by Dylan Howard
When the ten-month training course ended in April 2006, Harry and his new friends celebrated in style, with a raucous night out that ended up in a tacky strip club, Spearmint Rhino, in Slough, a dull town on the outskirts of London and the last place one would have expected to bump into a senior member of the Royal Family at 3 a.m. The inevitable media scandal blew over quickly when one of the dancers present that night sold her story but admitted Harry had politely, if woozily, turned down the offer of intimate entertainment.
Chelsy, though irritated with Harry’s boorish behavior, was smart enough to realize he was just letting off steam with his mates after a challenging year. Once the hangover had dissipated, Harry “passed out” again. This time it wasn’t due to booze; it was at the annual graduation parade at Sandhurst, in front of a beaming Queen, Princes Charles and Philip, and his brother William, now himself a new recruit beginning life at the Academy.
PART FOUR
A STAR IS BORN
Whatever it was, they married and had me.
—MEGHAN MARKLE
Barely a year after marrying in a Hindu ceremony at the Self Realization Fellowship Temple, off Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, in 1979, Doria Ragland and Thomas Markle announced they were expecting a child. Their union hadn’t been easy, in a state where barely fifty years ago, mixed marriages were still regarded as unconstitutional. While the laws had changed, society was still catching up, and by the end of the 1970s, Thomas and Doria still attracted plenty of attention, suspicion, and casual racism.
Doria’s deep spirituality informed the couple’s choice of wedding venue. As a follower of the Hindu yoga guru Yogananda, Doria joined the likes of Steve Jobs, Mariel Hemingway, George Harrison, and Linda Evans in following the great man’s scriptures. She wanted to get married to Thomas in a place where color and background were irrelevant. “I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques,” Meghan wrote on her blog some years ago. “Whatever it was, they married and had me.”
A year after the wedding, Doria was pregnant. Thomas was delighted. His two grown-up kids, Thomas Jr. and Yvonne, fought like cats and dogs, and neither showed much interest in anything other than themselves. Partly, this was down to their turbulent childhood since Thomas and their mother split. Partly, it was down to the environment in which they were living. Teens in LA weren’t especially woke at that time, and what with Thomas Jr.’s reported fondness for weed and indolence and Yvonne’s bizarre flirtation with Satanism and the goth lifestyle, it was no surprise that Thomas found so much comfort and strength in the diminutive, yet solid presence of Doria Ragland.
The pregnancy was hard. Los Angeles in the summertime is a swampy hot mess, and for Doria, the daytime temperatures in the mideighties were painful and difficult to bear. But it was all worth it when, at 4:46 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 1981, Doria delivered a baby girl. They called her Rachel Meghan. She was quickly nicknamed “Flower” by the family.
“He was just so, so happy,” recalled Meghan’s stepbrother, Thomas Jr. “He spent every single minute he could with her. My dad was more in love with her than anyone else in the world and she became his whole life. He was just blown away by Meghan.”
Yvonne, meanwhile, aged seventeen and more interested in her gang of friends and social life than her father’s new baby, clearly resented the newcomer. Thomas’s regular absences during her traumatic childhood were no doubt fresh in her mind.
As Thomas delighted in the first years of his youngest daughter’s life, his professional profile grew significantly. The long hours and hard work were paying off, as Tom won an Emmy for his work on General Hospital after two nominations.
This meant he was now spending almost ninety hours a week at work, something his young wife was understandably less than ecstatic about, especially now that she had a baby to look after. The neighborhood, meanwhile, was still predominantly white. Out and about with baby Meghan, alone as usual while Thomas was at work, Doria soon tired of passers-by stopping to admire the young baby and assuming Doria was hired help—Meghan’s nanny.
As had been the case in his first marriage, Thomas’s long hours and devotion to his job at the expense of family life began eroding the secure domestic unit the couple had created. Despite his love of his daughter and his joy in watching her thrive, Thomas just couldn’t find a way to make it work with Doria. Arguments between the couple began to dominate their marriage, much to the weariness of Thomas’s two elder children, who had been here before. By the time Meghan was two years old, the couple had separated, divorcing five years later.
Thomas seemed heartbroken by the split, even though Doria cited his long absences from home as being its primary cause. He claimed Doria hadn’t given the marriage enough time to work. Whatever it was, the couple was now living separately, Meghan with her mother during the weekdays and with her father on weekends. The latter often provided the young girl with the chance to hang out on sets of popular TV shows, doing her homework and reading or playing around with other members of the cast and crew.
Some years later, Meghan reflected, with amusement, on how her worlds would collide in those years. “Every day after school for ten years, I was on the set of Married … with Children, which is a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up,” she said. Nevertheless, her after-school afternoons on set with her father gave Meghan an invaluable insight into the machinations of the process. She absorbed the world of studios, actors, crew, and technicians and the extraordinary levels of patience, skill, and talent required by all. The lessons would stand her in good stead in her own television career.
As Meghan grew older, she and her mother’s bond deepened, the pair coming to rely on each other for emotional and spiritual support during the hard years following the breakdown of the marriage. Doria had moved to Los Feliz, just south of Hollywood, where she was training to be a social worker. Later, she would return to her first love, yoga, and run classes around the neighborhood.
“My mom has always been a free spirit,” recalled Meghan. “She’s got dreadlocks and a nose ring. She just ran the Los Angeles Marathon. We can just have so much fun together, and yet, I’ll still find so much solace in her support. That duality coexists the same way it would in a best friend.”
Thanks to Thomas’s then-healthy income, young Meghan attended crèche (daycare), and later classes, nearby at the exclusive Little Red School House. There, she excelled in sports and drama, appearing at the age of five onstage to sing “The Wheels On The Bus” and school productions of Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story. She took a lead role in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, too (the chorus line of which also featured an unassuming blonde kid named Scarlett Johansson).
Living in a modest home with Doria but attending a posh girls school instilled a strong appreciation of the broad spectrum of privilege, wealth, and snobbery that was part of Hollywood society. Unlike many of her peers, Meghan went out of her way to befriend fellow students who were struggling with bullies or racial discrimination. At school, in the company of children from a wide range of ethnic and economic backgrounds, Meghan’s awareness about her ethnicity began to materialize into a major issue for her for years to come. According to a fellow pupil’s anecdote, some of Meghan’s snootier classmates asked if she would join their new “White Girls Only” club. Young Meghan’s reaction was stinging.
It wasn’t just fellow pupils who found themselves in Meghan’s firing line. After watching commercials in a social studies class, Meghan was appalled by a spot for a dishwashing liquid that ended with the tagline “Women of America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” A letter-writing campaign followed, in which the ten-year-old expressed her anger not only toward Procter & Gamble, the corporation behind the ad, but also to First Lady Hillary Clinton, Nickelodeon newsreader Linda Ellerbee, and feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. While Procter & Gamble never formally acknowledged Meghan’s letter, the wording on the offending commerci
al was swiftly amended to “People all over America.”
Meghan’s successful activism led her to join the National Organization for Women, the equal-rights group founded in 1966. Speaking many years later, she looked back on this time with pride. “It was at that moment I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of eleven, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality.”
By the time Meghan had reached her early teens, she had traveled with Doria to some of the most poverty-stricken parts of the world, including slums in Mexico and Jamaica, where she had been dismayed to encounter children literally scrabbling for food in the dirt. The experience left a deep impression on the thirteen-year-old, and when she returned home to Los Angeles, she went to see if she could volunteer at the Hippie Kitchen, a nondenominational charity running soup kitchens in the city’s dire Skid Row district. “It was rough and raw,” she remembered. She stayed away for the time being, intimidated by the drug-crazed homeless people who would line up for bread and beans and feeling a little out of her depth.
By now, Meghan had an after-school job at a frozen yogurt shop, the rather wonderfully named Humphrey Yogart. She also, by now, was attending a secondary school, Immaculate Heart, and had moved to live with her father, whose home was nearer to the school. Thomas’s fortunes had dipped, and it was only a lucky $750,000 win in the California lottery in 1990 that allowed him to send Meghan to the highly ranked all-girls school. (As of 2019, the school costs $16,850 annually to attend.) Even though his daughter was unaware of his win—as was Doria, from whom Thomas Sr. especially wanted to conceal it, lest it affect their divorce settlement—she repaid his investment abundantly.
Immaculate Heart in Los Feliz is a girls’ school steeped in religious and philosophical teaching. According to its motto, its aim is for students “to become women of great heart and right conscience through leadership, service, and a life-long commitment to Christian values.”
At Immaculate Heart, Meghan built on her successful academic record and extracurricular activities in music, sports, drama, and activism, as well as becoming something of a leader among the girls. “Meghan was the kind of student who, even though she had a circle of friends, she was friendly and welcomed everyone,” remembers teacher Christine Knudsen, who taught a senior elective Markle took on spirituality and literature. Immaculate Heart was a place where independence, toughness, and spirit were encouraged, not smothered.
Former student Kate Sullivan, interviewed by Charles A. Coulombe in the Catholic Herald, remembered the school’s feisty spirit: “As I recall, the line between political assembly and liturgy was fairly thin in my early days at Immaculate Heart—and that felt perfectly natural. It was no big deal to receive Communion from the nuns, or to hear a sermon delivered by a woman, or to sing ‘We Are a Gentle Angry People.’”
“[Meghan] had a lot of depth, probably because of her own experiences and hard knocks growing up,” Knudsen added. “She’d take conversations to a deeper level.”
Another Immaculate Heart teacher, Maria Pollia, also recalls Meghan with admiration and fondness.
“Meghan was always happy, raising her hand to ask questions and engaged in class discussions,” said Pollia. “She was also a very unusually compassionate person and developed that compassion quite early in her life.”
It was Pollia who inspired Meghan to return to Skid Row and the Hippie Kitchen, where she herself was a volunteer. Meghan explained how, three years prior, she had tried a day’s volunteering at the Kitchen but had been nervous. Now, as Pollia sought to instruct her charges in the ways of Catholicism and the necessity of helping others over one’s own fears, Meghan asked her for advice.
“Meghan approached me after class and said, ‘You know, when I was about thirteen, I volunteered at a kitchen on Skid Row and I was really scared. But I really, really, really want to go back. How did you do it?’”
Interviewed for the book The Game Changers: Success Secrets from Inspirational Women Changing the Game and Influencing the World, Meghan remembered how Pollia inspired her to volunteer again.
“I remember [Maria Pollia] told me that life is about putting others’ needs above your own fears,” she said. “Yes, make sure you are safe and never, ever put yourself in a compromising situation, but once that is checked off the list, I think it’s really important for us to remember that someone needs us.”
“She created relationships with the people who were at the Kitchen because she would come back,” Pollia recalled. “Not once, but throughout her entire junior and senior year at Immaculate Heart.”
“Meghan was really charismatic and was a very hard worker and very focused and you could tell she was going to do something special with her life,” another of Meghan’s fellow pupils recalled. “She was bubbly, optimistic, and positive. She was also very focused and had her eye on the prize—she knew where she wanted to go to college and she knew she wanted to do drama.”
It’s hardly surprising that such an accomplished, popular, and outgoing girl as Meghan was inundated with requests for dates and romantic trysts during her time at Immaculate Heart. Despite the school’s innocent name, there was no lack of activity buzzing between the school’s students and those neighboring boys’ establishments such as Loyola High School and St. Francis.
Meghan dated her first serious boyfriend, Luis Segura, for almost two years between 1997 and 1999, becoming close to the Segura family. She was remembered as “sweet and fun” by Luis. In April of 1999, she began seeing Giancarlo Boccato, her date for the Immaculate Heart Junior Senior Prom in April that year. However, despite the buzz among the guys that Meghan encountered wherever she went, from stage to soup kitchen, school to sorority club, she kept her rep for composure and flourishing sense of style. Interestingly, in these ways, she echoed that of another student, some four thousand miles away in the United Kingdom, one Catherine Middleton.
MEGHAN: STEPPIN’ OUT
Meghan’s love of theater and drama got serious at Immaculate Heart. At this time, her acting ambitions were confined mainly to practicing award speeches in front of her bedroom mirror, using a hairbrush for a microphone, according to those who knew her at that stage of her life. At Immaculate Heart, she embraced the drama department, becoming president of the Genesian Society, a group of students who followed drama festivals and stage plays. Meghan had found the perfect environment to turn her dreams of acting into reality and even roped her father into bring his lighting skills to school productions. It gave Thomas a chance to appreciate his daughter’s innate drama talents. He would often throw in the odd bit of advice learned from his own theater and television work, instructing her how to stand, move onstage, and project.
“She had the talent and focus to back it up,” said a fellow member of the Genesian Society. “You could tell she knew the work it would take and she was willing to put in the work.”
The school’s proximity to Hollywood meant that Immaculate Heart had no problem getting well-known acting coaches to visit the premises. One such luminary was Gigi Perreau, whose films in the 1940s and 1950s had made her one of the best-known child acting stars of all time. Perreau recalled Meghan as one of the most responsive and dedicated students she had taught. Speaking to Meghan’s biographer Andrew Morton, she remembered a “skinny kid who developed and blossomed into a beautiful and confident young woman.
“She was spot-on, learned her lines when she had to, very dedicated, very focused. She was a wonderful student, a lovely girl. I knew she would be something special.”
Meghan’s acting roles grew in range during her time at Immaculate Heart. From appearances in productions of Annie, she went on to tackle meatier roles in Stage Door, Steppin’ Out, and Back Country Crimes. However it was outside Immaculate Heart where Meghan took on the most challenging acting roles she had yet encountered. In January 1999, she blazed through auditions to secure the role of Jocasta, the lead in the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex at the nearby boys’ school, St. Francis High School. “Sh
e had charisma,” recalled the school’s drama director, Manny Eulalia. “Meghan was a standout. A lot of pupils went to the show just to see [her], she certainly had a fan club.”
If Meghan had impressed the boys of St Francis with her performance in Oedipus Rex, it was her next role, at the neighboring Loyola High School’s production of the 1955 comedy musical Damn Yankees that made her a local sensation. Taking the star role as slinky seductress Lola Banana, she wowed audiences in a sequined leotard, performing a risqué song and dance routine. Audiences were stunned with Meghan’s mastery and control. Maria Pollia was present backstage that evening, in raptures. “That night, a star was born.”
In June 1999, Immaculate Heart held its annual graduation ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl. That year, among the soon-to-be alumnae of the school, one individual made a characteristic splash, gathering up the biggest cache of end-of-year prizes and awards reflecting her proficiencies from theater to sports to charity work. Who else could it have possibly been?
At eighteen, Meghan Markle’s future was sunny. She had left Immaculate Heart one of its most celebrated, popular, and accomplished students, having overcome her earlier shyness, insecurity, and uncertainty over who she really was. The trauma of her parents’ separate lives had healed for the most part (yet her relationships with her parents and siblings could still hit rocky patches). She had become a regular at the Hippie Kitchen, a friendly face serving beans and salad to the inhabitants of Skid Row, never making a big deal of it and taking the time to get to know the men and women who lived in the most appalling poverty and hardship. Her acting career had taken off and was building up momentum. Meghan was discovering she had a natural flair and presence onstage and, crucially, the ability to project and perform. She and Doria were solid, a little partnership that balanced and grounded them both as it had done over the vicissitudes of the past eighteen years. Now, as she gained acceptance into Northwestern, she planned to study English, perhaps pursue a career in law, politics, or civil service. Everyone agreed, Meghan was one to watch. She felt positive and energized about her future. It was almost time to go to college—but first, there was a gap year to enjoy.