Australian Author

The on-hold music at the Danish palace is something with which my researcher and I have become way too familiar. Tinny versions of classic favourites such as Fur Elise and Coloney Bogey March are bad enough during 40c local calls. If you’re paying ISD rates they become positively satanic. Particularly if the royals you’re after never pick up. (I think it’s safe to assume our calls were not important to them.)

Writing an unauthorised biography certainly has its pitfalls. But after spending the last year chasing a woman whose image control is as unyielding as her stiff royal gowns, I’m relieved to have approached the story as an outsider. After all, if Princess Mary was able to make me jump through so many hoops while I was working as a free agent, imagine the taskmistressing that would have ensued if I was contractually obliged to do her bidding. My knees (not to mention my uncontrollable urge to speak rudeness to power) would never have survived the curtseying.

When Pluto Press first approached me about writing a biography of Mary Donaldson - the former Sydney real estate accounts manager who has become Crown Princess of Denmark - I was reluctant. As a child, I was a pony-mad Tomboy whose taunting of girly girls meant I had more in common with wicked stepsisters than Cinderella types. I never fantasised about handsome princes galloping up and providing rescue in the form of marriage proposals, although if one had, I would definitely have accepted his horse.

As an adult, my interest in the Mary Donaldson story was close to zero. I think it was the saccharine nature of most of the glossy magazine coverage that put me off. That and the royal fashions. Tiaras look tops on six-year-olds and decrepit rock chicks like Courtney Love, but it’s hard to take them seriously on grown women - particularly grown Australian women. And what the hell was Mary’s weird new accent all about? Is the great Aussie drawl really so uncouth that it requires a poncy Eurofication every time one of us cleans up abroad?

Once I began digging deeper, however, I discovered that - despite the boring frocks and stultifying protocol - this was actually a story chockas with wild humour and glorious idiosyncracy. The clincher was the rediscovery of a 2000 interview I’d conducted with The Tokyo Shock Boys for a Sydney newspaper. The extreme genital prankster were discussing reactions to their shows and mentioned they’d once entertained the Queen of Denmark and her husband - the funkily titled Prince Consort.

During this infamous performance, the four Shock Boys didn’t just fart in front of the royal couple, they lit them afterwards. ‘The queen was sitting in the front row,’ Shock Boy Nambu, a chap known for his iron testicles, told me over Devonshire Tea at the posh Vaucluse House Tea Room in Sydney. ‘Danna’s naked bottom was right in her face.’ Danna, aka Buns of Steel, insisted this did not breach royal etiquette. ‘It’s only rude to fart in front of the queen if you don’t light it afterwards,’ he said with a completely straight face. ‘That way you turn it into a celebration.’

Between bouts of fiery farting, the lads celebrated the Danish royals by dragging heavy objects around with their genitals, shooting fireworks from their rectums, breaking chopsticks between their butt cheeks and expressing milk from their eyes. ‘Some of the papers said it might damage Japan’s relationship with Denmark but the queen really enjoyed it,’ Nambu said. ‘Apparently she has an artistic mind.’

The revelation that Mary’s new in-laws were the sort of royals who watched fart lighting for fun revealed that there was way more to this story than sugary clichés and fairytale stereotyping.

I was in.

For those of you who, like me, managed to tune out the bulk of the Mary coverage as it unfolded, here’s a quick bluffers’ guide. Mary Donaldson, the daughter of a secretary and a mathematics professor, was born in Hobart and studied law there before moving to the mainland to work in advertising. In Sydney during the 2000 Olympics, a friend of a friend invited her to drinks with a bunch of out-of-towners at an upmarket Sydney pick-up joint. The visitor who took Mary’s fancy was Frederik, a good-natured young chap with an attractively hairless chest who turned out to be the heir to the Danish throne.

Mary and Fred kept their long distance courtship under wraps for 14 months before being busted in spectacular fashion by the international media. That’s when Mary moved to Europe and began the excruciating task of winning over the Danish royal family and the Danish public. Fortunately her extensive experience in nice girlism paid off and, on a chilly May afternoon in 2004, 180 million television viewers worldwide watched her say ‘I do’ (actually it was more of a ‘ja’) to the handsome prince in a Danish church. Since then, she’s continued to thrill glossy magazine readers by wearing an assortment of bucket-sized hats and waving from boats, expensive cars and horse-drawn carriages. On October 15, she performed the number one requirement of the modern princess by popping out a healthy male heir in a bright pink birthing room in a Copenhagen hospital.

While there had been plenty of coverage of Mary’s satin frocks and antique bling, I realised there were lots of unanswered questions about the human side of her journey. What was it really like to leave a bog standard life in Sydney and set up camp in a European castle? Would you hyperventilate every time you had to choose the correct fork for a pickled herring entree? Would your friends accuse you of being up yourself? Would you ever wish you could just go back to trackie dakked anonymity? I was consumed with curiosity about the minutia of royal life. I wanted to know about the servants, the possibilities for privacy and how on earth Mary kept losing weight given that she was required to eat at so many 100-course banquets.

The staggering, international popularity of the woman dubbed ‘the Danish Diana’ was also intriguing. At one point during my research, I was contacted by the editor of a large German magazine who’d heard I was writing a book and wanted a feature. ‘Of course Mary Donaldson is a well known person in Germany and there have been lots of articles about her in German newspapers and magazins [sic],’ he emailed urgently, ‘but still we feel that we know nothing about the real Mary Donaldson.’

Fascinating that - in an age of democracy, feminism and Paris Hilton slut skirts - old-fashioned phenomena such as fairy princesses, royal families and monster weddings were still so potent. Mary’s story also raised huge questions about issues such as aspiration, upward mobility, celebrity, transformation, coupling up and female worth. Not to mention the royal fervour that had erupted in supposedly republican leaning Australia once one of our own throned up. I couldn’t wait to start writing.

Before that could happen, however, there was the small matter of three years of blanket media coverage to catch up on. As mentioned previously, my researcher, Jo Cohen, and I made numerous approaches to Mary’s royal minders in Denmark seeking information and interviews. After an initial ‘that shouldn’t be a problem’, the powers-that-be stopped returning our calls and left us at the mercy of the on-hold muzac. Even a request to fact-check the book was ignored.

While this was disappointing, transcripts of previous interviews made it clear that - thanks to royal media training and her naturally guarded nature - Mary was always infuriatingly cagey with the press. The truth is a slippery and multifaceted bugger, anyway. One of the frustrations of moving from fiction to biographical writing was knowing that even if there was a single objectively ‘true’ version of what happened, I might not ever spot it in a crowd of competing versions. I decided to canvass a broad spectrum of recollections and opinions and encourage readers to make up their own minds.

For six months I read everything I could find that had been written about Mary in English. This was an arduous process that involved giving up everything else in my life including sleep. I also interviewed dozens of people from Mary’s past. My favourite of these were the high school chum who remembered Mary as being like a Holden Commodore (‘boring, but does exactly what you want it to do’), the self-development queen who taught Mary catwalking, photographic posing and new age breathing in a Darlinghurst carpark (‘I thought Mary would have made a great TV journalist’) and the private investigator hired by the Danish press to go through Mary’s Sydney rubbish bins (‘you need a strong stomach but very good intelligence information comes from it’).

My other favourite interviewee was the owner of a Sydney bondage parlour who revealed that Princess Mary now outranked Diana as the favoured muse for her straight, cross-dressing male clients. Mistress Scarlett had even staged an X-rated re-enactment of Mary’s wedding ceremony in which the role of the bride was played by a kinky middle-aged public servant called Bill - a wonderful reminder that despite the sugary fairytale propaganda, modern princesses do not mean the same thing to everyone and deserve closer examination. Hopefully this book does the trick.

Something About Mary is Emma Tom’s fourth book and was published by Pluto Press in November. Emma - who has recently taken to wearing tiaras with jeans and T-shirts - also writes a column for The Australian every Wednesday.

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Blaze Magazine - Bisexuality

Journalist, columnist and rock chick – Emma Tom is also one of Australia’s best known bisexual icons. Or is she the only one? Emma talks to blaze’s Whispers of the Silent B column about being bi, out and famous.

Emma, when you discovered your sexuality, did you always feel bisexual or did you think for a time that you were a lesbian?

I’ve known I was bi since high school when I developed a crush on a leggy blonde in some of my classes. My first reaction was “wow, cool”. My second was “damn, this is going to create some logistical difficulties”. Despite being wildly curious, I didn’t muster the courage to start hitting on women until I was 18 or 19. This was back in the late ‘80s in a small country town where the local lesbian community was pretty closed and separatist. I didn’t look like a stereotypical dyke and ­ given that I was also keen on men ­ didn’t act
like one either. Interestingly enough it was the local lesbians who gave me the hardest time about being bi. My family, friends and workmates, on the other hand, showed little to absolutely zero interest in my bisexuality. There was a brief flutter of family interest when I finally hooked up with a local girl with a very attractive mullet hair-do, but for the most part they really didn’t seem to care.

At the time of discovering your sexuality, were there bisexual people you knew of that you could look to that made sense of your life?

Unfortunately, no. Over the years I’ve encountered lots of people whose behaviour is bisexual, but I didn’t meet anyone who actively identified as bi until a couple of years ago.

Now in Australia, are there people you look to as bisexual icons?

The first bi people I met were movers and shakers (quite literally) in the Sydney fetish scene. It was great to discover the “pansexual” vibe at Sydney’s Hellfire Club. I also hooked up with a bunch of young women
in the Sydney rock scene who didn’t like sticky labels but whose sexuality was very fluid. They were also a fantastic discovery. While he’s not Australian, one of my all-time greatest bisexual icon is US sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. I have so much respect for the courage and humanity he showed when he forced the academy to take sexuality seriously.

In Sydney’s queer community, are bisexual people accepted as part of the whole?

There’s a slowly growing acceptance. Mardi Gras, for instance. Bisexuals used to have to prove their “commitment to the community” before they were allowed to join. Now we don’t need quite so much
paperwork.

At last year’s Feast festival, you were a guest at the Bisexuality in the Media forum. Has the media changed at all in the past year when it comes to the portrayal of bisexual people?

“Bi chic” (so long as it’s girl bi chic) continues to be a strong trend in the media - particularly the women’s magazines which regard girl-on-girl action as pervy. Critics of the rising depiction of bisexuality in pop culture say it trivializes same-sex relationships, but I disagree. Apart from the fact that pop culture trivializes
everything,I think Madonna and Britney’s pash at the MTV video awards had some very real benefits in the real world. It might have been a mere publicity stunt to them, but I reckon same-sex intimacy in this sort of context has a normalising effect and might encourage other young swingers to give it a go themselves. Who cares if it’s cool or faddish? I think sexual experimentation is something the world needs lots more of. And it’s tragic to hear about people who’ve been desperately keen to explore sex with an unusual gender but feel too constrained by other people’s opinions to venture outside the box. Hopefully bi chic for boys will be just around the corner. Lads who like it both ways have really missed out so far. They’re viewed with
suspicion by both the straight and gay communities and get a really tough time. I think the lesbian presence in traditional hetero porno videos has helped make the girl-on-girl thing much more palatable to
mainstream audiences. I’m a big fan of gay male porn and wish more people would start watching it so they can realise that the boy-on-boy thing is actually really saucy, too.

That said, I think we’ll be waiting a long time before Bono and Justin Timberlake think it’s in their commercial interests to have a snog at the Grammys.

You are a high profile Australian woman. Does your sexuality help or hinder your professional life in any way?

I’m not sure if being bi has been a help or hindrance to my career. It wasn’t a conscious decision I made, it’s just the way I am, so I’ve never given it much thought. It’d be like worrying about whether it’s a
hindrance being short or a dog-lover or a Kurt Vonnegut fan. These things aren’t negotiable. They just are.

For young people discovering their sexuality, do you have any advice drawn from your own experience that you would pass on?

If there’s no-one in your immediately circle of friends and family who understands your sexuality, look for allies in books and pop culture. I was thrilled, for example, to discover that one of the hunky heroes in
the new Dr Who is bi. I’m not sure about the sexual preferences of the Daleks though…

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Queensland Writing Magazine

1) What, in your opinion, are the keys to writing humorous columns?

Writing comedy is tough because people have such different taste in jokes. One night I watched The Simpsons in a pub with some friends and was shocked when I realised no-one else was laughing when I was. My drinking buddies fell about at the slapstick, whereas I loved the surrealisms (my favourite line from the show is the one where Homer celebrates something or other by leaning back in his chair and saying
‘mmm… slanty…’). Not everyone is as skilled as Simpsons creator Matt Groening when it comes to creating multi-dimensional comedy, so I guess one important key to writing humour is making sure your gags suit your audience.

2) Is there a difference between writing humour for columns and
fiction?

Writing fiction provides much more freedom than writing for newspapers. You can be absurd. You can be rude. Also you can make a lot more stuff up. You can make stuff up in newspapers, too, of course, but this
usually ends in a good, hard sacking.

3) How did you get into humour writing?

My childhood and adolescence were pretty miserable and I developed a dark sense of humour to cope. I also realised humour was a useful tool to use when attempting to change the world. When I was a teenager, I was the original Land Rights For Gay Whales girl. At high school, I organised demonstrations against government cuts to education and performed experimental theatre in kabuki-inspired marks to let the world know how I felt about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for the record it was: not happy). When I wasn’t reclaiming the night, I was writing protest letters to government ministers. Lots and lots of
them. Protests about the treatment of the indigenous population, protests about the logging of old growth forests, protests about the ABC’s axing of Dr Who, protests about the standard form letters I kept getting in return. Then I realised no-one likes to be hectored and that it was actually much more enjoyable for everyone concerned if these messages were cleverly hidden in jokes. I don’t know if this is a more
effective way to achieve social change, but at least I don’t feel the need to wear quite so many boiler suits.

4) Is there one stand out column for you, and why?

One of my favourite columns was a piece I wrote chastising wild animals for attacking humans. I’d just read A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift and was very excited about the persuasive power of satire. My column was full of stuff like: ‘It’s a scientific fact that animals have evolved for one purpose and one purpose only: to fulfill the voracious human appetite for slaves, entertainment, clothes and ingredients. (If
animals weren’t meant to be eaten there wouldn’t be so many recipes for casseroles. )’I thought it was pretty obvious I was being satirical but I copped lots of abuse from animal rights campaigners threatening to dob me into the military wing of the RSPCA. People are funny.

5) Who are/were your role models?

It’s hard to think of role models because, with me, they change every five seconds or so. Back when I was a prepubescent speed skater at Lismore Roller Rink in the 1970s, I thought Olivia Newton John was
absolutely tickety boo. These days I prefer Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Humour-wise, I find inspiration everywhere. I love malapropisms and the misuse of the word ‘literally’. (Once, Dino De Laurentis’ son was
talking about the film Blue Velvet and said: ‘The actors got paid literally nothing for doing this film. Well, I mean, they got slightly more than scale, but, really, it was literally nothing.’). I like Jane Austen’s heroines and their smart come-back lines. I like Shakespeare for calling people niggardly sheep-biters and telling them to go rub their chain with crumbs. I think stand-up comedian Steven Wright is God. He’s the guy who asked ‘what’s another word for Thesaurus?’.

6) Do you think the way Australians read comedy is changing and why?

I don’t know. In fact, I’d rather not make generalizations about all Australians (it leads you to the harder stuff). All I know is that people who don’t understand satire still write letters to me saying ‘how dare you suggest wild animals be blamed for attacking humans - no doubt you think the Irish should eat their children, too…’ I write these people a little note saying ‘thank you for your interest in The Australian’ and quietly return to pulling my hair out by the roots.

7) In your opinion, is the best humour topical or classic?

In newspapers, I think the best humour is topical. I know there’s still a big market for those timeless lifestyle columns where people write 900 words on how much they hate it when their husband doesn’t put the toilet seat up, or how crazy they get when their wife takes LIKE FOREVER to get ready for a night out, but I think this sort of humour has been done to death. And I should know. I used to do it to death, too.

8) Do you think humour can be taught? Why/not?

Do I think writing humour can be taught, or that having a sense of humour itself can be taught? If the former, YES. Writing is a craft. It’s just a matter of knowing the moves and practicing over and over.
If the latter, NO. People either fall about when they hear a bum joke or they just stand there giving you that look where their eyebrows join up in the middle. I’ve heard there are Indian laughter workshops where
you have to cack yourself over nothing, but I’m really not convinced you can fake it.

9) Can you briefly outline one of the key things you will discuss in your workshop (without giving too much away)?

At the humour writing workshop we’ll hone our comedic literary skills by talking about amusing writers and working out how the hell they do it. We’ll look beyond the obvious and find the funny in the tragic, the
prosaic and the boring. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of self-deprecating gags, as well as gags that are at other people’s expense. We’ll share jokes and finally start work on that Ben Elton-esque novel we’ve always meant to get around to writing. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even try some Indian laughing yoga. Mind you, the standard downward facing dog pose is pretty funny all by itself.

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Sun Herald

IS THE PRINCESS THE NEW ROLE MODEL? The enduring pulling power of the tiara set.
by John Elder - November 5, 2005

Just about everybody loves scampering fluffy puppies, a full red moon coming up over the ocean and pretty princesses tilting their sparkly heads.

We love them in much the same way - as things to behold. They actually don't need to do anything but appear before our eyes - and I'd argue that princesses get away with doing the least of all for the amount of excitement they generate.

Consider Princess Mary. Since leaving real estate for royal consorting, our Mary's every move has been slavishly recorded by magazines, newspapers and television cameras.

The thing is, apart from winning a couple of yacht races, Mary's "every move" has generally meant not doing much at all. And that's how we like it.

This is the princess paradox. Princesses are nice to look at, but it's best they are seen doing little - and then only nice things.

As author Emma Tom, who has just written a book on Mary says: "I've been amazed at the desperate lengths the women's magazines will go to justify another Mary photo spread. She's so interesting - and yet does so little of interest."

I've been told I'm a Mary nut. It's not true - although I went through a stage of being strangely excited whenever she came on the telly. And, yes, while on holiday a couple of years ago, I became flushed in the face one sunny afternoon after spotting Mary having a beer with her princely boyfriend on the Hobart waterfront.

They seemed so happy, they seemed so nice. Happier and nicer than anyone else around if you looked at them in a certain way: as a life-size retelling of Cinderella.

And fair enough, too. After all Mary and Frederik are - and I mean this in the best possible way - human baubles. Their job is to make us go: "Ah, how lovely."

Social researcher Neer Korn believes the princess, as a species, "is the one fantasy where you don't want to see all. Every aspect of society is laid bare . . . You don't want to see Mary Donaldson cleaning the toilet or flossing her teeth."

There are things in our lives that we want, and then there are the things we actually need. Princesses are apparently in the latter camp.

Social researcher David Chalke believes the princess "is an important part of our world". There is, he says, "a need in psyche that somewhere the magical princess exists". "And, all right, our life's a bit yucky and suburban and it will never be me. But that's OK because we don't aspire to it . . . but we need at least to believe that something like perfection exists however unreal and untrue it is. If life's all gritty realism then why keep going?

"With all the awfulness in the world - like Iraq and so on - you need a counterbalance in the form of something approximating goodness. The Pope, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and Princess Mary that's what they're there for. They are all universal symbols of goodness."

Chalke believes the princess "has the toughest gig".

"I think you could make a pretty good argument for it. When the Pope goes public it's like he's in a snow dome. The entire city is stage managed where the princess has to be in some sense accessible and human."

But how human do we want our princesses to be? Alanah House, editor of Woman's Day says, "Our readers have been interested in her going shopping for baby clothes and the pram she's buying - all that pervy stuff is popular. But we have to be very cautious. People are very protective of Princess Mary and they get upset if they think we're having a go at her.

"We have two people on the phone constantly talking to readers . . . Our readers are quick to let us know if they're unhappy."

Such as? "When we ran a story about Mary having problems with her sister-in-law . . . well, we've found they'd much rather hear about the good things. We ran a cover line about why Fred loved her so much: that's the sort of thing they want to read about. The wedding, the baby, the love and the fairytale. That's what really gets them going, rather than the doom and gloom.

"I think people want a bit of escapism in their lives and Mary is living the fantasy - the normal girl who goes to a pub one day and meets a prince and marries him and lives in a palace. There's just something about the word 'princess' that gets readers excited. Australian women still love the romance of the word and what they imagine it means."

In fact, House wonders if the preponderance of doom and gloom - in tandem with Australia's conservative socio-political climate - is creating a rise in enthusiasm for the princess as a role model.

"It's a cynical day and age and I think there's been a backlash. Young women are returning to more traditional values: to them marriage and children are more important than to women in their 30s and 40s. There's been a return to aspiring to the fairytale.

"It doesn't have to be Mary. It doesn't even have to be a 'princess' in royalty terms. In a way, Bec Cartwright is an Australian princess to our readers. She met the handsome sports star, had the whirlwind romance and marriage and is now living in the palace up at Palm Beach."

The editor of Woman's Day herself, however, doesn't want to be a princess. "There is a reality that people forget about. When Princess Mary was on tour from dawn to late at night she had official duties. It is a lot of hard work." House points to Australian Princess, a so-called reality show, as "tapping into the same fantasy without any acknowledgement of the reality at all".

Australian Princess is basically a grooming and etiquette competition - overseen by a man who would never treat a real princess the way he treats the show's contestants. That is, with unbridled scorn. Then again, as a devoted servant of Princess Diana, Paul Burrell has gone well out of his way to cash in on the connection.

As a genuine conduit to a better life, it's hard to take Australian Princess any more seriously than other makeover reality shows such as The Swan, Extreme Makeover or The Biggest Loser. In fact the scenario is so surreal that it takes satire - as posted on The Chaser website - to best describe the ludicrous nature of Australian Princess:

"Contestants on would-be-royalty reality show Australian Princess have expressed concerns about having to give birth in a newly added segment on the show, after Princess Mary gave birth this week. The new round will see contestants forced to give birth while a sneering Paul Burrell looks on, ridiculing their childbearing technique and posture. In line with royal custom, if any of the children are considered valuable, Burrell will then steal and try to hock them."

Writer Emma Tom says she was "intrigued" by Australian Princess and its often clueless contestants. "They're absolutely desperate to become princesses but have no idea about monarchies. They were showing them pictures of the (late) Queen Mum - and none of them of them knew who she was. There's this disconnect between the fantasy and reality. It's not the reality that they're after. It's something to do with getting attention and feeling special... It's very tangled up with the notion of celebrity."

It's worth noting here that a recent American survey found that Paris Hilton has displaced Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (the elegant and demure daughter of John F. Kennedy) as "America's True Princess" - at least in the minds of young American women.

According to fashionlines.com - an American-based fashion e-magazine - the amateur porn star and hotel heiress scored 48 per cent of the vote. Fashionlines editor Christine Suppes wrote she was "distressed" to hear of the news in an email.

Of course, in the delusional self-help climate of "believe hard enough in your dream and it will come true", it may be enough these days to simply call yourself a princess and sort of get away with it.

The genuine princess, however, has an impossible time getting away with anything. And where there isn't anything unpleasant to report, as Tom notes, some editors - with apparently no crises of conscience - are happy to make something up.

Released this week are two new books, one of them Tom's, that set out to tell the story of how our Mary got to live in a castle in Denmark - and both illustrate how a simple love story has been buried under an enormous and rotting pile of fabrication and innuendo, much baseless and pompous criticism, hysterical bloodlust and good old-fashioned bad manners. Guilty of such rudeness is the English translation of Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark by Karin Palshoj and Gite Redder, a couple of Danish journalists who invest much ink in accusing Frederik's family of (virtually) cutting out Mary's tongue. They warn that the palace, by trying to control Mary, will turn the country against her.

The authors then chide Mary for being cold and remote: "Can Mary in the long run continue to be so inaccessible, even perhaps dismissive of the press and public? A modern monarchy with a modern crown princess must have an open and respectful dialogue with the people, and in this regard Mary, Frederik and the royal court have a lot to learn."

On the other hand, Palshoj and Redder commend Mary's performance at her first press conference: "With those few words, incredible charm and a glint in her eye, Mary at once became beloved common property."

Applying sober reason to the Danes' earnest reporting, one finds a surprisingly easy-going bunch of folk who, for the time being put a protective arm around the new princess - and new mother - until she got her bearings.

The tone of Mary, Crown Princess owes much to the shabbier women's magazines - at home and abroad - that high-handedly nurture and annihilate the standing of famous folk in a back-and-forth fashion. In one moment, Palshoj and Redder are whispering Mary's name in hallowed terms, in the next they're poo-poohing her dress sense or inability to immediately read Danish road signs. Of course they bring in experts and observers to make the complaints - before agreeing that it's important that the lass from Tasmania lift her game.

Plus there's their faux romantic speculation that the lovers are fated to fail: the curse of coronated coupling. In a chapter titled "Heart or Throne", Mary's reported anxiety about joining the royal circus is discussed in the light of other apparently "troubled" royal couplings - in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Japan. And, of course, in England, home to the biggest debacle of them all: the sordid lie of Charles and Diana, the Cinderella duded by her fella.

But as Emma Tom makes delightfully clear in Something About Mary (released this week) Mary Donaldson is nothing like the late Diana Spencer, Princes of Wales, Queen of Hearts, hounded to death with a drunk at the wheel.

For one thing, Mary's husband isn't shagging an old flame on the side - we'd know if he was.

For another, Mary does her own driving - and doesn't mind a race. According to paparazzi who've tried chasing her, she's a skilled lead foot to the point of recklessness. (Her one documented fault of note.) They seem to like her, the people who stalk her. They say she's "nice" and "special".

Tom's book has the good taste to mock much of the media's reckless ratbaggery while clearly enjoying the mischief.

There are some terrific interviews with various muckrakers and hangers-on. Notably a Sydney-based "emotional intelligence coach" who went to 60 Minutes with video footage of Mary learning how to walk like a model - and says she feels hurt because a letter from the palace told her to pull her head in. Or the private investigator who was paid $20,000 by a Danish newspaper for two weeks' work, stalking Mary in the days before her love affair became world news.

The book chronicles the tabloids' two-handed portrayal of Donaldson's transformation - the chunky chick who's become anorexic - yet Tom believes Mary got off light. Perhaps it's a measure of how wretchedly the tabloids treat people. "I think the media has gone very easy on Mary . . . because there is nothing to say," Tom says.

She believes "that there many different princesses around at the moment".

"The word has a different currency among young women these days. The idea of being treated like a princess is not completely literal . . . It's become a short hand for young women who want to be made a fuss of and made to feel special."

Is it healthy?

"It depends on what you do with it. The idea that you want to be a princess and want to be treated with respect and have your needs met, dress up and have a good time tonight and feel good and gorgeous . . . well there's not much wrong with it. But if it's 'my life is shit and I want to be rescued by a rich man and I'll never work again' it's not healthy because it's unlikely to happen."

Tom says she's never hoped it would happen to her. "I was a tomboy. I never wanted to be a princess. I was initially reluctant to write (Something About Mary) because I had such little interest in her or in princesses."

However: "The thing that I'm embarrassed to admit; the thing that I responded to when researching the book was the true love part of it. I couldn't believe when I saw the wedding that I got teary seeing that beautiful young man so desperately in love with her. It was a powerful image.

"I think for many people, and not just young women, we do yearn for that romantic fairytale love. I know that a lot of young women think Frederik is the best thing ever invented in the husband stakes because he's such an amazing package. To see a man like him weeping in church as his bride appears - it's heady stuff for women, including me."

And will she keep an eye on our Mary's progress? "I think people are still sitting on the edge of their seats to see if she falls apart. Most people do fall, and it will be interesting if it happens. I doubt it, though. She performs like a machine."

Mary Crown Princess of Denmark, by Karin Palshoj and Gite Redder, is published by Allen and Unwin ($29.95).
Something About Mary, by Emma Tom, published by Pluto Press ($32.95), is released this week.

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