Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(80)
The couple’s only child, Prince Alfons Constantin Maria of Liechtenstein, was born in London in May 2001. Though the family feature occasionally in Panamanian and South American media, they remain largely under the radar in Europe.
While Prince Max heads a major investment company and makes the occasional speech on the environment, the royal couple, like the rest of the family, stay out of the limelight. A statement from the royal Palace in Verduz, the nations’s capital, rather says it all. “The Liechtenstein family is a private family, and this applies to any charities that they are involved in.” While the curious might catch the royal family strolling on the beach at their Panama holiday home in Playa los Destiladeros, they would rarely if ever see them on a public platform.
Though Meghan has much in common with Grace, Rita, Wallis, and Angela, the American royal she most closely matches is the former Sarah Butler, now Princess Sarah Zeid. Not only did she qualify with the same degree, international relations, from an American college, she works for the United Nations and devotes her life to often difficult and draining humanitarian work. When she married she changed her religion, her country, and her culture—just like Meghan. Born in Houston, Texas, she was educated in London and then attended college in Houston at the University of St. Thomas. Armed with a master’s degree in development studies, she joined the United Nations in New York, focusing on peacekeeping and children’s issues.
While working there she met Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan. Educated at Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, he married Sarah Butler in Jordan’s capital, Amman, in 2000. They have four children—Prince Ra’ad, born in 2001; Princess Hala, born in 2003; Princess Azziza, born in 2009; and Prince Zaid in 2011. Princess Sarah, now forty-five, continues her good works by raising awareness for causes including Every Newborn Action Plan, the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, and the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.
Charming and committed to the work of the UN, in 2014 Prince Zeid was appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In December 2017 Princess Sarah visited Africa in her capacity as the UNHCR Advisor on Gender, Forced Displacement, and Protection. She went to witness the humanitarian work being done in war-torn South Sudan, meeting displaced persons in refugee camps and visiting orphanages. Then she went on to visit more refugees settled in camps inside Kenya.
She recalled: “Everywhere we went, people were pleading for peace, for the opportunity to go back home and restart their normal life. I am truly humbled by the stories I have heard—stories of enormous courage, resilience and perseverance.”
She is also cochair of Every Woman Every Child, described as “an unprecedented global movement that mobilizes and intensifies… action by governments to address the major health challenges facing women, children and adolescents around the world.”
On her Twitter account, @PrincessSaraZR, she describes herself as “determined that mothers and newborns survive and thrive EveryWhere!” In one tweet she touchingly paid tribute to her husband: So very proud of #Zeid. He and @UNHumanRights have worked so hard and been so strong.
It has been a remarkable life so far, leading others by her example. Such is his admiration for his American wife that whenever Prince Zeid makes a speech, he tries to mention his American wife by name.
While Princess Sarah Zeid is from Meghan’s generation, it is another American, Lisa Halaby, who is probably the best known royal philanthropist. Born in Washington, DC, to a rich and accomplished family—her test pilot father headed Pan American World Airways—she worked in several countries before she found herself in Amman, the capital of Jordan.
There she met King Hussein of Jordan, whose wife had recently died, and in June 1978 they married. The king was forty-three, and Queen Noor, as Lisa became known, was twenty-seven. Of all Americans who married into foreign royalty, Queen Noor did more to help those less well-off than any other, working tirelessly in establishing a range of charitable foundations until the king’s death in 1999.
She alarmed many conservatives inside the Arab kingdom with her focus on women’s rights, economic development, and environmental protection. When the king died, her grace and warmth touched many Jordanians. President Bill Clinton described her as a “daughter of America and Queen of Jordan who made two nations proud.”
Another American queen, albeit of a much smaller country, was San Francisco–born socialite Hope Cooke, who by chance met Palden Thondup Namgyal, the heir to the throne of the tiny mountain kingdom of Sikkim, in a hotel lounge during a summer trip to India. He married the twenty-two-year-old student in 1963 and two years later became the king, or chogyal, after the death of his father. After a referendum in 1975, the population voted to join neighboring India and thus abolish the monarchy. As a result, the queen of Sikkim left behind the king, from whom she had become estranged, and took their two children back to New York, where she set up a new life in Brooklyn, finding work and contentment as a writer, historian, and lecturer.
Other notable American women who have married right royally include Jackie Kennedy’s kid sister Caroline Lee Bouvier, who married a Polish count in 1959 and became Princess Lee Radziwill, clinging to the title after their divorce after fourteen years of married life. Nearer Meghan’s own age is model Kendra Spears, who is the youngest American princess. Born in Seattle in 1988, by the time she was at college she was juggling her studies with the demands of the fashion world.