An intimate look at Meghan’s fairy-tale climb
New bio dishes on Meghan Markle’s early life.
A Hollywood Princess biographer says it hasn’t always been easy, but she arrives at “the palace fully formed.”
Meghan Markle, who next month will walk down the aisle at storied Windsor Castle and say “I do” to Prince Harry, is a “Hollywood princess” in the eyes of biographer Andrew Morton.
His new book, Meghan (Grand Central), out today in the UK and on sale Tuesday in the U.S., already has made headlines for its depiction of the Suits star as a social climber who aspires to be the next Princess Diana.
But Morton’s portrait of Markle is mostly gushing. He paints this California girl as “empathetic, self-possessed, sophisticated, poised and charismatic,” ticking off her résumé as “a successful actress, a popular blogger and an acknowledged humanitarian.”
Markle, 36, arrives at the “gates of the palace fully formed,” he writes, but the journey hasn’t been without bumps, including a divorce that blindsided her first husband and an estrangement from her half-siblings, who, Morton says, will not be getting invitations to the May 19 wedding.
(Morton will do a #BookmarkThis Facebook Live chat with USA TODAY on Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT.)
Here are five fascinating things we learn about Markle and her 33-year-old British beau from Meghan: A Hollywood Princess.
1Markle will make history
Coming from “a bloodline of slaves and kings,” Markle will be the first bira- cial divorcée to marry a member of the British royal family, proving, Morton writes, “how much and how far the royal family — and the British nation — have changed and evolved during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.” But he also notes that only 6% of the 1,100 people employed by the palace are from ethnic minorities. Markle will “be well aware that people of color do not feature noticeably inside the palace. Perhaps it is an issue she may decide to involve herself in after she settles into royal life.” According to a friend quoted by Morton: “She is going to bring a lot of diversity and new ideas, new ways of doing things. She is not just going to blend in to the royals.”
Morton believes Markle’s sense of empathy and compassion comes from “her struggle to understand herself and where she was placed in the scheme of humanity” as the light-skinned daughter of a white father and an AfricanAmerican mother who split up when she was just 2. She sometimes overheard racist comments made by classmates who assumed she was white. “Meghan felt she had to find her place, where she belonged, in both the black and the white worlds,” Morton writes. She has a “readiness to view the world from different perspectives, from both sides.”
3 She always dreamed of being a star
“Camera-ready” Markle has been ready for her close-up for a long time. Her “fractured family background and her sense of isolation caused Meghan a great deal of heartache as she grew up” but it also “helped provide some of the psychological drive that would propel her toward her overarching ambition,” Morton writes. “From a young age, Meghan dreamed of becoming a famous Hollywood actress. She fantasized about winning an Oscar one day, practicing her acceptance speech in front of her bedroom mirror.” It took “eight years going from audition to audition” before her big break in Suits, and now she’s giving up acting to become a real-life princess.
4 For Harry and Meghan, timing was everything
Morton writes that if Markle had met Harry a few years earlier, she would have made “friendly small talk” and moved on. “Prince Harry would not have impressed … (she) would have found the early Harry hard work, something of a lost soul.” Morton paints a dark picture of Harry 1.0 as an “angry drunk who lurched out of nightclubs” and says “for years he was carefully protected by highly paid public relations professionals who smoothed over his public escapades.” Meghan also would have been turned off by Harry’s “casual (youthful) racism,” Morton claims. The prince himself has spoken of finally getting help to deal with his long-suppressed grief over his mother’s death in 1997.
5They had each other at ‘hello’
On their first date (arranged, Morton believes, by Ralph Lauren exec Violet von Westenholz), Harry and Meghan “were mesmerized by one another.” Markle recognized that Harry “was looking for a safe harbor.” And yet she briefly worried that things were moving too fast. After she returned to her hotel, Meghan “wondered if she had been too eager to accept his invitation to meet again the following day.” She kept the date, and a few weeks later accepted Harry’s invitation to Africa for a get-toknow-you-better safari. “She had to pinch herself,” Morton writes. “Here she was about to travel halfway around the world to spend five days in a tented camp in the middle of nowhere with a man she had met twice.”