Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(78)
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 return 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.