If they had been among the millions watching the London wedding in the week before their baby’s birth, Meghan’s parents Tom and Doria Markle could hardly have failed to notice the difference between the classical dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and the gold orb-topped turrets of the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard where they had married eighteen months earlier. With its strikingly exotic Moorish entrance arch and plastic Buddhas, the Self-Realization Fellowship Temple stood out in the middle of LA’s red-light district – it was just a stone’s throw from where Hugh Grant would be caught in his car enjoying oral sex with prostitute Divine Brown in June 1995.
‘A fresh new day … and it is ours,’ read the opening line of the Markles’ wedding invitation, with the promise of ‘happy beginnings …’
Their ceremony of union had been presided over by Brother Bhaktananda, an ordained Buddhist priest in glowing orange robes who had been born Michael Krull in Pennsylvania. Founded in 1920 by Indian yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, the Fellowship Temple preached a gospel of ‘spirituality and self-knowledge through meditation and Kriya yoga’ and had been the choice of Doria, twenty-three years old at the time of her marriage to the thirty-five-year-old Thomas. According to her half-brother Joseph Johnson – Meghan’s uncle – Doria ‘was fascinated by alternative religions and yoga’.
Joseph would give Doria the credit for instilling in his niece Meghan her expansive self-confidence, along with the buoyant belief she developed early in her childhood that ‘she could be anything and achieve anything’. Joseph traced this back to the profusion of striking female role models in the family – ‘culturally our family did not have male figures around’ – and especially to Doria’s mother Jeanette, Meghan’s grandmother, who was the daughter of a Cleveland bellhop and lift operator in a ‘fancy whites-only hotel’.
Joseph recalled the searing experience of crossing America as a child with his half-sister in the days of segregation. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Doria had been just a baby when her mother packed her up to head west. Arriving one night in a small ‘all white’ town in the middle of Texas, they were cold and hungry, but no one would rent a room to them as non-whites.
‘We wanted food and shelter, but we were turned away because of the colour of our skin.’ It was the first time that Uncle Joseph, then seven years old, had experienced racism.
‘I was young,’ he recalls, ‘but I remember one guy pointing off into the snow saying, “The highway is that way. Get going! You are not welcome here.”’
Life got better in Los Angeles, where Doria was bussed with other black pupils under the recently passed desegregation laws to Fairfax High, a mostly white Jewish school.
‘We were raised together,’ Uncle Joseph recounted to the Mail on Sunday’s Caroline Graham. ‘There was an age difference [seven years] with Doria. She was the youngest. But, like Meghan, she’s whip-smart and always wanted more out of life.’
Priding herself on her hair, Doria grew ‘a big beautiful Afro’ and started work as a trainee make-up artist on the daytime TV show General Hospital – which was where, in her early twenties, she met Thomas Markle, twelve years her senior, recently divorced and working on the soap opera as the lighting director. The attraction was instant. On the highly successful long-running show nurses and doctors would engage in ‘lusty’ love affairs while performing heroic heart transplants. Tom and Doria couldn’t match the medical heroics, but their love affair proved both powerful and immediate, and they wasted no time in getting married.
Thomas had arrived from the east coast where he had grown up in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of three sons in a talented Anglo-German family – known as ‘Merckel’ before they anglicised the name. One of his brothers joined the US air force and was later an international diplomat, while the other became a bishop in the small Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America – its motto ‘God became human in order that human beings might become gods’.
Leaving school in his teens, the young and artistic Thomas had moved to the nearby Pocono Mountains, where he found backstage work in playhouses catering to the tourist trade – before relocating to Chicago. In the Windy City he married for the first time, fathering two children, and became a lighting director.
The equivalent of the director of photography in movies or television, a lighting director inspired and set the ‘mood’ or look of any scene, and Tom Markle had a light touch. Although physically heavy-set, he was creatively twinkle-toed, taking his inspiration from the Busby Berkeley movies he had loved to watch as a child with their extravagantly illuminated parades of elegantly clad dancers.
In later years, and certainly at the time of her marriage to Prince Harry, Thomas Markle would come to play the villain in Meghan’s life, taking money for clunky press interviews in which he was outspoken in his criticism of his daughter. Eventually, and notoriously, he would fail to feature at her wedding to Harry. But as a young father by all accounts – including Meghan’s own – Thomas’s creativity and commitment were a parental inspiration.
‘It’s safe to say,’ Meghan stated at the time of her engagement, ‘I have always been a “Daddy’s Girl”.’
One Christmas Tom tackled the central question of his daughter’s mixed-race identity by purchasing two sets of Barbie dolls – one black and one white. He took them apart and re-mixed them to create her own customised personal set – ‘a black mom doll, a
