Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(49)
She was delighted to discover that the national animal of Scotland is a unicorn, saying: “No! Really? It’s a unicorn! We’re all moving to Scotland.” When she realized that a dragon is the national animal of Wales, she said: “Are these real right now? It’s a dragon. Lions and unicorns and dragons, oh my.”
On August 4, she was in New York for her thirty-fifth birthday and stayed in the five-star St. Regis hotel in midtown in preparation for her friend Lindsay’s big day. “Happy birthday to the most kind, generous, wickedly smart and gorgeous inside and out maid of honor a girl could want,” Lindsay told her via social media. Intriguingly, on her birthday a bouquet of peonies, her favorite flowers, were delivered to her hotel suite. A princely offering perhaps?
Certainly something was going on in Meghan’s heart. “I am feeling so incredibly joyful right now,” she wrote on The Tig. “So grateful and content that all I could wish for is more of the same. More surprises, more adventure.”
She was certainly not short of adventures. In mid-August, after the Roth wedding, she left behind the elegant butler service at the storied St. Regis in New York and flew to Rome, where she joined her style guru friend Jessica Mulroney. They planned to embrace la dolce vita in some style, checking into the equally civilized Le Sirenuse hotel on the Amalfi coast in Italy.
With breathtaking views of the Bay of Positano, it is hard not to feel that this is but an ante room to paradise. Typically, Meghan publicized every detail of their four-day stay, even giving the holiday the hashtag #MJxItaly. They lounged around the pool, strolled into the market square, and took pictures of their breakfast under the heading “Eat Pray Love.” Meghan, who had had a couple of weeks to ponder the impending safari with Prince Harry, gave an indication of her romantic feelings when she held up a red leather-bound volume titled Amore Etern’ (Eternal Love) and photographed it under the light of a full moon. It was, she said, given to her by friends as a good omen.
At the end of their stay she kissed Jessica goodbye, who was one of only a handful of friends who knew the secret of her next destination, and prepared for her thirteen-hour flight to Johannesburg.
There may have been a slight raising of eyebrows inside the royal palaces when the news percolated through that Prince Harry was taking yet another girlfriend on a safari holiday to Botswana.
Those who monitor these things would have noted that this was his seventh holiday in Botswana with the fourth female companion to join him for a few romantic nights under the stars in a southern African hideaway. The young man certainly had style.
And he was not the only prince of the realm to fall headlong in love with the delights of the African continent. Another Harry, his great uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, enjoyed a torrid affair with the famous and married aviatrix Beryl Markham during a visit to Kenya in 1928. The duke’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, later and briefly King Edward VIII, took his mistress, Lady Thelma Furness, on safari while her husband camped nearby. “This was our Eden and we were alone in it,” she wrote breathlessly. “His arms about me were the only reality, his words of love my only bridge to life.”
There is something about the vast plains, the never-ending skies, the daily struggle for existence that seems to bring out the passionate and the spiritual in a prince. Prince Charles has passed on his more mystical appreciation of southern Africa to both of his sons. His message to William and Harry was that the exploration of the outer world allowed a deeper engagement with the inner world, a chance to seek truth in their surroundings.
Charles’s own guide was the South African philosopher Laurens van der Post, who encouraged the future king to find peace in the vast featureless wilderness of the Kalahari Desert. During a visit in March 1987 Charles and van der Post traveled to the desert by Land Rover, slept under canvas, and chatted around a campfire, listening to the sounds of the desert while marveling at the brilliant night sky. On the third day they came across a herd of zebra that stretched across the flat horizon. It was such a magnificent and imposing natural wonder that Charles found himself moved to tears. Nowhere else on the planet gives such a vivid reminder of the ineluctable rhythm of life—and of death—than the African plains.
Perhaps with these thoughts and reflections in mind, Prince Charles invited Prince Harry to join him on a five-day visit to South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho just two months after Harry’s mother had died in a Parisian underpass. Harry was still struggling to come to terms with her loss, and his father thought that time away from England would help the healing process.
Accompanying Harry, who was then thirteen, was his “surrogate mum,” Tiggy Legge Bourke, who had been an official companion to the young boy during his parents’ separation; his school friend Charlie Henderson; and Mark Dyer, a former equerry to the Prince of Wales. While Harry’s father undertook official engagements, the young prince was taken on his first South African safari. It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair.
After touring some of the famous battlegrounds, such as Rorke’s Drift from the famous Zulu war of 1879, the prince met South Africa’s first president, Nelson Mandela, and the Spice Girls, who were then at the height of their popularity and had traveled to South Africa to perform at a charity concert.
It was six years before he enjoyed a return visit. The prince, then nineteen, spent two months of his school gap year in the impoverished kingdom of Lesotho, the landlocked country that suffered from one of the highest HIV-AIDS infection rates in the world. Initially it was seen by many as a cynical public relations exercise to restore the prince’s stained reputation. But not as far as Harry was concerned. Moved by the plight of the children and with his mother’s memory clearly in mind, Harry joined forces with the country’s Prince Seeiso, who had lost his own mother. In 2006 they set up the Sentebale charity to help children suffering from AIDS to lead fulfilled and productive lives. The Sentebale charity—the name means “forget me not”—was so popular and, thanks to the prince’s involvement, became so well known outside the nation’s boundaries that it expanded into neighboring Botswana. He has energetically supported it ever since. In 2008 he recruited his brother to take part in a one-thousand-mile cross country motorbike trek along South Africa’s eastern cape to raise money for Sentebale and other charities supporting disadvantaged children. “It’s not just a bimble across the countryside, we’re expected to fall off many a time,” noted Harry.