Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(77)
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.