
Speaker 1: Behaving Badly, Real stories from history without the fairy tale endings,
Speaker 1: and we can't wait to ask her all about it.
Speaker 1: So welcome to the show, Linda, Hi, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for having me on. Why don't we start with
Speaker 1: one of my favorite badass princesses from this lot, who's
Speaker 1: uh could have? Lunit think? I don't know how you
Speaker 1: pronounced it. Could you tell us a little bit about her? So?
Speaker 1: She was a Mongolian princess. She was um, she was
Speaker 1: a relative of Genghis Khan. She was a great great
Speaker 1: granddaughter of Genghis Khan. She was the only girl in
Speaker 1: a family of fourteen boys, and she was impressive. I
Speaker 1: mean she you know, Marco Polo, who's the you know,
Speaker 1: the famous Venetian traveler and chronicler. Um, he saw her
Speaker 1: in action, and one of the things that she was
Speaker 1: particularly good at, she was you know, she was she
Speaker 1: was an archer and an excellent horsewoman, and those were
Speaker 1: things that were fairly common to Mongolian courship culture at
Speaker 1: the time, even among women. But she was an amazing wrestler.
Speaker 1: She could not be beaten. And supposedly, by the time
Speaker 1: Marco Polo saw her, she had amassed a herd at
Speaker 1: like ten thousand horses, because the common thing to do
Speaker 1: was to bet horses on the outcome of this match,
Speaker 1: and so she would just always win and she and
Speaker 1: it so by the time that Marco Polo finds her, um,
Speaker 1: the rumors got around and that she refused to marry
Speaker 1: anyone who couldn't beat her on the wrestling mat. And
Speaker 1: so at that point she was still unmarried, and that
Speaker 1: was kind of getting a little bit sticky, a little
Speaker 1: complicated for her family. Um. But from what the historical
Speaker 1: record seems to show she never was beaten, and she
Speaker 1: eventually just chose to marry someone even though they could
Speaker 1: beat her on the wrestling that so and and Linda.
Speaker 1: Part part of the amazing thing about her dominance in
Speaker 1: wrestling is it actually affected the clothes that athletes were, right. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: supposedly now even in today, when Mongolian men wrestle, they
Speaker 1: wear this kind of long sleeved best that's open in
Speaker 1: the front to show their opponents that they don't have rest.
Speaker 1: And supposedly it's men as a tribute to the female
Speaker 1: wrestler who was never defeated. Yeah, that's pretty great. And
Speaker 1: you know, obviously kulun Is is certainly one of our
Speaker 1: favorites from the book. I mean, do you have a
Speaker 1: favorite warrior princess? I know there's so many to choose from,
Speaker 1: but I'm I'm curious of in doing the research for
Speaker 1: the book, that was one that just really stuck out
Speaker 1: to you. One of my absolute favorites is Outfield, the
Speaker 1: Pirate Princess. So she's there isn't a lot of great
Speaker 1: evidence that she actually existed, but I just love her story. Um,
Speaker 1: she was a she was a princess of the fifth
Speaker 1: century and daughter of a of a Goth king. So
Speaker 1: this is all sort of out of the like you know,
Speaker 1: icy cold Scandinavian North, and she's certainly in the tradition
Speaker 1: of the kind of shield maiden warrior Princess model Um,
Speaker 1: and her story starts a little bit funny because she's
Speaker 1: she is meant to be so beautiful that she was
Speaker 1: forced by her family to cover her face lest she
Speaker 1: provoked the men around her into just you know, connections
Speaker 1: of lust or whatever they thought was right to happen. Um.
Speaker 1: And she was given by her father, the king. She
Speaker 1: was given a viper and a snake to rear Um,
Speaker 1: wishing to defend her chastity by the protection of these
Speaker 1: reptiles when they came to grow up. So basically she
Speaker 1: has these two deadly reptiles as her guard animals Um,
Speaker 1: and the idea was that, you know, if somebody could
Speaker 1: get through that, then then maybe he could be worthy
Speaker 1: of her Um. And eventually someone dead and this is
Speaker 1: the part that kind of cracks me up because the
Speaker 1: guy who eventually was able to kill both of the
Speaker 1: snakes and make it alive to alfhild Um was named
Speaker 1: Alf so if they got married, they would have been
Speaker 1: Alf and Elf Hills. Um. But where this story starts
Speaker 1: to kind of beer away from the whole sort of
Speaker 1: you know, princess and a castle rescued by the handsome
Speaker 1: prince thing is that she was given the decision once
Speaker 1: once he made it through killed pets. Um, she give
Speaker 1: a decision do you actually want to marry him or not?
Speaker 1: And she actually chose not to and instead became a
Speaker 1: pirate with a crew of lady pirates with her, and
Speaker 1: they tore up and down the Baltic Sea around the coast,
Speaker 1: and she amassed a flotilla and she basically came became
Speaker 1: like a pirate admiral, and um, I just I just
Speaker 1: loved this idea of her sort of you know, being
Speaker 1: like I could get married or I could be a pirate,
Speaker 1: and that's just way more fun. And so you know,
Speaker 1: this is also kind of one of the like ancient
Speaker 1: meat cute stories because Alf, of course has never forgotten
Speaker 1: about this, this beautiful maiden who um, you know, was
Speaker 1: so chased and so modest and yet spurned his advances
Speaker 1: and decided to become a pirate take to the sea
Speaker 1: that he's been following her. He's been trying to find her,
Speaker 1: and eventually he comes across this this you know, this
Speaker 1: flotilla of of pirate ships, of kind of Viking pirate ships, right,
Speaker 1: and in his head he's thinking like, right, nothing will
Speaker 1: keep me from my love. I know, I'm so close
Speaker 1: to her. I'm going to find her. It's gonna be great,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be awesome. I just gotta get to these
Speaker 1: pirates first. So they're fighting, he's fighting on the deck.
Speaker 1: He's found the pirates. Fun he accidentally knocks off one
Speaker 1: of the pirates helmet and it's herd and so, you know,
Speaker 1: and then and then the story gets a little bit
Speaker 1: like a little bit disappointing because oh, they got married,
Speaker 1: and and not long after that Elf got on her
Speaker 1: a son. So it's, you know, that's a little bit disappointing.
Speaker 1: But the start of the story is is really really exciting,
Speaker 1: and the fact that she was able to kind of
Speaker 1: pursue her own destiny in a way that was was
Speaker 1: different certainly to other women and was kind of contrary
Speaker 1: to that that what would later become an established fairytale story.
Speaker 1: I think it's really compelling and kind of fun, and
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to choose to believe that that
Speaker 1: was true. Let's just go with this as a as
Speaker 1: a real story. I want to believe that she's a
Speaker 1: real person. I mean, the story came out like six
Speaker 1: hundred years after this was meant to have and in
Speaker 1: a sort of you know, history that also included it
Speaker 1: was like a history of the Danes that also included
Speaker 1: like giants and dragons and other things that we're probably
Speaker 1: not true. So one of the things we've been fascinated
Speaker 1: in recent culture is like watching things like down Abbey
Speaker 1: or even like Prince Harry's engagement where these like commoners
Speaker 1: sort of marry in and uh. And I was curious
Speaker 1: about the story that you tell about Clara Ward, who's
Speaker 1: I guess hails from Detroit. Can you tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about her? Yeah, Clara Ward was, I mean
Speaker 1: her her story is very very much in line with
Speaker 1: a lot of what was happening at the end of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. Essentially, Europe was a Europe was the
Speaker 1: tough place to be. Um the sort of the national
Speaker 1: borders were changing all the time. Um, the fortunes of
Speaker 1: the European aristocrats were tumbling, and at the same time
Speaker 1: America was ascending in a big way, and particularly um
Speaker 1: American wealth was was becoming very very attractive, and so
Speaker 1: you saw a lot of these marriages between European aristocrats
Speaker 1: and American heiresses, and essentially the heiresses were bringing the
Speaker 1: money and the aristocrats were bringing the sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the titles, yeah, and the social standing and and all
Speaker 1: of that. That seemed sort of very very important then.
Speaker 1: And Clara Ward, who was the daughter of an American industrialist,
Speaker 1: she came from Detroit. She her her mother seems to
Speaker 1: have really wanted that life for her, and starting when
Speaker 1: she was in her teens, had her educated in London,
Speaker 1: in Italy and France. And the sort of most notable
Speaker 1: thing about those times was that Clara Ward got kicked
Speaker 1: out of every single school she went to, was just
Speaker 1: scribed as sort of far too wild to ever fit
Speaker 1: in into this kind of European society. But she eventually
Speaker 1: did marry. Um. She was very young, she was, you know,
Speaker 1: in her teens still when she married the Prince Caraman
Speaker 1: de Chimayum she was a Belgian prince, and they stayed together.
Speaker 1: Sort of it wasn't a good match. I mean, as
Speaker 1: as much as you can sort of you know, assume
Speaker 1: from a lot of these these marriages of wealth and title.
Speaker 1: People weren't always in it for love. Everything weren't in
Speaker 1: it for love. So Clara was seventeen years old when
Speaker 1: she met Prince Joseph Dick Caraman Chimay. He was the
Speaker 1: son of the Belgian foreign affairs minister. He was in
Speaker 1: serious debt, but of course he had this this title,
Speaker 1: and they got married in Paris in the eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: Her dress costs like like ten thousand dollars, I mean,
Speaker 1: which is just an insane amount of money in you know,
Speaker 1: in eighteen ninety. Um. Once they were married, they traveled
Speaker 1: to all of the sort of European hot spots. They
Speaker 1: were in the Belgian court, and they went to the Riviera,
Speaker 1: the Paris, went all over the place, and she you know,
Speaker 1: had two children this time. But it was clear from
Speaker 1: the reports that she was not happy, um, and that
Speaker 1: her relationship with her husband, which had you know, from
Speaker 1: the beginning not been great, was getting worse, and that
Speaker 1: she was potentially cheating on him and he didn't really
Speaker 1: care enough to stop her. Um. Things really came to
Speaker 1: the head when she was in the Belgian court. And
Speaker 1: evidently she says that King Leopold the Second showed so
Speaker 1: much attention to her too, that she was shunned by
Speaker 1: the rest of the court and became a sort of
Speaker 1: social pariah. And I think at that point really kind
Speaker 1: of crystallized her dislike of the European aristocratic circles that
Speaker 1: she was traveling in. So eventually, um there, Now, by
Speaker 1: the time they get to Paris, things are really you know,
Speaker 1: we've we've set the stage for a break between her
Speaker 1: and her husband, and sort of one of the first
Speaker 1: kind of best opportunities she takes it. And that opportunity
Speaker 1: happened to be a Hungarian gypsy violinist called Rigo Jancy.
Speaker 1: It's November eighteen ninety six. She's at a cafe, she
Speaker 1: sees him playing his violin. They smile at each other,
Speaker 1: and then ten days later she runs away with him.
Speaker 1: And two months after that she's divorced from her husband
Speaker 1: and separated from her children and also forced to pay
Speaker 1: him alimony for the rest of her life. She's now free, right,
Speaker 1: so this this like you can imagine too, I mean,
Speaker 1: this must have been this was incredibly scandalous. At the time.
Speaker 1: The courtroom for her divorce trial was packed. She didn't
Speaker 1: actually show up. All of her statements were actually went
Speaker 1: out by her lawyers. But she was just she was
Speaker 1: just done with it. And she even said, you know,
Speaker 1: she said, I wanted to be free. I am done
Speaker 1: with it. I don't think And she says later on
Speaker 1: too that that American went and could not fit into
Speaker 1: this kind of lifestyle, that it's too stifling, that it's
Speaker 1: too petty, and and she just hated it. But from
Speaker 1: that point on she lived her life to the fullest.
Speaker 1: I mean, she was you know, the she was painted
Speaker 1: by Vito loose law track. She was a star of
Speaker 1: Bellapoc friends. She you know, she posed in in these
Speaker 1: like skin tight leotard things with strange things on her head,
Speaker 1: had her pictures taken. She showed her ankles, I mean,
Speaker 1: she was having She she divorced Rigo Gout was involved
Speaker 1: with someone else, got married again who I think he
Speaker 1: was the handsomest man in Naples. I think that was
Speaker 1: his sort of you know, claimed the fame. And then
Speaker 1: they divorced and she married somebody else, and and it
Speaker 1: sort of you see that her you know, interest in
Speaker 1: her life is perpetual all the way up until the end.
Speaker 1: But details and actual facts about it are pretty slim
Speaker 1: on the ground. You don't really get a lot of great,
Speaker 1: great information about and reliable information about what happens to
Speaker 1: her after all these subsequent divorces. But um, she ended
Speaker 1: up I mean sadly. You know, she she died really young.
Speaker 1: She was only forty three. She died of pneumonia. And
Speaker 1: at the time, there were all these rumors that she
Speaker 1: was penniless, that she was completely cut off from her family,
Speaker 1: that you know, she had no friends and all these things.
Speaker 1: And while she may have been very much cut off
Speaker 1: from society, she wasn't penniless by any means. Um. She
Speaker 1: was certainly cut off from her children, but she hadn't
Speaker 1: been completely disowned. And you know, in the end, all
Speaker 1: of her obituaries just remembered her as this sort of
Speaker 1: you know, bright spark that blew out too quickly. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you wrote about how she'd been at a
Speaker 1: convent and she shocked the nuns at the convent, like
Speaker 1: the waiter and a station manager, and I mean, she
Speaker 1: has such a remarkable life, and I think it's also
Speaker 1: kind of difficult, Like all the stuff that she's doing
Speaker 1: is you know, the kinds of things that if if
Speaker 1: we're to happen to a modern celebrity celebrity now, you know,
Speaker 1: it would be equally as interesting. But this is all
Speaker 1: happening at the turn of the century. This is this
Speaker 1: is the eighteen nineties to the nineteen tents. I mean,
Speaker 1: she died in nineteen sixteen, you know, so this is
Speaker 1: all like like she is she is. You know, she
Speaker 1: is a celebrity in the vein of celebrities now, but
Speaker 1: without the kind of machinery around promoting that celebrity. So
Speaker 1: if there's always kind of wonderful gossip columns and stuff
Speaker 1: that you read. And the Library of Congress, by the way,
Speaker 1: is a treasure trope and has everything. And I found
Speaker 1: out a lot from all the newspapers that they had
Speaker 1: their um But you know, you can see the beginnings
Speaker 1: of the steeds of the kinds of celebrities that we
Speaker 1: have now. And you know, her claimed aime was that
Speaker 1: she had a lot of money and she did some
Speaker 1: dosy things with it. She feels very modern in that regard,
Speaker 1: But I also just appreciate that she lived the life
Speaker 1: that she wanted to lead and wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: put into the boxes that her family wanted her to
Speaker 1: be in, or the European Court wanted her to be in,
Speaker 1: and or even you know, the public wanted her to
Speaker 1: be in. She she, she did her and good honor.
Speaker 1: We have several more fascinating lives that we want to
Speaker 1: ask you about, but before we do that, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're
Speaker 1: talking to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, the author of Princesses Behaving Badly. Now, Linda,
Speaker 1: before we get back to some of the other specific princesses,
Speaker 1: I did appreciate, you know, so many of the side
Speaker 1: stories and sidebars and other guides that you had in
Speaker 1: the book, and one of these was a guide to
Speaker 1: faking prince's Hood. And I was, curiously, can you tell
Speaker 1: us some of the better strategies for pretending you're a
Speaker 1: royal if you're not actually a royal? Uh? Well, there
Speaker 1: are some fantastic examples of people doing that, and my
Speaker 1: favorite at Christmas Princess Cariboo. Who's in it? But um,
Speaker 1: it seems like the best way to pretend that you're
Speaker 1: royal when you're not is to just put your all
Speaker 1: into it and and stay it with confidence. It's sort
Speaker 1: of like people will believe you more if you just
Speaker 1: say it really loudly. Princess all of the Cumberland. She
Speaker 1: her story. This was This was in the early eight hundreds,
Speaker 1: right around the time in England when the press was
Speaker 1: becoming really really powerful and there were a lot of
Speaker 1: places where you could get pamphlets printed. And these pamphlets
Speaker 1: were probably they're just everywhere, like pretty much every it was.
Speaker 1: It's basically the same thing as having something self published.
Speaker 1: Now and you said, you will see tons of them
Speaker 1: where you know, the George Wilson, the Black Heath Pedestrian,
Speaker 1: a man who's walked a thousand miles, like, he gets
Speaker 1: his pamphlet printed and tells his story, it sells it.
Speaker 1: So she had her pamphlet printed and claimed to be
Speaker 1: Princess Olive of Cumberland, the sort of a legitimate sort
Speaker 1: of illegitimate, illegitimate daughter of the king's brother. Um. And
Speaker 1: any time that somebody says these things confidence, they put
Speaker 1: it down in paper, they put it down in writing,
Speaker 1: they tell enough people, they say it with enough power,
Speaker 1: they use the prince, people are going to start to
Speaker 1: believe it. Yeah, and it's it's amazing. I feel like
Speaker 1: there was one u one story in there. I can't
Speaker 1: remember who, but like there was a woman who refused
Speaker 1: to speak German unless unless a fellow queen or princess
Speaker 1: spoken to her. Like there's such elaborate ways out of
Speaker 1: like you know, explaining away the reason that you can't
Speaker 1: speak a language or whatever. It's just kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: It's also I think because people, you know, people do
Speaker 1: want to believe like there's there's I think this is
Speaker 1: part of the sort of really interesting world that um
Speaker 1: that royalty and habits that because it feels so special
Speaker 1: to people around you feel special by being connected to you.
Speaker 1: So if you know that that and of itself is
Speaker 1: enough for people to want to support your idea and
Speaker 1: to support you in your claim, and you know, so
Speaker 1: it becomes this kind of self perpetuating thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: it feels you know, royalty still feels special. So I
Speaker 1: I want to get back to some of the seedier
Speaker 1: sides of being a princess and h and can you
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about Charlotte of Prussia who
Speaker 1: threw a notorious party. Oh yeah, she's one of my
Speaker 1: favorites too, because I think she's the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Right,
Speaker 1: so who you know, we think of Queen Victoria as
Speaker 1: um Victorian. Yeah, I mean, just you know, everything about
Speaker 1: Victoria in the Victorian era is buttoned up in prim
Speaker 1: and proper. But in eight Charlotte of Prussia, um chain
Speaker 1: smoking Princess Victoria Elizabeth August Charlotte, granddaughter in Queen Victoria,
Speaker 1: the daughter of the Prussian rulers, the younger sister of
Speaker 1: Kaiser Vilham, the second um through a sex party at
Speaker 1: a hunting lodge in the woods, and evidently dozens of
Speaker 1: aristocrats showed up. It was you know, it was drinking
Speaker 1: and dancing and sex and lots of things going on.
Speaker 1: And the only reason that people found out about this
Speaker 1: was that there was someone in the party that night
Speaker 1: who leaked the story and started to blackmail the other
Speaker 1: people who were there, and they could describe in detail
Speaker 1: some of the naughty things that everybody who was up to.
Speaker 1: And it came out that um that Charlotte was the
Speaker 1: one who had thrown the party, and she had a
Speaker 1: reputation for being snobby and for being rude. Um. She
Speaker 1: did not have an academic mindset, so to speaking. Um,
Speaker 1: she was a flirt, you know. So so there was
Speaker 1: there's not a lot going for him, and this was
Speaker 1: all coming from her own mother too, which is not
Speaker 1: very nice. Yeah. Um, And so you know, after the
Speaker 1: sex party happened, there was this this massive blackmail scandal
Speaker 1: that just rocked the cord and and um and became
Speaker 1: you know, a really really really big scandal. There was
Speaker 1: a police investigation that lasted years, and eventually it came
Speaker 1: out that it was the kaiser's brother in law and
Speaker 1: his French mistress who were behind the black mail of
Speaker 1: the sexy aristocratic swinger party. But even by that time,
Speaker 1: you know, Charlotte's reputation was already in treads. It wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna it wasn't going anywhere good. You know, there's one
Speaker 1: other scandal I wanted to ask you about as well,
Speaker 1: But before we get to that, let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: all right, Linda. So we were talking about scandals before,
Speaker 1: and actually there's another one I've been wanting to ask
Speaker 1: you about about Princess Margaret, you know, the princess who
Speaker 1: may have actually caused the bank robbery. Can can you
Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about that? Yeah? Okay, So
Speaker 1: if anybody's seen the movie The Bank Job. I think
Speaker 1: it came out in I want to say two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight. It's the Jason stith In movie, so you'll
Speaker 1: be you'll be familiar with the story from that. But
Speaker 1: but it is based on a real thing that happened.
Speaker 1: So um in a gang of thieves dug into the
Speaker 1: safety deposit fault box fault at Lloyd's Bank here in London.
Speaker 1: It was around Baker Street and Marlabum so Sherlock Holmes
Speaker 1: area by the way, um and made off with huge
Speaker 1: amounts of money, I mean untold amounts of money, because
Speaker 1: you know, people put things in safety deposit boxes that
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily want people other people to know about.
Speaker 1: And eventually the men were caught. Um four men were
Speaker 1: arrested in jailed for the crime, but the mastermind behind
Speaker 1: the whole thing was never actually arrested. The thing that
Speaker 1: was weird about this, and the thing that got people talking,
Speaker 1: was that um, four days after the the incident, four
Speaker 1: days after the brobbery itself, the newspapers stopped talking about it,
Speaker 1: and I mean the British newspapers still stopped talking about
Speaker 1: anything unless it's you know, completely dead buried in the ground.
Speaker 1: So what people started to say was that the authorities
Speaker 1: had put a d notice basically a gag order, preventing
Speaker 1: the media from talking about what might have happened in
Speaker 1: because on the theory that the whole heist was actually
Speaker 1: set up by m I five to steal compromising photographs
Speaker 1: of Princess Margaret. It was supposedly photos of our having
Speaker 1: a threesome, quite possibly with a gangster called John Binden.
Speaker 1: Nobody really knew. But I mean, even even without the
Speaker 1: whole big job thing, you know, Margaret's life was kind
Speaker 1: of both tragic and also scandalous, and also sort of
Speaker 1: evocative of the changes that were rocking the British monarchy
Speaker 1: at the time, um, changing social barris, all those things.
Speaker 1: You know. I think it's really worth noting that Margaret
Speaker 1: was prevented from marrying the first person that she loved,
Speaker 1: marrying the man that she wanted to marry because he
Speaker 1: was divorced and at the time, the church, you know,
Speaker 1: the Queen is the head of the church here in
Speaker 1: this country, the church could not allow her to marry
Speaker 1: someone who had been divorced. So it's really worth noting
Speaker 1: that Prince Harry is marrying someone who is divorced. It's
Speaker 1: at least significant to show in just two generations how
Speaker 1: much things have changed from what it was like in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and before and to what it's like now. Right, Linda, So,
Speaker 1: what do you want people to come away with when
Speaker 1: when reading about these princesses in your book? I think
Speaker 1: the biggest thing that I want people to realize is
Speaker 1: that underneath the title of princess there's a person, a real, living,
Speaker 1: breathing or formally breathing human being, who made good decisions
Speaker 1: and made bad decisions, who had feelings and sometimes loved
Speaker 1: the wrong people, sometimes did the right thing, sometimes did
Speaker 1: the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the right
Speaker 1: thing for the wrong reasons. That these were humans. And
Speaker 1: I think the most important thing is that, you know,
Speaker 1: there are so many princesses in this book, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I I really was just jamming them in because there
Speaker 1: are so many women whose stories are not being told,
Speaker 1: and I want people to see this book as an
Speaker 1: invitation to find out more about those women. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and there's so many that we didn't get to today.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a great story of a punk princess
Speaker 1: or you know, the Mafia Princess Lucretia. It was such
Speaker 1: a fascinating story. You know she she wore a hollow
Speaker 1: ring full of poison that she could pour into somebody's
Speaker 1: drink at any time. Well, I'm gonna go with the
Speaker 1: hollow ring story. But there's so many and I hope
Speaker 1: our listeners will all check out the book Princesses Behaving Badly,
Speaker 1: real stories from history without the fairy tale endings. But Linda,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you guys
Speaker 1: so much for having me on. Thanks again for listening.
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