Finding Freedom

by Omid Scobie

  On that late October night in Toronto, Harry was happy, and so was Meghan.

  A cocktail or so into the party, they were both feeling relaxed, absorbing the Halloween spirit.

  It was possibly the perfect night out—until they received a call from one of Harry’s aides at Kensington Palace. It wasn’t good news.

  The Sunday Express was going to run with the story of their relationship—and the tabloid was rumored to have been tipped off by an employee of none other than Eugenie and her father, Prince Andrew.

  With the news about to blast out to every corner of the Internet that everyone’s favorite bachelor was off the market, Harry and Meghan’s night of revelry threatened to turn into a melee.

  Harry and Meghan left the party and returned to her house. Their main worry was that her place would be besieged by photographers within twenty-four hours. They had a little time to think, because there were only a couple of paparazzi in Toronto. (One of them had already texted Meghan to ask if the news was true; she didn’t reply.) But it wouldn’t be long before photographers flew in from New York and LA, all hoping to get that first picture of the happy couple. Another outlet, Us Weekly, had also confirmed their pairing and knew that they were together in Toronto but agreed with the Palace to hold off reporting the news until Harry had returned home.

  Harry’s phone wouldn’t stop pinging with word from the Palace. Aides suggested it would be best for Harry to cut his trip short and quietly return to London, his minimal security now something of an issue. But the prince wasn’t having it. He wasn’t budging. If things were going to get tricky, there was nowhere else he’d rather be than at Meghan’s side.

  5

  A Prince’s Stand

  When Harry and Meghan arrived at Jessica and Ben Mulroney’s house the morning of October 30, they had at least slept through the craziness of the news blowing up.

  They had made the decision to head to the Mulroneys’ Upper Canada home the night before, after Harry was advised by an aide to stay soomewhere discreet, somewhere no one in the media would think to look. Meghan had already been texting Jessica (or Jess, as friends called her) throughout the evening for moral support when her pal suggested that they were welcome to hide out at their place. Harry and Meghan agreed it was the perfect plan and decamped from Seaton Village early the following morning with bags packed.

  It wasn’t the first time they had been at the Mulroneys’. Before the world knew that Harry and Meghan were a couple, they had often visited the couple’s home in the quiet, upscale neighborhood where Harry’s security was less visible.

  It was there that Meghan got a firsthand glimpse of how Harry might be as a father, falling hard as he expertly won over the Mulroneys’ then six-year-old twins, Brian and John, and three-year-old daughter, Ivy. Already experienced in charming little ones, he never turned up empty-handed, instead arriving with small presents each visit. But it wasn’t just his generosity that endeared him to the kids. Harry was also willing to get on the floor with them to play or smush up his face against the window, his funny expressions never failing to earn a giggle.

  Now that the world knew Harry and Meghan’s secret, they convened around the countertop in the open living room/kitchen space, so Jess and Ben could hear everything.

  Meghan felt somewhat bittersweet about the situation. On the one hand, she was disappointed that their secret was out. It was no longer just the two of them. While Meghan, before she met Harry, had occasionally set up a paparazzi photo here and there or let info slip out to the press, she did everything in her power to protect the privacy of her relationship with the prince. She knew that keeping things quiet meant that they could get to know each other without pressure or further worries that came from reporters covering and commenting on their burgeoning romance.

  But there was also a part of her that was relieved. She had struggled to keep the secret from friends and colleagues (only a handful of castmates and production staff at Suits knew) and didn’t like lying about the purpose of her trips to London.

  Harry knew this day was “inevitable” and had told Meghan as much soon after they met so they could, he explained, “make the most of this time we have.” Of course, Meghan couldn’t really understand what it would mean to be famous on the level Harry had been for his entire life. “We were very quietly dating for about six months before it became news,” Meghan said later in Vanity Fair. “And right out of the gate it was surprising the way things changed.”

  After they were outed, Meghan received close to one hundred messages in twenty-four hours from people she hadn’t spoken to in months, even years. Everyone wanted to know: Is the news true?

  Meghan’s mother and father knew about her and Harry, of course, long before they were exposed. She had told Doria as soon as she returned to Toronto from her trip to London where they first met, and she had introduced her mother to the prince in Los Angeles. Meghan’s dad didn’t hear about her boyfriend until later that summer, after her visit to Botswana. In a Good Morning Britain interview, Thomas later shared, “She said, ‘We’ll have to call him “H” so no one knows.’ I eventually spoke to him, and he was a very nice man, a gentleman, very likable.” A source confirmed that Harry had spoken to her father several times over the phone in the first year of their relationship.

  But for the rest of the world, this was major news. In addition to friends and acquaintances, Meghan also received messages from a few journalists she had swapped details with over the years. She didn’t reply to anyone.

  For the next three days—while friends, neighbors, and particularly Suits cast members texted Meghan to warn her of reporters and photographers appearing all over—the couple stayed at the Mulroneys’. Then Harry had to go back to London for work, leaving Meghan in Toronto to deal with her new life of constant scrutiny.

  Every move she made became front-page news, including attending classes at Moksha Yoga or shopping with Jessica at their favorite department store, Hudson’s Bay, where they used to be able to spend uninterrupted hours.

  Universal Cable, Suits’s production company, provided security to escort Meghan to and from the large studio in North York, near downtown Toronto. But the paparazzi quickly became familiar with her daily routines. Prior to meeting Harry, the only time she experienced cameras were on a set or a red carpet. The few paparazzi images of Meghan taken before she started dating Harry were mostly taken cooperatively.

  The security was necessary. Shortly after the news broke, a photographer from an LA-based photo agency had scaled the fence into her back garden and waited for Meghan by her car, hoping to get a picture before she headed out to run errands. Meghan was terrified and immediately called the police. “This is how it’s always going to be, isn’t it?” she said to a friend at the time.

  Not even a week after her romance was splashed across countless newspapers, magazines, and websites the world over, Meghan was back in the VIP section of Toronto Pearson, en route to London and Harry. Now that she knew photographers were on the hunt for her, she felt uneasy. Apart from the occasional Suits fan asking for a selfie, Meghan has always traveled undisturbed. This time, she decided upon a disguise. Nothing dramatic, just a Yankees baseball cap pulled down to shade her eyes. It seemed to do the trick.

  After Meghan described how nerve-racking it was to travel now that she was officially the prince’s girlfriend, Jessica arranged for her to use the private jet of the Canadian real estate power couple Krystal Koo and Michael Cooper. Jessica’s longtime friends, the couple had run interference in the past for Harry and Meghan and were more than happy to help. Fancying a trip to London themselves, Koo and Cooper joked about hiding Meghan in one of the new suitcases that Meghan had bought when it became clear that there were to be a number of transatlantic trips in her future.

  Traveling with familiar faces helped ease a bit of Meghan’s anxiety, and once she landed in London, where she stayed with Harry at Kensington Palace, she was met with a sense of comfort. Starting to consider Brita
in as a potential future home, she began to establish her own life there.

  A regular runner, she took to jogging through Kensington Gardens and then nipping out to the nearby Whole Foods to pick up whatever supplies she needed for dinner at Nottingham Cottage, which Meghan had already warmed up with a few little touches like Diptyque candles and a potted plant. (His garden with a little hammock was minimal, as “neither of them are green fingered.”)

  Arriving home laden down with shopping bags, she never had to worry about fumbling around for her ID. While your average Kensington Palace visitor must show two forms of legal identification to get through the gates, Meghan was now able to breeze past the guards without a second thought. She had ingratiated herself early with a polite handshake and an insistence that they refer to her only as Meghan. All that “Ms. Markle” nonsense was not her style. (Harry called Meghan “Meg,” and she always referred to him as “H.”)

  It was clear to everyone who knew her how happy Meghan was—even her hair colorist. While she was living in Toronto, the actress went to Luis Pacheco every month for a touch-up or some gold highlights or chocolate brown lowlights that gave her hair a “rich, healthy, and reflective” look on and off camera. When Luis saw Meghan in November 2016, he noticed, “There was something really different about her. She looked so sweet and tender—she had this glow about her.” He didn’t know that the reason was Harry, or the fact that she was about to hop a plane to see him again in London.

  Whether Meghan was lunching at one of her favorite restaurants like Kurobuta, which served tapas-style Japanese on Kings Road, perusing antiques and homewares at Portobello Market, or simply grocery shopping, Harry made it clear she didn’t need to hide out behind the palace walls. Unbeknownst to her, the Whole Foods near the palace was a lunch spot for Daily Mail reporters since it was located right next to the tabloid’s offices. While shopping there one day, she was spotted by a reporter who tailed Meghan back to the gates of the palace, snapping a picture on his phone. It was front-page news the following day: “Harry’s Love Is in London!”

  The British tabloid press was, in fact, having a field day with Harry’s new girlfriend. Not that most publications ever seemed to need permission to go after someone before, but to them Meghan presented herself as particularly fair game. She had lived much of her adult life in the public eye, occasionally in sexy outfits, such as when she was on Deal or No Deal, which the papers had quickly unearthed. But it was the hints she left on her social media accounts—like the image of two spooning bananas she posted the day after her relationship with Harry went public—that made certain sections of the media think she was perhaps purposefully teasing them.

  In royal circles, there is an unspoken code of silence expected from royal girlfriends who are expected to conduct themselves with the same discretion as members of the royal family itself. The press closely followed Meghan’s various social media accounts and found lots of material they felt broke with this code. There were the matching bracelets, photos of trips to the Cotswolds, and more. Harry, known for his wicked sense of humor, enjoyed Meghan’s coy posts. But the press came away with a different message: you can’t plea for privacy and tease the media.

  No matter how Meghan conducted herself online, there was never any justification for the racism that didn’t take long to appear in stories about her. A headline in the Daily Mail in the first week of November referred to Meghan’s upbringing as “Straight Outta Compton,” going so far as to call her mother’s neighborhood “gang-scarred.” Three days later, the same British tabloid wrote that Meghan would have failed the “Mum Test.” The article breathlessly detailed how “the Windsors will thicken their watery, thin blue blood and Spencer pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA.” It went on to describe Meghan’s mother as a “dreadlocked African-American lady from the wrong side of the tracks.” These publications had sunk to a new low. Subtext turned into outright race-baiting as each day certain tabloids went one step further. A newspaper wrote that Meghan was “not in the society blonde style of previous girlfriends.”

  Racism in the UK takes a different form than it does in the United States, but there is no mistaking its existence and how engrained it is. A major theme of racism in the UK centers on the question of who is authentically “English.” It can come through in subtle acts of bias, micro-aggressions such as the Palace staffer who told the biracial co-author of this book, “I never expected you to speak the way you do,” or the Daily Mail headline, “Memo to Meghan: We Brits Prefer True Royalty to Fashion Royalty.” While their columnist was criticizing Meghan for her Vogue editorials, there was another way to read it, and that was that to be British meant to be born and bred in the UK—and be white.

  With anti-immigration sentiments rising amid fears of the country losing its British identity through its diverse elements, the idea of a nonwhite person moving into the House of Windsor ruffled feathers. Some took to Meghan’s Twitter and Instagram accounts to express racist feelings that were anything but subtle, including calling her the N-word or a “mutt.” Members of the royal family had dated and even married commoners, but no senior royal, apart from Princess Diana post divorce, had ever publicly dated anyone who was not white. This was a real first.

  Harry was incandescent with rage. For the prince, Meghan was his personal introduction to the ugliness of racism. While it might have been new territory for Harry, bias—both unconscious and intentional—had always been a part of Meghan’s life.

  The issue of skin color started for Meghan even before she was born, with her parents’ marriage. Their romance was at once ordinary and radical since Thomas, the youngest of three boys from Newport, Pennsylvania, was white, and Doria, raised in LA, was black. “Growing up in a homogeneous community in Pennsylvania, the concept of marrying an African-American woman was not in the cards for my dad,” Meghan wrote. “But he saw beyond what was put in front of him in that small-size (and, perhaps, small-minded) town.”

  The predominantly white community of Woodland Hills that Meghan lived in when she was a toddler was not always welcoming to Doria. Meghan described her mother’s hurt at often being confused for her nanny because her skin tone was darker than her daughter’s.

  Meghan grew up being taught to embrace both parts of herself. When she was seven, Meghan awoke Christmas morning to find a large box, wrapped in glitter-flecked paper. Tearing open the gift, Meghan said, “I found my Heart Family: a black mom doll, a white dad doll, and a child in each color.” Her dad had bought a number of Barbie family sets, taken them apart, and carefully created one that accurately reflected his daughter’s reality. Her parents, as Meghan said, “crafted the world around me to make me feel like I wasn’t different but special.”

  But they couldn’t entirely keep ugly truths from infiltrating Meghan’s childhood. One of her memories is from the 1992 riots in South-Central, sparked by the acquittal of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of Rodney King a year earlier. Eleven-year-old Meghan, home from school early because of the riots, watched the ash from street fires sift down on suburban lawns.

  “Oh, my God, Mommy,” she said. “It’s snowing!”

  Being biracial proposed a whole special set of obstacles. In the seventh grade, Meghan was asked to identify her ethnicity, either white or black, on a census in her English class. She didn’t know how to answer. “You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other—and one half of myself over the other,” Meghan wrote. She left the box blank. Her father told her, “If that happens again, you draw your own box.”

  The last place she thought she would encounter ignorance was at college, but that was exactly what she found during her very first week at Northwestern. When one of her dorm mates asked leading questions about her black mother and white father and their divorce, Meghan sensed the woman’s underlying judgment. In her nonconfrontational way, she extricated herself from the conversation. But she was left with a terrible feeling of having been f
orced to justify her very existence.

  It was after college, though, that Meghan described her most jarring experience of hate. She was back home in LA when she witnessed her mother called the N-word as they pulled out of a parking space.

  “My skin rushed with heat as I looked to my mom,” she wrote. “Her eyes welling with hateful tears, I could only breathe out a whisper of words, so hushed they were barely audible: ‘It’s okay, Mommy.’ I was trying to temper the rage-filled air permeating our small silver Volvo.”

  Emotions swirled inside her. She worried about her mother and their safety.

  “We drove home in deafening silence, her chocolate knuckles pale from gripping the wheel so tightly.”

  It wasn’t just big moments like the one in the parking lot that helped define Meghan’s character; it was countless small ones as well. She came to despise the question “Where are you from?” Not easily identified, she knew what people were really curious about was her skin color. But Meghan didn’t want to be defined by that.

  “While my mixed heritage may have created a gray area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that,” she wrote in ELLE. “To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.”

  Meghan might have fully accepted her unique identity, but there was no way she was going to accept attacks on her background and, more specifically, on her mother. With photographers camped out in front of Doria’s home, some of the tabloids continued to publish inaccurate stories that rested on racist stereotypes of the struggling African American woman and completely ignored her mother’s 2015 masters in social work and her position as a senior counselor within the geriatric community.