March 23, 2018 • 29 mins
There are plenty of princesses with fairy tale endings. These aren't those princesses! Will and Mango chat with Princesses Behaving Badly author Linda Rodriguez McRobbie to determine which princess you'd want on your wrestling team, which princess left royalty for the circus, and which princess parties you definitely want to avoid.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, Mango, what that will? So you know how
tons of kids want to be princesses, right like there's
Sophia the First and Disney movies. I know, you know,
my my, my daughter, four year old Ruby actually wants
none of that. She wants to be a professional golfer,
she says right now. She's also been telling people she
wants to be a professional t ball player. And uh
(00:20):
and when she does ballet, it's honestly like less delicate
and more aggressive than any stylent ballet you've ever seen before.
Oh I love that, and I love Ruby's ideas. And
you know what, I actually believe her if she wants
to be a professional golfer, I believe she will be
a professional golfer. So though, but anyway, I'm glad Ruby's
got her own ideas. You know. The funny thing about
(00:40):
history is that people have always looked up to princesses
and you know, tried to imitate their style. And one
really strange version of this was the Alexandra Limp. Have
you heard about this? So? So the limp is named
for the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Now, initially she had
a scar on her next so she started wearing a
choker to conceal it, and immediately all the fashionable women
(01:02):
in society did the same thing, and overnight chokers became
all the rage, which I guess makes a certain type
of sense. We see this kind of thing happened. But
but then when Alexandra had a bout of rheumatic fever
that left her with this pronounced limp, so people actually
started trying to imitate that too, and and they weren't
being ironic with this, It just fascinating to read about.
(01:24):
So they purposely started wearing mismatch shoes to imitate her walk,
and then shoemakers even got in on the act. They
started selling these one tall heeled shoe and one low
shoe as a pair, so that you could get a
little bit more of that natural Alexandra limp. I'm not kidding.
That's ridiculous. How long did this last for? I think
it was maybe a season or two, And you know,
(01:46):
most commoners thought that high society folk looked like idiots.
But the BBC reports that there was a fashion journal
that called for an immediate end to the trend a
year or two after it started. I think instead they
suggested quote. The skirt of the season, we are informed,
is to clean closely round the feet in consequence, whereof
ladies will be obliged to walk because if their feet
(02:06):
were tied together. Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, No,
it definitely isn't, but it does show society's obsession with princesses,
or at least a certain kind of princess, and today's
show is all about breaking that stereotype. So we're gonna
be talking about princesses behaving badly, warriors, schemers, Charlatan's and
(02:27):
a whole lot more. So let's dive in. Hey, their
(02:51):
podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson
and as always I'm joined by my good friend man
Guesha Ticketer and sitting behind that soundproof glass wearing a
shirt that just says inconceivable, which is a nice Princess
Bride reference from Tristan over there. That's our friend and
producer Tristan McNeil. Now, speaking of Princess Bride, do you
know how that book was written? Mango, I don't so.
(03:12):
The author, William Goldman, he wanted to write a book
for his daughters and they were four and seven years old,
I think at the time, and so he just asked him, like,
what should it be about? And one set of princess
and the other one said a bride, And so that's
how I got his title. That's pretty fun, and it's
perfect for today's show because it isn't really a safew
princess story, right, yeah, I mean it's it's definitely one
(03:33):
of my favorites, but but we should jump in. So
today on the program, we've got an old friend and
one of our favorite writers from our Mental Floss days,
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. Now, she wrote a book called Princesses
Behaving Badly, Real stories from history without the fairy tale endings,
and we can't wait to ask her all about it.
So welcome to the show, Linda, Hi, thank you so
(03:53):
much for having me on. Why don't we start with
one of my favorite badass princesses from this lot, who's
uh could have? Lunit think? I don't know how you
pronounced it. Could you tell us a little bit about her? So?
She was a Mongolian princess. She was um, she was
a relative of Genghis Khan. She was a great great
granddaughter of Genghis Khan. She was the only girl in
a family of fourteen boys, and she was impressive. I
(04:18):
mean she you know, Marco Polo, who's the you know,
the famous Venetian traveler and chronicler. Um, he saw her
in action, and one of the things that she was
particularly good at, she was you know, she was she
was an archer and an excellent horsewoman, and those were
things that were fairly common to Mongolian courship culture at
the time, even among women. But she was an amazing wrestler.
(04:41):
She could not be beaten. And supposedly, by the time
Marco Polo saw her, she had amassed a herd at
like ten thousand horses, because the common thing to do
was to bet horses on the outcome of this match,
and so she would just always win and she and
it so by the time that Marco Polo finds her, um,
(05:03):
the rumors got around and that she refused to marry
anyone who couldn't beat her on the wrestling mat. And
so at that point she was still unmarried, and that
was kind of getting a little bit sticky, a little
complicated for her family. Um. But from what the historical
record seems to show she never was beaten, and she
eventually just chose to marry someone even though they could
(05:23):
beat her on the wrestling that so and and Linda.
Part part of the amazing thing about her dominance in
wrestling is it actually affected the clothes that athletes were, right. So, yeah,
supposedly now even in today, when Mongolian men wrestle, they
wear this kind of long sleeved best that's open in
the front to show their opponents that they don't have rest.
(05:45):
And supposedly it's men as a tribute to the female
wrestler who was never defeated. Yeah, that's pretty great. And
you know, obviously kulun Is is certainly one of our
favorites from the book. I mean, do you have a
favorite warrior princess? I know there's so many to choose from,
but I'm I'm curious of in doing the research for
the book, that was one that just really stuck out
to you. One of my absolute favorites is Outfield, the
(06:08):
Pirate Princess. So she's there isn't a lot of great
evidence that she actually existed, but I just love her story. Um,
she was a she was a princess of the fifth
century and daughter of a of a Goth king. So
this is all sort of out of the like you know,
icy cold Scandinavian North, and she's certainly in the tradition
(06:30):
of the kind of shield maiden warrior Princess model Um,
and her story starts a little bit funny because she's
she is meant to be so beautiful that she was
forced by her family to cover her face lest she
provoked the men around her into just you know, connections
of lust or whatever they thought was right to happen. Um.
(06:52):
And she was given by her father, the king. She
was given a viper and a snake to rear Um,
wishing to defend her chastity by the protection of these
reptiles when they came to grow up. So basically she
has these two deadly reptiles as her guard animals Um,
and the idea was that, you know, if somebody could
(07:15):
get through that, then then maybe he could be worthy
of her Um. And eventually someone dead and this is
the part that kind of cracks me up because the
guy who eventually was able to kill both of the
snakes and make it alive to alfhild Um was named
Alf so if they got married, they would have been
(07:37):
Alf and Elf Hills. Um. But where this story starts
to kind of beer away from the whole sort of
you know, princess and a castle rescued by the handsome
prince thing is that she was given the decision once
once he made it through killed pets. Um, she give
a decision do you actually want to marry him or not?
(07:58):
And she actually chose not to and instead became a
pirate with a crew of lady pirates with her, and
they tore up and down the Baltic Sea around the coast,
and she amassed a flotilla and she basically came became
like a pirate admiral, and um, I just I just
(08:19):
loved this idea of her sort of you know, being
like I could get married or I could be a pirate,
and that's just way more fun. And so you know,
this is also kind of one of the like ancient
meat cute stories because Alf, of course has never forgotten
about this, this beautiful maiden who um, you know, was
so chased and so modest and yet spurned his advances
(08:41):
and decided to become a pirate take to the sea
that he's been following her. He's been trying to find her,
and eventually he comes across this this you know, this
flotilla of of pirate ships, of kind of Viking pirate ships, right,
and in his head he's thinking like, right, nothing will
keep me from my love. I know, I'm so close
to her. I'm going to find her. It's gonna be great,
it's gonna be awesome. I just gotta get to these
(09:03):
pirates first. So they're fighting, he's fighting on the deck.
He's found the pirates. Fun he accidentally knocks off one
of the pirates helmet and it's herd and so, you know,
and then and then the story gets a little bit
like a little bit disappointing because oh, they got married,
and and not long after that Elf got on her
(09:24):
a son. So it's, you know, that's a little bit disappointing.
But the start of the story is is really really exciting,
and the fact that she was able to kind of
pursue her own destiny in a way that was was
different certainly to other women and was kind of contrary
to that that what would later become an established fairytale story.
(09:45):
I think it's really compelling and kind of fun, and
I think I'm going to choose to believe that that
was true. Let's just go with this as a as
a real story. I want to believe that she's a
real person. I mean, the story came out like six
hundred years after this was meant to have and in
a sort of you know, history that also included it
was like a history of the Danes that also included
(10:06):
like giants and dragons and other things that we're probably
not true. So one of the things we've been fascinated
in recent culture is like watching things like down Abbey
or even like Prince Harry's engagement where these like commoners
(10:28):
sort of marry in and uh. And I was curious
about the story that you tell about Clara Ward, who's
I guess hails from Detroit. Can you tell us a
little bit about her? Yeah, Clara Ward was, I mean
her her story is very very much in line with
a lot of what was happening at the end of
the nineteenth century. Essentially, Europe was a Europe was the
(10:51):
tough place to be. Um the sort of the national
borders were changing all the time. Um, the fortunes of
the European aristocrats were tumbling, and at the same time
America was ascending in a big way, and particularly um
American wealth was was becoming very very attractive, and so
(11:13):
you saw a lot of these marriages between European aristocrats
and American heiresses, and essentially the heiresses were bringing the
money and the aristocrats were bringing the sort of you know,
the titles, yeah, and the social standing and and all
of that. That seemed sort of very very important then.
(11:34):
And Clara Ward, who was the daughter of an American industrialist,
she came from Detroit. She her her mother seems to
have really wanted that life for her, and starting when
she was in her teens, had her educated in London,
in Italy and France. And the sort of most notable
(11:54):
thing about those times was that Clara Ward got kicked
out of every single school she went to, was just
scribed as sort of far too wild to ever fit
in into this kind of European society. But she eventually
did marry. Um. She was very young, she was, you know,
in her teens still when she married the Prince Caraman
de Chimayum she was a Belgian prince, and they stayed together.
(12:19):
Sort of it wasn't a good match. I mean, as
as much as you can sort of you know, assume
from a lot of these these marriages of wealth and title.
People weren't always in it for love. Everything weren't in
it for love. So Clara was seventeen years old when
she met Prince Joseph Dick Caraman Chimay. He was the
(12:40):
son of the Belgian foreign affairs minister. He was in
serious debt, but of course he had this this title,
and they got married in Paris in the eighteen ninety
Her dress costs like like ten thousand dollars, I mean,
which is just an insane amount of money in you know,
in eighteen ninety. Um. Once they were married, they traveled
(13:01):
to all of the sort of European hot spots. They
were in the Belgian court, and they went to the Riviera,
the Paris, went all over the place, and she you know,
had two children this time. But it was clear from
the reports that she was not happy, um, and that
her relationship with her husband, which had you know, from
(13:23):
the beginning not been great, was getting worse, and that
she was potentially cheating on him and he didn't really
care enough to stop her. Um. Things really came to
the head when she was in the Belgian court. And
evidently she says that King Leopold the Second showed so
much attention to her too, that she was shunned by
(13:44):
the rest of the court and became a sort of
social pariah. And I think at that point really kind
of crystallized her dislike of the European aristocratic circles that
she was traveling in. So eventually, um there, Now, by
the time they get to Paris, things are really you know,
we've we've set the stage for a break between her
and her husband, and sort of one of the first
(14:06):
kind of best opportunities she takes it. And that opportunity
happened to be a Hungarian gypsy violinist called Rigo Jancy.
It's November eighteen ninety six. She's at a cafe, she
sees him playing his violin. They smile at each other,
and then ten days later she runs away with him.
And two months after that she's divorced from her husband
(14:27):
and separated from her children and also forced to pay
him alimony for the rest of her life. She's now free, right,
so this this like you can imagine too, I mean,
this must have been this was incredibly scandalous. At the time.
The courtroom for her divorce trial was packed. She didn't
actually show up. All of her statements were actually went
out by her lawyers. But she was just she was
(14:50):
just done with it. And she even said, you know,
she said, I wanted to be free. I am done
with it. I don't think And she says later on
too that that American went and could not fit into
this kind of lifestyle, that it's too stifling, that it's
too petty, and and she just hated it. But from
(15:10):
that point on she lived her life to the fullest.
I mean, she was you know, the she was painted
by Vito loose law track. She was a star of
Bellapoc friends. She you know, she posed in in these
like skin tight leotard things with strange things on her head,
(15:31):
had her pictures taken. She showed her ankles, I mean,
she was having She she divorced Rigo Gout was involved
with someone else, got married again who I think he
was the handsomest man in Naples. I think that was
his sort of you know, claimed the fame. And then
they divorced and she married somebody else, and and it
(15:53):
sort of you see that her you know, interest in
her life is perpetual all the way up until the end.
But details and actual facts about it are pretty slim
on the ground. You don't really get a lot of great,
great information about and reliable information about what happens to
her after all these subsequent divorces. But um, she ended
(16:13):
up I mean sadly. You know, she she died really young.
She was only forty three. She died of pneumonia. And
at the time, there were all these rumors that she
was penniless, that she was completely cut off from her family,
that you know, she had no friends and all these things.
And while she may have been very much cut off
(16:34):
from society, she wasn't penniless by any means. Um. She
was certainly cut off from her children, but she hadn't
been completely disowned. And you know, in the end, all
of her obituaries just remembered her as this sort of
you know, bright spark that blew out too quickly. And yeah,
(16:54):
I mean you wrote about how she'd been at a
convent and she shocked the nuns at the convent, like
the waiter and a station manager, and I mean, she
has such a remarkable life, and I think it's also
kind of difficult, Like all the stuff that she's doing
is you know, the kinds of things that if if
we're to happen to a modern celebrity celebrity now, you know,
(17:16):
it would be equally as interesting. But this is all
happening at the turn of the century. This is this
is the eighteen nineties to the nineteen tents. I mean,
she died in nineteen sixteen, you know, so this is
all like like she is she is. You know, she
is a celebrity in the vein of celebrities now, but
without the kind of machinery around promoting that celebrity. So
(17:37):
if there's always kind of wonderful gossip columns and stuff
that you read. And the Library of Congress, by the way,
is a treasure trope and has everything. And I found
out a lot from all the newspapers that they had
their um But you know, you can see the beginnings
of the steeds of the kinds of celebrities that we
have now. And you know, her claimed aime was that
(17:58):
she had a lot of money and she did some
dosy things with it. She feels very modern in that regard,
But I also just appreciate that she lived the life
that she wanted to lead and wasn't going to be
put into the boxes that her family wanted her to
be in, or the European Court wanted her to be in,
and or even you know, the public wanted her to
(18:18):
be in. She she, she did her and good honor.
We have several more fascinating lives that we want to
ask you about, but before we do that, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're
(18:44):
talking to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, the author of Princesses Behaving Badly. Now, Linda,
before we get back to some of the other specific princesses,
I did appreciate, you know, so many of the side
stories and sidebars and other guides that you had in
the book, and one of these was a guide to
faking prince's Hood. And I was, curiously, can you tell
us some of the better strategies for pretending you're a
(19:06):
royal if you're not actually a royal? Uh? Well, there
are some fantastic examples of people doing that, and my
favorite at Christmas Princess Cariboo. Who's in it? But um,
it seems like the best way to pretend that you're
royal when you're not is to just put your all
into it and and stay it with confidence. It's sort
(19:28):
of like people will believe you more if you just
say it really loudly. Princess all of the Cumberland. She
her story. This was This was in the early eight hundreds,
right around the time in England when the press was
becoming really really powerful and there were a lot of
places where you could get pamphlets printed. And these pamphlets
(19:50):
were probably they're just everywhere, like pretty much every it was.
It's basically the same thing as having something self published.
Now and you said, you will see tons of them
where you know, the George Wilson, the Black Heath Pedestrian,
a man who's walked a thousand miles, like, he gets
his pamphlet printed and tells his story, it sells it.
So she had her pamphlet printed and claimed to be
Princess Olive of Cumberland, the sort of a legitimate sort
(20:13):
of illegitimate, illegitimate daughter of the king's brother. Um. And
any time that somebody says these things confidence, they put
it down in paper, they put it down in writing,
they tell enough people, they say it with enough power,
they use the prince, people are going to start to
believe it. Yeah, and it's it's amazing. I feel like
(20:33):
there was one u one story in there. I can't
remember who, but like there was a woman who refused
to speak German unless unless a fellow queen or princess
spoken to her. Like there's such elaborate ways out of
like you know, explaining away the reason that you can't
speak a language or whatever. It's just kind of amazing.
It's also I think because people, you know, people do
(20:55):
want to believe like there's there's I think this is
part of the sort of really interesting world that um
that royalty and habits that because it feels so special
to people around you feel special by being connected to you.
So if you know that that and of itself is
enough for people to want to support your idea and
to support you in your claim, and you know, so
(21:17):
it becomes this kind of self perpetuating thing. I mean,
it feels you know, royalty still feels special. So I
I want to get back to some of the seedier
sides of being a princess and h and can you
tell us a little bit about Charlotte of Prussia who
threw a notorious party. Oh yeah, she's one of my
(21:39):
favorites too, because I think she's the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Right,
so who you know, we think of Queen Victoria as
um Victorian. Yeah, I mean, just you know, everything about
Victoria in the Victorian era is buttoned up in prim
and proper. But in eight Charlotte of Prussia, um chain
(22:01):
smoking Princess Victoria Elizabeth August Charlotte, granddaughter in Queen Victoria,
the daughter of the Prussian rulers, the younger sister of
Kaiser Vilham, the second um through a sex party at
a hunting lodge in the woods, and evidently dozens of
aristocrats showed up. It was you know, it was drinking
(22:24):
and dancing and sex and lots of things going on.
And the only reason that people found out about this
was that there was someone in the party that night
who leaked the story and started to blackmail the other
people who were there, and they could describe in detail
some of the naughty things that everybody who was up to.
(22:47):
And it came out that um that Charlotte was the
one who had thrown the party, and she had a
reputation for being snobby and for being rude. Um. She
did not have an academic mindset, so to speaking. Um,
she was a flirt, you know. So so there was
(23:07):
there's not a lot going for him, and this was
all coming from her own mother too, which is not
very nice. Yeah. Um, And so you know, after the
sex party happened, there was this this massive blackmail scandal
that just rocked the cord and and um and became
you know, a really really really big scandal. There was
(23:27):
a police investigation that lasted years, and eventually it came
out that it was the kaiser's brother in law and
his French mistress who were behind the black mail of
the sexy aristocratic swinger party. But even by that time,
you know, Charlotte's reputation was already in treads. It wasn't
(23:50):
gonna it wasn't going anywhere good. You know, there's one
other scandal I wanted to ask you about as well,
But before we get to that, let's take a quick break,
(24:10):
all right, Linda. So we were talking about scandals before,
and actually there's another one I've been wanting to ask
you about about Princess Margaret, you know, the princess who
may have actually caused the bank robbery. Can can you
tell us a little bit about that? Yeah? Okay, So
if anybody's seen the movie The Bank Job. I think
it came out in I want to say two thousand
and eight. It's the Jason stith In movie, so you'll
(24:31):
be you'll be familiar with the story from that. But
but it is based on a real thing that happened.
So um in a gang of thieves dug into the
safety deposit fault box fault at Lloyd's Bank here in London.
It was around Baker Street and Marlabum so Sherlock Holmes
(24:55):
area by the way, um and made off with huge
amounts of money, I mean untold amounts of money, because
you know, people put things in safety deposit boxes that
they don't necessarily want people other people to know about.
And eventually the men were caught. Um four men were
(25:16):
arrested in jailed for the crime, but the mastermind behind
the whole thing was never actually arrested. The thing that
was weird about this, and the thing that got people talking,
was that um, four days after the the incident, four
days after the brobbery itself, the newspapers stopped talking about it,
(25:37):
and I mean the British newspapers still stopped talking about
anything unless it's you know, completely dead buried in the ground.
So what people started to say was that the authorities
had put a d notice basically a gag order, preventing
the media from talking about what might have happened in
because on the theory that the whole heist was actually
(25:59):
set up by m I five to steal compromising photographs
of Princess Margaret. It was supposedly photos of our having
a threesome, quite possibly with a gangster called John Binden.
Nobody really knew. But I mean, even even without the
whole big job thing, you know, Margaret's life was kind
of both tragic and also scandalous, and also sort of
(26:23):
evocative of the changes that were rocking the British monarchy
at the time, um, changing social barris, all those things.
You know. I think it's really worth noting that Margaret
was prevented from marrying the first person that she loved,
marrying the man that she wanted to marry because he
was divorced and at the time, the church, you know,
(26:47):
the Queen is the head of the church here in
this country, the church could not allow her to marry
someone who had been divorced. So it's really worth noting
that Prince Harry is marrying someone who is divorced. It's
at least significant to show in just two generations how
much things have changed from what it was like in
the nineteen seventies and before and to what it's like now. Right, Linda, So,
(27:12):
what do you want people to come away with when
when reading about these princesses in your book? I think
the biggest thing that I want people to realize is
that underneath the title of princess there's a person, a real, living,
breathing or formally breathing human being, who made good decisions
and made bad decisions, who had feelings and sometimes loved
(27:36):
the wrong people, sometimes did the right thing, sometimes did
the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the right
thing for the wrong reasons. That these were humans. And
I think the most important thing is that, you know,
there are so many princesses in this book, right, I mean,
I I really was just jamming them in because there
are so many women whose stories are not being told,
(27:59):
and I want people to see this book as an
invitation to find out more about those women. Yeah, and
and there's so many that we didn't get to today.
I mean, there's a great story of a punk princess
or you know, the Mafia Princess Lucretia. It was such
a fascinating story. You know she she wore a hollow
ring full of poison that she could pour into somebody's
drink at any time. Well, I'm gonna go with the
(28:23):
hollow ring story. But there's so many and I hope
our listeners will all check out the book Princesses Behaving Badly,
real stories from history without the fairy tale endings. But Linda,
thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you guys
so much for having me on. Thanks again for listening.
(28:50):
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a good review for us. Do we do we forget Jason?
Jason who
Guess what, Mango, what that will? So you know how
tons of kids want to be princesses, right like there's
Sophia the First and Disney movies. I know, you know,
my my, my daughter, four year old Ruby actually wants
none of that. She wants to be a professional golfer,
she says right now. She's also been telling people she
wants to be a professional t ball player. And uh
(00:20):
and when she does ballet, it's honestly like less delicate
and more aggressive than any stylent ballet you've ever seen before.
Oh I love that, and I love Ruby's ideas. And
you know what, I actually believe her if she wants
to be a professional golfer, I believe she will be
a professional golfer. So though, but anyway, I'm glad Ruby's
got her own ideas. You know. The funny thing about
(00:40):
history is that people have always looked up to princesses
and you know, tried to imitate their style. And one
really strange version of this was the Alexandra Limp. Have
you heard about this? So? So the limp is named
for the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Now, initially she had
a scar on her next so she started wearing a
choker to conceal it, and immediately all the fashionable women
(01:02):
in society did the same thing, and overnight chokers became
all the rage, which I guess makes a certain type
of sense. We see this kind of thing happened. But
but then when Alexandra had a bout of rheumatic fever
that left her with this pronounced limp, so people actually
started trying to imitate that too, and and they weren't
being ironic with this, It just fascinating to read about.
(01:24):
So they purposely started wearing mismatch shoes to imitate her walk,
and then shoemakers even got in on the act. They
started selling these one tall heeled shoe and one low
shoe as a pair, so that you could get a
little bit more of that natural Alexandra limp. I'm not kidding.
That's ridiculous. How long did this last for? I think
it was maybe a season or two, And you know,
(01:46):
most commoners thought that high society folk looked like idiots.
But the BBC reports that there was a fashion journal
that called for an immediate end to the trend a
year or two after it started. I think instead they
suggested quote. The skirt of the season, we are informed,
is to clean closely round the feet in consequence, whereof
ladies will be obliged to walk because if their feet
(02:06):
were tied together. Which doesn't sound like much of an improvement, No,
it definitely isn't, but it does show society's obsession with princesses,
or at least a certain kind of princess, and today's
show is all about breaking that stereotype. So we're gonna
be talking about princesses behaving badly, warriors, schemers, Charlatan's and
(02:27):
a whole lot more. So let's dive in. Hey, their
(02:51):
podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson
and as always I'm joined by my good friend man
Guesha Ticketer and sitting behind that soundproof glass wearing a
shirt that just says inconceivable, which is a nice Princess
Bride reference from Tristan over there. That's our friend and
producer Tristan McNeil. Now, speaking of Princess Bride, do you
know how that book was written? Mango, I don't so.
(03:12):
The author, William Goldman, he wanted to write a book
for his daughters and they were four and seven years old,
I think at the time, and so he just asked him, like,
what should it be about? And one set of princess
and the other one said a bride, And so that's
how I got his title. That's pretty fun, and it's
perfect for today's show because it isn't really a safew
princess story, right, yeah, I mean it's it's definitely one
(03:33):
of my favorites, but but we should jump in. So
today on the program, we've got an old friend and
one of our favorite writers from our Mental Floss days,
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. Now, she wrote a book called Princesses
Behaving Badly, Real stories from history without the fairy tale endings,
and we can't wait to ask her all about it.
So welcome to the show, Linda, Hi, thank you so
(03:53):
much for having me on. Why don't we start with
one of my favorite badass princesses from this lot, who's
uh could have? Lunit think? I don't know how you
pronounced it. Could you tell us a little bit about her? So?
She was a Mongolian princess. She was um, she was
a relative of Genghis Khan. She was a great great
granddaughter of Genghis Khan. She was the only girl in
a family of fourteen boys, and she was impressive. I
(04:18):
mean she you know, Marco Polo, who's the you know,
the famous Venetian traveler and chronicler. Um, he saw her
in action, and one of the things that she was
particularly good at, she was you know, she was she
was an archer and an excellent horsewoman, and those were
things that were fairly common to Mongolian courship culture at
the time, even among women. But she was an amazing wrestler.
(04:41):
She could not be beaten. And supposedly, by the time
Marco Polo saw her, she had amassed a herd at
like ten thousand horses, because the common thing to do
was to bet horses on the outcome of this match,
and so she would just always win and she and
it so by the time that Marco Polo finds her, um,
(05:03):
the rumors got around and that she refused to marry
anyone who couldn't beat her on the wrestling mat. And
so at that point she was still unmarried, and that
was kind of getting a little bit sticky, a little
complicated for her family. Um. But from what the historical
record seems to show she never was beaten, and she
eventually just chose to marry someone even though they could
(05:23):
beat her on the wrestling that so and and Linda.
Part part of the amazing thing about her dominance in
wrestling is it actually affected the clothes that athletes were, right. So, yeah,
supposedly now even in today, when Mongolian men wrestle, they
wear this kind of long sleeved best that's open in
the front to show their opponents that they don't have rest.
(05:45):
And supposedly it's men as a tribute to the female
wrestler who was never defeated. Yeah, that's pretty great. And
you know, obviously kulun Is is certainly one of our
favorites from the book. I mean, do you have a
favorite warrior princess? I know there's so many to choose from,
but I'm I'm curious of in doing the research for
the book, that was one that just really stuck out
to you. One of my absolute favorites is Outfield, the
(06:08):
Pirate Princess. So she's there isn't a lot of great
evidence that she actually existed, but I just love her story. Um,
she was a she was a princess of the fifth
century and daughter of a of a Goth king. So
this is all sort of out of the like you know,
icy cold Scandinavian North, and she's certainly in the tradition
(06:30):
of the kind of shield maiden warrior Princess model Um,
and her story starts a little bit funny because she's
she is meant to be so beautiful that she was
forced by her family to cover her face lest she
provoked the men around her into just you know, connections
of lust or whatever they thought was right to happen. Um.
(06:52):
And she was given by her father, the king. She
was given a viper and a snake to rear Um,
wishing to defend her chastity by the protection of these
reptiles when they came to grow up. So basically she
has these two deadly reptiles as her guard animals Um,
and the idea was that, you know, if somebody could
(07:15):
get through that, then then maybe he could be worthy
of her Um. And eventually someone dead and this is
the part that kind of cracks me up because the
guy who eventually was able to kill both of the
snakes and make it alive to alfhild Um was named
Alf so if they got married, they would have been
(07:37):
Alf and Elf Hills. Um. But where this story starts
to kind of beer away from the whole sort of
you know, princess and a castle rescued by the handsome
prince thing is that she was given the decision once
once he made it through killed pets. Um, she give
a decision do you actually want to marry him or not?
(07:58):
And she actually chose not to and instead became a
pirate with a crew of lady pirates with her, and
they tore up and down the Baltic Sea around the coast,
and she amassed a flotilla and she basically came became
like a pirate admiral, and um, I just I just
(08:19):
loved this idea of her sort of you know, being
like I could get married or I could be a pirate,
and that's just way more fun. And so you know,
this is also kind of one of the like ancient
meat cute stories because Alf, of course has never forgotten
about this, this beautiful maiden who um, you know, was
so chased and so modest and yet spurned his advances
(08:41):
and decided to become a pirate take to the sea
that he's been following her. He's been trying to find her,
and eventually he comes across this this you know, this
flotilla of of pirate ships, of kind of Viking pirate ships, right,
and in his head he's thinking like, right, nothing will
keep me from my love. I know, I'm so close
to her. I'm going to find her. It's gonna be great,
it's gonna be awesome. I just gotta get to these
(09:03):
pirates first. So they're fighting, he's fighting on the deck.
He's found the pirates. Fun he accidentally knocks off one
of the pirates helmet and it's herd and so, you know,
and then and then the story gets a little bit
like a little bit disappointing because oh, they got married,
and and not long after that Elf got on her
(09:24):
a son. So it's, you know, that's a little bit disappointing.
But the start of the story is is really really exciting,
and the fact that she was able to kind of
pursue her own destiny in a way that was was
different certainly to other women and was kind of contrary
to that that what would later become an established fairytale story.
(09:45):
I think it's really compelling and kind of fun, and
I think I'm going to choose to believe that that
was true. Let's just go with this as a as
a real story. I want to believe that she's a
real person. I mean, the story came out like six
hundred years after this was meant to have and in
a sort of you know, history that also included it
was like a history of the Danes that also included
(10:06):
like giants and dragons and other things that we're probably
not true. So one of the things we've been fascinated
in recent culture is like watching things like down Abbey
or even like Prince Harry's engagement where these like commoners
(10:28):
sort of marry in and uh. And I was curious
about the story that you tell about Clara Ward, who's
I guess hails from Detroit. Can you tell us a
little bit about her? Yeah, Clara Ward was, I mean
her her story is very very much in line with
a lot of what was happening at the end of
the nineteenth century. Essentially, Europe was a Europe was the
(10:51):
tough place to be. Um the sort of the national
borders were changing all the time. Um, the fortunes of
the European aristocrats were tumbling, and at the same time
America was ascending in a big way, and particularly um
American wealth was was becoming very very attractive, and so
(11:13):
you saw a lot of these marriages between European aristocrats
and American heiresses, and essentially the heiresses were bringing the
money and the aristocrats were bringing the sort of you know,
the titles, yeah, and the social standing and and all
of that. That seemed sort of very very important then.
(11:34):
And Clara Ward, who was the daughter of an American industrialist,
she came from Detroit. She her her mother seems to
have really wanted that life for her, and starting when
she was in her teens, had her educated in London,
in Italy and France. And the sort of most notable
(11:54):
thing about those times was that Clara Ward got kicked
out of every single school she went to, was just
scribed as sort of far too wild to ever fit
in into this kind of European society. But she eventually
did marry. Um. She was very young, she was, you know,
in her teens still when she married the Prince Caraman
de Chimayum she was a Belgian prince, and they stayed together.
(12:19):
Sort of it wasn't a good match. I mean, as
as much as you can sort of you know, assume
from a lot of these these marriages of wealth and title.
People weren't always in it for love. Everything weren't in
it for love. So Clara was seventeen years old when
she met Prince Joseph Dick Caraman Chimay. He was the
(12:40):
son of the Belgian foreign affairs minister. He was in
serious debt, but of course he had this this title,
and they got married in Paris in the eighteen ninety
Her dress costs like like ten thousand dollars, I mean,
which is just an insane amount of money in you know,
in eighteen ninety. Um. Once they were married, they traveled
(13:01):
to all of the sort of European hot spots. They
were in the Belgian court, and they went to the Riviera,
the Paris, went all over the place, and she you know,
had two children this time. But it was clear from
the reports that she was not happy, um, and that
her relationship with her husband, which had you know, from
(13:23):
the beginning not been great, was getting worse, and that
she was potentially cheating on him and he didn't really
care enough to stop her. Um. Things really came to
the head when she was in the Belgian court. And
evidently she says that King Leopold the Second showed so
much attention to her too, that she was shunned by
(13:44):
the rest of the court and became a sort of
social pariah. And I think at that point really kind
of crystallized her dislike of the European aristocratic circles that
she was traveling in. So eventually, um there, Now, by
the time they get to Paris, things are really you know,
we've we've set the stage for a break between her
and her husband, and sort of one of the first
(14:06):
kind of best opportunities she takes it. And that opportunity
happened to be a Hungarian gypsy violinist called Rigo Jancy.
It's November eighteen ninety six. She's at a cafe, she
sees him playing his violin. They smile at each other,
and then ten days later she runs away with him.
And two months after that she's divorced from her husband
(14:27):
and separated from her children and also forced to pay
him alimony for the rest of her life. She's now free, right,
so this this like you can imagine too, I mean,
this must have been this was incredibly scandalous. At the time.
The courtroom for her divorce trial was packed. She didn't
actually show up. All of her statements were actually went
out by her lawyers. But she was just she was
(14:50):
just done with it. And she even said, you know,
she said, I wanted to be free. I am done
with it. I don't think And she says later on
too that that American went and could not fit into
this kind of lifestyle, that it's too stifling, that it's
too petty, and and she just hated it. But from
(15:10):
that point on she lived her life to the fullest.
I mean, she was you know, the she was painted
by Vito loose law track. She was a star of
Bellapoc friends. She you know, she posed in in these
like skin tight leotard things with strange things on her head,
(15:31):
had her pictures taken. She showed her ankles, I mean,
she was having She she divorced Rigo Gout was involved
with someone else, got married again who I think he
was the handsomest man in Naples. I think that was
his sort of you know, claimed the fame. And then
they divorced and she married somebody else, and and it
(15:53):
sort of you see that her you know, interest in
her life is perpetual all the way up until the end.
But details and actual facts about it are pretty slim
on the ground. You don't really get a lot of great,
great information about and reliable information about what happens to
her after all these subsequent divorces. But um, she ended
(16:13):
up I mean sadly. You know, she she died really young.
She was only forty three. She died of pneumonia. And
at the time, there were all these rumors that she
was penniless, that she was completely cut off from her family,
that you know, she had no friends and all these things.
And while she may have been very much cut off
(16:34):
from society, she wasn't penniless by any means. Um. She
was certainly cut off from her children, but she hadn't
been completely disowned. And you know, in the end, all
of her obituaries just remembered her as this sort of
you know, bright spark that blew out too quickly. And yeah,
(16:54):
I mean you wrote about how she'd been at a
convent and she shocked the nuns at the convent, like
the waiter and a station manager, and I mean, she
has such a remarkable life, and I think it's also
kind of difficult, Like all the stuff that she's doing
is you know, the kinds of things that if if
we're to happen to a modern celebrity celebrity now, you know,
(17:16):
it would be equally as interesting. But this is all
happening at the turn of the century. This is this
is the eighteen nineties to the nineteen tents. I mean,
she died in nineteen sixteen, you know, so this is
all like like she is she is. You know, she
is a celebrity in the vein of celebrities now, but
without the kind of machinery around promoting that celebrity. So
(17:37):
if there's always kind of wonderful gossip columns and stuff
that you read. And the Library of Congress, by the way,
is a treasure trope and has everything. And I found
out a lot from all the newspapers that they had
their um But you know, you can see the beginnings
of the steeds of the kinds of celebrities that we
have now. And you know, her claimed aime was that
(17:58):
she had a lot of money and she did some
dosy things with it. She feels very modern in that regard,
But I also just appreciate that she lived the life
that she wanted to lead and wasn't going to be
put into the boxes that her family wanted her to
be in, or the European Court wanted her to be in,
and or even you know, the public wanted her to
(18:18):
be in. She she, she did her and good honor.
We have several more fascinating lives that we want to
ask you about, but before we do that, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're
(18:44):
talking to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, the author of Princesses Behaving Badly. Now, Linda,
before we get back to some of the other specific princesses,
I did appreciate, you know, so many of the side
stories and sidebars and other guides that you had in
the book, and one of these was a guide to
faking prince's Hood. And I was, curiously, can you tell
us some of the better strategies for pretending you're a
(19:06):
royal if you're not actually a royal? Uh? Well, there
are some fantastic examples of people doing that, and my
favorite at Christmas Princess Cariboo. Who's in it? But um,
it seems like the best way to pretend that you're
royal when you're not is to just put your all
into it and and stay it with confidence. It's sort
(19:28):
of like people will believe you more if you just
say it really loudly. Princess all of the Cumberland. She
her story. This was This was in the early eight hundreds,
right around the time in England when the press was
becoming really really powerful and there were a lot of
places where you could get pamphlets printed. And these pamphlets
(19:50):
were probably they're just everywhere, like pretty much every it was.
It's basically the same thing as having something self published.
Now and you said, you will see tons of them
where you know, the George Wilson, the Black Heath Pedestrian,
a man who's walked a thousand miles, like, he gets
his pamphlet printed and tells his story, it sells it.
So she had her pamphlet printed and claimed to be
Princess Olive of Cumberland, the sort of a legitimate sort
(20:13):
of illegitimate, illegitimate daughter of the king's brother. Um. And
any time that somebody says these things confidence, they put
it down in paper, they put it down in writing,
they tell enough people, they say it with enough power,
they use the prince, people are going to start to
believe it. Yeah, and it's it's amazing. I feel like
(20:33):
there was one u one story in there. I can't
remember who, but like there was a woman who refused
to speak German unless unless a fellow queen or princess
spoken to her. Like there's such elaborate ways out of
like you know, explaining away the reason that you can't
speak a language or whatever. It's just kind of amazing.
It's also I think because people, you know, people do
(20:55):
want to believe like there's there's I think this is
part of the sort of really interesting world that um
that royalty and habits that because it feels so special
to people around you feel special by being connected to you.
So if you know that that and of itself is
enough for people to want to support your idea and
to support you in your claim, and you know, so
(21:17):
it becomes this kind of self perpetuating thing. I mean,
it feels you know, royalty still feels special. So I
I want to get back to some of the seedier
sides of being a princess and h and can you
tell us a little bit about Charlotte of Prussia who
threw a notorious party. Oh yeah, she's one of my
(21:39):
favorites too, because I think she's the granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Right,
so who you know, we think of Queen Victoria as
um Victorian. Yeah, I mean, just you know, everything about
Victoria in the Victorian era is buttoned up in prim
and proper. But in eight Charlotte of Prussia, um chain
(22:01):
smoking Princess Victoria Elizabeth August Charlotte, granddaughter in Queen Victoria,
the daughter of the Prussian rulers, the younger sister of
Kaiser Vilham, the second um through a sex party at
a hunting lodge in the woods, and evidently dozens of
aristocrats showed up. It was you know, it was drinking
(22:24):
and dancing and sex and lots of things going on.
And the only reason that people found out about this
was that there was someone in the party that night
who leaked the story and started to blackmail the other
people who were there, and they could describe in detail
some of the naughty things that everybody who was up to.
(22:47):
And it came out that um that Charlotte was the
one who had thrown the party, and she had a
reputation for being snobby and for being rude. Um. She
did not have an academic mindset, so to speaking. Um,
she was a flirt, you know. So so there was
(23:07):
there's not a lot going for him, and this was
all coming from her own mother too, which is not
very nice. Yeah. Um, And so you know, after the
sex party happened, there was this this massive blackmail scandal
that just rocked the cord and and um and became
you know, a really really really big scandal. There was
(23:27):
a police investigation that lasted years, and eventually it came
out that it was the kaiser's brother in law and
his French mistress who were behind the black mail of
the sexy aristocratic swinger party. But even by that time,
you know, Charlotte's reputation was already in treads. It wasn't
(23:50):
gonna it wasn't going anywhere good. You know, there's one
other scandal I wanted to ask you about as well,
But before we get to that, let's take a quick break,
(24:10):
all right, Linda. So we were talking about scandals before,
and actually there's another one I've been wanting to ask
you about about Princess Margaret, you know, the princess who
may have actually caused the bank robbery. Can can you
tell us a little bit about that? Yeah? Okay, So
if anybody's seen the movie The Bank Job. I think
it came out in I want to say two thousand
and eight. It's the Jason stith In movie, so you'll
(24:31):
be you'll be familiar with the story from that. But
but it is based on a real thing that happened.
So um in a gang of thieves dug into the
safety deposit fault box fault at Lloyd's Bank here in London.
It was around Baker Street and Marlabum so Sherlock Holmes
(24:55):
area by the way, um and made off with huge
amounts of money, I mean untold amounts of money, because
you know, people put things in safety deposit boxes that
they don't necessarily want people other people to know about.
And eventually the men were caught. Um four men were
(25:16):
arrested in jailed for the crime, but the mastermind behind
the whole thing was never actually arrested. The thing that
was weird about this, and the thing that got people talking,
was that um, four days after the the incident, four
days after the brobbery itself, the newspapers stopped talking about it,
(25:37):
and I mean the British newspapers still stopped talking about
anything unless it's you know, completely dead buried in the ground.
So what people started to say was that the authorities
had put a d notice basically a gag order, preventing
the media from talking about what might have happened in
because on the theory that the whole heist was actually
(25:59):
set up by m I five to steal compromising photographs
of Princess Margaret. It was supposedly photos of our having
a threesome, quite possibly with a gangster called John Binden.
Nobody really knew. But I mean, even even without the
whole big job thing, you know, Margaret's life was kind
of both tragic and also scandalous, and also sort of
(26:23):
evocative of the changes that were rocking the British monarchy
at the time, um, changing social barris, all those things.
You know. I think it's really worth noting that Margaret
was prevented from marrying the first person that she loved,
marrying the man that she wanted to marry because he
was divorced and at the time, the church, you know,
(26:47):
the Queen is the head of the church here in
this country, the church could not allow her to marry
someone who had been divorced. So it's really worth noting
that Prince Harry is marrying someone who is divorced. It's
at least significant to show in just two generations how
much things have changed from what it was like in
the nineteen seventies and before and to what it's like now. Right, Linda, So,
(27:12):
what do you want people to come away with when
when reading about these princesses in your book? I think
the biggest thing that I want people to realize is
that underneath the title of princess there's a person, a real, living,
breathing or formally breathing human being, who made good decisions
and made bad decisions, who had feelings and sometimes loved
(27:36):
the wrong people, sometimes did the right thing, sometimes did
the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the right
thing for the wrong reasons. That these were humans. And
I think the most important thing is that, you know,
there are so many princesses in this book, right, I mean,
I I really was just jamming them in because there
are so many women whose stories are not being told,
(27:59):
and I want people to see this book as an
invitation to find out more about those women. Yeah, and
and there's so many that we didn't get to today.
I mean, there's a great story of a punk princess
or you know, the Mafia Princess Lucretia. It was such
a fascinating story. You know she she wore a hollow
ring full of poison that she could pour into somebody's
drink at any time. Well, I'm gonna go with the
(28:23):
hollow ring story. But there's so many and I hope
our listeners will all check out the book Princesses Behaving Badly,
real stories from history without the fairy tale endings. But Linda,
thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you guys
so much for having me on. Thanks again for listening.
(28:50):
Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works
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(29:13):
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