Finding Freedom

by Omid Scobie

  As soon as the Caribbean tour was finished, Harry’s first stop—in a break from protocol—was to see Meghan. Palace policy dictated that “working visits should not be combined with personal travel.” Harry came under fire from the press for not taking the British Airways flight to London from Barbados that he had been booked on, instead traveling straight to Toronto. If Meghan hadn’t already fully understood that every small detail of a royal’s life was under the microscope, she did now.

  Although Harry had once warned Meghan that his life was “surreal,” even he had been blindsided by the kind of coverage she elicited.

  While Harry was traveling and Meghan was home in Toronto, she made her affections known in subtle ways. While running errands around town on December 3, she wore her newly purchased $300 Maya Brenner necklace, a delicate fourteen-carat-gold chain bearing both the initials “M” and “H.” That same day, she also dressed her beagle, Guy, in a Union Jack sweater, posting the snap to Instagram. The message was received by Harry, who turned up outside her door not twenty-four hours later.

  Two days after Meghan was photographed buying flowers at her usual florist, wearing her new initial necklace, she received a phone call from a senior Kensington Palace aide. She was advised that wearing such a necklace only served to encourage the photographers to keep pursuing such images—and new headlines.

  She said little during the call, choosing instead to simply listen to the counsel. But after hanging up, she felt frustrated and emotional. While she knew the aide had good intentions, the surreal experience of having someone from her boyfriend’s office tell her what kind of jewelry to wear or not to smile at a photographer was too much.

  Meghan immediately called one of her close friends, close to tears as she waited for her pal to pick up.

  “I can’t win,” she said, completely distraught. “They make out like I’m to blame for these pictures, that it looks like I’m encouraging them, that me even acknowledging the cameras may not be sending the right message. I don’t know what to say. It was only yesterday people online were saying I look miserable in pictures, because I was trying to just ignore [the photographer].” She felt damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

  Another one of Meghan’s good friends, Jessica Mulroney, had had a similar conversation with her friend Sophie Grégoire Trudeau in 2013, after her husband, Justin, set his sights on becoming Canada’s prime minister. According to a source, Jessica told the future First Lady of Canada that unfortunately that kind of intrusion into her behavior was something she had to get used to if she wanted a life with a public figure—and she should trust that people around her husband just wanted the best for both of them.

  It was Sophie who ultimately offered Meghan the same advice. Jessica introduced the women in 2016, knowing that the two now had a lot in common. Sophie had given up a career in television, where she had been working as a correspondent on CTV’s eTalk, to take on a more formal role alongside her husband as he hit the campaign trail.

  The pair became fast email friends, Meghan was interested to hear how Sophie had successfully made the move from an entertainment news correspondent to much-beloved First Lady, all while skillfully dodging controversy.

  “Sophie would have made it clear that every single aspect of Meghan’s past would be dug up, so the most important thing was to be honest with Harry—tell him everything,” said a close Trudeau friend and former cabinet member. “Sophie’s a smart woman and the perfect brain for Meghan to pick. She knows how difficult something like this is. Few people can relate or truly sympathize. For those of us that knew about their friendship, it was amazing to see the change in Meghan that followed.”

  Still, Harry and Meghan had to transition to a new way of life.

  “Both of us were totally surprised by the reaction after the first five or six months of when we had it to ourselves, of what actually happened from then,” he said later in a joint interview with Meghan for the BBC. “You can have as many conversations as you want and try and prepare as much as possible. But we were totally unprepared for what happened after that.”

  “We were just hit so hard at the beginning with a lot of mistruths that I made the choice to not read anything, positive or negative,” Meghan said of the narrative of her as a scheming social climber from “the ghetto” whose main goal in life was to marry up. “It just didn’t make sense. And instead we focused all of our energies just on nurturing our relationship.”

  That was the public line, but privately the couple couldn’t help but stay abreast of what was written in the newspapers and online, thanks to press aides having to ask for comments or explanations. Meghan told friends that looking at any websites or comments sections on her social media accounts made her feel sick, especially when her ethnicity was under attack.

  “It’s a shame that that is the climate in this world,” she said. “At the end of the day I’m really just proud of who I am and where I come from, and we have never put any focus on that. We’ve just focused on who we are as a couple. And so, when you take all those extra layers away and all of that noise, I think it makes it really easy to just enjoy being together and tuning all the rest of that out.”

  Still, after fighting back, the couple was exhausted. They had been together publicly for only just over a week, but it felt more like a lifetime. The adversity only made their love for each other stronger, and a family friend said that it strengthened Harry’s mission to protect Meghan.

  No matter how much Harry tried to put it in context, she often spoke to friends about how difficult it was not to take it personally when the press and public questioned her suitability as a royal bride and compared her to the aristocratic girls Harry had dated in the past.

  Being an actress in Hollywood certainly helped Meghan start off her new role more adeptly than the other women in Harry’s life. But the tabloid controversies did all they could to derail her poise.

  “There’s a misconception that because I have worked in the entertainment industry that this would be something that I would be familiar with,” Meghan said. “But even though I’d been on my show for, I guess six years at that point, and working before that, I’ve never been part of tabloid culture. I’ve never been in pop culture to that degree and lived a relatively quiet life, even though I focused so much on my job. So that was a really stark difference out of the gate.”

  While she might not have been prepared for the intensity of being catapulted from TV stardom to the royal stage, as an actress she was used to a level of criticism most people aren’t. She also possessed a comfort level in front of photographers that doesn’t come as easily to Harry.

  Meghan was now in a role that never had a hiatus. Like another American actress, Grace Kelly, who married Prince Rainier of Monaco, she had the potential to make the royal family more accessible to a wider swath of the public in the UK and abroad. The price for Meghan, however, was that now every word uttered, every gesture made, every piece of clothing worn, would instantly be scrutinized and analyzed for subtext. She had to move with a level of decorum that no normal life demands.

  The transition wasn’t just culture shock for Meghan. Kensington Palace’s royal courtiers also had a period of adjustment exacerbated by the relentless twenty-four-hour digital media cycle. Most of the team began work at the household after William married Kate in 2011, so they missed the early days of the couple’s relationship and the British tabloid’s incessant harassment of Kate, as they criticized her and her mother, Carole, digging up every trace of her and her family’s past.

  “When Harry introduced Meghan as his girlfriend, a serious girlfriend, it was a new experience for everyone,” a former palace aide revealed. “When Harry formally introduced her to his team [in August 2016], he was already certain of their future. I think dealing with the extreme and sudden level of interest in Meghan and teaching her how to deal with it was something many of them had to learn on the job. There is no training you can do to prepare for that.”

 
Learning on the job inevitably involves making some mistakes or at least having some rocky moments. Meghan expressed frustration to friends over aides “flip-flopping” between decisions. Case in point were the numerous discussions Harry and Meghan had with staff about the right time and place to first be photographed as a couple. Taking her to an engagement was off-limits, as that would go against royal protocol. But perhaps Harry could bring Meghan to a sporting event as a guest spectator in the stands with him, so they could be seen together without appearing to court attention. The goal of the photo was to softly introduce Meghan to the public while keeping the paparazzi at bay.

  Meghan had a good idea about how the pap game worked, but now she was in Harry’s “overwhelming and confusing” world and so deferred to him and his staff. “There was an element of ‘I’m just going to be quiet and see what everyone else thinks,’ ” a friend said of Meghan’s attitude.

  As to the timing of their first photo together, Harry wanted to take a “sooner the better” approach, and Meghan agreed. Heads nodded all around on one idea, only to have an aide at another household dismiss the entire plan as a bad idea the very next day.

  If there was this much debate over a photo, what was going to happen if Meghan wanted to speak her mind about something? If she wanted to fully enter the royal sphere, she had to remain apolitical, which made her previous level of activism impossible. (She had previously spoken out against Brexit and called Donald Trump “misogynistic” and “divisive.”) Silencing herself was no small sacrifice.

  It took some months before she felt comfortable with the guidance provided by Harry’s team, including Jason and the prince’s private secretary, Edward Lane Fox, known as Ed or ELF to friends and journalists. Ed, Harry’s “right-hand” man, was a former captain in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry, who had served in Iraq and Bosnia. That was where he and Harry first met, before he joined Harry’s team in April 2013. Hugely involved in the Invictus Games, Ed had become a close friend of Harry’s during the prince’s solo travels over the years. The team trained Meghan and the people most important in her life on how to protect themselves from the increased attention. Having the palace acknowledge her friends and their presence in her life was a relief to Meghan, who at one point wondered if there would be pressure to move away from those in her “old” life.

  There were conversations about social media conduct, and specific advice to Meghan’s friends, all who had one-on-one time with Jason to learn the dos and don’ts of Twitter and Instagram (for example: how to avoid leaving clues that revealed Meghan’s location to the paparazzi, who were monitoring anyone associated with Meghan’s accounts). “It was a little bizarre,” one of the friends who spoke to Jason said. “But it made sense. This wasn’t about the royal family; it was simply about her safety. That’s how it was laid out. It was good to know there was someone to talk to if we had been pestered by tabloid journalists or paps.”

  Calls between Meghan and Kensington Palace aides quickly became the norm. And while she still got a little annoyed at the advice sometimes, Meghan grew to realize the importance of their support and experience as she navigated Harry’s world, which was quickly becoming her own.

  7

  Tropical Storms

  As 2016 came to an end, a more confident—and careful—Meghan was emerging. She changed her phone number for the first time in years, sending out the new UK digits to just a small group of people. It was yet another step toward leaving behind her non-royal life.

  What hadn’t changed was her conviction that Harry was the one. Their feelings ran in tandem. Harry told friends he was excited about how natural things felt with Meghan, how their relationship moved organically—“like it was just meant to be,” he confided to a friend over drinks in London at the start of December. Two weeks later, Meghan booked a last-minute Air Canada flight to London, because she simply couldn’t bear to wait until their planned rendezvous later in the month. After all, this was to be their Christmas celebration together.

  While Harry and Meghan were serious, their relationship was still far too new for her to earn an invite to the Queen’s spouses-only formal affair at Sandringham. So while Harry was in the countryside at the Queen’s home in Norfolk, Meghan planned to spend the holidays in Los Angeles with Doria and the family of her good friend Benita Litt, an entertainment lawyer turned founder of a carryall line, who had traveled with Meghan and Misha to Spain earlier that summer. Meghan loved spending time with Benita and her husband, Darren, especially when her “fairy goddaughters,” Remi and Rylan, were around.

  If the last-minute London visit was the couple’s holiday celebration, they were determined to live it up. A day after her arrival at Heathrow Airport, they turned up at Pines and Needles in Battersea Park on the hunt for their first shared tree. (The Christmas shop, just two miles from Kensington Palace, was also a favorite of Madonna’s and Elton John’s.) After fifteen minutes of browsing, they made their pick: a six-foot Nordmann Fir that Harry and Meghan tucked under their arms and carried out to the car by themselves.

  Back home they hunkered down, trimming the tree and cooking meals, leaving only once to fit in a quick workout at Harry’s nearby KX gym before stocking up on groceries for dinner. On December 14, eager to leave the cottage after two days indoors, they decided to spend an evening out on the town. They had accepted last-minute tickets to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But having gotten a late start driving out of the palace, they were afraid the Piccadilly Circus traffic they were now stuck in would keep them from making the 7:30 p.m. curtain call. So, they hopped out of the nondescript minivan they had taken to avoid drawing attention to themselves and started to walk briskly, heads down and holding hands, toward the Gielgud Theatre.

  The West End was bustling, and the couple knew if they moved quick enough, they could get into the theater without being spotted. Both were quite excited by the idea of running through the busiest streets of London, knowing full well that the entire world wanted to see them together. It was a brief moment of freedom they hadn’t experienced in a while, even if it lasted for only sixty seconds at the most. For that small amount of time, they felt as if they were just another of the many couples powering down the sidewalk. It was exhilarating and fun. When they breezed through the door of the theater like regular patrons, the usher waiting to take them to their VIP box seats was somewhat taken aback. Harry and Meghan exchanged a look that showed they couldn’t believe it either.

  Ironically, their brief moment of anonymity as a couple turned out to be the first captured for all the world to see. What Harry and Meghan were unaware of at the time was that a photographer had followed them from the Palace gates and had snapped their every move as they dashed to make it to the theater before the lights went down.

  The release of their first pictures together was decidedly not the planned affair Kensington Palace had hoped for. They only found out about the paparazzi when Harry received a text message from a press aide at 10:35 a.m. the next day with a photo of the front page of The Sun. “WORLD PHOTO EXCLUSIVE!” the cover line blasted. “Harry and His Meg: 1st Snap of Prince with Love.” The couple were unbothered, knowing that such an article had been bound to happen eventually—although Meghan wasn’t crazy about the fact that the two had been followed without their knowledge. “That was creepy,” she told a friend.

  What did bother Meghan, to the point of being reduced to tears, were an alleged series of topless photos posted by the tawdry gossip site Radar Online. Although the celebrity website claimed the pictures were taken during her 2013 Jamaica wedding to Trevor, Meghan insisted they weren’t of her. Her lawyers took legal action, but the lackluster apology they received on the website did little to ease the pain. Coupled with the paparazzi now constantly staking out Doria’s LA home—an intrusion that forced the mother and daughter to change their Christmas plans and spend much of the holidays hiding out in Toronto—the latest barrage of media attacks left her feeling s
haken.

  To lift her spirits, Harry planned a New Year’s trip where they could really get away from it all. He rung up his pal Inge Solheim, a Norwegian adventure guide Harry had befriended during a Walking with the Wounded charity trek back in 2011. Inge had gone all out for Harry when he was with Cressida, arranging a top secret 2014 ski trip to Kazakhstan. “It’s always my pleasure to help a friend like Harry,” said Inge, who arranged for Harry and Meghan to spend a week in a cabin in Tromsö at the very tip of Norway in the Arctic Circle, where there was absolutely no chance of being bothered by photographers. There, Harry and Meghan enjoyed seven days of dog sledding, whale watching, dining on local delicacies, and snuggling to watch as the aurora borealis lit up the skies.

  From the Arctic Circle, the couple returned to London, where Meghan finally met Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. The January 10 get-together at the Cambridges’ Apartment 1A home was brief, but Harry wanted to make sure the two had a chance to connect.

  Despite the fact that Harry was a regular guest in her household, Kate had seemingly not shown much interest in finding out who this woman was who had made her brother-in-law so happy. But that indifference wasn’t necessarily directed toward Meghan. “The Duchess is an extremely guarded person,” a friend explained. After she married William, she was careful about letting others in to her social circle. Her friends today—including Lady Laura Meade and Emilia Jardine-Paterson, both of whom married friends of William’s—are for the most part the same ones she had on her wedding day. Like her husband, Kate ran in a tight group.

  Meghan brought a present for the duchess, who had celebrated her birthday just a day earlier. The soft leather Smythson notebook helped to break the ice, as did Meghan’s cooing over then twenty-month-old Charlotte. The meeting ended with Kate letting Meghan know that she was always welcome to contact her if she needed anything. Having been through the experience of being a royal girlfriend herself, Kate knew how trying it could be to suddenly have one’s personal life laid bare.