The 36 Club

We all know about the 27 Club, that cabal of live-fast, die-young rockers who kicked off before they could pay off their mortgages (Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, et al). But let’s light a candle for the 36 Club, when we mark the anniversaries of its two most distinguished members who died at that tender age. Neither Marilyn Monroe nor Princess Diana made it to their 37th birthdays. These two celebrated blondes share more than just an Elton John song — recall he recalibrated the lyrics to Candle in the Wind from Marilyn to Diana for the latter’s funeral. Both icons have been fully consumed by the culture, their images withstanding the ravages of time and fashion.

Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, controls her estate, and you can visit the grounds where she’s buried at 25 quid a pop (though her tomb is on a small island off limits to the riffraff). The Monroe estate, left largely to her acting guru Lee Strasbourg, ended up in the control of his second wife’s daughter, who established Marilyn Monroe, LLC and recently sold it to Authentic Brands for between 20 and 30 million dollars. They make sure her visage keeps up its presence on coffee mugs and t-shirts, though a more expensive likeness was recently sold at auction for 195 million dollars in the form of Andy Warhol’s Blue Shot Marilyn. Her famous 1962 “Happy-birthday-Mr-President” sequined frock (in which she sang sexy returns of the day to JFK) was recently in the news for getting ripped when a Kardashian tried to squeeze into it for the Met Gala. Meanwhile Princess Diana’s poof-sleeved wedding dress has been on display at Kensington Palace, her former address, where they also unveiled a poorly reviewed statue of her, standing with three random children to represent the “universality and generational impact” of her work.

The Marilyn saga has been refashioned into drama over the years, by third hubbie Arthur Miller’s marriage exegesis After the Fall, as well as Terry Johnson’s brainy-comic Insignificance (in which she explains the Theory of Relativity to Albert Einstein), not to mention an opera, Marilyn: Scenes from the '50s in Two Acts by Lorenzo Ferrero, which they’re still talking about in Finland.

Meanwhile, the Diana legend has been turned into its own Broadway musical, which was filmed and streamed on Netflix last year to universal disparagement (though a lot of people seemed to watch it). And on film and TV, Diana could have programmed her own festival, with depictions of her in Diana (Naomi Watts) and Spencer (Kristen Stewart) as well as The Crown (Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki). Other actresses who have played her in TV movies over the years include Catherine Oxenberg, Caroline Bliss, Serena Scott Thomas and Julie Cox.

In bookshops, there have been the tell-all memoirs, by her butler, her bodyguard, her alleged best friend, even the woman who once hired her as a babysitter. There’s a book devoted to her jewelry. In Monica Ali’s Untold Story, a Diana manqué fakes her own death and moves to the US. Marilyn underwent her own novelization by Joyce Carol Oates, in the fictionalized biography Blonde. It has been filmed, natch, with Ana de Armas as the titular redhead — I mean flaxon-haired bombshell.

What does all this mean? It means that more than 60 years after Marilyn’s passing, and a quarter century post Diana’s exit, we’re not finished with either of them yet. Both self-destructive (Marilyn dying by over-self-medicating, Diana by failing to buckle up), they still romp breathily through our dreams, batting their eyelashes, blowing us kisses, remaining the standard by which both movie and palace royalty is judged. When Prince Harry married an actress, poor Meghan had to compete on both scales.

So they’re still with us, those two vixens, displaying a greater resiliency than the latest Instagram phenom or Tiktok hero, each a talisman still ticking in our hearts, as well as on those t-shirts and in those films, more A-list than any pop idol, more box office than any movie star. The Monroe estate made $13 million last year.

It’s a little uncanny to think that had she lived, Marilyn would be celebrating her centenary next year, and Diana would be applying for her senior travelcard. But in our consciousness, neither one passes her 36th year, forever glam, forever money, forever diamonds in our midst.

Why I Wrote Duch

How did I come to write a novel about a sixtysomething Princess Diana being found alive in Paris? To be honest, she never particularly interested me during her lifetime, but her shocking death was an emotionally transformative event in the UK. I wasn’t there at that moment, observing the hysteria from the US (which was to have its own emotional rupture four years later on 9/11).

As a longtime Londoner (before and since) I was taken aback by the response to her death, when all the indignities she’d suffered at the hands of the media and royal family were brought into sudden, stark relief.

That interested me, as did the story of Anna Anderson, a troubled woman who jumped from a bridge into a canal in Berlin in February 1920. When she was pulled out, she began claiming that she was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of the Russian Tsar, who had somehow escaped the family’s assassination in Yekaterinburg two years earlier.

The two events melded in my mind, and I began writing the story — as a film. Duch began life as a screenplay, and I got about 20 minutes in when I realized it made no sense in that form; I’d written other screenplays that I hadn’t managed to get anyone to read. Better to write it as a novel, and if anyone wanted to turn the story into a movie (its natural delivery system), that was fine with me.

But I wanted to write it really as a film in novel form. Its terse, present-tense sequences are meant to unfurl like a movie in a reader’s mind. I wanted the story to happen in a fixed period (three weeks) in a propulsive manner.

I read a lot of books on Princess Diana and spent several weeks in Paris researching the locations — a working holiday if there ever was one. Next to London and New York, Paris is my favorite city, and Fox’s apartment in the book is essentially the one I stayed in on Blvd. St-Germain on the Left Bank.

I think of the book as really being about Celebrity Derangement Syndrome. The hysteria that brought the crowds out to collectively mourn a much-loved figure like Diana was healing and cathartic. But that same kind of hysteria elected a failed property developer and game-show host President of the United States two decades later.

Duch’s instant following, her huge rallies and pored-over statements, would have been unbelievable a generation ago. Now it feels all too credible. Progressive populism and right-wing demagoguery are two sides of the same coin if they cause people to blindly follow a person they really know little about.

I have the greatest respect for Princess Diana, and my regard for her only grew the more I looked into her sadly curtailed life. Her loss was no greater felt than by her two sons, the younger of whom liked to imagine his mother still alive and living in Paris.

Perhaps she isn’t actually still walking amongst us. But as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises, isn’t it pretty to think so?