J. R. Moehringer gives high praise to Prince Harry, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy being the ghostwriter of Harry’s best-selling memoir “Spare.”
In a new essay for The New Yorker, Moehringer recalls getting into a shouting match with the Duke of Sussex over Zoom at 2 a.m. one morning last summer, after two years of working together. Harry wanted a comeback added to an anecdote in the book, and he and Moehringer had been battling over that line for months.
The anecdote concerns a training exercise in which fake terrorists tormented Harry in a test of battlefield mettle. As Moehringer recalls, Harry was “hooded, dragged to an underground bunker, beaten, frozen, starved, stripped, [and] forced into excruciating stress positions by captors wearing black balaclavas” during the exercise. But one of the fake terrorists crossed a line with a “vile dig” about Princess Diana during the exercise and apologized for the comment afterward.
Harry wanted Moehringer to include something he said to his captors, a comment the prince thought refuted other people’s years-long criticism of his intelligence. But Moehringer — who has ghostwritten other celebrity memoirs — thought it was unnecessary to include the comeback, finding it “somewhat inane.”
In service of a story that would have the “greatest resonance for the widest range of people,” Moehringer told the prince that “people don’t need to know anything more than that [the] captors said a cruel thing about [Diana],” he writes.
After a long silence, Harry agreed, and flashed a “mischievous grin” at Moehringer, saying, “I really enjoy getting you worked up like that,” as the ghostwriter recalls.
In the New Yorker piece, Moehringer also recalls visiting Harry and Meghan Markle at their home in Montecito, Calif., once with his wife and children.
“Harry won the heart of my daughter, Gracie, with his vast ‘Moana’ scholarship,” Moehringer writes. “His favorite scene, he told her, is when Heihei, the silly chicken, finds himself lost at sea.”
And Moehringer says Meghan gave him warm hospitality the two times he visited her and Harry by himself and stayed in their guest house. “Meghan and [son] Archie would visit me on their afternoon walks,” he wrote. “Meghan, knowing I was missing my family, was forever bringing trays of food and sweets.”
“Spare” was published this January, and the memoir was a record-breaking success. At a book party, Harry gave a speech in which he thanked Moehringer. “He mentioned my advice, to ‘trust the book,’ and said he was glad that he did, because it felt incredible to have the truth out there, to feel — his voice caught — ‘free,’” Moehringer writes. “There were tears in his eyes. Mine, too.”