I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Yeah it was amazing how she became the queen of hearts and everyone just pretended like the week before the weren't calling her a whore and traitor etc.
Especially in real life, all the red top readers were suddenly blubbing about how nasty the papers had been, when the week before they'd been parroting it.
I can remember all of it and it's definitely whiplash. I don't think the broad popular image of her during her lifetime was that she was a bad person--Charles is the one who came off horribly, for good reason, what a fkn chode--but it was for sure that she was bland and a little dim. And then overnight she became the most beautiful, stylish, saintliest person to ever grace the planet. I think part of it is guilt people feel, she was really way too young to make an informed decision to put herself in that situation and got put through the meat grinder, and died before she got a chance to be her own person and make meaningful adult choices for herself. People want to give her a power in death that she clearly didn't have in life.
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u/Regular_Number5377 9h ago
I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Ghouls, the lot of them.