Shawn Hubler and Livia Albeck-Ripka
Los Angeles: It was the world’s fastest-breaking change of address: after moving to the United States amid a painful and public break with the royal family, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, were returning to Britain.
The Telegraph, a staid British newspaper, preceded the news with the most prized of Fleet Street boasts, “Exclusive”.
“MEGXIT BOMBSHELL,” trumpeted The Sun, a raffish tabloid. It also claimed “WORLD EXCLUSIVE” for good measure.
But in Montecito, the sun-soaked, celebrity-studded California community where the couple have lived since 2020, word of the royal departure spread at the usual pace: leisurely.
“Want to know how much a non-story it is up here?” asked Ann Louise Bardach, an author and journalist who lives in the region. She scrolled local news sites. The police were searching for a bank robber. The nearby Santa Barbara Zoo had euthanised a capybara. Yet there was “not one word” about the royals’ departure, Bardach said.
“I’m not saying it’s not a big story.” But “look who the neighbours are,” she added. “Oprah.”
It has been six years since Harry and Meghan went into self-imposed exile, torn by family feuds in Buckingham Palace and efforts to carve out their own professional identities.
Montecito, where they settled, is about 160 kilometres north-west of Los Angeles, the megalopolis where Meghan grew up and gained some prominence of her own as an actor before their 2018 marriage. The community has a population of fewer than 9000 people and an idyllic landscape dotted with the second homes of showbusiness people and moneyed Californians.
Some residents wondered whether the royal couple might have taken comfort in the high rate of fame per capita in the enclave, whether it had granted them relative anonymity.
But now Harry and Meghan were pulling up stakes in time for their two children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5, to start school in Britain in September.
In interviews in Montecito and nearby Santa Barbara, many locals reacted with nonchalance, as if they had spotted a moving van a few streets over.
“If they prefer it there, that’s for them, then. To each their own,” said Ryan Souza, 21, a Wake Forest University student from Montecito. He was taking an evening stroll through downtown, where loafer-wearing men and gold-adorned women dined al fresco.
Buz Bonsall, 76, who has lived in the unincorporated community since high school, said he knew all about the couple and believed he glimpsed them from afar. As for what he thought of their leaving, he had one word: “Nothing.”
“They can go where they want,” Bonsall said.
Another who saw the couple often, if only in passing, said she had been surprised.
Gina Pennino, 72, who lives around the corner from the couple’s gated estate in the Riven Rock area of Montecito, said that though she often saw the family while walking her dog, she had “no idea they were moving”.
“We don’t really know them. They wave. They drive. They close the gates,” Pennino said.
So it has gone for the time that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their two children have lived in Southern California: international fame, low local profile.
Their multimillion-dollar compound was in an area notable for tall privacy hedges and gated driveways. The ultrawealthy neighbours have included Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe, Gwyneth Paltrow, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Oprah Winfrey and many others.
The couple filmed their 2022 documentary series Harry & Meghan, episodes of which Netflix said were viewed in more than 28 million households, at a nearby Mediterranean-style estate. This week, at a gathering across the road by a swimming pool, a woman held the hand of a small child and a wine glass. No one at the party wanted to talk.
Roy Lee, a Santa Barbara County supervisor whose district includes Montecito, said he was sad to see the couple go and that they had been a “big part of the community”.
Other residents said Harry and Meghan were memorable less for their civic involvement than for their security apparatus. They had little personal interaction with the couple but knew their bodyguards, dog walkers, nannies and assistants on sight.
Neighbours recounted awkward moments when errant dogs dashed onto the couple’s property as the gates opened, or when friends accidentally set off alarms while trying to drop off, say, a birthday party invitation for one of the children.
In April, the couple’s black SUV pulled up abruptly at Little Mountain, a hip Montecito restaurant, and Harry and Meghan swept with a security escort past regular diners waiting for a table, through the front door and into a private dining room. (Actor Michael Keaton showed up on the same night.)
The protection was a necessary inconvenience, the couple often said.
When Harry and Meghan first moved to California, the paparazzi were so relentless that the couple filed suit in 2020, accusing unnamed defendants of deploying drones and telephoto lenses to take unauthorised photos of Archie, then 14 months old. In a 2021 interview with Winfrey, the couple revealed how racist attacks by the British tabloids had strained Meghan’s mental health.
An owner of the Mad Dogs & Englishmen Bike Shop, Jennifer Blevins, said she and her partner were slammed on social media in 2023 after they gave a bicycle to Archie on his fourth birthday and the coverage “went viral”.
“We didn’t fully appreciate how many people dislike Meghan,” Blevins wrote in an email. But Blevins, whose husband is also from the United Kingdom, said the duchess “was so kind” and hoped the family would “be happy wherever they land”.
Elizabeth Holmes, a Los Angeles-based journalist who has written frequently about the royal family, said it made sense that Harry and Meghan would return now, given the declining health of King Charles III.
“What remains to be seen is what non-royal life looks like for the Sussexes in the UK. How much, you know, British tabloid attention will they get? And the privacy that they’ve given their children, will that be able to continue?” Holmes said.
D.J. Waldie, a cultural historian and author in Southern California, said the royal departure was unsurprising. The region’s relationship with celebrities, he said, has long been characterised by “a degree of fickleness”.
“Celebrities often love a lot of things about Southern California, but then all of a sudden, they don’t,” he said. “And when that happens, they often return to their native habitat with colourful stories of a strange, unusual, exotic place that isn’t quite real.”
Souza said although England – royal throne of kings and sceptred isle – might be the right move now for the family, he would make a different choice.
“I would stay here,” Souza said. “Can’t beat the weather.”
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
