Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle

by Beverly Bartlett

  Even the nation’s by then quite large Islamic population was utterly delighted by Isabella’s invocation of her religion, for they thought that she used it in a humble, charming way. “It’s hardly a matter of introducing a royal religion,” explained one religious leader. “She didn’t say trapping should be banned because it’s unchristian. She said being a Christian requires her to speak out, something that a member of any principled religion can agree with.”

  By week’s end, the majority leader had done a complete reversal, holding a press conference to announce he’d vote no on his own bill. He wore a button that said I’M DIZZY FOR IZZY.

  On the street, the rusty bumpers of the Bisbas driven by many young people sported stickers that said IZZY FOR PRIME MINISTER.

  Back at the castle?

  Sir Hubert retreated to his chambers and cursed for hours. “Sell shoes? Sell shoes?” he said to his wife. “Did I say sell shoes? Harrumph. I’d make shoes, I tell you, if it weren’t for that pension fund.”

  Queen Regina seemed to be considering a cobbling career herself about then. She kept watching the clip over and over, fixating on the stunning line about Isabella’s responsibilities as a citizen being more important than those of a princess.

  Her Majesty was aghast, muttering repeatedly, “Well I never.”

  And King Philippe would reply, “Neither have I.”

  It was clear what the people thought, however. Isabella’s public career, right up until that awful day when it all fell apart, was unparalleled. Sometimes, even all these years later, I wish she could have kept it up. I still feel robbed that it was cut short. Part of me agrees with the conventional wisdom of the time, which was that something had to give. She couldn’t keep going that way forever. It was just a matter of time before she got fat or, at least, pregnant. Soon enough, she would have gotten old and inflexible and would have started muttering about teenagers needing to have more respect or about good help being hard to find anymore. It was only a matter of time before some other new, young, mysterious princess in some other small, glamorous country pushed her aside on the global stage. Or, you know, some television starlet.

  But part of me believes Isabella could have done it. And oh, wouldn’t it have been something to see!

  But alas, I’m getting ahead of myself again. The important thing to note about the royal family during those wonderful Isabella years was that gradually, a certain giddy, reckless atmosphere developed. Steeped in tradition, ruled by decorum, frightened by change, the rest of the royal family did not come close to emulating the princess, but they did slowly begin to exercise a bit of self-will and ambition.

  Queen Regina boxed up her royal furs and sent them to a museum. “I think fur’s ghastly,” she told Hubert. “I don’t care what the furriers think.”

  His Majesty took to wearing imported suits and watching American football, even though his advisers thought it would unsettle the country.

  And Prince Raphael? Well, Rafie did several things. Most notably, he began to admit to himself that he was in love.

  Chapter 9

  This love he admitted surprised Rafie, because he had convinced himself that his marriage was one of conve-nience. And it was convenient. Because, despite Ethelbald Candeloro’s initial private cynicism, Raphael and Isabella’s marriage was one of the soundest royal matches of the last two centuries. They were, even at their worst, an extraordinary public team. Whenever they stood before the people, they played off each other and supported each other and bucked each other up in ways that only those who were close to them could appreciate.

  Being a royal, after all, is very much a lifelong performance art piece. And Rafie and Isabella, for the most part, ad-libbed with ease and flair. Rafie would somehow call attention to himself just when Isabella was becoming a bit weary of all eyes being on her. She would dress most attractively on the days when he felt his small speeches were the weakest. She would snort water out of her nose, and he’d come up with the line “At least they got my good side.”

  The Prince and Princess of Gallagher were quite rare in that they genuinely liked each other. Modern royal couplings are usually either strictly practical or wildly romantic. The idea of a comfortable companionship was almost unheard of and usually came only by accident and after a good many years.

  But it came immediately to Raphael and Isabella. So they did not engage in the competition and petty jealousies that unravel the marriages of many young heirs. It was unremarkable to them. That was part of being a team.

  It is true that, like many newlyweds, they struggled during the first year of their marriage. Isabella’s public stumbles created nights of icy arguments and heated silences in the couple’s suite in the west wing of the castle. In their worst nights, they confronted demons and nursed regret and wondered about former loves. Despite all that bumbling and mumbling, despite their misgivings and wonderings, their public face never faltered, and of all the charges lobbed at Isabella during her dizziness days, it is a compliment that no one once suggested she was a bad wife.

  Later, when she became the phenomenon that defined a century, she managed to do so without seeming to ever intentionally overshadow her husband. Perhaps it was a testament to their humility and companionship, but I think it was because the magic that Isabella spread worked the best on people she was close to. And Raphael was the closest. So he would look at a sea of well-wishers, notice that 80 percent of them were reaching for Isabella’s hand rather than his, and his only reaction was to be sorry that he’d distracted the other 20 percent. At least that is the impression he always gave in public, and in my experience, it is the impression he gave in private, too. He was, simply, a team player and she was his team.

  This is not to suggest that they were just friendly coworkers. Far from it. Neither the prince nor the princess was raised to engage in mushy banter and sweet nothings, but oh, how they laughed and giggled and shared conspiratorial looks and phrases. (In the entire time that the royal couple lived at the castle, neither Secrest nor Vreeland could figure out the meaning of certain code words that Their Highnesses would exchange with each other, prompting gales of laughter.)

  In fact, if things had only turned out differently for Raphael, I am quite sure that his marriage to Isabella would have been remembered as one of the greatest love stories ever lived on a global stage. And that is saying quite a bit for what was, after all, the relatively sensible pairing of two well-positioned people. Usually, great love stories must have great suffering. There must be valiant struggles and cruel ironies and tremendous sacrifices. They can’t just be cavorting about European resort towns in a souped-up Bisba, making a splash by going through drive-throughs while wearing tuxes and diamonds.

  (“Those stuffy royal banquets always leave me wanting,” Isabella reportedly said to a Bisbanian White Castle employee one late night, as she pulled up to order twenty burgers to go. The employee—dubbed Burger Boy by the low-rent tabloid that bought his story and published it under the headline WHITE CASTLE PRINCESS—claimed this comment was awfully suggestive, given that it was uttered in a breathy voice, while Rafie, who was in the passenger seat, moved his hand along Isabella’s thigh and stared at her in a slightly drunk, leering way. Her tiara, Burger Boy said, was slipping off the side of her head. Most commentators, including Ethelbald Candeloro, did not believe Burger Boy. I was never brave enough to ask either Isabella or Rafie, so I don’t know for sure. But I must say it sounds just like them to me.)

  The true story of Isabella and Rafie’s love actually does have cruel ironies and great sacrifices and valiant struggles. But no one knows that story. The story that the world believes it knows, with Raphael’s sudden death and Isabella’s long exile, is just too short. You’d think the decades during which the widowed princess wore her somber brown and roamed American streets would have permanently etched the Isabella-Raphael love story on the world’s romantic psyche. But it somehow just made people forget Rafie altogether.

  Nevertheless, I’m
getting ahead of myself again. First I must finish explaining Isabella’s glorious recovery.

  The improvement noted by Ethelbald Candeloro had, as I already stated, started right after Isabella read Geoffrey’s first letter. That first occasion was not at all like the last one. When Isabella read the letter the final time before destroying it, she wept. For the letter had come to mean a great deal to her. But when she read it the first time, she laughed bitterly.

  She had not known exactly what she was hoping for. The letter was in fact much like what she should have expected. Geoffrey’s simple, uncomplicated observations were, after all, what she had always liked about him. But she had somehow entertained the notion that her life and the strange turn it had taken would have merited more than a paragraph, especially a paragraph that suggested she listen to the Boss.

  Isabella appreciated the works of Springsteen as much as any European princess could. She rather enjoyed the CDs Geoffrey had loaned her while she was at Yale, and she had even downloaded some more. She had listened to songs about the romance of the roads that lead out of dying small towns as she was flying back into tiny Bisbania, with its petty neighborhood politics and struggling industries. She had listened to songs about working-class couples being torn apart by economic hardship while she was being courted by the prince.

  But she stopped listening to the music when she moved into the castle, where the music was always selected by Hubert or the queen and where the king required that 86 percent of any playlist be national.

  Somewhat irrationally, Isabella thought Geoffrey should know about the castle playlist rules, so it irritated her that he suggested listening to a retro American songster, and it further irritated her that Geoffrey seemed to go out of his way to point out that he had married—though this seems unfair, coming from a woman who had been the star of the most celebrated wedding of the century. (Especially given that Geoffrey mentioned his wife only in passing, and not until the “P.S.”) But fairness was beside the point. Isabella was experiencing the same sort of jealousy that makes all of us prefer to believe that none of our ex-boyfriends ever really got over us, even when the evidence would suggest that they were over us before the relationship was officially over.

  Despite Isabella’s rather pronounced initial disappointment, she saved the letter. Sometimes when she was lonely or sad, she would pull it out of her makeup drawer and reread it. These readings became daily and served to elevate and solemnize the simple words, and soon she found herself taking comfort in them. She came to like the notion that she could listen to a working-class American songwriter for advice, since it seemed to dignify her duties as real work. It also eventually came to please her that Geoffrey’s wife had sent her advice. It suggested, somehow, that despite all the “Dizzy Izzy” headlines, Her Royal Highness the Princess of Gallagher had a following, an appeal, a “people,” if you will. There were real human beings out there—an American car mechanic’s wife among them—who were rooting for her.

  So she ordered (she would say “asked”) Secrest to bring her headphones, and the princess began listening to Springsteen while writing letters or signing proclamations or dining alone. They gave her energy, put a bounce in her step, and helped her to laugh at herself. Many a day, she’d head off for a round of ribbon cuttings humming “Working on the Highway” and giggling a little. Often she would attempt in her speeches to toss out a poetic image that she thought might have suited the Boss—most notably in a commencement address at Bisbania Community College, in which she compared a degree to a beloved and well-tuned car.

  More and more, she found herself relying on Springsteen for inspiration and comfort. Then one day, while lifting weights to one of the rocker’s lesser-known tunes in the castle gymnasium, she came to believe that somehow the Boss was speaking directly to her.

  She had the headphones turned up loud. She was attempting to keep pace with the music as she did her modest bench presses—less weight, more reps for toning. Suddenly, the lyrics jumped out at her. The song, entitled “Cynthia,” was a silly little ditty about construction workers admiring a classy lady. She doesn’t stop or greet the men, but they don’t care. In a gloomy and glum world, the workers appreciate simply knowing that such loveliness exists.

  Isabella was so enthralled with the song that she stopped in mid-bench press to listen to it. She had, like many princesses before her, struggled to know her job. She was not an actress who entertained, nor a stateswoman who governed. What should she do? And here was the answer. The construction workers saw the classy lady as an excuse to take a break from their daily labor. When she passed by, it was a reason to “stop, stand, and salute” her style.

  In the days that followed, Princess Isabella couldn’t get the lines out of her head. They seemed, she thought, to be written particularly for princesses of her generation. Suddenly, she was at ease. Her taste in clothes became unfaltering. At the same time, her knack for picking appropriate causes became unwaveringly accurate. She learned how to look directly into people’s eyes, even when looking at six hundred people at once. And, in an unexplained twist, she even finally developed nice skin, which allowed her to wear less makeup.

  Her newfound knack for capturing the public fancy became, perhaps, most apparent in what became known as the “sock incident”—the near disaster that ensued when Isabella was photographed hopping off a train in celebration of Public Transport Day wearing one black sock and one blue.

  We are not, I’m sorry to report, speaking of a mere flash of color peeking out from a royal trouser leg. There was, in this outfit, a lot of sock. Isabella was wearing knee-high stockings with a short plaid skirt, capturing the so-called schoolgirl look that the queen thought was questionable enough for a woman of Isabella’s age, even if the colors were right.

  But, in this case, the colors were quite clearly wrong.

  Secrest had, needless to say, been on vacation. Otherwise, she would have personally checked the tags for dye-lot numbers and held them up to the window, as was her routine, to detect any unfortunate fading issues, which can sometimes occur even with the best laundries. Yes, the clothes were as right as rain whenever Secrest checked them.

  But Secrest was lying on a beach in southern Spain that day. So the niece of one of the castle gardeners, a young intern originally hired to walk the royal dogs, had taken Secrest’s place in handling the princess’s clothes. Although it appears that by “handle,” we mean only that she “handed” them over, because the subsequent investigation found evidence of slipshod work from toe to top. In addition to the color problem, the socks were from two different designers, and one of the princess’s bobby pins had a speck of rust.

  Isabella herself, I suppose, could have saved the day by glancing at her feet herself. But she was not accustomed to paying much attention to such things and probably could not have been expected to notice the coloration differential in the dim light of her dressing room.

  However, the difference screamed for attention in the early-morning train-station light and caused gasps of wonder and astonishment from the crowds bottlenecked at the station. (It is one of the ironies of Public Transport Day that the efforts to accommodate visiting dignitaries make everyone else late for work.)

  Hubert was beside himself with rage and hurt. He fired two laundry maids and, of course, the inattentive intern and further launched a review of the castle vacation policy.

  “Why on earth would Secrest be on vacation on Public Transport Day?” he kept asking the other senior advisers, who all agreed that they could not imagine a legitimate reason.

  The queen herself launched the internal review of how the intern came to replace Secrest, and the review provided weeks of surprising revelations. I’ll spare you the sordid details of how an unrequited crush on the dog groom had served to distract the young worker. But I will say that the entire staff was beside itself with shame and self-loathing after the investigation turned up an ominous memo, carefully filed away but never followed up on, from the head of ken
nel operations, who complained just days before the sock incident that the intern had twice walked Grover, the royal greyhound, using a leash that did not match his collar.

  “The leash was red. The collar blue. Dear Grover is a rare milky white,” the kennel chief wrote. “The poor dog looked like the flag of France! Scandalous!”

  Hubert, who had found the memo in his own file cabinet but could not remember it ever crossing his desk, turned green with rage every time he thought about it. “This is the person put in charge of the princess’s clothes?” Hubert said. Ever after, he became obsessive about reading every memo addressed to him, often twice, to the exclusion of all other duties.

  The castle maintenance staff was soon charged with installing an elaborate lighting system in the dressing room of all the principal royals so that they could direct their dressers to adjust the lighting to mimic eighty-six distinct environments—from a cloudy day at the racetrack to a dusk trip down a red carpet to, needless to say, a clear morning in a train station on Public Transport Day.

  (As a quick aside, I must report that among the ramifications was a personal one for Secrest, who met the chief of kennel operations over a hot morning cider to discuss the unfortunate chain of events. They found comfort in each other’s words and eventually in each other’s arms and were happily married soon after. Secrest was a blubbery, happy mess at the wedding, but was as ramrod strict as ever when she returned to work from her weekend honeymoon.)

  But even as the sock crisis reverberated throughout the castle, ending a few careers and several carefree vacations, it played completely differently with the public, thanks to an anonymous freethinking public relations professional who was helping out at the anti-domestic violence organization known as Battered Women No More. The young public relations executive was a student of something called “guerrilla public relations,” in which do-good organizations with little funding grab media attention by “hijacking” news stories and taking credit for celebrity fashion errors or marriage breakups.