Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(57)
Harry then joined his friends for a shooting weekend at Oettingen Castle in Bavaria, Germany, before he was reunited with Meghan, who came for a weeklong stay at Nottingham Cottage in early December.
They bought their first Christmas tree together, and the staff at the Battersea garden center Pines and Needles gave them a bunch of mistletoe for good luck. For the most part they managed to elude the watchful paparazzi, the couple wearing matching blue beanie hats to obscure their faces. They walked through the theater district, where they saw the slapstick comedy Peter Pan Goes Wrong and later the brilliantly staged The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, based on Mark Haddon’s novel.
Much as they would have liked to spend Christmas together, royal tradition threw a wrench in their plans. Every year the extended royal family gather at Sandringham, the queen’s twenty-thousand-acre estate in Norfolk. Girlfriends and boyfriends are excluded.
They did, however, see in the New Year together at Nottingham Cottage before flying on January 2 to the remote town of Troms? in northern Norway on the edge of the Arctic Circle to see the dazzling and awe-inspiring aurora borealis, or northern lights.
Even if the happy couple were not quite ready to make a formal commitment to one another, they and others had to anticipate the future. In his mind Suits creator Aaron Korsh decided that Meghan’s private life now overshadowed her character, Rachel Zane. For her sake it was best to write her out of the hit series. As he said later: “I had a decision to make. I didn’t want to intrude and ask her: ‘Hey what’s going on and what are you going to do?’ So collectively with the writers we decided to take a gamble that these two people were in love and it would work out.” As Harry’s previous actor girlfriend Cressida Bonas had discovered, there was a high professional price to pay for dating a prince. If the Harry and Meghan romance had petered out, Meghan would have been out of work. It was a high-stakes romance with consequences for her career with every passing week.
Indeed, for how much longer could a potential princess be seen cuddling up to her screen lover, Patrick J. Adams, her hand placed suggestively on his knee? When Adams was asked by a fan what it was like “making out on screen with a potential future English princess,” he replied deadpan: “The same as it was before she was a potential future princess.”
That said, both Meghan and her romantic costar Patrick J. Adams had by now appeared in more than one hundred episodes of the hit show. As far as he was concerned, it was time to hang up his role in Suits. Even if Meghan had felt the same way, her personal life took this professional decision out of her hands.
As he later told the Hollywood Reporter: “There was this natural sense that we both knew that the time had come for both of us. It went unspoken and we just enjoyed the hell out of the last few episodes that we got to shoot. We both knew that we wouldn’t be coming back. It made every one of our scenes that much more special. We had a great time. We could laugh through it. Even the things that might have frustrated us about the show, they became things that we could have a good laugh about and compare notes on just how crazy this thing had become.”
For as long as she was on the show, the producers were ready and willing to use her royal connections and newfound celebrity—that February she was ranked fourth among the most eligible dinner guests by Tatler magazine—to boost ratings. One trailer promoted the characters as “almost royalty,” while another featured a scene from a previous season of Meghan in a wedding dress.
Others had the same idea. The gritty British crime movie Anti-Social, originally released in 2015, was repackaged as a “special edition” and featured Meghan’s name prominently in the publicity. In the movie she played a fashion model named Kirsten and was seen emerging from a shower dressed in a towel, drinking champagne, and kissing an on-screen lover. A number of Trevor Engelson’s friends, who knew that he had always been reluctant to cast Meghan in his productions, now teased him mercilessly telling the Hollywood producer that he could have made a fortune repackaging his movies if Meghan had been featured in the original. “He got a lot of flak,” a friend told me.
Meghan herself had some serious commercial decisions to make. It wasn’t about money or self-promotion. Her blog, The Tig, had meant the world to her. It was her baby. She had watched it grow from a modest one-woman show to a brand that represented her very civilized, refined, yet adventurous view of life. It was aspirational and frothily feminine but always with a serious point, be it about gender equality or human rights. The Tig was, as she always said, the little engine that could. Now she realized that her blog couldn’t go on as it had in the past as long as she remained within the royal orbit. Her pictures, comments, recommendations, and thoughts would be taken out of context and associated with Prince Harry or the royal family or both. She was no longer Meghan the blogger; she was one half of a partnership in which the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was fifth (now sixth) in line to the throne. Different rules applied. For all her protestations and doubts, she conceded that if she was going to go forward with her prince, at some point she would have to severely modify the contents of The Tig.
This was to be her first major reality check, running a blog and dating a royal. If matters became more formal, in the shape of an engagement ring, then she would have to rethink the entire existence of her social media platforms. A friend said: “She’s trying to figure out how to scale back what she puts out there about her life, including her social media and website. If she had to leave all that she’s doing for the relationship to work, she would without hesitation.”