Dish on ‘Meghan’ with Andrew Morton

You’ll want to #BookmarkThis. On April 18, join USA TODAY for a Facebook Live chat with author Andrew Morton about Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, his new biography of American actress and royal bride-tobe Meghan Markle. #BookmarkThis is a series of live video chats with best-selling authors. Fans can submit questions in advance. It’s a great opportunity to touch base with Morton, whose book goes on sale Tuesday in the USA (Grand Central Publishing). With Queen Elizabeth II’s blessing, Markle, 36, will marry Prince Harry, 33, at Windsor Castle on May 19. Morton is a British journalist best known for Diana: Her True Story, a 1992 tell-all about Harry’s late mother and her disastrous marriage to Prince Charles. Now Morton brings his reportorial skills to the very modern story of Markle and how the divorced, biracial actress (Rachel Zane on the USA Network legal series Suits) stole Harry’s heart on their first date. The book is embargoed, but a few details have begun to leak out thanks to excerpts published in the British press. Morton reveals that Markle’s own charitable work was inspired by Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997; that the actress is a “social climber” whose decision to end her marriage to first husband Trevor Engelson came “totally out of the blue”; and that her family tree has a distant link to royalty. Morton also is author of Wallis in Love. It’s the biography of another American who married into British royalty, with less happily-ever-after results. Scandalously, England’s King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry the divorcée Wallis Simpson; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were for all intents and purposes then banished by the royal family.

Author Andrew Morton