Founded in 1945 by Ruth Pease, Little Red School House is a Hollywood institution favored for the sons and daughters of LA’s showbiz elite. While parents rarely saw Johnny Depp, whose daughter attended the school, waiting outside the school gates, Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to pick up his daughter after school in a spray-painted Mercedes-Benz. Teaching—based around the four-stage program of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget—is eclectic, imaginative, and expensive: $18,800 for kindergarten, rising to $22,700 for grade 6. As the school chooses only the brightest and the best, older children have to take an exam before they are considered for entry. In 1983 Doria, who was now training as a social worker, and Tom enrolled two-year-old Meghan for preschool at the exclusive school.
The setup was convenient for all involved. Little Red School House was close to the ABC studios in Los Feliz, where Tom worked, and just a few minutes away from Doria’s work and her new home just south of Hollywood. Meghan would stay at the school until she was eleven years old. While reading, writing, and arithmetic were at the core of the school day, children could dip into a whole range of subjects, from Spanish to quantum physics. In summer, children worked in the community garden and hiked the nature trails at Leo Carrillo Beach or nearby Griffith Park.
The school’s stage shows, watched by proud parents, were another regular feature of the curriculum. When she was five, Meghan entertained the parents with a rendition of the song “The Wheels on the Bus,” and she was later featured in Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story. One Halloween Meghan and her friend Ninaki “Nikki” Priddy played two corpses discussing the size and comfort of their respective coffins. Another time she shared the lead in an adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Unfortunately, her costar, Elizabeth McCoy, came down with stomach flu just hours before the show began, leaving Meghan desperately trying to memorize both parts. “That was the worst experience of my life, trying to learn your lines,” Meghan told an apologetic McCoy afterward. Ironically, no one gave a thought to asking a little girl with an unkempt mane of blond hair, thick glasses, and an awkward, clumsy manner who was lurking in the chorus. Her name was Scarlett Johansson, now one of the world’s highest-paid actors.
McCoy, who these days is a renowned chef and scriptwriter, had another reason to thank Meghan. Two years Meghan’s junior, Elizabeth was a self-confessed weird kid. Intense, fiercely intelligent, and overweight, she was interested in offbeat subjects like UFOs, the occult, and ghosts. Other children thought her odd. Nor did it help that she suffered from petit mal seizures, a form of epilepsy that saw her going into a trancelike state from time to time that made her unreachable. As the seizures last for only a short time, children who have them are often thought to be daydreaming or not listening.
Meghan, Elizabeth was to discover, was not like many of the other kids, who either walked on by or mocked her. The first time Meghan saw Elizabeth suffering from a seizure she came to her aid, sitting holding her hand and comforting her. Elizabeth also remembers how she provided friendship when she was being taunted by the “mean girls,” as she describes them. She recalls: “I was bullied and miserable and my only salvation were the kids who liked me. I really liked Meghan a lot. She didn’t turn me away if I started talking about offbeat subjects. She listened. She was cool and had cool things to say. I liked being around her.”
It was clear that Meghan had inherited her mother’s strong sense of right and wrong, and was prepared to stand up for herself and for others. On one occasion the so-called mean girls announced that they were starting a “White Girls Only” club and wanted Meghan to join. “Are you kidding me?’ said Meghan to the gaggle of fellow pupils, dismissing them in a sentence. They went very quiet after that. That playground confrontation highlighted Meghan’s own concerns about her identity. She tells the story of how, around this same time, Christmas 1988, her father bought two sets of Heart dolls containing the traditional nuclear family unit of mother, father, and two children. He bought one with black dolls and one with white and mixed them together to represent Meghan’s own family. Then he wrapped them in sparkly Christmas paper and placed the box under the tree.
Her struggle to understand herself and where she was placed in the scheme of humanity instinctively made her more aware of those who had difficulties fitting in.
As Elizabeth McCoy recalls: “You never forget the people who were mean to you and who was nice. That’s why I have never forgotten Meghan. She was one of the most righteous people I have ever met. If someone was being treated unfairly she stuck up for them. On one occasion I made the girl who bullied me cry. I tried to apologize, and Meghan sided with the other girl because she was the one in tears.
“Meghan called it like it was. She was going to defend those who needed it. Her attitude was: ‘I can see you are hurt and I’m going to protect you.’ She was a genuinely decent human being who looked out for people who needed help. She gave a damn about people other than herself.”
Even Elizabeth’s father, Dennys McCoy, an internationally known animation scriptwriter, singles out Meghan. He recalls: “She stood out because she was a level-headed kid who was smart and mature for her age. We were surprised that she became an actress. We thought she would be a lawyer.”
By the time she was ten, Meghan was fiercely switched on and loved to debate an issue, taking part in discussions about racism in America, most notably after the notorious beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, by LA cops in 1991, the Gulf War that same year, and the buildup to the 1992 presidential contest between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. During one classroom discussion about the looming war in the Gulf, a fellow pupil was in tears because he didn’t think his older brother, who was serving in the US military, would make it home. The issue became such a hot topic that the children, led by Meghan, staged a protest on the school grounds. They made banners and signs with antiwar slogans. Such was the interest that local TV station KTLA sent along a camera crew to film the protest.
Even nearer to home were the LA riots in late April and early May of 1992, which ignited after four Los Angeles Police Department officers, who were filmed savagely beating Rodney King, were acquitted of assault and using excessive force. As the burning and looting spread like fingers along LA’s thoroughfares, Meghan and her classmates were sent home. Meghan watched with wonder as ash from burning buildings floated onto her lawn. She thought it was snowing, but her mother knew better and told her to get into the house. Even when they returned to school there was a brooding sense of anxiety; the children, including Meghan, crowded around a second-floor school window as they watched police arresting a man acting suspiciously. In total the six days of rioting left sixty-three dead and more than 2,300 injured, and led to more than 12,000 arrests.
The experience awakened the nascent activist in her, and Meghan determined to use her influence when she could. She gained something of a reputation for writing to companies, especially food giants, about damaged or faulty packages and foods. Invariably she was sent bags of chips, cookies, and the like by the food companies as compensation and regularly brought the fruits of her letter writing to share among her school friends.
Her most memorable coup was when, at age eleven, she wrote a letter to the household products company Procter & Gamble for making a sexist commercial that used the tag line “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans” to sell dishwashing liquid. She and the rest of her classmates were watching the commercials as part of a social studies assignment. However, it was the reaction by two boys in her class to the dishwashing liquid ad that particularly incensed them. She recalls them saying, “Yeah, that’s where women belong—in the kitchen.” Meghan felt confused. She was angry and annoyed, knowing that they were wrong, but she also felt, as she later recalled, “small, too small to say anything in that moment,” as she wrote later about the incident.
She went home and told her father, Tom, who suggested that she channel her feelings into handwritten letters of complaint. Not only d
id she write to the soap company chairman saying that the phrase should be changed to “People all over America,” but also to Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady; Nick News anchor Linda Ellerbee; and prominent women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who was based in Los Angeles.
While Hillary Clinton and Linda Ellerbee wrote letters of encouragement, and Gloria Allred also offered her support, according to Meghan, she never heard from Proctor & Gamble. However, when the ad aired again just a month later, she saw the fruits of her handiwork. It had been changed to say: “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” Her success once again had the TV cameras arriving at the school, this time with Ellerbee interviewing Meghan and her fellow pupils about her one-schoolgirl campaign.
“I don’t think it’s right for kids to grow up thinking these things, that just mom does everything,” Meghan told Ellerbee. “It’s always, ‘mom does this,’ and ‘mom does that.’” Sometime afterward, this and other incidents inspired her to join the Washington-based National Organization for Women. Meghan, as she proudly recalled, became one of the youngest if not the youngest member of the group, founded in 1966, which campaigns for women’s rights.
More than twenty years later, in 2015, Meghan reflected on this chapter of her life while giving a speech as the newly minted UN Women Advocate for Political Participation and Leadership.
“It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of eleven, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality,” she said at the time. While her childhood experiences were the crucible that set her on the path to activism, her mother believes that she was hardwired from birth to try to make the world a better and more equal place. In short, she had a moral compass. Doria played her own part, strict at home but also ready to show her daughter that there was more to the world than Woodland Hills. She raised her to be what she called “a global citizen,” taking her to places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where Meghan recalls seeing children playing in the dirt roads and peddling Chiclets so that they could bring home a few extra pesos. When Meghan, then age ten, and her mother visited the slums of Jamaica, the schoolgirl was horrified to see such grinding poverty. “Don’t look scared, Flower,” her mother told her. “Be aware, but don’t be afraid.”
Her experience is reminiscent of the times the late Diana, Princess of Wales, privately took her boys, William and Harry, to visit the homeless and the sick in central London so that they would hopefully appreciate that life did not begin and end at the palace gates.
Meghan’s letter-writing campaigns, interest in current affairs, purposeful traveling, and gender awareness were all of a piece with a young girl embarking on a journey where feminism could coexist with femininity, as well as an ethos of hard work matched by a willingness to try the new and the interesting.
By sublime irony, just as her letter-writing campaign got underway, another letter-writing campaign was kicking off, this one regarding the raunchy comedy show Married… with Children, for which her father was now the lighting director. Meghan often sat on the floor of the studio after school waiting for her father to finish work so he could take her home. Indeed, she thrilled her fellow classmates when she was given permission to bring several friends on set to meet the cast.
As she sat quietly reading or studying, all kinds of ribald scenes were played out, some involving various stages of undress and semi-nudity, as well as off-color jokes about sex—hardly the normal afterschool fare for a young girl. In January 1989, a Mormon from Michigan, Terry Rakolta, led a boycott of the show after the screening of an episode entitled “Her Cups Runneth Over,” which involved the purchase of a bra. That episode showed the character of Al Bundy ogling a naked model in a department store.
The resulting media storm led to some sponsors withdrawing advertising and the conservative Parents Television Council describing the show as “the crudest comedy on prime time television… peppered with lewd punch lines about sex, masturbation, the gay lifestyle and the lead character’s fondness for pornographic magazines and strip clubs.”
Meghan later described her own misgivings about spending time around the long-running comedy when she appeared on Craig Ferguson’s late night show. She told the host: “It’s a very perverse place for a girl to grow up. I went to Catholic school. I’m there in my school uniform and the guests would be [former porn star] Traci Lords.” While she wasn’t allowed to watch the show when it aired, her mother would let her kiss the screen as her dad’s name went by in the credits at the end of the program.
Perverse it may have been, but it paid the bills—and Meghan’s private school fees. At this time, unbeknownst to her, her father enjoyed a slice of luck that meant he no longer had to work such a brutal schedule. In 1990 he won the California State Lottery, scooping $750,000 with five numbers, which included Meghan’s birthdate. The win was ample payback for the thousands he had spent over the years buying lottery tickets.
As he still had outstanding financial matters concerning his divorce from Doria, he kept the win secret. In order to avoid registering his name with the lottery authorities, he sent an old Chicago friend to pick up his winnings. The plan, according to his son, backfired when his pal ended up swindling him out of the lion’s share of his fortune in a failed jewelry business.
Before he lost his loot, Tom gave his son a substantial handout to start a flower shop and bought daughter Yvonne a second car after she wrecked the first one he had given her.
Within three years of his big win Tom had declared bankruptcy, the lottery win proving more of a curse than a blessing. At least he had kept some money aside to pay for the next stage of Meghan’s education. His daughter enrolled as a freshman at Immaculate Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school just yards from his home in Los Feliz. From then on it made sense for her to live with her father during the week. It was a decision that would have far-reaching implications for the way she was seen by her new teachers and classmates.
3
A Street Called Gladys
Sixth Street in Downtown Los Angeles is not a place for the unwary, and after dark even the wary give it a wide berth. Danger lurks in the shadows; desperation loiters on the sidewalk. This is the heart of Skid Row, the mushrooming and endlessly shifting encampment of the homeless and the helpless that is a makeshift home to more than two thousand people. Los Angeles is the homeless capital of America. At the last count there were more than 57,000 men, women, and children sleeping rough in the City of Angels. Tent towns frequently spring up around the city underpasses, in empty buildings, and in other open spaces.
This particular stretch is more organized than most of the impromptu enclaves of Skid Row, with volunteers handing out water, clean socks, and food. And there is one place in particular, at the corner of Sixth and Gladys, that offers a welcome oasis of calm and tranquility amid the shouts, moans, and shrieks of those who live in the tents and cardboard sheds that line both sides of the road.
This is the Hospitality Kitchen, more popularly known as the Hippie Kitchen, which is part of the Catholic Worker community founded more than eighty years ago by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Their stated goal is to “feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner.” In an average day volunteers will hand out a nourishing but simple meal to around one thousand folk who line up around the block; for many it is their only food for the day. There is no prayer or proselytizing, just beans, salad, a hunk of bread, and a thick slice of goodwill.
Their uncompromising ideals have, at times, placed them in head-on conflict with the Catholic hierarchy, local police, and even other homeless charities. Catholic Worker activists are known to protest unfair treatment of the homeless, American militarism and nuclear policy, as well as the death penalty. Acts of civil disobedience have led some to suffer arrest and even jail. Former nun Catherine Morris, now eighty-three, and a stalwart of the Hippie Kitchen for more than forty years, has lost count of the number of times she an
d her husband, Jeff Dietrich, have been arrested for peaceful acts of civil disobedience. They like to think of themselves as the “Merry Pranksters,” the name derived from the early hippie followers of counterculture author and poet Ken Kesey.
Though protest is an integral part of the Catholic Worker credo, feeding the homeless and the destitute takes priority. And it was in the garden of the Hippie Kitchen—a small outdoor haven that’s filled with colorful murals, the chirping of Brazilian finches in an aviary, and water bubbling over a fountain—that Meghan Markle had what could only be described as an epiphany.
She first visited the Hippie Kitchen when she was just thirteen and found the experience “very scary.” By the time Meghan enlisted as a volunteer in the early 1990s, the composition of the homeless neighborhood had drastically changed, from mainly old, white male drunks to a new, younger and more volatile community of those high on crack cocaine and other deadly drugs. “I was young, and it was rough and raw down there and, though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed,” she later recalled.
She may well have chalked the visit up to experience and never ventured there again but for a classroom conversation with her Immaculate Heart High School theology teacher Maria Pollia some three years later. During class Maria, who had been a volunteer at the Hippie Kitchen for years, described her own early experience and how she faced up to her fears and doubts.
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