Meghan

by Andrew Morton

  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 her
self.” 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.