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the circumstances of her death. Her untimely demise, however,

served only to amplify the public’s romantic perception of her as a

modern goddess cruelly destroyed by a faithless husband, unsympa-

thetic in-laws, and prying paparazzi. The life and death of the

Princess of Wales, is, indeed, a monument to sad contradictions

and ironies.

Lady Diana Spencer was born into aristocratic privilege, the

daughter of Viscount Althorp, on July 1, 1961 at the remote and

spacious family estate near Sandringham in Norfolk. Her parents

divorced when she was still a child, leaving Diana and her siblings in

the care of her father and his second wife. She was a shy child,

unhappy about the absence of her mother, and early on developed a

passion for children, which led her to become a nursery school teacher

in London. At 18, she re-met Prince Charles, 13 years her senior and

heir to the British throne, whom she had known slightly in childhood.

Their courtship became public, and she had the ﬁrst taste of the media

circus that was to dog her every move for the rest of her life. On July

29, 1981, three weeks before her twentieth birthday, Diana married

her prince—the ﬁrst English woman in 300 years to become the wife

of a future English king—in a wedding aptly described by the

Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘‘the stuff of which fairy tales are

made.’’ The ceremony took place before an overﬂowing congrega-

tion of some 2,500 in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and drew a

record-breaking global radio and television audience of nearly one

billion. A worldwide media event, the wedding afﬁrmed Diana’s

value as an internationally marketable personality whose image soon

appeared not only in magazines, newspapers, and television programs

across the globe, but also adorned an unending stream of merchandise

ranging from postage stamps to coffee mugs.

Diana’s married life revolved around her ofﬁcial Court duties

and, increasingly, her own public causes. Ten days after her twenty-

ﬁrst birthday, the princess gave birth to the next heir apparent, Prince

William, and, two years later, to Prince Henry (known as Harry). She

insisted on taking her young sons on ‘‘normal’’ outings to cinemas

and theme parks and on informal holidays abroad, and she bestowed

lavish affection on them in public. Her conduct represented a sharp

break from the stiff conventions of royalty and contributed to her

position as the media’s darling and to the discomﬁture of her less

demonstrative mother-in-law. On the one hand, Diana seemed deter-

mined to protect her sons from the harsh glare of public scrutiny; on

the other, she kept the people abreast of the family’s life by granting

interviews and making numerous public appearances. She fed the

media’s hunger even while expressing despair at its persistence.

By the mid-1980s, rumors of a rift between Charles and Diana

were growing, accompanied by whispers of inﬁdelity and reports that

the princess was far from well or happy. By the end of the decade, it

was public knowledge that Diana was suffering from bulimia, a fact

that she courageously admitted in public in hopes of helping other

sufferers; that Charles had resumed his long-standing love affair with

Mrs. Camilla Parker-Bowles early in his marriage; and that Diana had

sought solace in an affair with an army ofﬁcer named James Hewitt,

who co-operated in a scandalous tell-all book about their relationship.

For a time, Diana was cruelly treated by the media and criticized

by the public, who simultaneously relished and disapproved of a spate

of further revelations. When, however, Charles consented to an in-

depth television interview with his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby,

and confessed to the Parker-Bowles affair, Diana retaliated with her

own interview that effectively put the knife into the royal family and

re-established her position in the public affection. To the evident

distress of the queen, the couple announced a separation in 1992, the

year in which Britain and America were agog at the publication of

Andrew Morton’s book, Diana, Her True Story. The royal divorce

followed four years later.

Her marital woes and personal troubles only served to raise

Diana’s public proﬁle even higher, and she took advantage of the

media’s relentless coverage of her every move by redirecting their

attention from her private life to her charity work. Though stripped of

her full title—no more Her Royal Highness—she continued to

upstage her beleaguered husband and his family in the public eye. She

rufﬂed the feathers of politicians with her international campaign for

the banning of land mines, visited lepers, and indicated her sympathy

and support for AIDS sufferers by embracing one such for the

television cameras.

But even as Diana worked to focus the world’s attention on her

pet causes, the public remained most keenly interested in her post-

divorce love life. The public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for detail

was both whetted and offended by Diana’s sudden whirlwind ro-

mance with Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayed, which hit the headlines

in 1997. Her new lover was the son of Mohammed Al-Fayed—the

owner of Harrod’s department store and the Ritz Hotel in Paris, from

where the couple left on their last fateful car journey—and had long

been a ﬁgure of ugly controversy in Britain. When the Mercedes in

which Diana and Al-Fayed were traveling crashed at high speed in a

Paris tunnel on the night of August 30, 1997, immediate blame was

laid at the door of the press photographers who were giving chase to

the car, and gave rise to protracted legal hearings in Paris in a futile

attempt to charge somebody with the couple’s senseless deaths.

The news of Princess Diana’s death sent shock waves around the

world and plunged millions into a near-hysterical frenzy of grief. The

profound sense of loss that was experienced, particularly in Britain,

elevated Diana’s mythic-martyr status to unprecedented levels. In the

aftermath of Diana’s death, her brother, Earl Spencer, remembered

his sister as ‘‘the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, and of

beauty.’’ Indeed, when, in the eyes of the public, the queen failed to

show the requisite level of emotion at the news of Diana’s death, she

endured outraged criticism for ‘‘not responding to the pain of

Britons.’’ To quell the anger, she spoke publicly about Diana’s death

on television, and agreed to lower the Union Jack atop Buckingham

palace to half-mast—an honor that had, for nearly a thousand years,

been reserved solely for reigning monarchs. As further evidence of

Diana’s impact on staid British institutions, although a divorcee, she

was given a state funeral on September 5, 1997. Her cofﬁn was borne,

in a simple but ceremonial procession, from her home at Kensington

Palace to Westminster Abbey, where the service was conducted in the

presence of television cameras. The cameras then followed the

cortege to her ﬁnal resting-place at Althorp, and two-and-a-half

billion television viewers in 210 countries worldwide watched the

hours of ﬁlmed coverage. In Britain, sporting events were postponed,

bells chimed every minute, and a moment of silence was observed

before the take-off of each British airline ﬂight in memory of

the princess.

In death, Diana hardly eluded the international cult of celebrity

that had haunted her during her life. Thriving on the controversy over

who was to blame for her death, the international media sold more

magazines and newspapers worldwide than they had at any time

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during her life. Even the charities to which she had been patron were

complicit in exploiting her valuable name and image. The Diana,

Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, established to endow a suitable

memorial, was still riven by indecision, controversy and exploitation

by the end of the 1990s, while her name and likeness was continually

exploited by the souvenir market. While Diana’s status as an exem-

plary mother and world-class humanitarian became cemented in the

popular imagination, she left behind a darker legacy, that of a public

ﬁgure who became a past master at manipulating the media and the

celebrity culture that had both exploited and promoted her. As the

object of the world’s infatuation, Diana was, in the words of her

brother, ‘‘the most hunted person of the modern age.’’ The British

Prime Minister, Tony Blair, however, addressing the nation on the

Sunday morning following the accident, dubbed her ‘‘The People’s

Princess.’’ So she was, and so she is remembered.

—Lauren Supance

URTHER READING:

Battiscombe, Georgina. The Spencers of Althorp. London, Consta-

ble, 1984.

Campbell, Lady Colin. Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody

Knows. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Davies, Nicholas. Diana: A Princess and Her Troubled Marriage.

Secaucus, New Jersey, Carol Publishing Group, 1992.

Holden, Anthony. The Tarnished Crown: Princess Diana and the

House of Windsor. New York, Random House, 1993.

Martin, Ralph G. Charles and Diana. New York, Putnam, 1985.

Morton, Andrew. Diana: Her True Story. New York, Simon &

Schuster, 1992.

DiCaprio, Leonardo (1974—)

After his critically-acclaimed performances in This Boy’s Life

(1993) and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Leonardo DiCaprio

quickly gained a reputation for playing tormented young men in such

ﬁlms as The Basketball Diaries (1995), Total Eclipse (1995), and

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996). His boyish good

looks and sensitive, troubled persona made DiCaprio a favorite of

young women. Starring in the romantic tragedy Titanic (1997), which

grossed more money than any ﬁlm ever had before, broadened

DiCaprio’s popularity even further.

—Christian L. Pyle

URTHER READING:

Bego, Mark. Leonardo DiCaprio: Romantic Hero. Kansas City,

Andrews & McMeel, 1998.

Catalano, Grace. Leonardo: A Scrapbook in Words and Pictures.

New York, Dell, 1998.

———. Leonardo DiCaprio: Modern-Day Romeo. New York,

Bantam Books, 1997.

Krulik, Nancy. Leonardo DiCaprio: A Biography. New York, Arch-

way/Pocket Books, 1998.

Looseleaf, Victoria. Leonardo: Up Close and Personal. New York,

Ballantine, 1998.

Dick and Jane Readers

For nearly 40 years, from 1930 through about 1970, more than

85 million American schoolchildren learned to read using the Dick

and Jane readers that were part of a series published by the Scott

Foresman Company. The books took their name from the series’ lead

characters who, with a dog named Spot and a kitten named Puff,

inhabited a nostalgic, innocent American landscape of white picket

fences and neighborliness. So deeply have the Dick and Jane stories

been etched into the minds of the Baby Boomer generation and their

immediate predecessors that the repetitive phrase ‘‘See Spot run!

Run, Spot, run!’’ is today remembered by millions as the very ﬁrst

sentences they could read on their own. It has been estimated that

four-ﬁfths of the nation’s schools were using Dick and Jane readers,

ranking the books with the venerable McGuffey Readers of the

nineteenth century as a tool of universal literacy.

With an emphasis on methodology over content, the Dick and

Jane series was conceived in part as a rebellion against then in-vogue

didactic traditions that relied heavily on moralistic and patriotic texts

drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, and American historical legends.

The Dick and Jane readers emphasized non-phonic sight reading and

repetitive, limited vocabulary, a formula that became a parody of

itself by the time their approach was jettisoned in the tumultuous

1960s, to be replaced by phonics and books with more diverse

characters and situations. The fact that method trumped content in the

choice of storylines for the Dick and Jane readers provoked frequent

criticism, such as this acerbic remark from educational critic Arther S.

Trace: ‘‘Students could learn a great deal indeed from early American

readers, but the only possible answer to what children can learn from

the Dick-and-Jane type reader is, ‘Nothing of any consequence.’’’

The Dick and Jane program was developed by three people—

Dr. William S. Gray, an authority on pedagogy, and by Zerna Sharp

and Harry B. Johnston. Working with teachers and school psycholo-

gists, the three worked as a team to develop the Scott Foresman series,

using the limited vocabulary technique advocated by Dr. Gray. Thus,

the ﬁrst grade Dick and Jane readers had only about 300 words, the

third grade reader about 1,000, and the sixth grade reader about 4,000.

Writers for the series had to adhere to strict guidelines about using

limited words, and were required to introduce only a few of them on

each page, then repeat them frequently in forthcoming pages. Poetry

and imaginative literature were nonexistent. All this led to criticism

that the books were uninteresting and unnatural.

Dick and Jane ﬁrst made their appearance in 1930, in a pre-

primer of the Elson-Gray basic reader series, with stories in large type

under vividly colored heavy-line illustrations set in boxes according

to 1920s graphics conventions. It was not until 1941, when Eleanor

Campbell began illustrating the series, that the Dick and Jane charac-

ters, in pastel, took on the rounder, ‘‘cuter’’ form known to most Baby

Boomers, inviting comparisons with Norman Rockwell for their

evocation of idyllic small-town life and situations. Within a short

time, other books were added to the series, including More Dick and

DICKENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

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Jane Stories and Dick and Jane. In 1937, a pre-primer Before We

Read was introduced. The concept caught on, and by the end of the

1930s half of America’s schoolchildren were learning to read with

Dick and Jane.

The Dick and Jane series was completely revised in 1940,

introducing Campbell’s illustrations and three paper-bound pre-

primers—We Look and See, We Work and Play, and We Come and

Go, which prepared students for the 160 page primer Fun With Dick

and Jane. It was in this edition that ‘‘Baby’’ became known as

‘‘Sally,’’ that Spot became a long-haired spaniel, and in which the

kitten previously known as ‘‘Little Mew’’ was renamed ‘‘Puff.’’ In

1950 another revision introduced The New Basic Readers, with

updating of storylines and illustrations to reﬂect a more suburban

postwar lifestyle.

In 1941, a special edition of the Dick and Jane readers was

developed for Roman Catholic schools, the nation’s largest non-

public school system. Called the Cathedral series, this version

featured Catholic situations and even changed the names of the

characters to children with more ‘‘Catholic’’ names—John, Jean,

and Judy.

The universe of the Dick and Jane readers was one of optimism

and innocence, inviting criticism that the situations were unreal and

stereotypical. As Sara Goodman Zimet writes in What Children Read

in School: ‘‘Dick and Jane’s world is a friendly one, populated by

good, smiling people who are ready and eager to help children

whenever necessary . . . There are no evil impulses to be controlled.

Instead, free rein and encouragement is given for seeking more and

more fun and play.’’ Arther S. Trace, Jr. complained that the Dick and

Jane readers ironically painted authority ﬁgures in an unfavorable

light, noting that ‘‘Father behaves like a candidate for the all-

American clown. He acts, in fact, like an utter ass, and Mother is

almost as good a representative of the female of the species . . . These

stories do, of course, help adjust students to life if their fathers and

mothers are fools . . . The Dick and Jane readers for the early grades

are comic books in hard covers.’’ City life is generally ignored in the

Dick and Jane readers, leading other critics to implicate the books as

partially responsible for low reading scores in inner-city schools. The

series was not adapted for racial diversity until shortly before its

demise; it was not until 1965 that African American characters were

introduced in the form of Dick and Jane’s neighbors, Mike, Pam, and

Penny. The Dick and Jane readers fell into general disfavor around

this time, partly due to changes in reading pedagogy that advanced

more realistic and relevant storylines, and partly because of com-

plaints of the book’s racial and sex-role stereotyping. Still, the books

retain a sentimental hold over the millions of Americans who learned

their ﬁrst words within their covers, and the Dick and Jane readers

have become both collectors’ items and cultural icons.

—Edward Moran

URTHER READING:

Kismaric, Carole, and Marvin Heiferman. Growing Up with Dick and

Jane. San Francisco, Collins, 1996.

Trace, Arther S., Jr. Reading without Dick & Jane. Chicago, Henry

Regnery Company, 1965.

Zimet, Sara Goodman, editor. What Children Read in School: Criti-

cal Analysis of Primary Reading Textbooks. New York, Grune &

Stratton, 1972.

Dick, Philip K. (1928-1982)

Author of 26 novels and 112 short stories, Philip K. Dick started

his career as a science ﬁction writer in 1952. He was awarded the

Hugo Award, a presentation made by fans, for his novel The Man in

the High Castle in 1962, but he had to wait until the late 1970s to

receive critical acclaim rivalling his popular reputation. His novels

are uneven in quality, most containing powerful social satire. Dick

has been immensely inﬂuential in contemporary science ﬁction

writing, identifying many of the prominent concerns of cyberpunk,

particularly consumerism, the cyborg, issues surrounding memory,

surveillance, and mediated or artiﬁcial reality. Bladerunner (1982),

the ﬁlm version of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

(1968), has become a central reference point for critical discussions of

both science ﬁction and modern technologically driven society.

Dick’s career can be roughly divided into three main stages. In

the 1950s, after he had been expelled from the University of Califor-

nia at Berkley, he produced ﬁction for magazines and Ace books.

Writing against a backdrop of McCarthyism, the ﬁrst novels Dick

produced present satirical dystopias, exaggerating aspects of contem-

porary social experience. Solar Lottery (1955) presents an economic

The cover illustration of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint.

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dystopia, The World Jones Made (1956) concerns the power of the

police, Vulcan’s Hammer (1956) the rise of a computer technocracy,

and The Man Who Japed (1956) examines the totalitarianism inherent

in democracy. These novels also established his interest in themes of

political power and messianic ﬁgures.

It is, however, the consideration of different levels of reality and

the world of appearances imposed upon ordinary characters which

marks out Dick’s work as radically creative and culturally astute. The

Eye in the Sky (1957), The Cosmic Puppets (1956), and Time Out of

Joint (1959), which all have structural inconsistencies in the worlds

they portray, each deal with shifting realities and characters who defy

illusion. These convoluted plots circle the issue of deﬁning the real

from the ersatz, which is a predominant theme throughout Dick’s work.

The Man in the High Castle (1962), which earned Dick his Hugo

Award, also debates the same theme. It is an alternate history, where

the Allies have lost World War II. The novel stands out from his

earlier work because it is less allegorical; its length allows Dick the

space for deeper characterization and to dwell on ambiguity and

irony. From this point Dick writes about existence within depleted

environments and derelict worlds, particularly the harshness visual-

ized in the Martian colonies. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer

Eldritch (1964) Dick concentrates on the use of drugs which allow

Martian colonists to escape the severity of their lives. Dick’s ﬁction

often explores the social use of drugs, including their economic and

psychological effects. This interest culminates in A Scanner Darkly

(1977), where drugs promote such powerful illusions that they pre-

empt reality.

Flow My Tears the Policeman Said (1974) was nominated for

both the Nebula (writers) and the Hugo (fan) awards and it won the

John W. Campbell Award, which is presented by academic writers for

the best science ﬁction novel of the year. The book marked a stage in

which Dick was ready to cast aside the more traditional conventions

of science ﬁction, e.g., time travel, space colonies, technology, aliens,

and telepathy, in order to focus on the more philosophical concerns of

mainstream writing. He wrote a series of non-generic novels during

the 1950s, but only one—Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)—was

published in his lifetime. His last novels, VALIS (1981), The Di-

vine Invasion (1982), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

(1982) combine autobiography and realism with the metaphysical

search for God.

Dick will be most remembered for Do Android’s Dream of

Electric Sheep?, which best exempliﬁes his preoccupation with the

nature of humanity, realized in the dystopia of a society that has wiped

out animal life and supplanted it with androids. It is a novel of deep

existential insight which expands its hardboiled genre for the popular

market. Dick died of a stroke just before the completion of Blade

Runner. In acknowledgement of his achievements, the Philip K. Dick

award was established after his death to recognize the best novel of

the year published originally in paperback.

—Nickianne Moody

URTHER READING:

Gillespie, Bruce, editor. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. Mel-

bourne, Norstrilia Press, 1975.

Olander, J. D., and M. H. Greenberg, editors. Philip K. Dick. New

York, Taplinger, 1983.

Robinson, K. S. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Michigan, UMI

Research Press, 1984.

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy has been called America’s most famous detective,

but his fame does not stop in this country. With his chiseled counte-

nance and tough-guy morality, Tracy has become recognizable through-

out the world. When Chester ‘‘Chet’’ Gould created the character—

the ﬁrst Dick Tracy comic strip ran on October 4, 1931—he could not

have foreseen the inﬂuence of his tough but honest police detective.

In fact, the inﬂuence extends well beyond the comics, into ﬁlm, radio,

and television. The timing of the comic strip’s release was perfect.

The Depression paved the way for a character who upheld traditional

values even as he fell hard on the sordid underworld—he was just a

regular guy ﬁghting to make the world a better place. Moreover,

prohibition, though nearing its demise, had established heretofore

unknown levels of underground criminal activity. The strip also

suggested better times with its presentation of new inventions, tools to

continue the war against crime, and more importantly, inspiring signs

of progress to come. Dick Tracy was created as a reﬂection of his

times, and Gould’s genius is reﬂected in the fact that the comic strip

has survived for so long.

Gould always regarded himself as a cartoonist and he had done

quite a number of odd illustration jobs before showing a strip called

Plainclothes Tracy to Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, co-founder

and director of the New York Daily News. Patterson was himself

something of a powerhouse in the world of comics. He was the

editorial force behind the development of such strips as Little Orphan

Annie, Moon Mullins, and Gasoline Alley. Patterson saw promise in

‘‘Plainclothes Tracy’’ and set up a meeting with Gould. It was

Patterson who was responsible for the name change. The name

‘‘Dick’’ was slang for a detective, and complemented ‘‘Tracy,’’

Gould’s play on the word ‘‘tracing.’’ Patterson also suggested a basic

outline for the ﬁrst story, in which the father of Tess Trueheart,

Tracy’s sweetheart, was robbed and murdered and, consequently,

Tracy went into the crime ﬁghting business. Dick Tracy made his

premier in the Detroit Sunday Mirror and about a week later, on

October 12, 1931, began as a daily.

Dick Tracy quickly became not only Gould’s claim to fame, but

also Patterson’s greatest success in the ﬁeld. For readers, Dick Tracy

was something completely different. Moral tales in the comics, nearly

half of which at the time were serial strips like Dick Tracy, were not

uncommon. But Dick Tracy presented a rough kind of morality. Tracy

was always good, the villains always evil, and the confrontations

always ﬂamboyant. The level of violence was new to the comics, and

Gould was not above bringing his villains to the cruelest of all

possible ends. Audiences were also fascinated by the details of police

procedure. Fisticuffs and gunﬁre were there, but Gould always

remembered that Dick Tracy was ﬁrst and foremost a detective.

The strip also gained notoriety for its take on technology and its

pageant of some of the most bizarre villains to appear anywhere. Of

the inventions, the most famous was the two-way wrist radio which

later became a television and, ﬁnally, a computer. Gould believed that

technology was the key to the future. Because of this, he was always

experimenting with new ﬁctional inventions that would range from

items that would eventually ﬁnd equivalents in the real world, like the

Voice-O-Graph voice print recorder, to the absurd. His placement of

an antennaed race of humanoids and giant snails on the moon is,

however, regarded by many as the low point of the strip. At any rate,

Gould lent the strip a gruesome edge with the villains whose corrupt-

ed morals were reﬂected by their physical deformities. The names of

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the criminals are evocative in and of themselves: The Blank, Flyface,

The Mole, Pruneface, and B-B Eyes.

When Chester Gould retired from Dick Tracy in December of

1977, its artistic responsibilities were taken over by Gould’s longtime

assistant Rick Fletcher while the writing became the responsibility of

Max Allan Collins. Collins was a young mystery novelist who would

also go on to script comic books like Batman along with his own

detective creation, Ms. Tree. Fletcher was eventually replaced by

Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Dick Locher in 1983 and

Collins was later replaced by Mike Killian.

Although Gould himself did not give it much consideration,

Dick Tracy refused to be simply conﬁned to the comics page. He

would appear on radio and television, in books and movies—serial

and feature—and in animated cartoons. He has been personiﬁed by

the likes of Ralph Byrd, Morgan Conway, Ray MacDonnell, and, in a

1990 motion picture, Warren Beatty. In addition, Dick Tracy has been

the basis for a great multitude of licensed products, from toys to

clothing, and, of course, watches.

Clearly, the inﬂuence of Dick Tracy can be seen across a

spectrum of media. Although the serial strip has lost much of its

foothold in American newspaper comics, comic books owe much to

Dick Tracy. Though perhaps not the greatest draftsman to work in

comics, Gould was, without a doubt, original. His use of shadows

opened doors for comics to explore darker visuals. One might even

see Gould’s work as a precursor of sorts to the techniques of ﬁlm noir,

and the police procedure of Dick Tracy became a staple of detective

stories in virtually all narrative media. Dick Tracy also served as the

model for yet another icon of American culture. Bob Kane credited

Dick Tracy as the inspiration for his own creation, the Batman, and

Gould’s menagerie of grotesque villains found reﬂection in the likes

of the Joker and Two-Face, a virtual duplicate of Gould’s Haf-and-

Haf. It could be argued that Dick Tracy invented the look that would

come to be associated with both an era and a type of character. When

we hear the words ‘‘hard-boiled’’ we can’t help but think of the

trenchcoat and fedora pioneered by the famed Dick Tracy.

—Marc Oxoby

URTHER READING:

Crouch, Bill Jr. Dick Tracy: America’s Most Famous Detective. New

York, Citadel Press, 1987.

Roberts, Garyn G. Dick Tracy and American Culture: Morality and

Mythology, Text and Context. Jefferson, McFarland, 1993.

Dickinson, Angie (1931—)

An attractive and talented ﬁlm actress of the 1960s and 1970s,

and star of the popular television show Police Woman, Angie Dickin-

son’s lasting image was thrust upon her by Brian De Palma in 1980.

By then an elegant and sophisticated presence, she was cast in De

Palma’s Dressed to Kill as a woman who is brutally and shockingly

slashed to death in an elevator. Competing with the shower scene in

Psycho as one of the most uncomfortably enduring celluloid murders

of modern times, Dickinson’s bloody demise guaranteed her immor-

tality. Earlier in her career, Dickinson (born Angeline Brown in North

Dakota), exuded a unique blend of up-front acting, all-American girl

charm, sympathetic femininity, and good-natured sex appeal. She

was perfect as both foil and comfort to the men in her several male-

oriented ﬁlms, beginning with Rio Bravo (1959). Although she

played many sympathetic characters, a tougher quality was exploited

in The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967). She was married for a

time to Burt Bacharach.

—Robyn Karney

URTHER READING:

Cross, Robin. ‘‘Angie Dickinson.’’ In Who’s Who in Hollywood,

edited by Robyn Karney. New York, Continuum, 1993.

Diddley, Bo (1928—)

Best known for the ‘‘shave-and-a-haircut’’ beat that bears his

name, Bo Diddley helped build the rhythmic foundations of rock and

roll with a string of hits during the mid-1950s. Diddley came out of

the Chicago blues scene, but also brought the African American

traditions of child game songs, tall-tale telling, and ritualized rounds

Bo Diddley

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of bragging and insults into popular music, making him an early

practitioner of rap. Diddley’s chunky riffs and early use of distortion

and tremolo effects on his unique square guitar were later used in

1960s funk and 1970s heavy metal.

The history of Diddley’s beat has been traced to African Yoruba

and Kongo cultures in Nigeria, and from there to Cuba, where the

clave pattern was the basis for nineteenth century dance hall music.

Early New Orleans jazz composer Jelly Roll Morton employed it in

‘‘Black Bottom Stomp’’ in the early twentieth century, and it was a

common rhythm played by children on diddley bows—homemade

single-stringed instruments—in rural Mississippi. The rhythm is also

commonly referred to as ‘‘hambone,’’ a method of slapping and

stomping often used by shoeshine boys.

Diddley was born Ellas McDaniel in McComb, Mississippi, and

moved to Chicago at the age of eight where he was undoubtedly

exposed to these traditions. ‘‘Truthfully, I don’t know where it came

from exactly. I just started playing it one day,’’ Diddley said in

George R. White’s biography Bo Diddley: Living Legend. ‘‘I ﬁgured

there must be another way of playing, and so I worked on this rhythm

of mine. I’d say it was ‘mixed-up’ rhythm: blues, and Latin American,

and some hillbilly, a little spiritual, a little African and a little West

Indian calypso . . . I like gumbo, you dig? Hot sauces, too. That’s

where my music come from: all the mixture.’’

Young Ellas was entranced one day shortly after moving to

Chicago by a man playing a violin. He signed up for classical lessons

from Professor O.W. Frederick at the Ebenezer Baptist Church,

where he studied for 14 years. After hearing John Lee Hooker on the

radio, however, he decided to play guitar. His sister, Lucille, bought

Diddley his ﬁrst guitar when he was 13. According to Diddley,

‘‘ . . . the violin was the railroad track, or lifeline, to me playing a

guitar . . . I used the bow licks with the guitar pick, and that’s the

reason for the weird sounds. That was my way of imitating with the

bow on the violin strings, and that was the closest I could get to it.’’

Diddley attended Foster Vocational High School, where he

learned to build violins and guitars, but quit school to work manual

labor jobs and play on street corners. He formed a small group and

played in neighborhood taverns, recording a demo that got the

attention of Chess Records. Diddley, along with maracas player

Jerome Green, joined Otis Spann on piano, Lester Davenport on

harmonica, and Frank Kirkland on drums to record ‘‘Bo Diddley’’

and ‘‘I’m a Man’’ in 1955.

Chess was prepared to issue the single under McDaniel’s real

name, but harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold suggested Bo Diddley,

a slang term for a comical-looking, bow-legged, short guy. The name

and the single caught on, reaching number two on Billboard’s rhythm

and blues singles chart. He charted six more singles through 1960 on

Checker, a Chess subsidiary, and recorded 22 albums for Chess/

Checker through 1974.

Countless artists have had hits using Diddley’s rhythm, includ-

ing Buddy Holly (‘‘Not Fade Away’’) and Johnny Otis (‘‘Willie and

the Hand Jive’’). Many more, including the Rolling Stones and Eric

Clapton, have had hits covering these tunes. The Who, the Yardbirds,

Ronnie Hawkins, and the Doors all employed Diddley’s beat at one

time or another. Unfortunately for Diddley, American copyright law

does not cover a beat or rhythm—only lyrics or a melody—and he

therefore never received royalties from these songs.

Diddley released a few albums in the 1980s and 1990s with his

own company, BoKay Productions, and other small labels, but he

found it difﬁcult to ﬁt in with the new style of popular music. Diddley

returned to form with the release of A Man Amongst Men on Atlantic

Records in 1996. Featuring guest musicians Jimmie Vaughan, Ron

Wood, Richie Sambora, Billy Boy Arnold, Johnnie Johnson, and

Johnny ‘‘Guitar’’ Watson, the album was nominated for a Grammy

Award as Best Traditional Blues Album.

—Jon Klinkowitz

URTHER READING:

DeCurtis, Anthony. ‘‘Living Legends.’’ Rolling Stone. September

21, 1989, 89-99.

Kiersh, Edwards. Where Are You Now, Bo Diddley?: The Stars Who

Made Us Rock and Where Are They Now? Garden City, New

York, Doubleday, 1986.

Lydon, Michael. Boogie Lightning. New York, Dial, 1974.

White, George R. Bo Diddley: Living Legend. Chessington, Great

Britain, Castle Communications, 1995.

Didion, Joan (1934—)

Joan Didion has proven herself one of the most acute observers

of and commentators on American life in the latter half of the

twentieth century. Her widely anthologized essays have been re-

quired reading for two generations of college students. Combining

old-fashioned investigative reporting and New Journalistic subjec-

tivity, she has brought her trademark style and deeply skeptical

intelligence to bear on a variety of cultural phenomena, from her own

marriage and the rock group the Doors, to the terror in El Salvador,

Cuban exiles in Miami, and the Central Park jogger case. Her highly

cinematic novels are stylistically and tonally of a piece with her

nonﬁction and have become increasingly journalistic and more

political over the years. Focusing on women who are afﬂuent but

adrift, Didion’s decidedly pessimistic novels expose not just her

characters’ self-delusions, but the political and psychological short-

comings of an American Dream gone sour. As such, the novels, along

with the essays, give laconic voice to the disillusionment and pessi-

mism that is the other face of the radicalism of the 1960s.

—Robert A. Morace

URTHER READING:

Felton, Sharon, editor. The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport,

Connecticut, Greenwood, 1994.

Winchell, Mark Roydon. Joan Didion. Boston, Twayne, 1989.

Didrikson, Babe (1911-1956)

More than a hero to feminists and young women who aspire to

athletic achievement, athlete Babe Didrikson was a sports hero in the

ﬁnest American tradition, larger than life, with super-sized faults to

match her virtues. Carrying a chip on her shoulder from her rough and

tumble upbringing, Didrikson approached life with a swagger and a

wisecrack. She brought controversy and excitement to the reﬁned

world of women’s golf, and challenged assumptions everywhere she

went. She broke world records regularly and broke barriers set up

DIDRIKSONENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE

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Babe Didrikson

against women. Her statistics are an inspiration to women athletes

everywhere. But it is the ﬂesh and blood Didrikson, angry, cocky,

competitive, and irrepressible, that forged her place in history’s sports

hall of fame.

‘‘Before I was even into my teens I knew exactly what I wanted

to be when I grew up,’’ Didrikson wrote, ‘‘My goal was to be the

greatest athlete who ever lived.’’ Didrikson achieved her goal. The

Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year six times

between 1932 and 1954, and in 1950, they gave her the title Female

Athlete of the Half Century. She was an All-American basketball

player, an Olympic gold medal winner in track and ﬁeld, a record-

breaking golf champion, and a proﬁcient dabbler in other sports from

swimming to shooting pool. Didrikson’s athletic achievements clear-

ly transcend the footnote usually allowed for women in sports.

Mildred Didrikson was born in the south Texas town of Beau-

mont. The sixth of seven children in a working-class family, she

learned early the value of toughness and self-reliance. Roaming the

streets of Beaumont, she taught herself to run by racing the streetcars

and learned hurdles from leaping over hedges. It was the boys in her

hometown who gave her the name ‘‘Babe’’ because she hit so many

home runs in their sandlot games.

Didrikson dropped out of high school and was playing semi-

professional basketball when she was made an All-American in 1932.

That year she participated in an Amateur Athletic Union track-and-

ﬁeld championship as a one-woman team. She entered eight events

and won six, and the championship. A team of twenty-two women

came in second, eight points behind Didrikson. That day on the ﬁeld,

the smart-aleck kid from south Texas set world records for the high

jump, the eighty-meter hurdles, the javelin, and the baseball throw. A

few weeks later, competing in the Olympics in Los Angeles, she won

gold medals for the javelin and the eighty-meter hurdles and a silver

for the high jump. She would have won the gold for the high jump, but

her best jump was disqualiﬁed on a technicality because her head

went over the bar before her feet.

In 1935, Didrikson took the golf world by storm. Before her

career was over she had won ﬁfty-ﬁve professional and amateur

tournaments and set a record with seventeen wins in a row. Staid

golﬁng audiences were put off by Didrikson’s irreverent, wisecrack-

ing style, but her drives were regularly ﬁfty to one hundred yards

longer than her opponents’, and it was not uncommon for her to come

in well under the men’s par, so she was hard to dismiss. The upper-

class golﬁng establishment tried to exclude her because she played

professionally and most women’s golf consisted of amateur events,

but Didrikson got around them in typical aggressive style. In 1949,

she helped found the Ladies Professional Golfers Association to put

women’s golf on more even footing with men’s by giving profession-

al women golfers a venue.

Didrikson remained the cocky, streetwise, tough kid from south

Texas. Her style was both confrontational and comic, sometimes

charming her audiences with silly trick golf shots, sometimes shock-

ing them with her directness. Many of her opponents hated her,

perhaps because she was an egotistical and graceless winner. The

press nicknamed her ‘‘muscle moll,’’ and college physical education

departments warned women against emulating her. Didrikson was

unabashed. She continued to start her golf matches with a grin and the

quip, ‘‘Well, I’m just gonna have to loosen my girdle and let ’er ﬂy!’’

She also continued to play almost every sport available. She played

exhibition games in baseball and football, shot exhibition pool, and

even sang and played harmonica on the vaudeville stage. When asked

if there was anything she didn’t play, Didrikson answered dryly,

‘‘Yeah. Dolls.’’

Didrikson married professional wrestler George Zaharias in

1938. They had met when they were partnered in the Los Angeles

Open golf tourney. In 1941, Didrikson underwent surgery for colon

cancer, and doctors told her that her athletic career was over. With

typical unconcern for the opinions of naysayers, she continued to

play, and in 1954, she won ﬁve golf tournaments, playing with pain,

fatigue, and a colostomy bag. Two years later, she died. The epitaph

on her tombstone in Galveston, Texas, reads ‘‘Babe Didrikson

Zaharias—1911-1956—World’s Greatest Woman Athlete.’’

—Tina Gianoulis

URTHER READING:

Cayleff, Susan E. Babe: The Life and Legend of Babe Didrikson

Zaharias. Urbana, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Knudson, R. Rozanne. Babe Didrikson: Athlete of the Century. New

York, Viking Kestrel, 1985.

Lynn, Elizabeth A. Babe Didrikson Zaharias. New York, Chelsea

House, 1989.

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Dieting

It would be hard to ﬁnd anyone in the United States, or in any

other part of the Western world, who has not at one time gone on a

weight-loss diet. Perhaps the most long-lived fad of our society, the

diet craze has grown and expanded its inﬂuence until almost every

issue of every popular publication contains at least one diet article and

television talk shows regularly feature diet gurus and those offering

weight loss testimonials. With little evidence that such diets work,

and with quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, a multi-billion dollar

industry has grown up around the modern obsession with thinness.

Women are the vast majority of consumers in the diet industry, and,

though men do diet, it is almost exclusively women who focus a

signiﬁcant portion of their time and energy on the effort to become thin.

Though Americans are constantly bombarded with the concept

of thinness as an ideal of health and beauty, it is a relatively new

concept that would have seemed laughable just one hundred years

ago. Though standards of beauty have varied from culture to culture

and from century to century, plumpness has widely been viewed as

signaling health, success, and sensuality. Many modern cultures do

not place the same value on thinness as much of western society.

Some, such as those in Polynesia and east and central Africa, value fat

women to the extent of fattening up daughters to make them

more marriageable.

Human bodies evolved in response to a struggle to survive with

an uncertain food supply. The ability to store fat was a valued genetic

trait. As long ago as 30,000 to 10,000 B.C.E., statues like the so-called

Venus of Willendorf show an ideal of feminine beauty that includes

large thighs, broad buttocks and pendulous breasts. The Biblical book

of Proverbs says, ‘‘He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made

fat.’’ Even in Medieval Europe, when the religious art showed lank,

acetic Marys and Eves, the secular art pictured round, ﬂeshy women,

brimming with laughter and sexuality. A fat, dimpled buttock or thigh

was a universal symbol of sex appeal.

On the contrary, thinness was viewed as a sign of weakness,

disease, and poverty. Eighteenth-century diet specialist Jean-Anthelme

Brillat-Savarin called thinness ‘‘a terrible misfortune’’ for a woman.

‘‘Every thin woman wishes to put on weight,’’ he said, ‘‘This is an

ambition that has been conﬁded to us a thousand times.’’ He obliged

them by prescribing fattening diets. By the end of the nineteenth

century, women had begun to slim their waists through the use of

tightly laced corsets, but ample cleavage and voluminous hips were

still very much the style, helped along by contrivances called

farthingales, panniers, and bustles. These were wire frames worn

under the clothes to add desirable inches (or feet) to hips and buttocks.

Indeed, most changes deemed necessary in the body were effected by

additions to the costume. Only later would women begin to consider

the idea of altering the body itself.

As the 1900s began, the country was in an era of tremendous

growth and change. The industrial revolution was bringing science

into the day-to-day lives of common citizens. A feminist age was

beginning as women entered the work force in unprecedented num-

bers and began to demand more rights. Along with these changes

came a new look in women’s fashions. The corsets and cumbersome

contraptions were gone and so was the abundant ﬂesh. By the 1920s

women were supposed to be slim, straight, and boyish. Hair was

bobbed, breasts and hips were bound, and women began to try to lose

weight. Along with such extreme treatments as electrotherapy, tape-

worm pills, and hot baths to melt fat off, miracle diets promised to

fatten the scrawny as well as slim the stout.

Around the same time, the newly burgeoning insurance industry

began to study the effects of weight and other features on longevity.

Inspired perhaps by the fashion of thinness, researchers tended to

ignore the evidence that the underweight and the tall had higher death

rates too, and they only focused on the overweight. Even though their

research methods were questionable and their samples included only

the upper classes who had the money and inclination to purchase life

insurance, the insurance tables were popularly accepted as fact in

terms of optimum height-weight ratios. These tables have remained a

standard by which modern people measure themselves, even though

their recommendations have varied widely over the decades.

It was also around the 1920s that doctors began to abandon their

condemnation of thinness as a sign of the common disorder

‘‘neurasthenia’’ and to attack excess weight as the cause of many

health problems. Even then, there was not widespread belief that

people could control their body size, and doctors worried that dieting,

especially the dieting of young women, was dangerous to health.

The Roaring Twenties’ dieting craze, which never penetrated

much beyond the upper classes, waned during the late 1930s and early

1940s, as the poverty of the depression years deepened. But by the

1950s, the preference for thinness and disgust with fat was on its way

to becoming a national obsession. This obsession was perhaps useful

to a society which was trying to distract women from the increased

responsibility they had been given during the war and refocus them on

home, family, and fashion. The number of magazine articles about

weight and diet skyrocketed, and fatness, which once had been

viewed as a physical characteristic like any other, had become a vice

and a moral failing. Weight loss products and diet foods began to

appear on grocery shelves, and dieters bought them in huge quantities.

Pharmaceuticals ﬁrm Mead and Johnson created an all-liquid diet

food called Metrecal that boosted their earnings over 300 percent in

the years between 1958 and 1960. Just as quickly, however, proﬁts

dropped again, as unsuccessful dieters moved on to try other products.

Amphetamines, a fairly new drug about which little was known, were

prescribed freely to women as a weight loss aid.

Diet books also began to appear, some with a health food bent,

others purely fashionable. Exercise had long been seen as having a

negative effect on weight loss because it stimulated the appetite, but

modern experts made the case for exercise as an adjunct to a weight-

loss diet. Fad and novelty diets began to pop up, often having nothing

more to recommend them than sheer weirdness, but promising

‘‘miracle’’ results. The Drinking Man’s Diet, offered permission to

imbibe; the grapefruit diet ascribed extraordinary fat burning qualities

to the acidic yellow fruit which was to be eaten several times a day.

One diet prescribed only steak, another suggested eating foods high in

fat. Americans were willing to try anything that promised results.

Medical opinions about the effects of obesity continued to

follow closely the guidelines and research done by the insurance

industry, even though that research was proved ﬂawed and limited on

many occasions. Since the major factor in body size seemed to be

genetic, doctors began to prescribe weight-loss diets even for preg-

nant women and young children. As fat was seen as the result of moral

ﬂaws such as lack of willpower, it was also seen as a psychological

problem, and fat people were sent to psychiatrists to seek the deep

root causes of their body size.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the continued increase of the thinness

obsession, perhaps more than coincidentally with the rise of a second

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wave of women’s liberation. Some feminists speculate that each time

women gained power and pushed for more rights, they were purpose-

ly distracted by a cultural insistence on an unattainable female body

ideal. Women, though genetically predisposed to be fatter than men,

have always borne the brunt of the weight-loss fad. Though some

dieting occurs among men, it is far more common that even men who

do not ﬁt the media mold of beauty have little shame over exposing

bellies and bare chests in public, while women, even admired models

and actresses, experience shame and self-loathing about their bodies.

Perhaps because men have had more economic and political power, it

has been necessary for women to ﬁt the mold most pleasing to men. If

the eating disorders and obsession with dieting that women exhibit are

reﬂected anywhere among men, it is among gay men, who have the

same need that heterosexual women have to ﬁt the male standard of

beauty. Nowhere has that standard been challenged more strongly

than within the lesbian community. Though not immune to cultural

beauty standards, lesbians’ relative independence from men has given

them both room and incentive to question those standards. That

questioning has led to pioneering work in the fat acceptance move-

ment, which challenges the diet industry and medical establishment’s

demonization of fatness.

By the 1990s the diet fad has become so widespread that most

Americans are continually on one sort of weight-loss plan or another,

and most women consider themselves fat, no matter what their actual

size. Studies have been done that show a high percentage of girls as

young as eight years old have begun to diet. Fashion models appear

acutely undernourished and even they must have their pictures

airbrushed to remove offending ﬂesh. Eating disorders such as

anorexia (the rejection of food to achieve ever-increasing thinness)

and bulimia (binge eating followed by forced vomiting or laxative-

induced diarrhea) which once were rare, have become epidemic.

Surgical procedures such as stomach-stapling and liposuction are in

demand even though they are known to have dangerous or even

deadly effects.

The media abounds with new ‘‘miracle’’ diets, and the diet

business has grown from a few companies with names like Weight

Watchers and Slenderella to a 50 billion dollar-a-year industry. With

ads offering such perplexing promises as ‘‘Lose ten pounds for only

ten dollars,’’ these diet companies have perhaps ﬁnally achieved the

perfect American solution to excess weight. If willpower, therapy,

and even prayer don’t work, one can buy weight loss.

The success of products like Metrecal in the 1950s has led to a

boom in diet products and organizations. While some products like

SlimFast and Lean Cuisine specialize in diet food, others have

jumped on the bandwagon by offering ‘‘lite’’ or ‘‘lo-fat’’ versions of

their products. Soft drink companies were among the ﬁrst to offer

proﬁtable diet alternatives. These are guzzled in astounding quanti-

ties by Americans of all sizes, even though their artiﬁcial sweeteners,

ﬁrst saccharin, then cyclamates, and most recently aspartame, have in

some cases been found to have damaging effects on the body. Often,

as in Metrecal’s case, when a new product is introduced, there is a

rush to try it. When it proves to be less than miraculous, sales may

drop as consumers move on to the next new promise.

Another form of diet business is the dieter’s organization or

‘‘club.’’ Afﬂuent dieters often pay high prices to attend spas and ‘‘fat

farms’’ to help them lose weight. For middle and working class

dieters there are more affordable alternatives. Organizations like

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig offer counseling and group support

for a price, plus a line of food products that are required or strongly

suggested to go with the program. The twelve-step approach of

Alcoholics Anonymous is emulated by groups like Take Off Pounds

Sensibly (TOPS) and Overeaters Anonymous, which tend to view

fatness as a sign of addictive attitudes towards food and offer free

support groups to combat the addiction.

Over the years, many weight-loss ‘‘gurus’’ have risen to media

prominence, producing books or videos to promote their personal

recommendation for weight loss. As early as 1956, Roy de Groot

published his low-protein ‘‘Revolutionary Rockefeller Diet’’ in Look

magazine, leading the way for Robert Atkins’ Dr. Atkins’ Diet

Revolution in 1972, Herbert Tarnower’s ‘‘Scarsdale’’ diet in 1979,

and Jane Fonda’s books and videos in the 1980s and 1990s. Trading

on medical credentials or celebrity, these diet ‘‘experts’’ often

become corporations in themselves, proﬁting handsomely from sales

and public appearances.

Yet many Americans are still overweight. In fact, diets have

never been successful at making fat people thin. Only about ten

percent of dieters lose anything close to their goals, and only about

half of those keep the weight off for an extended period of time. The

body is an efﬁcient processing machine for food and its response to

the starvation message sent by dieting is to become even more

efﬁcient, thereby needing less food to maintain the same weight. The

World Health Organization’s deﬁnition of starvation is 1200 calories

per day, the same intake as an average weight-loss diet. Even when

caloric reduction causes the body to use stored resources, there is no

guarantee that unwanted fat will be used. The body might as easily

draw from muscle tissue, even from the brain or heart, with life-

threatening results.

Some researchers claim that the rising numbers of fat people are

caused by the incessant dieting practiced by most Americans. Each bit

of weight loss causes the body to respond as it would to recurring

famine, by storing food, and fat, more efﬁciently. Even aside from

overtly dangerous diets, such as liquid protein diets or extreme 400 to

500 calorie diets, any sort of weight-loss diet can have seriously

negative effects. Depression, irritability, and fatigue are frequent side

effects, along with amenorrhea for women, muscle damage, and

stress on liver, kidneys, and the cardiovascular system. In the long

run, medical studies on the negative effects of being fat become

useless, for, in a society where everyone diets, fat people, persecuted

for being fat, often spend a large part of their lives dieting. It is

difﬁcult to separate the effect of weight on health from the effects of

long-term dieting and from the stress of being fat in a culture that

demeans fat people.

Though dieting has become so entrenched in American culture,

some voices are being raised in protest. The fat-positive movement

(also called the size-acceptance or size-diversity movement) is grow-

ing, energized by people who are no longer willing to devote their

lives to ﬁtting an impossible ideal. An anti-diet movement has arisen,

drawing attention to the dangers of dieting with an annual Internation-

al No-Diet Day. Concerned by the rising numbers (over 11 million in

the 1990s) of young girls afﬂicted with anorexia and bulimia, some

parents and educators are calling for more focus on raising the self-

esteem of adolescent girls. However, surveys still report that a large

percentage of women would prefer being run over by a truck or killed

by a terrorist to being fat, and American culture has a long way to go

to leave superﬁcial values behind. Perhaps as long as there is still so

much money to be made off of Americans’ preoccupation with

thinness, dieting will remain a lifestyle and an obsession.

—Tina Gianoulis

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