From now until she went to university, Meghan would live mostly with her father. They had moved from the Providencia Street house to a smaller and more modest place near the school and his workplace. She remembered spending afternoons after school, dressed in her distinctive Catholic school uniform, at the studio where her father was working. She learnt all about lights and camera angles and the myriad of other techniques that make up the magic that is Hollywood. She recounted how ‘every day after school for 10 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. There were a lot of times my dad would say, “Meg, why don’t you go and help with the craft services room over there? This is just a little off-color for your 11-year-old eyes.”’
Ironically, it was race, not sex, that was developing into an issue for Meghan, though it is obvious from all she and everyone who knew her says, that it was a problem she was careful to keep to herself. At least, at the time. There was, for instance, the time she was compelled to fill out a mandatory census questionnaire in her English class. Asked to choose between boxes for white, black, Hispanic or Asian, she was befuddled so asked her teacher which one she should choose. The teacher recommended Caucasian, ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she remembered. But she refused to do so. ‘Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So, I didn’t tick the box. I left my identity blank - a question mark, an absolute incomplete - much like how I felt.’
These are not the words of a child who is comfortable with her identity, but of one who is thoughtful, perplexed with uncertainty and troubled by it. Later on, Meghan spoke to her father, who told her that next time she should simply create her own box and tick that. This suggests that Meghan was trying to reconcile the conflicts arising out of being a child of colour who could be viewed by her peers as white and didn’t really know where she fitted in. Many other mixed-race Americans, being asked the same question, would have unquestioningly answered black. The fact that she did not shows that, even at that age, she had a more nuanced view of the subject than many others did. While she was not prepared to deny her African antecedents, nor was she prepared to resile away from her Caucasian. Because she did not look obviously mixed-race, and the only parent who seems to have had any profile at the school at that time was her father, many of her classmates simply assumed she was white. On one occasion, a cabal of girls even asked her to join a White Girls Only Club, her response being a non-explanatory, ‘Are you kidding me?’
By her own account, ‘my mixed race heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence.’ Later on, she would work through the conflict ‘to embrace that. To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.’ But before she could do so, she had to work her way through the grey to come to the light.
This early conflict would ultimately not only strengthen her but also deepen her. It gave her empathy for those who also did not fit in easily into one of life’s many boxes. According to her school friend Elizabeth McCoy, ‘If someone was being treated unfairly, she stuck up for them. She was a genuinely decent human being who looked out for people who needed help. She gave a damn about people other than herself.’
Her former homeroom advisor, Christine Knudsen, thought, ‘She’d take conversations to a deeper level. She had a lot of depth, probably because of her own experiences and hard knocks growing up,’ referring to her parents’ divorce, though equally the issues surrounding her racial identity must also have influenced Meghan’s thinking.
Tellingly, Knudsen did not remember race being an issue at all at the school. It was ‘not a big deal simply because our school is so diverse. There’s no looking down on someone because she comes from something different than you do.’ A recent breakdown of the diversity of the students shows that 35% were white, 20% Latina, 17% multiracial, 17% Asian or Pacific Islander, 5% black and 6% preferred not to state. The year Meghan graduated, the demographics were similar, the main difference being that there were slightly more black students. These figures mean that Meghan was by no means the only bi-racial student, and indeed, non-Caucasians being a two-thirds majority, she was in the majority rather than the minority, save as her appearance went.
The pattern that emerges is that the pressure Meghan was under regarding her race was to a large extent internal rather than external. She was being affected by the conflicts many other people of colour who inadvertently ‘pass’ for white have suffered throughout the ages. The singer Marsha Hunt once described her blue-eyed, blonde-haired grandmother of colour, by this time driven insane, staring at herself in the mirror befuddled as to how she could have been categorised as black when she looked white.
Meghan was a clever child and would grow into an intelligent woman. She had witnessed from early childhood how ‘my mom, caramel in complexion with her light-skinned baby in tow, (was) being asked where my mother was since they assumed she was the nanny.’ One would have to be lacking in empathy to fail to see how such experiences would have coloured the feelings of both mother and daughter. They would have had to be inhuman not to be embarrassed, annoyed, humiliated, aware of the cultural disparity between blacks and whites, and subject to a host of conflicting feelings, few of which would have been comfortable to experience. No child likes being different. No child wants to stand out from the crowd. No child wants to know that people think its mother is its servant. It is therefore understandable that no one has any memory of Meghan ever volunteering information on the subject of her race. Without actively concealing it, she was by omission avoiding the subject.
Because Immaculate Heart was a Catholic school, and Catholicism preaches that there are both sins of commission and omission, Meghan will have been aware that to omit to assert her identity was tantamount to a sin of omission. This awareness can have done nothing to reduce the pressure that she felt as she was mistaken for white, for while she never actively denied her heritage, and was indeed fond of her mother and her mother’s family, she also did not assert it actively. Such a dilemma would have been difficult for any child to endure. It must have driven her back into herself, and by her own account, she was a part of no special group and would volunteer for activities to avoid having to eat lunch alone. She was well liked by all and was friendly with many, but she had no actual circle of friends, felt isolated for all her superficial popularity, and was therefore already functioning as a solitary and independent unit. As she put it, ‘My high school had cliques: the black girls and white girls, the Filipino and the Latina girls. Being bi-racial, I felt somewhere in between. So every day during lunch, I busied myself with meetings - French club, student body, whatever one could possibly do between noon and 1pm - I was there. Not so that I was more involved, but so that I wouldn’t have to eat alone.’
Although Meghan had a best friend, Nikki Priddy, with whom she had been schooled since the age of two, and they would obviously have lunch together some of the time, her statements indicate that she felt that her racial identity was a problem with which she was finding it difficult to deal. However, rather than feeling sorry for herself, or becoming embittered by her circumstances, she was already positive and self-confident enough to find resourceful solutions which kept her occupied and gained her the approbation of her teachers. The message one receives is that this early solution to the problem of isolation helped her develop a self-reliance and independence that not only provided her with positive feedback, but also hid her isolation behind a facade of affability.
These were traits that would serve Meghan well in adulthood. Outstanding success in adulthood might initially be a question of luck, but maintaining it and capitalising upon it to the extent that she has, are a matter of grit, endurance, determination, and discipline. These are all q
ualities that are enhanced when adults have surmounted early hardship or deprivation, and Meghan’s revelations of her early struggles reveal that she did indeed suffer from a sense of alienation as a result of her bi-racialism. Circumstance forced her into being something of a lone wolf, and lone wolves make the best hunters.
Although Meghan’s identity struggles were not obvious to anyone when she was growing up, already her determination was. According to Maria Pollia, who taught her Theology in her junior year, she was ‘a focused young woman who challenged herself to reflect on the toughest texts.’ She did not shy away from challenges, but embraced them, and sometimes even sought them out. A case in point was Meghan’s willingness to volunteer after her teacher had mentioned in class that she worked with homeless people. When she informed Pollia that she too had worked with them, and wanted to do so again, she sent her to the skid row kitchen where she herself worked.
‘My parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot: buying turkeys for homeless shelters at Thanksgiving, delivering meals to people in hospices, giving spare change to those asking for it,’ Meghan would later explain. Though her introduction to charity work, like Diana Princess of Wales’s, initially came from observing her parents endowing those less fortunate than themselves, it was really through their schools that both women converted an initial introduction into an established practice.
Meghan now spent a year and a half working on skid row, and Pollia said, ‘The people that I knew at the kitchen would tell me what a natural she was. Skid row is a very scary place. Once she got over that and she was talking to people, she knew everybody’s names.’
For all the care she showed to strangers, Meghan had trouble behaving similarly towards her father. Nikki Priddy remembered that ‘as Meg got older she had to parent Tom a little more and she couldn’t do that.’ Despite the diplomatic tightrope she walked as she carried messages back and forth between her civil parents, Meghan had always been the one both parents had taken care of, and she did not take well to having those roles reversed. Her refusal to do for her father what she was doing for strangers gives an invaluable insight into her character, and shows that even at an early age she knew where she wanted to establish boundaries. Soup kitchens are very much one thing or another. There are no shades of grey. You are either poor and needy or you are helping the poor and needy. The lines of demarcation could not be clearer. Within those parameters, the lonely, sensitive, giving, loving, and emotionally needy have scope to achieve all the human connectedness they yearn for as they are bountiful to strangers. Because the contact between giver and recipient is essentially impersonal in terms of identity while being intensely personal within the moment, the atmosphere is often far more highly charged than it would be in more ordinary circumstances. This is gratifying for both the giver and recipient, and explains why so many people who feel alienated work with the less fortunate. There is little doubt that this dynamic was at play with Meghan. Thereafter, a girl whose identity had caused her both pain and confusion, would seek out those who might seem underprivileged but were, to her, sources of warmth, meaning and human connectedness. And they came without the risks and pitfalls involved with companionship with her peers. Giving to strangers was one thing. Giving to loved ones who she felt should be giving to her was something else.
Pollia remembered how Meghan took to working on skid row with such alacrity that she would update her on the specifics of what Betty was up to and whether Ralph still had his dog or Fred his fish. She had discovered a great way to rise above the barriers of isolation in which the grey areas of her racial identity had bogged her down. Meanwhile, Meghan was learning one of life’s most profound lessons: goodness really can be its own reward, and its benefits were both practical and emotional. But, to achieve them, you had to be proactive.
And proactive Meghan certainly was. By this time, she was well on the road to becoming the activist she would later grow into being. Although she now credits Pollia with having provided her with encouragement and inspiration, the most cursory of examinations reveals that her father in fact played at least as fundamental a role. As she herself used to admit, Tom Sr instilled the belief in her that she could achieve anything she wanted, as long as she strove for it. Intensely hard-working, courageous in standing up for what he believed in, and forthright, he encouraged her to have a voice, and to use it. Disparate members of her family attribute the remarkable degree of self-confidence Meghan possesses, and possessed from her youth, to the encouragement her father gave her to cultivate her judgement, trust it, and act upon it. There is, for instance, the matter of the Ivory dishwashing liquid advertisement which has assumed almost mythical status since Meghan became a successful actress, then an even more famous duchess.
Like all myths, cause and effect are problematic, and the numbers don’t quite add up, but the basics are indisputable. In 1995, Meghan saw a commercial for Ivory Clear Dishwashing Liquid with the tagline: “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” According to an account she gave at a United Nations conference in the years when she was still a relatively unknown actress, ‘Two boys from my class said, “Yeah. That’s where women belong — in the kitchen.” I remember feeling shocked and angry and also just feeling so hurt. It just wasn’t right, and something needed to be done.’ Thomas Markle Sr encouraged her to write letters of complaint, which, by her own account, she did, mailing them to the First Lady Hillary Clinton, the high-profile women’s rights advocate Gloria Allred, and Proctor and Gamble the manufacturers of Ivory Clear Dishwashing Liquid. While the First Lady and the controversial lawyer responded, Proctor and Gamble did not. According to Meghan, a month later they replaced the ad with one that said that “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” This led her to believe that her complaint had been responsible for the change. As she put it to the UN, ‘It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of 11, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality.’
Empowering though that message was, there are four difficulties with the scenario, all of which were picked up once Meghan and Harry started going out seriously and the palace did the background checks it does on all people who become closely involved with the royals. Firstly, Meghan was not eleven in 1995, but fourteen. Secondly, Hillary Clinton was not First Lady in 1992, when Meghan was eleven, but became First Lady in 1993, when Meghan was twelve. Thirdly, there is no evidence that her sole letter altered the course of history. Proctor and Gamble indubitably changed its tagline, but it was optimistic of Meghan to suppose that it did so as a result of one letter written by the eleven or even fourteen year old Meghan Markle. Lastly, no advertising agency could replace an advertisement in a month. Advertisements take months to prepare. They are parts of advertising campaigns in which spontaneity and responsiveness of the sort to which Meghan was laying claim simply do not exist. Had she suggested that hers might have been one of the many letters that led to change; had she not provided such a tight timeline, which proved that her letter could have had no impact whatsoever, she would have been on firmer ground. But by presenting the facts as she did, she undermined the legitimacy of her claims. In the process, she opened herself up to suspicions that would lead a courtier, who values integrity, to conclude that she was a ‘typical Hollywood type…..always pushing herself forward in the most obvious manner, when a more modest and realistic approach would have indicated integrity. As it is, when one watches the tape of that speech, one winces at her rank egotism, not to mention the naiveté displayed by so many Hollywood types, who think, because they have said that black is white and pink is green, everyone accepts this fiction as fact.’
In fairness to Meghan, she is a creature of Hollywood. The values there are different from those of palaces. Fantasy and self-promotion are not frowned upon, nor is exaggeration, all of which are viewed as valid tools for ‘getting your message across.’ A fourteen year old who writes a letter which garners praise from her sc
hool, as hers did, and which earns the standard responses that the Hillary Clintons and Gloria Allreds customarily send out to anyone who contacts them, nevertheless has just cause to be proud of her accomplishment, even if she unknowingly mistakes the polite response that public figures send out as being something more personal, and further believes that, because the company then altered its tagline, it did so as a result of her letter.
Be that as it may, this was one of those turning points that each individual has in his or her life. Like any other, it also had long-reaching effects. Just as how it empowered Meghan to conclude that her actions had had more of an effect than they could possibly have had, thereby encouraging her to adopt the role of activist, it also induced people who would otherwise have viewed her neutrally, to suspect her of inflating herself beyond her natural entitlement. This is where the exacting standards of the Old World collide with the embellishments of the New. Self-promotion and exaggeration have traditionally been viewed with suspicion in the royal and aristocratic worlds, where one’s word has always been one’s bond. There is an elaborate code of behaviour preventing people from too-overtly pushing themselves forward or laying claim to what isn’t theirs by right. Indeed, British history is full of people who have gone to the executioner’s block or otherwise ruined themselves rather than dishonour themselves by over-egging the pudding or in any other way compromising their integrity. A case in point was Terence Rattigan’s 1946 hit play The Winslow Boy, which was based upon an infamous case when my late friend Mary Archer-Shee’s cousin Martin nearly bankrupted himself to defend his son George against the unfair accusation of having stolen a five shilling postal order, which he denied having taken. While things have loosened up enough for traditionalists to know that it is no longer necessary to endanger one’s prosperity to defend oneself against a petty accusation, and to accept that ‘hype’ forms a more acceptable part of modern life than it used to, people still adhere strictly to the dictum, ‘Lay claim only to what is your due.’
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