Burton, Rachel

E58.2200.001 – Media Events & Spectacle

December 15, 2010
Final Paper

The Dream of an American Queen: British Royalty and America

The spectacle and grandeur of the British monarchy has endearing qualities for many

Americans, and more erstwhile royal watchers are emerging to celebrate the upcoming wedding

of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton. One could generalize that in America‟s eyes,

Kate is the future Queen of England, and in Britain she is thought of simply as a “commoner”

who got lucky to meet and fall in love with Prince William. A girl with humble beginnings, Kate

has quickly achieved celebrity status especially in the United States, where the story of

individual success is close to the hearts of many Americans.

How is the British royal family‟s celebrity status received by Americans? With the recent

engagement, there has been an outpouring of mass media coverage and popular culture

references, such as Anne Hathaway (an American actress, famous for her role in The Princess

Diaries) lampooning Kate during a Saturday Night Live skit in which Kate is introduced to the

Queen and Prince Philip as William‟s future wife. It seems that British royalty has carved a

place of its own in American pop culture. Through a celebrity studies lens, the image of the

British monarchy in American high culture will be examined in this paper using chapters from

Graeme Turner‟s Understanding Celebrity and Frank Prochaska‟s The Eagle and the Crown:

Americans and the British Monarchy.

Prochaska‟s book examines the American spectacle of and relationship with the British

monarchy, and explains that the hype surrounding royalty in America has long been present,

escalating with the reign of Queen Victoria, even though she never set foot in America. With the

1
death of Queen Victoria and subsequent accession to the throne of King Edward VII, America‟s

love affair with royalty grew due to the perspective that “in contrast to Queen Victoria‟s court,

Edward VII‟s was colorful and cosmopolitan, marked by assured patriotism, lavish hospitality

and elaborate ritual. It was also less forbidding to those outside looking in.” (Prochaska 109)

Alas, in 1901, the year of Victoria‟s death, the immigrant population in America was

growing, and many of them – especially recent immigrants from Central Europe and beyond –

saw the British monarchy as a distant presence, or were indifferent to it. But, as Prochaska (110)

mentions, most citizens in the United States came from countries with monarchial traditions: “It

left many of them with a residual sense of deference to royalty.” Americans did not have their

own monarchy, and so they adopted the British monarchy as their own and aspired to catch any

glimpse of the immense tradition and ritual involved.

At that time, during the reign of Edward VII, there was a growing number of American

debutantes being presented in court, and while they were taken less seriously in Britain by the

aristocracy who thought them common, especially those who came from families in business, the

American press exalted these girls. When President Theodore Roosevelt‟s niece, Corinna

Robinson, was debuted, “the society pages back home were full of it, just as they were when a

bevy of Yankee peereses, along with President Roosevelt‟s sister, opened a stall at the Queen‟s

summer fete in 1907.” (Prochaska 112-3).

Following the death of King Edward, Prince George (later George V) celebrated his

accession to the throne and his Coronation in June 1911 saw a surge in American bookings for

transatlantic ocean liners and a steady diet of royal news fed to the American public by the

mainstream press. In New York, the latest “Kinemacolor” motion pictures of the Coronation

were shown in several theatres. It was clear at the beginning of the twentieth century that British

2
royalty enjoyed the limelight in America. As the years progressed and Europe lurched from crisis

to crisis, the British monarchy was comforted by the attention their American cousins continued

to lavish upon them.

While newsreels and motion pictures may have been recent inventions, photographs of

royalty had been circulating for several years since the era of Queen Victoria‟s reign. The

monarchy had often involved themselves in the results of the photographs, but with the increase

of “snapshotters,” especially in 1911, the “paparazzi” established itself as a cornerstone of what

was to come in the life of the royal family. In 1911, King George V and his son, the Prince of

Wales, attended the annual Cowes regatta and had formed a contract with photographers that

forbid them from entering the royal bathing place. One or two of them broke the contract and

snapped photographs of the royal party, much to the King‟s displeasure (Prochaska 123). This

cemented the role of paparazzi in the royal celebrity sphere.

Royal presence, no matter how slight, rarely went unnoticed by the Americans. In 1912,

when the Duke and Duchess of Connaught visited the United States, they were invited by more

than 200 well-wishing Americans to their homes, but declined almost all of them except for

some plutocrats like the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. Then considered “nouveau riche” in the

United States, the families guided the Duke and Duchess through their palaces and treasures, and

even the Duchess was shocked by the “ostentatious display of wealth … the visit provided yet

further instances of the treatment of British royalty by America‟s wealthiest citizens.”

(Prochaska 124)

In the eyes of the United States, George V‟s successor, King Edward VIII, was a

progressive, modern king and the world‟s most glamorous bachelor as well. He inspired a host of

popular culture products, including a romantic comedy that was later made into a film, Just

3
Suppose, by the playwright Albert E. Thomas, which was performed at the National Theatre in

Washington only a few months after his visit. Throngs of American women lusted after him and

fueled the dream of an actual “American queen,” one that had been born and raised in the United

States (Prochaska 129).

There had been a longing for such an American queen since the Prince of Wales visited

in 1860 and excited royal watchers that speculated over the future King‟s consort: “Choosing a

bride for the sovereign became a national pastime on both sides of the Atlantic” (Prochaska 138).

Edward was a social king, smoking in the cinema and dancing to jazz, inspiring Americans

whom interpreted his behavior as a sign of modernity and progress, while “courtiers and the

respectable classes in England twittered over their teacups” (Prochaska 135). Eventually,

Edward found his companion in Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman whom he had met

in England, and the press went crazy with exclusive telephone interviews and sensationalized

stories in print. Prochaska (139) describes Simpson‟s reaction:

‟The things that have been said about me are almost beyond belief. … I feel

terribly hurt and humiliated.‟ She was particularly bitter about intrusive

photographers, who followed her every movement. On the same day, a rather

disingenuous leader in the Washington Post took up her case, saying that the

rumors and speculation surrounding the King and Mrs Simpson could have „very

evil consequences‟ and applauded the restraint of the British press, which was

hesitant to jump to conclusions about their relationship on the basis of

circumstantial evidence.

4
 Gossip is central to celebrity production, and there was no shortage of it with the

courtship of King Edward and Wallis Simpson. Edward‟s choice of a companion was not royal-

born, not even a British subject, and violated royal rules of marriage, which left Edward with

little choice but to abdicate from the throne. This fueled sensational gossip in America during the

exile of the now Duke and Duchess of Windsor, when they lived in New York and Florida.

“They may have wished to shun the press, but it was a tribute to royal celebrity that

photographers continued to pursue them, a welcome reminder that they were not dead socially”

(Prochaska 143). Time magazine even selected Wallis its Woman of the Year in 1936 – the first

time the magazine had named a female, rather than a male, of the year.

After the abdication of Edward, King George VI was crowned and along with his wife,

Queen Elizabeth, became the first reigning British monarch to visit the United States in June

1939. However, the attitude of many Americans at that time was that Edward, the Duke of

Windsor, was the rightful inhabitant of the throne, that the „colorless‟ King was on probation,

and that the Queen was too „plump‟ and „dowdy‟ for American tastes, but, “to the delight of the

British party, massive crowds appeared at every turn, numbering half a million in Washington on

the day they arrived from Canada. At Washington‟s Union Station, the King and Queen took

heart from the multitude of ordinary Americans sweltering in the summer sun just for a glimpse

of their passing.” (Prochaska 148-9)

In December 1939, a Gallup poll asked Americans what worldwide news stories of the

year most interested them. The royal visit came fifth, after the declaration of war in Europe, the

conquest of Poland, the repeal of the arms embargo, and the attempt on Hitler‟s life, but ahead of

Germany‟s invasion of Czechoslovakia. The American interest in the British monarchy grew

steadily and today, the large number of Queen Victoria‟s descendants – there were 536 of them

5
by 1990 – increased the scope for seeing a member of the royal family in person. With the

growth in tourism across the Atlantic, more and more Americans came into contact with the

culture of British royalty. (Prochaska 117)

As Mikita Brottman (40) wrote, “newspapers do not report events that are meaningful in

themselves, but in fact translate them into their own meaning-system or scale of values.” The

American press was hungry for more royal news – and thus fed the public their hunger. With the

coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, television was given an enormous boost due to

the sheer number of people all over the world who watched the spectacle on television from their

homes.

As the New York Times observed, the coronation marked “the birth of international

television.” Not only did the market for television open up, it also changed the iconography of

royalty forever – “for the first time, the American public at large was brought into a Coronation,

which led to a sense of active involvement, giving the event the character of an international

communion.” (Prochaska 163) Americans were all the more impressed because the tradition of

national celebration in the United States was weak by comparison with British standards.

As the years progressed and Diana Spencer joined the royal family, America‟s

perspective on royalty had changed drastically – increasingly, mainstream media treated the

monarchy as part of the entertainment industry. “The British royal family was just an institution

composed of jet-setting celebrities rather than as a constitutional fixture. Royalty might be

worshipped one minute and decried the next, just like so many others in the passing parade of

idols consumed by the denizens of popular culture.” (Prochaska 189)

The distinction between popular culture and royalty had blurred, just as the line between

high culture and low culture has faded, and the American press now grouped royalty with

6
celebrity, making analogies between Buckingham Palace and Dallas. In a feature by Time

magazine, the House of Windsor was made to be a seething “Palace of Dallas” on the inside,

where “the royal tour of the United States turned Princess Diana into a world-class celebrity and

an American idol. „Dynasty Di‟ now played opposite Prince Charles, the „mystical crank‟.”

(Prochaska 188) The media molded Diana‟s image in American culture – and with her death in

1997, the media also molded America‟s reaction – by circulating her image unceasingly.

Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times shortly after Diana‟s car accident, about the media

obsession with the Princess:

“We can‟t stop. The photographers can‟t stop. The reporters can‟t stop. The

editors can‟t stop. And the consumers can‟t stop. The celebrity culture has

become a mass psychosis. It has broken out of its former confines in the

entertainment industry and overrun institutions of authority. It has swamped the

British monarchy.”

Overnight, Diana became a legend, an academic subject, and a marketing sensation. As

Prochaska examines, the media outlets saw an opportunity in the event to tap a commercial

market, and “tacked on to their real object the pretence of memorializing a popular Princess. The

tragedy was so profitable that a host of magazines rushed to redo their cover stories.” (195-6)

The shock of Diana‟s death, to many Americans, stems from the affection we would feel for an

acquaintance, and is a form of empathic identification (Turner 9).

This form of the illusion of intimacy, as Richard Shickel asserts, connects us with Diana,

suggesting that the relationship between the public and Diana actually “resides only in the minds

7
of the beholders. Those in charge of manipulating the image – Diana and her minders – know

that „none really exists‟.” (Turner 91) The constructed, parasocial relationship between us and

Diana is actually a cultural and social function of royal celebrity, being a surrogate for grandeur

more genuine since the tradition of royalty does not exist in America.

Chris Rojek discusses the intimacy between the celebrity and the fan/consumer,

suggesting that there is a productive intimacy where the celebrity feels like they are an important

and valued part of everyday life, and the consumer employs the celebrity to extend and enrich

their everyday world, and that this relationship is a simulated first-hand experience:

“The intimacy between the star/celebrity and the fan/consumer seems particularly

heightened and extended because everything knowable, every verifiable fact,

every salacious allegation, every bare centrimere of star/celebrity flesh, is

reported upon and dwelt over by the mass and narrowcast media, and utilized by

fans/consumers to help them make sense of their lives.” (Redmond 35)

Before Princess Diana entered the picture, the British royal family lacked a legitimating

narrative of success. Diana‟s marriage into the family produced „a curious variant of the myth of

success‟: she was a commoner, a misfit, and, ultimately, „a failure in her royal duties‟ from the

perspective of most of the family.” (Turner 96) Like Diana, Kate Middleton is a statistical outlier

– someone from the outer cores who somehow managed to penetrate the royal core. This

resonates with the idea of the American Dream and individual success. Like Turner (104) says,

we are intrigued celebrities because they represent how we think that experience is, or how it

8
would be lovely to feel that it is. No American girl would have qualms with marrying the future

King of England, and so our love affair with Kate Middleton begins.

During the week when the news of the royal engagement broke, newspapers and

magazines all over the United States were overdosing themselves on stories and pictures of the

new “royal couple.” In a blog observing America‟s frenzied reaction, the British paper the

Telegraph mentioned that the engagement was one of the most read and emailed stories on the

New York Times and New York Post‟s websites.

The lifestyle section in the Post was completely devoted to the “great Kate.” The Times

published a grand piece on how William presented Kate with his mother‟s ring, and opened a

forum in which people could discuss whether the royal couple could be a modern family. As the

Telegraph mentioned, “there were news segments on CNN and, oddly, the local news channel

„New York 1‟ which is ordinarily devoted to coverage of traffic jams, subway delays and the

weather. But the Daily News wins the prize for most excitable news outlet, devoting its front

page yesterday to Kate Middleton, with this headline: “The New Diana!”

The Times ran an article about how some people in various cities across America are

“gearing up for distant royal „I Dos‟”. People who enter little corner shops simply have to ask

“What do you think about the wedding?” No need to say which wedding. American morning

news immediately sent correspondents over the pond, and New York‟s St. George‟s Society is

planning a huge wedding-themed gala next spring aboard the Princess yacht. A flurry of calls

and emails has been received by the Princess Prep summer camp that sends young American

girls to royal British sites. On television, BBC America is showing several royalty-themed

shows, and TLC is rerunning its special “William & Kate: A Royal Love Story.” (Brown 2010)

9
 This media obsession is compounded by the fact that Kate comes from humble

beginnings – it could have been any one of us, in a sense. Kate was a gangly girl with a brace

who was an athlete at her school and always volunteered to clear away the equipment

(Macfarlane 2010). When Kate moved to a different part of England at 13 years of age, she

presented her babysitter with a framed Picasso print of a bouquet of flowers:

“Apart from the various photographs, the couple also treasure a framed Picasso

print of a bouquet of flowers presented to them by Kate when she left St.

Andrew‟s. It is on display at their house in Llanarthey, near Carmarthen.

Suddenly struck by a thought, Denise begins carefully peeling away the parcel

tape on the back of the frame – and there, on the top of the page, is a scrawled

message in a teenage hand. It reads „Catherine x x‟.

„I can‟t believe it,‟ Denise says. „I sliced the rest of the message off to fit the

frame. How can I have done that? It‟ll probably be worth more than the original

Picasso painting one day.‟ Denise also worries what she will do if she ever sees

Catherine again. „I‟d just want to run up and hug her. But what about Royal

protocol?” (Whitworth 2010)

In America, we tell our friends with potential we will save their autographs for when they

become famous. In Britain, that thought never entered their minds in regards to royalty – you

were either born with it or not. In examining the taxidermy of celebrity, Turner cites James

Monaco‟s theory of the three categories of celebrity: the hero, the star, and the quasar – the hero

10
being someone who actually did something that attracted attention in the first place, the star

being celebrity achieved through a public persona that is more important than their professional

profile, and the quasar being the “accidental celebrity,” focused on initially through no fault of

their own. (Turner 21) Where does Kate fit into this model? She is an example of where the three

categories overlap, in the sense that she is an accidental celebrity because she did not choose

who she fell into love with, but she is also a hero because she actually attracted the attention of a

British prince, and all the while being a star, because to be quite honest, what professional

profile? She worked for a while for her parents‟ party planning company, but her professional

track just isn‟t in the news.

Additionally, Rojek insists that the fundamental modernity of celebrity stems from its

being a phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers, TV, radio and film, and developed a model

much similar to Monaco‟s, consisting of three ways through which celebrity is developed –

ascribed through blood relations, achieved in open competition, or attributed by the media

(Turner 22). Kate does not clearly fit into any of the three categories as well. She was not

ascribed celebrity or royalty status, nor was William‟s love for and engagement to Kate

attributed by the media. While Kate may have participated in a sort of open competition for the

affection of the Prince, it is patronizing to simply view Kate as a winner of a competition. She is

the British embodiment of the American dream of individualized success, at least in the eyes of

the American celebrity consumer.

Further dissecting the production and consumption of celebrity, Turner examined Joshua

Gamson‟s established five audience types of celebrity consumers: traditional, second-order

traditional, postmodernist, game player (gossiper) and game player (detective). The traditional

audience regards the celebrity text as realistic, while having a low level of awareness of the

11
actual production process. The second-order traditional audience believes in the “deserving

celebrity” and their own capacity to discern authenticity by interpreting the media

representations. The postmodernist audience knows about and understands how celebrity is

manufactured, seeks out its evidence and details, and rejects any narrative of the naturally rising

celebrity as false. The last two types, game player (gossiper) and game player (detective), both

regard the content of celebrity stories as semi-fictional. While they aren‟t too much bothered by

where the stories originated or if they are authentic, and for both the level of awareness of the

production process is medium to high, the gossiper uses the stories as a “rich social resource”

and the detective uses them as a “giant discursive playground.” (Turner 110-111)

Turner disagrees with Gamson that a consumer can fall neatly into one of these five

categories, but rather believes that one consumer can fit into more than one category. Indeed, the

modern American consumer of British royalty stories can move around from category to

category, from time to time – but while the boundaries between these categories have been

blurred, one type of consumer is prevalent in today‟s mainstream media: the game player. As

game players, both gossipers and detectives, American consumers are star gazers that engage in

interpretative and identificatory strategies.

Royal consumerism in British culture experienced a downturn during the first three

decades of Queen Elizabeth‟s reign, largely due to the import of American popular culture. The

Sex Pistols debuted their best-selling single “God Save the Queen,” Andy Warhol popularized

the Queen‟s portrait in a series of colored images, and J.C. Penney‟s held a “Best of Britain”

promotion sale including items similar to those used daily by the royal family. Over the years,

the ancient institution of the monarchy had been subsumed into popular culture. American

interest in British royalty was not only limited to the mass mind, though. When Prince Charles

12
and Diana got married in 1981, the humorist Art Buchwald created a “Society to Ignore the

Royal Wedding,” formed of a group of the world‟s “greatest minds” in Washington (Prochaska

182).

The infiltration of the British monarchy into American popular culture is warmly

welcomed by Americans, and the royal wedding of William and Kate is at the forefront of the

stream, cushioned by their celebrity status. Kate is the next Princess Diana, and in the future

Americans may feel an even stronger bond with Kate, because she wasn‟t born with it, she

worked for it – personifying the American Dream with a royal flavor.

13
Sources

Brown, Robbie. "Gearing Up For Distant Royal 'I Dos'." New York Times 19 November 2010:
A13.

Macfarlane, Jo. “‟Kate Middleton was gangly and wore a brace – but a 100mph kind of girl‟.”
Daily Mail 21 November 2010.

Prochaska, Frank. The Eagle and the Crown: Americans and the British Monarchy. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008.

Redmond, Sean. “Intimate fame everywhere.” Framing Celebrity: New directions in celebrity
culture. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage Publications, 2004.

Whitworth, Melissa. “Royal Wedding: New York goes wild over the news of Prince William and
Kate Middleton‟s engagement.” Telegraph 18 November 2010.

14