Prince Harry and Meghan pose for photographers in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace after their engagement was announced on November 27, 2017. The Sunken Garden was one of Princess Diana’s favorite spots. (Facundo Arrizabalaga / EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock)
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Nottingham on their first official joint royal engagement on December 1, 2017. She appeared relaxed, if a little nervous, as she went into the royal handshaking mode and made conversation about the weather. (WENN Ltd / Alamy)
On Christmas Day, Meghan attended St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham with her future in-laws. This was a break with tradition, as only couples who were married or single family members attended the royal family’s holiday gathering. As the Queen left the church to return to Sandringham House, the royal ladies, including Meghan, dropped a brief curtsy. While her future sister-in-law Catherine Middleton dropped a perfectly relaxed curtsy, Meghan’s was much more wobbly, a sign that practice was needed. (Chris Jackson / Getty Images)
The next royal generation: Catherine and William, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry after church on Christmas Day, 2017. The royal quartet are now known as the Fab Four, the nickname used for the pop group the Beatles. (Photograph by Paul John Bayfield, Camera Press London)
Meghan greets a crowd of well-wishers in Brixton, in south London, while visiting community radio station Reprezent 107.3 FM on January 9, 2017. After wearing an expensive designer gown for her official engagement photographs, Meghan stuck to a simple and inexpensive black sweater from the mid-market food and clothing store Marks & Spencer for this event. (Dominic Lipinski / AFP / Getty Images)
As part of Meghan’s lessons in all things British, Harry took her on visits to Scotland, England, and Wales, where she visited Cardiff, the latter’s capital. Meghan wore jeans made in Wales, carried a bag made by a small British manufacturer, and wore velvet boots by a British designer. Her Prince of Wales check jacket was made by a British company that aims to make the most sustainable and least polluting wool clothing in the world. (Andrew Bartlett / Alamy)
Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and Catherine Middleton, then six months pregnant, at “Making a Difference Together,” the first annual Royal Foundation Forum in London in February 2018. Since Meghan joined the royal family in November, more than a million fans had clicked on royal social media sites. (Chris Jackson / AP / REX / Shutterstock)
Appendix
The American Princesses
Famously, there have been Hollywood film stars, notably Grace Kelly and Rita Hayworth, who have married into royalty.
Notoriously, there have been divorced Americans, namely Wallis Simpson, who married the British king Edward VIII and sparked a constitutional crisis in the House of Windsor.
Controversially, there has even been a biracial American who wed a European prince.
Uniquely, Meghan Markle is the only divorced, biracial American actor to marry into the British royal family.
She may be unique, but she is not alone. Over the last two hundred years some thirty-five Americans have married right royally, American money, bloodline, and celebrity shoring up and sustaining the life of regal houses around the world.
Crumbling dynasties have been revived by the arrival of a fresh face from the New World. Meghan Markle was a princess waiting to happen, a figure straight out of central casting who has made the House of Windsor seem relevant and inclusive in multiracial Britain.
For all of her freshness, glamour, and star quality, she still follows a well-trodden path.
Since Betsy Patterson married Jerome Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Emperor Napoleon, in Baltimore in 1803, several dozen American girls have lent their fortunes and their faces to ancient dynasties.
Though Betsy was the daughter of Maryland’s richest man, her wealth and beauty counted for nothing in the eyes of Napoleon. She was not royal, and so the marriage proved to be a short one, Napoleon refusing to allow her to land in France when his brother attempted to bring his pregnant trophy wife back home. She finally gave birth in London, but Jerome never saw his son and the couple was doomed never to meet again. Shortly afterward, on his brother’s orders, Jerome was made King of Westphalia and married a German princess. Untitled ladies from the colonies were still below the salt.
GRACE KELLY
The legendary and beloved Hollywood film star Grace Kelly was a very different proposition. She was welcomed with open arms by France’s neighbor Monaco and is universally credited with having saved the principality’s ailing royal house.
Grace epitomizes what America can bring to foreign crowns—glamour, fame, grace, and a desire to give back. She could serve as a template for Meghan Markle’s own royal journey.
Born in 1930, she enjoyed a comfortable East Coast upbringing in a prominent Catholic Philadelphia family. Like Meghan, she starred in school plays, but though she had two uncles working in movies, her father, a former Olympic gold medalist, disapproved of her going into acting, which he considered only one step above prostitution.
She defied him and, perhaps, made her small screen debut in The Swan, where she played a princess. Much in demand on TV—like Meghan—she made headlines when she appeared on the big screen in the seminal cowboy movie High Noon, which starred Gary Cooper.
By now high-profile and highly prized for her classic blonde ice-maiden looks, she won an Oscar for her role in The Country Girl, playing opposite Bing Crosby and William Holden. Her legendary status was assured with three Alfred Hitchcock movies, To Catch a Thief, Dial M for Murder, and Rear Window. Perhaps appropriately, her final film, released in 1955, was named High Society, for she had been transformed from a Hollywood star to a European princess.
Renowned these days as a sunshine destination for Europe’s jet set, in the 1950s the tiny principality of Monaco was struggling for existence. It had a seedy reputation. “A sunny place for shady people,” as novelist Somerset Maugham memorably described this stretch of the Mediterranean coastline. Prince Rainier, the twenty-six-year-old scion of the Grimaldi family who had ruled the principality since 1297, realized that he had to attract rich backers if the pocket-sized country was to expand beyond its almost total reliance on its famous casinos. The Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, later famed for his marriage to Jackie Kennedy, widow of the assassinated US president, was one of his key advisers.
In the summer of 1955, Grace Kelly was at the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France promoting The Country Girl. Rainier, desperate for some positive publicity and urged on by Onassis, agreed to a photo shoot with the Hollywood star at his palace.
Her encounter with her future husband lasted a mere forty-five minutes, but they began secretly corresponding. Seven months later, Rainier arrived in the US, and around Christmas suddenly announced the royal engagement.
Hollywood insiders viewed the match as a cynical business arrangement masterminded by Onassis. As film producer Robert Evans recorded in his memoirs: “The right bride could do for Monaco’s tourism what the coronation of Queen Elizabeth did for Great Britain.” However, the majority saw their union as a fairy-tale match, a beautiful Hollywood princess whisked away to a magical hillside kingdom by the azure sea.
In April 1956 the couple were married in Monte Carlo, the wedding lavishly covered by the world’s media and watched by a television audience of some 30 million. By contrast the, coronation of Queen Elizabeth was watched by 20.4 million, then a record. From that moment Monaco commanded the world’s attention as a glamour spot, with the new princess the jewel in its crown. There soon followed the birth of the couple’s three children—Princess Caroline, Prince Albert, and Princess Stephanie. The dynasty was secure.
Eventually life in the goldfish bowl of a tiny principality proved suffocating as far as Grace was concerned. In 1962 she managed to convince a reluctant Rainier to support her fourth collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock, accepting the lead role in the movie Marnie. The prospect of her retur
n to the big screen triggered a firestorm of publicity in the United States but at the same time a rush of sanctimonious disapproval among the Monégasques. They did not want their princess playing the part of a kleptomaniac. Rainier changed his mind. In the end Tippi Hedren took the part of Marnie, much to Princess Grace’s disappointment.
Her experience might give Meghan pause. For Meghan, to be separated from a profession she has pursued so determinedly all her adult life must inevitably present similar psychological challenges and engender comparable feelings of alienation. Like Grace, Meghan has given up much—her acting career, her philanthropic work, and her very successful website, all those vital elements that helped define her as a woman. Their absence will inevitably leave a gap in her heart that may not be entirely filled by her royal duties.
For a woman who was so adept at using social media to project her taste, choices, and political and social views, it will be hard to come under the umbrella of Kensington Palace and go along with their reign of silence. A similar example is Queen Letitia of Spain. Before she married King Felipe, she was a journalist and commentator, used to expressing her sometimes controversial views on mainstream Spanish television. After her marriage, silence. It was difficult for her to leave that life behind, and in the early years she did struggle. She was naturally assertive, but she had to allow her husband to take the lead. As far as Meghan is concerned, the good news is that she has adapted to her elevated social position.
In the case of Grace Kelly, she substituted her career with her philanthropic work, notably the launch of a very successful charity, AMADE Mondiale. The aim of this worldwide charity is to protect the “moral and physical integrity, and spiritual well-being, of children throughout the world without distinction of race, nationality, or religion, and in a spirit of complete political independence.” A charity, indeed, after Meghan’s own heart. When Princess Grace died in September 1982 at age fifty-two, she left behind a heartbroken husband and family and a grieving principality that had come to adore and revere their Hollywood royal.
RITA HAYWORTH
Actor Rita Hayworth, known as the Hollywood “love goddess,” was another famous film star who caught the eye of a prince, on this occasion Prince Aly Khan, the son and heir of the impossibly rich Aga Khan III, the leader of the world’s Ismaili Muslims.
Their union caused a sensation, especially as Hayworth had been married twice before, first to a used car dealer who became her agent and then to legendary Hollywood director Orson Welles. Khan, who was divorced, had a reputation as a lover of speed, sex, and showmanship.
Dark, dashing, and flirtatious, the playboy prince drove cars faster, raced horses harder, and loved women more recklessly than any other man. He was a lawyer, soldier, big-game hunter, and diplomat, though it is his skills in the bedroom for which he is still renowned. “A copper-skinned bedroom bombshell,” wrote one biographer, “the ultimate lady-killer of his day.”
It was Aly Khan’s dalliance with the Prince of Wales’s mistress Lady Thelma Furness that ended their entanglement and opened the way for Wallis Simpson to occupy the vacant position. It was, however, during his dalliance with Pamela Harriman, later US ambassador to France and one-time daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, that Aly met Rita Hayworth, at the time one of Hollywood’s greatest stars and pinups. He made her his princess.
Predictably, the union between the Brooklyn-born actor and the royal playboy lasted only a matter of months. Hayworth left her royal husband during a three-month visit to Africa and headed to Hollywood to patch things up with Orson Welles.
They were together long enough for Hayworth to present him with a daughter, Princess Yasmin Aly Khan, who today is known as a philanthropist and influential advocate in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, the illness that claimed her mother in 1987, at age sixty-eight.
DUCHESS OF WINDSOR
Nothing illustrates how much society and the royal family have changed than the life and loves of Wallis Simpson, the twice-married woman from Baltimore who rocked the throne of England in 1936 when King Edward VIII abdicated rather than reign without the help and support of the woman he loved. If Prince Harry and the divorced actor Meghan Markle had fallen in love in those days, they would not have been allowed to marry. The stigma surrounding divorce was not just an issue for the royal family; it permeated society as a whole. During the 1920s and 1930s divorce was unthinkable and expensive. Wallis’s uncle Sol told her firmly that no member of the family had divorced in three hundred years. She traveled to France and China in search of a cut-rate divorce from her first husband, aviator Win Spencer, and then spent years jumping through administrative hoops before she finally was free, in December 1927. When Meghan divorced in 2013 after two years of marriage, she simply signed a form stating that she and her first husband, Trevor Engelson, had “irreconcilable differences,” paid a small fee, and went her own sweet way.
In Wallis’s day even remarriage was difficult. After she divorced her second husband, shipping broker Ernest Simpson, she and the former king had to wait a frustrating and seemingly endless six months in separate countries before they could marry.
Just to twist the knife, while the royal family agreed that the once and former king could be titled His Royal Highness the Duke of Windsor, they specifically withheld the HRH appellation from the duke’s bride. In their eyes, she was only grudgingly royal. The royal family referred to her as “that woman.” It caused a family rift that lasted until the duke died. Though she is a divorcée, no such restriction applies to Meghan Markle, who will be Her Royal Highness from the moment she says, “I do.” A full-throated member of the first family.
As a gender equality campaigner, Meghan will be the first to appreciate that in Wallis’s day, few women went to college and only slightly more took paying jobs. She was from a generation where marriage was the only recognized path to social acceptance and financial stability.
Where Wallis and Meghan would recognize one another is in their unquestioned ability as networkers. Wallis’s social triumph was to import the American tradition of the cocktail hour, where her growing circle of mainly American friends dropped in to her apartment in Bryanston Court, near Marble Arch, which she shared with her second husband Ernest Simpson, for drinks and conversation for an hour or so in the early evening. She had the knack of fixing a decent cocktail for their guests—and in a prod at the English she made sure that her drinks were ice cold.
Word got around and her salon attracted businessmen, journalists, lawyers, and eventually a smattering of aristocrats and minor royalty. After meeting the Prince of Wales at a weekend house party hosted by his mistress Viscountess Furness, the future king also became a regular, often staying for dinner.
The modern-day equivalent to the salon is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and a personal blog—and Meghan, who also enjoys a cocktail (especially dirty martinis) has used her blog, The Tig, to convey her passion for food, travel, beauty, and fashion combined with her advocacy for women’s rights and gender equality. While Wallis’s currency was cocktails and parties, Meghan’s was shared confidences—with blog posts that give glimpses into her life on the road, suggest remedies for homesickness, and thoughtful lists of books she recommends (including some by Donna Tartt, Stephen King, and Lena Dunham). By the time she closed down her internet portals following her engagement last November, her Instagram site had accumulated 1.9 million followers.
In spite of the distance in decades, where Wallis, Meghan, and, for that matter, Princess Diana reigned supreme was in the power of fashion. The so-called revenge dress worn by Princess Diana for a charity event at the Serpentine Gallery on the night Prince Charles admitted his adultery on prime-time television will go down in history as an iconic moment that defined their marriage and revealed her liberation as an independent woman.
Wallis, too, used her wardrobe as a weapon, her sleek, crafted style in sharp contrast to the homely fashions preferred by her enemy, the queen mother, whom she called “Cookie,” as
she apparently resembled a cook.
While she acknowledged that she was no great beauty, she made sure that her clothes reflected the standing of her husband as ex-king, preferring to wear such designers as Mainbocher, the American designer who made the iconic wedding dress, Chanel, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Dior. “The duchess loves Paris because it is not too far from Dior,” drawled the duke wearily on one occasion. As royal jewel historian Suzy Menkes remarks: “She worked even harder than her husband at being elegant, punishing herself by existing on little more than a single egg when her weight shot up two tiny ounces. In that absolute dedication to appearance she belongs to an era when a woman dressed to please, rather than tease, her man. There is something eternal about her style that still resonates today.”
Her signature style—sophisticated, classic, and glamorous—ensured that she regularly topped the list of the world’s best-dressed women. What became known as the Windsor style—a neat but fluid silhouette—ensured that she was able elegantly to display her diamond bracelet; her flamingo brooch covered with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds; and the other jewelry showered upon her by her doting husband. She amassed such a collection that it made history when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s Geneva in 1987, a year after her death, fetching $50 million—a record for a single-owner jewelry collection at the time. Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins, and Charles, Prince of Wales, were among the bidders.
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