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many people who feel alienated work with the less fortunate.
This is where the exacting standards of the Old World collide with the embellishments of the New. Self-promotion and exaggeration have traditionally been viewed with suspicion in the royal and aristocratic worlds,
people still adhere strictly to the dictum, ‘Lay claim only to what is your due.’
on this side of the Atlantic it did alert people to the fact that the new Duchess of Sussex had both a propensity for exaggeration and a flair for dramatics in a way that the British find suspect.
According to Ninaki Priddy, Meghan’s best friend from childhood, attention, approbation and applause have always been driving forces for her. ‘Meg always wanted to be a star,’ she said. Despite this, she was normal and likeable, even though she did exhibit some of the grit that would later on lead to her outstanding success. The two women knew each other from the age of two, when they started at the Hollywood Little Red House together. At the age of eleven, they transferred to Immaculate Heart. ‘It was always Nikki and Meg. We were so close-knit we came as a two. We were both honorary
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The lesson she was learning was that the most stylish and glamorous women show how special they are not only in their personal presentation, but through humanitarianism. She had found her role model and ‘used to love The Princess Diaries - films about a commoner who becomes part of a Royal Family. She was very taken with that idea. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0,” Nikki Priddy said.
In 1990, Tom had won $750,000 in the California State Lottery. Although much of it was dissipated in an ill-advised investment in a jewelry business with a friend from Chicago, it nevertheless provided him with the means to work less and indulge his children even more than he had previously done.
During her years at Immaculate Heart, Meghan threw herself into dramatics more than into anything else. Her ambition, as Nikki has stated, was to be a star. This was an ambition her father shared and fostered. Known at the school as an Emmy award-winning lighting director who was nominated virtually every year, the dramatics department was only too pleased when Meghan delivered him up as the technical director of every production in which she was involved.
In Meghan’s case, however, the procedure would become more noticeable with the passage of time as the cartilage between the tip and the bone drooped, giving her nose a ski jump effect which, ironically, Harry had naturally.
Although Tom had lost a large part of his lottery winnings, he was still a highly successful lighting director, and he took out bank loans and put in the extra hours necessary to raise the money needed to send his treasured Flower to the university which would be but a stepping stone on her journey to ever increasing success.
networking in the belief that who you met might well prove more useful in the future than what you knew.
She has always had a propensity to embellish, to draw dramatic lessons out of the most anodyne events,
use poetical licence to highlight a point she wishes to make but which might not actually have happened the way she recounts
Her friend explains, ‘The way to tell is how neatly they [Meghan’s reminiscences] fit the story. Meg’s inventions are too tailor-made to be reliable. People just don’t act the way she says. Once you know her, you can tell which stories are Meghan and which really happened.’
she flourished in a way any girl with real problems would not have done, this suggests that she encountered no significant or actual prejudice.
‘I knew the (American) Ambassador in Buenos Aires,’ Michael Markle said. ‘I personally talked to him and got her fixed up with the internship she wanted.’ As a result of her uncle’s string-pulling, she was offered a six week long internship as a junior press officer at the American Embassy in Argentina’s capital city.
Attitude and personality, however, were not sufficient to enter the State Department. One also had to pass the Foreign Service Officer Test, which Meghan sat while in Argentina. To her chagrin, she failed it.
Although there was a similar lack of congeniality between Charles and Diana and Tom and Doria, both couples had found a way to navigate around the shoals of disappointment to the extent that their children were able to have good relationships with both parents.
This was largely due to Diana’s emotional state. If she was happily distracted by a lover, she and Charles would have a relatively civilised, indeed settled, relationship. Sometimes it was even affectionate, in the way a brother and sister who are not particularly close but have a basic fondness for each other, would behave towards each other. This was especially true throughout the second half of the eighties, when Diana’s affair with James Hewitt was flourishing. However, whenever her love life was not satisfactory, she would turn a fully loaded fusillade on Charles and blow serenity out of
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Charles was non-confrontational and would do everything in his power to avoid an argument, Diana was the antithesis. When she was spoiling for a fight, she made sure she got one and that everyone knew about it. She would scream the house down. She would be on the rampage for hours. She would hurl abuse and objects and always reduce herself to tears of frustration and hysteria.
Because Diana was never faithful to any one lover, including James Hewitt and Hasnat Khan, the two men she later claimed she was truly in love with prior to Dodi Fayed, and because she was always on the lookout for the perfect man who would make her life complete, her love life was volatile even when it was relatively settled.
There was always an unpredictable element as to what would set her off, for the triggers had nothing to do with her husband or even her lover’s behaviour, but her inner need to feel loved: and to feel that that love was something she could rely upon. Always careful to direct her eruptions in her husband’s rather than her lovers’ direction, this did not make for a stable or happy atmosphere at home. Then, when things settled down, she would revert to being serene, accommodating Diana who understood that she had to remain married to Cha...
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Diana, for all her volatility, was a loving and obliging mother.
Lilibet was therefore used to two dominant figures in her immediate family, her husband and her mother, neither of whom liked the other and both of whom she assuaged in her desire to have a happy and harmonious family life.
As William and Harry grew up, becoming ever wilder, word began to spread in aristocratic circles how out of control they were.
the two boys continued to be reared in their wild way, with all the royal adults bemoaning the lack of discipline their mother had decreed appropriate.
Diana was preaching the same lesson Joseph Kennedy had taught his boys: You can break the rules as long as you aren’t found
This freewheeling attitude was anathema to the Royal Family. The rules mattered. Humans being human, everyone would sometimes break the rules. But an awareness of being subject to the rules, as opposed to being above them, was an important part of being properly royal.
Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones
Diana’s grandmother Ruth, Lady Fermoy, who violently disapproved of Diana’s conduct, to such an extent that by the time of her death in 1993, she was no longer speaking to her granddaughter. Lady Fermoy regarded Diana as treacherous, dangerous, and irresponsible. She felt that she had been an appalling Princess of Wales, had undermined the monarchy, was a bad daughter and granddaughter, had been anything but a good wife, and moreover was proving to be a dangerously lax mother.
Harry, however, had one handicap that was insurmountable. He was the second son. Second sons do not count in royal or aristocratic circles except as spares.
Second Son Syndrome.
too many second sons are bitterly envious of their elder brothers.
Ken Wharfe recounted how, when he was four or five, Harry informed their nanny, ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, because William is going to be king.’
Contrary to the misinformation that Diana later on spread about her husband, Charles was a good and involved father
once Harry started school, it quickly became apparent that he was as unacademic as his mother had been.
Already there were concerns that the boys might grow up, under Diana’s ministrations, to be as hyper-emotional as she was. And that was something no one wanted, for public roles are best fulfilled with the emotions contained rather than revelled in.
The first shot across the bow had been the publication in March of that year of this author’s Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, which revealed that both the Prince and Princess of Wales had had extra-marital affairs, that she wanted out of the marriage, that she suffered from bulimia, and even that she believed that her late lover Barry Mannakee, formerly her protection officer, had been wiped out to prevent him from speaking out about their affair: a belief she would later confirm in print and on television.
Diana had contributed to the contents of both books, and the reason why the Morton book had come to be written was that she and this author had fallen out because of her determination to propound a version of her tale so heavily slanted in her favour that it was more propaganda than fact.
Harry’s Eton days were anything but distinguished. ‘He would never have been accepted had he not been Prince Henry of Wales,’ an Old Etonian, who still maintains good links to the school, told me. ‘He simply did not possess the intelligence to perform adequately at such an academic school. He’d’ve been far better off attending Gordonstoun, where character counts far more than academic results.’
there was evidence suggesting that Eton had not only thrashed around to find positive ways of marking Harry’s entrance examinations, but that thereafter they had struggled to have him pass his further exams.
cadet. ‘William was genuinely popular. He was liked by everyone. The same could not be said of Harry,’ a parent of one of Harry’s contemporaries told me. ‘Harry was not liked. He was bumptious and antagonistic. He was a very angry young man.
He snuck out of school. He drank and smoked. He was abusive. And he dabbled in drugs.
Diana had always been jealous of any woman to whom her children warmed.
The Royal Family was delighted that the boys had a more rural female in their lives to counterbalance their metropolitan mother’s influence.
He had also inherited her unacademic but highly emotional tendencies.
Like his mother, Harry grew into a sometimes volatile, unpredictable, antagonistic, aggressive, but also charming, endearing, and energetic personality.
many of the former heroin addicts had started out on cannabis.
he was well on the way to reinforcing his reputation as a drunken and awkward Lad.
The documentary also proved to be a turning point in the public’s perception of Harry. Up to then, the British public had only known of his troubled, troublesome and laddish side. Now they could see for themselves that here was a prince with a heart, a man who loved children, who did not care about colour or class, who wanted to make a difference.
