Both sides of Meghan’s family have confirmed that while she was growing up ‘nothing was too good for her.’ Her father spoiled her from the time she was a baby. Although her mother lay down boundaries, she also spoiled her, as did the extended families. At the age of two, around the time of her parents’ separation, she was enrolled in the Hollywood Little Red School House. This was an exceptional school started by an exceptional woman whose objective was to create exceptional adults.
Ruth Pease, born Stover, was the only child of deaf parents. As a result, she was teased from early childhood and grew up valuing kindness and diversity as well as education and character. During the Second World War, she ran a nursery school for six children at her house. One charge was a half Chinese boy whose parents had had difficulty finding a place for him elsewhere. At the time, the US was at war with Japan, and the child, who was often mistaken for Japanese, attracted such prejudice that no one else would take him in. Ruth’s landlord then objected to her running a nursery school from his property, necessitating a move to a house nearby on a quiet, tree-lined street named Highland Avenue. Her husband Robert painted the building red, they expanded to some twenty children, and, to distinguish it from a daycare centre, Pease in 1951 helped to form the Pre-School Association of California. According to her daughter Debbie Wehbe, ‘People started referring to it as “the little red schoolhouse.”’ So they changed the school’s name and added the storybook bell tower which became a stand-out feature. Diversity was one of Mrs Pease’s aims, and, over the years, the school acquired such a good reputation that its alumnae included the children of the 1950s sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, Johnny Depp, and Flea - bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers - as well as diplomats and people from more average backgrounds.
By 1968, new building codes required the tearing down of the old building and the construction of a new one. Meghan therefore arrived in 1983 to a much enlarged and expanding institution, whose reputation for excellence and diversity was second to none locally. By no means cheap (from twenty to twenty five thousand dollars at today’s prices), it was by that time one of the main ‘go to’ centres of learning for the children of the Hollywood elite. Meghan would spend nine years there, flourishing under the ministrations of a progressive but structured regimen based upon the four stages of Cognitive Development formulated by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.
The location of the Hollywood Little Red School House could not have been more convenient for Tom and Doria. He worked at the ABC Studios in nearby Los Feliz while her workplace, where she was training to be a social worker, was a few minutes away and easily accessible to her new home just south of Hollywood. After school, Doria, always physical, would take Meghan for bike rides, runs, or yoga, and they would end the day with mother and daughter making dinner. Meghan now attributes her love of cooking to this early regimen, so clearly it was a happy activity.
In 1992, at the age of eleven, Meghan transferred to Immaculate Heart High School. This again was a school where Hollywood’s elite and aspirational sent their children. Founded in 1906 and located on a beautiful hillside property in Los Feliz, LA, it was and remains a Catholic preparatory school for girls from grades 6 - 12. ‘We celebrate more than a century of nurturing the spiritual, intellectual, social and moral development of students as they distinguish themselves as women of great heart and right conscience,’ the school maintains, and once more, it was a bastion of elitism intermingling with some children of more ordinary background. Alumnae include Tyra Banks, Lucy Arnaz, Mary Tyler Moore, and Diane Disney, as well as several girls who have gone on to make their names in the entertainment industry.
From now until she went to university, Meghan would live mostly with her father. They had moved from the Providencia Street house to a smaller and more modest place near the school and his workplace. She remembered spending afternoons after school, dressed in her distinctive Catholic school uniform, at the studio where her father was working. She learnt all about lights and camera angles and the myriad of other techniques that make up the magic that is Hollywood. She recounted how ‘every day after school for 10 years, I was on the set of Married… with Children, which is a really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up. There were a lot of times my dad would say, “Meg, why don’t you go and help with the craft services room over there? This is just a little off-color for your 11-year-old eyes.”’
Ironically, it was race, not sex, that was developing into an issue for Meghan, though it is obvious from all she and everyone who knew her says, that it was a problem she was careful to keep to herself. At least, at the time. There was, for instance, the time she was compelled to fill out a mandatory census questionnaire in her English class. Asked to choose between boxes for white, black, Hispanic or Asian, she was befuddled so asked her teacher which one she should choose. The teacher recommended Caucasian, ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she remembered. But she refused to do so. ‘Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So, I didn’t tick the box. I left
