As her freshman year got underway, Meghan partied up a storm, was popular with the girls as well as the boys, and got herself one of the hottest boyfriends on campus when she paired up with a white, 6’5” basketball player from Lakewood, Ohio named Steve Lepore. He was on the basketball team in his sophomore year, and would prove to be as disciplined and focused as she was. But he was more interested in fitness than partying, intending to qualify as a pro, and made all the necessary sacrifices, such as foregoing female companionship the night before a game in keeping with standard practice amongst basketball, baseball, football, and hockey players. At the end of that academic year, he transferred to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he became a stand out player. At the time of writing, he is an assistant coach on Eastern Kentucky University’s men’s basketball staff, and, with his wife Carrie, is a proud parent to their young daughter Giuliana Rudi.
Patently, the relationship was not serious enough for Meghan to follow him, and she lost no time in replacing him in her affections, though for the remainder of her time at Northwestern she was never again one half of such a dynamic duo.
This had no perceptible effect upon the pleasure Meghan was having at college. She developed three friendships which went some way towards replacing the gap left when geography separated her from Nikki Priddy. Although the childhood friends kept in touch, Meghan now found a substitute of sorts in Lindsay Jill Roth, the attractive blonde daughter of Jewish lawyers from the prosperous Long Island village of Lattingtown within the town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York. With a population of less than two thousand, of whom 94% were white, it had no real parallels with Woodland Hills save for both areas being predominantly white and both having median incomes above the regional averages, with Woodland Hills being a bit less than $100,000 per annum while Lattingtown was half again as much. The two girls now became fast friends after meeting in a Toni Morrison Literature class in their first year at Northwestern. They drank together, partied together, studied together, and later on, when they left college they kept in touch as Lindsay became a producer for Larry King Now, The Real Girl’s Kitchen, and Queen Boss, as well as publishing What Pretty Girls Are Made Of in 2015. Meanwhile, Meghan struggled until she got the role of Rachel Zane in Suits.
In 2016, when Lindsay married an Englishman named Gavin Jordan, Meghan was her Matron of Honour. This is revealing, for when Meghan married Trevor Engelson in 2011, she chose Nikki Priddy to be her Maid of Honour. Despite this, the bond between Meghan and Roth was strong. ‘We’re the kind of friends’ she said, ‘who can be 3,000 miles away and still be talking about or thinking the same thing, and even texting each other the same thing at the same time miles away. I don’t know many people who are as generous and supportive as Meg is. I think people assume that when someone gains notoriety that they change. But she’s 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. There’s a motto that Meg and I have consistently come back to throughout the years: “I choose happiness.” It’s a constant reminder to be self-aware, be uniquely you, be happy and to treat people with respect; to be kind, empathetic and to really learn from those around you in any circumstance. Meg does that. Meg has especially developed into an extraordinary businesswoman, actress, writer and advocate for women and children.’
Meghan had made another girlfriend with whom she would keep in touch. This was Genevieve Hillis, her sorority sister from Kappa Kappa Gamma, but her other closest friend at the time wasn’t Genevieve but an African-American named Larnelle Quentin Foster. He was a gay but heavily closeted son of pastors who he felt would be disappointed if they knew of his sexuality. He studied acting at Northwestern and would ultimately become a professor of drama. He is now openly gay. In college, though, he lived locally with his parents. He and Meghan became something of an item, often going to avant-garde theatre shows or ‘just hanging out. We were very social. We were always doing different things, having fun. She was ambitious to be an actress, but we didn’t want to be in rehearsals all day like a lot of the others. We would much rather watch a show than be in one.’
Meghan often joined the Foster family for meals on weekends, and was so much a part of the family’s activities that she would attend services at their church with them. She and Larnelle also enjoyed cooking together: her specialty at the time was Indian cuisine. Larnelle would later describe Meghan as being ‘very kind, very genuine, someone who cares deeply about her family, her friends and the world’.
Having turned down three scholarships to attend Northwestern and study English, Meghan had not been at the university long before she realised that she had made the wrong choice of major. She therefore opted to change to theatre arts and international relations. Although she still aspired to stardom, she was now broadening her horizons to include the possibility of the Corps Diplomatique as a stage. ‘At no time did she consider that hers would be an ordinary life,’ one of her old time friends, who asked to remain anonymous, said. ‘She intended to be a high flyer, no matter what she did. She could envisage herself as a Broadway or film star, or an Ambassador or a diplomat whose actions would change the world while improving the lot of humanity.’
With that in mind, Meghan approached her father’s elder brother Michael, a State Department operative whose specialty was US Government communications systems. Within the family, it was accepted that he was CIA. He had been posted to such disparate places as Berlin, Guam, Bucharest, and Ottawa, with his wife Toni, who would die in 2012. He was known to be popular and well-connected within the State Department. Meghan wanted him to find her an internship with a US embassy abroad. She explained that she was considering a career in international relations, and wanted to test the water with some practical experience of the diplomatic life to see if she would like being a diplomat. The difficulty was, she had left it so late that getting her what she wanted would mean calling in additional favours from friends.
‘I knew the (American) Ambassador in Buenos Aires,’ Michael Markle said. ‘I personally talked to him and got her fixed up with the internship she wanted.’ As a result of her uncle’s string-pulling, she was offered a six week long internship as a junior press officer at the American Embassy in Argentina’s capital city. While there, her duties were those of any other junior press attaché. She answered enquiries, drafted letters, shunted paper from one department to another, generally making herself useful doing what was effectively donkey work. But she struck her superior, Mark Krischik, as both efficient and ingenious. ‘If she had stayed with the State Department, she would have been an excellent addition to the US diplomatic corps. She had all that it takes to be a successful diplomat.’
Attitude and personality, however, were not sufficient to enter the State Department. One also had to pass the Foreign Service Officer Test, which Meghan sat while in Argentina. To her chagrin, she failed it. However, she had planned to fly to Madrid at the end of her internship, under the International Education for Students Program, to take their six week course in Spanish. She adhered to that plan, and would later on find the knowledge she gained useful.
She was not tempted, however, to resit the exam. Unused as she was to failure, she decided that her future lay in acting. Diplomacy had only been a pipe dream. She had become aware that that career path would be strewn with too many difficulties. Not only would she have a longer and harder road to travel before she became the star she wanted to be, but the rewards, close up, seemed less attractive than being a star of stage or screen. In that, her assessment was accurate, for no matter how high flying a careerist diplomat is, the top of the Corps Diplomatique simply doesn’t have the pizazz or the allure that becoming a stage or screen star does.
This taste of failure, however, was but the first gulp of a potion that Meghan would have to swallow time and again throughout her twenties. Shining brightly in high school and university is not always a precursor to worldly su
ccess. In fact, those who sparkle in such safe and structured settings often fail to light up the real world, while those who were more mundane students soar to greater heights once they’re released into the hurly-burly of the real world. So it would prove with Meghan when she graduated from Northwestern’s School of Communication with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre and international studies.
While Meghan shone at school and university, Harry, who was born three years and one month after her on the 15th September 1984, did not. If their scholastic records would prove to be as opposite as it was possible to be, their entry into the world had parallels. The Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage hit the rocks shortly after Harry’s birth, and while they remained together for the next eight years, before he was even a toddler, the marriage was in reality over. For the next eight years, the Waleses’ relationship was a study in a couple avoiding togetherness except on official occasions. Charles based himself down at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, the house the Duchy of Cornwall had bought for his use from Viscount and Viscountess Macmillan of Ovenden in 1980, prior to his marriage in 1981. According to Charles’s then valet, Stephen Barry, who used to ferry Diana back and forth between Buckingham Palace and Highgrove for midnight assignations with the prince, she had a great deal of input with the decoration. Once the marriage foundered, however, she opted to remain in London at Kensington Palace during the week, while Charles based himself down at Highgrove. The couple was seldom together even on the weekends. Whenever Diana was going to be in residence at Highgrove, Charles would frequently visit friends. So civilised was the arrangement that he allowed her to entertain her lover James Hewitt even in the country. A noted equestrian, with Charles’s blessing he also taught Diana and the boys to ride.
Although there was a similar lack of congeniality between Charles and Diana and Tom and Doria, both couples had found a way to navigate around the shoals of disappointment to the extent that their children were able to have good relationships with both parents. Superficially, both sets of parents might have aimed for an absence of overt hostility, but only the Markles were successful in maintaining this consistently. This was largely due to Diana’s emotional state. If she was happily distracted by a lover, she and Charles would have a relatively civilised, indeed settled, relationship. Sometimes it was even affectionate, in the way a brother and sister who are not particularly close but have a basic fondness for each other, would behave towards each other. This was especially true throughout the second half of the eighties, when Diana’s affair with James Hewitt was flourishing. However, whenever her love life was not satisfactory, she would turn a fully loaded fusillade on Charles and blow serenity out of the water.
At times like these, everything was his fault. He had ruined her life by being the man he was and not being the man she had wanted him to be. But for him, her life would have been perfect. The scenes were traumatic for all concerned, including the children, for, while Charles was non-confrontational and would do everything in his power to avoid an argument, Diana was the antithesis. When she was spoiling for a fight, she made sure she got one and that everyone knew about it. She would scream the house down. She would be on the rampage for hours. She would hurl abuse and objects and always reduce herself to tears of frustration and hysteria. Because Diana was never faithful to any one lover, including James Hewitt and Hasnat Khan, the two men she later claimed she was truly in love with prior to Dodi Fayed, and because she was always on the lookout for the perfect man who would make her life complete, her love life was volatile even when it was relatively settled. There was always an unpredictable element as to what would set her off, for the triggers had nothing to do with her husband or even her lover’s behaviour, but her inner need to feel loved: and to feel that that love was something she could rely upon. Always careful to direct her eruptions in her husband’s rather than her lovers’ direction, this did not make for a stable or happy atmosphere at home. Then, when things settled down, she would revert to being serene, accommodating Diana who understood that she had to remain married to Charles and the best way forward was for them to continue leading separate but civilised existences, he with his mistress, she with her lover.
As Diana approached thirty, however, she began to question why she had to remain married to Charles. She was frank about wanting a loving marriage and a daughter. This introduced a whole new level of volatility into her family life. No longer was the trigger solely when she was dissatisfied with her love life. Now, whenever she was so satisfied with it that she fantasised about divorcing her husband and marrying whichever of the lovers she wanted to marry at that moment - the main candidates were James Hewitt, Oliver Hoare, and Hasnat Khan - she set about tearing the place apart in her quest for her liberty.
Diana had an advantage over Charles that neither Tom nor Doria had over each other but which Meghan shares with Diana. Both women, from early childhood, were products of broken homes. Both learnt from an early age how to navigate between opposing factions, how to play Peter off against Paul so that they would get what they wanted. Both were soft and sweet but both were also tough beneath the ostensibly vulnerable exterior. Both had developed the tactical abilities unique to the children of broken homes. They had learnt at an early age how to palliate, negotiate, and use whatever tools worked well for them, to achieve their goal: whatever that goal might be.
Although Meghan was brought up in a more superficially peaceable environment, Diana, for all her volatility, was a loving and obliging mother. She was also the ultimate authority figure in the Wales nuclear family. She was insistent that her children would grow up to be spirited. She decreed that they would not be so disciplined, the way other royal children were, that they would have the spontaneity drained out of them. Charles was not allowed to interfere and there was never any prospect of the Queen intervening.
Although titular head of the family, Elizabeth II, known in the family as Lilibet, was not its de facto head. That was the Duke of Edinburgh, whose role was consistently challenged and often undermined by Lilibet’s powerful mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Lilibet was therefore used to two dominant figures in her immediate family, her husband and her mother, neither of whom liked the other and both of whom she assuaged in her desire to have a happy and harmonious family life. Her attitude only further eroded the influence she and her husband had with their eldest son, and, by extension, his wife.
Although Philip tried as best he could to lay down the ground rules within his own nuclear, Mountbatten-Windsor, branch of the family, the Queen Mother was a constant source of opposition where Charles was concerned. She had always been, ever since he was a toddler. She never caused problems with the three youngest royal children, leading more than one royal relation to observe that the only reason why she meddled with Charles was that he was going to be king one day. She had made sure with her daughter the Queen, and now with her grandson the future King, that she would leave her imprimatur on the Crown by way of her influence over them. Her avowed reason with Lilibet had been and remained that she knew best what the Crown needed, and with Charles it was that neither of his parents ‘understood’ him the way she did. She felt that it was her right as a grandmother and queen consort to encourage him and give him all the love and direction she discerned he needed.
Being supportive of a man who will not stand up to his wife is no way to solve the underlying problem of how children should be disciplined. The Queen Mother was therefore inadvertently reinforcing the vacuum of influence Charles had within his own nuclear family. A vacuum which was also fostered by his hands-off parents whom he viewed with antagonism, for by this time Charles’s relationship with both the Queen and Prince Philip was anything but warm.
As William and Harry grew up, becoming ever wilder, word began to spread in aristocratic circles how out of control they were. The late Kenneth Rose, one of the best connected journalists of his day whose personal friendships with several of the royals was an open secret, wrote in his diary, following a we
ekend with Philip’s first cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten and her husband David Hicks, how thirteen year old ‘Prince William is tiresome, always attracting attention to himself. Hardly surprising when he is so spoilt by the tug-of-war of his parents, and by courtiers, servants and private detectives.’ Harry was even more spoilt.
Although Prince Philip was the paterfamilias with a huge amount of influence where his three other children were concerned, his lack of influence with Charles was noteworthy. He and the Queen’s position as parents to Charles had been so undermined over the years by the Queen Mother that parents and son were virtually estranged. They saw as little of each other as possible, and when they were together, they were polite the way strangers are. ‘There was absolutely no warmth between them. I think the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would have liked things to be different, but Charles simply wasn’t interested,’ a prince told me. Philip therefore was not in a position to provide the critical intervention everyone in the family felt William and Harry needed, in order for them to be brought up with a sufficient degree of discipline to enable them ultimately to perform their royal duties properly. So the two boys continued to be reared in their wild way, with all the royal adults bemoaning the lack of discipline their mother had decreed appropriate.
At the time, none of the royals realised that Diana was actually encouraging her sons to be recalcitrant, or that she was encouraging Harry to develop the rebellious streak which ran throughout her nature. This the boys would inadvertently reveal later on when they said that she used to tell them, ‘I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t get caught.’ Of course, Diana expected them at all times to treat the staff well. She would never have tolerated them being rude to strangers when out in public. She never-endingly reiterated how they must always remember they were royal and therefore they should behave to the world at large in a royal manner. But, beneath it all, Diana was preaching the same lesson Joseph Kennedy had taught his boys: You can break the rules as long as you aren’t found out. It isn’t the rules that matter so much as making sure no one catches you out when you break them. As long as you don’t suffer the consequences of the breach, it’s okay. It has often been said that Joe Kennedy encouraged his sons to be amoral by instilling this code. If that is so, Diana was doing the same.
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