Martha MacCallum Insists Imus--and the Rest of Us--Should Care About the Royal Wedding
Martha MacCallum, co-host of America’s Newsroom on the Fox News Channel, could not believe she was present for Charles’s retirement announcement. “I’m just curious if he knows that they just canceled ‘All My Children,’” she said. “So, there’s really no reason to retire.”
There is reason, according to MacCallum, to care about the April 29th nuptials of Prince William and Kate Middleton. “Obviously it’s very fashionable to bash the royal wedding, and say that nobody cares about it,” she said, debunking Imus’s theory that he was some sort of trendsetter.
MacCallum, who will cover the wedding for Fox News, believes the royal wedding is worth caring about because of “the big gyp;” also known as the so-called “fairy tale” wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, William’s parents, in 1981.
“Everybody was supposed to believe that they was this beautiful young couple, and they were the future of the monarchy,” MacCallum said. Instead, there were scandals galore, and one particularly lurid rumor that Charles spent the night before the wedding with his then-ex-girlfriend and current wife, Camilla Parker Bowles.
William and Kate are, in MacCallum’s view, the one chance for the Monarchy to rebuild its reputation. As a beautiful young couple, MacCallum believes William and Kate will be of great use to the institution, and to the notion of having royalty at all.
The royal family learned a lot from the experience with Princess Diana, who was killed in 1997 in Paris and whose marriage to William was more or less arranged and, to say the least, contentious.
“One of the things they learned was it might be a good idea to let two people sort of meet and fall in love, and like each other, and maybe even spend some time living together in this situation before they got married,” MacCallum said. “They seem like they really care about each other.”
Unlike William’s parents who, in a post-engagement interview, had diverging ideas on whether or not they were in love. “Diana said, ‘Well of course,’” MacCallum said, doing the accent. “And Charles said, ‘Whatever love means.’”
Fox’s Shepard Smith will join MacCallum in London to cover the wedding, and though he’s wary of the grand event, MacCallum promised him he’d wind up fascinated by it. And besides, why complain about getting to stare at a beautiful brunette for a few days?
Confused, Imus chimed in, “Are you talking about Shepard, or Kate?”
The invite list for the royal affair includes David and Victoria Beckham, Elton John, and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Notably absent are the Obamas and the Sarkozys, though MacCallum pointed out the wedding is not a state affair.
Imus saw the omission in a different light. “Mrs. Sarkozy would run into too many people she’d slept with,” he suggested.
Prince William and Kate will definitely run into some of their own exes at the wedding, because many are invited, a strategic move MacCallum thinks is a protective measure to keep any of them from talking to the press.
Then she prattled on for a bit about how wonderful it is for William that he can get married before he loses all his hair, but by that point she had lost something even more tenuous: Imus’s attention.
-Julie Kanfer
Reader Comments (1)
Mr. Charles:
I have planned my day around your show for as long as my memory serves me.
It will never be the same without you around to keep the "Old Cowboy" in check.
Thinking about joining your all white bible study group to chant prayers for your return
Pray that you will pull a Reggis on us.....and return to your desk
thank you from the bottom of my heart for the information..and laughs
douglas petepiece
ontario Canada
ps...thanks for telling the daggen goobers where charlies will be fishing...lets pray they don't find him