Counterbalancing this viewpoint were those who defended Meghan’s conduct. There was much speculation that someone as new wave as her might believe that the foetus flourishes better when its mother communicates with it from outside the womb. Let Meghan do what she pleased, was their message. Leave her alone. So what if she wants to clutch her belly. She’s not harming anyone.
Nevertheless, the turn the pregnancy had taken opened up other questions. How many months gone was she? Because the due date was being kept secret at the insistence of the couple, in defiance of accepted royal practice, there was speculation that she might be approaching her seventh month and the baby would arrive in March. This at least explained the Vesuvian explosion that had erupted abdominally.
The anomaly inherent in all of this was too good for Meghan’s growing band of detractors to ignore. The belly clutching and the sudden growth of the bump fed right into their incredulity. They quickly leapt to the conclusion that she wasn’t pregnant at all.
The internet now came alive with speculation. While all reasonable people accept that it is a forum where conspiracy theories proliferate and crazies have their say without anyone taking them too seriously, events such as the Arab Spring have also shown that it can be a platform for the dissemination of factual information that established circles, including the press, can and do suppress. All political institutions, including royal ones, monitor the internet. Their survival depends on it. Some groundswells can wash them away unless they are careful.
Underlying the more bizarre speculations, however, was a message that Meghan might well have profited from, had she cared to listen to it. This was that too many people didn’t believe that she was what she was projecting. She did not ring true to them. She did not convince them. Despite the decades she had spent acting up a storm, they were simply not buying her act. Since much of royal life is about getting the tone and content right, of projecting the appropriate image and doing so in a believable and constructive way, Meghan would have been well advised to have listened to some of the criticism.
Beneath this, there was another issue. Royalty doesn’t act; it is. The message being delivered was that she should stop projecting and start being. She should be more like the Queen, or Princess Anne, or the Prince of Wales, or Camilla, and less like Princess Michael of Kent, whose affectations and pretentiousness had made her a mockery which her detractors asserted Meghan was quickly matching and now in danger of exceeding.
In fairness to both sides, Meghan is an actress and actresses act. Asking someone whose whole life has been about performance to unlearn the art of projection is a tad optimistic. This, of course, is one of the reasons why Prince Philip did not think Harry should marry Meghan. He foresaw the problems she would have as she went about her royal duties, not only in terms of executing them behaviourally but also in the discomfiture she would endure as her performance was rated. With rating inevitably comes slating, which no one as thin-skinned as Meghan would find tolerable. The Queen and Prince Philip had been friendly with Princess Grace of Monaco. They knew the struggles she had had before she was taken seriously. And how, once she had settled into the role of ruling princess and been accepted in it, she had chafed against its restrictions. Moreover, Grace had taken the whole business of royalty far more seriously than Meghan did. She had been highly motivated to fit in, and had made the sacrifices even when she was tempted to do otherwise. But that hadn’t made them any the easier to bear. By the time of her untimely death, she had taken to poetry readings as a means of satisfying the undying yearning to be on stage. Would Meghan have the motivation to do something similar, or would the actress within her prevent her from adjusting to royal demeanour while also propelling her to make a hash of a role which, with a bit of willingness on her part, she might be able to master successfully, to the benefit of herself, the monarchy, and her ethnicity.
Although the public will have thought nothing about the struggles of an actress adjusting to a role that requires the absolute opposite of projection, Meghan’s actressy demeanour was turning out to be both a plus and a minus. Being a more polished and dramatic performer than any of the other royals, she wowed where they did not. But this, for many, was a part of the problem. Only time would provide a solution, for, until people got used to her and realised that her actressiness might not be a sign of insincerity but merely the manifestation of an innately dramatic personality, they would continue to look askance. In the meantime, they would be faulting her on the grounds that she was a little too conscious of what she was doing, that she deliberately projected just that little bit more than they were used to with the other royals. In reality, there was an exact corollary between Meghan when she was starting out as an actress and Meghan when she started out as a duchess. In both situations, her eagerness to project what she believed the role required was so excessive that she did not strike the right note. It was for that reason that she took so long to achieve success as an actress, and it was the same reason why she got some people’s backs up.
Putting the admiration of fans to one side, public figures are most convincing when they are not focused on their performance, nor on conveying any message except authenticity. When a public figure is so busy enacting an underlying message that onlookers are made to feel
