CHAPTER 2
For a couple whose backgrounds are so radically different in worldly terms, Meghan and Harry were born to parents whose unions shared surprising similarities. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales and Mr and Mrs Thomas Markle were mismatched. Once their marriages failed, both sets of parents would try their best to spare their children from suffering from the fallout, in the process exacerbating its effects in unexpected ways. Had Harry and Meghan been born to couples who were more compatible, more evenly matched, and more aware of the need to provide stronger boundaries and less indulgence, it is unlikely that either the Duke or the Duchess of Sussex would ever have had as much in common as they do. For all their differences, they also share such profound similarities that this unique combination has proven to be a potent force binding them together in ways that make them a uniquely strong couple.
Rachel Meghan Markle was born three years before Harry on the 4th August 1981. Her father Thomas Wayne Markle Sr was, according to her, a successful, 37 year old ‘lighting director for a soap opera’ who had received a Chicago/Midwest Emmy for the television show Made in Chicago in 1975, and would later on be a co-recipient of two Daytime Emmy awards for the popular soap opera General Hospital in 1985 and 2001. He was nominated on several other occasions as well, and also worked on the long-running series Married… with Children, while ‘my mom was a temp at the studio when they met’.
Doria Loyce Ragland was four weeks shy of her 25th birthday at the time of her daughter’s birth, and had been married for a year and nine months. Meghan likes ‘to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her Afro, plus their shared love of antiques. Whatever it was, they married and had me. They moved into a house in The Valley in LA, to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.’ Tom Sr was earning some $200,000 per annum, so, while not wealthy, the family was certainly comfortable.
It might be difficult for people of a certain age to imagine how it was for inter-racial couples four decades ago. The reality is, it took courage for both the Caucasian Tom and the Afro-American Doria Markle to embark upon their union. Admittedly, Hollywood, where they worked, was a lot less colour prejudiced than the hinterlands of Newport, Pennsylvania and Cleveland, Ohio, where Markle and Ragland families came from. But even in California, mixed race couples were still more of an exception than the norm, and Meghan states that some of her early memories were coloured by the embarrassment of people mistaking her mother for her nanny. As they lived in a white neighbourhood, and appear to have been the only mixed race family nearby, the confusion of the other residents as to what role Doria played in the fair-skinned Meghan’s life might well have been a matter of ignorance and unthinking expectation rather than prejudice. But, to a proud and strong woman like Doria, it was humiliating nevertheless to be mistaken for her daughter’s nanny. There is every indication that this was one of the catalysts which made the marriage as short lived as it was.
Although Meghan was Doria’s first, and would prove to be her only, child, her father already had a son and daughter from his first marriage. In 1964, at the age of twenty, Tom had married Roslyn Loveless, a nineteen year old secretary he had met at an on-campus party at the University of Chicago. In November of that year, their daughter Yvonne, now Samantha Marie, was born, followed two years later by Thomas Wayne Markle Jr.
After graduating from college, Tom Sr worked as a lighting director at WTTWTV-Channel 11, the primary Public Broadcasting Service in Chicago, Illinois, winning his first Emmy in 1975. At first, the marriage was happy, but within a few years, Roslyn was feeling neglected. According to her, Tom spent all hours of the day and night working. His aim was to win an Emmy, and while he was bringing in good money, he not only neglected her, but caroused with other women. By the early 70s, the marriage was over and the couple separated.
Tom lived in Chicago and had the children for weekends, but after he was nominated for his first Emmy, he moved to California, settling in Santa Monica. Samantha, who did not get on with her mother or her brother, joined him first. Then a traumatised Tom Jr arrived following an incident when Roslyn’s boyfriend apprehended burglars and was shot in front of mother and son. Tom Jr promptly fled to the safety of California, where the one fly in the ointment, from his point of view, was the presence of his sister, for whom he had an innate antipathy.
With both children now living with him, Tom moved to a spacious, five bedroomed house on Providencia Street adjacent to the Woodland Hills Country Club in the San Fernando Valley. Its location made the Markle residence one of the more desirable properties
