Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Page 4

  The letter was simple enough.

  Dear Jeff,

  Remember me? I’m terribly sorry for falling out of touch. My life has been rather a blur as of late, but that’s no excuse. I often think fondly of our weekly chats and I hope things are going well for you.

  If you’d like to stay in touch, I’ve enclosed a card with my address. If you don’t mind, use the return address “Lord Baron Dudley.” I’ve instructed my staff that letters bearing that return address be forwarded to me unopened.

  Do tell me all about your life. I’m afraid mine is dreadfully dull, although I’m lucky in many ways and I know I should not complain.

  Belle

  And there it was. Nothing objectionable on any level. She had neither presumed that he knew about her life, nor condescended to tell him. Aside from the practical matter of instructing him on how to reach her, she had simply acted as if nothing had changed.

  But things had. Even though you don’t yet know what happened to the man who became known as Geoffrey Whitehall-Wright, even you must realize that things had changed dramatically for him.

  And they would change for Princess Isabella also. They would change the moment that Secrest appeared in the doorway of the royal bedchamber with a relieved smile on her face and a single envelope in her hand.

  Secrest did not know then exactly what “this Lord Baron Dudley business”—as she came to think of it—was all about. The royal associate knew only that Isabella had been asking repeatedly if any mail had arrived from Lord Dudley, and that Her Royal Highness had seemed, alarmingly, a bit more crushed each time the answer was no.

  Castle employees do not wish to see their royal charges depressed. It bodes badly in so many ways. Depressed royals might, for example, start eating too much or letting themselves go in some other way, getting the higher-ranking castle advisers all worked up and bringing down pressure on the likes of Secrest to urge the princess to start taking better care of her nails or to forgo fig pancakes for breakfast. Or perhaps depressed royals would turn their ill moods in another direction and sulk around, constantly complaining about the lack of light in their bedroom or proclaiming their lack of royal interest in the day’s schedule of ribbon cuttings.

  It made for such unpleasant company.

  Already Secrest had overheard—she was very good at overhearing things—the senior advisers musing about some photos taken of Isabella at a garden tour, where she had carried herself in a glum, slump-shouldered way that Secrest would have described as “sullen and spoiled” but Hubert, with uncharacteristic charity, described as “looking pale and tired.” Secrest’s initial relief at Hubert’s kind description dissolved when she realized it was motivated by his suspicion that Isabella was tired and pale in a joyous, expectant way—if you catch my meaning.

  Secrest thought that sullen and spoiled was more likely. And not just because she knew that Raphael was up late reading speech pathology texts alone while Isabella was roaming about the castle in her nightclothes pleading insomnia. Secrest had the unglamorous duty of serving the royal birth control pill on a china plate each morning and restocking the royal—how shall we put this?—feminine products each month. She thought Hubert was being wildly optimistic.

  Hubert might be the head of castle operations, while Secrest was only a glorified chambermaid. But Hubert was a provincial, small-city, same-haircut-he-had-in-high-school kind of guy, while Secrest was, you see, a woman of the world.

  Over the years, Secrest had lived in other countries and pursued other careers while waiting for her mother to give up the castle position. Most of the other castle help, by contrast, had never left the confines of their own tiny nation. The Huberts of the castle had spent their pre-castle years helping out in the legendary but struggling royal fig orchards, so vital to the national self-image but slowly choking on the Bisbanian smog. Or they had worked in Bisbania’s troubled auto industry, which exported the flashy but unreliable (and, needless to say, smog-producing) Bisba convertibles. These experiences meant Secrest’s colleagues had trouble imagining a worldview that extended beyond the petty neighborhood politics that so often dominated Bisbanian affairs. They also had trouble imagining working for a dynamic, profitable, up-to-date operation, but never mind that.

  Or maybe you should mind that. For that was precisely where Hubert was making his mistake, Secrest thought. The nation’s misguided approach to fig production and auto production was, in her mind, related to Hubert’s old-fashioned notions of royal reproduction. He did not see any reason to move the fig orchards away from the city center. He did not see any reason to reengineer the Bisba, and he did not see any reason that Isabella would view her royal wifely duties any differently from the few hundred princesses who had come before her over the past few thousand years. He thought that Isabella would quickly set herself toward producing an heir because that was what previous Princesses of Gallagher had quickly set themselves toward doing.

  Secrest, though, could imagine other worldviews and other sorts of affairs. She had begun to suspect that this Dudley fellow was not a “distant uncle,” as Isabella had originally, if somewhat nonsensically, suggested. Secrest could imagine all too well the sort of cross-class, cross-culture friendship that a lonely member of the nobility might be tempted by while being schooled in a casual, classless country, the sort of undisciplined place that teaches young nobles to hand out silly titles like “royal associate.”

  But Secrest didn’t allow herself to worry too much about all of that on the day when the slightly rumpled envelope with a Connecticut postmark arrived in Isabella’s mail, mixed in with the usual tea invitations, fan letters, and credit card solicitations. (“H.R. Highness is already approved!”) Secrest simply snatched up the envelope and dashed off to Isabella’s room, confident that, whatever problems lay ahead, the immediate problem was solved—no more slightly sullen-looking princess.

  Later, Secrest would wonder if she should have told Hubert about the letter. Later, she would promise herself to keep a wary eye on this Dudley correspondence. Later, she would vow to sneak peeks at anything Isabella left lying around the royal desk, vow to pick up crumpled drafts from the royal wastebasket, vow to keep her royal associate ears open—especially when Isabella was busy chatting on the phone and not paying much attention to who was emptying her wastebaskets or straightening her bed or laying out her clothes.

  But on the day the letter arrived, Secrest was only happy and relieved as she burst into Isabella’s room, announcing with uncharacteristic breathlessness:

  “Your Highness, I think, perhaps, you are expecting this.”

  Chapter 5

  Nearly a year separated the start of Lord Baron Dudley’s long-distance advice and the time when Isabella’s mythmakers first marked a turnaround in the princess’s “performance.” But to appreciate the turnaround, you must first appreciate how bad things had gotten.

  Far too often, biographies of the princess have merely breezed through the first year or so of her marriage, chronicling the well-known “thar she blows” photo, a few fashion mistakes, and the “Dizzy” nickname. I can understand how this happens. I myself can hardly bear to repeat her many missteps. Remembering them is like remembering the most awkward thing you ever did in the seventh grade, or some really flawed attempt at flirtation. It just makes you shiver all over. Egad.

  But I feel obligated to remind people, especially my younger readers, just how badly the princess struggled at first, after the honeymoon and before the miraculous remake. I will try to be as brief and discreet as possible. I’ve included the tabloid headlines as a handy reference.

  * Isabella glibly visited an overseas factory widely rumored to be experimenting with biological warfare and, with a goofy grin on her face, praised their “exciting work.” Headline: DIZZY IZZY SAYS: GO GERMS!

  * On two occasions, she was photographed dancing at nightclubs on St. Teresa of Calcutta Day, then considered the most holy of the modern saint days. Headline: HOLY GO-GO? IZZY TANGOS ON SAI
NTLY TOES.

  * She wore shoes made from cloned alligators, a practice long banned in Bisbania. Headline: HEELS FROM HELL: IZZY’S WRONG AGAIN.

  * Surely, I need not rehash the infamous incident involving the Prime Minister of Algeria. Headline: SLURP AND BURP: IZZY’S DINING DISASTER.

  And she was forever dressed wrong. Not that such things should matter, the commentators would always note. But there was just something off about her. She would be all frilly when sleek would have been better. And she would be all sleek when lacy would have been better. Ethelbald Candeloro, who wore an overgrown handlebar mustache on his pasty, somewhat flabby face in the photo that ran alongside his column, once remarked that he wouldn’t have imagined there was a bad time to be sleek until Isabella came along.

  Things reached their nadir, I suppose, a few months after the wedding, when Isabella was rushing out of the castle to catch a flight to Russia for the baby shower of a minor duchess in the recently restored but, needless to say, much humbled Russian royal family. (The Russian royals had, by this point, taken to calling the Russian Revolution and the century of communism that followed it “the experiment,” and they were calling the slaughter of most of their ancestors “the accident.”) Isabella was running late because of some sort of security scare that had been triggered by a wayward raccoon rustling about in the royal garbage. So she was not quite herself as she dashed off to the airport. That is how she came to be photographed climbing into a stretch Bisba, wearing a denim peasant skirt and carrying in her right hand a goblet of ice water. Her hair was somewhat askew.

  The tabloids had a field day.

  First off, they dubbed the skirt a “prairie” skirt, which was not correct in the fashion sense, but perhaps was close enough from a political standpoint. “How have we reached a point,” Ethelbald Candeloro wrote in what became an infamous column, “where the wife of the Bisbanian heir scoots off to represent us among the nobility of other continents, wearing the fashion of rough-handed American cattle herders and carrying glassware into motor vehicles, as if the royal family could not afford a proper, lidded thermos cup?

  “Moreover,” he continued, “the goblet appeared to be German, an insult to the hardworking glassblowers of Bisbania’s Eighth Street Glass Factory. While the water, I understand, was imported from Morocco. Morocco! As if Bisbanian springs did not produce water as fresh and tasty as that of a desert country most famous for playing it again, Sam.

  “All of that would be reason enough to leave His and Her Majesty beside themselves, but it also appears,” he concluded, “that the Princess of Gallagher could stand to be introduced to a comb, a tool the rest of us use, often daily, to arrange our hair into pleasing—or at least nonoffending—configurations.”

  Ethelbald was being awfully unfair. While I’ll be the first to admit that carrying crystal into a car does seem a bit gauche, the goblet in question came straight from Queen Regina’s kitchen, and thus if anyone owed an explanation to the Glassblowers of Local 808, it would be the queen. Meanwhile, Isabella had planned, as was the custom of royal travelers, to change her skirt and comb her hair on the plane en route to Moscow, which at last report was located in Europe, not another continent. (Besides, given the Russian royal family’s then-recent stint as peasants, it would seem unlikely that they could make a case for being offended by the humble styling of Isabella’s skirt.)

  Finally, I have it on good authority that the water came straight from the royal lavatory sink, not from a well in Casablanca. Isabella had drawn the glass herself while packing up her toiletries, although Ethelbald would surely think both activities were beneath her station in life. (She had insisted she would handle those tasks so that Secrest could check the royal mail one last time. And it was the last time Secrest allowed herself to be dissuaded from doing her own job, I can assure you of that.)

  But the truth did not matter. This is exactly the sort of nonevent that tabloids can drag out for several weeks, with new rounds of leaked criticism and rumored backlash. FORMER BUTLER SAYS IZZY ALWAYS INSISTED ON IMPORTED STEMWARE, one headline would say. QUEEN ORDERS MIDNIGHT RAID OF IZZY’S KITCHEN, DIRECTS ALL FOREIGN WATER DUMPED IN ROYAL TOILET, would read the next.

  People not in that circumstance have trouble understanding how hard it is to turn your public image around once it has taken this sort of battering. Isabella was seen as someone levelheaded enough, but just too awkward, frumpy, and ill at ease to represent a country that wants potential tourists to believe it is good-looking and laid-back. People who were far more awkward and frumpy and ill at ease resented her, saying she made them all look bad. She’d tread off to some obscure nation and sit in bleachers with other dignitaries at some silly dedication, and fifty-five-year-old, balding, overweight, badly dressed factory workers would yell at the screen during news accounts of the event: “Look now what’s she done, she’s grinning during the prayer, she makes us all look like fools.” Or “What’s that? Wearing black to a coronation? They’ll think we’re all rubes.” And it mattered not that, at Yale, young women wore black everywhere. “This ain’t Yale,” the commentators would say, snickering a little at what they considered their clever use of American slang.

  The queen became so distressed that she brought in one of those disastrous British princesses. I can’t remember her name now. It’s become so hard to keep them all straight. But whatever her name or title, she was, at that point, just beginning to live down a series of dating disgraces, misguided forays into pop music, and unsuccessful dieting ads. She was no help at all.

  “I can’t imagine why they want you to take my advice,” she said, in the marvelously blunt way of the British. “The best thing that ever happened to me was Will’s mum dying. It somehow reminded people that, princesses or not, we’re still mortal, still human beings, we still bloody bleed and die. Even then it took years to pull my image out of the loo.”

  You can imagine what that did for Isabella’s spirits.

  In fact, the visit of the British princess only succeeded in getting King Philippe, who had been moping about the castle in a fretful way, thinking along very unhelpful lines. His staff insisted that whenever he and the queen dined together, he would whisper, “Divorce worked out well enough for King Will’s father.”

  The queen would invariably reply, “Widowhood worked out even better.”

  The problem is that once people are expecting you to be awkward and ill at ease, there is almost no way to appear to be graceful and at ease. You can glide across a room like an angel, but any photographer worth his press license can still manage to get a picture of you blinking and in midswallow. No one in the room even saw such a moment, but it looked great next to a headline with the word “dizzy.”

  Once you’ve made a few clumsy mistakes, there’s almost no point in coming out with a wonderful, insightful speech. People just assume someone else wrote it.

  I could compile a book about exactly what went so gloriously wrong in the first year or so of Isabella’s marriage. I could debate whether it was bad advice or bad karma. Was it that Isabella, for all her celebrated levelheadedness, wasn’t up to the job? Or was it that no one, really, is up to that job?

  That book has been written many times already. If you’re looking for a good one, I’d recommend Dizzy Izzy: Deconstruction of a Postmodern Princess by Camille Paglia, although it does dwell a bit much on the silly psychobabble of the time period. (And the constant comparisons to King William’s mother will just bore many of today’s readers to tears. You have to remember the book was written relatively soon after Will’s mum’s death, and people of the time actually thought she would be of more lasting significance than Isabella.)

  Still, I’m telling the story not of Isabella’s missteps but of how she found her footing. Change rarely happens overnight, and this change most certainly did not. But there was a moment when it became marvelously apparent, and that was the moment when Ethelbald Candeloro published a column under the headline: I’M DIZZY FOR IZZY.

  Ethe
lbald, with amazing candor, wrote of how he had been cruelly delighted when the engagement had been announced, because Isabella had shown all the signs of producing years of juicy copy. Yes, he had joined the throngs praising the prince’s choice at the time. Who would, on news of an engagement, be tactless enough to predict a rip-roaring disaster? But that was, Ethelbald now admitted, what he had privately expected. From the way her name so easily lent itself to mockery (Dizzy Izzy, indeed) to her absolute daring (her wedding dress was lovely, but anything so bold portended years of fashion mistakes ahead), it all added up to a sure sign of a terrific fiasco.

  When would princes learn, Ethelbald remembered asking himself at the wedding, that they must marry only crowned heiresses of other countries, creatures who were neither glamorous nor down-to-earth nor mature nor levelheaded? A successful match, Ethelbald had thought, would come only when princes marry silly, selfish women who demand their butlers bring food right to their room and insist on wearing only the gowns of their great-grandmama the Queen of Someplace Distant and Tasteful. Ethelbald noted in passing that Rafie’s sister, Princess Iphigenia, was a prime example of a proper princess and was sure to suit some foreign prince very well.

  All this rubbing shoulders with commoners and dressing like a modern woman and living like a modern woman, it just wouldn’t work at all, he had thought. Isabella’s so-called down-to-earth quality—which he viewed as more of a stubborn, selfish insistence that she should have the same right to breeze about the public streets as the average commoner—was the surest sign of disaster to come. Ethelbald had thought Isabella’s desire to eat in ordinary cafés and to have tea with commoners, however charming on the surface, would inevitably cause her to blunder into disaster. Isabella was so unassuming, he had argued, because she did not fully appreciate her new role; therefore, she never understood her own privilege, could not fathom the danger of dining in public spots, spending her own money extravagantly, or trusting those who seemed kind.