Years Ago Today
The cultural legacy of three significant anniversaries provides nostalgic comfort
Milestones that matter
70 YEARS OF ANNE THE PRINCESS ROYAL
IN THIS SPRING’S season of loss and reckoning, an unlikely royal celebrity emerged. Or, rather, re-emerged: stalwart, no-nonsense – a self-described “fuddy-duddy” – is having a moment. After a decade during which we were all consumed by the shiny next-generation stars of the Firm, it is the sturdy-and-steady values of this older member of the Royal Family who feels most relevant again.
As Anne approaches her milestone 70th birthday on Aug. 15, there is newfound appreciation for the Queen’s second child and only daughter. It is her anachronistic qualities – duty, thrift and respect leavened by her wit and outspokenness – that make Anne appealing as we seek comfort in the tried and the true.
In her Vanity Fair cover star moment this past April, the biggest headlines from the (very rare) interview with Anne came in regards to how younger royals approach the work. What she said was sensible: “Please do not reinvent that particular wheel. We’ve been there, done that. Some of these things don’t work. You may need to go back to basics.”
Interest in Anne has been building since her alter ego, played with sass by actress Erin Doherty, hit Netflix screens in season 3 of The Crown last November. The smirking Anne of the ’60s and ’70s we met that season – mucking about in a love quadrangle involving Andrew ParkerBowles, the then-Camilla Shand and her brother Charles – was notable for her fresh-faced beauty, her verve and her cool head. Not for TV
Anne the downcast sighs and emotional sop of her love-struck brother: she cast off Parker-Bowles with nary a glance in the rear view of her convertible, instead jamming to David Bowie and wearing groovy ’70s outfits.
Now, of course, The Crown is a heightened and fictionalized take on history – and it skipped over the
most character-revealing hour of real life: the atttempted kidnapping of Anne in 1974, when that same composure saved her and then-husband Capt. Mark Phillips. She simply refused to get out of her Rolls Royce, responding with the nowlegendary line “Bloody likely” to an assailant who was waving a gun in her face at the time.
Just as Prince Charles’s stodgy image has shifted – he used to be derided as batty for talking to his plants – now he is seen as the OG of organic farming. Similarly, Anne, who was photographed in her prime by Norman Parkinson, is now the patron saint of sustainable and local fashion, re-wearing her favourites faithfully, over nearly five decades. That she has kept her figure intact since her 20s showcases her personal discipline. She has stuck, like the Queen, to a signature hairstyle, a helmet-headed updo.
Also like her mother, horses remain Anne’s passion, and she keeps breeding stables at her home of Gatcombe Park, where she rides daily and teaches her four granddaughters, who also live on the estate. As Prince Philip famously said of his daughter, whom he also nicknamed Deadpan Anne: “If it doesn’t fart or eat hay, then she isn’t interested.”
There is still a touch of the royal rebel in Anne. Her decision not to accept titles for her two children seems prescient, for Zara and Peter have largely led private, far less encumbered lives than their HRH cousins. Anne is the only royal (thus far) with a criminal record (for an incident involving her dog biting a child, to which she pleaded guilty). She is a notable lead foot, having received driving bans for speeding (a trait and fate Zara appears to have inherited). Then there were the back-to-back viral moments last December during the reception for U.S. President Donald Trump at
Buckingham Palace, where Anne was seen as naughty: first, a misconstrued shrug to her mother in the receiving line perceived as a snub at Trump’s expense and, later, in a moment when she was filmed laughing with world leaders including Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson who were caught on a hot mic deriding Trump.
Known for her quick, acerbic wit and self-deprecation – the former inherited from her father Prince Philip – she is also careful with a dollar, like her mother. She certainly has her mother’s devotion to duty: Anne is often awarded the unofficial title of “hardest working” royal. She typically covers off 500-plus
IT WAS THE year the Rubik’s Cube was born. CNN, too. John Lennon was gunned down in front of The Dakota in New York City, John McEnroe squared off against Bjorn Borg at Wimbledon and Ronald Reagan coasted to a swift win in his bid for the Oval Office.
On the tube, though, in 1980, the thing that permeated the loudest were those three trite words: who shot J.R.? annual engagements, often four or five a day. She emphatically has no plans to retire.
In terms of work, Princess Anne is the exact opposite of a showboat. She gets it done, quietly and thoroughly and without expectation of recognition or gain. In her unprecedented speech during the early days of lockdown, the Queen evoked the romantic spirit of wartime sacrifice. In that vein, Princess Anne feels fresh this year because she has always kept calm and carried on. —Leanne Delap
The cliffhanger of cliffhangers – one that changed TV and invented the idea of things going viral long before we talked about things going viral – it represented a phenom birthed by the popular nighttime soap opera, Dallas, courtesy of its reigning rogue, J.R. Ewing. Shot twice by an unknown perpetrator right outside his office at the end of its third season – and with J.R. having more enemies than there are days in a week – his was a near
death that stirred a frenzy so rife that the show made the cover of Time magazine that summer.
Not only that but it even became a talking point in the aforementioned presidential race as the months whirred on and also led to guessing games afoot as far as Buckingham Palace.
“I won’t ask you,” quipped the 80-year-old Queen Mother, with characteristic royal tact when, at a gala that year, she came face to face with actor Larry Hagman, who played the iconic villain, J.R., as the mystery deepened.
“I couldn’t tell you anyway – not even you, ma’am,” Hagman came back with a raffish smile, as all the papers crowed later.
Yes, the show would run a total of 14 years over the stretch of 356 episodes on CBS (to be rebooted for a short time later on TNT), but it was the white-hot glare of those months that seared it into foreverterritory. Moreover, before the assailant would come to be finally revealed in November of that year when the show returned in an ep dubbed Who Done It? (40-yearold spoiler: it was his whack-job sister-in-law Kristin, played by Mary Crosby, daughter of Bing!!) to a whopping viewership of 83 million people – way bigger than any Superbowl these days – its whole cast had essentially become hostages to the attention.
“That was the longest summer of my life,” Linda Gray, who played J.R.’s long-suffering wife, shared many years later. “I would go to the market [and] every two feet, as I was pushing the cart, people would say, ‘Who shot J.R.?’”
Where, then, does it all look from the prism of precisely 40 years later? For one, it is interesting the way the catchphrase itself has wormed its way into Americana to such an extent that it remains one of the most famed ad catchphrases of all time – Who Shot J.R.? sitting pretty within the ranks of Where’s the Beef? (Wendy’s), Because You’re Worth It (L’Oréal), Just Do It (Nike) and Good to the Last Drop (Maxwell House Coffee).
More presciently, looking at it from the vantage point of our own era of Peak TV (where content really does seem to be infinite), it is worth remembering how, until Dallas, episodes of prime-time dramas tended to be selfcontained, rather than strung into continuing stories for maximum emotional investment. Indeed, Dallas itself started that way before it leapt into a serialized format in its second season – something that would be quickly aped at the time, from its own spin-off, Knots Landing, to its chief soap rival Dynasty to other popular dramas of the ’80s and ’90s like Falcon Crest.
But in a way, Dallas never stopped influencing, its genetic material felt everywhere from shows like Melrose Place, Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal to those like Lost, Gossip Girl and House of Cards. Sue Ellen, arguably, was both the original Desperate Housewife, as well as the first Real Housewife. In our never-wavering fascination with the filthy rich and the clans behind them, even a recent show like Succession owes a debt to Dallas.
Game of Thrones? Long before imaginations wandered to the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, our heads were in Southfork, following the larger-than-life characters associated with the Ewing Oil empire. Cue the power back-stabbings, poisonous love triangles, and families torn asunder.
On a socio-political graph line, though, Dallas’s legacy can be summed up by the fact that it harkens back to a time when one broadcast TV show could – and did – appeal to every age group and demographic at once – and when there was even such a thing as a consensus culture. Contrary to today when “appointment TV” is nearly a foreign concept – and the amplification of cable channels and streaming networks has led to a fragmentation of viewer tastes and innumerable orbits of fanship – it represents an era when people even watched the same few newscasts! Rather than, yes, being siloed into different echo chambers (think Fox News) and their bespoke Twitter feeds.
Who shot J.R? Possibly the question should be: who killed the mainstream? —Shinan Govani
IT SEEMS FITTING that this year should mark the 25th anniversary of Jagged Little Pill, an album that delivered Alanis Morissette’s unique blend of vulnerability, angst and blistering vocal pulses to the masses while becoming emblematic of a generation of women unafraid to speak their minds. Indeed, one of its most wellknown singles, “Ironic,” could easily be the theme song of 2020, a year full of unprecedented twists, turns and endless proverbial rain – more like a deluge – on thousands of wedding days.
When Morissette’s breakthrough album was released in June of 1995, she wasn’t the first bad bitch on the mic or the most angsty, either. The early ’90s were full of edgy frontwomen who would gladly go toe to toe with the men of alt rock – Courtney Love, Shirley Manson and Liz Phair among them. But Morissette, 21 at the time and with a vocal register that ebbed from plaintive to fiery to a little bit of a yodel, resonated with the mainstream music audience. Jagged Little Pill sold 33 million copies, won five Grammys (including album of the year) and became an entrée for blossoming feminists to express their feelings in a different way than allowed by fellow chart toppers, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion.
Cue the album’s debut single, “You Oughta Know,” a ragey breakup anthem written about Dave Coulier – a.k.a. Uncle Joey from Full House (this never ceases to amaze) – with a reference to getting busy in a movie theatre in the first verse. Sure, her heart was broken but, more importantly, she asked what every lovelorn woman really wants to know, “Are you thinking of me when you f**k her?” overtop throbbing bass (Flea and Dave Navarro from the Red Hot Chili Peppers were recruited to play bass and guitar on the track). In the video, she wanders the desert, wearing a black negligee with a long, tangle gled mop of hair that’s ceremoniously w whipped about in grunge fashion.
B Before Jagged Little Pill, the Ot Ottawa native was known i n Ca Canada for two dance-pop albums an and warming up for Vanilla Ice. Mo Morissette had just moved to L.A. aft after being dropped by her label for wa wanting to pivot from her past. She wa was connected to Glen Ballard, a son songwriter and producer who had pre previously worked with the likes of Wi Wilson Phillips, and the two holed up in Encino, Calif., during the summe mer of 1994 (incredibly, during the inf infamous O.J. Simpson car chase a few blocks away) to produce an albu bum subsequently picked up by Ma Madonna’s record label, Maverick. Som Some songs, like “Hand in My Poc Pocket,” were perfected in a few days. Oth Others, like “Ironic,” reflect a hastines ness that has baited critics for decade ades. “Isn’t It Ironic? Probably Not” wa was the headline on a 2008 New York Times Tim skewering of the song, which it noted was full of coincidence and bad luck, rather than actual irony. (“Honestly, I thought 10 people would hear that song. I didn’t think the whole planet would be putting it under such scrutiny so I wasn’t really being precious about it,” Morissette told HuffPost in 2014.)
But syntax has meant little to the legacy of Jagged Little Pill, an album that recently made its way to the stage in a musical scripted by Diablo Cody. In the years since her debut, Morissette has been credited with influencing the careers of Avril Lavigne, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson. You can add Beyoncé to that list, too, after she blended “You Oughta Know” into her performance of “If I Were a Boy” at the 2010 Grammys. The connective tissue between these two great artists – a fearless ability to put it all out on the table – speaks to the timelessness of courage. We need it now more than ever. —Randi Bergman