Meghan Markle was ‘famished for prestige … validation,’ new royal book says

“Meghan doesn’t really have a brand – you feel that she is grasping at the ‘Twitter caring’ of the moment.”

Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.

Article content

Desperate Meghan Markle saw Prince Harry as a ticket to prestige, power and boffo bucks, an explosive new book on the Royal Family claims.

Article content

Former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown’s tome, The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor – The Truth And The Turmoil, examines the royals over the past 25 years.

And one of the book’s major subjects is the contentious former Hollywood actress.

Brown describes Markle as a woman “famished for prestige, frantic for validation” before finding love with Prince Harry, seeing the popular royal not just as a potential partner but as a “solution to every problem she had.”

At the time, she was a 37-year-old actress starring in sudsy legal drama Suits, filmed in Toronto. There were few other acting jobs available to her and her media imprint was zero.

“The morning after their first date, she spoke about Harry to a girlfriend as if he were a hot submission from her agent. ‘Do I sound crazy when I say this could have legs?’” Brown writes, adding that together the pair were “drunk on the shared fantasy of being instruments of global transformation.”

Article content

Both, Brown quoted a source, have a “mutual addiction to drama.”

Meghan also saw there were “deals to be made” as part of the Royal Family and found the “celebrity buffet” irresistible, Brown told a Washington Post podcast.

“They wanted to be able to have a commercial arm to their activities. That was the stumbling block. Meghan certainly saw the deals that were there to be made because they were royals,” Brown told the podcast.

“It’s as though she couldn’t resist everything that was on offer on the celebrity buffet. A hunger to avail herself of the global leverage, to live in glorious houses without strings attached.”

She believes Harry would have left the firm anyway, but Meghan gave him the “tools to leave.”

“Meghan doesn’t really have a brand – you feel that she is grasping at the ‘Twitter caring’ of the moment. Vaccinations, Ukraine, Women’s rights, my 40th birthday, let’s have a mentoring scheme. Nothing is really going anywhere for Meghan.

“And the whole problem, with an entertainment deal is you have to produce. They’ve signed with Netflix but what have we seen? Nothing. Creating entertainment that works is very hard to do. Their Spotify podcast is going nowhere. Netflix is not doing so well are they going to renew that contract?”

Before she met Harry in the summer of 2016, Markle was desperate to be taken seriously in Hollywood, as a humanitarian and, ultimately, trendsetter.

And Harry was vulnerable, Brown said.

For her part, the B-list star “absorbed her new identity ravenously.”

[email protected]

@HunterTOSun