Photos reveal Princess Mary’s private pain over Prince Frederik outing
The Tasmanian-born royal has had a hell of a week – and photos of her out and about in public show the pain of being a princess.
COMMENT
That Cinderella, she can suck it. Ariel, Jasmine, and Belle too.
It’s long past time to ditch, to resolutely can, to mothball and to mummify once and for all the notion that being an actual princess is anything to aspire to.
The jig is up.
Just ask Our Mary, the woman otherwise known as the Crown Princess of Denmark and future Queen of a nation that is big on wind turbines and folk dancing. She’s had an absolute rotter of a week, a real corker of a few days, which are irrefutable proof of what a furphy the princess game really is.
The reason: Spanish magazine Lecturas and the fact that her husband of nearly 20 years Crown Prince Frederik decided he fancied seeing a new Pablo Picasso exhibition in Madrid late last month.
Thus, off future King Fred tootled to Spain only to discover that, according to Daily Mail social diarist Richard Eden, “a mutual friend who was to have joined him at the Picasso show was, at the last minute, unable to go”.
Into the breach stepped Mexican divorcee Genoveva Casanova, who is variously described as a reality star and a socialite, and who had nothing better to do that night than hang out with a future crowned head of a European nation.
The duo then had a day and night that involved them reportedly wandering around the city’s El Retiro park, seeing those much vaunted Picassos, going out for dinner, where they watched some flamenco before they returned to her apartment.
Then, this week, Lecturas published photos of Frederik and Genoveva in Madrid, setting off a European hullabaloo.
Ms Casanova has flatly denied any suggestion they are more than just friends and has indicated she may take legal action.
The timing of these images being made public could not have been worse for Mary, who had no chance but to spend much of the week standing in front of banks of cameras and journalists thanks to King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain arriving for a three-day State visit.
Rather than getting to weather this storm behind the high fences and thick walls of their Amalienborg Palace home, Mary instead had to put on a concerted real life demonstration of grinning and bearing it for the Danish and Spanish press packs, over and over.
For the three days of the official Spanish State visit, the crown princess (and her prince) were on full court public display, like it or lump it, first attending the Joaquín Sorolla exhibition and an official dinner at Copenhagen’s Glyptoteket Museum before the following day turning out for a trip to the Danish Architecture Centre.
What I wonder is, how can anyone look at what Mary has been through this week, at having to get her hair blow dried, plaster on a ‘happy’ face and do some rictus smiling while this tabloid squall crashed around them, and think that being royal would be something attractive?
Let us all now say it in unison: Being a princess sucks.
The crown princess might have rubies the size of hens’ eggs and a ski chalet but choice? Control over her life? The freedom to deal with the fallout of this week in private?
Consider this a particular mirthless ‘huh!’
Mary is now learning a lesson that Diana, Fergie, Sophie, Kate and Meghan worked out painfully and first hand – a royal marriage comes with demands that should make any rational woman think twice.
For all of these women, the first thing to go is privacy, pffft, because any gal on the cusp of making the interstellar leap from normality to royalty will always be an object of manic and perpetual public and press fascination.
The years that follow bring with them more personal attrition.
No matter what our princess (or duchess) might have previously done with her life, no matter her pre-marriage successes or education or achievements, she becomes reduced to a walking, politely nodding glyph in $3000 Dior trousers.
Spontaneity, freedom, choice. Pffft, pfftt, pffft.
The new princess’s life no longer is her own because she is now an appendage of some venerable royal house that dates back to before Gutenberg got into the printing business, no matter if she has a degree in economics and was a Vice President of HSBC (Queen Maxima of the Netherlands), had a successful career as a speech therapist (Queen Mathilde of Belgium) or was one of her country’s most high-profile journalists (Queen Letizia of Spain).
Princesses, you see, are not allowed to have feelings in public, to call in sick and to ever look anything but deadset thrilled to have to get up in the predawn hours so they can be fully made-up and prepped to go out and open a suburban roundabout.
Watching Mary this week is positive proof of the personal indignities, the suffering and ‘the suck it up’ ethos that is demanded of princesses.
In Shakespeare’s Richard III the homicidal maybe-hunchback King muses that he can “cry ‘content’ to that which grieves my heart … And frame my face to all occasions.”
More than 500 years later and here we are: With princesses left with no choice but to ‘frame their faces for all occasions’ no matter what a Spanish tabloid might be alleging.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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