The Sunday Times April 24, 2022 21NEWS REVIEW
gossip column for the Montecito Journal.
“But the Invictus Games meant it wasn’t
to be.”
An £11 million house aside, what are
the joys of Santa Barbara? And how do
the royal exiles spend their days here?
Firstly, they’re very much based in
Montecito, the ritziest corner of Santa
Barbara county, alongside their friends
Ellen DeGeneres and Winfrey, and a safe
distance from the students and sugary
cocktails found in the town of Santa Bar-
bara. (Harry has yet to visit Old Kings
Road, a British-influenced bar on Santa
Barbara’s main drag, which has a “No
w***ers” sign in the window.)
In Los Arroyos, the Mexican restau-
rant, I ignore protocol and introduce
myself to Paltrow and Apple, the teenage
daughter she has with Coldplay’s Chris
Martin. “We bought some land here six
years ago,” says Paltrow, explaining that
the newly built property was finished last
year. “We’ve been coming regularly for
six months but I’ve always loved it here.”
I’m interested in the area because Harry
and Meghan live up the road, I say. “Well,
there goes the neighbourhood,” the
Oscar-winning actress replies with a grin.
About a 90-minute drive north of Los
Angeles, the “Cotswolds of California” is
a place of pristine beaches, gated com-
pounds, exercise bunnies and billion-
aires playing real-life Monopoly. So far
the Sussexes have kept a low profile,
staying at home with Archie, who turns
three next month, and 10-month-old
Lilibet.
Although Harry, 37, took five months’
paternity leave when Lilibet was born,
public sightings have been relatively rare.
“Harry and Meghan haven’t become part
of the community, and I think a lot of peo-
ple are bristling about that really. It’s such
a lovely place to go out and they’ve been amillionaire polo professional and Ralph
Lauren model, when the season begins
on May 1.
“It’s one of the most beautiful polo
clubs in America and there is expectation
and hope that Prince Harry will start
playing there,” says Andrew Bossom, a
fellow polo-mad old Etonian living in the
Golden State. “It would be a huge step
into the local community for him.” Harry
has reportedly been practising on a pri-
vate polo field belonging to Pat Nesbitt,
an uber-wealthy hotel magnate.
It’s not all play and no work. A camera
crew trailed the couple in Holland as part
of the £112 million Netflix deal they signed
in 2020. Currently, two series — one
about the Invictus Games; one children’s
animation about the adventures of a
young girl “inspired by influential
women in history” — are in the pipeline.
JR Moehringer, a respected American
ghost-writer, has been working with the
prince on his as-yet-untitled memoir,
which will be released this September.
Harry has promised to give an “accurate
and wholly truthful” account of his life
(for an undisclosed amount) and there
are fears in Buckingham Palace that his
relationships with Camilla, Charles and
William will be particularly picked apart.
It’s not clear how much time Harry’s role
as a chief impact officer, aka “chimpo”,
for BetterUp, the mental wellness app,
takes up.
Meghan’s Spotify podcast, Archetypes,
which will investigate the “labels that try
to hold women back”, launches this sum-
mer. She has allegedly tried to trademark
the word “archetypes”. The couple
signed an estimated £18 million Spotify
deal in late 2020 but, to date, have
released one holiday-themed episode.
One contact who recently quit working
for the streaming giant in America
reported that noses were out of joint and
one Spotify higher-up had grumbled to
her: “We’ve paid Meghan millions to do
f***ing nothing.”
The 40x40 female mentorship
scheme, which Meghan launched on her
40th birthday last August, has not yet
triggered the promised global “ripple
effect”.
Nevertheless, in sunny Montecito,
there is extraordinary goodwill and tight-
lipped loyalty extended to the royal resi-
dents. A professional dog walker, exercis-
ing eight dogs on Butterfly Beach, evokes
a mafia-like culture of omertà: “You don’t
speak about those people around here.”
In a children’s shop, which isn’t selling
Meghan’s 2021 children’s book, The
Bench, the woman behind the till con-
fesses to scaring off some paparazzi look-
ing for the royals. “It breaks my heart
when I see the photographers,” she says.T
wo hours after arriving in
Montecito, I spot my first
A-lister. Gwyneth Paltrow,
looking lithe, tanned and
every inch the off-duty movie
star, walks into the Mexican
restaurant where I’m having
lunch, and nobody bats an
eyelid. In this billionaires’
enclave in California, there is
an unwritten code that the regular Joes
must pretend that their wildly famous
neighbours are also regular Joes.
That discretion is one reason why the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex chose to buy
an £11 million home here — taking out a £7
million mortgage in the process. The pop
star Katy Perry and her actor partner,
Orlando Bloom, who also live in Monte-
cito, became friends with Meghan and
Harry after Bloom offered them advice
about sneaky paparazzi tricks. Almost
two years after moving into his Megxit
mansion, which is nestled in the foothills
of the Santa Ynez mountains and over-
looks the Pacific Ocean, Prince Harry has
stressed that he has settled in nicely.
“Home for me now, for the time being,
is in the States,” he told NBC’s Today Show
while at the Invictus Games in Holland
last week. “We’ve been welcomed with
open arms and have such a great commu-
nity up in Santa Barbara.” It was Harry’s
first big interview since the destructive
sit-down with Oprah Winfrey last March
and many viewed the “open arms” line as
a less than subtle throwing of shade at the
UK and his family’s alleged poor treat-
ment of Meghan.
The couple seem to be loving life on
their 7.4-acre, nine-bedroom, 16-bath-
room estate, which also has a cinema,
gym, tennis court, playground, swim-
ming pool and guest house, and where
round-the-clock security guards tour the
property on golf buggies.
Their recent visit to Windsor for tea
with the Queen, and a brief meeting with
Prince Charles and the Duchess of Corn-
wall, was the first time that Meghan had
set foot in Britain since March 2020. Any
freshly built bridges will have beenshaken by the NBC interview days later, in
which Harry dodged a question about
whether he missed his father and
brother, and voiced concern about
whether the Queen had the “right peo-
ple” around her. With a legal row with the
Home Office about police protection in
the UK rumbling on, it’s up in the air
whether the Sussexes will return en
famille for the Platinum Jubilee in June.
“It’s appropriate that there’s a recon-
ciliation. You don’t want to see them iso-
lated,” says Andrew Morton, author of
Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. “Obvi-
ously, seeing the Queen is important but
for the long-term structure of the royal
family there needs to be some kind of rec-
onciliation between the two brothers
because they are the future.”
In Montecito, some residents were
frustrated by the timing of last week’s
European trip. They’d hoped to glimpse
the prince at a Santa Barbara concert
where Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the British
cellist who found fame after playing at
the Sussexes’s 2018 wedding, performed
alongside his pianist sister last Tuesday.
“There were high hopes that Harry
would appear,” says Richard Mineards, a
British journalist who writes a waspishAfter the Sussexes’ rare return to Britain,
speculation is mounting about whether
the couple will be back for the jubilee. In
the meantime, they’re feeling right
at home in California’s glitziest
suburb, discovers Laura Pullmanno-show,” says Mineards. “There is this
big question of, ‘Where are they?’”
Fun is definitely being had. Harry
walks the couple’s two rescue dogs, Guy
the beagle and Pula the labrador, along
Butterfly Beach, cycles along the water-
front with Archie on the back of his bike,
and has ridden a “wienermobile”, a pro-
motional car shaped as a giant hot dog,
after he asked to have a go. While Archie
is at the local nursery, which is reportedly
a favourite among celebrities and teaches
emotional literacy, mindfulness and sus-
tainability, and Lili is sleeping, Harry tries
to fit in his daily 45-minute meditation.
However, Harry, who is still largely
beloved as Princess Diana’s cheekier son
in America, could soon become more vis-
ible: he’s joining the Santa Barbara Polo
and Racquet Club, according to one
insider. The word on the ground is that
he’ll play alongside his friend, Ignacio
“Nacho” Figueras, the Argentinian multi-I spy Gwyneth and
ask her about the
royal couple. ‘Well,
there goes the
neighbourhood,’
replies the actress
with a grinSanta
BarbaraLos Angeles10 milesMontecito101Harry and Meghan with the Queen shortly after wedding in 2018AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESThe Duke and Duchess
of Sussex’s arrival in
Montecito caused a
buzz even in a town
where Gwyneth Paltrow,
Oprah Winfrey, Harry
Styles, Katy Perry and
Orlando Bloom are seen
out and aboutThe Sunday Times April 24, 2022 21NEWS REVIEW
“I chased a few of them
away one time. I don’t
want that stuff in Monte-
cito, so I was a nuisance.”
Five minutes’ drive up
the road, in Santa Bar-
bara’s visitor centre, the
Irish manager, Ruairi Bat-
eson, explains that one
reason why the rich and
famous move to Monte-
cito is because there are
none of the celebrity
homes bus tours which
are popular in Los Ange-
les. “Harry and Meghan
moved up here and the
paparazzi from LA — the
biggest sharks in the
world — arrived in Montecito,” says Bate-
son. “They were so used to getting away
with stuff but locals and police and every-
thing were like, ‘Get the f*** out’, their
drones were shot down. After about two
weeks, they left, it was like, ‘Oh we don’t
f*** with Montecito’. And that’s why
Harry and Meghan live here.”
Last year, a Hollywood paparazzi com-
pany, Splash News & Picture Agency, filed
for bankruptcy after Sussexes sued them
for taking pictures of Archie while they
were temporarily living in Beverly Hills.
“The low-keyness is the beauty of this
place,” says Bateson, proudly. “There
was a little bit of a buzz for a week and a
half when they arrived, and then it was
like, OK whatever.”
Elsewhere, a young clothes boutique
assistant is desperate to see “the other
British Harry” — the pop star Harry Styles
— who has also been spied in Montecito.
“Harry [Styles] is just the ideal man in so
many different ways,” she says. “I’m in
love with him and I haven’t even met
him.”
At Pierre Lafond, the upmarket delica-
tessen and wine shop around the corner
from the Sussex home, a customer recalls
spotting Harry (Windsor) at the nearby
Loon Point Beach. “I was like, ‘He looks
really familiar’ and then realised who it
was, and my wife was going crazy,” he
says. “I was like, ‘You need to contain
yourself, don’t make a scene’.”
He wants the prince to become a
client for his business looking after a
property’s indoor plants. “The initial
installation [of plants] can cost anywhere
up to $12,000 [£9,000]. The service can
be anywhere from about $400 to $1,000
a month.”
Hiking and eating are the main activi-
ties in Montecito. The couple’s favourite
restaurant seems to be the overrated
Lucky’s Steakhouse, which charges $18
(£14) for a wedge of dressed iceberg let-
tuce and $140 (£109) for a porterhouse
steak.
This is where they’ve come with their
close friend David Foster, the music
mogul, and, on another occasion,
Harry’s cousin Princess Eugenie and her
husband Jack Brooksbank.
They’ve also dined at San Ysidro
Ranch, the hotel owned by Ty Warner,
the billionaire behind Beanie Babies cud-
dly toys, and at the Rosewood Miramar
Beach hotel, which has a private dining
room for VIPs.
When I visit the Rosewood, a falconer
is working hard with Hiccup the hawk to
scare off the seagulls and, at the ocean-
front bar, a guest shares the latest rumour
that Harry and Meghan are eyeing up the
local state schools. “It might fit in with
their politics and all the schools round
here are very good,” she says, sipping a
gin sundowner. “But I don’t know
whether the security would be enough
for them.”
Certainly, the gossip-mill in Montecito
is in full swing. Most locals have heard
that Harry wants to sell up and buy some-
where else nearby. One woman’s facialist
heard that they recently gave up trying to
get takeaway burgers from In-N-Out, the
trendy fast-food joint, due to security
logistics. Another woman believes the
US supermarket rag tittle-tattle that
Harry is sleeping in the guest house due
to marital strife.
In Holland, the couple, who will cele-
brate their fourth wedding anniversary
next month, seemed as united as ever,
with Meghan saying that she “could not
love and respect [Harry] more”.
On my last morning in Montecito, I
visit Jeannine’s, a brunch hotspot with
average waffles but celebrity cachet. Sit-
ting outside is a pretty brunette wearing a
tiara and being fussed over by friends.
False alarm: it’s a regular joe in a plastic
tiara who’s celebrating her birthday
breakfast.
Heading to the station, I take a final
punt, asking the Uber driver: “Have you
ever seen Harry and Meghan?” Non-
plussed, he replies: “Harry and Meghan?
Is that a film?”
@LFPullmanwbbILLUSTRATION BY PETE BAKER AND RICHARD WALKER