The fall-out from Meghan Markle’s Vanity Fair cover and the stinging nickname former editor Graydon Carter gave her

On September 6, 2017, two months before her engagement to Harry was announced, Meghan Markle featured on the cover of Vanity Fair.

With a glamorous picture of the actress on the cover and a headline that proclaimed loudly ‘She’s Just Wild About Harry’, the article quoted Meghan speaking openly about her romance with the prince. But Meghan was not happy.

Within hours of the magazine’s pre-publication copies being distributed, Meghan was on the phone to her public relations firm to tell them ‘hysterically’ of the Palace’s dismay, according to author Tom Bower. 

The author of Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors, said Meghan had been ‘ecstatic’ when first asked to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2017 issue.

According to Bower, the interview was to focus on Meghan’s philanthropy and the celebration of the 100th episode of Suits.

But when she was asked about her relationship with Harry, Meghan replied: ‘We’re a couple. We’re in love.’

The interview was done at Meghan’s home by Sam Kashner, a long-standing contributing editor at Vanity Fair, who admitted before the interview that he had no idea who Meghan was.

As reported by Vanity Fair in 2017, Meghan said: ‘I’m sure there will be a time when we will have to come forward and present ourselves and have stories to tell, but I hope what people will understand is that this is our time.

‘This is for us. It’s part of what makes it so special that it’s just ours. But we’re happy. Personally, I love a great love story.’

Pre-publication copies of Vanity Fair’s September 2017 edition were released to Megan’s PR agency and Buckingham Palace.

‘Her unexpected openness about Harry took the Palace by surprise, Bower wrote.

‘Like a thunderclap, the interview triggered sensational reactions: Meghan had used her relationship with Harry to promote herself,’ he said.

Valentine Low wrote in his book Courtiers that Meghan also thought it was racist to say she’s ‘wild’ about Harry because of the connection to Judy Garland’s 1939 song featuring blackface dancers.

‘She was very unhappy with how that had been handled,’ said a source. ‘And she was looking to throw blame in every possible direction, despite it having been a positive piece.

‘She did not like the photographs. She thought the story was negative. She was upset that it was about Harry, not about her.’

And it seems the fallout of the cover continues to trickle on to this day. 

In March, former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described Meghan as ‘The Undine Spragg of Montecito’.

His reference was to the main character in The Custom of the Country, a tragicomedy by author Edith Wharton that was published in 1913.

The book tells the story of Spragg, a social climber who moves from the Midwest to New York to experience the high life.

Spragg then marries a man from Manhattan’s high society, but she’s never satisfied because of her greed and ambition.

In a savage takedown published in January, headlined American Hustle, contributing editor Anna Peele spoke to ‘dozens’ of sources connected to the duo who labelled the Sussexes as the ‘most entitled, disingenuous people on the planet’.

Perhaps this cooling of relations between Meghan and the publication laid the seeds for the latest bombshell article, which claimed that some people who worked with Meghan ended up needing therapy and that she allegedly didn’t come up with the idea for her Spotify podcast, Archetypes.

The piece also stated that the Duchess of Sussex could be ‘really, really awful’ when things did not go her way.

According to The Times, the couple have dismissed the allegations with sources close to the Sussexes describing them as ‘distressing’.

Meghan’s first foray with Vanity Fair began in the summer of 2017 when Meghan wanted a new PR team to help her in the U.S.

She hired PR adviser Keleigh Thomas Morgan from New York-based agency Sunshine Sachs, whose clients have included Hollywood stars Salma Hayek, Jane Fonda and Natalie Portman.

The New York-based agency had been advising Meghan since her days as an actress on legal drama Suits, before she ditched them in 2022.

Meghan agreed to do an issue with Vanity Fair in the autumn, which Kensington Palace signed off on, but said that Keleigh could sort out the negotiations.

Meghan was also described as acting ‘like a Mean Girls teenager’ in the article.

She would reportedly be ‘warm and effusive’ towards employees at the start before turning ‘cold and withholding toward the person she perceived to be responsible’ when something ‘went poorly, often due to Meghan and Harry’s own demands‘.

And Meghan’s bad blood with magazine editors doesn’t end here.

Two years later, Meghan guest-edited the September 2019 Forces for Change issue of British Vogue which featured 15 ‘trailblazing change makers’ on its cover.

It became the fastest-selling issue in the magazine’s 104-year history, selling out in ten days.

Among the advocates featured on the cover were Greta Thunberg, Sinéad Burke, actors Gemma Chan and Jameela Jamil and then-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

But critics pointed out that the Queen was not among the 15 ‘women she admires’ featured, and neither were nurses, doctors, lawyers and teachers.

And questions were raised over why the Duchess only carried out 22 royal engagements in the seven months she spent as an unpaid guest editor.

In the book Battle of Brothers, royal author Robert Lacey wrote about the huge unpaid time commitment Meghan made to the magazine.

He wrote: ‘In the same seven months, January to July 2019, the Court Circular showed the Duchess of Sussex carrying out just 22 royal engagements, less than one per week – though this period did include Meghan’s maternity leave, along with a three-day tour to Morocco with Harry.

‘But why had this “powerhouse” recruit to the highest echelons of the House of Windsor spent seven months labouring so intensively on behalf of British Vogue – entirely unremunerated it must be emphasised again – while doing hardly any work at all for the British Royal Family?’

Three years later, the duchess was due to appear on the cover of British Vogue at the same time as Meghan’s keynote appearance at the One Young World Summit in Manchester in September 2022.

But Conde Nast insiders claim it was abruptly pulled and scrapped completely.

An insider told MailOnline that Meghan was being ‘difficult about making it a cover’ and her team were ‘insisting on particular straplines’.

She then found herself at loggerheads with not only the editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, but also the Queen of fashion magazines, Anna Wintour.

The insider said: ‘Anna heard about it, and just like banned her and said, “That’s it. We don’t want to do this”.

‘And so she didn’t get the cover, and I guess she didn’t even get the story. [Edward Enninful] probably agreed with Anna that you don’t get to call the shots on who’s on the cover. That’s absolutely an Editor’s decision.

‘Anna was p***** off. Anna was frustrated with all the micromanaging, and just was like, “All right. That’s it. She can’t have the cover and we’re not doing the story”.’

Meghan’s behaviour led the legendary former Tatler editor Tina Brown to blast the former Suits actress for having ‘the worst judgement of anyone in the entire world‘.

Brown, who wrote the bestselling royal biography The Palace Papers, said: ‘The trouble with Meghan is that she has the worst judgment of anyone in the entire world. She’s flawless about getting it all wrong.

‘I mean, she just is. She really is a perfectionist about getting it all wrong.’