HARRY, MEGAN AND JACKIE KENNEDY
When I first heard that Megan and Harry were withdrawing from their duties as members of the British royal family, I thought, “good for them.” What could be more vacuous than having no more role to play in life than hanging around Buckingham Palace, showing up at charity events, visiting Commonwealth countries, and living in a fish bowl harassed by paparazzi? They were celebrities for merely existing, not for anything they accomplished. They faced a life signifying nothing. It wasn’t for them. They wanted more. They wanted out.
Or so I thought.
I had similar thoughts about Jackie Kennedy. After her second husband, Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis died, she also looked forward to a life without significance. Having been defined as the spouse of two fabulously wealthy men, she now wanted to be defined by her own accomplishments. Like the royals, she wanted more. She wanted challenges, something she could sink her teeth into, something that required effort, something that would define her as a real person, not a mannequin. She wanted a life of substance.
What has been sad for many women of my generation, she wrote,
is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the window pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised? Of course, women should work if they want to.
Consequently, she got an actual job.
In September, 1975, at age forty-six, she began working as an acquisition’s editor for Viking press. I didn’t expect the former first lady to actually “work,” but to my surprise, she remained at her job for almost twenty years, acquiring for her publishers, almost one hundred books. In 1994, she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While undergoing chemotherapy, she continued to plow through manuscripts in her New York City apartment. She died later that year at age sixty-five.
“Her fame,” wrote biographer, Donald Spoto, “which she neither understood nor encouraged, was a constant annoyance, while the public saw her as something of a social artifact.” Nevertheless, she was able to infuse her life with the bracing, exhilarating and psychologically gratifying feeling of exerting effort to achieve a goal.
Harry and Megan, on the other hand, not only understand fame, but encourage it, promote it, and revel in it.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis genuinely wanted peace and productivity. Harry and Megan claimed to want “peace,” but declared war on the royal family. They popped-up to share their pain on talk shows, book promotions, and public whine-fests. They sat for a lengthy interview with Oprah, viewed by nearly fifty million people. They appeared on The Late show with Steven Colbert, were guests with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, filmed a six-part Netflix Special, and topped it off with Harry’s 2023 tell-all memoir, “Spare.”
“I love my brother deeply..,” Harry told Anderson Cooper, in reference to
William, the future king of England. “...None of anything I’ve written and
anything I’ve included is ever intended to hurt my family...”
Really? Except for:
· “his [William’s] familiar scowl which had always been his default in dealing with me, his alarming baldness more advance than my own, his famous resemblance to Mummy which was fading with time with age.”
· “It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me and my father say things that weren’t true…It was really hard."
· He claimed that he and Megan were “bullied out” of the Royal Family.
· “I have never seen the level of abuse and harassment that I
witnessed with my wife…
· Even worse, Meghan, who was half black, contemplated suicide. “I just didn’t want to be alive anymore. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.”
· “She was going to end her life,” said Harry. “They're not gonna stop until she dies.”
· After receiving a disturbing text from William, they were so upset that they hugged each other and had to go put on the balcony for a breath of fresh air. How do we know this occurred? Because there happened to be a video crew in their room, filming their travails.
By relentlessly complaining to the rest of humanity - with each book, each insult hurled at their families, each film clip of their poignant anxiety, and finally placing Megan on the precipice of suicide – they are begging for the world’s attention, affirmation and sympathy. But Harry and Megan are neither noble nor heroic, nor persecuted, nor struggling, nor good. They want to be recognized as long-suffering victims, struggling to survive, surrounded by vipers.
Jackie Kennedy was the real victim. Living in a fish bowl and married to a serial philanderer who was assassinated, she didn’t complain or write tell-all books. She got a job. Something Harry and Megan should consider.