Skydragon said:
Many women are able to earn themselves a decent amount, without having to constantly remind people that they were married into such and such a family. I think what annoys me about her, apart from anything else, is her need to remind people, in the hope that they will treat her as something special, which of course she is not. Neither Sarah or the children were ever going to be destitute, Andrew still paid the girls upkeep and school fees and I didn't notice Sarah going without new clothing, makeup or food.
I'm afraid I could easily see Sarah ending up destitute after the Queen refused to bail her out the last time. The girls would have been taken care of but Sarah, I just don't see the Queen or her family helping her out if she didn't get her financial house in order.
Playing a little devil's advocate here, if I may, skydragon, I think perhaps, you are very knowledgeable about the royal family and behavior of the British upper classes but the area of commecial endorsement in America, is a totally different world with different forms of expected behavior.
Commercial endorsement a time-worn way for a public figure to get back on one's financial feet and yes, of course, one is expected to trade on connections, or to play up whatever reason the public would have to be interested. With Sarah it was her association with the royal family. Its probably why Weight Watchers hired her; I don't think they would have liked it if she had refused to let them use her royal associations in their campaign.
Again, playing a little devil's advocate, you may well think that Sarah is nothing special, but she's getting on David Letterman and getting on the cover of Ladies Home Journal so quite a few people must think she's special or these people and organizations wouldn't give her the time of day. These people are in a business and they are not going to put her on their cover or put them on their TV show if they don't think she will attract interest. Its true that Sarah would not get this attention without her connections to royalty, but in this world, people don't care.
Sarah is not royal any more and she lives in a different world now with different expectations. If she was too loud and boisterous to be a royal when she was a royal, I think it was a little unrealistic to expect her to tone it down when she was no longer royal. Actually I see Sarah as a better fit in her current line of work than she was when she was a royal. The prim and proper way, I fear, was never going to be Sarah's way. To be honest, in her current area of business, she has had success and she has lasted a lot longer than other celebrity spokespersons.
Perhaps, as a member of the British upper classes you are most annoyed with her for betraying her own people, the British upper class and betraying the strictures and morals that the class represents? I come from a class-based upbringing in the American South but no doubt, its quite different from yours. But Southerners too react with horror when they perceive that one of their own has betrayed them.
I hope you don't take offense, skydragon because with my background, I can totally understand your aversion to Sarah because part of me totally recoils to anything that is attention-seeking, loud, brazen, or (as the Germans would say) unvershaemt (shameless).
On the other hand, now that I'm in New York and working with people in sales, marketing, media, and public relations, I am beginning to see how the other side lives so to speak and it definitely lives under the equally-held belief that the world is so saturated with images, soundbites, news and information that unless a person is loud, unique and forceful, that person won't be seen. In other words, bad attention is better than no attention.
Its a curious (and to me a foreign) way of living but one of my dear friends definitely comes from this world. She has a heart of gold but she embarasses me every time we go out. She, like me, grew up in the socially conscious and very strict Southern society and while it didn't bother me, it just about killed her and she couldn't wait to get out of it. It wasn't until I met her that I realized that there were some people whose personality was so big that a refined and conservative environment would kill them.