Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Grim and Mild from Aaron Minky. As you probably know,
Speaker 1: I tend to shy away from Noble Blood episodes featuring
Speaker 1: modern figures, not least of all because my aim is
Speaker 1: usually to uncover stories that haven't been told yet. But
Speaker 1: Princess Diana is a figure that looms so large in
Speaker 1: her collective consciousness, defining people's understanding of what it means
Speaker 1: to be a princess. It seems to me that in
Speaker 1: some ways, the tragedy of her story emerged at the
Speaker 1: tension between the modern and the traditional. Here was a
Speaker 1: woman very much of the nineties, trapped in an archaic institution,
Speaker 1: and here was a global population with a very traditional
Speaker 1: obsession with the monarchy, with youth, with beauty, with power,
Speaker 1: but now armed with modern tools cameras and helicopters and motorcycles.
Speaker 1: The myths of Diana looms so large, especially in the
Speaker 1: wake of her death and the conspiracy theories that surrounded her,
Speaker 1: that for me, actually getting an understanding of the woman
Speaker 1: beneath it all was daunting. And so today I've enlisted
Speaker 1: the help of the brilliant Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall
Speaker 1: to join me. They're the host of the podcast You're
Speaker 1: Wrong About and they did a phenomenal five part series
Speaker 1: on Princess Diana, and I am so excited to be
Speaker 1: with them here today. Sarah and Michael. Hi, Hi, Hi Danta,
Speaker 1: Hi Danna, thank you so much for being here. You're
Speaker 1: very good at this. That was like more insightful than
Speaker 1: anything we said on our show, Data making some good.
Speaker 1: Mike's comments do not reflect my beliefs, but I do.
Speaker 1: Sarah doesn't think I was insightful at all. I thought
Speaker 1: that we I think that we're equally insightful, and then
Speaker 1: I can compliment you without chipping away at my own work, um,
Speaker 1: which is what I intend to do. Well. That was beautiful, though,
Speaker 1: Thank you. I think that you were so insightful and
Speaker 1: I listened to your five part series that I immediately
Speaker 1: had to invite you on the show to to do
Speaker 1: a Noble Blood crossover. For me, it was. It's challenging
Speaker 1: because usually I work with the historical record, and like
Speaker 1: with media and with Diana, media itself seems like I'm
Speaker 1: like a character in the story. Yes, and there's like
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly too many facts and too much information as opposed
Speaker 1: to like, well, this is her hairbrush and this is
Speaker 1: what we think she looked like. It's also such an
Speaker 1: honor for you to ask us on because I hope
Speaker 1: people know that you're our royal correspondent and you have
Speaker 1: talked on our show about Marie Antoinette and Princess Anastasia. Um,
Speaker 1: and this is Princess Anastasia. Correct, Yeah, she's she's okay.
Speaker 1: See I'm already tripping up a little bit here. Um.
Speaker 1: But anyway, you have been our royal correspondent for a
Speaker 1: while now, and those are I think are some of
Speaker 1: our best episodes, or at least my favorite that we've done.
Speaker 1: This is this is just lovely. Well, I'm so honored
Speaker 1: to then have you back to return the favor on Diana,
Speaker 1: who especially I think, with the resurgence of the Crown,
Speaker 1: has sort of re emerged in the in the public
Speaker 1: consciousness as like a fashion Nike and I see influencers
Speaker 1: now in bike shorts and sweatshirts. I think she's really
Speaker 1: come back into vote. What what do you sort of
Speaker 1: ascribe all that to the crown or do you think
Speaker 1: there's another factor in sort of the public interest in
Speaker 1: Diana re emerging. Mike, I was gonna have you taken
Speaker 1: aligned woman correspondent. Yeah. I mean I think that the
Speaker 1: crown the same way, maybe that the people versus O. J.
Speaker 1: Simpson Dave gave people a point of entry into the
Speaker 1: life of someone that they were willing to reassess or
Speaker 1: assess for the first time if there's zoomers. So I
Speaker 1: feel like this is is you know, Princess Diana died
Speaker 1: in nine and so we now have a generation of
Speaker 1: young adults who either have no living memory of her
Speaker 1: or were born after her death, and so inevitably, at
Speaker 1: some point people in that age group, I think, wanna
Speaker 1: learn about what was happening right as they were entering
Speaker 1: the world, and then also learning how previous generations of
Speaker 1: media mishandled stories. I mean, I don't know, for me,
Speaker 1: that was a coming of age thing. Michael, what about you?
Speaker 1: When did your sort of when did you come online?
Speaker 1: In terms of understanding Princess Diana's story about three months
Speaker 1: ago and I started researching the series. I mean, a
Speaker 1: lot of the feedback that we've gotten from people are like,
Speaker 1: you know, I I liked the series in spite of
Speaker 1: the fact that I have no particular interest in the
Speaker 1: British Royal family, and I think that's like where me
Speaker 1: and Sarah came to it from, Like neither one of
Speaker 1: us are particularly like into the British Royal family or
Speaker 1: I'm also into royal history, but like I really have
Speaker 1: never like when William and um, what's her face, Kate,
Speaker 1: I guess see when they got married. I knew people
Speaker 1: who got up at one in the morning to watch it,
Speaker 1: and I was like, I'm going to read about it
Speaker 1: on Inside Edition dot com the next day because I'm
Speaker 1: interested and I want to see the outfit and the
Speaker 1: pictures and everything, but like, I'm not invested, Like I'm
Speaker 1: invested in the tutors, but you know, being invested in
Speaker 1: people who are living their lives in front of you
Speaker 1: right now seems weird and it'll break your heart, something
Speaker 1: that I kind of thought because I'm sort of on
Speaker 1: the periphery of that of like, really I am interested
Speaker 1: in the British Royal family just sort of has a
Speaker 1: power structure and like the historical legacy of that. But
Speaker 1: I found that Americans who woke up at like one
Speaker 1: in the morning to watch that it was sort of
Speaker 1: like they wanted the pageantry of like an excuse to
Speaker 1: get dressed up and eat scones. Like they used the
Speaker 1: British Royal Family as mascots as like like Derby Day
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, Like it was just like a bag,
Speaker 1: which I think that speaks to the larger picture where
Speaker 1: they're more symbols than people. It's like they are an
Speaker 1: excuse to like play fancy British, which is a very
Speaker 1: fun thing to do, right, and speculate on someone having
Speaker 1: or perhaps not having a baby, and then what kind
Speaker 1: of baby, and then when will we see the baby,
Speaker 1: a good or a bad? A good or a bad baby,
Speaker 1: what will the baby be wearing? How is the baby looking?
Speaker 1: And it's like look at your own babies. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's very much that they become mascots, at least to me,
Speaker 1: like modern living day mascots more than people. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of what makes it such an exploitative system.
Speaker 1: I mean, as we talked about in the show, there
Speaker 1: are a million reasons economic, political reasons to get rid
Speaker 1: of the Royal Family, which like everyone kind of knows
Speaker 1: those arguments and they know the counter arguments and you
Speaker 1: can play that debate out. But to me one of
Speaker 1: the most compelling reasons why the Royal family is bad
Speaker 1: is just that it's a massive human rights violation to
Speaker 1: make people be in this as dum and Diana is
Speaker 1: an interesting sort of vessel for that argument, because she
Speaker 1: wasn't part of the system and then she gets sucked
Speaker 1: in and you see all of the injustices. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then a story on a lift. And it seems to
Speaker 1: me that Diana was very bad at being the quiet,
Speaker 1: non speaking mascot side of of being a royal because
Speaker 1: her sort of personhood kept jumping out, yes exactly. That
Speaker 1: she understood the needs and the nature of modern celebrity
Speaker 1: in a way that the Royal family, because, as Tina
Speaker 1: Brown talks about in her book, they basically have the
Speaker 1: social morays of Britain thirty forty years ago. Like whatever
Speaker 1: Britain was doing years ago, that is, like their table manners,
Speaker 1: that is their etiquette for dinner, table conversation. Everything is
Speaker 1: a couple of decades old. And Dianna came in. I
Speaker 1: mean she grew up in a reasonably she grew up
Speaker 1: in a royal adjacent household, so it's not like she
Speaker 1: was some complete common folk, but she would least had
Speaker 1: something resembling the modern morays of British society. In the
Speaker 1: night she rude the tube right like she could, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like she knew what actual life was. The juxtaposition of
Speaker 1: what she understood celebrity to be and the kinds of
Speaker 1: celebrities that they thought they were is what makes the
Speaker 1: story so fascinating and also so sort of comical that
Speaker 1: over and over again Princess Diana is just like you,
Speaker 1: people are acting insane. What are you doing? And because
Speaker 1: everybody around her is either in the royal family or
Speaker 1: these sort of footmen of the royal family like part
Speaker 1: of that system, they're constantly just like gaslighting her, like
Speaker 1: why would you want to go visit an AIDS ward?
Speaker 1: Why are you doing this? And she's like because I'm
Speaker 1: a good person, Like why am I getting yelled at?
Speaker 1: What is the reason? And there's a story where she
Speaker 1: was rushing to see a friend who was dying of
Speaker 1: AIDS at the time, and they were like, you can't
Speaker 1: leave because blah blah royal product. Yeah, you don't leave
Speaker 1: moral on a Saturday. Yeah, And it's like you you
Speaker 1: mustn't leave, and you must curtsy to the queen seven
Speaker 1: times and then face west and curtsy twelve more times
Speaker 1: or what like, there was this weird protocol and they're
Speaker 1: mad at her that she left to go literally see
Speaker 1: her friend on his deathbed. And it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where you just you can very easily put yourself
Speaker 1: into her shoes and be like, why am I getting
Speaker 1: yelled at for this? This is out So here's my
Speaker 1: hypothetical question. And not I'm not on the side of
Speaker 1: anyone in this. I mean I'm on Diana's side because
Speaker 1: I think that's she's a normal human being. Yes, but
Speaker 1: Queen Elizabeth's sort of like non personhood has led like
Speaker 1: longevity for the for the crown. You don't shine right,
Speaker 1: you shine for a long time. You just you. You
Speaker 1: can't be a flare because flares then go down. You
Speaker 1: just have to sort of stay at the medium level
Speaker 1: this whole time. Is there something to be said for
Speaker 1: this idea that like if Princess Diana had lived, that
Speaker 1: people would have turned against her just because figures who
Speaker 1: are not volatile but just a exist at all, like
Speaker 1: women who exist in any capacity with a personality and
Speaker 1: with flaws, like the media eventually tears them down, like
Speaker 1: does the does the crown. No sort of that. In
Speaker 1: order to survive this long, you just have to do
Speaker 1: nothing basically, I mean she she would have carried on aging,
Speaker 1: so yes, um. I also like that you describe Queen
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's career as like the oil at Hanakah. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think that, I really do think that is sort of
Speaker 1: what the role is to do, say as little as
Speaker 1: possible and just continue on as like a steady yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And that well, and that also reminds me of um
Speaker 1: speaking of the only way to age gracefully, or the
Speaker 1: only way to age in a way that the public
Speaker 1: accepts and doesn't get mad at you about. I think,
Speaker 1: at least historically and probably now, you just have to
Speaker 1: do a Greta Garbo and disappear right, don't exist, and
Speaker 1: then no one will yell at you for getting older
Speaker 1: or for getting older in the wrong way, because every
Speaker 1: way is the wrong way. When Greta Garba was in
Speaker 1: Queen Christina, there's a final shot where she's on this
Speaker 1: boat that's carrying her away from the man that she
Speaker 1: loved who's now dead, and she's abdicated from the throne.
Speaker 1: And in real life she was probably a lesbian, but
Speaker 1: who cares and you know she's going toward her destiny.
Speaker 1: And the direction that she got for how to play
Speaker 1: the scene was like, just have your face be completely blank,
Speaker 1: Just think of nothing, try to amount nothing, because then
Speaker 1: people will project ship onto you and it'll be perfect.
Speaker 1: And that's what that ending shot is. And I feel
Speaker 1: as if that applies to the career of Queen Elizabeth,
Speaker 1: both as a female celebrity and as a ruler with
Speaker 1: a kind of power. But I'm curious about the nature
Speaker 1: of her power, and I would love to hear about
Speaker 1: what kind of power you think she had throughout her
Speaker 1: career and also as a public figure during World War
Speaker 1: Two as a pretty young person. Um. But I feel
Speaker 1: as if, yeah, looking at her, that model seems to
Speaker 1: have worked, which is that you you do as little
Speaker 1: as possible, and you also are as little as possible,
Speaker 1: because the more people are seeing their own ideas of
Speaker 1: you when they look at you, the more merciful they
Speaker 1: will be. Perhaps I also think that if if you
Speaker 1: do anything and have a personality um that is anything
Speaker 1: beyond like us weekly idiosyncrasies, people will be like, why
Speaker 1: the hell are we bowing and putting a crown on you?
Speaker 1: A human person, Like, why am I bowing to a person? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think Queen Elizabeth probably probably understand how silly the
Speaker 1: whole institution of monarchy is. And if you act quote
Speaker 1: unquote relatable like Diana did, it's like a princess can't
Speaker 1: be relatable because why would people bow to just like
Speaker 1: the girl next door. It's like they're rumbling the entire
Speaker 1: thing if people realize that Diana and therefore the rest
Speaker 1: of them are people. So I'm interested a little bit
Speaker 1: in um going back and and talking a little bit
Speaker 1: about her biographical information. When I was a child, my
Speaker 1: only understanding of Diana was a purple beanie baby that
Speaker 1: half that came out when she died. I had that too,
Speaker 1: And I always thought, just as in my childhead, like
Speaker 1: when that she was the people's princess, that she was
Speaker 1: a commoner. But she was. Yes, I totally thought people's princess,
Speaker 1: like she must be reasonably normal person. And she met Charles,
Speaker 1: like maybe they went to college together and they bumped
Speaker 1: into each other at the quad or something like that
Speaker 1: was sort of narrative that I constructed in my head.
Speaker 1: She was working at like a charming notting Hill bookstore
Speaker 1: that would have been great. So Michael, who was she?
Speaker 1: But I mean she grew up like the Royal family
Speaker 1: was her next door neighbor growing up. And because they're
Speaker 1: on these kind ree estates next door neighbor me they
Speaker 1: lived like miles away because they both had these like
Speaker 1: massive estates with like deer that they're hunting running around.
Speaker 1: But she went over to their house. She they would
Speaker 1: come over to her house for various things. They were
Speaker 1: sort of in each other's orbit. Her great aunt was
Speaker 1: this sort of scheming royalist person who was like trying
Speaker 1: to arrange these marriages. Like she was very much a
Speaker 1: part of the royal system. And her dad was the
Speaker 1: Earl of something and wait um, and her dad was
Speaker 1: the Earl Spencer, not the Earl of Spencer, which is
Speaker 1: important for some reason. Spencer's fancier yes or something yes.
Speaker 1: And so she grew up in this royal system and
Speaker 1: she actually one of the only commonalities that she ever
Speaker 1: had with Prince Charles, like one of the only things
Speaker 1: that would have helped them get along is that they
Speaker 1: both had these very similar childhoods where they had all
Speaker 1: this material wealth. You know, they had servants, they had
Speaker 1: amazing meals, they had horseback riding lessons, etcetera. But just
Speaker 1: they were completely immo sationally bereft that both of them
Speaker 1: had these parents that were absent and obsessed with protocol.
Speaker 1: Princess Diana's father would eat by himself in his sort
Speaker 1: of study and then the kids would kind of scrounge
Speaker 1: for food in the kitchen and it's just you read
Speaker 1: this stuff and you're like why. It's like, why not
Speaker 1: just be with your kids for the night, But like
Speaker 1: that wasn't done, especially if you're a man, and he's
Speaker 1: like a single father is for commoners. And so she's
Speaker 1: kind of raised by these random nannies who keep quitting
Speaker 1: because she's like really shitty to them, so they keep
Speaker 1: leaving and it's they're going to jump in the sack
Speaker 1: with her dad, right, yes, And so she has this
Speaker 1: sort of rotating string of you know, women in their
Speaker 1: early twenties who don't last that long. Her mom is
Speaker 1: living in London. They sort of go off to visit
Speaker 1: her mom after they get divorced, and this is like
Speaker 1: the closest thing to normalcy that she has. But she
Speaker 1: really has this like very emotionally empty upbringing, and this
Speaker 1: is something that like you never really get over just
Speaker 1: the fact that your parents aren't really there in any
Speaker 1: meaningful sense for most of the time that you're growing up.
Speaker 1: And her parents being divorced, I think is a factor
Speaker 1: that might have been in her mind as like a possibility,
Speaker 1: where I think maybe for Charles that's just like not
Speaker 1: a thing that is done. Yeah, I mean, these people
Speaker 1: don't really exist in any sort of normal institutions. It's
Speaker 1: actually very strange for parents to get divorced and then
Speaker 1: the father to get custody. He's very odd that Princess
Speaker 1: Diana's father gets custody. But the reason is because he's
Speaker 1: the Earl Spencer something something. The courts are just like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, he's royal. He gets whatever he wants, Like
Speaker 1: oh okay, like this is this is all the ways
Speaker 1: of this system has these weird little tentacles in this
Speaker 1: sort of official justice system that her mom never really
Speaker 1: has a chance to get custody of Diana and her brother.
Speaker 1: That's a weird thing of the weird juxtaposition between modernity
Speaker 1: and this yes and to equated system that doesn't make defensible,
Speaker 1: system that makes no sense. And of course the minute
Speaker 1: that he gets custody He's like, Okay, you're both now
Speaker 1: going off to boarding school because like, I really want
Speaker 1: my kids. I want to take them away from my
Speaker 1: ex wife, but I don't actually want to see them,
Speaker 1: so I'm going to send them off to boardings. Well,
Speaker 1: he couldn't trust her to send them to the right
Speaker 1: boarding school. I guess I think you're being hard on
Speaker 1: this guy. I find it fascinating that Prince Charles actually
Speaker 1: dated Diana's older sister before he dated Diana. How long
Speaker 1: and involved was that relationship. This was like very much
Speaker 1: foreshadowing for what happens with him and Diana that they did.
Speaker 1: I believe it's a couple of months. But the reason
Speaker 1: why he stops dating her sister is her sister talks
Speaker 1: to the press. She has this fateful lunch with a
Speaker 1: journalist where she's just like eating fries, hanging out chatting
Speaker 1: and right, yeah, and so she ends up telling this
Speaker 1: journalist like, I don't know if Wherever gonna get married,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, you know, I'm still kind of
Speaker 1: figuring it out. And you know, I don't really care
Speaker 1: if he's the King of England or some janitor off
Speaker 1: the street. I'm not into him or whatever, And then
Speaker 1: the Royal family reads this and they're like, did she
Speaker 1: just compare Prince Charles to a janitor? And how dares
Speaker 1: you imply he would ever do a day's work in
Speaker 1: his life? And so they completely cut her off, and
Speaker 1: so years go by before he sort of reconnects with
Speaker 1: Diana and then he's like, oh, didn't I meet you once?
Speaker 1: But this is a sign of like how much the
Speaker 1: Royal family had too much spin it? Yeah, did you
Speaker 1: look a little more broken in? You know? And he's
Speaker 1: holding a crop. To me, It's astonishing how young she
Speaker 1: was when they got together. There, What was she nineteen?
Speaker 1: And he's thirty two. As someone who's thirty two at
Speaker 1: this moment, that's weird. Can you imagine hanging with a
Speaker 1: nineteen year right now? I can't imagine marrying one, Mike,
Speaker 1: I can imagine hanging out with a nineteen year old,
Speaker 1: making them dinner and gently slipping in life advice in
Speaker 1: a in a covert way. Can I imagine having a
Speaker 1: relationship with one? No? Oh my god. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: we're just talking about the power differential of life experience
Speaker 1: and being like kind of more established and not being
Speaker 1: a member of the royal fucking family. And there's also
Speaker 1: this thing. I mean, I would think about the fact
Speaker 1: that both of them, in the weeks leading up to
Speaker 1: the wedding, we're crying and trying to back out of
Speaker 1: it and basically Telean Sophie and Peep show Sure, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't. Yeah, go on, Uh, I've not
Speaker 1: seen the show. So Sarah keeps bringing it up every time.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, you really keep forgetting you haven't seen it.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. It's one of four shows I've seen in
Speaker 1: my life, like all the way through, Dana, I've seen it,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, it is. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of crying and like, at one point, the
Speaker 1: guy a character who's getting married Mike, He's like just
Speaker 1: tries to get hit by a car, but he's like
Speaker 1: too passive to really start a fight, so the guy
Speaker 1: won't hit him with his car. He just swears at him.
Speaker 1: This is Charles. This is exactly Charles. A couple of guts.
Speaker 1: He doesn't really have the guts to truly back out
Speaker 1: of this, and he knows that this is his sort
Speaker 1: of country royal whatever duty stuff, and so he kind
Speaker 1: of sleep walks into this marriage, and also Diana sleepwalks
Speaker 1: into this marriage, and it's just like everyone around them
Speaker 1: sort of knows that it's a bad idea, but there's
Speaker 1: this idea of like, you know, it's it's what's done.
Speaker 1: Or one of the big things at the time is
Speaker 1: that if he doesn't marry Diana, it's like, well, there's
Speaker 1: nobody else, Like she's the last one because she has
Speaker 1: to be sort of royal adjacent. She has to be
Speaker 1: sort of lord whatever titled, and she also has to
Speaker 1: be a virgin, which is outrageous, and she has to
Speaker 1: sort of look the part and sort of have this
Speaker 1: trophy ish kind of personality, and literally part of the
Speaker 1: argument is like there's no one else. There's no one left.
Speaker 1: He's dated everybody else, and everyone else, like Camilla has
Speaker 1: like had sex and like seems to maybe enjoy sex
Speaker 1: with other human beings, and like she's obviously ineligible for this.
Speaker 1: So he has to marry this person who like he
Speaker 1: doesn't like that much and she doesn't like him, so
Speaker 1: he dated. Like how big of a pool is this really?
Speaker 1: Like hundreds? My understanding is that there's two sort of
Speaker 1: theories of this. One is that he was kind of
Speaker 1: a playboy for these years. You know, he's thirty two, right,
Speaker 1: so that's a lot of years in which he can
Speaker 1: be dating people, and so he has a lot of flings,
Speaker 1: and there's sort of women getting payoffs and n d
Speaker 1: a s to sort of disappear into the night. There's
Speaker 1: this as a rumor, But then other sources will say
Speaker 1: that all of this playboy stuff was something that was
Speaker 1: deliberately constructed by the royal family to make him seem
Speaker 1: like an eligible bachelor. He wasn't actually doing this. All
Speaker 1: loads and loads of women would date Prince Charles and
Speaker 1: have flings with Mike. Well that's we don't We don't know, so,
Speaker 1: like I know, I guess I think both theories are
Speaker 1: plausible because like it's hard to know how charismatic someone
Speaker 1: is unless you meet them when they're like twenty nine
Speaker 1: or whatever, Like we can't go back in time and know.
Speaker 1: But like it's yeah, I feel like it's a combination
Speaker 1: of Like I guess a lot of people would date
Speaker 1: the prince no matter what he looked like, Like there's
Speaker 1: only you know, the whole country. My hypothesis based on
Speaker 1: just your interpretation and what I feel like is both
Speaker 1: factors that he is not charismatic and not charming but
Speaker 1: a playboy because people want to sleep with the future
Speaker 1: King of England and he kind of knows it in
Speaker 1: the back of his mind. I feel like he has
Speaker 1: this deep seated insect of like, I know, people kind
Speaker 1: of only like me because I'm the here to the throne.
Speaker 1: But maybe you do know they're forced to like you,
Speaker 1: and maybe that's a kind of confidence. I don't know, Mike,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, going That's the thing. I don't know to
Speaker 1: what extent these people know how artificial their lives are.
Speaker 1: Because if you've grown up your entire life in that system,
Speaker 1: Prince Roles has never had a friend who didn't know
Speaker 1: acutely that he was going to be the king one day. Right,
Speaker 1: So all of your relationships, ever, every small talk conversation
Speaker 1: you've ever had in your entire life, is with somebody
Speaker 1: who knows that you have more power than them or
Speaker 1: will in the future, and so there's nothing to compare
Speaker 1: it to. Right Like, if if any of us sort
Speaker 1: of got into the royal family and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden people were treating us differently, we would understand that
Speaker 1: as different, but He's just like, Oh, I guess everyone
Speaker 1: just sucks up to you all the time. And that's
Speaker 1: what being alive is like. It's that they would have
Speaker 1: any idea that this is extremely strange. Well, it's like
Speaker 1: how the super rich in America, you know, we have
Speaker 1: the like affluenza defense, which I forget what that is
Speaker 1: supposed to refer to. But I do think there's kind
Speaker 1: of I don't know if it's insanity, but you're like,
Speaker 1: you are less connected to reality when you grow up
Speaker 1: extremely wealthy, because like the material world has fewer consequences.
Speaker 1: Your parents like whisk away problems and have them from you.
Speaker 1: Probably you can just buy your way out of seemingly anything.
Speaker 1: And I do feel like you might just persist in
Speaker 1: the idea that the world is a soft play area
Speaker 1: until it's too Yeah. Yeah, you know what I always
Speaker 1: think of. I always think of Gwyneth Paltrow did that
Speaker 1: abysmal movie Shallow How which that suit and one day
Speaker 1: the director made her walk around in a fat suit,
Speaker 1: sort of live as a fat person. We were talking
Speaker 1: about this on Oprah like experiment, Yes, yes, And the
Speaker 1: thing that she said on Oprah that I cannot get
Speaker 1: over is She's like, I would walk into a room
Speaker 1: and no one looked at me, which is like, that's
Speaker 1: that's the experience of like not being a super hot
Speaker 1: blonde lady. At this point, she's famous for years and year,
Speaker 1: the daughter of blythe Stanner, famous for her entire life,
Speaker 1: Like she just has no idea what it's like to
Speaker 1: walk into a room and no one really notices what,
Speaker 1: which is the experience of like nine percent of humanity
Speaker 1: every time you walk into a room. But that's never
Speaker 1: happened to her, So that, to me is fascinating that
Speaker 1: she just doesn't understand what the experience of a non famous,
Speaker 1: non hot, non blonde person would be. And I think
Speaker 1: she was blonde still, but aside from every everything else
Speaker 1: is different though. Okay, so here's I also think, like
Speaker 1: a question that like as a child, I didn't couldn't
Speaker 1: quite wrap my head around. Princess Diana is beautiful and
Speaker 1: seems cool and fashionable and charismatic. Why doesn't Charles like her?
Speaker 1: You know, like why he really seems to resent her
Speaker 1: and just like doesn't like her on like a fundamental
Speaker 1: person level, and yet everyone else fell in love with her.
Speaker 1: How did what do you ascribe that disjoint too. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think so much of it is just they're just
Speaker 1: fundamentally mismatched as people. The age thing is part of it,
Speaker 1: and because of the age, I don't think he ever
Speaker 1: sort of understands the extent to which age plays into this.
Speaker 1: But he always sees her as frivolous because she's not
Speaker 1: a sort of an into lectual. She's she's had used. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. I mean, so much of his sort
Speaker 1: of self conception is of himself as sort of like
Speaker 1: a thought leader. He's always been somebody who wanted to
Speaker 1: be more outspoken than his mother was. He takes policy
Speaker 1: stances on issues very early, and he's always thought of
Speaker 1: himself as like doing very innovative philanthropy, and he wants
Speaker 1: to talk about you know, big global issues like overpopulation,
Speaker 1: even though like that leads to some really gross areas eventually.
Speaker 1: Sona and I both made the same face when he
Speaker 1: said that, just like just early stage. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean he really thinks of himself he again, because he
Speaker 1: doesn't understand her privilege. He is, he doesn't understand all
Speaker 1: the factors that play into why people treat him the
Speaker 1: way that they do. He thinks that he's this like
Speaker 1: intellectual and so there's this really interesting moment on one
Speaker 1: of their first royal visits when they're in Wales and
Speaker 1: they go and they do the sort of shaking hands
Speaker 1: thing and they do the line and she's on one
Speaker 1: side and he on the other thing, and then he
Speaker 1: goes and he gives like an hour long speech about
Speaker 1: like the social issues facing Britain. And he works on
Speaker 1: the speech for days, and he thinks that it's going
Speaker 1: to be like a real sort of coming out moment.
Speaker 1: I'm going to promote all these interesting ideas, and it's
Speaker 1: nowhere in the papers. Nobody gives a ship, and all
Speaker 1: on the coverage the next day is what is Diana wearing?
Speaker 1: What did Diana say to people in Wales? Diana made
Speaker 1: like a three or four minute long speech. What did
Speaker 1: she say? And his sort of ideas, what he considers
Speaker 1: these really innovative ideas are just completely ignored in favor
Speaker 1: of her quote unquote frivolous nonsense like what her fault. Obviously,
Speaker 1: of course she works at all the newspapers and writes
Speaker 1: all these pieces and she gets the pictures of Spider Man.
Speaker 1: I mean, I also I'm like, when I hear our
Speaker 1: lying speech, I'm like, of course, Charles doesn't realize that
Speaker 1: nobody wants an hour lying speech on anything, and that
Speaker 1: the beauty of a three to four minutes speech that
Speaker 1: probably is what he considers frivolous, is that people can
Speaker 1: follow it. I mean the Gettysburg addresses like two minutes
Speaker 1: right famously, and what was Lincoln wearing? We talked about
Speaker 1: that a lot too, and he was a pretty good guy.
Speaker 1: You know. It's also kind of interesting because Michael, you
Speaker 1: brought up like what actually is the power of the
Speaker 1: royal family, And to be honest, like in Charles defense,
Speaker 1: whether or not he's a smart person, he's not like
Speaker 1: a politics professor at Oxford. He has no special expertise
Speaker 1: in this. Their real power is doing what Diana was
Speaker 1: really good at, which was bringing attention to things, yes,
Speaker 1: and like connecting with people. And you know, even the
Speaker 1: thing he always considered it very frivolous, the way that
Speaker 1: she would, you know, go to homeless shelters and talk
Speaker 1: to homeless people and sort of connect with them seem
Speaker 1: like a cartoon villain. Well, this is the thing is
Speaker 1: because it's it's not sort of linked up to policy,
Speaker 1: it's not linked up to sort of broader social change.
Speaker 1: If you really want to solve homelessness, you don't need
Speaker 1: to visit homeless shelters. You need to sort of change
Speaker 1: the policy and change the funding and get private sector
Speaker 1: investment blah blah blah. And what she understood is that
Speaker 1: like that's not really her job. Like what she does
Speaker 1: when she goes to a the shelter, she is actually
Speaker 1: bringing attention to the issue of homelessness. And he never
Speaker 1: actually understood it that you can actually do policy in
Speaker 1: this like back doorway by just deciding which issues to
Speaker 1: bring attention to. I mean, the tragedy is they could
Speaker 1: have made a in theory, are really good team I
Speaker 1: know doing that if he if he wasn't threatened by
Speaker 1: her and could harness and work with her power. Dana.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the parallels you see to Marie Antoinette,
Speaker 1: because this is something that I always think about when
Speaker 1: we're talking about Diana, which is like, here's someone who
Speaker 1: you know grew up in this world, but not in
Speaker 1: exactly this world, and who grew up, you know, riding horses.
Speaker 1: I guess Charls wrote a lot of horses growing up
Speaker 1: but who who wasn't expected to be important basically and
Speaker 1: then married someone who was almost defined by social awkwardness
Speaker 1: and just could never fit in somehow because she was
Speaker 1: too good at what no one wanted to admit her
Speaker 1: job was. Yeah, I find the parallels really ear especially
Speaker 1: because like from all the records, Marie Antoinette was really
Speaker 1: good about poverty and like poor people on the ground level.
Speaker 1: She quote unquote I used the word adopted because that's
Speaker 1: the words that they used at the time, like adopted orphans,
Speaker 1: which meant like paid for their funding, but specific people
Speaker 1: like she didn't enact big policy changes about like the
Speaker 1: poverty structure in France, but like literally if she was
Speaker 1: in her carriage on the side of the road and
Speaker 1: she saw a child on the side of the road,
Speaker 1: she stopped her carriage and it was like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: pay for your funding for the rest of your life,
Speaker 1: which sort of is like the the Diana approach, which
Speaker 1: is like do this on the on the micro level,
Speaker 1: not the macro level. The soft heart be in the
Speaker 1: world and the husband is like, no, we can fix everything,
Speaker 1: and it's like can you though, But that's just I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't blame Marie Antoinette for doing anything wrong, because
Speaker 1: it's sort of like what you described, like that just
Speaker 1: all she was born and new and cared about like
Speaker 1: you can't the last thing a fish can describe as water.
Speaker 1: And it's the unfortunate timing of like people being racist
Speaker 1: to Austrians and and people painting the monarchy at that time,
Speaker 1: where it's like, I think if people, fundament if the
Speaker 1: temperature of England was hating the monarchy at the time,
Speaker 1: people would not have been short of finding reasons to
Speaker 1: hate Diana. Yeah, there's also the thing. I mean, they
Speaker 1: were in this weird place where sort of different people
Speaker 1: understood Charles and Diana's marriage as different levels of arranged.
Speaker 1: So if they could have just agreed on the fact, look,
Speaker 1: we're not a love match, we're never going to be
Speaker 1: in love, but we could actually make a pretty powerful
Speaker 1: and impactful royal couple together, and so let's just do
Speaker 1: our duties and Diana will be on the front end
Speaker 1: shaking hands and Charles will be on the back end
Speaker 1: like bilking rich people for money to fund policy initiatives.
Speaker 1: Find they could have easily done that, but that would
Speaker 1: require both of them to be nest about what the
Speaker 1: marriage was, that it wasn't a love marriage, and it
Speaker 1: seems like he has too much of an ego to
Speaker 1: ever want to be the behind the scenes person exactly,
Speaker 1: and so he wanted one of the really foundational things.
Speaker 1: And it's very easy to forget, is it. Before Diana
Speaker 1: came along, Charles kind of was the Diana that there's
Speaker 1: this famous trip to Australia before he starts dating her,
Speaker 1: where he goes and he shakes hands and he does
Speaker 1: these events and thousands of people come out. He was
Speaker 1: seen as a sort of the young, authentic, likable one,
Speaker 1: which on the scale of sort of everyone else in
Speaker 1: the royal family, he absolutely was. He was very charismatic
Speaker 1: compared to you know, Prince Philip, for God's sake. But
Speaker 1: then of course once Diana is around, it's like you've
Speaker 1: you've upgraded, like from a Honda to like a sort
Speaker 1: of yeah exactly. And so he all of a sudden, kids,
Speaker 1: do you want to take the Honda out again? And
Speaker 1: they're like, well, she she she broke the curve, right,
Speaker 1: And so he had the sort of glimpse of himself
Speaker 1: as the sort of the likable one, the normal one,
Speaker 1: the face of the new royal family and then he's
Speaker 1: just completely buried under all of the coverage of Diana.
Speaker 1: And so he again, if he was able to be
Speaker 1: honest about this, like what are my strengths, what are
Speaker 1: my weaknesses, this all could have worked out. But neither
Speaker 1: one of them were able to admit what was really
Speaker 1: going on. And you know, she still had this myth
Speaker 1: in her head that it was a love match, right
Speaker 1: like she she thought it was a fairy tale romance,
Speaker 1: and she kept trying to get back to that. And
Speaker 1: he always thought of it as a little bit more
Speaker 1: wrapped up in duty than she did. And so the
Speaker 1: just the different expectations of her and him and his
Speaker 1: miserable family really what made it just completely unworkable. Uh
Speaker 1: do you do you think the public at the time
Speaker 1: viewed it more like a fairy tale. It seems like
Speaker 1: the merchandizing at the time was following that narrative like
Speaker 1: plates and stuff. Uh, well, Mike, I'm actually curious, like,
Speaker 1: do you know how much money this union generated just
Speaker 1: in terms of you know, memory billion tourism and stuff. Oh,
Speaker 1: there's probably like a PhD written about that, because you
Speaker 1: come across figures when you were researching no, because it's
Speaker 1: so hard to do the direct versus indirect. It's one
Speaker 1: of the arguments against getting rid of the royal family
Speaker 1: is always that it would affect tourism. So some percentage
Speaker 1: of tourism is generated by like visiting the Buckingham Palace
Speaker 1: and like going to see all the royal sites, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And so people wondering the guards, right, everyone wants to bother,
Speaker 1: and so some percentage of sort of visits to Britain
Speaker 1: would have been arranged around their wedding and it would
Speaker 1: have spiked slightly in the months afterwards. Like there's all
Speaker 1: these sort of very difficult to measure effects of this,
Speaker 1: but it would be in the sort of probably in
Speaker 1: the billions eventually. I mean, the the amount of stuff
Speaker 1: that you could buy with their faces on it. I
Speaker 1: mean people have been sending us like like my mom
Speaker 1: and her cupboard has you know this like dollhouse that
Speaker 1: was like an official royal family thing, or like towels
Speaker 1: and plates like just murt was nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and also I feel as if they were considered important
Speaker 1: for the morale of the country, right, yeah, like what
Speaker 1: like who will we look up to? Who is a
Speaker 1: positive figure, like we're having a bad time economically, UM,
Speaker 1: like we need this, you guys, Like, I feel like
Speaker 1: that's kind of the I don't like. Just from what
Speaker 1: we've talked about in this series, I feel like that
Speaker 1: was a feeling that was present. I'm also now wondering
Speaker 1: because we guess recorded an episode on John Delorian, who
Speaker 1: had to negotiate with Margaret thatcher Um at one point
Speaker 1: in his career because he was manufacturing in Belfast. I
Speaker 1: was like, did he ever, you know, maybe meet the
Speaker 1: Charles and Diana seems possible that Peter Morgan's going to
Speaker 1: figure it out if they did. I feel like I
Speaker 1: would show up in a DeLorean deep dive more than
Speaker 1: Charles and Diana deep dive because they met every buddy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and I mean it's funny. I was just
Speaker 1: watching Muriel's Wedding, which has a scene where the main character,
Speaker 1: who's obsessed with getting married and with weddings, is working
Speaker 1: in a video store and she is watching and specifically
Speaker 1: watching and then rewinding and rewatching Princess Diana approaching in
Speaker 1: her carriage and getting out and the dress being unveiled,
Speaker 1: this dress, And I remember, Mike you describing like it's
Speaker 1: just her little Diana and her little dad in her
Speaker 1: little carriage with her giant dress with feet of train, yeah,
Speaker 1: like packed in. They're like when you order command hooks
Speaker 1: from Amazon, and they're like, we thought you needed seventy
Speaker 1: five thousand peanuts to keep these command hooks nice and safe.
Speaker 1: And you know, and I do feel like just having
Speaker 1: that resonant image of a bride, like I just I
Speaker 1: understood her to be iconic before I understood anything else
Speaker 1: about her. So I guess I don't know. My sense
Speaker 1: is that like, no matter what, you're more nuanced attitude
Speaker 1: towards the whole situation. Like I think the general consensus
Speaker 1: was like, these people are not going anywhere. Like it is,
Speaker 1: even if I don't like them, it is unimactionable that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. It's actually very
Speaker 1: interesting to think about the ways in which, even as
Speaker 1: she critiques the Royal family and in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways revealed the flaws of the Royal family, Princess Diana
Speaker 1: I think was also very important for promoting the idea
Speaker 1: of the royal family. You know, for more than a
Speaker 1: decade there after their wedding, she was extremely popular, and
Speaker 1: there was a sense of like, this is part of
Speaker 1: our national character that we have this dollhouse with these
Speaker 1: pageant ish characters that are going around the world and
Speaker 1: meeting with high level people and they're promoting land mine
Speaker 1: stuff at the u N. I mean, this does actually
Speaker 1: affect public moral and a lot of it, Like there's
Speaker 1: there's sort of possibly not true stories of you know,
Speaker 1: Austra really a thinking of trying to leave the Commonwealth,
Speaker 1: and then there's a visit by Charles and Diana and
Speaker 1: they're like, maybe the Royal and so these kinds of
Speaker 1: things do actually matter for sort of how do we
Speaker 1: think about this institution And so it's interesting and that
Speaker 1: you know, she was so critical of the Royal family
Speaker 1: and the royal family treated her terribly, but as a
Speaker 1: symbol of the Royal family, we finally had a likable
Speaker 1: symbol that like people were like, maybe we can wait
Speaker 1: a couple more decades before we get rid of this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That was a really I think fun episode of The Crown.
Speaker 1: If you watch the most recent season with a god,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get this wrong, and I apologize in advance.
Speaker 1: Whether the Prime Minister or the President of Australia. Uh,
Speaker 1: Prime minister, Prime minister, thank you? Uh was you know,
Speaker 1: garnering public support for leaving the Commonwealth but people like
Speaker 1: Diana so much. He's like, well, I can't have this
Speaker 1: conversation now. Yeah. I mean I think that they were
Speaker 1: playing that up a little bit in the ground and
Speaker 1: like that episode is like factually like there's massive factual
Speaker 1: errors in that episode, but like it is saying something
Speaker 1: about it's easier to sort of swallow the royal family
Speaker 1: when the main face of it is genuinely likable and
Speaker 1: seems like somebody who's you know, down to earth, and
Speaker 1: like she is visiting homeless shelters and doing stuff on aids, etcetera.
Speaker 1: She also looks like a princess. I feel like the
Speaker 1: Sufi dress that like shoulder dressed, and the literal princess
Speaker 1: skirt and the getting out of a carriage even that
Speaker 1: like articulated in my conception the archetype of what a
Speaker 1: princess is for a long time. Yeah. I think it's
Speaker 1: really important that people need beautiful things to look at,
Speaker 1: and people want to see pageants and we want to
Speaker 1: see you know, beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes, and we
Speaker 1: will just you know, we will go to great links
Speaker 1: to have that in our lives. And I think that
Speaker 1: if we recognize that that's a human need, we would
Speaker 1: obtain it in ways that are less weird. So now,
Speaker 1: moving a little bit further in the story, I'm interested
Speaker 1: in when the marriage dissolved, which seemed sort of inevitable
Speaker 1: based on their personalities, as you mentioned, Michael, how did
Speaker 1: the public react. Who's who was the one that people
Speaker 1: blamed at the time. I mean, this was it depends.
Speaker 1: I mean there were there were parts of the British
Speaker 1: establishment that blamed her that you know, the minute she
Speaker 1: did the infamous Panorama interview. She spoke to this journalist
Speaker 1: Andrew Morton for a sort of unauthorized biography about her,
Speaker 1: and she pretended that he didn't interview her for years
Speaker 1: when he actually did so all the information was true.
Speaker 1: The establishment was like, oh my god, it's so cringe
Speaker 1: e right, she's talking about eating disorders, she's talking about
Speaker 1: suicide attempts. You know, this is not done by high
Speaker 1: level royal people. How there she But then most of
Speaker 1: the public was like, hey, she's a person in like
Speaker 1: this is actually really relatable and she's in like a
Speaker 1: shitty marriage with like this kind of trash dude, and
Speaker 1: that sounds like my life too, and so the sort
Speaker 1: of the people who quote unquote matter really blamed her
Speaker 1: for it, and we're just mortified at the fact that
Speaker 1: she was putting all this stuff into the public realm.
Speaker 1: But the subjects, like people in Britain really liked her
Speaker 1: after this and like hated Charles for years after this.
Speaker 1: I read somewhere and I think this is correct that
Speaker 1: for a little while before Prince Charles married Camilla, you know,
Speaker 1: in the recent last few decades, he hired like a
Speaker 1: very famous, expensive publicist to try to revamp both of
Speaker 1: their public images, and so the way that he reintroduced
Speaker 1: Camilla to the public was a very very controlled, systemic
Speaker 1: interesting like like they made a few appearances not as
Speaker 1: an official couple. Then you know, like it was incredibly
Speaker 1: controlled how they were introduced Camilla to not be the
Speaker 1: other woman at a point where they're like hopefully people
Speaker 1: kind of forgot about Diana a little bit, and then
Speaker 1: I just feel like the Crown came out and they
Speaker 1: had to set their Instagrams to private or like, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I knew I from they were really
Speaker 1: trying to sneak back in there. So just one brief aside,
Speaker 1: what do you make of Camilla, both of you, that
Speaker 1: class woman. The pictures of her when she's younger, she
Speaker 1: looks like this, like hot, sporty, you know, posh lady.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, and then she married someone else,
Speaker 1: so it just wasn't quite to be. But then of
Speaker 1: course she and Prince Charles, Like, I mean, how soon
Speaker 1: did they start having an affair into the Diana relationship, Mike,
Speaker 1: It depends if you ask, but it's either like four
Speaker 1: years or like two years, okay, so like between two
Speaker 1: and four years, so like not, you know, this is
Speaker 1: a young marriage, um that is already sustain you know,
Speaker 1: some some some heavy winter weather. I guess I don't
Speaker 1: know in the form of Camilla, but it's because clear
Speaker 1: that they were a love match with each other. And
Speaker 1: I remember we talked about, you know, the squidgy Gate
Speaker 1: tape where Charles is on the phone with Camilla, and
Speaker 1: I am a staunch defender of Charles against you know,
Speaker 1: this idea that it is somehow embarrassing to say that
Speaker 1: you wish you could turn into a tiny man who
Speaker 1: lives in the vagina of the woman you love, Like,
Speaker 1: I think that's beautiful. I will ploset that there are
Speaker 1: intimate texts and emails and phone calls between every couple
Speaker 1: that would be humiliating if they've made the light day
Speaker 1: so ei, there aren't humiliating texts or like little or
Speaker 1: phone conversations or just nicknames or sexual concepts between you
Speaker 1: than like maybe or maybe you could be communicating more.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I also think, I mean, we did
Speaker 1: a dramatic table read of infamous tampon tapes for some people, yes, extremely,
Speaker 1: including my boyfriend, and what really comes out from those.
Speaker 1: Of course everybody focuses on the tampon jokes whatever, but
Speaker 1: it's like a forty five minute long transcript and it's
Speaker 1: a portrait of like a very functional relationship and it's
Speaker 1: really the only functional romantic relationship that he ever had
Speaker 1: in his life. And you know, Camilla's like, hey, what's
Speaker 1: your speech about tomorrow? Tell me a little bit about it.
Speaker 1: You know, the last speech you gave was really good.
Speaker 1: Can't wait to see the transcript of this one. Just
Speaker 1: basic like supporting your husband in his endeavors and asking
Speaker 1: him about his ideas. And that's what it is to
Speaker 1: love someone to be genuinely interested in their stupid speech
Speaker 1: that I'm sure it's very long, and but like it's
Speaker 1: like you have to care about someone a lot to
Speaker 1: want to read the transcript of their speech on like
Speaker 1: the Welsh economy. Yes, and like Princess Diana was not
Speaker 1: someone who was really interested in that aspect of his life.
Speaker 1: And they were, you know, even as he sort of
Speaker 1: tried to spoon feed her and force with her these
Speaker 1: these pseudo intellectual ideas, she saw there as a vessel
Speaker 1: for like really nasty behavior from him, and so she
Speaker 1: never really engaged with him on that level. She never
Speaker 1: gave him praise, but like, hey, you did a really
Speaker 1: good job at your speech the other day. I read
Speaker 1: it like that was not an aspect of their relationship.
Speaker 1: And so in those tapes, like the tampon things kind
Speaker 1: of an inside joke, like a cute inside joke. And
Speaker 1: that's a hallmark of functioning relationships, when you're generating inside
Speaker 1: jokes with each other and you sort of riff on
Speaker 1: the same concept with each other. And it's not clear
Speaker 1: that he was ever getting that from Diana. It was
Speaker 1: always this very formal thing he could never really be
Speaker 1: himself around her, she could never be herself. It just
Speaker 1: never matched. And so those tapes are like really a
Speaker 1: portrait of a couple clicking with each other, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of nice. I mean, once again, I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette or guess sort of royal frank royal family
Speaker 1: protocol generally, because one of my favorite things about Versailles
Speaker 1: and Louis backed this trend. But it was like a
Speaker 1: salary position to be a royal mistress, and like there
Speaker 1: was money, you know, budgeted for that, and it was like, okay,
Speaker 1: new fiscal year for the royal mistress, and everyone agreed that,
Speaker 1: like someone had to do that. And I just feel
Speaker 1: like this is one of those relationships where like everyone
Speaker 1: at the outset was like, okay, here the ground rules.
Speaker 1: We're gonna discreetly have affairs. I don't want to see this,
Speaker 1: you don't want to see that. And then you know,
Speaker 1: just like if like their marriage is is a career,
Speaker 1: you know, I feel like you can't if you're if
Speaker 1: your marriage to someone is your vocation, then I it
Speaker 1: just seems like it's really hard for that to be
Speaker 1: also your primary romantic relationship, Like you have to be
Speaker 1: really strong going in I think, and you know that
Speaker 1: another really interesting parallel between Diana, not a parallel, a
Speaker 1: a point of comparison between Marie Antoinette and Diana, because
Speaker 1: historically the purpose, not the purpose, but an incidental purpose
Speaker 1: of a royal mistress was to deflect fire away from
Speaker 1: the queen. I didn't realize that that's so great. It's
Speaker 1: sort of a Madonna whore complex, which is is troubling,
Speaker 1: but but was really effective where people could see the
Speaker 1: queen as as maternal and and um, you know, perfect
Speaker 1: and flawless, holy and quiet, and then they could fulfill
Speaker 1: their needs of like gossip and like petty little like
Speaker 1: incidental talk about the royal mistress. And as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: Louis the sixteenth buck to the trend, he didn't have
Speaker 1: a royal mistress, so all of that like petty gossip
Speaker 1: energy just funneled only to Marie Antoinette, where in another
Speaker 1: case it would have been, you know, distributed probably between
Speaker 1: two or three other women. Because as a society we
Speaker 1: just culturally love talking about and gossiping about and diminishing.
Speaker 1: You just have to have at least one the the
Speaker 1: what we've learned is that you have to have at
Speaker 1: least one woman in the public sector to just be
Speaker 1: like a spittoon for for public enmity, and then you
Speaker 1: can protect, you know, and then another woman can quietly,
Speaker 1: you know, not be loath. But you do have to
Speaker 1: have at least one for people to hate there somewhere
Speaker 1: Like there's also an interesting thing with Camilla because it's
Speaker 1: one of the only times that we have this weird
Speaker 1: sort of switching of who is the wife and who
Speaker 1: is the mistress, because if you look at them aesthetically,
Speaker 1: Camilla should have been his wife and Diana should have
Speaker 1: been his mystery. It's one of those American hustle things
Speaker 1: where like he's he's married to who, and he's having
Speaker 1: an affair with which one yes, So it's this weird
Speaker 1: It's just it's sort of rejiggered the way that the
Speaker 1: tabloids sort of dealt with this, that Diana ended up
Speaker 1: being the vessel for a lot of the gossip and
Speaker 1: Camilla was just sort of like this empty presence. There
Speaker 1: wasn't much to project on her. But I think the
Speaker 1: benefit of Camilla those people could hate her and then
Speaker 1: make Diana seem more saintly by comparison, yes, exactly. And
Speaker 1: also I mean Camilla didn't like Diana. Camilla treated her terribly,
Speaker 1: like I don't I don't want to sort of be
Speaker 1: the you're wrong about Camilla necessarily. I think all three
Speaker 1: of these people acted terribly to each other and did
Speaker 1: not each other in ways that manifested into people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the academic articles that I
Speaker 1: read that I didn't get to bring up on the
Speaker 1: show was called I Believe the Croning of Camilla, and
Speaker 1: it talked about how in the press, whenever they would
Speaker 1: talk about Camilla, they would always unfavorably compare her to Diana,
Speaker 1: you know, like her beak like nose and her wrinkled eyes,
Speaker 1: and it was something that every time they brought her up,
Speaker 1: they had to mention that she was like less attractive
Speaker 1: than Diana, Right, And so it did make her seem
Speaker 1: somewhat tragic to me that, you know, she's with this
Speaker 1: guy in this like pretty functional relationship, and yet whenever
Speaker 1: she shows up in the media, they have to say like, oh,
Speaker 1: she's ugly and anyway, he seems really like her, and
Speaker 1: they're in this blah blah blah. Right. It just it's
Speaker 1: just interesting that like that was something that they had
Speaker 1: to do. And I feel like there's something weird about
Speaker 1: just constantly being compared to somebody like Diana that I
Speaker 1: think would be really hard, especially and this is now
Speaker 1: a transition, Especially when you die at your peak and
Speaker 1: never and never have to age in public or you
Speaker 1: know you can, you can only always be remembered favorably.
Speaker 1: Diana is very tragic death then catapulted her from global
Speaker 1: celebrity to icon. What even is higher than icon? Yeah? Symbols?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, why do you think there are
Speaker 1: so many conspiracy theories around her death? Because the Royal
Speaker 1: family killed? Are using m I six did the Royal
Speaker 1: family killing? I thought that was clear? Do they kill
Speaker 1: the loved private sitisens? I think my theory on this,
Speaker 1: like all conspiracy theories, is it's just such an unsatisfying
Speaker 1: end because the sort of larger than life figure. And
Speaker 1: then how does she die? She dies in a drunk
Speaker 1: driving accident. It's like the most pedestrian, Quotitian way that
Speaker 1: somebody can die, and that just but she wasn't wearing
Speaker 1: her seatbelt. It's like an ad that should play for
Speaker 1: high schools. Dude, yeah, I know, and it's just like
Speaker 1: there's just something so kind of unresonant about the way
Speaker 1: that she died. It seems wrong, right if you were
Speaker 1: making a movie about it, she would like kill herself
Speaker 1: or you know, she would disappear off the face of
Speaker 1: the earth due to the pain or something. That sort
Speaker 1: of seems like it fits with the rest of her
Speaker 1: life because the rest of her life was so sort
Speaker 1: of mythical, and then she dies in this way that
Speaker 1: like tens of thousands of people die every year, and
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, it's like common, you can And when
Speaker 1: we talked about in the episode like where the idea
Speaker 1: was like, it's isn't it weird that she died in
Speaker 1: a car accident, you know, with this timing, etcetera or something,
Speaker 1: And it's like, it's not weird because people die in
Speaker 1: car accidents constantly in this country, like constantly and inevitably
Speaker 1: it's going to happen to some famous people. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's like statistically the least weird, and all the other
Speaker 1: countries too, by the way, in the world. Sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was gonna make a bring up a point that
Speaker 1: you made on the your podcast, which is so brilliant
Speaker 1: that I find myself echoing it almost constantly, that we
Speaker 1: think that significant events have to have significant causes. I
Speaker 1: think you brought that up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the the
Speaker 1: idea that, like, because her death had such a massive
Speaker 1: effect on everyone, it seems like the cause also should
Speaker 1: be massive. Yeah. And then you look at the actual
Speaker 1: factors behind it, and there's basically three main factors that
Speaker 1: the the driver of the car was drunk, he was speeding,
Speaker 1: he was going a hundred and ten miles an hour
Speaker 1: when he went into the tunnel, and Diana and Dodi
Speaker 1: were not wearing their seatbelts. And if any one of
Speaker 1: those things was different, there's a chance that they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have crashed or they would have lived. But you take
Speaker 1: all three of those factors and put them together, and
Speaker 1: it's just like a very normal kind of crash. And
Speaker 1: then and isn't it like the tunnel itself, like it
Speaker 1: just had this little like dip in, this little curve
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, that we're just like basically basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was this perfect thing where the tunnel slopes downward
Speaker 1: and curves at the same time, and so the driver
Speaker 1: was going so fast that the car almost jumped off
Speaker 1: of the road, and by the time the driver was
Speaker 1: able to sort of see that he was going out
Speaker 1: of control and turn the wheel, they had sort of
Speaker 1: settled back down onto the road, and he overcorrected and
Speaker 1: then he just rams into this pole, which is how
Speaker 1: these catastrophic plane crashes sometimes happened to We had you know,
Speaker 1: it was the Dreamliners or whatever, right the what was it?
Speaker 1: We had a series of high profile plane crashes in
Speaker 1: the past few years, and basically I think what was
Speaker 1: happening was that pilots were overcorrecting because the software was
Speaker 1: malfunctioning and telling them that they were in a nosedive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were overcorrecting for that, and just you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: over correction errors. Like it just it's so and it's
Speaker 1: I mean, don't you think that it's like really upsetting
Speaker 1: to realize that someone is not just mortal, but like
Speaker 1: that mortal. Yeah, they're just sort of in the blink
Speaker 1: of an eye, and like a few, like a few
Speaker 1: bad decisions happened. And this guy was like I always
Speaker 1: thought he was like a little drunk, like he'd had
Speaker 1: some wine or something, but he'd had like several scotches
Speaker 1: or something. He was three times the legal limit. He
Speaker 1: was like super drunk, and he hadn't eaten all day,
Speaker 1: and he was taking medication that amplified the effect of
Speaker 1: the alcohol. I mean, he was very impaired. And you
Speaker 1: get into the details of this in your podcast. Was
Speaker 1: anyone more interested in like the specifics? I think that's
Speaker 1: a wonderful source. You also go into the fact that like,
Speaker 1: he wasn't an actual driver. He said he was like
Speaker 1: the head of security. He wasn't the driver. And the
Speaker 1: main thing to me is most of the conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: are around this tunnel that you know, they flashed a
Speaker 1: light in the tunnel that blinded him and then he
Speaker 1: swerved the wheel, or there was a motorcyclist in the tunnel, whatever,
Speaker 1: And they thing to know is that there was no
Speaker 1: reason to expect that they would be in that tunnel.
Speaker 1: If you look at the hotel where they were leaving
Speaker 1: and the apartment that they were going to, there is
Speaker 1: a straight line from one place to another, and it's
Speaker 1: not the tunnel that they went in. But the traffic
Speaker 1: was so bad on the schams Aliz that they had
Speaker 1: to take a different route. But Paris is like a
Speaker 1: winding mess of hundreds of streets, right, So so even
Speaker 1: if you knew that they weren't going to take the
Speaker 1: Charm's Elise, there's forty fifty different routes they could have
Speaker 1: taken to Doughty's apartment. So even if you were sort
Speaker 1: of the royal family and you were trying to murder
Speaker 1: Princess Diana, there's no way you would know that they
Speaker 1: would have taken that route. There's no way you could
Speaker 1: ever have planned for this, and there's just there's also
Speaker 1: people have talked about how it's just really bad to
Speaker 1: try to kill somebody in a car because you can't
Speaker 1: expect what the driver is going to do. Like, there's
Speaker 1: no reason to think that flashing a light in somebody's
Speaker 1: eyes would result in a fatal car accident. It would
Speaker 1: just be like, oh, it's annoying, and then it's okay,
Speaker 1: can you can you go to the basic conspiracy theories,
Speaker 1: because like there's the light flashing, and then there's like, general,
Speaker 1: the royal family did it, General the paparazzi did it,
Speaker 1: and then I'm sure a small slice of like the
Speaker 1: Clintons did it. Yeah, Hillary Clinton, Diana, as we all know,
Speaker 1: I piggyback down that I just have one sort of
Speaker 1: additional question is why would the Royal family want to
Speaker 1: kill her at this point? The main reason that I mean,
Speaker 1: it's actually a very sad story that one of the
Speaker 1: main purveyors of the conspiracies is Doti Faed's father, who
Speaker 1: has like a very sort of justified beef with the
Speaker 1: Royal family and with the British establishment. His claim has
Speaker 1: always been that they're super Islamophobic, which like they are
Speaker 1: like as a general principle, like yes, these are not
Speaker 1: people who are like super into diversity in the country,
Speaker 1: and so he has felt sort of shut out of
Speaker 1: the British establishment, which he was, and so he has
Speaker 1: built up even though he owns Herod's right, even if
Speaker 1: he were white, like he probably would be like a
Speaker 1: big bagre baiting, you know. Yeah, in the country it's
Speaker 1: wrapped up in like wealth stuff and like old stuff
Speaker 1: that there were deals that he didn't get and there
Speaker 1: was like they never approved his visa, which like genuinely
Speaker 1: is both that they just kind of left it at
Speaker 1: the back of the pile for decades. So he has
Speaker 1: legitimate grievances, but he builds up this idea that they
Speaker 1: didn't want her marrying a Muslim and that she may
Speaker 1: have been pregnant with Doughty Alfa Yette's baby, and so
Speaker 1: there was gonna be this like royal baby who was
Speaker 1: the sort of half brother of the future King of
Speaker 1: England who was going to be a Muslim, and they
Speaker 1: couldn't handle that and they freaked out. But at the time,
Speaker 1: there was no actual evidence that Diana was going to
Speaker 1: marry Doughty. There was no evidence whatsoever that she was pregnant.
Speaker 1: The only evidence that she was pregnant was somebody took
Speaker 1: a photo of her in a bathing suit and she
Speaker 1: like has a tummy. She is a middle aged woman,
Speaker 1: Like she has like a little bit of a tummy
Speaker 1: in this photo, and they're like, she's probably It's like,
Speaker 1: that's that's it. That's your evidence that she's pregnant. It's
Speaker 1: like one photo every single Star magazine, every celebrity is
Speaker 1: pregnant at every given moment. I also like how you
Speaker 1: can speculate that that's evidence of someone like growing more
Speaker 1: comfortable with their body and successfully, you know, being on
Speaker 1: the road to recovery from an eating disorder, like she's pregnant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the sort of the that's like the arth theory
Speaker 1: of this. The Royal family wanted her out of the picture,
Speaker 1: But it just doesn't make any sense, and it especially
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense given that they killed her on that
Speaker 1: day because Dotie Fayette had started telling people that he
Speaker 1: was going to ask her to marry him, but the
Speaker 1: first person he told was that morning. So if the
Speaker 1: Royal family was really afraid that she was going to
Speaker 1: marry Doughty al Fayette, they somehow would have put together
Speaker 1: this mastermind plan in like six hours. And they can't
Speaker 1: even plan a fox hunt in less than a month,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. And they're bad at a like relate, they're
Speaker 1: bad at things the things. Yes, so you know there's
Speaker 1: a million I mean I read two books about it,
Speaker 1: Like you can go into all of the specifics. There's
Speaker 1: like a guy who was driving a Fiat that night
Speaker 1: who might have been a paparazzi, But it's like they
Speaker 1: don't add up to anything because it's just like, well,
Speaker 1: what's the actual theory that somehow they knew that he
Speaker 1: was going to take this route. They faked the blood
Speaker 1: alcohol content of the driver, They convinced Diana not to
Speaker 1: wear a seat belt, Like if you try to put
Speaker 1: it in chronological order what the theory actually requires, Like
Speaker 1: you just can't make it plausible. It's like a lot
Speaker 1: of the O. J. Truther theories. You're like, individually, these
Speaker 1: elements could have happened, maybe, but it's very it's like
Speaker 1: impossible for me to believe in a world where all
Speaker 1: of them happen in sequence, and where people actually managed
Speaker 1: to plant behind the scenes. Yeah, exactly, in like six
Speaker 1: hours right there, they're swapping out vials of blood. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds of telepathic communication happening in these scenarios, people
Speaker 1: like just sort of unspeakingly, uncommunicating Lee all carry out
Speaker 1: plans with maximum efficiency and discretion in a way that
Speaker 1: never happens anywhere else. And you also have to imagine
Speaker 1: that if they have the power, if the Royal family
Speaker 1: had the power to orchestrate this massive and immediate conspiracy coup,
Speaker 1: they would also have the power just to like have
Speaker 1: made Charles more likable. Like, if they have, if they
Speaker 1: have the infrastructure to orchestrate this elaborate fake death, use
Speaker 1: that manpower. They should have just used that manpower to
Speaker 1: like make people like Charles a little bit more, to
Speaker 1: make him see less of like a little bit of
Speaker 1: a wet blanket, right, they could have blocked the panorama interview,
Speaker 1: like they could have stopped the publication of this tell
Speaker 1: all biography. Like, there's many smaller steps they could have
Speaker 1: actually to make her murder to make her look like
Speaker 1: less likable also like that. I mean, her death is
Speaker 1: is a human tragedy obviously, but on the largest scale,
Speaker 1: it made people love Diana more than they had. That's
Speaker 1: the thing, Yeah, exactly, which they surely would have foreseen.
Speaker 1: If they can arrange like a seven hour murder, conspiracy
Speaker 1: and two languages, they probably could have foreseen that this
Speaker 1: would make her more popular eventually. Yeah. So you know,
Speaker 1: with Diana having been dead for oh god, over two decades,
Speaker 1: where do you think her legacy sort of stands now?
Speaker 1: Just a near professional private opinions. I mean, I feel
Speaker 1: like the Crown has left people with a chance to
Speaker 1: feel like they have a firsthand experience of kind of
Speaker 1: the compressed storyline of her her marriage and life and
Speaker 1: divorce and death. Um, and it seems as if, you know,
Speaker 1: that's giving people a new access point with which to
Speaker 1: love her, Like I think that like Marie Antoinette or
Speaker 1: any number of figures who have endured a sespecially after
Speaker 1: an untimely passing. I think there is she was able
Speaker 1: to interact with the press or with the forms of
Speaker 1: media that recorded her life in a way that I
Speaker 1: think gave people at the time and continues to give
Speaker 1: them a feeling like they have some real connection with
Speaker 1: who she was. Like, I think what made her great
Speaker 1: at what she did was that, you know, despite all
Speaker 1: the performance, despite the great pain of her life, a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, I feel like she did I
Speaker 1: hate to use this word because it's just been it's
Speaker 1: so gross now in the age of influencer culture, but
Speaker 1: like she kind of maybe was one of the people
Speaker 1: who helped invent authenticity as we know it today. M hm, Sarah,
Speaker 1: do you think I am trying to come up with
Speaker 1: the most articulate way to ask that people tend to
Speaker 1: fundamentally hate women in power for a variety of what
Speaker 1: Do you think that part of the reason Diana was
Speaker 1: so beloved was because she was vulnerable and and tragic?
Speaker 1: Do you think there was there was a victim aspect
Speaker 1: to why she was able to remain so beloved And
Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: I mean I would say yes. And I feel like
Speaker 1: my first memory of thinking critically about Diana was listening
Speaker 1: to the version of Candle in the Wind that was
Speaker 1: rewritten and tribute to her, and then realizing soon after
Speaker 1: that that was a rewritten version of a song originally
Speaker 1: about Marilyn Monroe, and I was like, that's kind of odd.
Speaker 1: I just think that's odd to have some other girls
Speaker 1: song rewritten for you. Um I I don't know why
Speaker 1: I'm bothered by that. I just am. I know it's
Speaker 1: hard to write a new song, but um, it just
Speaker 1: feel but it does feel like it expresses this thing
Speaker 1: of like I mean, it's like Mike and I guess
Speaker 1: recorded on Miss America. And I keep thinking of that
Speaker 1: because a lot of the themes are the same, like
Speaker 1: she must be a virgin, she must be you know,
Speaker 1: this age and and this you know, all these other qualifiers.
Speaker 1: And we were talking about how it feels like it
Speaker 1: feels to me like when you are anointed and crowned
Speaker 1: Miss America, like you were the human carrier of the
Speaker 1: spirit of Miss America, and then you know, you show
Speaker 1: up the next year and give the crown away, and
Speaker 1: then your little husk um crumbles and blows away in
Speaker 1: the wind and falls into the beach on Atlantic City
Speaker 1: and is washed away by the surf, and then you
Speaker 1: become a mermaid. Yeah. I think that's what happens, and
Speaker 1: that's why you never see them again. But just this,
Speaker 1: it feels like that song being kind of rewritten and
Speaker 1: reused fits with this idea that we have a society
Speaker 1: that just consumes women and that we somehow apologize for
Speaker 1: it by selectively mourning some of them. Um, and that
Speaker 1: Maryland was one who was consumed by the fame machine,
Speaker 1: and Princess Diana became, you know, another and it was
Speaker 1: just she was consumed by more you know, the O
Speaker 1: family and British tabloids than by the Hollywood treadmill or
Speaker 1: whatever it was. And her presence is one that I
Speaker 1: think carries us potentially into really meaningful experiences of thoughtfulness
Speaker 1: and empathy. But she's also very accessible because she is
Speaker 1: kind of poured into the mold that we are most
Speaker 1: conditioned to find sympathetic and lovable, partly because you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing less intimidating a woman who's already dead,
Speaker 1: Like there's a reason why so many of our beloved
Speaker 1: young women in society are murder victims, you know, they're
Speaker 1: They're not very uppity, are they. And it's also like
Speaker 1: the media then loves this idea of like, oh, we
Speaker 1: all killed her. Yeah, god, the maya culpa that the
Speaker 1: self flagellation of the maya culpa, I think is an
Speaker 1: instinct that everyone kind of likes to indulge in. Let's
Speaker 1: not blame the very specific tabloids and very specific editors
Speaker 1: who were like buying photos of her that were taken
Speaker 1: at night and clearly invasive, Like no, no, no, Let's
Speaker 1: not blame the people who actually made decisions. Let's blame
Speaker 1: everyone who was like no Jenkins, you know, let's blame
Speaker 1: literally everybody instead of like the eight people who actually
Speaker 1: made her life to it was all of us. It
Speaker 1: was society. I think my big thing with Diana is,
Speaker 1: you know, you can talk about the authenticity in this
Speaker 1: sort of clinical way, but you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things we mentioned on the show was that diagnoses of
Speaker 1: bulimia I believe quadrupled in Britain in the early es
Speaker 1: once she started talking about this, because people were finally
Speaker 1: getting diagnosed, people were finally talking about it. And I
Speaker 1: think to me, as somebody who lived in Europe for
Speaker 1: eleven years. I lived in Britain. There's a huge problem
Speaker 1: with sort of official, aristocratic European society that does not
Speaker 1: talk about stuff. And this was one of the things
Speaker 1: that Diana really struggled with, that she would go to
Speaker 1: these dinner parties and you're not allowed to talk about
Speaker 1: anything real, You're not allowed to reveal anything of yourself.
Speaker 1: You just make this excrew cruciating, superficial small talk for
Speaker 1: hours and hours and it never ends. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that she really did was break
Speaker 1: that habit and point out that, like, this isn't serving anybody, Like,
Speaker 1: who is it helping for us not to talk about
Speaker 1: what we're struggling with. Why would we do this to ourselves?
Speaker 1: Why do we raise our kids this way? Right? And
Speaker 1: so I just think that it's a model that the
Speaker 1: solution to the things that Diana struggled with in her
Speaker 1: life is not to push them under the rug. It's
Speaker 1: to bring them out into the light and talk about
Speaker 1: how you're not a broken person for struggling with an
Speaker 1: eating disorder. You're not a broken person for like still
Speaker 1: dealing with the trauma of your weird cold upbringing and
Speaker 1: you're terrible sandwiches, Like you're allowed to talk about this stuff,
Speaker 1: and so I just think if there's a model, it's
Speaker 1: really like bringing things into the light and talking about
Speaker 1: yourself as a whole person, that you are beautiful and
Speaker 1: you wear these outfits and everything, Like you can talk
Speaker 1: about the sparkly stuff, but you can also talk about
Speaker 1: the dark stuff and that doesn't take away And one
Speaker 1: thing doesn't take away from the other's beautifully said. And
Speaker 1: I also want to go on the record finally and say,
Speaker 1: like I reject the dichotomy that people who are interested
Speaker 1: in like fashion and and uh clothes are automatically frivolous,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, like I think her her fashion is is
Speaker 1: interesting and and worth as worth talking about as Prince
Speaker 1: Charles's non expertise on Welsh economic policy. Great men are
Speaker 1: interested in sports. There is nothing more frivolous than like
Speaker 1: knowing sports statistics. Like you're not going to talk shit
Speaker 1: on somebody who knows the names of a couple of
Speaker 1: designers if you can tell me what like cal Ripken,
Speaker 1: hit in four or whatever. Sorry, it's all frivolous. You
Speaker 1: don't get to talk ship on other people's frivolous stuff. Also,
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I don't know how men look in England.
Speaker 1: Maybe they look great, who knows. In America men look awful,
Speaker 1: and so many of them could just learn how to
Speaker 1: dress better, just a little bit, just five to ten
Speaker 1: were sent better because like, quality of men's wear is
Speaker 1: a beautiful thing. Like men can dress gorgeously. Like watch
Speaker 1: Robert de Niro and Casino. If you want my point
Speaker 1: to be probably proved to you. So I have the
Speaker 1: movie I thought you were going to bring up. I
Speaker 1: love the best dressed men. I might think. Listen, Robert
Speaker 1: de Niro has more costume changes in that movie than
Speaker 1: Sharon Stone, and I think he's probably accessible on the
Speaker 1: scale of masculinity. But he wears like beautiful loud suits.
Speaker 1: But the point is that, like, men could look so
Speaker 1: much better and have so much of the passive power
Speaker 1: that comes from looking good, but they're just terrified of it.
Speaker 1: And it's hilarious to me because you could just you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's right there in front of you, but you're
Speaker 1: afraid of taking it. And I argue, if you're rich,
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy to be hot. Oh yeah, you just
Speaker 1: hire a couple of people, you're like, tell me, give
Speaker 1: me a skincare routine, dress me, give me a capsule wardrobe.
Speaker 1: Thank you? Ye. So on that note, before we go,
Speaker 1: I do want to ask each of you what your
Speaker 1: favorite iconic Diana fashion moment is. Do you have a
Speaker 1: favorite Diana look that comes to mind? I know what
Speaker 1: I was going to say, do you? I think you do? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: So my favorite look is that picture you showed me
Speaker 1: Mike where she's wearing mom jeans and a T shirt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I knew, you know what was that? I think I
Speaker 1: said Duluth. But either way, when was that photo taken?
Speaker 1: That was right after the divorce, so I believe ninety four. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and of course these weren't mom jeans at the time.
Speaker 1: These were very fashionable genes of the kind that you
Speaker 1: know Meg Ryan was wearing in. But she's wearing like
Speaker 1: high cut, you know, just like but it is it's
Speaker 1: like a very like Meg Ryan kind of a look.
Speaker 1: It's like, these are my jeans, I am a mom.
Speaker 1: And then like you know, and I'm sure these are
Speaker 1: all made by designers. And then a T shirt with
Speaker 1: stars on it, and she just looks like she could
Speaker 1: be the former Princess of Wales. Or she could be
Speaker 1: like the prettiest mom in Duluth, Minnesota, like picking up
Speaker 1: her kids from gymnasts. If I want to google, if
Speaker 1: I want to google this picture, what do you think?
Speaker 1: I what's the best most effective search? Mom jeans? I think, honestly,
Speaker 1: Princess Diana, mom jeans. Oh yeah, yeah, Diana mom jeans
Speaker 1: star T shirt and she's like walking downstairs. It's a
Speaker 1: white T shirt. Yeah, yeah, totally. She looks like she
Speaker 1: could be at the Mall of America. Yes, love that
Speaker 1: in the best possible way. Yeah, I look, I wish
Speaker 1: I was in Minnesota right now. I am a huge
Speaker 1: fan of Duluth Wine moms, and she looks better than
Speaker 1: any of us could trying to be a Duluth Wine mom. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And just that she's like that, I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: I know that mom jeans has acquired a pejorative connotation.
Speaker 1: I think that's unfair, and I feel as if like
Speaker 1: this is a picture of her being a mom, which
Speaker 1: is an opportunity she was really deprived of for a
Speaker 1: lot of her marriage. That is a good segue. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm superseding you, Michael and doing mine now. A look
Speaker 1: that I love because it feels very twenty twenty or um.
Speaker 1: Also sort of a mom jean, like a like a
Speaker 1: light washed jean, boots, brown boots, a crew neck sweatshirt,
Speaker 1: a blazer, and a hat. Oh I know the photo,
Speaker 1: it's like a balloon on her shirt. I think she's
Speaker 1: also with William the British Lung Foundation. Oh yeah, there
Speaker 1: we go, British Lung Foundation. She just looks very sporty
Speaker 1: and like she casual in a way that I wish
Speaker 1: I could emulate. And it feels very modern. I think,
Speaker 1: even like I was gonna say, Hilaria ulan Um, who's
Speaker 1: Justin Bieber's wife, Haley Haley Bieber. I think Haley Bieber
Speaker 1: recordlated some of these looks for like a fashion sir.
Speaker 1: Looks white sweatshirt, So she's wearing a white sweatshirt under
Speaker 1: a blazer with a baseball cap on. Like this is
Speaker 1: like Billy Crystal at a baseball game. Almost like but yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's like you know, yeah, she like she knew
Speaker 1: how to put items together. He didn't. She. She was
Speaker 1: also really good in the look of like a crew
Speaker 1: neck sweatshirt with bike shorts. She looked really good doing that.
Speaker 1: I think this is such a cliche, but mine would
Speaker 1: be the infamous revenge dress. Oh and please describe the
Speaker 1: context of their revenge dress. This is why I think
Speaker 1: it's so important, Because I don't know that much about fashion.
Speaker 1: I can't say much about the actual dress itself, but
Speaker 1: it's such a metaphor for the way that women can
Speaker 1: use fashion as power. So the entire thing was Prince
Speaker 1: Charles was on this sort of pr kick. He was
Speaker 1: doing a documentary for the BBC that was supposed to
Speaker 1: like humanize him and make him seem cool and down
Speaker 1: to earth and authentic. And I have seen it and
Speaker 1: it does not mean any of those things. But he
Speaker 1: was convinced that it would. And so Diana had gotten
Speaker 1: this invitation to go to the Serpentine Gallery and she
Speaker 1: had turned it down whatever, I'm busy. That night, she
Speaker 1: finds out this BBC documentary is airing, and she's like,
Speaker 1: on second thought, I am going to go. And she
Speaker 1: shows up in this cracker jack knockout black dress with
Speaker 1: like shoulders out and this big necklace, and she just
Speaker 1: looks like a billion bucks. And she did this deliberately
Speaker 1: to knock Prince Charles off the front pages. She wanted
Speaker 1: to take the nation's attention away from him and put
Speaker 1: it on her, and it worked. All of the front
Speaker 1: pages the next day are like knock out Diana, and
Speaker 1: Prince Charles is on page seventeen, just like his dumb
Speaker 1: Welsh speech and she's like yeah, words, yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: like I can still do this, and I just think
Speaker 1: it's like it's such a moment of her understanding herself
Speaker 1: as a symbol in ways that she didn't at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the marriage, in ways that she didn't at
Speaker 1: the beginning of her career. She's like, this is the
Speaker 1: way that I can communicate with the public, This is
Speaker 1: the way that I can get my message across. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's literally just me showing up to something in a
Speaker 1: dress that is enough and so to me, it's just
Speaker 1: such a confidence moment her totally understanding and using the
Speaker 1: power that people ascribe to her gave to her. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's so rare to see a woman do that,
Speaker 1: and sort of, you know, women throughout her life she
Speaker 1: was criticized for being frivolous, like oh, she's always shopping
Speaker 1: and she's doing all this fashion stuff, and it's like
Speaker 1: that's literally her job. It's absurd to criticize her for
Speaker 1: understanding her job, Like she achieved peace in the Falklands. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And she's going to these events where she has to
Speaker 1: change into different formal clothes three or four times a day,
Speaker 1: so that requires a lot of shopping, Like you just
Speaker 1: have to have a lot of dresses for that. Also,
Speaker 1: that's the thing that people were writing about her and
Speaker 1: talking about her a lot in interviews. No one was
Speaker 1: asking her her take on the Falklands because she's not
Speaker 1: an expert on the falk List. She's like this just
Speaker 1: this random woman basically shows up at things. It's fine.
Speaker 1: So this was a rare moment of a woman in
Speaker 1: public life actually using that kind of scrutiny to send
Speaker 1: a message. And it's just like a nice little power moment.
Speaker 1: I love that. I think that is a perfect place
Speaker 1: to end. Sarah Michael, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1: Where can people find you on the internet if they're
Speaker 1: inclined to hear more of your wisdom and perspective. Our
Speaker 1: podcast is on all of your major podcast apps. It's
Speaker 1: called You're Wrong About And you can find Sarah also
Speaker 1: on Why Our Dads, which on your telephone find Mike
Speaker 1: also on maintenance phase. You know. Yeah, and so you've
Speaker 1: talked about dr Oz recently. I've talked about the Dark
Speaker 1: Night recently. We have a few other interests sometimes, Yes,
Speaker 1: perfect and I think both dads and uh. The public
Speaker 1: obsession with weight and bodies also feeds into the Diana issue.
Speaker 1: So this is all it. She had a dad and
Speaker 1: she was on diets. You well, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining me. H, have a have a good one.
Speaker 1: How do people sign off of these things? I'm usually
Speaker 1: talking alone to myself in a closet. Fairly well, Dana,
Speaker 1: bless you, God, Bless Princess Diana, Bless bless us everyone,
Speaker 1: everyone Perfect. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Monkey. The show
Speaker 1: is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by
Speaker 1: Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble
Speaker 1: Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and
Speaker 1: you can learn more about the show over at Noble
Speaker 1: Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows,