Is
it just me or did Meghan Markle seem out of sorts at the Queen’s
funeral? It’s no secret she didn’t receive the
warmest of welcomes. According to the tabloids she was uninvited
to a state dinner, shunted back behind the VVIPs at the various
services and seemed to spend most of her stay dodging the
stink-eye from other members of the Royal family.
Lolly—a
London-based friend and expert in royal dress protocol—tells
me Meghan’s choice of hat was a bit of a faux pas. Here
are Princess Kate and the Queen Consort discussing it:
Camilla:
We need a word about that hat.
Kate:
What about it?
Camilla:
It’s lovely but it’s more suited to a garden
party. Not a state funeral. Also, where’s her veil?
Veils, while not mandatory, are highly suggested on these
occasions.
Kate:
Have her arrested and beheaded. She won’t be making
that mistake again. (stifles a laugh)
Judging
by her expression and body language, I couldn’t escape
the feeling she was stinging with regret over how she handled
Megxit. It’s like she was thinking . . . oh crap. I
believe I may have fucked myself royally (pun intended). Perhaps
that Oprah interview, though plenty lucrative, wasn’t
the best idea in the world?
Maybe
she feels that way. Maybe not. But, according to Lolly, a
consequence of her behaviour toward her in-laws was finding
herself 6000 miles from home and not a single royal dresser
willing to dress her. “She’s toxic,” says
Lolly. “They wouldn’t return her calls.”
Had
she one reliable friend to help her navigate Royal life, poor
Meghan would never have found herself in such an admittedly
high-class predicament. Fame is a whirlwind. Get caught up
in it and it becomes a challenge to discern good advice from
bad.
Intensified
by an emperor-has-no-clothes dynamic, the toxic impact of
21st century Millennial ‘you go girl’ culture
appears to have trapped Meghan in a vortex of praise where
uttering anything short of full-throated encouragement makes
you a frenemy and honesty is mistaken for jealousy. That Meghan
surrounds herself with fawning flatterers became all too apparent
with the first episode of her Spotify podcast “Archetypes.”
Below is a sampling of blandishments exchanged between her
and guest Serena Williams (careful not to slip in my vomit):
Serena:
I love you. Anything you want me to do I’m gonna do.
I believe in you.
Meghan:
You are such an amazing mom.
Serena:
I think you’re fearless.
Meghan:
You look beautiful.
Serena:
I want you to understand what it meant to have your support.
Meghan:
You made pregnancy look so sexy.
Serena:
I love how you speak to me.
Can
you imagine two grown men speaking to each other like that?
Also, I heard Spotify just had these T-shirts made up:
We
spent 20+ million on Meghan Markle’s podcast and all
we got was a fawning, syrupy mutual tongue bath.
Having
a friend fluff up your ego now and then is one thing. Lubricating
famous friends with gushes of love who in turn gush more love
back into a bottomless pit of self-obsession is quite another.
There’s a reason people mistrust praise: it’s
not nearly as valuable as constructive criticism. Had one
of Meghan’s pals held back on the ‘yass queens’
and ‘you-go-girls’ for a minute, Meghan’s
time at the Queen’s funeral might have been less awkward
and relations with her in-laws less thorny. Now she finds
herself not only persona non grata in London Royal circles,
she doesn’t rate much anymore in Hollywood, where royalty
carries weight but being a royal pariah does not.
First
cousin of ‘you go girl’ culture is ‘I’m
sorry this is happening to you’ culture. The idea being
that ‘lived experience’–IE how you feel
emotionally–should triumph over facts. Empathy is non-negotiable.
Even if the problem seems trifling, you must bleed compassion
when what you’re really thinking is ‘this is a
first-world problem and you need to buck up.’
Discussing
the hardships they face as pampered, global multimillionaire
superstars, Serena shares a story of her baby suffering a
broken wrist, how she rocked the crying infant through the
night and still managed to get up the next day and win a French
Open match, on less than an hour’s sleep.
Not
to be outdone, Meghan shares her own harrowing tale of being
on tour in South Africa and a heater in her baby’s room
catching fire (the baby was not in the room at the time, was
unharmed and the reported ‘fire’ has since been
downgraded to merely ‘smoke’). “The moment
we arrived,” Meghan recounts, “we had to drop
him off at this housing unit they had us staying in . . .
”
Hold
on . . . a ‘housing unit?’ Meaning something like
this?
Erm,
not exactly. This was the ‘housing unit’ where
the family was forced to stay:
“We
came back,” she goes on to say, “and, of course,
as a mother, you go, ‘oh my God, what?’ Everyone’s
in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to
do? Go out and do another official engagement. I said, ‘this
doesn’t make any sense.’”
Here’s
me:
Here’s
Serena Williams: “I couldn’t have done that.”
Wait
. . . wut? You just humble-bragged about staying up all night
with a crying baby and waking up after an hour’s sleep
to win a match at a major tournament. You have 23 Grand Slam
singles titles and were ranked Number 1 for 319 weeks. Didn’t
you mention something about growing up in crime-ridden Compton
and learning to play tennis on public courts littered with
syringes, against the background noise of gunfire from drive-by
shootings? Yet you couldn’t have endured a measly three-hour
official engagement?
It’s
all hindsight but Meghan should have brushed up on her warcraft.
I’m thinking of the famous Emmerson quote, paraphrased
by Omar Little in The Wire: “You come at the king, you
best not miss.” As it stands, Meghan’s Oprah disclosures
only wounded the King, along with his late mother the Queen.
For this, she and Harry were booed at the Platinum Jubilee
and now occupy a space on the Royal Family website way down
‘below the fold’ (as they call it in journalism),
alongside a thoroughly disgraced Prince Andrew.
I
feel for Meghan. The press has been hard on her at times.
As an outsider marrying into Prince Harry’s rarefied
circle, she’s surely endured a few supercilious glares
from some of the snobbiest bitches on planet earth. It’s
not like there’s a manual out there about how to marry
into a 1200-year-old royal dynasty. If not a manual, these
newcomers deserve at least some helpful words to live by .
. . something along the lines of the Serenity Prayer, from
which members of AA the world over take inspiration, but tailored
to our pathologically narcissistic era…
God,
grant me the humility to graciously accept a genuine compliment
. . .
The
impulse to run when someone’s blowing smoke up my ass…
And
the wisdom to know the difference.
Amen.
