For someone who incessantly complains about being silenced, Meghan Markle never seems to shut up.
The B-list actress formerly known as the Duchess of Sussex has officially spent more time whining about her royal in-laws than she actually spent as a working royal — fewer than two years, including an extended maternity vacation. Now, she is in The Cut moaning about her horrible life as a Hollywood trophy wife to a literal prince.
The magazine’s cover star was ostensibly promoting the overdue launch of her feminist podcast Archetypes. A full 21 months elapsed between Meg and her husband, Harry, inking their reported $25 million deal with Spotify and the launch of their first series. So the Mountbatten-Windsors need the coverage as much as The Cut needs the clicks. But the real drama came not from Meghan rehashing yet again how (to borrow a phrase from Tina Brown) a 1,000-year-old company headed by a 96-year-old monarch was insufficiently progressive for a Soho House socialite. It was, rather, Markle’s thoroughly modern and distinctly Californian woe: keeping up with the Joneses of Montecito.
When Harry first blindsided his dear old dad and granny with the news that he and his wife were divorcing the family, they decamped from Canada to California. Despite having never actually met billionaire producer Tyler Perry in person, Meghan nabbed an invite for her and Harry to sojourn at his Beverly Hills mansion at the start of the pandemic.
Then Meghan found the house described by The Cut’s Allison P. Davis as “the kind of big that startles you into remembering that unimaginable wealth is actually someone’s daily reality … evokes a classic Tuscan villa, a Napa vineyard, and a manicured Beverly Hills country club decorated with careful, considered coastal tones for a casual air — the home equivalent of billionaires dressing down in denim.”
“We didn’t have jobs, so we just were not going to come and see this house,” Meghan lamented to the magazine of her initial reaction to the mansion, back when the couple was dependent on giving JP Morgan speeches for income. “It wasn’t possible. It’s like when I was younger and you’re window shopping — it’s like, I don’t want to go and look at all the things that I can’t afford. That doesn’t feel good.”
Lo and behold, Spotify handed them that reported $25 million and Netflix another $100 million. (To date, Archewell has produced about two hours of content for the former and zero for the latter.)
Like any good fairy tale, the princess scored her happy ending, purchasing the $14 million Montecito mansion shortly before she and Harry excoriated the queen, her dying husband, and the Prince of Wales in an Oprah interview blasted across the world.
“One of the first things my husband saw when we walked around the house was those two palm trees,” Meghan told Davis. “See how they’re connected at the bottom? He goes, ‘My love, it’s us.’ And now, every day when Archie goes by us, he says, ‘Hi, Momma. Hi, Papa.’”
As the Sussex set surely says, this is “self-care” for the rich, famous, and feckless.
