Cinderella Vs. Alice

by Alexandra Molotkow

So! My So-Called Life fans, and there are a few of you out there, were thrilled to learn that Allison Joy Langer aka “Rayanne Graff” — I know her better as Alice from The People Under the Stairs — has just become the Countess of Devon. Langer married her husband, Charlie Courtenay, who she met at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, in 2005; when his father died this month, he became the Earl of Devon, and the couple inherited a 600-year-old castle on 4,000 acres of land.

Marrying into royalty, or nobility, or whatever it means to be an Earl, is sort of like… well, it’s sort of like royalty, in that no one I know takes it seriously, but we all get a kick out of the idea. There are women who quite frankly deserve nothing less than royalty because LOOK AT THEM, but Olivia Wilde seems much happier with Jason Sudeikis, who frankly punches WAY above his weight, than she did with her Italian prince or whatever, and I guess, go Olivia.

The concept of “marrying well” is fascinating to me. It was never a fantasy growing up (though I fantasized about being Elton John’s sister), and my mother took pains to ensure that I never thought of marriage in terms of a career goal, if at all. She was right to, but that doesn’t make the business of marriage any less interesting, or significant. It’s one way that smart women have hustled throughout history, and desirability, in the classic sense, is a set of skills passed down through the ages, as useful or not useful as carpentry or accounting.

The idea of a marriage of convenience doesn’t churn my stomach — most marriages are to some degree, of course, and I strongly believe that whatever life arrangement causes the most happiness and does the least harm is absolutely ideal. While it freaks me out to think of having to be “on” within a deep intimacy, there’s something to be said for a partnership that keeps you on your toes, whether intellectually or by way of the Fully Optimized Public Self. A marriage in which you can never get food poisoning sounds terrifying, but so does one in which one or both parties goes to the bathroom with the door open.

In a New Yorker feature on Grace Kelly, Anthony Lane writes:

The younger woman’s kernel of privacy was no less keenly guarded, yet she chose to live and marry in the public glare, as if daring herself to bury any frailties beneath the sheen of self-possession. Even when wretched, she would be right-side-uppy.

Good for her(?)! At the very least, she and Prince Rainier seemed to have fun:

Though Rainier was most regal he kept a pet parrot that swore like a sailor and could imitate a popping champagne cork — a common sound in the palace.

….Grace taught Rainier how to prepare an American barbecue with hot dogs, pizza, baked beans and potato salad — but he would always add champagne.

The ultimate romantic fantasy, of course, is a relationship that works. And we know by now that you can’t have a stable partnership in which one of you isn’t pulling your weight, whatever that weight happens to be in the context of your thing. So as marrying-into-nobility idols go, I suggest Natalia Vodianova.

Vodianova was born in a Russian industrial town, and as a child supported her single mother and younger sister, who is autistic, by hawking fruit in the bitter cold. “I used to sell fruit on the street in minus-25 degree Celsius weather, outside in the open air, for 12 hours straight,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I would come home and scream in pain as my fingers and my toes were literally defrosting.”

A boyfriend strongly encouraged her to attend a casting call for modeling work, after which she was whisked off to Paris; their relationship disintegrated as a result, but she later bought him a Mercedes in thanks. A year after the move, she met the Honorable Justin Portman who was, according to Vanity Fair,

the third son of the late Ninth Viscount Edward Henry Berkeley Portman and a member of the 22nd-richest family in Great Britain. In the 16th century, Henry VIII himself gave the Portman family its ancestral lands — more than 100 acres of central London, including Oxford Street, Portman Square, and Marylebone. Today, the clan has homes on Antigua and in Australia, not to mention the 3,000-acre spread in Herefordshire, in the West Midlands, where Justin grew up — “where the cows come from,” as he puts it. He was educated at the exclusive Harrow School, in northwest London, and went on to pursue a career as an artist. He had a show in London and sold every piece.

I don’t know what most of that means, but it sounds boss. Natalia made her own money, loads of it, as well as three children and a happy life. Interviewers remarked on how in love her and Portman seemed. They split in 2011, but Vodianova found someone else, and now as then she comes off as smart, thoughtful, and levelheaded, in addition to one of the most beeeoootiful women in all the land with all the riches and romance her heart desires:

It’s easy to refer to her life as a modern-day fairy tale, but for Vodianova, it’s a bittersweet comparison. “On the one hand, I don’t like it because my story was not defined by who I am dating, by some prince charming,” she asserts. “I married for love. I work hard on being a good mother, and a good partner and in my profession. Those successes cannot be attributed to chance.” But there is one fairy tale that she’s happy to be associated with: Alice in Wonderland. “She took what was given to her and went with it. Go down the rabbit hole and see what life gives you. I can definitely relate to that!” she says. “Besides, I never wanted to be Cinderella. I’d rather be Alice, and I’m happy I found my wonderland.”