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.
Make no mistake about it, Meghan is clever. She intended to use the blog to boost her profile as well as her bank balance. Thereafter, she approached celebrities who crossed her path and offered them a platform to air their views. It was a masterful move, one which elevated her and gave her ballast, for while the stated objectives of the blog were lightweight, she also roped in writers, artists, activists as well as celebrities. It quickly became successful, and by the time she ended it in 2017 just before her marriage to Harry, it had some 2m followers.
Because Meghan was intelligent and a quick learner, absorbing as if by osmosis all the lessons gleamed from the talented people who crossed her path, she was polishing her act at the very moment that the blog was growing in importance. Being a lifestyle blog, it covered everything from tennis with Serena Williams to stars like Elizabeth Hurley and Heidi Klum, with just enough coverage of serious issues such as gender, race, activism and poverty, to balance the overt superficiality of its otherwise aspirationalism.
The Tig proved instrumental in another area of Meghan’s life. She had fancied the celebrity chef Cory Vitiello ever since she had first seen him in his downtown Toronto restaurant, The Harbord Room. He was a highly desirable man-about-town who had enjoyed a series of high-profile romances, including with the former Member of Parliament, businesswoman and philanthropist Belinda Stronach, whose billionaire father Frank is one of Canada’s richest men, and television personality and humanitarian Tanya Kim, who co-hosted a popular talk show with Ben Mulroney. Cory would be a feather in her cap if she could somehow contrive to bag him, which she did through the simple expedient of publishing a glowing review of his restaurant in The Tig which contained an even more glowing regard for the chef himself.
According to one of Meghan’s childhood friends, who wishes to remain anonymous, she is extremely seductive when she targets people she wants to impress. ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or woman. If Meg wants to suck you into her orbit, she pulls out all the stops. She learnt a long time ago that flattery works, especially if it’s dished out with lashings of self-abnegation along the lines of, “You’re so marvellous, everything you do is so great, I want nothing from you except to admire you.” She’s wonderfully spontaneous. No one is more enthusiastic, especially when she wants to ensnare a man. She envelopes him in a miasma of adoration. She makes out that his every mundane action is a unique gift to humanity. Few people and even fewer men can resist an onslaught of such positivity from someone as appealing as Meghan. ‘This makes her very seductive. Men don’t want to resist the outpouring and, because she seems so sincere, they end up hooked on her.’
Meghan has tremendous charm, apparent vulnerability, sweetness, and personability. She has a great deal of sex appeal, most of which emanates from her personality and those big brown eyes which beam with delight when she wants to bedazzle. She is also highly intelligent and excellent company. Above all, however, she is self-confident. By her own account, she found leaving
