Battle of Brothers

‘She was one of those children,’ said her teacher Ilise Faye, ‘that would stand up for the underdogs. She would stand up for what she believed in, and she was a leader among her friends, her peer group.’

A year or so later, Meghan went a stage further with her political and social campaigning. She was watching a TV show in school when a commercial came on for Ivory Clear dishwashing liquid, showing a sink full of dirty dishes, with the tagline ‘Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.’ Two boys in the class piped up, ‘Yeah, that’s where women belong – in the kitchen!’

‘I remember feeling shocked and angry,’ Meghan said, ‘and also just feeling so hurt … Something needed to be done. So I went home and told my dad what had happened, and he encouraged me to write letters. So I did – to the most powerful people I could think of.’

Starting at the top, the eleven-year-old wrote to the First Lady, Hillary Clinton; to Linda Ellerbee, the host of Nick News, her favourite kids’ TV news programme; to the noted women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred; and to Ivory Clear’s manufacturer, Procter & Gamble.

Procter & Gamble never replied. But Hillary Clinton and Gloria Allred did. Both sent letters of encouragement, and Linda Ellerbee sent a camera crew to interview the young campaigner. A month later Procter & Gamble changed its tagline. ‘Women all over America’ became ‘People all over America’, and its TV copy lines have tried to remain gender neutral ever since.

The Immaculate Heart School that Meghan attended from the age of eleven to seventeen might not have been ritzy, but it was an esteemed and fee-paying all-girls Catholic establishment that was known for producing hard-working, polite and civic-minded young women. About a third of its students were white, 20 per cent were Latina, 17 per cent were mixed-race like Meghan, 17 per cent were Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 per cent or so were black. Former pupils included actresses Tyra Banks and Mary Tyler Moore, yet though the campus was sited below the hilltop lettering of the famous Hollywood sign, the religious – and even austere – academy was not celebrity-inclined.

Virtually all of Immaculate Heart’s students went on to high-quality colleges, and many went to Harvard, Princeton or Stanford. But the teaching sisters were proudest of the number of pupils who volunteered for their out-of-school charity projects – among them a soup kitchen on Skid Row for which they equipped girls with the slogan, ‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’

Through these secondary school years Meghan stayed pretty much full-time at the home of her father, since Thomas lived within walking distance of Immaculate Heart. He would help with the lighting and stage sets of the school productions in which his daughter performed – including the musicals Into the Woods and Annie, in the latter of which Meghan sang her own solo number.

‘I remember her being very excited and nervous about her song,’ recalls Gigi Perreau, a former child actress who taught Meghan drama at Immaculate Heart for four years. ‘She was very active in my drama department. We never had a moment’s problem with her. She was spot on, learnt her lines when she had to – very dedicated, very focused.’

Immaculate Heart had a fondness for ancient Greek words with a religious connotation – ‘kairos’, for example, meaning ‘the time when God acts’, was the title given to school spiritual sessions, in which Meghan participated as a group leader. Another was ‘arche’, the term Aristotle had coined to express the ‘origin’ or ‘first cause’ of all things (as in the term ‘archetype’); and then there was ‘agape’, meaning charity or the highest form of unconditional love – ‘the love of God for man and of man for God’.

According to Aristotle, there is regular love and then there is agape. During her summer vacations Meghan would take part in retreats organised by the Agape International Spiritual Center: ‘We are on the planet,’ ran Agape’s manifesto, ‘to be and express the Divine Love of God that is alive in every fiber of our being, waiting to be released through us onto our world. Living as love is a way of life that brings heaven on earth.’

Founded in 1986 in Los Angeles by Dr Michael Bernard Beckwith, Agape described itself as a ‘trans-denominational’ community that embraced Christianity without excluding other religions, teaching that Jesus, like Gandhi or Buddha, was not so much ‘the great exception’ as ‘the great example’. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison were among the celebrities to endorse Dr Beckwith’s spiritual process that unlocked, as Oprah put it, ‘everything that is unique, mighty and magnificent inside each of us’.

Agape’s morning schedule at its summer camps started soon after dawn with meditation and teaching at 6.45, helping to set a pattern of early rising (and, later, early morning texting and emailing) that Meghan would maintain into her professional life. Aged thirteen, she enjoyed her first kiss at an Agape summer camp held at Santa Monica – with the future comedian Joshua Silverstein who, also thirteen that year, would recall it happening at the end of a drama workshop.

‘We were kind of leaving and walking out,’ Silverstein remembered in the spring of 2018 – he was by then a thirty-six-year-old married father of two, starring with James Corden on The Late Late Show. ‘I noticed her making a beeline toward me with a lot of intention.’

The teenage couple had already met and bonded over their mixed-race heritage.

‘She was charming and quirky,’ said Silverstein. ‘She wasn’t a stereotypical thirteen-year-old girl … decked out in pink every day … flaunting make-up or anything. She was her own person, very authentic to who she was at the time … serious about her craft. I found out from our friends that she liked me and I liked her, and I just think that we decided it would be a good idea to become boyfriend and girlfriend.’

The pair had held hands previously and hugged, but now there was something different in Meghan’s manner that caught Silverstein off guard.

‘She kissed me. She made the move,’ he recalled. ‘And I think I was like, OK – we’re at that phase of our relationship right now, we’re kissing … But the kiss was definitely her – her initiative absolutely.’

Meghan confirmed Silverstein’s memory in an interview she gave to talk show host Larry King: ‘I was thirteen, it was a summer camp and I kissed him.’

According to Silverstein, he and Meghan continued their relationship for the rest of the Agape camp – with more kisses – then mutually decided to split up at the end of the summer. They discussed the matter dispassionately. Neither of them wanted to put a ‘dampener’ on what might happen when they got back to school – they wanted to be free to date other people – a couple of extremely mature thirteen-year-olds.

Agape has remained an important part of Meghan Markle’s life. She would even become an Agape youth minister for a period and her mother Doria still attends Agape services on Sunset Boulevard. To the end of Meghan’s school years and onwards through college at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority and participated in community and charity projects, she would rise early every day to meditate and repeat an Agape morning mantra – as she is thought to do to this day.

‘God is on my side’, runs one such mantra. ‘God is coming into being through me. God wants me to be all I can be. God wants to come into its own through me’ – the point of the word ‘its’ being that, for Agape, God is not so sexist as to be either male or female.

So here was the dedicated and definitely un-Windsor bombshell – the Agape kisser – who would be waiting for Prince Harry after all his trials and travails that we shall be reading about in the pages ahead.

5

‘Whatever “in love” Means’

‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’

(Princess Diana, recording her thoughts for author Andrew Morton in 1991)

When Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin wanted to sum up the tragic legend of Diana, Princess of Wales, dead in August 1997 at the age of only thirty-six, they turned to the anthem they had composed twenty-four years earlier in tribute to another troubled heroine who had died at the very same age: Marilyn Monroe.

‘ Goodbye Norma Jean, Though I never knew you at all …’

Within hours of Diana’s death, radio stations had started to play the original ‘Candle in the Wind’, catching the metaphor of the flickering, sensitive superstar destroyed by too much publicity and by her inability to find a partner who could sustain her difficult nature with solid emotional support and understanding – ‘Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.’

Quickly rewritten to be sung in Westminster Abbey just six days after her death, the Diana version of ‘Candle’ avoided those tricky targets in favour of safer praise:

You called out to our country and you whispered to those in pain,

Now you belong to heaven and the stars spell out your name.

When Charles, Prince of Wales, aged thirty-two, made his momentous proposal of marriage to the still-teenage Diana, nineteen, on 3 February 1981, he had just come back from a skiing holiday.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he told her as they sat together in the nursery at Windsor – and then he simply dived in.

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

Diana laughed and later remembered thinking, This is a joke.

But the prince was deadly serious – ‘You do realise,’ he said sternly, ‘that one day you will be Queen’, reproving the teenager for her hilarity.

Diana got the point immediately.

You won’t be Queen, she told herself, according to her subsequent account – but that was not what she said at the time to her future husband.

‘I love you so much,’ she declared, trying to shift the mood in a happier direction. ‘I love you so much.’

Charles’s response came back as a shrug of the shoulders and three historic words: ‘Whatever “love” means.’

The prince was so pleased with his exercise in home-baked philosophy that he repeated it publicly three weeks later when the couple announced their engagement on 24 February. On this occasion the interviewer had served up a flaccid final question about how the couple were feeling: ‘And, I suppose, in love?’ To which Diana replied at once, ‘Of course’, leaving Charles to lift his eyebrows again: ‘Whatever “in love” means.’

Friends pointed out later that he had been engaged in a serious exercise – taking issue with popular clichés about being ‘in love’. But whatever Charles meant on television, that had not been the issue when Diana had first told him that she loved him ‘so much’. Following her acceptance, the prince had gone straight upstairs to phone his mother with the crucial news the Queen had been waiting for.

‘His choice of marrying Diana was really motivated by his parents pushing him to get the succession assured,’ recalls a friend. ‘He once actually said as much to me at a dinner with Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. He intimated that he was being pushed and pushed towards marriage.’

Prince Charles’s proposal to Diana, in other words, had not been about his feelings or emotions, which were by then committed to another woman. It had been essentially a business proposition.

A few days into their honeymoon on the Royal Yacht Britannia, they opened their diaries to discuss their next engagements, when out of Charles’s dropped not one, but two photos of Camilla.

Diana chose not to spoil the moment. She had already worked out the truth about Mrs Parker Bowles from a pre-wedding lunch à deux that Camilla herself had proposed to celebrate the engagement and to ‘look at the ring’ – an oddly proprietorial suggestion to make. Camilla had posed one strangely repeated question about whether Diana was planning to join her husband with the Beaufort Hunt – and Diana, no great horsewoman, deduced that hunting was an activity in which Mrs PB was hoping to keep the prince to herself.

‘Whatever happens, I will always love you,’ Diana overheard Charles proclaiming urgently one evening on his hand-held telephone in his bath. Then her husband told her how he needed to find a country house that tied up with his work for the Duchy of Cornwall – and chose Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Highgrove was over 190 miles from Cornwall, but less than half an hour’s drive from Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowles’s home near Chippenham – and it was smack in the middle of Beaufort Hunt country.

Getting ready while on honeymoon in Egypt for a white-tie dinner with President Anwar Sadat, Diana noticed that her husband’s cufflinks were engraved with two intertwined letter Cs.

‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ replied Charles defensively. ‘So what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend.’

‘Boy, did we have a row,’ recalled Diana later, talking to the author Andrew Morton. ‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’

Things got worse when the couple left Britannia to round off their honeymoon in Balmoral that September. Charles would take Diana for long walks around the Highlands, finding a hilltop where he could settle her down and read philosophy to her – Carl Gustav Jung, or the writings of his friend, the guru and conservationist Laurens van der Post. Two months into their marriage, she assumed that her husband was ringing up his mistress every five minutes the moment he got back to his room at the house, asking her advice on how to handle his difficult bride.

The emotional strain intensified Diana’s bulimia nervosa, the eating disorder that had struck her, according to the princess, just a week after the couple had got engaged.

‘A bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ Charles had said, putting his hand accusingly on his fiancée’s waistline. ‘And that triggered off something in me – and the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate.’

She remembered the first time she made herself sick. The vomiting released the tension she had been feeling, and she felt ‘thrilled’ – but it proved to be the beginning of a lethal pattern in which Diana would find herself vomiting every day. When first measured for her wedding dress in February 1981, Diana had been 29 inches around the waist; on her July wedding day, she was down to 23½ inches. On top of this, she had found herself dreaming about Camilla.

Charles invited Laurens van der Post himself up to Balmoral for some personal counselling to help his wife – with no success.

‘Laurens didn’t understand me,’ Diana said. ‘Everybody saw I was getting thinner and thinner and I was being sicker and sicker. Basically they thought I could adapt to being Princess of Wales overnight. Anyway, a godsend – William was conceived in October. Marvellous news, occupied my mind.’

Diana’s pregnancy with William prompted scarcely an improvement in her condition, however, for now the princess began suffering from both bulimia and morning sickness. Concerned about the health of the baby growing inside her, she refused to take her bulimia pills – with graphic consequences: ‘Sick, sick, sick, sick, sick,’ she related to Andrew Morton in the book that, ten years later when it was published, would blow the lid off the myth of the ‘dream’ royal marriage.

1976: ‘Dear Roddy …’ Elizabeth II writes to Princess Margaret’s boyfriend Roddy Llewellyn

In 1981, the lid was already off so far as the royal family was concerned. They had witnessed Diana’s weeping and fits – and their sympathies were all with Charles.

‘So I was “a problem” and they registered Diana as “a problem”,’ the princess told Morton. ‘Poor Charles is having such a hard time.’

The Queen saw Diana’s vomiting as a cause, not a symptom, of the marriage issues – but she did show sympathy when it came to her daughter-in-law’s troubles with the press. Diana suffered something close to a nervous breakdown that December when she went out from Highgrove to buy some wine gums in the local village shop – only to find herself surrounded by the ever-developing pack of newspaper photographers and reporters. The princess broke down in tears.

For the first time in her reign, Elizabeth II summoned the editors of all Britain’s national, daily and Sunday newspapers to Buckingham Palace, along with the principal news directors at the BBC and ITN. Never had there been a British media gathering like it. The Queen’s press secretary Michael Shea received the Fleet Street grandees in the palace’s magnificent white and gold 1844 Room, explaining how the princess was ‘more than usually affected by morning sickness because of her age and build’ and how the Queen was taking a personal interest in her privacy. Pleasantly suggesting that more restraint might be in order, Shea invited the editors for drinks next door in the still more magnificent Caernarvon Room decorated with paintings of Britain’s triumphs against Napoleon.

Hardly had the editors taken their first sips of champagne, when the Queen herself walked in escorted by her younger son Prince Andrew, who was just then approaching the height of his popularity as a naval helicopter pilot. The intrepid hacks were so overwhelmed by the royal presence that they simply exchanged humble banalities with their sovereign like any citizen would – until the editor of the News of the World, Barry Askew, also known as the Beast of Bouverie Street, finally dared to address the issue that had brought them all together.

‘If Lady Di wants to buy some wine gums without being photographed,’ he said, ‘why doesn’t she send a servant?’

‘What an extremely pompous man you are!’ replied Her Majesty with a gracious smile – and the hearty laughs around the room made clear who was considered the winner of that exchange. A month later Askew was sacked from the News of the World by his proprietor Rupert Murdoch – though it was not explained whether that was for making such a public fool of himself or because he had compromised his paper’s independence by attending the meeting.

The palace gathering had identified the new dimension – and the new challenges – that Diana’s glamour had brought to the royal family, and, sadly, it did not resolve them. Three months later, in February 1982, Charles and Diana flew to the Bahamas for a pre-baby holiday, staying at Windermere on the island of Eleuthera, the secluded home of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter and son-in-law, Patricia and John Brabourne.

In this romantic setting, far from civilisation – and from Camilla – the royal couple sunbathed and swam together, splashing and kissing in the surf with their arms around one another. They grilled each other barbecue suppers – but they were not alone. Before dawn one morning, kitted out in full tropical gear, binoculars and a huge, long-distance telephoto lens, Daily Star reporter James Whitaker and his photographer accomplice Ken Lennox crawled through the darkness across a spit of land opposite the Brabourne beach. Lying patiently in wait as the sun rose, the spies were finally rewarded by the extraordinary sight of a bikini-clad Diana splashing into the sea with her five-month-pregnant belly clearly visible – and obviously imagining that she was quite alone. The revealing photos covered the front page of the Star next morning.

In vain did the Queen condemn the invasion of her daughter-in-law’s privacy as ‘tasteless behaviour’ that was ‘in breach of normally accepted British press standards’. The Press Council tut-tutted – and James Whitaker proudly claimed the coup as the high spot of his career.

‘I’ve never done anything more brilliantly intrusive,’ the reporter boasted. ‘We’d crawled and waited for hours. It was one of the triumphs of my professional life.’

‘Brilliantly’ intrusive? A triumph? What profession? What life?

These are running themes to ponder as we leave Princess Diana for the moment, exposed on the front page with the unborn Prince William inside her. Before June 1982 when he enters our story, we have another character to meet, born five months ahead of William: Ms Catherine Middleton, and her family, who would, in due course, be joining the royal family.

6

Party Pieces

‘Une nation de boutiquiers.’ – ‘A nation of shopkeepers.’

(Insult directed against the British, attributed to Napoleon, 1822)

So that’s enough for the moment from those wacky Windsors – not to mention the manic Markles on the other side of the Atlantic …

Let us turn our attention instead to those charmingly civilised, middle-of-the-road, middle-class, middle-England Middletons who have risen so high, but also oh-so-modestly, from their salt-of-the-earth coal-mining origins, with no history of nasty plottings or family back-stabbings – no messy divorces, no scheming ambition …

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper …

Lord Copper was Evelyn Waugh’s brilliantly fearsome amalgamation of the overbearing 1930s press lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook, ruling imperiously over his imaginary tabloid rag The Daily Beast* in Scoop, Waugh’s 1938 novel of Fleet Street skulduggery. Lord Copper’s editors were so scared of their boss that they never dared say no to his face, only disagreeing with him ‘up to a point …’

So let us not dare to doubt the perfection of the sainted Middletons – well, up to a point, dear reader – as they now enter our story with the birth of their daughter Catherine Elizabeth on 9 January 1982, five months before the birth of her future husband Prince William. It is interesting to note that the brides of both our royal heroes are older than their husbands – and how the histories of their royal recruitment present such instructive studies in social climbing. The Queen Catherines of England certainly form a society that is well worth climbing into: Catherine of Valois, Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr, Catherine of Braganza – Catherine Middleton …

Let us start with the coal-mining. Kate Middleton’s great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side, John Harrison, came from Hetton-le-Hole in County Durham. Today Hetton is effectively a suburb of Sunderland, but it was a mining village in its own right in 1896, when John, aged twenty-two, married domestic servant Jane Hill, by whom he would father nine children, including Kate’s great-grandfather, Thomas. For some twenty years John went down the pit every working day, until he was trampled in a freak accident by a runaway pit pony. After being laid out flat on his back for months, Great-great-grandpa was compelled to take early retirement, and for the rest of his life he could walk only with the help of a stick.

Great-grandfather Thomas, known to the family as ‘Tommy’, was too canny to follow his father down the pit. He trained as a joiner and in the 1930s headed south to London with his wife Elizabeth, settling in the western railway depot suburb of Southall, where his carpentry earned them enough to buy a two-bedroomed terraced house facing the Grand Union Canal. There Tommy and Elizabeth raised Kate’s grandmother Dorothy, who left school early to work on the high street as a shop assistant at a branch of the Dorothy Perkins fashion chain – and was known to family and friends as ‘Lady Dorothy’.

Strong and aspirational women play an important role in the history of Kate Middleton’s family – starting with her great-grandmother Edith Goldsmith who smoked twenty Woodbines a day, brought up six children and, when widowed, went to work in the local jam factory. In 1953, just two months after Elizabeth II’s coronation, Edith’s twenty-two-year-old son Ron, a builder, who had left school at fourteen, married Lady Dorothy, then just eighteen.

Ron and Dorothy – Kate’s grandparents – settled in a council flat in Southall, and 1955 saw the birth of their daughter Carole, Kate’s mother. Delighted with her new baby, Lady Dorothy bought little Carole – in the words of one spiteful relative – ‘the biggest Silver Cross pram you have ever seen’.