"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles," said the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And after almost 18 months of married life, and with her first choice of home, Windsor Castle, denied, the Duchess of Sussex still hasn't slotted into the role the palace, the media and the British people had defined for her from the moment she posted a picture of two bananas spooning on Instagram, which confirmed things were serious.
Square pegs and round holes were always going to be an issue for a woman who refuses to have her edges filed down to fit; a TV star who didn't come this far to wear high-street clothing, no matter what the PR Svengalis urge (she reportedly had the most expensive wardrobe of any royal in 2018); a forward-thinker whose impulses (to re-write chunks of her Suits scripts) had always paid off in Hollywood.
But whereas scrawling inspirational messages on bananas (again) for sex workers gets you anointed humanitarian of the year in the pages of US Weekly, in the UK it only gets you mass derision. No wonder Markle was caught on camera two months ago harrumphing to pop star Pharrell Williams: "They [the Brits] don't make it easy."
They don't. And we haven't. But if there's one thing LA does better than anywhere else on earth, it's make things easy. Everything from dentistry to celebrity and hypocrisy is facilitated in the place actress Emily Mortimer once called "a beauty parlour at the end of the universe".
And Malibu – where the Duke and Duchess have been looking for "a bolthole", according to Edmund Fry, an old café owner friend of Markle's – is a celebrity enclave within the biggest celebrity enclave on the planet. A little slice of A-list-stuffed heaven populated by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cindy Crawford, it's a place with a sufficiently limited grasp of royal terminology to welcome "homesick" Markle back a princess. It could be her very own principality.
According to Fry, who has revealed Markle's intention to seek refuge there, the privacy afforded stars in LA is one of the city's biggest draws. "It is possible to live stress-free and out of the glare of publicity here. Many celebrities with families live their lives day-to-day without making a big deal of their fame." And it's true that an invisible forcefield surrounds the stars out there, repelling any intrusion or negativity.
I've watched Anne Hathaway wait in line in a supermarket queue without her being given so much as a second glance, and seen Meryl Streep wander in and out of Chateau Marmont unnoticed.
I've listened to a top action star brag about his ferocious heterosexuality… only to find myself seated at a neighbouring restaurant table that very night as he, his boyfriend and their miniature schnauzer enjoyed a candlelit supper.
I've witnessed a famous married British television star carouse his way through the city, and heard an LA neighbour recount how brazenly a still-more famous, married British sportsman "uses my SoulCycle class as a pick-up joint" – both safe in the knowledge that the city protects its famous own.
For that reason, hypocrisy – endemic in Hollywood – isn't just tolerated, but expected. Only in La-La Land can a celebrity spokeswoman for natural ageing look like a human blowfish, such has been her penchant for hardcore injectables for the past two decades.
Only there can an actress fly her CO2-spewing private jet from the ecological award ceremony, where she will tearfully accept her lifetime achievement award (with the battle cry "This is for mother nature!") to the animal welfare rally she spearheaded, barely having taken the time to set down her endangered species-skin handbag.
These people have meditated and green-juiced their way out of the cynicism we Brits are so proud of. Their love of celebrities, like the love a child has for its parents, is unconditional. And although the royal couple's imminent LA adventure will doubtless be described as temporary to start with, it's not hard to imagine how the seagulls soaring over Malibu's Ocean Front Cottage might hold more appeal than the 28-planes-an-hour over Frogmore.
When it emerged last year that the 37-year-old had reportedly asked for air fresheners for St George's Chapel before the wedding because Markle didn't "like its musty smell", somebody should have explained that the musty smell is royalty, antiquity… Britain.
And although Christopher Hitchens once described LA as "mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania – they think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now", Meghan and Harry are young and beautiful now.
So perhaps better they revel in the nonsense, delusion and egomania of that city than slide into bitterness and hostility here.
