Thanks to Tom Markle’s earning power – swollen by a $750,000 win in the California State Lottery in 1990 – Meghan’s upbringing was not as deprived as some have imagined. Canoga Park where she spent much of her childhood is a respectable blue-collar and middle-class suburb of Los Angeles – not fancy, perhaps, but cheerfully green and racially mixed.
When Meghan was six, Doria and Tom separated and divorced, and she went to live with Doria. But Tom remained a hands-on father. ‘He taught me how to fish,’ recalled Meghan, ‘to appreciate Busby Berkeley films, write thank you notes and spend my weekends in Little Tokyo eating chicken teriyaki with vegetable tempura.’
It was her father’s care and belief, she later said, that inspired her ‘grand dream’ of becoming an actress – and in a very practical sense. With Doria working – at jobs as a travel agent, a clothing designer and later a social worker – Tom would be the one to pick Meghan up from school and take her to work with him.
Her assurance and her familiarity with show business would come from nearly a decade of doing her homework on the sets of the sitcom Married … with Children and General Hospital – on which her father was the lighting supremo. In 1982, the year after Meghan’s birth, Tom Markle had won a Daytime Emmy Award for his lighting direction of General Hospital and four years later he had been nominated for an award for his lighting work helping to stage the 58th Academy Awards – the Oscars.
Meghan was not obviously thrown off course by her parents’ separation and divorce in 1987. If anything, it increased her self-reliance. Early in 1991, aged only nine, she was filmed by a local news channel holding up an anti-war protest sign in a demonstration against the first Gulf War that she herself had organised in the school playground. A boy in her class had burst into tears because his elder brother was heading out to fight against Iraq, and the boy thought he was going to die. So Meghan drew a sign saying ‘Peace and Harmony for the World’ and gathered her classmates into the protest.
‘She was one of those children,’ said her teacher Ilise Faye, ‘that would stand up for the underdogs. She would stand up for what she believed in, and she was a leader among her friends, her peer group.’
A year or so later, Meghan went a stage further with her political and social campaigning. She was watching a TV show in school when a commercial came on for Ivory Clear dishwashing liquid, showing a sink full of dirty dishes, with the tagline ‘Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.’ Two boys in the class piped up, ‘Yeah, that’s where women belong – in the kitchen!’
‘I remember feeling shocked and angry,’ Meghan said, ‘and also just feeling so hurt … Something needed to be done. So I went home and told my dad what had happened, and he encouraged me to write letters. So I did – to the most powerful people I could think of.’
Starting at the top, the eleven-year-old wrote to the First Lady, Hillary Clinton; to Linda Ellerbee, the host of Nick News, her favourite kids’ TV news programme; to the noted women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred; and to Ivory Clear’s manufacturer, Procter & Gamble.
Procter & Gamble never replied. But Hillary Clinton and Gloria Allred did. Both sent letters of encouragement, and Linda Ellerbee sent a camera crew to interview the young campaigner. A month later Procter & Gamble changed its tagline. ‘Women all over America’ became ‘People all over America’, and its TV copy lines have tried to remain gender neutral ever since.
The Immaculate Heart School that Meghan attended from the age of eleven to seventeen might not have been ritzy, but it was an esteemed and fee-paying all-girls Catholic establishment that was known for producing hard-working, polite and civic-minded young women. About a third of its students were white, 20 per cent were Latina, 17 per cent were mixed-race like Meghan, 17 per cent were Asian and Pacific Islander, and 5 per cent or so were black. Former pupils included actresses Tyra Banks and Mary Tyler Moore, yet though the campus was sited below the hilltop lettering of the famous Hollywood sign, the religious – and even austere – academy was not celebrity-inclined.
Virtually all of Immaculate Heart’s students went on to high-quality colleges, and many went to Harvard, Princeton or Stanford. But the teaching sisters were proudest of the number of pupils who volunteered for their out-of-school charity projects – among them a soup kitchen on Skid Row for which they equipped girls with the slogan, ‘Put the needs of others above your own fears.’
Through these secondary school years Meghan stayed pretty much full-time at the home of her father, since Thomas lived within walking distance of Immaculate Heart. He would help with the lighting and stage sets of the school productions in which his daughter performed – including the musicals Into the Woods and Annie, in the latter of which Meghan sang her own solo number.
‘I remember her being very excited and nervous about her song,’ recalls Gigi Perreau, a former child actress who taught Meghan drama at Immaculate Heart for four years. ‘She was very active in my drama department. We never had a moment’s problem with her. She was spot on, learnt her lines when she had to – very dedicated, very focused.’
Immaculate Heart had a fondness for ancient Greek words with a religious connotation – ‘kairos’, for example, meaning ‘the time when God acts’, was the title given to school spiritual sessions, in
