In his new memoir, Graydon Carter, the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair, has dished on various celebrities he dealt with over the two decades that he helmed the glossy monthly magazine.
And one of those celebrities is Meghan Markle. For one of the final issues he edited before stepping down in 2017, Carter told the New York Post that he was convinced to feature her on the cover when she was then a little-known TV actor. That’s because she was the woman who had finally nabbed Prince Harry, one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.
“Jane Sarkin, who booked our covers, came in and said, ‘We should do a cover on Meghan Markle,’” Carter said in an interview with the New York Post to promote his memoir, “When the Going was Good.”
“I said, ‘I have no idea who that is,’” Carter said he told Sarkin, the features editor who booked celebrity covers.
“She said, ‘She’s on ‘Suits,’” Carter continued. “I said, “I have no idea what that is, why should we do a story on her?’ So she said, ‘Because she’s going to marry Prince Harry.’”
For Meghan, then a supporting player on the cable TV legal drama “Suits,” being on the September 2017 cover of Vanity Fair proved to be pretty momentous in terms of raising her global profile. There were rumors in the British tabloid media that she was dating Harry, but the Vanity Fair story confirmed the relationship. The issue had the cover line “She’s just wild about Harry” and quoted her as announcing, “We’re a couple. We’re in love.”
At the time, A Vanity Fair cover was still considered to be a major coup and a rare honor in celebrity world. But as previously reported by royal author Tom Bower, Harry was wary of Meghan doing the interview with Vanity Fair because he wanted to delay officially announcing their relationship until he received formal approval from his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, to get engaged.
In order to make her interview palatable to Harry, Meghan and her publicists insisted to Vanity Fair that the story not dwell on her relationship with Harry, but present her “as a major actor and especially as an activist and philanthropist,” Bower reported in his 2022 book, “Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors.”
Carter similarly told the New York Post that Meghan challenged the reporter: “Excuse me, Is this going to all be about Prince Harry? Because I thought we were going to be talking about my charities and my philanthropy.”
To that, Carter raised his eyebrows and said of Meghan: “This woman is slightly adrift on the facts and reality.”
Bower’s book also reported that Carter had scoffed at Meghan’s assertion about her activism. As Carter and other Vanity Fair editors discovered, people in the public eye “sometimes found difficulty living up to their self-created publicity.”
Carter was generally skeptical of celebrity claims about their good works, according to Bower. “Hollywood philanthropy is PR philanthropy,” Bower quoted Carter as saying, meaning that actors’ philanthropy was often superficial rather than a deep commitment.
But Carter’s skepticism wasn’t the only reason that Meghan’s Vanity Fair cover didn’t end up focusing on her philanthropy, according to Bower. The magazine’s fact-checkers had trouble confirming Meghan’s oft-told origin story about her activism.
As Meghan shared in a speech at the 2015 UN Women’s Conference, she first took up the cause of fighting sexism as a 11-year-old girl.
Meghan said that she raised objections to sexism in advertising for Proctor & Gamble products. She said she wrote the company’s chairman and Hillary Clinton, then first lady, to complain about a slogan promoting dishwashing liquid that said “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” Meghan said that the wording should be changed to “People all over America.”
During her UN Women speech, Meghan said she received letters of encouragement from Clinton, Nickelodeon host Linda Ellerbee and feminist attorney Gloria Allred. Ellerbee notably featured Meghan in a “Nick News” report that on her protest, along with a clip of her writing Clinton.
During her speech, Meghan said that P&G soon changed the tagline for their product.
“It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions,” Meghan said. “At the age of 11, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality.”
But Bower reported that Meghan had actually joined in a letter-writing campaign to Proctor and Gamble that was already underway. Bower also said she did so with the encouragement of her father, Thomas Markle, from whom she is now estranged. Furthermore, Thomas Markle, a well-known TV lighting designer, had used his contacts in the industry to get Meghan featured on Ellebee’s show, according to Bower.
Meanwhile, Vanity Fair’s fact-checkers could find no evidence that Meghan ever received a letter from Clinton, or that she was instrumental in getting the company to change its tagline, Bower reported. Her father, though, encouraged her to think she had made a difference.