According to Aristotle, there is regular love and then there is agape. During her summer vacations Meghan would take part in retreats organised by the Agape International Spiritual Center: ‘We are on the planet,’ ran Agape’s manifesto, ‘to be and express the Divine Love of God that is alive in every fiber of our being, waiting to be released through us onto our world. Living as love is a way of life that brings heaven on earth.’
Founded in 1986 in Los Angeles by Dr Michael Bernard Beckwith, Agape described itself as a ‘trans-denominational’ community that embraced Christianity without excluding other religions, teaching that Jesus, like Gandhi or Buddha, was not so much ‘the great exception’ as ‘the great example’. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and Van Morrison were among the celebrities to endorse Dr Beckwith’s spiritual process that unlocked, as Oprah put it, ‘everything that is unique, mighty and magnificent inside each of us’.
Agape’s morning schedule at its summer camps started soon after dawn with meditation and teaching at 6.45, helping to set a pattern of early rising (and, later, early morning texting and emailing) that Meghan would maintain into her professional life. Aged thirteen, she enjoyed her first kiss at an Agape summer camp held at Santa Monica – with the future comedian Joshua Silverstein who, also thirteen that year, would recall it happening at the end of a drama workshop.
‘We were kind of leaving and walking out,’ Silverstein remembered in the spring of 2018 – he was by then a thirty-six-year-old married father of two, starring with James Corden on The Late Late Show. ‘I noticed her making a beeline toward me with a lot of intention.’
The teenage couple had already met and bonded over their mixed-race heritage.
‘She was charming and quirky,’ said Silverstein. ‘She wasn’t a stereotypical thirteen-year-old girl … decked out in pink every day … flaunting make-up or anything. She was her own person, very authentic to who she was at the time … serious about her craft. I found out from our friends that she liked me and I liked her, and I just think that we decided it would be a good idea to become boyfriend and girlfriend.’
The pair had held hands previously and hugged, but now there was something different in Meghan’s manner that caught Silverstein off guard.
‘She kissed me. She made the move,’ he recalled. ‘And I think I was like, OK – we’re at that phase of our relationship right now, we’re kissing … But the kiss was definitely her – her initiative absolutely.’
Meghan confirmed Silverstein’s memory in an interview she gave to talk show host Larry King: ‘I was thirteen, it was a summer camp and I kissed him.’
According to Silverstein, he and Meghan continued their relationship for the rest of the Agape camp – with more kisses – then mutually decided to split up at the end of the summer. They discussed the matter dispassionately. Neither of them wanted to put a ‘dampener’ on what might happen when they got back to school – they wanted to be free to date other people – a couple of extremely mature thirteen-year-olds.
Agape has remained an important part of Meghan Markle’s life. She would even become an Agape youth minister for a period and her mother Doria still attends Agape services on Sunset Boulevard. To the end of Meghan’s school years and onwards through college at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma Sorority and participated in community and charity projects, she would rise early every day to meditate and repeat an Agape morning mantra – as she is thought to do to this day.
‘God is on my side’, runs one such mantra. ‘God is coming into being through me. God wants me to be all I can be. God wants to come into its own through me’ – the point of the word ‘its’ being that, for Agape, God is not so sexist as to be either male or female.
So here was the dedicated and definitely un-Windsor bombshell – the Agape kisser – who would be waiting for Prince Harry after all his trials and travails that we shall be reading about in the pages ahead.
5
‘Whatever “in love” Means’
‘Jealousy, total jealousy … I felt I was a lamb to the slaughter.’
(Princess Diana, recording her thoughts for author Andrew Morton in 1991)
When Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin wanted to sum up the tragic legend of Diana, Princess of Wales, dead in August 1997 at the age of only thirty-six, they turned to the anthem they had composed twenty-four years earlier in tribute to another troubled heroine who had died at the very same age: Marilyn Monroe.
‘Goodbye Norma Jean, Though I never knew you at all …’
Within hours of Diana’s death, radio stations had started to play the original ‘Candle in the Wind’, catching the metaphor of the flickering, sensitive superstar destroyed by too much publicity and by her inability to find a partner who could sustain her difficult nature with solid emotional support and understanding – ‘Never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.’
Quickly rewritten to be sung in Westminster Abbey just six days after her death, the Diana version of ‘Candle’ avoided those tricky targets in favour of safer praise:
You called out to our country and you whispered to those in pain,
Now you belong to heaven and the stars spell out your name.
When Charles, Prince of Wales, aged thirty-two, made his momentous proposal of marriage to the still-teenage Diana, nineteen, on 3 February 1981, he had just come back from a skiing holiday.
‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he told her as they sat together in
