by Dylan Howard
Despite the trauma of her father’s desertion, Doria sailed through high school, known for her kindness, serenity, and deepening interest in Far Eastern philosophies and spirituality. After graduating from Fairfax High, she worked briefly as a travel agent (to get flight tickets on the cheap), before setting up small businesses designing clothes (“A Change Of Address”) and a company importing incense from India and Nepal. When that folded, she found a new career as a makeup artist. Since Los Angeles was home to hundreds of television and movie studios, Doria quickly found herself in demand and joined one such studio as a trainee.
Working on the set of the soap opera General Hospital, Doria discovered a new world. Amidst the stars, directors, producers, sound guys, wardrobe artists, and general mayhem of a daily Hollywood television show, she kept catching the eye of a tall, slightly balding bearded man. He was in charge of the lighting and people treated him with profound respect. He was clearly some kind of big shot in the studio, but then every time Doria passed him on the set, in a corridor, on the lot—she noticed, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Finally, they went on a date.
It was one of those whirlwind romances that baffle everyone except the lovers themselves. At barely 5’3”, twenty-three-year-old Doria Ragland was gentle yet focused and ambitious, obsessed with yoga, Eastern mysticism, and meditation. Thomas Markle was a thirty-three-year-old divorcé with two small children and a demanding, successful job as an Emmy Award-winning lighting director. But the pair was in love, so much so that within six months of meeting, Doria Ragland became Doria Markle. They were married on December 23, 1979, at a faux Indian temple festooned with gold orb-topped turrets, stone elephants, and plastic Buddhas—“the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple”—on the famed Sunset Boulevard.
The fact that Markle was white scarcely bothered the Raglands. Many years later, her brother Joseph told a newspaper: “We would have accepted pink, black, brown, or red as long as Doria loved him. All that mattered to us was he treated her well.”
Unlike Doria Ragland’s ancestors, Thomas Markle’s forebears were raised in comfort, privilege, and security. The Markles were European in origin, their ancestors originating from Alsace, Germany, where one Abraham Merckel (1630–1698) was considered sufficiently aristocratic to warrant a family coat of arms, a gold feather set between two gold fleur-de-lis on a blue background. His son, Johann Martin Merckel, married Juliana Safftler, and the pair emigrated to the New World sometime in the mid 1700s, where Johann altered the spelling of his name, settled in Pennsylvania, and died in 1777, in York County.
Ironically, compared to Doria Ragland’s, Thomas’s ancestry is harder to trace.
What is known is that generations of Markles lived and thrived in Pennsylvania in relative affluence. Yet, in the wake of Harry and Meghan’s engagement, as genealogists around the world went into overdrive researching the new princess’s family, it emerged that not only was Meghan’s ancestry German, like her new husband’s, but their families may have shared a rather less savory link.
The story goes that, during the reign of the infamous Henry VIII (1491–1547), a plot was hatched by wealthy landowner Lord Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, to overthrow the well-upholstered monarch, who found out and beheaded him. Hussey is alleged to be an ancestor of the Markle clan, along with the nineteenth-century land (and slave) owner, Mary Hussey Smith.
Fast-forward ten or so generations, and a boy named Thomas Wayne Markle was born on July 18, 1944, in Newport, Pennsylvania, the son of Doris May Rita and Gordon Arnold Markle. Doris and Gordon were a blue-collar couple; he worked in the local post office, while Doris looked after Thomas and his two older brothers, Fred and Michael. Despite the family’s low income, childhood was idyllic for Tommy and his brothers. The five Markles lived in a small clapboard house, from where young Tommy would venture out to fish in the Juniata River, swing from monkey vines in the surrounding forests, or pick blackberries for their mom. After spending his teen years picking up holiday work such as stacking bowling pins at the local bowling alley or helping out at the sorting office with his dad, Thomas’s life diverged from that of his brothers’. Unlike Fred, who today is a bishop in Florida, or Michael, who joined the US Air Force and became a diplomat, Thomas craved a future of creativity, drama, and art. Leaving the small town of Newport, he chanced his luck in the Poconos, a mountain resort in the north of the state, where he fell in with a local theater group. Soon, he was manning the stage lights.
It was an education and an inspiration for the small-town boy. Here was everything he had dreamed of—the glamour and excitement of the stage, a creative outlet for his artistic eye, and the chance to excel and, literally, to shine. Once he had learned everything he could from the small Poconos setup, he decided to take the next step in his burgeoning career. Moving to Chicago, he secured a job as a lighting technician at WTTW, a public broadcasting service. On the side, he also worked at the Harper Theater as a lighting director as well as the long-running kids’ show Sesame Street.
Thomas was also, when not working at all hours to further his career, a convivial and handsome young man with a wandering eye for the ladies. The nearby University of Chicago provided Thomas with a steady stream of dates as well as buddies to hang out with, and it was at one of their parties in 1963 that Thomas met a sunny, tall, and vivacious eighteen-year-old student and part-time secretary, Roslyn Loveless. The pair hit it off immediately, bonding over a shared absurd sense of humor, their red hair, and similar heights. It was a quirky, laugh-filled partnership that soon solidified into marriage when the couple exchanged vows the following year. Seduced by Thomas’s playful nature and “light air,” Roslyn and he made a great team. Shortly after the wedding, along came daughter Yvonne, followed by Thomas Junior in 1966.
Initially, Thomas took to family life with gusto. He was a prankster and a joker and always up for a laugh and a good time. Thomas Jr. has happy memories of visiting sets where his dad was directing the lighting, including Sesame Street, an especially cool experience that afforded him much-envied bragging rights at school. Likewise, Thomas Jr. shared his old man’s passion for baseball, the two making frequent trips to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs. It was a fun-filled childhood, but as Thomas’s career flourished—it was around this time he began receiving Emmy nominations for his lighting work, with commensurately generous paychecks—he and Roslyn began quarreling during his increasingly rare spells of downtime. He was spending more and more time at work, something that would become a lifelong habit. He no longer seemed to have enough time for Roslyn and the kids. Those parties he still managed to find the time to attend—he seemed to be too fond of them—and the sight of a hungover, grumpy, bear-like dad came to become a sadly familiar sight to the growing children.
Finally, in 1970, Roslyn and Thomas went their separate ways. It seemed Thomas’s easygoing personality and jokey disposition had vanished, and they both felt young enough to start over. Initially, the break seemed to work out. Thomas was living nearby and had the children on weekends. But by 1975, the lure of glittering new opportunities for a talented lighting director in Hollywood finally proved too much to resist, and Thomas moved to Santa Monica. Roslyn and the kids moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to live with her brother, Richard. Things didn’t go well, despite the stability provided by Richard’s reassuring presence. Among other problems, Thomas and Yvonne had developed an especially hostile sibling relationship, and they were both bullied at school. As a final straw, Thomas Jr. witnessed an armed robbery that went horribly wrong, severely injuring Roslyn’s new partner and traumatizing the young boy.
It was decided that in light of all these issues, it would be better all around if the children moved to Santa Monica to live with their father, despite his punishing work schedule. Thomas had barely seen his kids for the past few years, and this would mean that the pair, now approaching their teenage years, would again get to bask in the limelight of their father’s rocketing career.
But, despite
moving to a large new home on Providencia Street, Thomas and Yvonne’s sibling rivalry only deepened with the onset of adolescence. Tensions ran high. The seeds of a family estrangement were being sown, with Yvonne’s bratty behavior and Thomas Jr.’s frustration at his sister causing bad blood all around.
It was perhaps unsurprising that yet again, Thomas Sr.’s prolonged absences from the house grew longer and longer. To the kids, however, something seemed different about their dad, when they did see him. Against the backdrop of his warring offspring and his heavy workload, he somehow seemed to have become—lighter, more joyful and easygoing. He had, in short, essentially reverted to the father they remembered from their early childhood. It was not long before they found out why. Thomas was in love—and his new girlfriend’s name was Doria Ragland.
A TALE OF TWO COMMONERS
When Prince William and Kate Middleton married, much was made of the fact that she was a “commoner,” one of the minuscule number of nonaristocrats to marry a senior Royal since the 1700s. To detractors, it was another nail in the coffin of dignified British tradition. To fans of the Royals 2.0, it was another welcome sign of a slowly modernizing Royal Family, who preferred love marriages over strategically planned alliances and were taking a more pragmatic approach to the inner circle’s private lives in light of a generation of divorces, mismatches, and heartbreaks.
Amazingly, until 2013, the Queen had to grant permission for all members of the Royal Family to marry, from her firstborn son all the way down the hierarchy. This was due to the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was brought into place to avoid any unpleasantness over spouses who may “diminish the status of the royal house.” Although, arguably, some of the principal members of the family seem to have needed no help in that particular regard over the years, there were sighs of relief throughout the upper echelons of the Firm when the Queen finally repealed the Act. However, the Queen’s approval is still mandatory for the immediate six in line to the throne: Prince Charles, Prince William, Prince George, Princess Charlotte, Prince Harry, and Prince Andrew.
It’s also worth noting, according to my palace insiders, that the reigning monarch is pleased with all her grandchildren’s matches, including working-class rugby player Mike Tindall, who is happily married to Zara Phillips; and son Prince Edward’s wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex, a self-made woman from a business background.
Of course, by the time Queen Elizabeth’s children had reached marriageable age, the marital protocol had already been profoundly disturbed by the antics of the wayward Princess Margaret in the 1950s, who had caused chaos first by trying to secure permission to marry the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend, then actually marrying the louche, decadent society photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Princes Edward and Andrew went on to marry posh commoners, albeit of upper middle-class stock. And famously, by 1981, Lady Diana Spencer, from an aristocratic background, was considered suitable for the heir to the throne, Charles, Prince of Wales (who also carries the royal titles Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay.)
But what constitutes a commoner? In order to understand the royal dilemma, we need to travel back in time, to the sixteenth century, when dark intrigues that beset the Royal Court would have the modern-day Royal Family’s teacups rattling in shock. King Henry VIII had never had a reputation for moral rectitude and restraint; the burly monarch was, after all, a literal lady-killer. But one particular liaison—a four-year affair with his second wife Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary—ended up reverberating down the centuries. Such that he eventually came to be great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather to one Catherine Middleton, born in Berkshire in 1982.
But let’s rewind back to 1524, when Henry’s mistress, Mary, gave birth to another Catherine, who had a daughter of her own, Elizabeth Knollys. In 1578, Elizabeth, then courtier and Maid of Honor to Queen Elizabeth I, married a noble Elizabethan soldier and aristocrat, Sir Thomas Leighton. Their offspring went forth and multiplied across the country. Their fortunes waxed and waned over the centuries, mostly waning. It wasn’t until 1914 and a wedding in the northern city of Leeds that the dynasty that would lead directly to the Duchess of Cambridge came into place, with the wedding of Olive Lupton to a solicitor, Noel Middleton.
The Luptons, though not aristocrats, have been established in Yorkshire since the fifteenth century—the earliest-recorded member being Roger Lupton, who became Canon of Windsor in 1500. They were a powerful presence in the county, as wool manufacturers and merchants, and as civic and cultural figures of some importance—indeed, Michael Middleton’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Arthur Lupton, was a friend of the German writer Goethe.
Hugh Lupton, the brother of Michael Middleton’s great-grandfather, meanwhile, was Lord Mayor of Leeds, and with his wife, Isabella, the Lady Mayoress, hosted visits by Princess Mary during the 1920s. Hugh Lupton’s brother-in-law, Viscount Bryce, served as British ambassador to the United States, where his social circle included Prince Arthur, governor general of Canada. Plainly, Olive was quite a catch for the status-conscious Middleton family.
Noel Middleton himself came from a long line of wealthy attorneys. Once married, the young couple wanted for nothing, other than to raise their family in peace and security. They had four children, Christopher, Anthony, Peter, and Margaret, who enjoyed a life of genteel upper middle-class comfort. A secure, happy unit, the Middletons lived in a sprawling house, in the city’s Roundhay Park district, the children enjoying a fine education and frequent holidays. However, tragedy struck in 1936, when Olive suddenly died of peritonitis at fifty-five, while on a walking holiday in the scenic Lake District.
The family’s youngest son, Peter, was only sixteen when Olive died. Three years later, war was declared, and he and his brothers joined the military. Peter entered the Royal Air Force and flew Mosquito fighter jets as part of the Kent-based 605 Squadron. (He trained at RAF Cranwell, where, over seventy years later, a certain cadet known as William Wales would also gain his flying wings.) His father, who had suffered the loss of his own siblings during World War I, stayed in Leeds, where the manufacturing industries remained luckily unscathed by German bombs—probably due to the fact that the belching black smoke from the factories had obscured the terrain so effectively, German bomber pilots shrugged and went off to batter Coventry or Liverpool instead.
Noel was mightily relieved when his family reunited back in Leeds after the war. On December 7, 1946, his son Peter, by now a commercial pilot, married Valerie Glassborow, the daughter of a prominent local banker. A few years later in 1951, Noel died, leaving a fortune estimated to have been somewhere in the ballpark of £1.5m, divided between his four children.
The Middletons’ increasing wealth over the generations owed much to the foresight of Olive Lupton’s father, Francis, who had wisely set up a trust expressly for the education of his descendants. As the decades passed, the amounts flourished across a wide range of holdings, from the family business, various property holdings across Leeds, and a broad portfolio of stock market investments.
Cushioned with this wealth and celebrated as a wartime flying ace, Peter Middleton and Valerie had four children, the eldest of whom, Michael, was born in 1949 in Moortown, Leeds. One of eventually four children, Michael grew up in privileged surroundings, as had his immediate forebears. Like his father and grandfather, he attended the prestigious Clifton College in Bristol, where he excelled at sports as well as in his studies.
But for young Michael, there was no need to go on to university like his peers. Like his father, flying was in his blood. In 1962, Peter had been chosen to accompany the Duke of Edinburgh as copilot on a two-month tour of South America—forging a bond with the Royal Family that was to echo decades in the future in the most unimaginable way.
Naturally then, upon leaving school, there was only one thing Michael wanted to do—fly. Accordingly, he enrolled at flight school at British European Airways (the forerunner to British Airways). Following six
months training as a pilot, he switched to ground staff training, where he graduated as a flight dispatcher, a senior position equivalent to captain.
With his tall, military bearing, smart uniform, movie-star looks, and quiet, self-possessed character, Michael was never short of admirers. One of them, an equally glamorous and popular new recruit, managed to catch the young flight despatcher’s eye. Her name was Carole Goldsmith.
CAROLE MEETS HER CAPTAIN
In 1974, the British government unveiled the country’s new flagship airline, British Airways. A merger between the UK’s two state-run airlines BOAC and BEA, as well as two smaller domestic airlines, the move was designed to remove rivalry between the airlines and solidify into one flagship brand a new entity to compete in a world of rapidly expanding global travel. As a result, thousands of staff from both existing corporations, as well as new hires, had to be redeployed and reassigned within the new hierarchy.
Travel was still glamorous, far from the depressing cattle class ordeal it is today. Cabin crew had to be elegant and gracious and embody the magic of long-distance travel. For a young man or woman looking to travel the world in style, being part of a cabin crew was a real dream job. The kind of job that would attract someone ambitious, smart, focused, and beautiful.
Among those finding new opportunities in the restructured company was a teenage typist from the former BEA typing pool. Carole Goldsmith, a tall brunette with striking features and a figure that was the envy of her colleagues, had left school at sixteen and worked temporarily at a low-budget clothing store before joining the airline in 1974 on the strength of her Pitman professional qualifications. The life of a typist may have suited someone happy with stability and regularity in their career, but within a couple of drudgery-filled years, Carole was deeply and profoundly bored. Peering into the future, she saw a future in which she might end up being a personal assistant or a company secretary, a role that had no place in her long-term plans to see the world, elevate her social standing, and meet a man worthy of her and her ambitions.