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American Morning

Talk With Author of 'Diana & Jackie'

Aired August 21, 2002 - 09:46   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Two women, separated by a generation. Diana and Jackie were both cultural icons. You need only to hear their first names, and you know instantly who they are. Diana, princess of Wales, of course, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were both thrust into the spotlight because of their marriages to famous men. But a new book, "Diana and Jackie," shows they had much more in common than that.
And author Jay Mulvaney stops by now. Good morning.

JAY MULVANEY, AUTHOR" DIANA AND JACKIE": Good morning.

ZAHN: How are you?

MULVANEY: Fine, thank you.

ZAHN: What are most obvious similarities between these two?

MULVANEY: If you look on the surface level, you know, they both dressed extremely well, they both had husbands who cheated on them, they were both good mothers, but if you look a little bit deeper, it's interesting, they were daughters of acrimonious divorce that really shaped their childhood. They both had, essentially, arranged marriages to men who were 12 years their senior, men who needed trophy brides to succeed at their jobs, and they both married into these families that tried to suppress the individual for the common family goal.

And most importantly, they both inherited roles through marriage, rebelled in those roles, and in rebelling against them, forever changed the archetype of first lady and royal princess.

ZAHN: And yet you write that Diana probably had more challenges, and more demons she had to deal with.

MULVANEY: She did. It comes down to, I think, a really a lack of a sense of self. Jackie had a strong sense of self that was nurtured by her father. Diane didn't. Diana didn't know who she was. And she relied on what newspaper said she was and how she was going to behave that day, or that month or that week.

ZAHN: It's interesting, because you talk about the expectations on both of them through the media. Television just coming of an age when Jackie Kennedy took us on that first tour of the White House. Of course Princess Diana on the scene where the celebrity culture was very much elevated, an art form almost. What does that reveal about how they live their lives? MULVANEY: Again, it goes to -- Jackie knew how she wanted to present herself to the public. She didn't like to give interviews. She didn't like to talk to reporters, but...

ZAHN: Which kept the mystique very much alive, did it not?

MULVANEY: It really did. Jackie operated on that sort of British stiff upper lip: never complain, never explain. Diana was completely the reverse. She was the American quivering lower lip, going on television and telling everybody everything, and she was doing it at a time, like you say, where that's what people did. They were just on television all over the place, and so the mystique just evaporated.

ZAHN: And yet, in many ways, was Diana then more disarming to the public, when it came to how comfortable she was revealing her soul?

MULVANEY: Here is the I thing about Diana and her great gift to people, I think. Here is this woman who is tall, blond, rich, thin, beautiful, and she was talking about things that princess shouldn't know about, bulimia, adultery, betrayal, divorce, depression. In exposing herself, exposing her vulnerabilities, she not only endeared herself to the general public, but she also enabled women around the world to talk about these issues free of shame and free of condescension. If it could happen to Diana, it's not so devastating that it could happen to me, too.

ZAHN: Of course you also make the point that they were good at manipulation.

MULVANEY: They were so shrewd, the two of them.

ZAHN: Who was better at it?

MULVANEY: I think Jackie was sort of better at it. She had more time, and again, she had a really keen intellect, and she knew the image she wanted to present to the public, and that's image that she kept for the, what, 30, 35 years that she was in public life.

ZAHN: Did Jackie and Diana ever spend much time together?

MULVANEY: They met only once at a party at Jackie's friend's, Bunny Melon's (ph) house in Virginia in 1985. Bunny Melon (ph) had put together a small party so that Diana could meet people her own age, and John and Caroline Kennedy were included, and then Jackie came down at the last minute.

ZAHN: So Diana very much admired Jackie.

MULVANEY: She admired her completely. She wrote to Caroline and John after Jackie's death, telling them how much Jackie served as a role model for her in raising her children in the public eye.

ZAHN: That letter was actually made public?

MULVANEY: It was not made public, but I got a chance to see it, though.

ZAHN: And was there much more of a personal nature written in that letter.

MULVANEY: Diana gave a lot of herself in these letters. She spoke about how much Jackie had meant to her, how much she had enjoyed meeting her, and how Jackie had asked her to write her life story, but how she had declined do it.

ZAHN: Can you tell us how you got that letter?

MULVANEY: I cannot.

ZAHN: Come on, Jay. You're just sharing it with the AMERICAN MORNING audience here. A final thought on the public view of these women. Like you said , they were glamours and tall, and rich and married into a very powerful families, but at the very core, they both wrestled with some deeply rooted problems.

MULVANEY: They really did. They did. And Jackie's gift to America was that -- and to the world was that she taught us -- she enabled us to be proud of ourselves as a people. She pulled it together for the American people in the aftermath of JFK's assassination, and Diana's gift is that she enabled to us accept ourselves as people with flaws, and I think I that's their lasting legacy to the world. They were two women. They changed dynasties.

ZAHN: Well a lot of folks can't get enough of this information. The name of Jay's book is "Diana and Jackie."

Jay Mulvaney, thanks for dropping by and sharing some of our anecdotes with us. Appreciate it.

MULVANEY: My pleasure.

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