Let’s not tempt fate, but the Duchess of Sussex has been flying largely under the radar all year. The brickbats once regularly flung at the royal family from her Montecito mansion have stopped. The glossy cover interviews and magazine guest editor slots have stopped. The podcast, praise be, has stopped. The spectacularly successful, spectacularly dire Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary came out last December, a lifetime ago in celebrity doc-land. There have been no big controversies, career or house moves. It’s all gone strangely quiet.
Meghan’s last proper trip to Britain was last September, arriving days before Queen Elizabeth died. This year, she dodged her father-in-law’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in May — the Duke of Sussex cut a lonely figure in the third row — and when she flew to Germany for the Invictus Games this September she managed to spend only 90 minutes on British soil as a stopover. The prospect of Meghan curtseying to Queen Camilla any time soon is slim. She played her part at the Invictus Games beautifully, dishing out medals, hugs and handshakes, but generally 2023 has been an underwhelming vintage.
All of which raises the questions: why has this once-irrepressible princess gone so quiet? How is Meghan filling her days? To start with the obvious answer: she is looking after her young children, Archie, 4, and Lilibet, 2. Even Meghan’s harshest critics (form an orderly queue) accept that she is a doting, hands-on mother. During a speech at a low-key event in New York last month, she told the crowd: “Being a mum is the most important thing in my entire life” before gesturing to her husband and adding: “Outside of my marriage to this one.”
The family has spent large swathes of this year bunkered down in their 7.4-acre, nine-bedroom, 16-bathroom estate in Montecito, the chichi town just down the Californian coast from Santa Barbara. Locals gripe that their involvement in the community is minimal but, last Tuesday afternoon, all four of the Sussexes were out taking part in Montecito’s Halloween parade, Ghost Village Road (a pun on the Coast Village Road location).
“You get literally hundreds and hundreds of kids in costumes so I’m sure that Harry and Meghan felt that was a safe place to be. Obviously with their bodyguards with guns in tow which is not very Montecito,” says Richard Mineards, a British journalist who lives down the road from the Sussexes. “It’s the ideal time to take the kids out so they wouldn’t be recognised.” No word yet on whether Harry was trusted to choose the family’s costumes. The couple also appeared at a recent charity fundraiser held at Kevin Costner’s ocean-side mansion, along with Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey.
Advertisement
As to why Meghan is keeping a quieter profile, various theories have been floated. Some suggest that it is a conscious break after too much negative exposure, but another reason could be to conserve energy is her legal battle with her half-sister. On Wednesday, Samantha Markle will be back in court in Florida launching a last-ditch attempt to sue her younger sibling for comments Meghan made in the Netflix documentary and in the Winfrey interview in March 2021. In the unlikely event Samantha succeeds, Meghan could be hauled to court, forced to testify and release private messages and emails. Samantha insists that she and her younger sibling were close growing up; Meghan has said that she grew up as an only child who longed for siblings. “Meghan continues to participate in and perpetuate the lies around her family and upbringing,” read the court filing.
Family drama aside, there are snipes that the Meghan, 42, is simply enjoying the cash from both the $100 million, five-year Netflix deal, which the couple signed when their stock was riding high back in 2020, and Harry’s pull-no-punches memoir, Spare. A recent skit in an episode of Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane’s cartoon sitcom, shows Harry and Meghan lounging by a swimming pool as a liveried butler delivers them an envelope with the line: “Sir, your millions from Netflix for no one knows what.” Time will tell whether the couple’s latest streaming gambit, buying the rights to adapt the romance novel, Meet Me at the Lake, will pay off for their Hollywood backers.
For months, there’s been chatter about a Meghan 2.0 relaunch. The term “Meghanaissance” has even been bandied about, which we can only pray doesn’t stick as well as “Megxit” did. In September, The Daily Telegraph reported that the former actress was “preparing to launch a major new commercial venture” and that a return to Instagram was imminent. (She closed her personal account after meeting Harry.) Overexcitable pundits predicted that she could command Kardashian-levels of cash for a single social media post.
But she might need to change tack first. “She’s going through a major rebrand right now,” says Stacy Jones, founder of the LA-based marketing agency Hollywood Branded, adding that the duchess needs to stop her woe-is-me shtick. “The narrative has really circulated more around the victimisation. It’s circled around race. It’s circled around ‘poor Meghan Markle and Harry’, and that’s not a platform you can build a brand on.”
The timing for reinvention makes sense. In June, the couple were ditched from their estimated £18 million Spotify contract, brokered in 2020, after producing only 12 episodes of Meghan’s widely panned Archetypes podcast. In it, she made some of the world’s most dazzling women — Serena Williams, Paris Hilton and Mariah Carey — sound dull. “Just because you’re famous doesn’t make you great at something,” said Jeremy Zimmer, the United Talent Agency chief executive, at the time. Bill Simmons, a top Spotify executive, was more brutal: “‘The f***ing grifters.’ That’s the podcast we should have launched with them’.” In July, Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece headlined: “Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are in their flop era.” It all feels a long way from the bunting rollout when the pair first landed in the Golden State in 2020.
Advertisement
Speculation that Meghan was about to sign a big-bucks deal with Amazon’s Audible, the home of Barack and Michelle Obama’s audio content, was shut down last week with Audible dismissing the reports as bunkum. One Los Angeles media insider wondered if the rumours originated from Meghan’s own camp to try to drum up interest. “Most businesses would hesitate to work with the Sussexes after the chaos that was Spotify,” she says.
So, what next? This month, there will be renewed interest in the neverending royal saga thanks to the release of the sixth and final series of The Crown (we’re entering the Chelsy Davy era), as well as the publication of chief Meghan-watcher Omid Scobie’s new book, Endgame.
A teaser for the book on Amazon described it as “a penetrating investigation into the current state of the British monarchy — an unpopular king, a power-hungry heir to the throne, a queen willing to go to dangerous lengths to preserve her image and a prince forced to start a new life after being betrayed by his own family”. Published on November 28, it is subtitled “Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy’s Fight for Survival”.
However, there is some speculation that Meghan will end up focusing on her own memoir, according to Tom Bower. The tale of going from Deal or No Deal suitcase carrier to persecuted princess would obviously sell. “It will be Meghan’s truth. There will be a readership for it because she’ll undoubtedly settle some scores from her point of view,” says Bower, the author of Revenge, a bestseller on Harry and Meghan.
“What she says she said to the Queen, to Kate, to Philip, all that will be in the book whether corroborated or not, and that’s a goldmine.” The Sussexes’ 2022 deal with Penguin Random House was allegedly £16 million for four books. So far, we’ve just had Harry’s account of his frostbitten penis. A spokesman for the duchess denied that she was working on a memoir.
Advertisement
It’s unrealistic that Meghan will lie low for much longer. In April, she signed up with talent agency William Morris Endeavor (WME), where she works with heavyweight agent Ari Emanuel. “Harry and Meghan’s mistake was creating too much content too soon, sharing too much and completely destroying the romantic mystery that surrounds the idea of real royalty,” says Kinsey Schofield, an LA-based royal commentator. “Now it’s up to WME to try to get the toothpaste back in the tube.”
For others, the WME collaboration indicates that Meghan wants to revive her former career. “I think she absolutely is going to return to acting,” says Jones. “With the popularity of Suits on Netflix right now there have been rumblings on whether the show could actually come back.”
None of this is concrete, however, and progress on Project Meghan remains murky. Rumours of a reboot of her pre-Harry lifestyle blog, The Tig, proved hollow. Ditto a collaboration with Christian Dior. Ditto Meghan signing up for a sequel to The Bodyguard.
Might politics be a viable option? “I’m sure that in the long term, she’s hoping to get some sort of Democrat nomination,” Bower says. “The thing about Meghan is that she does work hard. She is not a slouch and has huge ambition.”
Meghan-watchers are in agreement that her problem seems to be carving out a clear new path while also regaining lost popularity. The car chase debacle in New York in May didn’t help her cause. The couple claimed they were dangerously pursued by paparazzi through Manhattan following a charity gala. The New York Police Department was unimpressed. “Her most important strategy now will be that she’s not contaminated by any scandal,” Bower says. “It’s bad for the brand, she doesn’t want to be controversial. She doesn’t want to be in any way accused of the sins of bullying and all the rest.”
Advertisement
Meanwhile, Archewell, the Sussexes’ charitable endeavour, is slowly ticking along and held its first in-person event in New York, about mental health and technology, last month. But Meghan’s strange 40x40 project, which aimed to help women re-enter the workforce, was quietly dropped after a year.
Nature abhors a vacuum and with nothing of substance coming out of Camp Meghan, salacious gossip is swirling: the marriage is on the rocks; Harry has a Montecito hotel room set aside for occasional solo escapes; Meghan is casting around for her new leading man. And so on.
“I would measure the duration of the marriage in years rather than decades,” says Graydon Carter, the founder and co-editor of Air Mail. “I think she has run rings around poor Harry and gotten what she wanted: notoriety, money, and a title. His usefulness to her diminishes daily.”
Carter, a former editor of Vanity Fair, who is in the UK for Air Mail’s “London List”, a who’s who of the hottest people and places in the capital, spent decades among the great and good of Hollywood. He pooh-poohs the idea of Meghan returning to acting: “If there is a Real Housewives of Montecito show in the works, she’d be a shoo-in.”
Whatever her true workload, there’s time for play: Beyoncé concerts, Lakers basketball games and Michelin-star nights out with Cameron Diaz. There was a recent holiday to Canouan, the Caribbean island renowned for saving billionaires from rubbing shoulders with millionaires.
Advertisement
But Hollywood experts such as Jones believe that, when it comes to Meghan’s big rebrand, time is of the essence: “She’s been given this massive opportunity, but she’s not really seizing it.”
