“It’s one of the worst corners of Skid Row,” she says. “One of the most distressed and distressing. It is heartbreaking. Driving through at night it looked like something Charles Dickens would be writing about. People huddled around blazing oil drums. It was very, very frightening. An awakening for me.” Her message to the class, though, was to put your fears aside and make contact with the homeless on a human level. They are people, too, people with names, people with a past and hopefully a future.
“Life is about putting the needs of others above your own fears,” she counseled. It was a message that resonated with sixteen-year-old Meghan. “That has always stayed with me,” she later recalled.
After class, Meghan spoke with her teacher, who advised on the practicalities of volunteering at the Hippie Kitchen. Heartened, Meghan began to go regularly, working as a server and clearing tables, which put her directly in contact with the Hippie Kitchen’s guests. Maria Pollia recalls: “What she learned was what I learned—that it is the human contact people crave. It’s someone saying hello and knowing your name.” Meghan earnestly absorbed all the advice and began to come back with stories from the people she had met and connected with.
“It was remarkable that once in the situation she got right in it. She wasn’t just handing out stew and letting everyone go by, but she was connecting with people, she was learning their names and listening to their stories.” And, as Catherine Morris observes, everyone on Skid Row has a story. It might be a hard luck story, a never catching a break story, or a wrong turn story; they would all be eye opening for Meghan, offering a new perspective on what kind of life you could be dealt. The homeless are human beings, not mere statistics.
Megan’s experience was echoed by others such as schoolgirl volunteer Sophie Goldstein, who described how she, too, confronted her fears and concerns. “When I first came here, I have to admit, I was kind of nervous.” she wrote on the Catholic Worker blog. “I saw the area and I was scared. Then I met the people. What the Workers told me was that a lot of the time these were people who couldn’t meet up with their bills, and now they’re stuck, or that they have drug problems. I got to put a face on my own prejudice.
“I realized that these are real people. They are not just crazy homeless that you hear about all the time, or that my friends talk about, or the flippant remarks that people make about the homeless.” For Meghan it was a life-affirming and life-changing experience.
Up to that point, Meghan’s only other experience of work was at Humphrey Yogart, a frozen yogurt shop where she worked when she was thirteen, serving customers and taking out the trash for $4 an hour, employed under a California law that permitted youngsters enrolled in school to work ten to twelve hours a week. Owner Paula Sheftel recalls that Meghan was a hard worker and popular with the customers, “who had to prove she had an outgoing personality and would work well with staff.”
“A lot of the kids can’t handle the pressure. It takes a special personality for somebody that young to deal with it. Meghan had that early on.” Meghan had ample opportunity to practice her people skills at the often fast-paced fro-yo shop, but she also gained another valuable lesson that would later serve her well. One afternoon Meghan saw Yasmine Bleeth, one of the stars of Baywatch and a particular idol of hers. Finishing up with the trash bin, Meghan approached the star and blurted out, “I really like you in that Soft N Dri commercial.” Bleeth smiled, asked Meghan her name, and shook her hand. Later Meghan would say, “That moment with Yasmine is exactly what I base every interaction with fans on.”
A yogurt shop in Beverly Hills was a far cry from the Hippie Kitchen at Sixth and Gladys, which, like her travels with her mother to Mexico and Jamaica, honed her awareness. As she later observed: “Yes, make sure you are safe and never ever put yourself in a compromising situation, but once that is checked off the list, I think it’s really important for us to remember that someone needs us, and that your act of giving/helping/doing can truly become an act of grace once you get out of your head.”
If this was a practical application of her spiritual journey, her encounter with the work of Catholic theologian Thomas Merton emphasized her intellectual curiosity and emotional maturity. In a world of black and white, Merton’s mercurial thinking, with its endless shape-shifting vista of gray, of muted maybes and possibilities, is hard to pin down.
The offspring of two artists, Thomas Merton is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, sold more than a million copies. He wrote more than sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race. Merton lived a raucous and challenging life, fathering a child while studying at Clare College, Cambridge, in the UK, and joining the Communist Party before finally confirming to the Catholic church in 1939 when he was in his mid-twenties. In 1941, he joined the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he gained a reputation as a monk who was a spiritual seeker, not a settler, a man who did not recognize absolute truth but saw the grand ambivalence, the contradictions and duality of existence. In later life he explored the similarities between Buddhist and Christian monks.
For the average American sixteen-year-old weaned on an academic diet of short sentences and multiple-choice questions, Merton is a complex and demanding character.
In her 1997 theology class, titled Experiencing God, Meghan examined the teachings of Father Thomas Merton and other mystics. Her teacher, Maria Pollia, recalls that Meghan was not daunted by the intellectual challenges posed by Merton’s work, embracing concepts that demand considerable maturity and considered reflection. For the first time in their school career, students were thrown into a subject without obvious answers, the course requiring more than an ability to memorize pages of a set text. Pollia recalls: “As we become more mature in the adult life, we understand that there are many inconsistencies, many dichotomies, and that life is a continuing encounter with mystery.
“For a young person to feel comfortable with that conversation is very unusual. They get there in the end, but rather than fear these concepts and backing away, Meghan was already interested in pushing deeper and deeper into these questions. She was remarkable. Someone said, would you have remembered her irrespective of Prince Harry? Absolutely. She is one of the top five outstanding students in my career, and I promise you I am not just saying that.”
During this philosophy course Meghan and her classmates were faced with a real-life paradox: How could a young mother, a glamorous humanitarian in the prime of life, die in the cruel banality of a car accident. She and her friends watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in early September 1997, tears coursing down their cheeks at the poignant moment when the cameras zoomed in on the royal coffin. Perched among the white flowers was an envelope with one word, “Mummy,” containing Prince Harry’s last note to his beloved mother. Meghan was not the only one to ask how this tragedy could befall a living icon; dozens of conspiracy theories sprang up on the internet and elsewhere as millions tried to make sense of the senseless.
Nor was she the only one to feel Diana’s loss in a keenly personal way. After she heard about the tragedy, she and her friend Suzy Ardakani had sat and watched old videos of the 1981 wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. According to family friends, she was intrigued by Diana not just for her style but for her independent humanitarian mission, seeing her as a role model. Inspired by the princess, she and her friend Suzy collected clothes and toys for less privileged children. In fact, such was her interest in the princess that Suzy’s mother Sonia even gave her a copy of my biography, Diana, Her True Story, which remained on her bookshelves for the next few years. As her childhood friend Ninaki Priddy observed: “She was always fascinated by the Royal family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0.”
Diana’s death was a painful reminder for the Ardakani family, who had just two years previously also experienced the life-ch
anging force of a random act of fate. One afternoon in 1995, Matt Ardakani, Suzy’s father, was working at his downtown car body shop when a deranged Vietnam veteran who had murdered his family came into the garage and started shooting at random. Mr. Ardakani was hit in the spine and lung and rushed to hospital. When Suzy was told about the shooting, it was Meghan who was the first to console the sobbing teenager and the one who accompanied her to the hospital, where they kept vigil for hours.
Suzy’s mother, Sonia Ardakani, recalls: “She and Suzy sat beside Matt’s bedside for many hours, praying he would pull through. We feel sure those prayers helped him survive.” Though permanently paralyzed by a random act of madness, Matt did survive and is still working.
Meghan’s instinctive empathy with others and her interest in giving back—a central tenet of Immaculate Heart’s mission—as well as her evident maturity, thoughtfulness, and positive attitude made her the clear first choice to be a group leader at a Kairos retreat in the fall of 1998. Like hundreds of Catholic schools across America, Immaculate Heart regularly organized Kairos (Greek for critical moment) retreats for students, which were designed to help teenagers contemplate the place of God in their lives.
During the four-day retreat, which was held at the Holy Spirit Center at Encino, six girls were chosen to lead groups of eight in various discussions to encourage participation and debate. As a leader, the most daunting assignment was to make a thirty-minute presentation dealing with a challenging list of issues including self-image, trust, core values, and finding yourself.
Christine Knudsen, who has been organizing the Kairos retreat at Immaculate Heart for twenty-three years, described the qualities she watches for in the girls chosen as leaders. “You are looking for a girl who’s been through something and who has a certain amount of depth to her. The kinds of insights and comments Meghan made gave her a depth because she had had to struggle with her own issues.”
It was clear that her dysfunctional family background and the separation and subsequent divorce of her parents when she was still a youngster were the concerns she grappled with. “I know that was difficult for her, one parent over here and one over there and neither particularly fond of each other,” recalls Mrs. Knudsen. While she was not the only girl on campus with divorced parents, what singled her out was the way she had managed them. Like many children of divorced parents, she had learned to become a skilled diplomat, mediating between her warring parents. This nihilistic parental interaction taught Meghan a valuable lesson: how to control her emotions. “She is very poised,” observes a school friend. “It could be hard for her. Sometimes she felt she had to pick sides.”
At the time she lived with her father, whose house was walking distance from the school in Los Feliz, and saw her mother on weekends. The older she became, the more she felt she was the one who was mothering her father. It was a source of friction, especially when she started dating. As a friend notes: “Typical teenage stuff.”
There were other issues, too, that clearly troubled her, though she did not discuss them publicly at the time. Fitting in was a constant concern. As she later recalled: “My high school had cliques: the black girls and white girls, the Filipino [sic] and the Latina girls. Being biracial, I fell somewhere in between. So every day during lunch, I busied myself with meetings—French Club, student body, whatever one could possibly do between noon and one p.m.—I was there. Not so that I was more involved, but so that I wouldn’t have to eat alone.”
Photographer John Dlugolecki, who photographed Meghan and other students throughout high school, commented that Meghan would often talk to his wife, Vicki Conrad, about her love of drama. Vicky in turn noticed that Meghan never appeared to be part of the African American or the Asian groups of girls, or any other ethnic clique. Dlugolecki also remarked that Meghan “was not considered mixed race by her peers,” adding, “We only ever saw her with Tom, never with the mom.” And so it came as a mild shock to members of faculty when they finally got to meet Doria. “Everyone thought [Meghan] was Italian because she was so light skinned,” recalls one former teacher. “Then we met her mother and realized she was biracial.”
As poised and confident as she seemed to her classmates, at Kairos, when she discussed her own demons, at least those about her family discord, it clearly enabled her to encourage her classmates to confront their own.
Mrs. Knudsen recalls: “You have to be very honest about who you are and be willing to share all the things that you struggle with, your successes and failures. She was articulate, confident, feisty, and spunky. I remember her saying, ‘Why can’t we do it this way, has anybody thought about that?’ She was always thinking about a better way to do something, not just complaining.”
For many students the retreat is a turning moment in their young lives, a time when they face up to their own emotional issues honestly. Realizing that their classmates have their own problems is seen as a critical catalyst. “It’s a time of truth telling, and the leaders are the ones who set the tone,” observes Mrs. Knudsen. “The atmosphere is: ‘I am willing to share my truth with you, and that makes you willing to share your truth.’ So there is a lot of crying, but it is healing crying. Everything out in the open, you realize everybody has to struggle and that nobody is perfect no matter how they look.”
While her fractured family background and her sense of isolation caused Meghan a great deal of heartache as she grew up, it also helped provide some of the psychological drive that would propel her toward her overarching ambition. From a young age, Meghan dreamed of becoming a famous Hollywood actor. She fantasized about winning an Oscar one day, practicing her acceptance speech in front of her bedroom mirror. As James Lipton, the venerable inquisitor for the long-running Inside the Actors Studio, never tires of reminding his audience, most actors come from broken homes. This often bitter experience gives them the emotional rocket fuel to power a star-making screen performance.
From day one at Immaculate Heart, Meghan threw herself whole-heartedly into the drama department. Besides being a stepping stone in following her dream, at school the drama department has a rather different function. It acts as a welcoming club, an unofficial sorority, and a close-knit family. As the winner of six Daytime Emmy awards told me: “You might be a misfit everywhere else, but here you have a sense of belonging.”
As well as taking to the boards, Meghan held numerous offices, including president of the school’s Genesian Players, a group devoted to the preservation of the performing arts that actively hosted or attended plays, dramatic festivals, and apprentice stage productions. However, as she didn’t hold a formal office, she was always at the edge of the student council, never quite a part of it.
Immaculate Heart, which counts supermodel and TV personality Tyra Banks, beloved sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore, and Lucille Ball’s actor daughter Lucie Arnaz among its alumni, was able to call on a rich roster of Hollywood luminaries to direct and produce plays and musicals.
There was leading voice coach Rachael Lawrence, choreographer and Jersey Boys star Joseph Leo Bwarie, and, most prominently, Gigi Perreau, a former child actor whose work is honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Perreau started her career in movies at the tender age of two when she played Greer Garson’s daughter in the 1943 film Madame Curie. By the age of ten she had appeared in twenty-five films, including working on set with Nancy Reagan in the 1950 thriller Shadow on the Wall. When she retired from acting work, Perreau, now seventy-eight, brought her experience to staging plays and musicals at her alma mater, as well as to teaching drama classes.
Perreau remembers Meghan as a skinny kid who developed and blossomed into a beautiful and confident young woman during her time at Immaculate Heart. She recalled: “We never had a moment’s problem with her, she was spot on, learned her lines when she had to, very dedicated, very focused. She was a wonderful student, a lovely girl even then, and very hardworking. She was very dedicated. I knew she would be something special.”
In drama class they
often discussed topics of the day, and Perreau remembers Meghan as an inquisitive youngster who loved hearing tales of Perreau’s time in France and other European countries. She was keen to explore the world beyond the nearby Hollywood sign.
When she was rehearsing for a play, her father was always around. As an Emmy winner who had been nominated almost every year while working on General Hospital, he was soon roped into becoming the technical director for every school production Meghan was involved in. The majority of students were not aware that he was Meghan’s dad. He was known simply as “that guy in the overalls.” Those in the drama group were rather more respectful, calling him Mr. Markle. “He liked to be thought of as gruff,” recalls Perreau, “but he was always very generous with the girls. If we had a late rehearsal he would go out and buy a boxful of McDonald’s to feed them. Modest, too. He never asked to be credited for any work he did.” He was single and shy, and Perreau admits to having a “bit of a crush” on the burly guy in overalls who was clearly trying to bring up his teenage daughter on his own. She asked him out, and they went to see a play together at the Doolittle Theatre, just south of Hollywood and Vine. Though they had a good time, nothing ever developed.
Tom’s focus was on Meghan. A keen photographer, he took endless photographs of Meghan onstage, teaching her how to pose and coaching her on angles. He was proudly watching from the wings when she made her first solo singing performance, playing the secretary in the school’s production of the musical Annie. Perreau recalls: “I remember her being very excited and nervous about her song,” describing her performance as “delightful.” Meghan went on to play an aspiring actor in the 1937 comedy Stage Door and was featured in Back Country Crimes, a black comedy by American playwright Lanie Robertson. In the March 1997 program notes for Immaculate Heart’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, in which she played Little Red Riding Hood, Meghan announced her ambition to the world. In between thanking her friends and her “adorable” boyfriend, she revealed that she wished to attend Northwestern College, a prestigious university near Chicago. This, she predicted, would be her next stop on her way to Broadway. Meghan was clearly not a girl wanting in confidence.
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