That night, the bride ratified her style credentials by wearing a classical white silk crepe halter neckline evening dress by Stella McCartney to the black tie reception at Frogmore House. Situated on the Crown Estate, Windsor, in Windsor Great Park, it is a five minute drive from the castle. Harry drove Meghan there in an ice-blue E-Type Jaguar which coordinated perfectly with the large emerald cut aquamarine ring belonging to his mother Diana: this Meghan wore on her right hand. It was, according to people who attended it, a great party, with a wonderful atmosphere, and the couple seemed very much in love. ‘Not since the early days of Prince and Princess Michael’s marriage have I seen a royal couple so in love,’ a friend said. ‘They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It really was very touching.’
One would have hoped, after such a brilliant start, that the couple would continue to be as feted and admired as they were on their wedding day. Everyone I knew was rooting for them. They even made the mature and, some would say, ‘woke’ choice of not going on honeymoon immediately. Meghan and Harry both let it be known that they were deeply committed to their work, which would revolve around charitable and humanitarian activities. Being in their mid to late thirties, and, having been living together prior to the marriage, they hardly had need of a honeymoon the way a young couple starting out life together would.
Yet, four days after the wedding, I was having dinner at the house of an influential aristocrat with impeccable palace connections when I heard a report that filled me with foreboding. The day before, Meghan had joined Harry and Prince Charles and Camilla at a garden party at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s patronages in recognition of his 70th birthday. What had taken place then, which I will cover later on in this work, was so shocking as to lead all of us to conclude that Meghan was utterly unsuited to the role of royal duchess, and that it would be a miracle if the marriage worked out. None of us envisaged that she and Harry would be resourceful enough to find a way of moving beyond their royal status and that they would remain a couple while forging a non-royal way of life in the United States of America. But if what had happened was true - and it was - there was little doubt that she was no more suited to royal life than Angelina Jolie would be to competitive boxing.
It was hardly surprising that they would lurch from one controversy to another, in the light of Meghan’s unsuitability to royal life, and Harry’s blanket support for her. His failure to ever enlighten her as to where she was going wrong only ensured that she went from unintentional blunder to unintentional blunder. For every foot that they put right, they put four feet wrong. To those of us who wanted Meghan to remain in Britain as a fully-fledged member of the Royal Family, sprinkling her gold dust as she went about her royal duties and furthered the cause of racial unity throughout the country and the Commonwealth, this was a tragic outcome which could so easily have been averted had Harry enlightened his wife rather than supporting her in a path that would ultimately cause both of them misery and result in their departure. All he needed to do was handle things slightly differently. He could easily have been more instructive, making her aware that she was creating antagonism when it was obvious that she wanted approbation. Then the outcome could have been so different.
As it was, Meghan’s conduct was inadvertently creating so much friction and attracting such criticism that it was soon leading the couple and their supporters to question whether the basis was racist. This was not a happy state of affairs for the couple or for any monarchist, though it would prove to be a welcome bludgeon for republicans, anti-monarchists and left-wingers who want to change the social order.
Despite this negative outcome, the problems arising out of Meghan’s failure to adjust to the British way did make for a more interesting narrative than would otherwise have been the case, had she slotted into her royal role the way we all hoped. Had any author written a work of fiction with a plot along the lines of the Meghan and Harry story, it would have been dismissed as too fantastical to be believed. Yet, when one looks at their histories, the couple’s trajectory has a sense of appropriateness which suggests that they could well pull several rabbits out of their hats and end up just where they want to be: at the apex of celebrity as the most feted, revered royal couple in the United States. For both their sakes, but even more than that, for the sake of the hundreds of millions of people of colour all over the world whose hopes and expectations are vested in their success, I hope they do.
CHAPTER 2
For a couple whose backgrounds are so radically different in worldly terms, Meghan and Harry were born to parents whose unions shared surprising similarities. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales and Mr and Mrs Thomas Markle were mismatched. Once their marriages failed, both sets of parents would try their best to spare their children from suffering from the fallout, in the process exacerbating its effects in unexpected ways. Had Harry and Meghan been born to couples who were more compatible, more evenly matched, and more aware of the need to provide stronger boundaries and less indulgence, it is unlikely that either the Duke or the Duchess of Sussex would ever have had as much in common as they do. For all their differences, they also share such profound similarities that this unique combination has proven to be a potent force binding them together in ways that make them a uniquely strong couple.
Rachel Meghan Markle was born three years before Harry on the 4th August 1981. Her father Thomas Wayne Markle Sr was, according to her, a successful, 37 year old ‘lighting director for a soap opera’ who had received a Chicago/Midwest Emmy for the television show Made in Chicago in 1975, and would later on be a co-recipient of two Daytime Emmy awards for the popular soap opera General Hospital in 1985 and 2001. He was nominated on several other occasions as well, and also worked on the long-running series Married… with Children, while ‘my mom was a temp at the studio when they met’.
Doria Loyce Ragland was four weeks shy of her 25th birthday at the time of her daughter’s birth, and had been married for a year and nine months. Meghan likes ‘to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques. Whatever it was, they married and had me. They moved into a house in The Valley in LA, to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.’ Tom Sr was earning some $200,000 per annum, so, while not wealthy, the family was certainly comfortable.
It might be difficult for people of a certain age to imagine how it was for inter-racial couples four decades ago. The reality is, it took courage for both the Caucasian Tom and the Afro-American Doria Markle to embark upon their union. Admittedly, Hollywood, where they worked, was a lot less colour prejudiced than the hinterlands of Newport, Pennsylvania and Cleveland, Ohio, where Markle and Ragland families came from. But even in California, mixed race couples were still more of an exception than the norm, and Meghan states that some of her early memories were coloured by the embarrassment of people mistaking her mother for her nanny. As they lived in a white neighbourhood, and appear to have been the only mixed race family nearby, the confusion of the other residents as to what role Doria played in the fair-skinned Meghan’s life might well have been a matter of ignorance and unthinking expectation rather than prejudice. But, to a proud and strong woman like Doria, it was humiliating nevertheless to be mistaken for her daughter’s nanny. There is every indication that this was one of the catalysts which made the marriage as short lived as it was.
Although Meghan was Doria’s first, and would prove to be her only, child, her father already had a son and daughter from his first marriage. In 1964, at the age of twenty, Tom had married Roslyn Loveless, a nineteen year old secretary he had met at an on-campus party at the University of Chicago. In November of that year, their daughter Yvonne, now Samantha Marie, was born, followed two years later by Thomas Wayne Markle Jr.
After graduating from college, Tom Sr worked as a lighting director at WTTWTV-Channel 11, the primary Public Broadcasting Service in Chicago, Illinois, winning his first Emmy in 1975. At first, the marriage was happy, but within a few years, Roslyn w
as feeling neglected. According to her, Tom spent all hours of the day and night working. His aim was to win an Emmy, and while he was bringing in good money, he not only neglected her, but caroused with other women. By the early 70s, the marriage was over and the couple separated.
Tom lived in Chicago and had the children for weekends, but after he was nominated for his first Emmy, he moved to California, settling in Santa Monica. Samantha, who did not get on with her mother or her brother, joined him first. Then a traumatised Tom Jr arrived following an incident when Roslyn’s boyfriend apprehended burglars and was shot in front of mother and son. Tom Jr promptly fled to the safety of California, where the one fly in the ointment, from his point of view, was the presence of his sister, for whom he had an innate antipathy.
With both children now living with him, Tom moved to a spacious, five bedroomed house on Providencia Street adjacent to the Woodland Hills Country Club in the San Fernando Valley. Its location made the Markle residence one of the more desirable properties in the area. Even now it is predominantly a white neighbourhood, with some 80% of the population being Caucasian, and less than 3.5% Afro-American, but in the 1980s, there were even fewer people of colour living there. It was a prosperous area, and has remained so, with fashionable Calabasas to its east.
According to the Markles, in the early days of Tom and Doria’s relationship, they were extremely happy. She brought a welcome sense of family to the household, unifying them in a way that had not existed before. She herself came from a loving family, and even included the Markles in the Ragland family Thanksgiving celebrations. Tom Jr was surprised at how ‘warm and inclusive’ her parents and her half-brother Joseph and half-sister Saundra were, and commented that they were ‘the kind of family I had always wanted.’ Even after Doria’s parents divorced and her father married a kindergarten teacher named Ava Burrow, and produced a son named Joffrey Ragland, then divorced, Doria remained close to all of them.
The Raglands were a modest but by no means well-off family. Doria’s father Alvin owned an antique shop named ‘Twas New, while her mother was a nurse. They were what would be categorised as petit bourgeois in Europe and middle class in America. Doria herself was something of a hippie, which made her warmth and kindness even more appealing to the children than she would have been, had she presented in a more conventional manner. Shortly after moving into the Providencia Street house, she decided that what the family needed was something they could all love. She therefore took Tom Jr to an animal shelter, where they chose a beagle/golden retriever mix which he named Bo and which became a much-loved pet.
Like many twenty five year olds, Doria was not sure exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She had tried her hand at being a make-up artist before Meghan’s birth, but, with a baby and two stepchildren to cater to, as well as running a house which would later be described as ‘cavernous’, and a husband who worked eighty and ninety hour weeks, she found being a housewife less than appealing. She therefore took up yoga, with a view to teaching it, and only too soon was farming out babysitting duties to her mother Jeanette and stepson Tom Jr. Her seventeen year old stepdaughter had no interest in babysitting, preferring instead to be out partying with her friends. There have been reports that Samantha used to refer to Doria as ‘The Maid’, but these appear to be apocryphal, as both families remember everyone getting on well, even if, in typical teenage fashion, Samantha was focused more on having a good time with her friends than on being an integral part of the family.
Theirs was nevertheless an extremely relaxed household, with pretty much anything going. The children were allowed to come and go as they pleased, to have their friends around, even to smoke pot if they were so inclined.
According to both Toms, Tom Sr was completely besotted with Meghan from the moment of her birth. His every spare moment was spent with her. He was even more in love with her than he was with Doria and he also gave her more of his time and attention than he had ever given his two elder children. This seems to have caused some resentment with Samantha, who was jealous of the little princess when she saw the degree of attention she was getting from her father, but to say that it was a problem would be to exaggerate what was, after all, a perfectly ordinary situation, albeit one laden with possibilities for contemporaneous resentments to find inconvenient expression in the future.
There is also the suggestion that Doria felt sidelined by Tom Sr as he worshipped at the altar of his Flower, as both parents started calling the baby. Reading between the lines of what the family now says, it is likely that Doria’s reaction to Tom Sr’s fixation on Meghan was akin to Samantha’s. Not that Doria did not love her daughter. But she appears to have wanted Tom Sr to be more emotionally engaged with her than he thereafter was. Only too soon, the couple was squabbling. Doria resented being left alone for most of the time with the baby and her step-children, while Tom worked and worked and worked, then when he came home, he made a big deal of the baby, and took his wife for granted.
Up to then, theirs had been an extremely relaxed household, but as tensions developed between the workaholic Tom Sr and the neglected Doria, she too emulated the habits of her stepdaughter and started to come and go as she pleased, often parking the baby with her mother or with Tom Jr.
According to Meghan, when she was two, her parents separated. Her mother went back to her grandmother Jeanette’s house, where they lived during the week, while she returned to her father to spend weekends with him. She remembered harmony reigning supreme, with never a squabble or harsh word between the two of them. This was quite possible, though the family remembered superficial civility rather than real warmth between the couple. Meghan seems to have candy-coated a more acrid scenario, and moreover was doing so for good reason. The whispers are that Doria not only realised that she didn’t want to be alone with a husband who was never around and took her for granted when he was, but that she actually didn’t want to be with a husband at all. Thereafter, she would pursue a life of such extreme privacy that the question has been asked what, if anything, she had to hide. In choosing to lead her life in such a secretive way, she would thereafter be both resolute and independent. The fact that she did so with the quiet dignity for which she has become known, and ensured that civility reigned between her ex-husband and herself, at least until Meghan and Tom fell out (since when he has found her to be unresponsive), is testament to her strength of character and her ability to achieve what she wants in her own quiet and determined way.
Both sides of Meghan’s family have confirmed that while she was growing up ‘nothing was too good for her.’ Her father spoiled her from the time she was a baby. Although her mother lay down boundaries, she also spoiled her, as did the extended families. At the age of two, around the time of her parents’ separation, she was enrolled in the Hollywood Little Red School House. This was an exceptional school started by an exceptional woman whose objective was to create exceptional adults.
Ruth Pease, born Stover, was the only child of deaf parents. As a result, she was teased from early childhood and grew up valuing kindness and diversity as well as education and character. During the Second World War, she ran a nursery school for six children at her house. One charge was a half Chinese boy whose parents had had difficulty finding a place for him elsewhere. At the time, the US was at war with Japan, and the child, who was often mistaken for Japanese, attracted such prejudice that no one else would take him in. Ruth’s landlord then objected to her running a nursery school from his property, necessitating a move to a house nearby on a quiet, tree-lined street named Highland Avenue. Her husband Robert painted the building red, they expanded to some twenty children, and, to distinguish it from a daycare centre, Pease in 1951 helped to form the Pre-School Association of California. According to her daughter Debbie Wehbe, ‘People started referring to it as “the little red schoolhouse.”’ So they changed the school’s name and added the storybook bell tower which became a stand-out feature. Diversity was one of Mrs Pease’s aims, and, over the year
s, the school acquired such a good reputation that its alumnae included the children of the 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, Johnny Depp, and Flea - bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers - as well as diplomats and people from more average backgrounds.
By 1968, new building codes required the tearing down of the old building and the construction of a new one. Meghan therefore arrived in 1983 to a much enlarged and expanding institution, whose reputation for excellence and diversity was second to none locally. By no means cheap (from twenty to twenty five thousand dollars at today’s prices), it was by that time one of the main ‘go to’ centres of learning for the children of the Hollywood elite. Meghan would spend nine years there, flourishing under the ministrations of a progressive but structured regimen based upon the four stages of Cognitive Development formulated by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
The location of the Hollywood Little Red School House could not have been more convenient for Tom and Doria. He worked at the ABC Studios in nearby Los Feliz while her workplace, where she was training to be a social worker, was a few minutes away and easily accessible to her new home just south of Hollywood. After school, Doria, always physical, would take Meghan for bike rides, runs, or yoga, and they would end the day with mother and daughter making dinner. Meghan now attributes her love of cooking to this early regimen, so clearly it was a happy activity.
In 1992, at the age of eleven, Meghan transferred to Immaculate Heart High School. This again was a school where Hollywood’s elite and aspirational sent their children. Founded in 1906 and located on a beautiful hillside property in Los Feliz, LA, it was and remains a Catholic preparatory school for girls from grades 6 - 12. ‘We celebrate more than a century of nurturing the spiritual, intellectual, social and moral development of students as they distinguish themselves as women of great heart and right conscience,’ the school maintains, and once more, it was a bastion of elitism intermingling with some children of more ordinary background. Alumnae include Tyra Banks, Lucy Arnaz, Mary Tyler Moore, and Diane Disney, as well as several girls who have gone on to make their names in the entertainment industry.
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