Word: royals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last year it took upwards of $46 million to keep the royal operation afloat, and even in a time of serious unemployment (10.3% of the work force are jobless), there are surprisingly few complaints that the country is not getting its money's worth. Almost 90% of polled Britons want to retain the monarchy, and recently, when Labor's William Hamilton made a solitary exit from Parliament after another of his frequent excoriations of the extravagant royals, Conservative M.P. Geoffrey Finsberg scoffed, "Those who share Mr. Hamilton's view will doubtless have left the chamber with...
Once the game was up and the engagement was announced on Feb. 24 and the 18-carat sapphire in its 14-diamond garland materialized on her ringer, Lady Diana straightened up and really stepped out. According to a source close to the palace, she consulted with "someone" in the royal family, then appeared with the Prince in a $1,000 black silk taffeta strapless evening gown. The total effect was stunningly theatrical. A BBC announcer reported "audible gasps," and as they died so did the notion of Shy Di. R.I.P...
...tall, cantilevered figure, added little makeup to the petal-soft skin. But what would really have warmed those Hollywood pros was the instant revelation, as the strobes popped, of star quality. This is something that cannot be instilled, only enhanced. Movie stars were sometimes said to have a royal bearing. Lady Diana Spencer brings star quality back to Buckingham Palace...
...would have made only one change: they would have supplied a piquant biography. Color, however, is not wanted in a royal bride. Indeed, several earlier candidates for the Prince's chosen were dropped from competition because they had been rather too brightly painted in shades of scarlet. One, Fiona Watson, was discovered to have posed deshabille for Penthouse. Another, Davina Sheffield, was scratched after a former swain mouthed off about their life together. Perhaps a double standard should be etched into the royal coat of arms. "I wonder how the British people would react if they knew the extent...
Presumably, too, the quiet if not quite unremarkable quality of her early life, the absence of anything but a merely chronological past, brings her even closer to the royal ideal. She is only what she will become. Born to wealth and privilege, Diana Spencer, like the man she will marry, seems to have grown up at some operational distance from life. Not sheltered, exactly. Stashed away, secreted, in the protected closeness of a class and a culture. It is as if she spent every day of her nearly 20 years snug within the emphatic stillness of an English Sunday afternoon...