Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, have reportedly returned to Britain, having unsuccessfully attempted to transplant themselves into the celebrity soil of Montecito, Calif. With their departure, can America please shake off its obsession with royalty?
In certain corners of the American psyche, for reasons that often confound me, many of my fellow residents of this great democracy — 250 years after it shook off its monarchical yoke — are constantly describing our fellow citizens as American royals.
There have always been families — the Vanderbilts and Kennedys and Bushes — whose claim to a rarefied level of generational wealth, power and prestige has meant that some Americans want to worship them like they have the divine right to rule. They needed to proclaim John F. Kennedy Jr. our prince, as well as the country’s most eligible bachelor, and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy his princess, however reluctant she was to perform that role. This year, when Taylor Swift married Travis Kelce, the occasion was characterized as an American royal wedding. The coverage was a feeding frenzy even though the feasting was mostly limited to live feeds from the decidedly un-fairy-tale-castle-like exterior of Madison Square Garden.
When we describe our fellow citizens as American royals, the implication is that we’re gifting them with enhanced stature and a more durable place in history. But if we’ve learned anything from the public agonies of Harry and Meghan, it’s just how meaningless yet burdensome actual royal lineage can be.
I’ve never been particularly interested in Harry, but I was curious about Harry and Meghan as a couple. The biracial American actress had given up her career to marry a man whose lineage overshadowed his individuality. After they separated from Buckingham Palace and settled in California, Harry focused on one-off moneymaking projects that mostly involved just retelling his life story. I wondered why Harry didn’t seem inclined to pursue a career. I thought it was too bad that Meghan, an actress, turned her attention to hawking jam and swooning over dried edible flowers in a kitchen that was not hers.
I especially wondered why the two were creating such an intensely inward-facing life when they’d fled to California presumably in search of freedom and the ability to create themselves anew. They had the opportunity to see our celebrity culture up close. It’s a culture fueled by the idea that a person’s circumstances can always change. You can make your own luck. For royalty, change is verboten.
I remember when Meghan walked down the aisle at St. George’s Chapel in 2018 wearing the sleek white Givenchy gown designed by Clare Waight Keller. The dress didn’t evoke images of a fairy-tale princess, nor did it have the ostentatious drama of a gown destined for a Hollywood red carpet. With its bateau neckline and refusal of beads, ruffles and rhinestone, it was a dress that signaled a more straightforward, realistic vision of romance, marriage and, of course, the monarchy. I thought Meghan knew what she was getting into. I thought I knew. Like Meghan, I presumed the only difference between celebrity and royalty was degrees of notoriety.
“I thought, I grew up in L.A., you see celebrities all the time,” she said during an infamous conversation with Oprah Winfrey in 2021. “This is not the same, right? But it’s very easy, I think, especially as an American, to go, ‘Oh, these are famous people.’ It’s like, no, this is a completely different ballgame.”
In her new life, Meghan had observed nothing was quite like the suffocating, tradition-bound, highly visible role of a royal. Despite the financially lucrative shenanigans of Kardashians, Vanderpumps and Real Housewives, our celebrity ecosystem is far superior to any royal court. It isn’t exactly a meritocracy, but even our nepo babies have to prove their worth to command respect. Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy, found this to be true when he solidly lost the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District. Bronny James had to show the skeptics that he belonged in the N.B.A. because of his talent and not just to satisfy basketball historians itching for a son to play alongside his legendary father, LeBron James.
Talent, experience, charisma and hard work count for something in our celebrity culture. Those things mean nothing if you’re royalty. The celebrities who are idolized and revered — rather than tolerated or hate-watched — are exceptional at what they do. In the days after the death of the great Dolly Parton, more than one mourner reached for aristocratic vocabulary to describe her universal appeal, her talent and her generosity. Describing Ms. Parton as American royalty flattens her unlikely life story into something that was preordained rather than practically miraculous. Calling her royal distracts from her hard work and courage, the very things that made her such a wonder.
In that interview with Ms. Winfrey, Harry and Meghan unleashed accusations of racism in the royal family. Poor Harry seemed dumbfounded. The royal family had a fit of the vapors. And Meghan? I wondered how someone whose honey complexion, long hair and sprinkling of freckles had allowed her a bit of grace in our color-conscious culture digested a kind of blunt-force racism that was profane and antebellum. When to whom you are born is all that defines a royal family’s stature and justifies its treasure, one drop of the wrong blood can befoul the entire scheme. I imagined Meghan struggling to mourn the loss of a privilege that should never have existed.
So now I watch with a combination of exasperation, confusion and even a bit of sadness as they return to England. Harry and Meghan have struggled to right-size their relationship with the royal family, with popular culture and with themselves. They have heaved flamethrowers at Prince William and Princess Kate. Their Netflix dabblings have been less than impressive. Now, they are stuck in the in between. They are no longer fully royal. But they have little currency in the celebrity ecosystem.
What is Harry’s talent? What gives his life meaning out in the world, separate from his family? Meghan had whiffs of a possible acting role in England in Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen,” which is about attempts by a down-at-heel British aristocratic family to restore its fortunes by getting into the drug trade, but that seems to have evaporated. I hope she can find her way back to acting. Or realize her goal of becoming a lifestyle doyenne. Perhaps she can become a celebrity. A real A-lister. Harry could warm himself in her celebrity glow.
And he can finally feel what it’s like to be better than — more than just — a royal.
Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic and a former senior critic at large for The Washington Post.
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