On November 16, 2010, a thin brunette from Bucklebury, Berkshire, made a nervous appearance at a photo call. Kate Middleton—newly styled “Catherine”—wore a liquid drape dress (soon to sell out), an impeccable blowout, and a sapphire ring the size of a Gobstopper. Only its aristocratic association saved it from being hopelessly tacky. Softly stammering out answers, she and her newly announced fiancé, Prince William, would soon be splashed, as they had already been for years, on the cover of every British tabloid and newspaper—two beautiful, preppy string beans. Across the Atlantic, the engagement was met with an enthusiasm that came from desperate need; the American celebrity press was in the midst of an A-list drought, and the new royal couple was like sweet summer rain.
The United States has always contained elements of uncouth fawning over the British monarchy, an institution it fought a bloody war to separate itself from. In the Gilded Age, moneyed Newport types wanted to marry their daughters into aristocratic lines. Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 wedding to the ninth Duke of Marlborough was brokered by her overbearing mother, who also did a fair amount of leaking to the press; the wedding was mobbed by spectators, and a newspaper published a spoof cartoon of the young bride, chained to her mother. When King Edward VIII nearly broke the monarchy, in 1936, by abdicating the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, an alluring divorcée and rumored Nazi sympathizer…