Meghan ‘didn’t fit’ the royals says Finding Freedom author
Omid Scobie started out writing Meghan and Harry’s grand love story. Then, he says, snobbery, gossip, slights and bias saw them flee the fairytale.
It’s a tiresome question, so let’s get it out of the way.
Did the royal runaways, Harry and Meghan, co-operate with the authors of the new book about their escape, Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family?
Is this, in other words, their side of a messy story? They have denied it, so let’s ask one of the authors, Omid Scobie (the book was written with a fellow royal correspondent, Carolyn Durand): did the couple speak to you?
“No,” Scobie says quite firmly on the phone from London. The authors relied mainly on tales told by friends. But come on. Because if you have friends like this — who will divulge to a reporter when your lover first took you home; who was first to say “I love you”; the expression on your baby’s face when he emerged from the birth canal — well, you need to discard them and find better ones.
Because this book, it has all those details and more, right down to the wallpaper in the room where Harry first met Meghan. (There was a pattern of vaginas on the wall. Yes, I said vaginas.)
It also tells how she felt the first time she tripped over the threshold of Harry’s home in her dainty heels. Now, we know that no member of the royal family is allowed to authorise a biography. On the other hand, the cheery Scobie — he’s royal editor for Harper’s Bazaar and host of American network ABC’s popular royal podcast, The Heir Pod — freely admits that yes, of course he knows Harry.
A man named ‘Passport’
He tells the story in the book of how he once lost his passport during a royal tour of Brazil and a laughing Harry, having found it, had it sent back. Harry now calls him “Passport”. So, they’re friendly to the point of nicknames. They’ve also had many drinks. Early on, Harry asked Scobie about the London Underground. He knew what it was, apparently, just not how it worked. Harry also once confessed to Scobie that he sometimes wanted to be “just a normal guy” who could “pick up and spend a year in Brazil, pursing his own passions”. Which is, as we know, what normal guys do.
Scobie also knows Meghan. “Funnily enough, I met Meghan before Harry did,” he says, at a fashion week event in Toronto. “I’ve travelled with the couple on all of their engagements and domestic and foreign trips. And there has been a lot of speculation about whether the couple co-operated. But this always set out to be an unauthorised, unofficial biography.
“So, when we’ve quoted the couple — because the book is replete with first-hand quotes — that’s come from anecdotes or quotes that friends (many of them introduced to the authors by the couple) have shared with us. We spoke to over 100 people … But absolutely, my time around the couple, getting to know them individually and together, that definitely helped shape some of the opinions I do have in the book.”
Scobie says he started out expecting to write the grand love story — first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes, well, the um-ber-age.
Pregnancy exposed struggles
“It was going to be really the chronicle of their first year of marriage, up to those first days at home with Archie, and it was really around the time of Meghan’s pregnancy that we began to see some of the darkest struggles that she’s had to face, in many ways virtually alone if it wasn’t for Harry,” he says. “So, there certainly was an element of, I guess, ripping some things up.” Indeed.
But let’s go back. How did Meghan — once briefcase model No 34 on Deal or No Deal — end up married to the sixth in line to the British throne? We are told in the book that they were set up by Markus Anderson of Soho House. He’s the global membership director, so he was able to organise a room for Meghan to prepare for her date (with destiny?). We are taken into the bathroom, where she applied her make-up. We know that she chose a navy-blue dress. (Harry wore chinos.)
Harry later “told a friend” that he thought Meghan was “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my whole life”. The writers say that’s because “she glows a little brighter than anyone else in the room”. And so, by the time she arrived back in her room, he had sent her an emoji.
Almost immediately, they were obsessed with each other. It was as if Harry, in particular, was in a trance. On date three, she went to his little house — Kensington Palace — and he opened the door, and it was all pegs with jackets on the wall and lined-up shoes on the floor. In she went. We don’t get taken to the bedroom, so we can’t quite say if this is the consummation, but gee, it comes close.
The relationship stayed secret, with Meghan returning to North America and Harry to his duties. But they were already pretty well gone on the love front, with Meghan leaving little hints on her social media. She would dress her beagle in a Union Jack sweater, for example, and post to Instagram, so Harry would know she was thinking about him.
A short time later, she agreed to go to Africa with him. (She “came back smiling”.) In Botswana, she stretched her body into perfect yoga poses and camped out like a good sort on a swag rolled out by servants. It was here that Harry told Meghan: “I love you.” She immediately replied: “I love you too.”
The circus begins
The press gets wind of it, they get outed and so begins the circus.
“It didn’t take long for racism to appear in stories about her,” the book says. She was described as a child of a “dreadlocked African American lady from the wrong side of the tracks”. “Straight Outta Compton”, said another headline. She was referred to as “Harry’s showgirl” who “comes with a lot of baggage”. Because Meghan previously had been married. Worse, she was an American. But most troubling was the fact she had one black parent and one white parent. And Harry, who once dressed as a Nazi, was incandescent with rage about the commentary.
Now Scobie, 34, is bi-racial. “I’m part Persian, part Scottish,” he says. “I’ve always been very aware of some of the more subtle biases … she’s certainly been on the receiving end of racism and at least unconscious bias, and that’s something that I and I think any person of colour can relate to on a different level.”
Like, for example, when William cautioned Harry to take his time to get to know “this girl”. Harry heard in those words a certain snobbishness about Meghan, who had already set her man on his “journey of wokeness”.
“When you are an empathetic person like Harry — well, I never would have imagined 10 years ago that Harry would be engaging so deeply on the issues of racism,” says Scobie. “But here we are today.”
The authors paint a portrait of the royal family that at times can seem quite normal. William once gave Harry a “grow your own girlfriend” kit for Christmas, for example. Harry gave the Queen one of those wall-mounted singing bass.
But then Meghan gets invited for afternoon tea and Princess Michael turns up wearing a brooch of the torso of an African man in a gold turban. Innocent? The couple really doesn’t think so.
Then came gossip that Meghan had banned Harry from the annual pheasant hunt, supposedly because she was vegan. She who had received her proposal of marriage while trying to cook Harry a chicken!
On we go from here, through the tortured preparations for the wedding, with Meghan’s father being paid by photographers to wash his clothes at the local laundromat and refusing to get in the car to get him to the church on time. Meghan was distraught, so much so she had to have a facial and energy-healing session at Cliveden House.
From there it’s off to Australia, where Harry’s genuine warmth shone and will never be forgotten by many people. (Who else remembers that moment on the tarmac at Dubbo in NSW, where five-year-old Luke Vincent, who has Down syndrome, broke thought the security barrier, determined to touch Harry’s hairy face?) Meghan’s pregnancy was announced in Sydney, and who didn’t feel kindly towards her, knowing how queasy she must have been, yet she stayed up late one night to bake banana bread for a morning tea the next day? “I’ve spent enough time around Meghan to know those thoughtful moments truly come from a genuine place,” Scobie says. “I hope it doesn’t sound too sugary. It’s just who she is.”
But then it was back to Britain, where it soon became time for Archie to join the family. Meghan does not, we’re told, deliver by C-section. Meaning: vaginal birth, as foretold by that wallpaper all those months ago.
But it’s already all falling apart, with Meghan having made every possible misstep. She walked ahead of Harry. She opened her own car door. She signed something with a smiley face.
“One thing I heard, she was a hugger, she liked to hug,” Scobie says. “I remember hearing comments about that, like, she hugs everyone, as if it was tiresome or annoying. I think it was just being different. You can argue that neither side did anything wrong. She just didn’t fit in.”
Which brings us to the two feuds that would tear them all asunder. Scobie says Meghan expected, but did not get, support from Kate. They apparently can’t stand each other, although this book is not so gauche as to say so.
Instead, Scobie says, it “is a friendship that never passed the surface level stage. It lacked warmth, or depth.” Gossip about the loosening of the bonds between the brothers, Harry and William, also filled the press, and Harry, being a highly emotional person, read all of it. Scrolling on his iPhone, he would feel fury at the comments on the articles.
“H&M disgust me.”
“They are a disgrace to the royal family.”
“The world would be a better place without Harry and Meghan in it.”
And so they decide to flee, leaving all this outrageousness, if not yet the fortune, behind them, moving first to Canada, then to Los Angeles, where they live with baby Archie and Pula the rainmaking dog in a mansion on an 18ha estate.
The book chooses as its epigraph a line from Emerson: “Don’t go where the path may lead / Go where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ahem. Edward VIII, anyone? And we all know how that ended: with one American and one former royal living as miserable, chain-smoking, French-speaking people. And look, it is early days, but Harry and Meghan’s new life does not seem to be working out all that well, either. They’ve fallen out with many of his old friends, including Harry’s long-time bestie. There also seems to be quite a bit of litigation, with Meghan suing various tabloids for umpteen invasions of her privacy.
Scobie says the couple is not so sensitive, or indeed naive, as to believe that they can ever be “private people”. Where they draw the line is “drones flying over their fence, and family letters ending up in the pages of a newspaper”.
“But they understand that there is a fascination in who they are,” he says. Still, if she’s suing the newspapers over privacy breaches, how happy will she be about this, er, unauthorised book? Can Scobie’s friendship with the couple survive?
“Oh, I would definitely not consider myself a friend of the couple,” says Scobie. “I’m a journalist. And I think that there’s never, ever a situation in which journalists become friends with members of the royal family.”
Well, no, but what about those Australians who always liked Harry? Who chuckled at his youthful cheekiness; admired his military service and his fierce commitment to returned soldiers through the Invictus Games; who genuinely hoped for him to find lasting happiness after the death of his mother when he was just 12 — well, it is sad to think that through all this we may not see his friendly face again.
Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Royal Family by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand (HarperCollins, $34.99) is out on Wednesday.
