This week Meghan and Harry were in Canada, supporting music mogul David Foster’s foundation, which raises money for Canadian families whose children are undergoing life-saving organ transplants.
Meghan wore Princess Diana’s diamond and sapphire earrings, and a video has been released on Meghan’s Instagram showing what a marvelous, totally genuine time everyone is having.
This could have been a good news story for Meghan Markle, but it’s likely to be eclipsed by the ill-advised feud that she appears to have started with Martha Stewart.
To back up a little: Martha was being interviewed by People magazine when she got onto the subject of her party-going habits, saying her friends call her “LIFO: last in, first out,” and mentioned that she’d recently been at a dinner party at which Meghan was present.
Now, if you look carefully at what Martha actually said (video above), she was talking in pretty vague terms. She certainly wasn’t claiming Meghan was spilling every last detail of what happened at Highgrove.
What she said was, “I had dinner with Meghan Markle the other night. We were both guests at a dinner party in California. And she had just gotten back from the palace. I didn’t talk to her really more than to say a couple words, but I know she was talking about it.”
Meghan then did something incredibly stupid. She seems to have got the host of the party to call up People magazine and say that Martha’s account was “simply untrue,” and that “Meghan didn’t talk about her European vacation other than to say the family had a great time.”
Worse, they called Martha “confused.”
Implying that Martha, 85 (a woman who redefined America’s relationship with food, the kitchen, baking, homemaking, became America’s first self-made female billionaire as the creator of the modern lifestyle brand, etc etc), is a dotty old lady is an incredibly stupid thing to do, especially for Meghan, who enjoys very little public goodwill.
The Royalist suspects that Meghan was more angry about Martha’s very perceptive comment about why Meghan’s TV show failed. Martha said, “If you’re an actress, it’s hard to then transition to a princess and then from a princess into a homemaking guru on a television show. It doesn’t sort of follow. So go from there.”
The only sensible thing for Meghan to have done was to have followed Martha’s example when she was sent to prison: suck it up.
Or, as the late Queen Elizabeth II would have put it: never complain, never explain.
Launching a counter-story in People implying Martha is a confused old lady is a battle she can only lose.
Earlier in the week I discussed sociologist Chris Rojek’s distinction between achieved celebrity (won through accomplishment) and ascribed celebrity (conferred by birth or marriage). Martha is achieved celebrity in its absolute purest form: 40 years of doing what she does, building her reputation, winning her place in America’s heart.
You could make an argument that Martha has, big picture, been incredibly restrained. After all, Meghan has spent the last year literally copying her ideas and trying to eat her lunch.
The fact is, Meghan’s show was a complete mess. It’s no one’s idea of a homemaking show when the host tells viewers she doesn’t like either baking or honey, or recommends decanting pretzels from a big bag into a smaller bag, or ordering takeaway and plating it up.
It was appalling, which is why it did so badly, why Netflix parted company with her, and why the brand it was supposed to launch still hasn’t made it out of America. There’s plenty more that Martha could have said.
In fact, the closest she previously came was in a Yahoo interview, when she said that “authenticity, to me, is everything” and that she hoped Meghan “knows what she’s talking about.” This brings us back, of course, to the famous jam photographs, and a theme I’ve written about for years: the inauthenticity problem.
Martha, by contrast, is completely authentic. She went to jail. She paid her dues. She never grovelled for the cameras; about the only thing she ever said was that it was a horrible experience and she didn’t deserve it.
Her comeback wasn’t built on a fake redemption arc but on continuing to be brilliant at presenting TV shows. And now, in her ninth decade, she’s more relevant than ever: Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party brought her a whole new audience, and she landed the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover at 81, the oldest cover star in the franchise’s history.
Meghan, meanwhile, seems so paranoid that her brand and reputation will be destabilized by one tiny comment that she has made it infinitely worse by drawing attention to it.
Worse, responding by getting somebody else to ring up a magazine on her behalf (rather than making a statement saying she hadn’t talked about the meeting) is manipulative and transparent. It recalls the “five friends” story that followed the letter to her father; it recalls the stories about what a great boss she was after she was called a “dictator in high heels.”
All of them rebounded badly, because they simply weren’t believable. People don’t believe Meghan. They believe Martha.
Meghan has made a big, big mistake here, and I don’t think we’ve heard the end of it. It’s the middle of August, traditionally a dead period for real news. If someone can get anything further out of Martha Stewart, what should have been a half-hour story will become a seven-day saga that dominates the news cycle.
And how will Meghan react to that?
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