Let Us Spare A Thought For Prince Harry As He Struggles For Gainful Employment In This America

As a place to live and work, Los Angeles was supposed to be a soft landing for the bracingly handsome new parents and their baby boy, and, in housing anyway, it seems to have been that, if as reported they seem to be ensconced in Tyler Perry’s awe-inspiring mansion and its 17-acre grounds atop Beverly Hills. But Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have come in hard on this landing. In truth, Los Angeles is not an easy town even without the ambient chaos of the patchwork SARS-CoV-2 lockdown or the George Floyd protests, as generations of wannabe actors and auteurs who have come to seek fortune can attest. Not that Harry is going to find himself slinging burgers at the In-N-Out or worse, flogging real estate to newly-minted entertainment moguls — his will be a softer bad go than that.

But Los Angeles is and will continue to be hard ground for several reasons for the recently retired Captain Wales, as the former Blues and Royals chopper pilot was known by his troops during his second tour of Afghanistan. It’s about his career arc to date versus what is actually possible for him now.

At the moment, what’s possible for him on his chosen field of play, that of philanthropic good works, has been heavily reduced by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Admirably, as he left military service after a well-spent decade within it, including study at Sandhurst, earning his helicopter wings, and two deployments to Afghanistan, he founded the annual Invictus Games for disabled military and former military athletes, an effort that has brought them, and him, much fulfillment. Among his charities as a working royal — which seems a couple of geological epochs ago — the Invictus Games stood out as something that the athletic prince could be seen as doing into his dotage, far into the future, as brother to the eventual king. Obviously, as Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and sports leagues the world over struggle to resuscitate their large events in the pandemic’s enduring and very rough wake, the Invictus Games have, also, no home and no audience until the large venues are cleared for action with fans in attendance.

Harry has a brief of undeniably sterling philanthropic credentials and has put in the hard work as one of Britian’s (former) most beloved royals. The problem for him in Los Angeles is that neither philanthropy of the sort that the British royal family practices, nor his distinctive royal pedigree, are necessarily the designated fuel for the kind or the size of the operation that he’s got going, namely, his wife, their son, and their massive domestic needs, chief among them, the need for privacy and security. Harry, and the royal cohort from which he springs, chugs along on the diesel of a thousand-year-old monarchy. Los Angeles runs on schmooze.

Los Angeles is Meghan Markle’s old home town, which is to say, she will have to spin less hard to find a more willing network of fulfillment, and some of that may stand a chance of being a good or even a very good thing. But Harry, largely by his own hand or at his own impulse, has been fully stripped of his network of support.

None of this is to say that Harry is finding day-to-day life in Los Angeles difficult. Sensing fellow travelers in need, and possibly first dibs on an interview, Oprah and her close friend and the man with the land, Tyler Perry, have ridden to the rescue with Mr. Perry’s 17-acre Beverly Hills estate, where they are now thought to be living. Rumors had been strong that the couple had holed up in Malibu at the former Charvet/Burke estate of David Charvet and Brooke Burke, which amounted to an excellent head-feint. They were, finally, unreachable. Before the Covid-19 lockdown — as it was understood by California — hit, the couple did a couple of meal deliveries for a noble food charity. As a concession to the time and the condition of his chosen city, Harry wore a white bandanna over his face.