Product Description

Diana, Princess of Wales, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Their lives have been well documented but never before compareduntil now. Both were daughters of acrimonious divorces Both married older men who needed trophy brides to advance their careers Both married into domineering families who tried, unsuccessfully, to tame their independence Both rebelled within their official roles, forever shattering the archetype.Yet in many ways they were completely different: Jackies father adored her; Dianas father, eager for a male heir, was disappointed at her birth Jackie was superbly educated and well prepared for the world stage; Diana was not Diana opened her heart to the world; Jackie kept hers closed, maintaining a stiff upper lip to Dianas quivering American lower lip. iven unprecedented access to private archives and candid interviews with family members and friends, Jay Mulvaney offers an intimate look at the parallel lives and cultural impacts of these two iconographic women.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3464648 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Eight years after Jackie Onassis's death and a mere five after Princess Diana's, Mulvaney gives the millions of strangers who mourned their passing a reason to rejoice: he's taken the familiar and favorite stories that have been rehashed by countless journalists and biographers, cast them in a new light and come up with a book that's irresistibly readable. The twist: it's not just another biography, it's a compare-and-contrast study of the two style-and-glamour icons of the second half of the 20th century. Mulvaney highlights the similarities in their poor-little-rich-girl-childhoods and their troubled marriages to powerful, repressed men (both of whom, Mulvaney says, had conflicted relationships with distant, frigid mothers). He explores their Mediterranean phases Jackie's with Ari, Diana's with Dodi their influence on popular culture and their success in providing their privileged children with the opportunity to experience some semblance of normalcy. Both became expert media manipulators, but as Mulvaney reminds us, Jackie resented their intrusiveness while the deeply insecure Diana craved and thrived on the attention. Perhaps, Mulvaney writes, it was because Jackie, long adored by her father, had a stronger sense of self than Diana, who went without a name for the first week of her life, so badly had her parents wanted a son. The author of Jackie: The Clothes of Camelot and coauthor of Kennedy Weddings, Mulvaney is part melodramatic gossip hound (Diana's death was "like a comet racing across the sky"), part pop psychologist (JFK was "a little boy lost"; Diana the classic "underdog as overachiever"). He's got a knack for weaving a tale, and material that could have been tired and stale instead gets a fresh new perspective. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"I never noticed the extraordinary parallels between their front-page-famous lives until now. I so enjoyed reading this book." -- Dominick Dunne

"I never noticed the extraordinary parallels between their front-page-famous lives until now. I so enjoyed reading this book." --Dominick Dunne
-- Review

Review

Customer Reviews

A fascinating look at two great ladies
This book really turned me around on how much both Princess Di and Jackie Onassis accomplished in a substantive way with their lives. I always thought, "oh they were like Barbie dollls, attractive but not worth much more than a pretty photograph." Boy was I wrong. They each really worked hard at the things they loved, and it was really interesting to see the parallels in their two lives...how much they were alike and, more telling, how much they differed.

Jackie was stronger, more self assured, but Diana was more compelling and vibrant. They both made great contributions to the world and this book does an excellent job of making the case that each woman deserves to be taken seriously as a female role model and icon.

Straining to be scholarly
There are dozens of vapid biographies of both Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana out there, but this book manages to do the work of two: It has vapid info on both of them! What a thrill! Jay Mulvaney strains to produce some sort of substantial comparison and contrast, but the result is less than satisfying. (Considering that his only other books are about Kennedys and clothing, I wasn't expecting anything too earth-shattering)

Using the trio of "naiden, mother, myth" (instead of "maiden, mother, crone"), he examines the lives of both Di and Jackie -- their childhoods, their marriages, the two children each of them had, their husbands, and their lives after their husbands (in Di's case, post-divorce; in both of Jackie's cases, in widowhood).

One of the biggest problems with this book is the superficiality. The book makes a great deal out of similarities that just don't mean much -- divorced parents, philandering husbands, overbearing in-laws, out-of-control weddings, and so on. But the fact is that though there are some similarities (both of them became irrational focuses for the masses), there isn't a lot of similarity under the surface.

Yes, both of them had divorced parents, but WHY they divorced is drastically different. Yes, both of their husbands cheated on them, but they had drastically different personas. Those husbands were a shy, spoiled aristocrat and an outgoing, charismatic elected leader; one actually NEEDED a wife to uphold his image in order to get his position, while the other just wanted one. Despite what Mulvaney says, Diana was not close to Jackie's level intellectually (by her own admission, no less). And their own personalities were at different ends of the scale -- outgoing and sensitive, versus private and almost snobby. The superficiality of things like divorced parents, pretty clothes, crazy weddings and obnoxious in-laws are clearly shown.

Moreover, Mulvaney seems to be one of those biographers who dreads speaking ill of anyone. He claims it would be "harsh" to refer to Rose Kennedy or Queen Elizabeth II as a bad mom. Well, Charles and Jack were quite harsh, then. Bad personality traits are watered down, obnoxious tendencies are diminished. The worst thing he says about Rose is that her memoirs are full of "half truths and evasions." (Mulvaney has an evasion of his own: Rose disliked Jackie)

In short, this book can be summarized as: "Jackie and Di had some similarities." It doesn't even provide interesting pictures or any new information whatsoever; everything in this book is gleaned from previous material. All the "intertwining" that Mulvaney can manage is to start many of the paragraphs with, "Like Diana..." or "Like Jackie..."

Basically, this book feels like an attempt to draw in Di and Jackie enthusiasts all at once. It could just as easily have been about Diana and Grace Kelly, or Jackie and Hillary Clinton. A quick'n'dirty, very generic read about the Windsors and Kennedys, and there ain't nothing new here.

Extraordinary Everywomen
What an interesting book! Mulvaney takes the lives of the two most chronicled, photographed women of the 20th century and puts them in a fascinating new context. While there is little new here in terms of facts or photos, it's the writer's interpretation of this oft-told tales that make the book worth reading. (For example, I never realized how similar Jackie's and Diana's realtionships with their mothers-in-law were.) By contrasting the way these two world famous women played the roles most women are expected to play -- maiden, wife and mother -- he makes their extraordinary lives more relatable. Most fascinating of all to me was the cross-cultural note: It was Jackie, enigmatic to the end, who kept her private life private and maintained an almost-English "stiff upper lip;" it was Diana who openly, impusively shared her life with world in a more typically American fashion. And it remains Jackie's sense of mystery and Diana's vulnerabiity that continue to fascinate us, years after they're gone.