1997 – Candle in the Wind
For years I’ve enjoyed mulling over Taoist aphorisms. One favourite of mine concerns what makes a good group. “A good group is better than a spectacular group. When leaders become superstars, the teacher outshines the teaching. Very few superstars are down to earth. Fame breeds fame, and before long they get carried away with themselves. Then they fly off centre and crash. The wise leader settles for good work and then lets others have the floor. The leader does not take all the credit for what happens and has no need for fame. A moderate ego demonstrates wisdom.” Contrasting good leadership and a moderate ego with the image of the superstar as a rocket that flies up, spectacular and bright, and then burns out and finishes falling back to earth has been with me for a long time. Who can argue with that!
Like many such observations, there are helpful insights to be drawn from this Taoist verse, on a topic which deserves our considered thought and exploration. Indeed, I have used this brief extract in discussions about leadership on many occasions. However, in depicting a superstar as a rocket, the emphasis is on the person as an individual, rather than the person in a context. In many cases, the story is often more complex and interesting than might first seem to be the case. In a tumultuous year, 1997 was to see one such star’s flight end, but the fallout proved as spectacular as the original burst into prominence. 35 years earlier another star had also fallen to earth, and there is one odd connection that links the two.
There was little doubt that Marilyn Monroe was a Hollywood mega-star. To describe her in that way is to make it clear that the person who was Marilyn Monroe was almost incidental to the film star she became. Her’s wasn’t an auspicious start. Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles, and was to spend most of her childhood in foster homes, including time in an orphanage. It was a messy and unsettled time, and in June 1942, just after her 16th birthday and wanting to avoid being returned to the orphanage, she married her neighbour’s 21-year-old son, James Dougherty. Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marines in 1943, and a year later was shipped to the Pacific for two years. Apart, and realising he was increasingly at odds over her modelling career, Monroe divorced him in 1946.
She had worked for a while in a munitions factory during World War II, but in 1945, she met a photographer from the Army’s ‘Motion Picture Unit’, and began a successful pin-up modelling career, which in turn led to a few short-lived film contracts. All that changed in 1950 when she signed up with Fox and soon became a popular actress with roles in several comedies. Her cinema career never looked back. By 1953, she was one of the era’s most marketable Hollywood stars, her image established as a ‘dumb blonde’. This was the year a series of her nude photographs were used as the centrefold in the first issue of Playboy.
Stars are expected to be temperamental, and she obliged. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to make The Seven Year Itch, one of the biggest box office successes of her career. She set up her own film production company in 1954 and began studying method acting with Lee Strasberg. A new contract with Fox gave her more control and a larger salary. Another high point of her career was in 1959, when she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role in In Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis. Her career was short, but her films had grossed $200 million by 1962 (equivalent to $2bn in 2020). In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her sixth on its list of the greatest female legends for the Golden Age of Hollywood. True to the expected role of a major star, Marilyn Monroe struggled with various addictions, had affairs, and died from a much-investigated probable suicide, the source of conspiracy theories that continue to this day.
In becoming Marilyn Monroe, Norma Jeane had been transformed. There is no way to know what was her, and what was the person the film industry wanted. In films like Some Like It Hot she was funny, sexy and beautiful, a ‘Helen of Troy’ for those so-called golden years of Hollywood. At times she was almost like the girl next door, but, tantalisingly, she was always just out of reach. Smart enough to control some aspects of her career, and smart enough to know when to accept what the director or movie company wanted.
Eleven years after her death, the conspiracy industry was still busy producing more and more fantastic stories about what had ‘really happened’ to her, and how she had died. That year, 1973, Elton John released his new disc, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, a double LP set which eventually sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It is generally regarded as his finest album. While it wasn’t the title track, it included Candle in the Wind, which was released as a single the year after. Asked about his lyrics, Bernie Taupin said the song was about “the idea of fame or youth or somebody being cut short in the prime of their life. The song could have been about James Dean, it could have been about Montgomery Clift, it could have been about Jim Morrison … how we glamorise death, how we immortalise people.” Here is part:
Loneliness was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price you paid
Even when you died
Oh, the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Marilyn was found in the nude
And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in
And I would’ve liked to know you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did
Diana Spencer was twelve years old when Candle in the Wind was released. The fourth child of Viscount and Viscountess Althorp, she had grown up on the Sandringham Estate at Park House, leased by the Spencers from Queen Elizabeth II. Initially home-schooled, in 1973 she had joined her older sisters at a school in Kent. She was shy, academically weak and left school when she was 16 years old. However, she was said to have been a skilled pianist, an excellent swimmer, and she studied ballet and tap dancing. For the next few years she wandered between jobs, and spent some time as a nursery teacher’s assistant.
I suppose the next part of the story is well-known. She had first met Prince Charles in 1977, when he was dating her older sister. They met once more at a country weekend during the summer of 1980. It wasn’t chance, as she was being assessed as a potential bride, using the excuse of an invitation to watch Charles play polo. It must have gone well as plans progressed, and once approved by the Queen, Charles proposed on 6 February 1981. She accepted. Despite her family’s connections to the royals, she may have had little idea as to what she was about to face. Their engagement became official on 24 February 1981. Even I can remember the storm of publicity and scrutiny that followed.
Things moved quickly, and they married on 29 July 1981. Diana was the first Englishwoman to marry the first-in-line to the throne since one Anne Hyde married the future James II over 300 years earlier, and she was also the first royal bride to have had a paying job before her engagement! Within a year, William was born, followed by Harry two years after that. If she wasn’t academic, she was smart and determined, and gave her sons wider experiences than was usual for royal children, including taking them to fast food outlets and other public venues. She rarely deferred to Charles or to others in the royal family and was often intransigent when it came to her children. She chose their first given names, dismissed a royal family nanny and engaged one of her own choosing, selected their schools and clothing, planned their outings, and took them to school herself as often as her schedule permitted. She also organised her public duties around their timetables. The future ‘Peoples’ Princess’ was becoming established in the public’s eyes, just as her marriage was beginning to fall apart.
You know the rest. Charles was to demonstrate that he was neither academic nor smart. After fifteen years, much of Diana’s time had been spent living a lonely existence in the palace world. Affairs and tensions led to their divorce. Just one year later, Diana died in car crash in Paris. Throughout those 15 years, Diana had become more and more popular with the British public. She was celebrated for her approach to charity work, initially supporting charities centred on children and the elderly but later became known for her involvement in two particular campaigns, one concerning attitudes towards and the acceptance of AIDS patients, and the other for the removal of landmines. She also raised awareness and supported ways to help people affected with cancer and mental illness. She had been shy, but she proved to be both charismatic and friendly. Initially tentative meeting people, her charm and determination soon endeared her to the public. On top of all of that, she was very photogenic, and became a leader in promoting fashion in the 1980s and 1990s.
Diana’s death shocked her friend Elton John and he wanted to pay a tribute to her. In his autobiography, he reports he received a call from Richard Branson who told him many of those writing in the Book of Condolence at St James Palace were quoting the lyrics of ‘Candle in the Wind’. Branson asked John if he would rewrite the lyrics and sing them at the funeral. Apparently, he was passing on a request from the Spencer family. Elton John asked Bernie Taupin to revise the lyrics of the 1973 song and he performed it at Westminster Abbey. It was to be the only time. He continues to sing the original version of the song at his concerts but has consistently turned down requests to perform the revised version, not even at the memorial Concert for Diana in 2007. Its revised words (here in part) captured the moment and the emotion:
Goodbye England’s rose
May you ever grow in our hearts
You were the grace that placed itself
Where lives were torn apart
You called out to our country
And you whispered to those in pain
Now you belong to heaven
And the stars spell out your name
And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never fading with the sunset
When the rain set in
And your footsteps will always fall here
Along England’s greenest hills
Your candle’s burned out long before
Your legend ever will
It was released on 13 September 1997 as a tribute single, with the global proceeds from the song going towards Diana’s charities. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Candle in the Wind 1997 is the second highest selling physical single of all time (only surpassed by Bing Crosby’s 1942 song ‘White Christmas’) and is the highest-selling single since charts began in the 1950s. No wonder. The image of a candle in the wind is very powerful. It combines two quite opposite visions of a person – seeing it as a light burning bright, and at the same time as a momentary flicker of light about to be instantly extinguished.
Marilyn Monroe was a megastar in the way we usually think of them. A product of the cinema, but somehow bigger than the films she made. Cinematic fame is fickle, of course, and Marilyn didn’t always fare well, but for her public Bernie Taupin captured her well with that image of a candle burning brightly, then suddenly snuffed out.
Diana, Princess of Wales, offers a more complex phenomenon. In some ways it is evocative of how the context can both support and constrain what happens. The British royal family is almost invisible under the weight of its history, to the point it is the history and the set pieces that are all that remain. The opening of parliament, the trooping of the colour, the changing of the guard, they are a collection of public, tourist attractions. Somewhere in Buckingham Palace there is a remarkable woman, Elizabeth Windsor, who is slowly disappearing in front of us. ‘The Palace’ still shapes and constrains her life, despite all her intelligence and insight, doing so to the extent we will never know what we will have lost when she dies. What we are likely to discover that Charles is ill-suited to be particularly effective as the next monarch, since he isn’t especially good at the mastery of pomp and circumstance for the onlookers, and he lost the ability to say anything interesting after his extraordinary thoughts about how and where he saw himself lodged in Camilla’s anatomy! Many hope he’ll abdicate.
As for Diana, she shot up to the heavens, but outside of the system. There she was, on the day her engagement was announced, with the sun behind her wearing a thin skirt. You can imagine the horror on the faces of the palace officials. ‘Get her in here, get her under control, contain her, for goodness’ sake.’ And they tried. However, she was made of sterner stuff than her initial shyness suggested, especially in relation to William and Harry, making certain much of what she wanted was done. But a rocket can only keep flying if there is oxygen to support it, and that eventually ran out. An inept heir-apparent went back to his old flame, and abandoned Diana. By the time she escaped it was too late, and the end, if unexpected, was inevitable. Then there’s that other layer of complexity: despite divorce and affairs, Diana remained the public’s princess, and the grief at her death was quite extraordinary. In one of her few missteps, the Queen hadn’t understood the tide of emotion as she remained silent up in Scotland for five days until the backlash hit her. When she saw millions of flowers outside the palaces she got it, and paid tribute to Diana , opening with the now-famous line: “what I say to you now, as your queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.” Just in time.
Perhaps the royal family has it right. They keep tourism ticking over nicely. Perhaps the song has it right, too. Diana would have been 60 years old this year: if she had lived and stayed a royal, would she still be that friendly, caring mother, with a good eye for fashion and a commitment to those in real need, or a superstar slowly dimming? The image of a candle in the wind reminds us that we only see the bright light, not the return to darkness that follows.
