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. According 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
