In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”
Boy, ain’t that the truth. How did it go so horribly wrong? One moment, he had made the unusual (but perhaps looking back on it not-so-bold) choice of marrying an American, the former Meghan Markle, who seemed to complete him at last. Yes, there were some racist remarks in the tabloids. But there was also a reservoir of good will among the British press, people and royal family (see the elaborate wedding) for a man and a woman who were never going to be king and queen of the United Kingdom but who could’ve been king and queen of the Commonwealth, putting a different face on the royal family for it and allowing people of color who never dreamed they could be part of the royal family to see themselves in them.
Then amid chargers of racism, office politics and emotional sabotage leading to a mental health crisis, they left, rather gracelessly and with them any hope of leverage and possibility of return.
It’s a story that’s been told and retold and re-retold and is being told again in the series, which arrived on the heels of the couple receiving the Robert F. Kennedy “Ripple of Hope” Award for their work on racial justice and mental health — an award that some critics saw as premature to say the least and undeserved to say the most.
It’s easy to say what we would’ve done differently, given a life of fairy-tale privilege. But knowing what we know of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from what they’ve presented in the media, it’s hard to imagine this was ever going to end any other way. Harry wanted out. And Meghan was never going to play second fiddle to her sister-in-law, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, a woman whose beauty, poise and yes, star quality outshine virtually everyone else’s.
They couldn’t accept the hierarchy of a 1,000-year-old institution and their place in it, wanting instead a hybrid relationship that would’ve netted them an independent income, a fantasy that was never going to come true, so they quit the field. And in quitting, they exchanged the illusion of freedom for self-delusion.
As per the first trailer, Harry and the series liken the treatment he and Meghan received in the royal family and the press to what his late mother, Princess Diana, endured and even his sister-in-law was subjected to before her marriage to his brother, Prince William.
“The pain and suffering of women marrying into this institution, this feeding frenzy”….Harry notes of what he calls the “dirty game” of not only the tabloids stalking female royals but courtiers leaking and planting stories, presumably to make some royals (like his brother) look good and punish others (Harry and Meghan). “I realized they’re never going to protect you,” Meghan says, with Harry, adding, “I was terrified. I didn’t want history to repeat itself.”
But whose history is he referring to — his view or the actual historical record? While no one can deny the genuine beauty, compassion and humanitarianism of Princess Diana, who died 25 years ago this past Aug. 31 as the result of a Paris car crash, it’s also true that she manipulated the press, just as the press used her and the Sussexes are using the press now. For an excellent unraveling of this tricky symbiotic relationship, I suggest the juicy, funny, acerbic, insightful “The Diana Chronicles” by longtime editor Tina Brown (Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker).
The princess did not die, as Prince Harry claims, because she was hounded by the paparazzi for dating a nonwhite (Muslim) man, Dodi Fayed, who also died in the crash. Rather numerous official studies of the accident, detailed in Brown’s book, note that they died, because Fayed had allowed a drunk employee, Henri Paul, to act as chauffeur and neither Fayed nor Princess Diana were wearing their seatbelts. (Paul was also killed. The sole survivor was the bodyguard Trevor Jones, now known as Trevor Rees. While he was not wearing a seatbelt in the mobile tradition of bodyguards, experts concluded that everyone else should’ve been.)
The lack of an understanding of history goes hand in hand with a lack of self-awareness. The two talk about sustainability yet whizz around in private jets and SUVs. (At least William and Catherine flew commercial for his Earthshot Prize Awards.) The Sussexes scream freedom, but they’re always calling attention to the prison of themselves. They wanted to be acknowledged for doing their job well — their Australia trip and more shades of Princess Diana, who also felt she wasn’t properly appreciated after her stunning success eclipsed then Prince Charles on their Australian venture. But while good work should be rewarded, must you be praised for merely doing your duty? Was the royal family jealous of Harry and Meghan’s success — or rather was the family inured in a tradition in which no one eclipses the crown?
Perhaps most self-deluding of all, Harry and Meghan seem to think that they can reconcile with the royal family after all that’s been said and done. With the release of their critically lambasted but highly rated documentary and the prince’s forthcoming memoir “Spare” (Penguin Random House, Jan. 10), whatever relationship Harry had with his family is truly kaput.
You have to wonder what the appetite for the book will be now that the six-hour Netflix documentary has aired. What will be left to say? Perhaps only this: They had the chance to be Diana 2.0, as Meghan claimed she wanted to be. And they blew it.
Indeed, years from now, when the story of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex is finally told for the record, it will be one not only of lost time and lost relationships but lost opportunity.