The real reason why Meghan went on Ellen
Her pitch to middle America proves that British opinion no longer matters, says Celia Walden
I‘Her last interview with Oprah didn’t go down quite as well with Americans, who are fond of the Queen, as Meghan had hoped’
wonder what Kim Kardashian would have said if Ellen Degeneres had invited her onto her daytime chat show to eat tortilla chips “like a chipmunk” and “drink milk” from a baby bottle before a live studio audience? My guess is that it would have started with an “N” and an “O” – and ended with a click and a dialling tone.
But the Duchess of Sussex is, perhaps, less discerning. Certainly she’s more craven. And with Meghan Markle’s carefully choreographed brand now damaged by the revelations heard by the Court of Appeal earlier this month – where it emerged that she had “misremembered” various key points at the heart of her legal battle against Associated Newspapers – it was time for a concerted repositioning. Not in British minds, you understand (we no longer matter – if we ever did), but in the eyes of America, where her future lies.
Because that last interview with Oprah didn’t go down quite as well as Meghan had hoped with many of her countrymen and women, who, she seemed to have forgotten, have always been enormously fond of the Queen. And after Her Majesty’s recent health problems, now seemed a good moment to position herself in a softer, warmer light.
So the Duchess said yes. To all of it. Yes to “Aunty Ellen”. Yes to recasting herself as the game and affable “girl next door” in front of 1.5 million viewers and a studio full of middle Americans in matching medical-grade masks. Yes to eating several tortilla chips like a chipmunk. Yes to slugging from the baby bottle in her “prop purse”. Yes to mewling like a cat while wearing kitten ears, telling punchlineless elephant jokes, chanting “hot, hot, hot”, and squealing: “My boo loves hot sauce!”
It reached the stage where, like the royal biographer Angela Levin, who tweeted “I wonder whether Ellen Degeneres has a grudge against Meghan and wanted her to look so foolish her career would crumble”, I began to ask myself whether this might in fact be a prank within a prank; whether it was part of a sophisticated, cruel game the 63-yearold TV host had decided to play to see how far the actress-turned-duchess – whom she has previously mocked on the show as “the holder of case 24 on Deal or No Deal” – would go for the sake of celebrity?
Because although much was made of the deep personal friendship these two are supposed to enjoy off screen, I was not convinced. It wasn’t just the inorganic anecdotes that were teed up like golf balls throughout the hourlong show (not something a genuine friendship would necessitate, one would think) or the gaping audienceaimed smiles held a fraction too long. No, it was the slight glaze of Ellen’s eyes as Meghan recounted in enthusiastic detail how the two of them had first met a decade ago at an LA animal shelter and bonded over a dog she was thinking of saving.
“When Ellen tells you to take a dog, you take the dog!” Meghan chirruped excitedly. But, of course, Ellen didn’t remember any of this. Because whereas back in 2012 the pretty young actress holding a dog was already dreaming of sitting opposite Ellen in a doily-sleeved £1,336 designer blouse and bringing the house down with her “cute” anecdotes, Meghan was of zero use to the TV host then. And in Hollywood a friendship can only exist if you are mutually beneficial: brand enhancing. Why bother wasting your time with anything else?
For that reason and a few of her own, Meghan’s yeses just kept on coming. Yes to the sharing of illustrations penned when she was younger and photographs from her childhood. Yes to photographs of little Archie, too, along with anecdotes about the dinosaur costume he hated so much that he took it off. Then there was more in that same vein about five-month-old Lilibet: the teething, the sleep issues – all that 24-carat motherliness that screams: “I am normal! I am just like all of you!”
Of course, once you’ve been told that this woman deliberately chose to address her father as “daddy” in a letter, since “it would pull at the heartstrings” more efficiently if leaked, it’s quite hard not to be cynical about anything in the warm and fuzzy department. But barring a couple of awkward moments where a gooeyeyed Meghan failed to be recompensed with the “ooh”, “ahh”, “aww” or burst of applause she’d expected when handing over a particularly juicy intimacy, Ellen’s audience lapped it up.
If there was any confusion in these people’s minds as to precisely how the commodification of these private nuggets squared with the Duchess’s desire for privacy, you couldn’t tell. And given Americans’ unapologetic consumerism, maybe there was nothing uncomfortable about Meghan portraying the children’s book she was there to flog, The Bench, as a private “poem for my husband on Father’s Day … about my observation of him being a dad, which was the most beautiful thing to watch”.
Maybe the message that Meghan’s “intention” had never been to “share” that book with anyone but “a couple of friends”, and that it had basically been published and ruthlessly promoted quite by accident, didn’t hit a bum note over there. But over here in the UK? As Ellen robotically recited the plug for The Bench just seconds later, it was viewing-through-partedfingers time.
One thing about this curdled mess of an interview was a relief. And that was the dialling down of the victim narrative the Duchess has bought into so vigorously in the past. I mean, I’d take “cheeky, cheerful Meghan” over her doleful Oprah alter ego anytime. Indeed, as a former Suits fan, I remember thinking that the actress playing Rachel Zane had natural comic timing and ability. That said, there were a couple of early instances in Meghan’s Ellen interview where one felt she had to catch herself and stop it there, before the “woe is me” sucked her under.
Remembering how Harry came to visit her in Toronto one October early on in their relationship, Meghan recounted how – along with his cousin Eugenie and her now husband, Jack Brooksbank – the four of them “snuck out in Halloween costumes to just have one fun night on the town before it was out in the world that we were a couple.” Unable to hold back a telling repetition, the Duchess went on: “It was a post-apocalypse theme. So we had all this very bizarre costuming on and we were able to just sort of have one, final, fun night out.” Because it’s been drudgery from that moment on. But isn’t Meghan holding up well?