Meghan

by Andrew Morton

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Morton

  Cover design by Lisa Forde. Cover photo copyright © Getty Images, Mel Yates. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: April 2018

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  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-4735-3 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-4734-6 (ebook)

  E3-20180317-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: The Stars Were Aligned

  1 In Search of Wisdom

  2 Growing Up Markle

  3 A Street Called Gladys

  4 Can You Say, “Hi?”

  5 Short Skirts, High Heels

  6 A Star Is Tailor Made

  7 The “Aha” Moment

  8 Seeing Both Sides Now

  9 When Harry Met Meghan

  10 Into Africa

  11 A Very Public Romance

  12 Tea with Her Majesty

  13 The Billion-Dollar Bride

  14 Invitation to a Wedding

  Photos

  Appendix: The American Princesses

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Andrew Morton

  Newsletters

  To Carolyn and all our friends in Pasadena

  Prologue

  The Stars Were Aligned

  When the American actor Rachel Meghan Markle walks down the aisle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle on May 19, 2018, she will be making history.

  In the last important royal wedding for a generation, Prince Harry’s glamorous bride will be the first biracial divorcée ever to marry a member of the British royal family. Their union, blessed by Her Majesty the Queen, will make the monarchy seem more inclusive and relevant in an ever-changing world.

  During the service the eight hundred guests at the grand affair might hear a low hum competing with the singing of the choir. It will be the sound of the Duke of Windsor, who gave up his throne in 1936 so that he could marry a twice-divorced American, spinning in his grave, located nearby at Frogmore, on the grounds of Windsor Castle.

  He was prevented from making the love of his life his queen because Wallis had two former husbands still living. The only time Wallis was admitted into Windsor Castle was in her coffin in April 1986 for her funeral service at St. George’s Chapel. In the 1950s the queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, faced the same predicament, choosing duty before the love of her divorced paramour, Group Captain Peter Townsend.

  If nothing else, the wedding of the second son of Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales shows how much and how far the royal family—and the British nation—have changed and evolved during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It is a union and an occasion redolent with symbolism.

  Since the romantic traumas surrounding Edward VIII and Princess Margaret, the royal family, like the rest of the world, has accepted, albeit reluctantly, the fact that divorce no longer carries the social stigma it once did. Yet even in the early 1980s when Prince Charles was scouting the shires for a bride, the notion of a divorced American marrying into the royal family was unthinkable. Then the priority was to find a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocratic virgin.

  He found one in the winsome shape of Lady Diana Spencer, and the constitutional catastrophe of their marriage—and rancorous divorce—has caused the older generation of royals and their supporters to take pause before commenting on the chosen companion of the younger members of the family. Nor was the parting of the future king and queen a unique occurrence inside the royal family. The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret; her daughter, Princess Anne; and her beloved second son, Prince Andrew, divorced their marital partners. All were enveloped in varying degrees of scandal, most notoriously when Andrew’s wife, the Duchess of York, known as Fergie, was photographed having her toes sucked by her so-called financial adviser next to a swimming pool in the south of France.

  That Meghan divorced after a brief two-year union with a film producer has hardly raised an eyebrow, let alone created a constitutional crisis. After all, the future king, Prince Charles, is a divorcé who married his former mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, also divorced, in April 2005 in a civil ceremony just over the road from St. George’s Chapel—all very modern. Divorce, race, and a racy past—the House of Windsor now welcomes all comers. As Prince Harry succinctly put it during their engagement interview, the “stars were in alignment.”

  It is an observation Harry’s uncle, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, may reflect upon as he watches Megan Markle make her stately procession down the aisle. For Prince Andrew it is not just the stars but the decades that are out of alignment. Just thirty-six years ago, almost to the week, the prince, a red rose between his teeth, ran down the gangway of his ship, HMS Invincible, to be greeted by his proud parents, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

  Back then he was the world’s most eligible bachelor and a fully certified war hero, risking his life during the Falklands conflict between Britain and Argentina, which left more than nine hundred dead and thousands wounded.

  A few weeks later, in August 1982, he secretly flew to the private Caribbean island of Mustique, where the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, had a property, Les Jolies Eaux. He and his American girlfriend, Kathleen “Koo” Stark, the daughter of Hollywood producer Wilbur Stark, had, according to first reports, flown under the assumed names of “Mr. and Mrs. Cambridge.”

  When she first arrived in London in 1975 Kathleen wanted to be an actor and starred in a tepidly erotic rite-of-passage movie titled Emily directed by an arty aristocrat, the Earl of Pembroke. As pictures were circulated of Koo in various stages of undress, hysteria gripped the mass media and even some members of Parliament.

  Their romance continued long after their holiday, and the early revelations about her film role. She met the Queen, and Princess Diana considered her the perfect match for Andrew. She told me: “Sweet Koo adored him. She was terribly good to have around. Very gentle and looked after him. All her energies were directed at him. Very quiet. They suited each other so well.”

  Yet the stigma of that movie, one of her first, ultimately poisoned her relationship with Andrew. Forevermore known as a “porn actress”—nothing could be further from the truth—Koo and Andrew’s love affair was doomed. But for a fifth-rate movie, Kathleen may have been the first American to marry into the royal family since Wallis Simpson.

  By contrast Meghan Markle has taken acting roles where she has been filmed snorting cocaine, teaching housewives the art of striptease a
nd having sex in a storeroom. She appeared semi-naked in so many scenes in the long-running TV drama Suits that she complained that scriptwriters were deliberately crafting scenarios to show off her body.

  (Meghan might note that while the palace has ordered her website, The Tig, which contained intelligent and well-written essays about gender equality and race, to be scrubbed from the internet, videos of her very unprincesslike behavior remain for all to see.)

  While Meghan is not the first mixed-race woman to marry into European royalty—that honor goes to Panamanian-born Angela Brown, now Princess Angela of the tiny but wealthy country of Liechtenstein—she is the first divorced biracial American to take her place in the House of Windsor.

  Though race has aroused plenty of debate in her own country—inevitably because of America’s past as a nation practicing slavery and segregation—race relations have been largely ignored in conjunction with the royal family.

  Ironically, when the engagement was announced in November 2017, moviegoers in America and Britain were enjoying Victoria and Abdul, the story of Queen Victoria’s friendship with an Indian attendant Abdul Karim. His presence at court excited so much animosity that when the queen died in 1901, her successor, King Edward VII, personally supervised his eviction and deportation back to India. Victoria’s daughter Beatrice erased all references to Karim in her mother’s voluminous diaries. As historian Carolly Erickson observes in Her Little Majesty, “For a dark-skinned Indian to be put very nearly on a level with the queen’s white servants was all but intolerable, for him to eat at the same table with them, to share in their daily lives was viewed as an outrage.”

  Though the present queen does not, as author Penny Junor argues, recognize color, only 6 percent of the 1,100 people employed by the palace are from ethnic minorities, and only around thirty are in senior positions. While this ethnic imbalance is also reflected in the senior ranks of the civil service, it has been argued that the royal family has missed an opportunity to take the lead on race.

  It is a subject that Meghan has not shied away from discussing, and she will already be well aware that people of color do not feature noticeably inside the palace. Perhaps it is an issue she may decide to involve herself in after she settles into royal life.

  As Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, notes, the way in which Meghan handles herself will send out an important message to minorities. “It is a very big deal that she has talked of her pride in her ethnicity. For people of colour that will be seen as a very positive, modern approach and immensely welcome.”

  Not only is she part of the discussion about race in Britain, but her racial background informs attitudes in the US. The biracial soon-to-be-royal is considered part of the Loving generation, the cohort that gets its name from the Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested in 1958 and put in jail for the crime of miscegenation. Until the 1967 Supreme court judgment in Loving v. Virginia, interracial marriage was against the law in some states.

  In the 1970s there were about 65,000 black and white married couples in the United States. By the 1980s, a little over a decade after the Loving ruling, that number had doubled to 120,000. A significant jump, but one has to keep in mind that the population was around 240 million at the time.

  With a white Republican father and a black Democrat mother, Meghan has found herself at the center of an active discussion about the place of mixed-race individuals in society. Thus, Meghan’s narrative is that of a woman trying to find herself not just as a woman but to define her place in society, a world where she is seen as neither black nor white.

  Looking to the future, she will also have to define herself as part of the far smaller world of royalty.

  Even though Meghan is very much her own woman, it is interesting that those who taught her or knew her spontaneously mention the D-word in the same breath as Meghan. Comparisons with Diana are inevitable; Meghan’s secret solo visit in February 2018 to comfort the survivors of the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, West London, revives memories of Diana’s trips to the homeless on London’s South Bank. Her social work visiting AIDS patients, the homeless, and those on their last lonely journey was therapeutic, as healing for her as it was for those she comforted.

  While Meghan is empathetic, certainly, but also self-possessed, sophisticated, poised, and charismatic. She is a woman who is camera-ready, not camera-shy.

  Long before Prince Harry was mentioned in conjunction with Meghan, her alma mater, Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles, regularly screened the 2015 speech she made at the United Nations Women conference on gender equality as inspiration for the current generation of female students.

  It is said that to be an effective congressman, member of Parliament, or president, it is preferable to have enjoyed a successful career outside the political world so that when you walk into the chamber or the White House, it is not so intimidating. This is where Meghan finds herself. She has arrived at the gates of the palace fully formed: a successful actor, a popular blogger, and an acknowledged humanitarian.

  She can boast a bloodline of slaves and kings, servants and swordsmen. Hers has been a remarkable journey, a journey that began—where else—the city of dreams, Los Angeles.

  1

  In Search of Wisdom

  For years she was troubled by a nagging question at the back of her mind: Where does my family come from, what is my history? For Rachel Meghan Markle—known as “Bud” and “Flower” by her family—it was an endlessly perplexing issue. The fact that her mother, Doria Ragland, was an African American and her father, Thomas Wayne Markle, was a white Pennsylvanian only added to the confusion.

  As a member of the so-called Loving generation, those mixed-race Americans born after 1967 when miscegenation—that is, marriage between races—was no longer a crime, Meghan felt she had to find her place, where she belonged, in both the black and the white worlds. In the hierarchy of color that still defines place, position, and proximity in American society, she was light-skinned and therefore seen as “whiter” than her black cousins. From birth she loved both white and black skin, not a familiar occurrence in American society. So, along with her perplexity came a fluidity, a readiness to view the world from different perspectives, from both sides.

  She had listened wide eyed as her uncle Joseph had told and retold the story of the Raglands’ cross-country drive from Cleveland, Ohio, to Los Angeles in a borrowed car when her mother, Doria was a babe in arms. Their adventure turned nasty when they pulled into a one-horse town in Texas in the teeth of a blizzard. They were looking for a room for the night, but soon realized they were not wanted in the redneck town. One guy pointed off into the snow and yelled: “The highway is that way. Get going. You are not welcome here.” Another version of the story has them picking up Kentucky Fried Chicken from the “colored” door at the rear of the restaurant.

  While it may be family lore—the road from Cleveland to Los Angeles goes nowhere near the Lone Star state—for Meghan’s uncle, then around seven or eight, it represented his first real experience of racism. As Meghan was to learn, the history of her mother’s family was one of exploitation, discrimination, and injustice. Some of it she would experience firsthand, such as when she felt the rush of blood to her cheeks when someone in a parking lot used the N-word to her mother because she did not leave briskly enough. It was a word that her humble ancestors—slaves who worked on the cotton plantations of Georgia—would have heard on a daily basis.

  It is no wonder that Meghan was left bewildered by her family tree. Tracing her family back through her mother’s line is a difficult business. Prior to emancipation, evidence about the lives of black people in the South was inevitably scarce. There were few written records, and most information was passed on by word of mouth. What we do know is that for years the family was the property of a Methodist, William Ragland, whose family originated from Cornwall in the southwest of England, before emigrating to Virginia and then North Carolina. Ragland
lived in Chatham County, North Carolina, with his slaves before moving to the rural town of Jonesboro in Georgia, where land was regularly given away by the authorities in lotteries to encourage settlement. Traditionally, slaves were only known by a first name, given to them by their owner, and on occasion they also took their owner’s surname. The scanty records that are available show that the first “black Ragland”—that is to say, a direct ancestor of Meghan—was born in Jonesboro in 1830. This was Richard Ragland, who married a woman named Mary. Though much of his life was spent in enforced servitude, at least his son, Stephen, who was born in 1848, lived to see the emancipation that came when the Union, the anti-slave Northern states lead by President Abraham Lincoln, triumphed over the pro-slave Confederacy in 1865. At the end of the war, Stephen Ragland became a sharecropper and remained in Jonesboro, according to records unearthed by Massachusetts-based genealogist Elizabeth Banas. But this was merely slavery by another name, as the overwhelming majority of what was produced by sharecroppers was taken by the white landowners in rent and other dues, leaving an average sharecropper such as Stephen Ragland constantly in debt.

  Though freed at the end of the Civil War, it was not until the 1870 census that former slaves could officially register a name for themselves. Stephen Ragland stuck with his former master’s surname and his given name—not quite as romantic as “Wisdom,” the name Meghan believes her great-great-great-grandfather Ragland chose when he was given the chance to make a fresh start. As she wrote: “Perhaps the closest thing to connecting me to my ever-complex family tree, my longing to know where I come from, and the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name Wisdom.”

  Sadly, the professional genealogists and researchers who have carefully investigated her history point out that the records, albeit sketchy and contradictory, show that he kept his original name. They also reveal that his first wife was named Ellen Lemens, and that the couple married on August 18, 1869, and went on to have four children: Ann (who was also known as Texas), Dora, Henry, and Jeremiah, born in either 1881 or 1882, who is Meghan’s great-great-grandfather. Based on census and tax records it seems that for some years Stephen and Ellen continued to live on the plantation of white former slave owner Lemuel Ragland and his wife, Mary. In fact, when Lemuel Ragland died on May 19, 1870, Stephen Ragland was recorded in the census as working for the widow Mary, then age sixty. Other family members living in the vicinity, probably in the same plantation bunkhouse or rough-hewn wooden shacks, included Vinny and Willy Ragland, as well as Charles, Jack, Jerry, Mariah, and Catherine Lemens.