Before she ever met Prince Harry, there’s no denying that Meghan Markle had a thriving career of her own. Between her role on Suits, her blog The Tig, and her charity work, she had plenty going for her – but apparently, none of it was enough to warrant a Vanity Fair cover until she was linked to a man in line for the British throne. When Meghan found out that little tidbit, she reportedly did not take that dose of reality very well.
Back in September 2017, Meghan made it to the cover of the prestigious magazine just a few months before she and Prince Harry took their engagement public. At that point, she’d been dating him for more than a year and marriage seemed to be imminent, so the public’s interest in her was at an all-time high.
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t dish much about her very high-profile relationship at the time. She told the magazine, “We’re two people who are really happy and in love. We were very quietly dating for about six months before it became news, and I was working during that whole time, and the only thing that changed was people’s perception. Nothing about me changed. I’m still the same person that I am, and I’ve never defined myself by my relationship.”
Despite Meghan’s successful career and accomplishments, though, Harry was the big draw for Vanity Fair when it came to offering her a cover interview – something the future Duchess of Sussex wasn’t made aware of until she sat down to chat with someone from the magazine.
According to what former editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, who retired in 2017, told Page Six, editor Jane Sarkin pitched Meghan as a potential cover star “because she’s going to marry Prince Harry.” But Meghan assumed she was there to talk about herself and her philanthropical endeavors.
During her interview, Graydon said Meghan told 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.”
This led Graydon to believe that Meghan was “slightly adrift on the facts and reality.”
This isn’t the first time an insider has hinted there may have been controversy happening behind the scenes at Meghan’s Vanity Fair interview. In his 2022 book Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors, royal expert Tom Bower claimed Meghan was angry with Sam Kashner, who wrote the 2017 feature.
But as Sam wrote in an open letter that was published in The Times around the book’s release, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. In fact, he claimed that he had written about Meghan’s activism in the first draft, but it was edited out after an anecdote she’d shared from her childhood couldn’t be fact checked ahead of publication.
“I found Ms Markle to be exceptionally warm and gracious and admired her intelligence and remarkable courage, as I still do,” he wrote.
