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 success. 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
