Meghan ‘was very impressed to be mixing with’ people of that stature. Not only was she becoming a celebrity in her own right, but she was now socialising with a ‘better class of person than in LA’, where her and Trevor’s friends and associates were successful but not of the top rank. As Canadian columnist Shinan Govani observed, Meghan’s success in life owed more to the people she cultivated than her accomplishments on screen. She was a canny operator, and took full advantage of any opportunity that presented itself, sometimes even creating opportunities when none was apparent.
It was at this juncture that Meghan spotted how politics could further her trajectory to ever greater success. Canada is a more left wing society than the United States. Although Hollywood paid lip service to leftist causes, its primary aim was success through film. Compared with even the most right-wing of Canadians, woke Hollywood seemed curiously right of centre, to such an extent that the former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney seemed frighteningly leftist to even the most left of American Democrats. If you consider that Meghan’s Canadian circles now consisted of members of the political elite of both the left and right, and that there was a consensus amongst Canadians of all political hues that humanitarianism was a social obligation, it becomes obvious that Meghan would be incentivised to resume the humanitarian activities which she had abandoned once she started making her way in the world. During the years that she was struggling to achieve as an actress, she could have volunteered had she been inclined to do so. Often time had lain so heavily on her hands that she had taken to her bed with a bottle for comfort, but the truth is, she was too focused on realising her ambitions, and was also too intent on having a good time, travelling the world with Trevor, visiting places such as Vietnam and Central America, or just partying with him and making herself as visible on the social scene as she could, to bother with humanitarianism.
Now, however, that she was in an environment where such conduct would elevate her from being just another actress on the make, to a caring person whose tender sensibilities for the less fortunate would earn her the respect of her new associates, Meghan reconnected with the altruism that had gained her the approbation of her theology teacher at Immaculate Heart, Maria Pollia, all those years ago when she had volunteered at the Hippie Kitchen. She asked her newfound friends to refer her to a community project, and was duly introduced to the St. Felix Centre, earning the regard of those she helped as well as those who had helped her with the placement.
Meghan’s good works with the centre might have gone unnoticed by the world outside of St Felix Centre and her circle of friends and colleagues from that time, if the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had not chosen the Centre as one of the 12 charities which they highlighted in December 2019 on their Instagram for the good works each charity does to help ‘the lonely, hungry and homeless.’ St. Felix Centre then published the sole photograph which had been taken of Meghan while she was volunteering with them, and issued a statement:
“We feel very grateful to have been highlighted by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle, as one of the 12 charities doing important work worldwide.
“This photo has Meghan volunteering in our kitchen.
“Meghan Markle was an active supporter and volunteer of St Felix Centre during her time living in the city working on Suits.
“She volunteered on a regular basis in our kitchen as part of our Community Meals Program.
“The Duchess also donated food from the set of Suits, and on one Thanksgiving she brought all the food, turkeys and the fixings for over 100 people.”
The charity ended their proclamation stating what ‘fond memories’ they had of ‘lovely Meghan’, providing an insight not only into the way Meghan functioned, but also why people such as the Mulroneys and Trudeaus held her in such high regard.
It was in the third of the seven seasons during which Meghan played Rachel Zane, that her marriage to Trevor started to unravel. In his biography Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, Andrew Morton implies that Meghan began to despise Trevor because she had started looking down on him now that she had moved up in the world. He wasn’t doing as well as she’d have liked, and moreover his exuberant personality had started to grate now that she was mixing in a more refined circle.
Trevor had always been laidback where she was controlled and controlling. He would arrive for appointments slightly late and dishevelled, his shirt out of his trousers and maybe a spot of food on his lapel, while the perfectly contained and self-possessed Meghan was always immaculately turned out, Mixing as she now was in a world where people were more restrained than in Hollywood, Trevor’s New York enthusiasm came across as tacky, his enthusiasm crass, and his breeziness off-putting.
As Meghan had become more and more successful in Suits, he had started travelling to Toronto every few weeks to be with her, even doing as much of his work there as he could. By then he had also opened an office in New York, as much to be closer to her as for commercial reasons. While he thought being with her in Toronto would improve their marriage, in reality his presence had the opposite effect. Moreover, his career was going nowhere and that, added to his stylistic deficiencies, lessened his appeal. He had gone from being Trevity-Trev-Trev, without whom she could not imagine life, to someone she had grown beyond. ‘Meg used to tell me she couldn’t imagine a life without Trevor. She said if anything were to happen to him she wouldn’t be able to go on. He cherished her too. You should have seen the way he used to hold her face in his hands. We all felt he was her eternal love,’ Nikki Priddy said, struggling to reconcile Meghan’s volte face concerning Trevor.
This change of heart, which struck Trevor as coming like a bolt out of the blue, had actually been brewing for some time. Success had had an effect upon Meghan. It had liberated all sorts of feelings she had that had been lying latent, including the grudge she had harboured against Trevor for failing to help her when he could have and refused to do so, putting his precious integrity before her needs. Even more importantly, success had empowered her so that she had connected with her inner strength and no longer needed to depend on anyone else but herself.
Nikki took a more negative view and thought that Meghan had become harder and more opportunistic with the passage of time. ‘I think Meghan was calculated - very calculated - in the way she handled people and relationships. She is very strategic in the way she cultivates circles of friends.’
According to Nikki’s interpretation of Meghan’s motives, having found herself a new and more ‘classy’ circle of friends, she did not wish to be bogged down with her embarrassing misfit of a husband or even her old and less Establishment circle of friends. ‘Once she decides you’re not part of her life, she can be very cold. It’s this shutdown mechanism she had. There’s nothing to negotiate. She’s made her decision and that’s it,’ Nikki said, explaining how Meghan dropped the axe on Trevor as well as on her old circle of friends. Having achieved a new and more elegant circle and a degree of renown in a successful TV show, ‘It was like a light switched off. There’s Meghan Before Fame and Meghan After Fame. After three seasons of Suits, she called me to say the marriage was over. Maybe she had started to change before then, but I was refusing to see it.’
Of course, people change with time, and Meghan was no exception. As she grew into the stardom she had worked so hard to achieve, she developed new aspects of her personality. To her longstanding best friend Nikki, it seemed that her ‘tone of voice, her mannerisms, the way she laughed’ had changed to such an extent that they ‘didn’t seem real to me anymore. Even by season two of Suits, she was turning down lunch with us because she said she’d be recognised. I felt if I questioned her behaviour, I’d be left on the outside.’
Moving up in the world can come at a price. Some are willing to pay it, others aren’t. Meghan clearly was. Her new status meant that she had changed from unsuccessful actress to successful. She was happy with the changes and expected those who loved her to be happy for her too. Accordi
ng to Nikki, ‘When she was in town, she’d want you to drop everything to see her. If I was busy, it would be, “Why don’t you want to see me? I’m here. Let’s hang out.” However, if she wanted to cancel an engagement, she would do so and expect the friend to understand that she now had demands on her time so they should accommodate her. This age-old conflict between those who are left behind and those who have done the leaving might have been resolved with a bit of goodwill on both sides. It is impossible to say, from this vantage point, whose lack of flexibility resulted in a severing of ties, but Nikki decided that Meghan had developed a sense of entitlement because of the show, that success had gone to her head, and that she was severing ties with her past now that her old friends were no longer on a worldly par with her. Tellingly, it would turn out to be Nikki Priddy who dropped the axe on her friendship with Meghan, which gives us a wealth of information about how both women functioned, and what they valued.
It takes a lot to break the back of a lifelong friendship, but there were two straws that did it for Nikki Priddy. The first was when Meghan fell in love with a rescue dog and tried to wrest it away from someone who had displayed interest in it before Meghan did. She emailed the pet people asserting that the dog would have a better life in the Suits family than it would with the other prospective owner. Nikki felt she was playing the Suits card to gain an advantage to which she had no entitlement, and ‘it left a sour taste in my mouth.’ Meghan, of course, had another take entirely. She wanted the dog and was prepared to do whatever it took to get it. She would never have thought she was being ruthless, just clever in using everything at her disposal to get her own way. Being a winner.
The death knell of the friendship became the way Meghan behaved at the end of her marriage with Trevor. Nikki was bemused with the way she ended the relationship, simply posting him back her wedding and engagement rings without any explanation, leaving him feeling ‘like something stuck to the bottom of her shoe.’ Although there had always been ‘fights’ between them, there had been no warning that the relationship was even under threat, much less that it was in danger of coming to an end. Nikki, who was friendly with both Meghan and Trevor, telephoned her lifelong friend to speak to her about it, after seeing Trevor and learning what she regarded as being the callous and brutal way in which Meghan had ended the marriage. But Meghan refused to impart any information to the best friend she had had since the age of two. Nikki felt that she had not only changed personality but, having developed a new circle, really couldn’t be bothered with her old one any more. ‘It was obvious to me that she wasn’t the friend I’d grown up with,’ Nikki said, and decided to cut her out of her life entirely. People who have known Meghan all her life, believe that Nikki was wise to jump. Had she not done so, she might well have been pushed, so she at least had the comfort of doing the dropping. This was not a consolation her father would have.
If the loss of her closest and oldest friend bothered Meghan, she gave no indication. This was a time of great change for her, and the likelihood is that she was so busy growing into her new life that she barely had time for that alone, much less regrets about those she had left behind or who had dropped her. From January 2010 she had been writing a revealing blog called The Working Actress, about her experiences being unemployed then employed. It was time and emotion consuming. She graphically described the anguish she had suffered as she failed to land parts. ‘When it’s good, it’s fucking awesome. The other 300-plus days of the year, it’s harder than most would think. Humbling. Gruelling. Sometimes mind-numbing. But at the end of the day it’s all worth it. People often describe actors who pop onto the scene as “overnight success stories”. Here’s the reality - it’s more like years of hustle…welcome to the hustle.’
Meghan imparted penetrating insights into her psyche and the effect her years of rejection and occasional dollops of success had had upon her, writing about how she tricked herself via self-hypnosis into believing that she would succeed, endlessly repeating the mantra ‘I’m a booker. I book all the time’ in an attempt to give herself enough courage to audition and face failure again and again. ‘Point is: sometimes when you trick yourself, it actually works. I believed my silly little mantra and well…it came to be.’
During Suits’ first year she continued pouring her heart and soul into the blog, inadvertently giving the reader insight into how success was changing her. In March 2010, before her breakthrough, she confided that ‘I loathe walking the red carpet. It makes me nervous and itchy, and I don’t know which way to look. I just revert to this nerdy child that I once was. I hate it. I get off the carpet and have to shake it off. Sounds dramatic, but it’s really nerve-racking for me.’
Meghan remained an unspoilt hopeful appreciative of a chuckle from Donald Sutherland when her path crossed his during her half minute appearance on the Jennifer Aniston 2011 black comedy Horrible Bosses. But success was having an effect. Although she was by no means a major star once Suits was underway, she was already positioning herself to cope with fame in such a way that Meghan the Individual would not be swamped by the demands of fame. To do so, she had to adopt an attitude of disdain, so she started to denigrate fame and its demands from the lofty height of self-awareness. She wrote, ‘I am part of the horse and pony show this year. The scruffle has already begun with production and PR - the outfit I will wear, the hotel I will stay at, the parties I will attend.’ She also alluded to ‘the first-class flights the studio sends me out on,’ as if she had been brought up in a world of private jets and first class travel was an inconvenience to be decried rather than a luxury she was barely used to. Instead of frankly embracing the whole experience the way she had embraced the pain of failure, she distanced herself from the very thing she had sought all her life by disdaining the perks and demands of success. ‘They roll out the red carpet in a major way because they want me (‘the talent’ as they call us) to show up looking and presenting in the best possible manner. This is the ultimate “dance monkey, dance”. Now let me say this - as much as some people might hear this description and feel nauseated by it (that inner monologue of “but I am an artiste”) I say this to you, dear friend: Get over yourself.’
The difficulty with that admonition was, the audience to whom she was speaking was in reality an audience of one, and her injunction was nothing but one part of herself speaking to another. It was obvious she adored being on the road to fame, and was mesmerised by her new-found success. She had striven for the better part of a decade to get where she was, and who could begrudge her how she felt about her success? ‘This is part of the job, and it’s fucking awesome. It’s fancy and it’s cool, and it’s the business of what it takes to make it in this business.’
However, Meghan’s next statement showed that somewhere in the deep recesses of her being she had not entirely given up on her old dream of being a Broadway star or a serious actress who was way above movie or, God-forbid, TV stardom. ‘If you are pursuing television, then realise that you have already sold out, and take your big fancy pay check to produce your “artiste”-driven plays on hiatus. Because you can now.’
She then revealed how she could not help intermingling delight in her good fortune, self-congratulation and disdain as she continued, ‘Because flashing those pearly whites (ahem, veneers) and working the red carpet with your sexy little body (ahem, Spanx) is part of the job description you jumped on board for when you were lucky enough to sign on the dotted line that day you were testing.
‘This is what we call a high-class problem. And compared with the problems of what feels like many moons ago (not having money to fill up my gas tank, Scotch-taping my headshots as CVs because I ran out of staples, crying because I couldn’t get a call back, or even an audition - when I knew in my core that I was the best possible one for the part), I will take this any day.’
As if that had not been revealing enough, she also gave the first hints of the schizophrenic attitude to recognition she would later exhibit once she became truly famous. When the h
andyman who came to fix her dishwasher recognised her and asked her to pose for a selfie ‘to prove to his brother and dad that he’d met me’, she complained about having her private space violated. She also demonstrated the early sproutings of the exacting demands she would become known for once she became a member of the Royal Family. In the blog, she bemoaned the conduct of the driver who collected her from the airport. He had committed three cardinal sins. Firstly, he brandished a sign at the airport with her full name. This the discerning and authoritative Meghan tut-tutted was ‘kind of a no-no, usually it’s just a first initial and last name’. Secondly, he had the temerity to invade her personal space and show her photographs on his iPhone as they waited at the carousel for her luggage. Thirdly, he exasperated her when he delivered her to the wrong address.
This was the first recorded instance of the newly-privileged Meghan seeking the sympathy of her audience by demonstrating how hard done-by she was by the ineptitude, insufficiency, or plain, plumb insensitivity of people who were there to make her life easier but somehow managed to become a problem to her. The only difficulty with this scenario was that drivers are given their destination by their controller. The fault was therefore not the unfortunate Jim’s, at least not on that front, but the controller who had given him the wrong address.
Meghan also admitted on the blog that she had been ignorant of ‘what being a working actress would entail. I work long hours, I travel for Press, my mind memorises. My mind spins. My days blur. My nights are restless. My hair is primped, my face painted, my name is recognised, my star meter is rising, my life is changing.’
To capitalise upon those changes, Meghan stopped writing The Working Actress in the summer of 2012. She would wait two years before starting another blog. The Tig was an altogether more professional enterprise. Created by a successful Toronto digital agency named Article, it derived its name from Tignanello, a wine created in 1970 by Piero Antinori of the eponymous winery dating from 1385. This was a lifestyle blog which cleverly and self-consciously traded upon her success as an actress while at the same time earning her some $100,000 a year and ratifying her aspirations to being perceived as a classy and authoritative figure or, as Meghan put it, the ‘hub for the discerning palette - those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion, and beauty. I wanted to create a space to share all of those loves - to invite friends to share theirs as well, and to be the breeding ground for ideas and excitement - for an inspired lifestyle.’ Meghan was positioning herself to be as much an authority figure off screen as Rachel Zane was on it.
Meghan and Harry Page 10