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Growing Up Markle

Growing up Markle in the 1950s was like a chapter from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Young Tom Markle, Meghan’s father, and his two older brothers, Mick and Fred, enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the small Pennsylvanian town of Newport, where they lived in a modest clapboard house. (Royal trivia: Newport is just 90 miles north of the birthplace of the last American to marry a royal prince, Bessie Wallis Warfield Simpson.) The boys played on monkey vines in the woods at the end of their dirt road, went fishing for catfish in the Juniata River, and in summer picked blackberries, their mother, Doris, turning their trove into delicious pies and jellies. As a teenager Tom earned his pin money literally, setting the pins in the local bowling alley. Or he would join his father, Gordon, who worked in administration for the post office, watching his beloved Philadelphia Phillies score home runs on their black and white television.

By the time Tom graduated from Newport High School, his brother Mick had joined the United States Air Force, where he worked in telecommunications, though some say he was eventually recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency. Brother Fred headed south, found religion, and eventually ended up becoming the presiding bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America, located in Sanford, Florida, where he is known as Bishop Dismas.

Tom took a different attitude toward his future. After graduating, he left small-town Newport and drove to the Poconos, a mountainous resort area in northeastern Pennsylvania. There he worked at the local theater, learning the technical backstage side of the business and gaining valuable experience that gave him a step up the professional ladder. He then traveled to Chicago after getting a job as a lighting technician at WTTW, the local affiliate for the Public Broadcasting Service. He also worked at the Harper Theater alongside the new owners, Bruce and Judith Sagan, who wanted to give the Hyde Park district, also the eventual home of Barack Obama, a vibrant new cultural center. He soon became the theater’s lighting director, working on the controversial musical Hair, dance shows, and classic Russian dramas as well as jazz and chamber music concerts.

Tom worked hard and played hard, spending downtime with his student friends from the prestigious University of Chicago. During one rowdy party at the on-campus International House in 1963, Tom, then nineteen, met eighteen-year-old Roslyn Loveless, a student who worked as a secretary in the nearby Amtrak offices. Both tall—she is five foot nine; he is six foot four—and with similar red hair, the attraction was immediate, Roslyn amused by his quirky sense of humor and “light air.” They married the following year. Their only daughter, Yvonne, was born in November 1964 and their son, Tom Junior, two years later, in 1966. In those early years, life was a grind, Tom often working eighteen-hour days and Roslyn holding down a secretarial job herself while bringing up two children. It was a constant juggling act, and Roslyn’s mother, Dorothy, helped out when she could.

Despite the daily pressures they still enjoyed a busy social life and had a fun circle of friends, Tom keeping everyone amused with his offbeat brand of humor. Roslyn remembers one time at a Greek restaurant when he pretended to have a parrot called Stanley and passed the imaginary parrot from one person to the next, imploring the waitresses not to stand on him. “It was hilarious,” she recalls. When Yvonne and Tom Junior started to lose their milk teeth, he sent them long letters from two tooth fairies, Hector and Ethel, who described their lives and explained what would happen to their teeth. From time to time he’d take the children to work with him. It was a thrill, especially as at that time he was lighting the hugely popular puppet show Sesame Street. A trip to Wrigley Field to watch the Chicago Cubs baseball team, driving his dad’s car in the parking lot at WTTW, being lifted into the air on the studio lighting gantry, hunting for quarters on a stage filled with foggy dry ice: these were some of the good times Tom Junior treasures.

In his eyes, Tom Senior was the fun dad, the dad who played the best games and made you laugh the hardest—when he was around. Which, sadly, was not often. Childhood expectation was invariably tinged with disappointment. He was consumed by his work, the fruits of his labor coming in local Emmy nominations—and a fat paycheck. The price he paid for such success was his marriage; the constant late nights, the boozy cast parties, and endless distraction and fatigue took their toll. One of Tom Junior’s earliest memories is the sound of raised voices, slamming doors, and angry words. At some point in the early 1970s, when the children were still in elementary school, the couple decided to go their separate ways.

For a time, Tom lived in Chicago and had the children on weekends. But it didn’t last long. He had a dream, and that dream was Hollywood. Sometime before their divorce in 1975, Tom left his estranged wife and children behind as he started his new life on the West Coast. The children would not see their father again for several years.

At the urging of her brother Richard, who lived in New Mexico, Roslyn and the children traveled to Albuquerque to make a new life. For a while it was a happy time. Uncle Richard was not his father, as far as Tom Junior was concerned, but at least he was around, teaching him to drive his VW Bug in a parking lot and showing him how to shoot. Plus, Richard and Roslyn got on well together. For the first time in their lives the children did not have to live with a rancorous atmosphere at home.

The downside was that as the only redhead at his new school, Tom Junior found himself bullied and picked on by his new classmates. Fellow pupils would steal his lunch money, while others started fights. He used to dread going to school, often coming home with yet another black eye. Worse was to come. One night he went to see the movie Smokey and the Bandit with his mother and her new boyfriend, a martial arts expert called Patrick. They arrived back home to find a full-scale robbery in progress. When Patrick tackled the thieves, he was shot in the stomach and the mouth, the bullets whistling past Tom Junior. Although Patrick survived, Tom Junior was traumatized.

Between bullying and burglary Tom Junior decided to leave Albuquerque and go live with his father, who was now enjoying life at the beachfront town of Santa Monica in Southern California. He arrived in time to enroll in high school.

Though he still idolized his father, there was one big fat fly in the ointment of his new life: his sister, Yvonne. She had moved there a few years earlier when she was fourteen. They had always fought like cats and dogs. “The sibling rivals from hell,” their despairing mother called them.

When the trio moved from Santa Monica to a large home on Providencia Street adjacent to the Woodland Hills Country Club, Tom Junior snagged the downstairs den as his bedroom. He was especially thrilled when a friend sold him a king-sized waterbed. His excitement turned to dismay when he sat on it shortly after taking delivery only to be soaked in water. Inspecting the evidence, he discovered several holes in the brand-new bed. For Tom, there was only one suspect. He recalls that his sister Yvonne immediately admitted responsibility but argued that it was retribution as she had wanted that room for herself—another episode in a bitter, resentful dance between the siblings. As her brother now recalls, “If she didn’t get what she wanted out of you, she was your worst nightmare.”

Enter into this bickering dynamic the figure of Doria Ragland. Small and watchful, with liquid brown eyes and a jaunty Afro, this was the woman who had turned their father Tom into gooey mush. Before he ever brought her home, the children noticed a change in their father. He was more relaxed, frequently taking time off work, cheery and lighthearted. In short, he was happy. The couple had met on the set of ABC’s drama General Hospital, where she was training as a makeup artist and he was well established as the show’s lighting director. In spite of the twelve-year age difference—Doria was closer in age to Yvonne than to her boyfriend—the couple very quickly fell for each other.

Doria’s education at Fairfax High School had been badly affected by the 1971 San Fernando earthquake. The quake had destroyed nearby Los Angeles High School, so the two schools doubled up, Doria studying from seven in the morning until noon and then pupils from LAHS taking over their classroom for the afternoon. In spite of the difficulties she was a member of the Apex Club, a class for academically advanced youngsters. After graduating from Fairfax, Doria sold jewelry, helped in Alvin’s antique store, called ’Twas New, and tended a bric-a-brac stall at a Sunday flea market. She also worked as a travel agent. It was a way of obtaining cut-rate air tickets so she could see the world on the cheap.

Not that Tom Junior took much notice of the new addition to the Providencia Street household. What with his skateboarding and go-karting and working for a florist, Tom Junior barely missed a beat when Doria moved in. He was too busy enjoying himself with his new circle of friends.

As for Yvonne, it appears to have been indifference, if not dislike, at first sight. Eager that Thomas use his showbiz connections to get her work as a model or an actor, she doubtless resented the fact that the new arrival was taking her father’s focus away from her. During her time in Albuquerque with her mother, she had modeled jewelry and wedding gowns. Now the teenager was seeing dollar bills in the Hollywood sign. When her friends came over to the house she dismissed the presence of her father’s African American girlfriend, referring to her, according to her brother, as “the maid.” Her best friend, now a successful Realtor, doesn’t recall Yvonne using that language, and even if she did she ascribes it to her sour Chicago sense of humor. Nonetheless, Yvonne was not, as her mother recalls, a particularly tolerant young woman.

Doria’s arrival also coincided with Yvonne exploring the dark tenets of black magic, according to Tom. Even as a little girl Yvonne had had a fascination with the macabre, once bringing a moldering gravestone that she had found in the basement of their apartment block in Chicago into her bedroom. This time around, as her brother Tom recalls, she bought a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, installed an altar in her bedroom, played with a Ouija board, burned black candles, and dressed in the all-black uniform of the goth. It may have been no more than a rebellious teenage obsession, and her brother never witnessed her performing any satanic rituals, but he was still disturbed by her “weird” behavior. She left the house when it was dark and rarely returned before dawn. One of Yvonne’s friends recalls those years, saying that she and Yvonne would dress up and go out dancing, especially if a British band was in town. “We put on our makeup and got all decked out,” she recalls. “We were out having fun.” The ritual of boy meets girl, rather than anything satanic, was their aim.

Much of the back and forth between brother and sister was certainly more taunting and teasing than witchcraft. On one occasion, according to Tom Junior, she came to the flower shop where Tom Junior worked part time to borrow money from her brother. While he and his colleague Richard, a Christian Scientist, were dealing with customers she picked up Richard’s Bible and drew a pentagram, the sign of the devil, on one page with her red lipstick. Before leaving she wrote “666,” the mark of the beast, on another page. Young Tom had his revenge when he called the house, telling his sister that Richard was so traumatized by what she had done that he had run into the road and was hit by a bus. His ruse had her racing back to the flower store to check on Richard’s condition.

Certainly Doria could be forgiven for wondering what she had got herself into when faced with this bickering, back-biting brood. It was one thing falling in love with a man twelve years her senior; it was quite another being thrown headlong into his fractious family with brother and sister continually squabbling. A strong personality with a level head on her shoulders, Doria brought a sense of family to the gloomy house.

When she arrived, everyone was used to going their own way. Tom Senior worked every hour of the day and night, Yvonne was out clubbing with her friends while Tom Junior was smoking weed with his own crowd. She brought them together as a family, Doria seen as “the cool hippie peacemaker “who liked a joint herself.” She soon became friendly with their near neighbor Olga McDaniel, a former nightclub singer, Doria spending hours with her shooting the breeze and smoking a joint. “The best way I can describe Doria is that she was like a warm hug,” observed Olga’s daughter. Her masterstroke was to take Tom Junior to the animal shelter and help him pick out a family dog, which he named Bo. The noisy new arrival, a golden retriever–beagle mix, soon ruled their five-bedroom home in the leafy valley suburb of Woodland Hills.

At Thanksgiving Doria invited the Markles to join the Ragland clan, including her mother, Jeanette; her father, Alvin; her half brother, Joseph; and half sister, Saundra, for a true Southern feast of sweet potato pie, gumbo, ham hocks, and beans. “Good times,” recalls Tom Junior. “When I first met them, I was uneasy and nervous, but they were really warm and inclusive, the kind of family I had always wanted. They were happy assed people with a real sense of family.”

That sense of family was formalized when, on December 23, 1979, Doria and Tom Senior were married at the Self-Realization Fellowship temple on Sunset Boulevard, just east of Hollywood. The venue was Doria’s choice, the new bride adhering to the teachings of Yogananda, a Hindu yoga guru who arrived in Boston in 1920 and preached a philosophy of breathing and meditation as part of the yoga routine to help followers on their path to enlightenment. Hollywood stars Linda Evans and Mariel Hemingway, Apple founder Steve Jobs, and ex-Beatle George Harrison all followed his teachings. Even in such an enlightened setting, mixed marriages were still uncommon.

Less than half a century before Tom and Doria’s wedding, California had repealed anti-miscegenation laws that banned marriages between black and white people. However, it was not until 1967 for anti-miscegenation laws to be declared unconstitutional throughout the nation by the United States Supreme Court, with their landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia.

In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman, were married in Washington, DC. When they returned to their home in Virginia they were arrested in their bedroom under the state’s Racial Integrity Act. Judge Leon Bazile suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for twenty-five years. They appealed the judgment, but Judge Bazile refused to reconsider his decision, writing, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”

The Lovings, supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese American Citizens League, and a coalition of Catholic bishops, then successfully appealed to the US Supreme Court, which wrote in their decision, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival… Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” condemning Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law as “designed to maintain White supremacy.” While this judgment decriminalized miscegenation, mixed race couples were still looked upon with suspicion by many, confronted by casual racism and sometimes outright hostility. Racism remains a pungent fact of daily life for many African Americans.

On their big day, Tom Senior, wearing a sportscoat and button-down shirt, and Doria, in a flowing white dress with baby’s breath flowers in her hair, took their wedding vows in the presence of Brother Bhaktananda. He stressed the merging of the couple was for the “highest common good” and to achieve union with God. The children of followers of Self-Realization have a reputation as being open, inquisitive souls. So, when Doria found herself pregnant just a year after tying the knot, she and Tom couldn’t wait for the new arrival. Further good news came when the news of Doria’s pregnancy coincided with Tom’s first nomination for a Daytime Emmy Award for his design and lighting work on General Hospital; he would later be nominated for eight more—not bad for a man who was officially colorblind. If 1980 had been a good year, 1981 was going to be even better.

As the months ticked by and the summer thermometer inched upward, Doria became impatient for the waiting to be over. With the daytime temperatures often in the high nineties, she was grateful that they had an evaporative cooler and that the rambling home was dark and shady. In his spare time, Tom Senior decorated the nursery, painting the walls and hanging Disney characters and angel pictures around the white-painted crib. Finally, at 4:46 in the morning of August 4, 1981, at West Park Hospital in Canoga Park, obstetrician Malverse Martin announced that Doria and Tom were now the parents of a healthy baby girl. This latest addition to the sorority of Valley Girls was, as her mother noted, a Leo. Typical Leos are supposed to be “Warm, action-oriented and driven by the desire to be loved and admired. They have an air of royalty about them. They love to be in the limelight, which is why many of them make a career in the performing arts.” Never has an astrological star sign been more accurate.

The arrival of Rachel Meghan Markle transformed her father’s life. “He was just so, so happy,” recalls Tom Junior. “He spent every single minute he could with her. My dad was more in love with her than anyone else in the world, and that included Doria. She became his whole life, his little princess. He was just blown away by Meghan.” Her seventeen-year-old sister Yvonne was more interested in clubbing and makeup than playing with a newborn. “‘Babies, yuck, no thanks,’ that was our feeling,” recalls one of Yvonne’s friends. She was a teenager having fun, and fun was certainly not babysitting for the new arrival. Not only did Yvonne often seem indifferent to the baby now nicknamed “Flower” or “Bud,” she had to have felt left out on the sidelines, her father utterly devoted to baby Rachel. Doubtless she recalled his frequent absences when she was growing up and felt somewhat jealous of the attention now focused on her baby half sister.

It became an understandable source of fiction that her father did not spend as much time as she would have liked in using his contacts to fix her up with acting or modeling jobs. That said, sometime down the road he did get her a walk-on part on General Hospital and an episode in the drama Matlock, in which she was killed off before the first commercial break. It seems that she never fully exploited these opportunities.

Not only did Tom spend every waking minute with his daughter, in his own quirky fashion he tried to impose a little discipline on the somewhat laissez-faire household in order to protect his little “Flower.” Though he had always said to his son that if he and his friends wanted to smoke weed they should do so only in the house, this instruction changed with the arrival of the baby. On one occasion Tom Junior and his friends were smoking a spliff in the sitting room while Meghan was in the nursery crying. His father announced loudly that he was going upstairs to change her diaper. Shortly afterward he appeared in the sitting room carrying a full diaper. He joined the boys on the sofa, took a spoon out of his pocket and started eating the contents of the diaper. Grossed out, the boys fled the house. Only later did he reveal that he had earlier spooned chocolate pudding into a fresh diaper. It was his way of stopping the boys from smoking weed when Meghan was around.

But that was about as far as discipline went. Their house was still generally party central, Doria’s friends coming over, smoking weed, playing music, practicing yoga—which Doria now taught—and barbecuing. From the outside it seemed to be one big happy family, Doria’s relations, especially her mother, Jeanette, babysitting for the recently wed couple. Even Tom Junior pitched in to give Tom and Doria a break. For the most part Tom and Doria seemed happy, but then their bickering started. As much as Tom loved Meghan, he loved his job, too; he was still a workaholic and thought nothing of spending eighty or ninety hours a week on set. And in his eyes, it was paying off, Meghan proving to be his lucky charm. After two nominations, in 1982 he and his colleagues on General Hospital finally won a Daytime Emmy for “outstanding achievement in design excellence.”

But it all came at a price. Doria had not signed up for this, dealing with his children, raising her own, kick-starting a career, and trying to run the family’s cavernous house. Though it was not Tom’s fault, they were living in a predominantly white neighborhood where, because of her dark skin and Meghan’s light skin, people thought Doria was the nanny. They often stopped her and asked, quite innocently, where the baby’s mother lived. It was a petty humiliation that she could do without.

It seemed, too, that Tom was wedded to work more than he was wedded to her. It was a feeling that had been shared by his first wife, Roslyn. Gradually, the harsh words and the fighting became the norm rather than the exception, Tom Junior and Yvonne recognizing the all too familiar sounds of a relationship breaking down. According to family friends, Tom’s constant criticism of Doria over matters small and large wore her down. There came a point where Doria decided that enough was enough and went back home to her mother, Jeanette. As a family friend observed: “Doria is not a doormat, that much I know. She spoke up for herself, protected herself and her daughter fiercely. Her head was on straight. I trusted her judgment.”

The couple split up when their little “Flower” was just two years old, but did not divorce for another five years. He would have custody of his daughter on weekends and drop her off on Sunday evenings. Then, as Meghan told writer Sam Kashner, the trio would sit and eat dinner off their knees as they watched Jeopardy! “We were so close-knit,” she recalls, a memory perhaps seen through the forgiving prism of a child desperate for her parents to be united rather than accepting the bleak reality of a mother and father at odds. Others were not so sanguine, pointing to Tom’s bewilderment, not to say bitterness, that Doria had given their union so little time to prove itself. By the time Meghan was old enough to appreciate Jeopardy! they were divorced and living separate lives.

Founded in 1945 by Ruth Pease, Little Red School House is a Hollywood institution favored for the sons and daughters of LA’s showbiz elite. While parents rarely saw Johnny Depp, whose daughter attended the school, waiting outside the school gates, Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to pick up his daughter after school in a spray-painted Mercedes-Benz. Teaching—based around the four-stage program of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget—is eclectic, imaginative, and expensive: $18,800 for kindergarten, rising to $22,700 for grade 6. As the school chooses only the brightest and the best, older children have to take an exam before they are considered for entry. In 1983 Doria, who was now training as a social worker, and Tom enrolled two-year-old Meghan for preschool at the exclusive school.

The setup was convenient for all involved. Little Red School House was close to the ABC studios in Los Feliz, where Tom worked, and just a few minutes away from Doria’s work and her new home just south of Hollywood. Meghan would stay at the school until she was eleven years old. While reading, writing, and arithmetic were at the core of the school day, children could dip into a whole range of subjects, from Spanish to quantum physics. In summer, children worked in the community garden and hiked the nature trails at Leo Carrillo Beach or nearby Griffith Park.

The school’s stage shows, watched by proud parents, were another regular feature of the curriculum. When she was five, Meghan entertained the parents with a rendition of the song “The Wheels on the Bus,” and she was later featured in Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story. One Halloween Meghan and her friend Ninaki “Nikki” Priddy played two corpses discussing the size and comfort of their respective coffins. Another time she shared the lead in an adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Unfortunately, her costar, Elizabeth McCoy, came down with stomach flu just hours before the show began, leaving Meghan desperately trying to memorize both parts. “That was the worst experience of my life, trying to learn your lines,” Meghan told an apologetic McCoy afterward. Ironically, no one gave a thought to asking a little girl with an unkempt mane of blond hair, thick glasses, and an awkward, clumsy manner who was lurking in the chorus. Her name was Scarlett Johansson, now one of the world’s highest-paid actors.

McCoy, who these days is a renowned chef and scriptwriter, had another reason to thank Meghan. Two years Meghan’s junior, Elizabeth was a self-confessed weird kid. Intense, fiercely intelligent, and overweight, she was interested in offbeat subjects like UFOs, the occult, and ghosts. Other children thought her odd. Nor did it help that she suffered from petit mal seizures, a form of epilepsy that saw her going into a trancelike state from time to time that made her unreachable. As the seizures last for only a short time, children who have them are often thought to be daydreaming or not listening.

Meghan, Elizabeth was to discover, was not like many of the other kids, who either walked on by or mocked her. The first time Meghan saw Elizabeth suffering from a seizure she came to her aid, sitting holding her hand and comforting her. Elizabeth also remembers how she provided friendship when she was being taunted by the “mean girls,” as she describes them. She recalls: “I was bullied and miserable and my only salvation were the kids who liked me. I really liked Meghan a lot. She didn’t turn me away if I started talking about offbeat subjects. She listened. She was cool and had cool things to say. I liked being around her.”

It was clear that Meghan had inherited her mother’s strong sense of right and wrong, and was prepared to stand up for herself and for others. On one occasion the so-called mean girls announced that they were starting a “White Girls Only” club and wanted Meghan to join. “Are you kidding me?’ said Meghan to the gaggle of fellow pupils, dismissing them in a sentence. They went very quiet after that. That playground confrontation highlighted Meghan’s own concerns about her identity. She tells the story of how, around this same time, Christmas 1988, her father bought two sets of Heart dolls containing the traditional nuclear family unit of mother, father, and two children. He bought one with black dolls and one with white and mixed them together to represent Meghan’s own family. Then he wrapped them in sparkly Christmas paper and placed the box under the tree.

Her struggle to understand herself and where she was placed in the scheme of humanity instinctively made her more aware of those who had difficulties fitting in.

As Elizabeth McCoy recalls: “You never forget the people who were mean to you and who was nice. That’s why I have never forgotten Meghan. She was one of the most righteous people I have ever met. If someone was being treated unfairly she stuck up for them. On one occasion I made the girl who bullied me cry. I tried to apologize, and Meghan sided with the other girl because she was the one in tears.

“Meghan called it like it was. She was going to defend those who needed it. Her attitude was: ‘I can see you are hurt and I’m going to protect you.’ She was a genuinely decent human being who looked out for people who needed help. She gave a damn about people other than herself.”

Even Elizabeth’s father, Dennys McCoy, an internationally known animation scriptwriter, singles out Meghan. He recalls: “She stood out because she was a level-headed kid who was smart and mature for her age. We were surprised that she became an actress. We thought she would be a lawyer.”

By the time she was ten, Meghan was fiercely switched on and loved to debate an issue, taking part in discussions about racism in America, most notably after the notorious beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, by LA cops in 1991, the Gulf War that same year, and the buildup to the 1992 presidential contest between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. During one classroom discussion about the looming war in the Gulf, a fellow pupil was in tears because he didn’t think his older brother, who was serving in the US military, would make it home. The issue became such a hot topic that the children, led by Meghan, staged a protest on the school grounds. They made banners and signs with antiwar slogans. Such was the interest that local TV station KTLA sent along a camera crew to film the protest.

Even nearer to home were the LA riots in late April and early May of 1992, which ignited after four Los Angeles Police Department officers, who were filmed savagely beating Rodney King, were acquitted of assault and using excessive force. As the burning and looting spread like fingers along LA’s thoroughfares, Meghan and her classmates were sent home. Meghan watched with wonder as ash from burning buildings floated onto her lawn. She thought it was snowing, but her mother knew better and told her to get into the house. Even when they returned to school there was a brooding sense of anxiety; the children, including Meghan, crowded around a second-floor school window as they watched police arresting a man acting suspiciously. In total the six days of rioting left sixty-three dead and more than 2,300 injured, and led to more than 12,000 arrests.

The experience awakened the nascent activist in her, and Meghan determined to use her influence when she could. She gained something of a reputation for writing to companies, especially food giants, about damaged or faulty packages and foods. Invariably she was sent bags of chips, cookies, and the like by the food companies as compensation and regularly brought the fruits of her letter writing to share among her school friends.

Her most memorable coup was when, at age eleven, she wrote a letter to the household products company Procter & Gamble for making a sexist commercial that used the tag line “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans” to sell dishwashing liquid. She and the rest of her classmates were watching the commercials as part of a social studies assignment. However, it was the reaction by two boys in her class to the dishwashing liquid ad that particularly incensed them. She recalls them saying, “Yeah, that’s where women belong—in the kitchen.” Meghan felt confused. She was angry and annoyed, knowing that they were wrong, but she also felt, as she later recalled, “small, too small to say anything in that moment,” as she wrote later about the incident.

She went home and told her father, Tom, who suggested that she channel her feelings into handwritten letters of complaint. Not only did she write to the soap company chairman saying that the phrase should be changed to “People all over America,” but also to Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady; Nick News anchor Linda Ellerbee; and prominent women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who was based in Los Angeles.

While Hillary Clinton and Linda Ellerbee wrote letters of encouragement, and Gloria Allred also offered her support, according to Meghan, she never heard from Proctor & Gamble. However, when the ad aired again just a month later, she saw the fruits of her handiwork. It had been changed to say: “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” Her success once again had the TV cameras arriving at the school, this time with Ellerbee interviewing Meghan and her fellow pupils about her one-schoolgirl campaign.

“I don’t think it’s right for kids to grow up thinking these things, that just mom does everything,” Meghan told Ellerbee. “It’s always, ‘mom does this,’ and ‘mom does that.’” Sometime afterward, this and other incidents inspired her to join the Washington-based National Organization for Women. Meghan, as she proudly recalled, became one of the youngest if not the youngest member of the group, founded in 1966, which campaigns for women’s rights.

More than twenty years later, in 2015, Meghan reflected on this chapter of her life while giving a speech as the newly minted UN Women Advocate for Political Participation and Leadership.

“It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of eleven, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality,” she said at the time. While her childhood experiences were the crucible that set her on the path to activism, her mother believes that she was hardwired from birth to try to make the world a better and more equal place. In short, she had a moral compass. Doria played her own part, strict at home but also ready to show her daughter that there was more to the world than Woodland Hills. She raised her to be what she called “a global citizen,” taking her to places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where Meghan recalls seeing children playing in the dirt roads and peddling Chiclets so that they could bring home a few extra pesos. When Meghan, then age ten, and her mother visited the slums of Jamaica, the schoolgirl was horrified to see such grinding poverty. “Don’t look scared, Flower,” her mother told her. “Be aware, but don’t be afraid.”

Her experience is reminiscent of the times the late Diana, Princess of Wales, privately took her boys, William and Harry, to visit the homeless and the sick in central London so that they would hopefully appreciate that life did not begin and end at the palace gates.

Meghan’s letter-writing campaigns, interest in current affairs, purposeful traveling, and gender awareness were all of a piece with a young girl embarking on a journey where feminism could coexist with femininity, as well as an ethos of hard work matched by a willingness to try the new and the interesting.

By sublime irony, just as her letter-writing campaign got underway, another letter-writing campaign was kicking off, this one regarding the raunchy comedy show Married… with Children, for which her father was now the lighting director. Meghan often sat on the floor of the studio after school waiting for her father to finish work so he could take her home. Indeed, she thrilled her fellow classmates when she was given permission to bring several friends on set to meet the cast.

As she sat quietly reading or studying, all kinds of ribald scenes were played out, some involving various stages of undress and semi-nudity, as well as off-color jokes about sex—hardly the normal afterschool fare for a young girl. In January 1989, a Mormon from Michigan, Terry Rakolta, led a boycott of the show after the screening of an episode entitled “Her Cups Runneth Over,” which involved the purchase of a bra. That episode showed the character of Al Bundy ogling a naked model in a department store.

The resulting media storm led to some sponsors withdrawing advertising and the conservative Parents Television Council describing the show as “the crudest comedy on prime time television… peppered with lewd punch lines about sex, masturbation, the gay lifestyle and the lead character’s fondness for pornographic magazines and strip clubs.”

Meghan later described her own misgivings about spending time around the long-running comedy when she appeared on Craig Ferguson’s late night show. She told the host: “It’s a very perverse place for a girl to grow up. I went to Catholic school. I’m there in my school uniform and the guests would be [former porn star] Traci Lords.” While she wasn’t allowed to watch the show when it aired, her mother would let her kiss the screen as her dad’s name went by in the credits at the end of the program.

Perverse it may have been, but it paid the bills—and Meghan’s private school fees. At this time, unbeknownst to her, her father enjoyed a slice of luck that meant he no longer had to work such a brutal schedule. In 1990 he won the California State Lottery, scooping $750,000 with five numbers, which included Meghan’s birthdate. The win was ample payback for the thousands he had spent over the years buying lottery tickets.

As he still had outstanding financial matters concerning his divorce from Doria, he kept the win secret. In order to avoid registering his name with the lottery authorities, he sent an old Chicago friend to pick up his winnings. The plan, according to his son, backfired when his pal ended up swindling him out of the lion’s share of his fortune in a failed jewelry business.

Before he lost his loot, Tom gave his son a substantial handout to start a flower shop and bought daughter Yvonne a second car after she wrecked the first one he had given her.

Within three years of his big win Tom had declared bankruptcy, the lottery win proving more of a curse than a blessing. At least he had kept some money aside to pay for the next stage of Meghan’s education. His daughter enrolled as a freshman at Immaculate Heart, a private all-girls Catholic school just yards from his home in Los Feliz. From then on it made sense for her to live with her father during the week. It was a decision that would have far-reaching implications for the way she was seen by her new teachers and classmates.