Prince Harry and Meghan Markle can’t split — because “their value is in being a couple,” a source told Page Six amid claims that Markle shopped a potential post-divorce book.
A Vanity Fair cover story published last week alleged that the Duchess of Sussex’s team had quietly held talks with an unnamed publishing house to “gauge interest” in the idea for the book.
However, a source who has worked closely with the couple told Page Six, “Meghan and Harry know that they are tied together, their value is in being a couple — even if they wanted to split, they couldn’t. And honestly, they are obsessed with each other. They are just two narcissists.”
Another insider familiar with the original $20 million Penguin Random House deal the two signed in 2021 said they had never heard anything about a divorce tome.
However, it does appear the highly-publicized deal — which, as we previously reported, was originally believed to include books on “leadership” and “wellness” — seems to have quietly dissipated after Harry’s best-selling memoir, “Spare.”
Page Six has reached out to Random House and Sussex reps.
“They are worth more together,” said the publishing insider. “It doesn’t benefit them to be apart — they have all their deals together. I think the Random House deal is much like the Netflix deal: Netflix just said ‘Yes’ to everything because they wanted to get the docu-series [‘Harry & Meghan’]. So they said, ‘Ok, we’ll take the ‘Polo’ show’ and let’s see what happens with Meghan’s lifestyle show.”
Vanity Fair’s source reportedly clarified that the so-called “divorce” book was meant to be about the aftermath of a split from Harry, and not Markle’s first husband, Trevor Engelson, whom the “Suits” alum divorced in 2014.
Indeed, Page Six has been told that Markle never likes to broach the subject of Engelson.
Vanity Fair’s report noted that the book meeting did not signify that the Sussexes were breaking up, but was meant to see if the publisher would “theoretically be interested” should a divorce ever come to fruition.
According to VF, the publisher never made an offer and no manuscript was produced because there was no divorce to write about.
Page Six is told there was talk of Harry splitting his memoir into two parts before he decided to keep it to one book. “Spare” has now sold more than 6 million copies worldwide and was the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time, according to Guinness World Records.
Markle, for her part, has only released a children’s book.
Within the seemingly scuppered Random House deal, Page Six was told there were also plans for a potential wellness book by Markle, as well as a book penned by the couple and believed to be about leadership.
Harry addressed divorce speculation at the New York Times’ 2024 DealBook Summit last December, saying, “Apparently we’ve bought or moved house 10, 12 times. We’ve apparently divorced maybe 10, 12 times as well. So it’s just like, what?’”
Read the full article here
