Meghan Markle said to be ‘tiring’ of ‘needy’ Prince Harry
They’re often seen loved up and can’t seem to keep their hands off each other, but Meghan and Harry’s marriage has been called into question.
COMMENT
The royal family are supremely good at a number of things: Killing small birds, hoarding jewellery of questionable provenance and fancying their cousins. (Well, they used to anyway.)
But marriage? Decades of wedded bliss? Monogamy? All that love and honour stuff? Not so much.
Three out of four of the Queen’s children have divorced their spouses, ensuring that some of London’s most expensive lawyers became even wealthier, and pouring cold water on any lingering delusions that a royal wedding automatically guaranteed any sort of happily-ever-after.
Au contraire.
Then, in February 2020, Queen Elizabeth’s oldest grandchild, Peter Phillips, became the first martial domino to fall from that generation when it was announced that he had split from his wife of 11 years Autumn Phillips. (Don’t worry, they are a very modern family with both Peter and Autumn bringing their new partners to attend the wedding of his half-sister from his father’s second marriage, with Princess Anne there to boot.)
However, could another royal marriage be in danger?
Biographer extraordinaire Tina Brown (who was also a mate of Diana, Princess of Wales) has appeared at the Henley Literary Festival in the UK and has put the spotlight on the future of the union between Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Speaking of the Sussexes’ California life, Brown told the crowd: “It’s not very pleasant to be a D-list celebrity who, for them, doesn’t have enough money. It’s a wholly different game to be with those super-rich people.
“In Montecito, where they live, their $14 million mansion is a humble cottage compared to what these other people have.”
The Diana Chronicles and Palace Papers author then went on to joke, “Yes, and at some point, it might be more than a new house she’s looking for,” before adding, “Elon Musk is still single; that’s all I have to say.”
(Let’s just pause here for a moment to enjoy the truly bonkers image of Meghan and Musk, the erratic billionaire father-of-10, as a couple and her trying wrangle him into her Frank Gehry-designed meditation yurt to realign his energy centres in between him working on colonising Mars.)
Now, Brown was clearly in wisecracking mode along with the fact that this is Harry and Meghan we are talking about here, a couple so loved-up that they even held hands during a Westminster Hall service for the Queen after her death. They are, far and away, the most tactile, obviously enamoured royal duo outside of Her Majesty and her favourite pony Emma or Camilla, Queen Consort and a fresh carton of Benson and Hedges.
But what might give us pause for thought here is that Brown, the former editor of Tatler, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, is not the only big name who has started talking about the state of the Sussex marriage.
Tom Bower, the veteran biographer and author of the recent headline-grabbing Revenge: Meghan, Harry And The War Between The Windsors, has told Page Six: “There are many now in London who say that [Meghan] is tiring of [Harry].”
“They speculate that in two years she will say, ‘This is enough’ and should negotiate some sort of deal with [King] Charles to break the marriage.”
In another report from the same publication, Bower also said: “I think the funeral awakened some misery in him that he was so cut off from his family and friends and was an outsider. And I think that puts great pressure on their relationship.”
(In that same piece Bower said that the Duke “clings” to his wife “like a needy man, like a life raft” and that Harry had been left “damaged” and “very disturbed” by the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and mother’s death.)
So how much store should we put in Brown’s jesting and Bower’s claims?
On one hand, there is the fact that, according to no less of a source than Meghan herself, the series they are working on for Netflix is a documentary about their “love story,” telling The Cut in August: “The piece of my life I haven’t been able to share, that people haven’t been able to see, is our love story.” (During the same interview, the former Suits star also quoted from the speech she gave at their wedding, saying that “above all, love wins”.)
In pretty much every single image of the Sussexes, they are touching in some way or beaming at one another or both.
However, that does not mean that everything is necessarily smooth sailing.
The duo now face a series of stressors in their life.
There is the money side of things, with the couple now responsible for footing their estimated $3.1 to $4.7 million security bill (based on four estimates provided by security experts to Forbes) and maintaining the $15 million mortgage they took out in 2020 when they bought their 16-loo Montecito mansion.
The way they are footing those bills is via their whopping $200 million-odd worth of deals, reportedly, with Netflix, Spotify and Penguin Random House – three fronts on which their success is far from guaranteed.
More than two years after signing on with the TV and movie streamer, they have yet to actually release a single minute of content, with all eyes now on their reportedly forthcoming documentary series. With Netflix having lost $333 billion of its stock price this year, they cannot afford to have the Duke and Duchess on board for PR’s sake; they will have to prove that they can perform alongside the Bridgertons of the world.
The same goes for Harry’s memoir, with the 38-year-old having picked up a $29.2 million advance for three books, the Telegraph has reported. Can you imagine the pressure he must be under to churn out a bestseller?
In late August, Meghan’s first podcast series, Archetypes, launched. Oddly, while the series is overall the third most popular podcast in the US, only one out of the four episodes released so far (“The Demystification of the Dragon Lady with Margaret Cho and Lisa Ling”) is in the top 100 podcast episodes on Spotify. A home run, it certainly is not.
All of which is to say, so far, the Sussexes have yet to actually prove themselves as content creators or the sorts of celebrities who are worth paying eye-poppingly large sums of money to. All of these deals were inked within 18 months of their sensational exit from royal life when their stock was at its peak. If they fail to deliver hits all round, how likely is it that other big entertainment names will be keen to fork out tens of millions to work with them?
But wait, there is more, because we can’t overlook Harry’s ongoing alienation from his family. The Sussexes seemed to be left facing one public humiliation after another during their extended stay in the UK last month, including being disinvited to state reception and shunted into the second row for Her Majesty’s funeral.
On the weekend, the Telegraph reported: “Fundamentally … there has been no thawing of the relationship between the Sussexes and their British family.”
Imagine being Harry and having lost the closeness he used to share with his brother William and to be so distant, figuratively and literally, from his loved ones.
Consider too that Harry now lives far, far away from the tight-knit group of friends he has had since childhood and his adolescence. The only person who he is ever really photographed with aside from his wife is Argentinian polo hottie Nacho Figueras, with both men playing on the Los Padres team.
Which leaves us here: A very much in-love couple who are facing not insignificant money, career, legal and family stressors. (Last week it was announced that Harry, along with stars including Elton John, Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley are taking legal action against the Daily Mail’s parent company, alleging the publisher of “gross breaches of privacy”.)
That’s a hell of a lot of weight for any marriage to bear up under, let alone when we are talking about two of the most famous people in the world.
I’ll leave you with this last thought, though. There is one thing that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are superb at: Defying expectations. They have time and again charted their own course and done things how they see best, going against perceived wisdom and sensationally flying in the face of the status quo. On this one, I reckon Meghan is dead set right. Above all, love wins.
Daniela Elser is a writer and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
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