by Dylan Howard
INTELLIGENT HOT MESSES
“Meg always wanted to be famous. She just loved to be the center of attention.”
Meghan and Ninaki Priddy had been best friends since the age of two. The pair had met at Little Red School House and bonded immediately. At the age of eleven, they both moved to Immaculate Heart, where their friendship deepened as the pair navigated adolescence and the trials and tribulations of everyday teen life. They both came from divorced households and supported each other emotionally. The pair remained close after leaving school, and during Meghan’s gap year, they flew to Europe with Ninaki’s family, touring France and the United Kindom, where, one day, the pair were snapped laughing and posing outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, just two ordinary American tourists, among the crowds, on a sunny day in London.
“It was always Niki and Meg. We were so close-knit, we came as a two,” said Ninaki. “We were both honorary daughters in each other’s homes. We were like family. The idea of having a family was something Meg very much wanted, particularly because she was from a family that felt very disjointed. I think when you’re an only child in that situation your friends do become your family.”
Despite their sisterly relationship that had endured since babyhood, the time was fast approaching when the pair knew their paths were to diverge, with Ninaki heading to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. For Meghan, after lots of speculation from her teachers and friends, it was eastward to Chicago and the elite Northwestern University, where she would study English.
Northwestern comprises a dozen colleges and schools across three campuses—a 240-acre campus in Evanston, a twenty-five-acre campus in Chicago, and the newest campus, in Doha, Qatar. A renowned center of research and learning, it had been established in 1853, with a 379-acre tract of land on the shore of Lake Michigan, twelve miles north of Chicago. After completing its first building in 1855, Northwestern began classes that fall with two faculty members and ten students.
Meghan’s early days at the university were a challenge. She’d mentioned to friends and teachers at Immaculate Heart in her final year that her goal was to use Northwestern as her springboard toward a bona fide acting career.
The gregarious, open, ambitious young woman found herself out of the comfortable surroundings of Los Feliz and into a vast new world, where she was a fish out of water. Back in Los Angeles, Meghan was the teacher’s pet, theater star, and boy magnet. Here in Chicago, Meghan was one of a handful of nonwhite students. Her dorm was in the Mid Quads, where, as she recalled in an article she wrote for Elle in 2015, one student introduced herself to Meghan by sneering at her divorced parents, implying this was a result of Thomas and Doria’s mixed marriage. “To this day, I still don’t fully understand what she meant by that,” wrote Meghan. “But I understood the implication. And I drew back—I was scared to open this Pandora’s box of discrimination, so I sat stifled, swallowing my voice.”
“In my memories of Meghan at Northwestern, she was very clear about the need to think about the experiences of people who are not only biracial but of people of color,” one of her former teachers, Drama Professor Harvey Young, told Elle. “She was mindful of the need for gender equality and the importance of championing for women’s rights.”
The specter of racism was never far away. During one trip home from Northwestern, Meghan and Doria encountered a traumatic experience, coming home from a concert. Writing in Elle in 2015, Meghan recalled the event:
I was home in LA on a college break when my mom was called the N-word. We were leaving a concert and she wasn’t pulling out of a parking space quickly enough for another driver. My skin rushed with heat as I looked to my mom. Her eyes welling with hateful tears, I could only breathe out a whisper of words, so hushed they were barely audible: “It’s OK, Mommy.” I was trying to temper the rage-filled air permeating our small silver Volvo. Los Angeles had been plagued with the racially charged Rodney King and Reginald Denny cases just years before, when riots had flooded our streets, filling the sky with ash that flaked down like apocalyptic snow; I shared my mom’s heartache, but I wanted us to be safe. We drove home in deafening silence, her chocolate knuckles pale from gripping the wheel so tightly.
Meghan continued, “I took an African-American studies class at Northwestern where we explored colorism. It was the first time I could put a name to feeling too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community. For castings, I was labeled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’?”
She rushed the coveted Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which was founded in 1870 and was the home to some of the school’s most influential young women. A fellow KKG, Melania Hidalgo, remembered Meghan fitting in perfectly. She said that the girls identified as “intelligent hot messes, all very driven, ambitious, and passionate.”
Meghan soon found her feet and began participating fully in university life, not only following her English program, but a number of minors and ancillary classes that catered to her broad scope of interests. Front and center was the ongoing investigation into her identity and heritage. She also found time to continue her charity work. In March 2000, she undertook the grueling dance challenge, boogying for thirty hours straight in the annual Dance Marathon at the Norris University Center. (She reflected later that the typical weight gain experienced by first years—the “freshman fifteen,” occasioned by plenty of drinking, trips to the campus Burger King, and late nights—didn’t spare her, despite such exertions.)
“Meghan was the recruitment chair of the sorority during her time here,” Hidalgo said. “She was in charge of bringing in the new girls. You have to be a very friendly and outgoing person for that role. I lived in the house for a year and it’s a very fun experience, you end up becoming friends with people you never thought you’d mix with.”
The sorority was a hard-partying, hard-working crew, with a reputation for living it up. “Meghan had a fake ID during her time at the university and told us about it when she visited the campus,” said a student who met Meghan on a return visit to the campus in 2014. “She said she used it to drink at the Keg, which was a popular student bar for years, and she also got a job at a club in the city. You can get two fake IDs for about $100 in Chicago—it’s a little bit sketchy though and not everyone has one.”
Meghan’s charity work continued while at the university. She volunteered for numerous initiatives, such as the Glass Slipper Project, a nonprofit organization that collects donated dresses for teens who are unable to buy their own prom attire.
The university, which counted the likes of David Schwimmer, Warren Beatty, Stephen Colbert, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Zach Braff as alumni, clearly held a huge appeal for the budding actress, who would refer to herself as both Meghan (her original middle name) and Rachel (her Christian name) when attending auditions on and off campus, or casting calls for television commercials. On campus, she explored the history of black theater, as her interest in both black history and drama escalated. Professor Young, who taught Meghan in a seminar on contemporary black theater, recalled her as one of his most engaged pupils. “She was one of those people that I would highlight for students,” Young remembered. “I would say, ‘This is a possibility. This is a path you can pursue if you work hard.’”
Meghan was so committed to theater that during her second year, she pivoted away from studying English. “I knew I wanted to do acting, but I hated the idea of being this cliché—a girl from LA who decides to be an actress,” Meghan told Marie Claire in 2013. “I wanted more than that, and I had always loved politics, so I ended up changing my major completely, and double-majoring in theater and international relations.”
After that change, Meghan began spending more and more time rehearsing and practicing stagecraft at the school’s Virginia Wadsworth Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts, making full use of the faculty Theatre and Interpretation Center.
She also developed some close friendships, which would endure way past graduation. One of her closes
t friends from the early days at Northwestern was a flamboyant African-American, Larnelle Quentin Foster, who was soon confiding in and being emotionally supported by Meghan. Once Meghan made the switch to theater studies, she and Larnelle would visit plays and performances. They also made weekend trips to Larnelle’s family home, where Larnelle’s mother fell in love with Meghan immediately, begging her son to couple up with her. Larnelle was in fact gay and closeted to his family for fear of upsetting his mother, so Meghan was an extra welcome distraction.
Genevieve Hillis, another member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, has remained a tight buddy to the Duchess, to the present day, notably coorganizing Meghan’s lavish baby shower in New York in 2018 with Serena Williams. During a literature class in her first year, Meghan met Lindsay Roth, a New Yorker whose raucous sense of humor, warmth, and energy matched Meghan’s own, ensuring the pair were to become solid friends. Recalling Meghan to People in 2017, Roth said she was “still the same girl I met years ago, with the same values and priorities. She’s selfless, and that’s just a part of who she is and who she was raised to be.”
In a birthday Instagram post to Meghan the year before, Lindsay had paid tribute to her friend as “the most kind, generous, wickedly smart and gorgeous (inside and out) maid of honor a girl could have.”
Meghan’s love life also blossomed at Northwestern. Throughout her time at school, she enjoyed a number of discreet romances, such as her freshman year affair with hunky basketball player Steve Lepore, who was a campus hottie extraordinaire. Unfortunately, Steve had to transfer to North Carolina on a sports scholarship, leaving Meghan momentarily distraught, but she was too busy with university life to get too down.
As Meghan stretched her wings at Northwestern, she embraced the wide range of studies available to her, from classes in ethnic diversification and politics, to a course in industrial engineering. But theater remained her priority. In her final year, she managed to secure an appearance on General Hospital, thanks to Thomas’s intervention. The role was brief—but Meghan had finally made it onto the small screen.
SOUTHERN SOJOURN, HUSTLE TO HOLLYWOOD
Despite her hectic academic and extracurricular schedule, Meghan’s final year at Northwestern saw her seeking to broaden her horizons. Balancing her theater work, Meghan’s joint major in International Relations led her to seek work experience in the US State Department, as she pondered a possible career in politics or diplomatic service. Like many of her classmates, she scoped around for a suitable berth and luckily—through the Markle family’s connections—found one.
Just as her father had discreetly pulled a string here and there to secure Meghan’s television debut on General Hospital, so did his brother Mick, who was rumored in the family to be a CIA spy—although his official role was that of a governmental communications systems specialist.
When his niece sweetly asked if he could help find her an internship, he obligingly arranged for Meghan to take a six-week role as a junior press assistant in the US Embassy in Buenos Aires.
Meghan’s adventure in South America was memorable. Joining the team at the embassy, she quickly adapted to the strange, limited existence of US embassy staff in the dangerous city. At the time, the terror risk was reasonably severe, meaning Meghan’s movements had to be monitored. And, according to Meghan’s biographer, Andrew Morton, talking to London’s Daily Star newspaper, the threat almost turned seriously nasty on one occasion:
“One of the scariest things for her was when she was traveling with a convoy in Buenos Aires. She was with the American convoy that was attacked by demonstrators. She wasn’t hurt but they whacked placards on the vehicles. It was the scariest moment of her life. It really was a horrendous experience for her, it really scared her to death.”
But for the most part, Meghan’s time in Buenos Aires consisted of fairly routine office work, filing, copying, answering phones, and helping out wherever she could. Her cheery, positive approach and dedication impressed itself upon her colleagues, who were so enamored of their intern, they pressed her to take the Foreign Service Officer Test, a rigorous three-hour examination, a daunting hurdle for any prospective candidate for the Diplomatic Corps, that tested a vast spectrum of knowledge. Most uncharacteristically, Meghan failed the test. Still, she had completed six weeks with the embassy and survived the hardships and challenges the role had brought with it. Rumors also had drifted back to the States that Meghan and one of the embassy’s guards, a burly US Marine, had gotten pretty friendly during her time there. Nevertheless, while confident now that a career in frontline diplomacy might not be her calling, she was happy to focus on theater and drama as she returned to Northwestern, for the final time, to graduate.
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Meghan graduated from Northwestern in 2003. After she blazed through school and college, it would have been understandable if Meghan had felt somewhat let down about spending the days chasing up auditions and screen tests back in Los Angeles, in a tattered old SUV. Most of her auditions for roles in advertisements, television, and movies went nowhere. But knowing the acting world was a tough nut to crack, Meghan made sure to stay upbeat, keeping up with friends from college and home, exercising, hanging out with Doria, and having fun.
It was around this time that her bosom college buddy Lindsay Roth, now a casting agent, got Meghan a few lines in an Ashton Kutcher comedy, A Lot Like Love, where she talked the director into expanding her total on-screen dialogue from a “Hi” to five whole lines. Further blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances followed, in TV shows Century City, Cuts, CSI, Without A Trace, and Castle.
To generate some income and keep afloat while she trudged from one television audition to the other, Meghan resourcefully reactivated her calligraphy skills that would later become on show in the infamous letter to her father, offering friends and acquaintances handcrafted wedding invitations. Among her satisfied customers were Robin Thicke and Paula Patton, whose 2005 wedding invites were Markle originals. “I just thought Meghan did a beautiful job,” Patton recounted. “It really is a lost art, and it was so nice to create something without a device that doesn’t use a battery or need to be plugged in.”
Such was the demand for Meghan’s skills that for around a year between 2004 and 2005, she also taught a class in calligraphy, gift-wrapping, and bookbinding at the Paper Source store in Beverly Hills. “It was her part-time job as she was going through auditions,” said Paper Source CEO Winnie Park. “She talked about being a big fan of custom stationery and thinks it’s the best gift to give a friend. She hosted a group of customers and instructed them during a two-hour class on how to do calligraphy.” Writing a few years later on her blog The Tig, Meghan reflected on her enduring love of the written word and how this passion had come to mean so much to her: “I think handwritten notes are a lost art form. When I booked my first [TV] pilot, my dad wrote me a letter that I still have. The idea of someone taking the time to put pen to paper is really special.”
Meghan has since acknowledged that while during this time she projected optimism and ebullience, in private, she had her doubts. Was this the life she’d dreamed of? Hustling from audition to audition, barely bagging roles of more than a few words, and writing fancy wedding invitations for other people? As the 2000s wore on and Meghan headed into her midtwenties, it seemed at times as if she’d made a huge mistake. But as usual, the Markle determination powered through moments of self-doubt and worry. Things might be tough for this budding actress, but as Winston Churchill once famously said, “If you’re going through hell—keep going!”
ONE-WOMAN PITY PARTY
Tall, loud, brash, and confident, Trevor Engelson was the kind of guy friends describe as the “life and soul” of a party. Big, handsome, and charismatic, he had a larger-than-life personality and zest for life that drove a fierce ambition to make it big in the movies. He was the archetypal frat dude, typically found surrounded by a gaggle of friends, in a bar or a club, in the middle of things.
It was at a bar in
West Hollywood, where Meghan was hanging out one night in 2004, that she first heard Trevor’s strident New York vowels booming out across the room. Unexpectedly, the pair collided and began chatting. A flirtation somehow sparked into life. Soon after that, neat, precise Meghan was dating the loud, louche New Yorker. They would be together for the next seven years.
Trevor, from Great Neck, New York, had studied journalism at the University of Southern California, before starting out in Hollywood as a production assistant. Spunky and ambitious, he moved into talent management and founded a production company, Underground, in 2001.
His ultimate goal was movie production, an ambition he was to achieve with varying degrees of success during and after his time with Meghan. Initially, though, his irrepressible energy and go-get-’em spirit was like a shot in the arm for Meghan.
Her friends were initially baffled by the romance. Sure, Trevor was a graduate of the Annenberg School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Yes, he came from a wealthy Jewish family. Being tall, blond, tanned, and handsome, he was undoubtedly a catch. But whereas Meghan was cerebral, intelligent, well-read, and thoughtful, Trevor was a spur-of-the-moment kind of guy, a fast-moving figure who embraced fun, spontaneity, and impulse. Above all, he was a born hustler, focused on his dream to make it as a Hollywood producer. It was that iron-clad will and determination that drew Meghan toward him. She admired his get-up-and-go, his indefatigable zest for success, and the lengths he would go to to ensure he came out on top. He had, she surmised, the balls to make it big, and she wanted some of that.