Meghan: A Hollywood Princess
Andrew Morton
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 and 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.