In the words of Diana’s friend Richard Kay, who wrote for the Daily Mail, Chelsy “looks sort of like an unmade bed. The passionate attraction between them fizzles and crackles. You can see they just want to rip their clothes off.” Harry managed to keep his relationship with Chelsy a secret for months. The Mail on Sunday finally broke the story in November 2004.
But even Chelsy couldn’t tame Harry. It wasn’t long before the Mr. Hyde side of the prince emerged again. After a boozy evening at the London nightclub Pangaea, Harry emerged red-eyed in the wee hours of the morning, greeted by an unwelcome explosion of flashbulbs. He took a drunken swing at photographer Chris Uncle, leaving Uncle with a split lip when his own camera flew into his face. The photographer declined to press charges; but Harry’s reputation, so newly on the way to rehabilitation after Lesotho, took a nose dive.
Unfortunately, he still hadn’t hit the bottom.
IN JANUARY 2005, Harry and William were invited to their friend Harry Meade’s twenty-second birthday party at his father’s sprawling Gloucestershire estate. The theme was fancy dress (costumed, in America) “native and colonial.” Dinner and champagne would be served.
What could possibly go wrong?
Prince William opted to dress as a lion, with furry paws and black leggings. Pal Guy Pelly had the cojones to dress as the Queen. Harry, evidently with his brother’s assistance, browsed the racks of Maud’s Cotswold Costumes; and with his passion for all things military, selected a sand-colored uniform, which, he reckoned, complemented his pale complexion.
The problem was, it was an Afrika Korps Nazi uniform, complete with red swastika armband.
Had Harry learned anything in his history classes at Eton? He was a military buff! Didn’t he know the Nazis were the bad guys? Had he a clue about his own family’s history during World War II—when his great-grandmother Elizabeth, then Queen Consort, felt proud that Buckingham Palace had been bombed because she could then look London’s East Enders who had survived the Blitz in the face? Der Führer himself had called the Queen the most dangerous woman in England, because of her outspoken contempt for the Third Reich.
Why hadn’t Harry’s protection officers, older, seasoned, who had served their country, stepped in to say, “Perhaps Your Royal Highness might wish to select a different costume”? Didn’t any of them realize that Harry in a Nazi uniform would spark a media firestorm?
Sure enough, one of the party guests snapped a photo of Harry smoking and drinking and wearing that swastika armband. The day after the party, the Sun’s headline read HARRY THE NAZI.
Appalling! Shameful! Grotesque! Harry was condemned by parliamentarians, World War II veterans, religious leaders and dignitaries, and, of course, Holocaust survivors and other Jewish groups. And his timing couldn’t have been worse. The photos were published just six days before the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when Harry’s uncle Prince Edward would head off to Poland to represent the Queen at the commemoration ceremonies being held at the concentration camp.
Harry’s blunder also conjured the unpleasant spirit of his ancestor Edward VIII, whose Nazi sympathies were known to Parliament at the time of his reign and subsequent abdication, something that older members of the royal family as well as historians would have been aware of in 2005. But even after a formal apology was issued by Clarence House, where Prince Charles resided, William privately continued to defend his kid brother’s costume to their friends, insisting that Harry had only a vague idea of who Hitler was.
If true, this is perhaps the most inexcusable rationale of all, and it hardly made things okay.
Public apologies weren’t going to cut it anymore. Harry had said, “I’m sorry,” for his past drunken exploits, only to booze it up again. No one had any faith that this time would be different. Some members of Parliament called for his Sandhurst acceptance to be revoked. Even his grandmother thought that Harry’s common sense, if he’d ever had any, had flown out the window this time.
Prince Charles, however, was copacetic with Harry’s mea culpa, although he also exacted a unique punishment, banishing Harry to the Duchy of Cornwall’s Home Farm to clean out the pigsties. The penance reinforced the reality that the young prince had really stepped in it this time.
THE DUCHY OF Cornwall was also about to get a duchess. The results of a YouGov poll taken at the time revealed that 65 percent of responders believed that Charles should be free to move on with his life and marry his longtime lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. This compares to only a 40 percent approval in 1998, the year after Diana died.
“Great. Go for it,” Harry said when his father told him he’d proposed to Camilla. Over the past several years, both Harry and William had grown fond of Mrs. PB, as they called her. She made their father very happy; and to them, that was what mattered most.
But because Charles and Camilla were both divorced (although Charles was now widowed), the couple nonetheless had to have a civil wedding ceremony. In 2002, the church law changed with regard to divorced persons. They would henceforth be able to remarry in the church “in certain circumstances”—leaving it up to the individual clergyperson as to whether he or she was comfortable officiating at such a ceremony. If this law had been in effect in 1955, had Princess Margaret still wished to wed Peter Townsend, she might have been able to do so in the eyes of the church, if a clergyman was willing to perform the ceremony. However, Charles and Camilla presented even more of a special situation because they had engaged in a lengthy adulterous affair prior to their divorces; and because Charles, as the future king, would also become head of the Church of England. Theirs was more akin to the situation that tripped up Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in 1936, minus the Nazi subplot.
Charles’s original intention was to have the wedding in Windsor Castle itself; but if the Queen were to grant him a license to marry Camilla there, it would transform the WC, as Prince William jokingly referred to it, into a wedding venue that any couple could apply for.
So Charles and Camilla opted for plan B: a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, followed by a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury in St. George’s Chapel in front of seven hundred of their nearest and dearest, capped off by an afternoon reception hosted at the castle by the Queen.
Not so fast, said Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury. He would be willing to perform the religious blessing only if the newlyweds would publicly confess to and apologize for their mutual adultery.
Done and done. The Faustian bargain agreed to, on Saturday, April 9, 2005, after their civil ceremony in Windsor Guildhall, Charles and Camilla knelt in the transept of St. George’s Chapel and openly acknowledged their “manifold sins and wickedness.”
The Queen had privately given Charles her blessing to wed Camilla, but would not attend the Guildhall wedding. Although the law had been changed and she was mother of the groom, the optics would not have been good. Had she attended in her other role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, she would be seen to condone the culmination of her son’s adulterous affair. Her Majesty did, with a stony face, attend the Service of Prayer and Dedication in St. George’s Chapel, and of course presided over the afternoon tea, complete with the traditional smoked salmon finger sandwiches, tarts, and tea cakes.
For years, the Queen had refused to be in the same room with Camilla—out of principle, as well as in her capacity as head of the church—and Her Majesty had never permitted herself to be photographed with Camilla. She also embargoed photographs of Harry and William with Charles’s paramour. But that afternoon, the monarch finally agreed to sit for the official wedding photo of her son with the newly created Duchess of Cornwall.
Fitting in a Box
Acting
Having been laser-focused from childhood on the pursuit of an acting career, Meghan applied to a university that was known for its theater program as well as for its strong liberal arts curriculum. At the age of eighteen, she left sunny Southern California for the shores of Lake Michigan to attend
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, twelve miles north of Chicago.
Northwestern University was founded in 1855 to provide higher education to people living in the Northwest Territory. To date, the university’s former and present faculty has included eleven Nobel Prize laureates, thirty-eight Pulitzer winners, sixteen Rhodes scholars, two Supreme Court justices, six MacArthur Fellows, numerous Academy Award winners, and—numbered among its equally illustrious alumni—soon to be one American-born princess.
College meant again having to navigate the sometimes confusing, sometimes insulting, sometimes humiliating terrain of being biracial, of answering the loaded question “What are you?” Meghan’s first interaction with a closed-minded college dorm mate was a bit of an eye-opener.
The encounter took place during her first week at Northwestern. The girl asked Meghan if her parents were still together. “You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?” As if that had anything to do with it.
“I smiled meekly,” Meghan recollected in an article she wrote for Elle magazine, “waiting for what could possibly come out of her pursed lips next. ‘And they’re divorced?’ I nodded. ‘Oh, well, that makes sense.’ ”
Looking back on the incident years later, Meghan still didn’t understand what the girl meant, even though she knew there was an implicit racist message in her words. But it had been something of a shock and Meghan had been unable to summon a reply, “scared to open this Pandora’s box of discrimination, so I sat stifled, swallowing my voice.”
At Northwestern, Meghan plunged herself into her studies and pledged the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which was housed in a large fieldstone mansion just off campus. The venerated chapter was installed on campus in 1882.
She was back in California, home on a school break, when racism reared its ugly head again, this time with no ambiguity whatsoever. After attending a concert with her mother at the famed Hollywood Bowl amphitheater, as they were sitting in the parking lot, a driver called Doria the N-word because she wasn’t pulling her silver Volvo out of her spot fast enough to the bigot’s liking. Meghan had a visceral reaction to the epithet, later recalling “how hot my skin felt. How it scorched the air around me.”
Her heart filled with rage and empathy as she watched her mother’s dark eyes well with silent tears. “It’s okay, Mommy,” she said, the words coming out in a choked whisper, even as they both knew it absolutely wasn’t okay. The incident had touched a nerve. Opened a wound that bled afresh. Rekindled a memory that had nothing to do with them and everything to do with them.
Just a few years earlier, Los Angeles had been ripped apart by race riots. The city was burning, sparked by the Rodney King and Reginald Denny incidents. King was a black taxi driver beaten to a pulp in 1991 by a quartet of white cops. Denny was a white truck driver attacked and beaten to a pulp by four black assailants who came to be known as the L.A. Four, after the four white cops who’d beaten Rodney King were acquitted in 1992. Meghan still remembered the ash that fell for days on parts of the city “like apocalyptic snow.”
She recalled in her article for Elle that she “shared my mom’s heartache, but I wanted us to be safe. We drove home in deafening silence, her chocolate knuckles pale from gripping the wheel so tightly.”
At Northwestern, Meghan took an African American studies course, where for the first time in an academic setting she parsed the micro-prejudices of colorism—what it meant to look too light-skinned to fit in with the black community and too dark to fully assimilate into the white one.
She was also a true theater nerd and hated the possibility that someone might regard her as a cliché: one of those California girls who head east to learn how to become a serious actress. But she wanted more than an education centered around acting technique, stagecraft, and theater history classes. There had to be more; and Northwestern, being a university rather than a conservatory, offered it.
Another of Meghan’s lifelong interests was politics, so she changed tracks, switching from an English major to a double major in theater and international relations.
At a school where the theater curriculum was both intense and competitive, Meghan drew high praise from her department professors. For someone who was technically still in training, being under twenty-one and still an undergraduate, she was already leaving a mark. “My lasting impression of Meghan is her sense of self,” said Professor Harvey Young, who began his career as a lecturer at Northwestern in 2002 and chaired the university’s Department of Theatre from 2014 to 2017.
Another of Meghan’s theater professors, Head of Voice Linda Gates, remembered her in much the same way—as “being very positive. She had a very strong persona.”
By her junior year, Meghan had completed most of the credits required to graduate, so she applied for an internship at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Meghan spent the first semester of her senior year in South America. Because she had studied French in high school, when Meghan arrived in Argentina, she had no choice but to immerse herself in Spanish. It was a time of economic turmoil in the country. The peso, which for nearly a decade had been valued at 1:1 with the U.S. dollar, suddenly lost 40 percent of its value, and with it, its purchasing power.
Meghan acted as a media liaison to foreign dignitaries, an assignment in which her poise and polish as an actress, as well as her natural dignity and reserved manner, served her well, according to her half sister Samantha. The U.S. treasury secretary Paul O’Neill was in Buenos Aires at the same time; and when twenty-year-old Meghan Markle found herself riding in a motorcade of VIPs, it was heady enough to almost make her consider a career in politics.
But during a holiday break, Meghan returned home to Los Angeles. There a talent manager acquainted with one of her friends requested a copy of a student film Meghan had appeared in. After he viewed it, he convinced her she had a future on-screen and extended an offer of representation, so Meghan doubled back to her first love.
And in 2003, when Meghan received her degree in theater and international relations, she was the first member of her family to become a college graduate.
It was time to pursue her career in earnest.
While Prince Harry was running from photographers with his head ducked, Meghan was running toward them with her headshot in her hand.
At a party, a friend introduced Meghan to an agent, which led to her first few screen tests. Her first audition was for the role of Hot Girl #1, a passenger on an airplane in A Lot Like Love with Ashton Kutcher. She booked it. And then came the “oh, that was easy!” false sense of security from getting the job on her first try.
Because even in 2003, which was hardly ancient history, the landscape of film and television and to some extent theater casting, looked different. It’s hard enough for talented people to book a job. One of the unglamorous perils and pitfalls of the business is that a performer is invariably too something (fat, thin, blond, tall, short, pretty, etc.) or not (fat, thin, blond, tall, short, pretty, etc.) enough for the part. Or else they aren’t sleeping with the director/producer/star. When racial identity is thrown into the equation, it adds another too or not enough to an actor’s ability to even get seen for some roles, particularly with unimaginative directors and casting offices.
Meghan, who had been so fussed over by soap opera divas and sitcom stars when she was a child, who had easily won the leading roles in her school plays, who had just come through an ivory tower education in one of America’s finest university theater programs, and who had even snagged a bit part on a soap when she was still in college, was in for a rude awakening in the real world.
Casting directors put every performer’s headshot into a categorized file, whether it’s an actual one in a cabinet inside someone’s office or a virtual one on the computer. Casting notices are written to describe the “types” required for every job. And Meghan didn’t fit into a neat little folder. In her “ethnically ambiguous” photographs, as she put it, her looks didn’t seem to check any specific box. “W
as I Latina? Sephardic? Exotic Caucasian?”
The good news was that Meghan could audition for just about any role. She went on calls from music videos to commercials to feature films and series television. As Meghan described her pavement-pounding days, she had a closet full of outfits that could make her look “as racially varied as an eighties Benetton poster,” depending on the call: in red she could play a Latina; in mustard yellow, she skewed African American.
The bad news was that with her brown eyes, long straight brown hair, pale skin, and freckles, casting directors couldn’t “type” her. Which meant she wasn’t getting any work.
Meghan discovered that she was considered too white for the black roles and too black for the white roles, “leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.”
It’s a truism of the business that performers are often judged by their most recent gig, and when they haven’t booked one in a while, it can count against them, the unspoken assumption being What’s wrong with you? Never mind that the competition alone among beautiful young women in their twenties is already fierce, without adding talent and connections into the mix.
As Meghan would later describe her lean years on the celebrity chat show Entertainment Tonight, there was a time when she was too strapped for cash to fix her car, a “beat-up, hand-me-down Ford Explorer Sport” that sounded like a “steamboat engine” when she turned the ignition. The car doors were jammed shut, so when she had to attend an audition she would have to search for a spot in a hidden corner in the rear of the parking lot and crawl over the seats to exit, then reenter, her car through the trunk. Her license plate was affixed to the rear bumper with a bungee cord and a prayer.
American Princess Page 9
