Harry and Meghan seemed to have no empathy for the mortification Tom was facing as he was portrayed on a daily basis in the most unflattering light. They could have hired a media advisor to run interference for him. They should also have done the same for Samantha and Tom Jr. Such basic consideration would have been humane as well as clever, for it would have assured Meghan of positive responses from her relations and the negativity which emanated from her spurned relations would not have existed. Instead, she and Harry decided to blank out what was happening, which was somewhat perplexing. Harry had always had such sympathy for his mother’s plight, despite the fact that she usually tipped off her supposed pursuers, and had also expressed concern when Doria was subjected to undue attention, but Tom Sr was given neither support nor consideration beyond the repetition of empty platitudes.
To the embarrassment of the palace and the astonishment of the public, ‘the Markle debacle’, as it was soon called, intensified as the wedding date approached. It could not have been more obvious that Meghan’s family was unsophisticated with regard to the press, but why would they have been otherwise? They were not public figures, nor were they aristocrats or royalty. They were simply American working people, and if they were looked at askance in America, they would soon gain admirers in Britain for what was regarded as their forthright and unpretentious honesty.
Nevertheless, the situation as it developed became increasingly embarrassing for all the Markles, who were held up to ridicule, the tabloids feeling that they were fair game for mockery as the message Meghan had given out was that they were such undesirables that they couldn’t even be included in her wedding. Tom Sr’s response was to fall for the line of a journalist who suggested that they stage photographs of him pursuing more upmarket activities than the resolutely downmarket ones he had so far been pictured enacting. Instead of buying beer in his local deli, he should be measured for a suit, should be looking at computer images of his daughter and her fiancé, and what about doing gentle exercises while jogging up a hill with weights in his hands? Tom Sr was undoubtedly naive in thinking that such activities would improve his image, or that other journalists wouldn’t find out what he and one of their colleagues had cooked up between themselves, but who can blame someone who is being pilloried for trying to regain a bit of dignity?
The week before the wedding, his unfortunate attempt to divert the narrative into something more presentable was exposed in the Mail on Sunday. Stripping him of whatever remained of his self-respect, the paper revealed that he had cooperated with a paparazzo, staging photographs for a vast sum of money, which was not accurate. The tabloids being the tabloids, exaggeration was the order of the day. Tom’s humiliation was so complete that he not only had a heart attack, but also offered to withdraw from the wedding.
To their credit, Meghan and Harry declined his offer, and insisted he fly over and give her away. However, they lost patience with him when he had his second heart attack shortly after being released from hospital in Mexico following his first. Meghan stopped speaking to him, while Harry berated him by text. Tom told them that he suspected they were really sorry he hadn’t died, so that they could pretend to be sad and not have to bother with him. Their response was a complete lack of response to him and to all subsequent messages and ‘phone calls from him.
The palace’s worst nightmare, at least until Meghan and Harry bolted, had now begun in earnest.
CHAPTER 6
To the hundreds of millions of people who watched Harry and Meghan marry at St. George’s Chapel on the 19th of May 2016, theirs was a fairy tale come true. The bride looked so beautiful, so demure, so modest, so radiant, while the groom seemed so happy, so handsome, so proud. She was the apex of femininity, he of masculinity. Theirs was not merely a love story, but one with a message, the most important part of which was that the glass ceiling had now been removed for people of colour. The formerly marginalised could now aspire to anything. One of their own had achieved the greatest height apart from the presidency of the United States of America. She was now a royal highness, and not just any old royal highness either, but a fully paid up member of the most prestigious family on earth: the British Royal Family.
Meghan had now become the embodiment of hope and accomplishment for people all over the world, a beacon of light for billions who could thereafter look at her and think: If she could achieve this, maybe my children can scale great heights, even if I can’t. Meghan had reached a pinnacle that no other woman of colour ever had before. It was, by any measure, a tremendous accomplishment. It was also a great responsibility, and those of us who were aware of how many people’s hopes were vested in her, hoped and prayed she would have the attributes to live up to it.
The American entertainer Pharrell Williams summed it up well when he told Meghan and Harry, ‘I’m so happy for your union. Love is amazing. Love is beautiful. Don’t ever take it for granted. But what it means in today’s climate, I just wanted to tell you it’s so significant for so many of us. Seriously. We cheer you guys on.’
Harry and Meghan’s response was indicative of their attitudes. While she nodded graciously, completely in tune with the sentiments, she said, ‘Oh, thank you,’ before stating that her critics ‘don’t make it easy.’ She had missed the point entirely, which is that she now had a sacred duty to live up to, and no matter how difficult it was, she would be dashing the hopes people everywhere if she should fail. It was therefore beside the point whether her critics made it easy or not. Indeed, the mere fact that they did not was all the more reason to ensure that she succeeded in the role she now embodied.
Of course, it is not easy to live up to the expectations of others. Being royal is in many ways a thankless task, rather like being a secular nun, albeit one who is called upon to be a style icon. The personal rewards are there, but not in the emotional way that Meghan was used to either as a volunteer serving in soup kitchens or in the applause she would receive from a good performance in front of the camera or an audience at the UN. There is a very self-sacrificial aspect which is never entirely offset by the superficial glamour surrounding the high-profile aspects of royal life. Meghan was something of an expert on Diana, Princess of Wales. She will therefore have been familiar with Diana’s complaint to Princess Grace of Monaco on the occasion of her first official engagement with Prince Charles at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. As Diana bemoaned how ‘horrendous’ she was finding all the public attention - attention, incidentally, which she ensured she maintained till the very end of her life: attention, in fact, which actively contributed to her death in that it could not have existed without the participation of the press, and this Diana was careful to nurture despite her protestations to the contrary - Grace said with equal parts of wit and truthfulness, ‘Don’t worry, dear. It will only get worse.’ And it did, though it never got so bad, for all Diana’s complaints to the contrary, that she swapped the approbation that came her way as a result of being the Princess of Wales, for a more retired way of life.
Plainly, Meghan was taking a leaf out of Diana’s book, resenting the demands and intrusions while contradictorily fulfilling the glamorous aspects the press and public demanded of their new style icon. Like Diana, who was also very in tune with her feelings, Meghan had conflicting attitudes to the pros and cons of being royal. Had she had a more open and less personal approach towards her new role of royal duchess, had she focused less on the sensations it generated within her and accepted the rough with the smooth in a more comprehensive manner, she would have been entirely in tune with what Pharrell Williams was saying. She would have realised that when the going gets tough, the tough get going - towards success, not towards complaints or self-pity. One way or the other, you are obliged to pay for your privileges, and though the downside was disagreeable, the upside should have been well worth the effort, especially if she hoped to undertake the massive humanitarian role she and Harry had indicated they intended for themselves.
Meghan’s adjustment to her royal role woul
d have been more successful if someone close to her had pointed out that she had been perfectly happy to pay the price for being a cast member of Suits, and now that she had an even bigger role, with greater potential and more rewards, she should be focusing on the positives rather than wallowing in the negatives and jeopardising her chances of success as a result of her attitude. She had had no problem with keeping her feelings in their rightful place when she had been a working actress. She had willingly hung around the set waiting for her three minutes of filming while she shot the breeze with the film crew for hours on end. She had not objected to the hours of primping and priming when her hair and makeup were being done, when her costumes were being fitted, and she hung out affirming her status as a down-to-earth team player with the crew. She had willingly allowed herself to be used on publicity junkets and, when none was in the offing, had volunteered for others under the aegis of humanitarian work. Now she had well and truly arrived. Now she had the platform from which she could undertake all the philanthropic projects which had seemed to inspire her, and it was disappointing to learn that she seemed unable to realise that there was still a price to be paid.
In some ways, being royal was not that different from being an actress in a television series. Yes, there were differences. There was more scrutiny and you were expected to conform to entirely different standards, but if she had moved on to playing another role in another television show, she would not have expected, now that she had a new role, to call all the shots with scriptwriters, producers, directors, gaffers, cameramen, and everyone else associated with the new show the way she had been doing with everyone at court.
Having moved up in the world from minor to major stardom, her head seemed to have been turned and her sense of proportion displaced. Diana Wales had suffered a similar fate when she had married Prince Charles, but she had been half Meghan’s age and she at least had had the good grace to keep her struggles quiet until she was ready to bolt. Yet here was Meghan, barely married, already bemoaning her lot and wanting to be taken for a hardship case while also demanding that everyone do everything her way.
Success as a royal duchess was only possible if she remained a team player, if she understood that the game had changed, that she had a new role and a part to play, but that there were still boundaries, and in this bigger, much expanded role, the approbation she yearned for she would receive only if she understood that it would take an entirely new form from what she was used to. She couldn’t expect emotional gratification the way she had got it from the crew or cast of the show, or even from the occasional reviewer. She would have to settle for an entirely different sort of gratification, this time a more intellectualised, spiritual version that would be less obvious but no less real or significant. The hyper-emotional interchanges upon which she had relied had to be a thing of the past. Instead of twenty indigents or a camera crew, she would be interacting with tens and hundreds of thousands of people on an annual basis, some for no more than thirty or fifty seconds, others for only a matter of minutes, and all within a more formalised, less emotive setting. There would seldom be the opportunity for people to express the approbation they felt, for the life of a royal on public duty is so transient, so busy, the interactions with people so fleeting, that there simply is not time to get feedback the way she was used to from the lightning engineer or the cameraman with whom she had interacted on a daily basis for hours on end on set. However, if she gave herself the chance, with time she would come to appreciate that there was feedback: it was simply more subtle. But the rewards nevertheless existed, and they were profound.
There was also the issue of discipline and control, and here the balance was radically different from what she had been used to. Had Meghan and Harry exercised the patience and diplomacy that his grandparents the Queen and Prince Philip did at the time of the accession, laying down their imprimatur slowly and cautiously rather than stating, as Meghan did, that she intended to ‘hit the ground running’ upon marriage - thereby conveying the message that everybody had better watch out, as the new broom intended to sweep clean - she would have received a more positive response.
Meghan was used to a structure on the Suits set whereby she could interact with the producers, directors, and script writers. Prior to that show, she had had very little luck in influencing anyone to expand her role, but, by her own account, on it she had had so much success that she had got them to tone down the sex scenes and build her character up into something even more potent than the powerhouse they had originally envisaged Rachel Zane as being.
Royalty has a different structure. The courtiers organise and advise. The royals perform, but do so within well-defined boundaries. Royalty is an ensemble act. Each player exists to enhance the Crown. The monarch is the chief player. The importance of each player thereafter is determined by their proximity to the throne. After the monarch comes the immediate heir. After him comes the next heir in line, and so on down the scales of precedence. If you are the sixth dancer in the chorus line and you are supposed to kick after number five and before number seven, you screw up the whole routine if you do so out of time. In royal families as in Broadway shows, each player needs to know his or her place. If you break ranks, you are damaging the show. You are especially destructive if you break ranks in such a way that you make it clear to the audience that you are a better player than all the other members of the ensemble. In doing so, you are not only boosting yourself at the expense of the whole show, but you are also showing up the other players adversely.
Since the whole purpose of a royal family is to represent its nation as a whole, there is only ever one game in town for each royal family. An undisciplined and destructive ensemble player who breaks rank will therefore ultimately be nothing but a force for destructiveness where the royal family is concerned. And the idea of setting up your own dance routine, separate from the one everyone expects to see, was so beyond all comprehension that no one conjured it up as a possibility. With the exception of Meghan, who plainly had contemplated just such an eventuality, for why else would she have failed to disband her Hollywood team when she got married?
It was against this backdrop that the wedding took place. Behind the scenes, it was a massive relief that the day itself went off as well as it did. Aside from the unfortunate publicity involving Meghan’s father and the rest of the Markle family, her own conduct and that of Harry in the run-up had created fear rather than comfort. With his backing, she had demanded control of the wedding, notwithstanding neither of them having any financial responsibility for it and despite her being a newcomer to the royal scene and him acting as if she should be allowed to break every existing precedent and rule. Meghan had never been disruptive or disrespectful of the parameters laid down by the producers of Suits to ensure that it was a success. She had been happy to fit herself into that scheme of things. Yes, she was known to have been demanding and challenging, to push for better lines for herself, to want to expand her character, but all of this had been done in a professionally respectful way. If she could understand and respect those parameters, why would she and Harry seek to disrespect and disregard the parameters of the royal world?
It was no secret in royal circles that Diana had been a maverick who had often not only disrespected but also denigrated the royal world, despite it being her platform for greatness. Harry had also from time to time shown himself to be inclined to kick over the traces, quite mindless of the fact that he was rebelling against was the very thing that gave him any degree of greatness that he possessed. Could it be that the combination of Meghan and Harry, with his emotional issues and maternal heritage, and her dominating and exacting nature, might result in a challenge to the very way the monarchy expected the royals to conduct themselves?
As far as everyone in the royal circle was concerned, Meghan and Harry’s demands to be allowed to do as they pleased without very much regard for past practices did not bode well for an easy adjustment for Meghan as an individual or for them as a couple. In royal an
d aristocratic circles as in any other establishment, newcomers are expected to have some respect for the values and traditions of the world they are joining. This would be so whether the establishment is a company, a law firm, a television series, or anything else. Newcomers are not expected to demand fundamental changes to the lifestyle until they have had time to adjust to it and see what suits them. Everyone has quibbles over certain things, and is given latitude to ignore minor rules that are not fundamental to the existence of the institution, but the idea that someone at entry level will impose a new way of doing things on an old order is unthinkable. The idea that an establishment figure like Harry would consider it acceptable to expect everyone to fall into line as he and a newcomer like Meghan flouted tradition at every turn would never have entered into anyone’s head until it happened, and when it did, it received the expected reaction. This is because there was a genuine conviction that the values adhered to in a royal or aristocratic lifestyle are laden with wisdom gleamed over hundreds and sometimes a thousand years of trial and error. The British actor Larry Lamb once observed to me and the late Elizabeth Steuart Fothringham, the chatelaine of two stately homes in Scotland, ‘There seems to be a rule or at least a guideline for everything in your lives, but I’ve come to realise that a lot of it makes sense. It’s the wisdom of the ages. Even the way you drink soup is practical. You scoop it up away from yourselves unlike all of us, but that’s so, if it spills, it doesn’t spill on you. I bet you’ve never realised how clever little things like that are.’
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