One got famous wearing mouse ears. One got famous wearing brightly colored shifts. And one got famous wearing down the opposition while carrying a handbag.
The trio of famous deaths this week seems incongruous. Yet these spirited women — two quintessential Americans known by their first names and one quintessential Brit known by her nickname — were all vivid emblems of their time.
Three very different worlds are conjured up when you think about Annette Funicello, Lilly Pulitzer and Margaret Thatcher.
As a tot, I spent every afternoon in my Mickey Mouse Club ears and underwear, clutching a red patent purse full of Milky Ways, glued to the television watching Annette and company. For my older brother and other boys on the brink of their teens, the blossoming Annette sparked the first frisson of hormones. The comely daughter of an auto mechanic, she grew up in the San Fernando Valley and came across as the unpretentious Italian girl-next-door who might actually be your friend, or date.
She was so shy she asked Walt Disney if she should see a shrink; he said no, that she might cure herself of the very quality that people loved.
Even later, donning two-piece bathing suits in her goofy beach party movies with Frankie Avalon, she seemed as innocent as Sally Field in her flying nun outfit.
Annette was the avatar for carefree childhood and carefree summer. Maybe that's why it was such a shock when she revealed in 1992 that she had MS. The merry Mouseketeer and mother of three handled it with grace, becoming the face of MS, founding a research fund and serving as an ambassador for the MS Society.
"Like Cinderella, I believe a dream is a wish your heart makes," she said, sweet-tempered even as the disease ravaged her. "I've had a dream life."
Pulitzer, another ambassador of fun, fashioned her dream life by branding a sweet slice of the American dream. She cleverly patented Paradise Found. She made citrus-bright resort wear that was, as Vanity Fair put it, "shorthand for WASP wealth at play." The clothes had down-to-earth snob appeal, as the magazine said in 2003, noting that Jackie Kennedy and her maid both wore Lillys.
Just as Annette did not give in to her disease, Lilly, the daughter of a Standard Oil heiress, did not give in to her stuffy old-money background. After she married a Pulitzer heir and moved to Palm Beach, she wandered barefoot, threw parties, had three kids and suffered a nervous breakdown.
Unconcerned about making a spectacle of herself, she opened a stand to sell the fruit from her husband's orchards; then, she and a partner, wearing cheap, brightly patterned sheaths to hide fruit stains, had a eureka moment. Style is more than fashion, she said, and being happy "never goes out of style."
While Lilly was known as "the ultimate party girl," Maggie was "the ultimate conservative pinup."
Margaret Thatcher, the grocer's daughter and mother of modern conservatism, had her faults, heaven knows. Francois Mitterrand said she had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.
I was in Aspen in 1990 when she told George Bush not to go "wobbly" on Saddam.
My favorite Thatcher moment came while covering a Group of 7 meeting in Paris in 1989. Mitterrand had given her bad placement twice compared with other world leaders: once at the opera and once on the reviewing stand for a parade marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution, held where King Louis XVI was guillotined.
So as Maggie left Paris, she offered a pointed message about the excesses of the French Revolution, slyly presenting Mitterrand a book bound in red leather: "A Tale of Two Cities."