For her junior year she appeared yet again in a school production, Stepping Out, but for her senior year she decided to test her ability beyond the confines of Immaculate High. It was a new challenge and offered the chance of branching out on her own without her father looking down on her from the lighting gantry. There was also the small matter of spending time alone with her then boyfriend. Thus she found herself in a room with forty other girls waiting to audition for Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex staged in the fall of 1998 by the all-boys St. Francis High School in La Cañada Flintridge.
As it was drama director Emmanuel (Manny) Eulalia’s first big production at St. Francis, he wanted to make an impact, carefully choosing the girl who would play the lead role of Jocasta. It was no contest. “Meghan was a standout,” he recalls. “She had that something of the ‘it’ about her. As a director it is what you are always looking for. She had charisma, no doubt.”
After signing a formal document pledging to arrive on time, dress appropriately, and refrain from sexual and racial innuendoes—a code of behavior somewhat ahead of its time—Meghan and the rest of the cast got down to a grueling two-month schedule of rehearsals. Early on she impressed the show’s director with her timekeeping, preparation, and command of the stage. In the show’s musical numbers her voice packed a punch even if she quavered somewhat on the higher notes.
While she was the only girl from Immaculate Heart to audition, she already had star status at the all-boys school. She had already dated several pupils from St. Francis, including her first long-term boyfriend, Luis Segura. In time-honored fashion, it was his sister, Maria, who set them up on their first date. Describing her as “sweet and fun,” doubtless Luis, now a successful Realtor in downtown Pasadena, encouraged her to enter that year’s contest for homecoming queen.
This pinnacle of high school social standing came with serious competition from dozens of other girls. Hopefuls had to write an essay listing their accomplishments—Megan’s regular work in the Hippie Kitchen made her an instant standout—before facing a grilling from members of the student body and faculty. The names of the finalists were read out at the fifty-yard line on a hastily erected stage during halftime at a St. Francis football game. Amid whistling and cheering, Meghan was proclaimed that year’s queen and was duly crowned by the previous incumbent. The entire court then left the field in a procession of classic convertibles so that the game could continue. It was an indication of her popularity and appeal that a girl who was neither a cheerleader nor hailed from one of the closer all-girls Catholic schools was chosen.
At the dance Meghan, wearing a strapless pale blue gown and tiara, was accompanied by her date for the night, Danny Segura, her boyfriend’s brother who had played Creon in the Greek tragedy. He credited Meghan, who was a familiar figure in the Segura household, with inspiring him to take to the stage, successfully auditioning for a role in the high school musical before taking on the somewhat meatier role in Oedipus Rex.
Even though she was now “Queen Meghan,” drama director Manny Eulalia recalls that she didn’t let the adulation go to her head. She remained grounded, joking around as she accepted the congratulations of her fellow cast members. Once word got out that “Queen Meghan” was the female lead in the show, tickets sold briskly for the somber tragedy. For three nights the teenage cast played to a full house in the 250-seat theater at nearby Flintridge Preparatory School. In previous years, interest in school productions had been disappointing. Not this time. When Meghan first appeared, there was a rustle of applause despite the audience having been warned to curb their enthusiasm.
“A lot of pupils went to the show just to see Meghan,” recalls Manny with a smile. “She certainly had a fan club. Quite a few of the boys had crushes on her.” At the end of the eighty-minute production, the audience gave Meghan and rest of the cast a standing ovation.
In the program notes she wrote, “I would like to give thanks to Mommy, Daddy, Sushi, Aubergine, Danny boy, Brad, Gabe, all the beautiful, amazing, gorgeous sweeties at Immaculate Heart, the great guys at St. Francis, and the phenomenal cast and crew.”
Though she was deemed a stand out in Oedipus Rex, Meghan Markle’s high school acting career is best remembered for her performance as the sexy South American vamp Lola in the 1955 musical comedy Damn Yankees. As the production was being staged by another all-boys Catholic school, this time Loyola High School in downtown Los Angeles, once again she had to compete against girls from other Catholic schools. Fresh from her triumph in Oedipus Rex, she snagged the starring role of Lola, first played by Tony award winner Gwen Verdon. The story, based on a modern retelling of the Faustian pact, involved the vampish Lola, her deal with the devil, and her attempts to seduce a baseball fan turned star player Joe Hardy, played in this production by Paul Rorie, now a family lawyer. When Meghan, dressed in long satin gloves and a sequined leotard, shimmied across the stage in the sassy burlesque number “Whatever Lola Wants,” she brought the house down.
“It was like woo!” recalls a member of the audience. “She was extraordinary. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is an Immaculate Heart girl.’ She was wearing the little spangly number, doing the shimmies, the whole bit. It wasn’t lewd; she was playing a character. It was sweet in a way, but it was also like wow. This was a girl with star quality.”
At another time in another country, something very similar happened when the normally demure student Kate Middleton sashayed down the catwalk in a sheer shift dress over a bikini at a college fashion show. Prince William, watching the parade from the front row, whispered to his companion, “She’s hot.” The rest is royal history. On this occasion, it was an eye opener for those teachers and classmates who were seeing a very different side to Meghan. Normally seen as fun but thoughtful, mature and controlled, Meghan’s amorous song-and-dance routine was a revelation. After the show, her theology teacher Maria Pollia and her boyfriend went backstage and presented her with a bouquet of red roses. It was a touching moment. Meghan, who had been beyond excited to win the role, burst into tears. “Oh, you didn’t have to do this,” she sobbed, suddenly overwhelmed by the moment. As Pollia recalls: “She had appeared in many productions and she was always good. This time, though, she was a star. And that night a star was born.”
An academic star, too. Her graduation ceremony in the summer of 1999, which was held at the Hollywood Bowl, was another chance to shine. She walked away with a clutch of glittering prizes that touched on her intellectual, artistic, and charitable work. She was presented with the Bank of America Fine Arts award and the Notre Dame Club of Los Angeles Achievement Award, earned a commendation in the National Achievement Scholarship program for outstanding black students, and won a service award for mentoring younger students.
The future was looking very bright. As she had predicted three years earlier, she had been accepted at Northwestern University, where she intended to study English. She was accomplished in so many fields that some expected her to eventually enter politics or the law. All felt that she would do something worthwhile with her life and at the same time give back to the community. The word classy, which she used to describe herself in her final yearbook, and her choice of a quote from former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to illustrate her senior year photograph reflected her rounded personality. It read: “Women are like teabags; they don’t realize how strong they are until they’re in hot water.”
As her drama teacher Gigi Perreau recalled: “I wasn’t sure which direction Meghan would ultimately be going in because she also had interests in humanitarian activities. She had a good heart, had absorbed the school’s philosophy that there is nothing we cannot do, and she seemed to be focused on her future.”
A couple of years after she graduated Meghan returned to her alma mater. She chatted to a few of her old teachers and caught up on the news. “Keep in touch, sweetheart,” Perreau told her as Meghan was preparing to leave. The budding actor was still struggling to get a foothold on the greasy po
le that is Hollywood and was working as a hostess in a Beverly Hills hotel restaurant to pay for acting lessons. Somewhat ruefully she told her former acting mentor: “I don’t want to come back until I have really made it.”
The staff and pupils of Immaculate Heart are still waiting.
4
Can You Say, “Hi?”
Summertime and the living was easy for Meghan. Freshly graduated from Immaculate Heart and with her Northwestern University future beckoning, Meghan packed her last Los Angeles summer with memories and then packed her suitcases for her first semester away from home. She would effectively be starting a new life. Not one of her classmates from Immaculate Heart or anyone she knew from LA was going to Northwestern, and she was determined to make a good impression. The orthodontics she had had during her high school years had gradually adjusted her bucked, gap-toothed grin, and now she was smiling widely without feeling self-conscious.
Once her dental work was complete she had some head shots taken to send out for auditions. As she was leaving for Chicago in the autumn, the best she could hope for was a day or two’s work on one of the many music or short videos that were being shot around town. She had already earned around $600 for a couple days of work in a Tori Amos video, “1000 Oceans,” which was shot in a parking lot in downtown LA. Meghan, dressed in a low-cut blue spaghetti strap top, appeared as one of a crowd curiously examining a glass box containing Amos, writhing around as she sang. It comes across as a kind of performance art—but to a melody. The four-and-a-half-minute video, directed by Erick Ifergan, climaxes with scenes of rioting kids facing police horses and hoses, a musical reprise of the LA riots. Amos’s video is, for dedicated Markle watchers, the first public appearance of one of Meghan’s most distinctive mannerisms, continuously brushing back her long hair from her face with her hand.
That weekend, she had another audition lined up, this time for a Shakira video. It was to be a high-energy dance fest, a world away from Amos’s vision of urban alienation. Meghan’s best friend Nikki Priddy was going to drive with her to the audition, then they were going to go shopping so that she could find something new to wear for the Northwestern students’ reception at the Beverly Hilton hotel. The meet and greet was her first chance to scope out her fellow undergraduates and to make some first impressions herself. During the day Nikki and Meghan also planned to goof around, filming LA street scenes—and themselves—with Nikki’s new video camera.
The audition for the Shakira video didn’t go quite as well as Meghan had hoped. It was fun to dance crazily, but afterward she told Nikki: “I am burning up, I was really nervous I was going to fall out of my top I was just shaking around so much.”
She knew her performance hadn’t won her a gig as a $600-a-day featured dancer, but she was hoping for a spot as an extra. It was less money and no real camera time, but still, it would be fun. As she waited in the audition room she ran into a girl she had met at the Tori Amos video shoot. It was the last time they saw one another; Meghan did not get a call back.
After hitting the mall, the two friends drove through Los Angeles in Doria’s Volvo station wagon with the personalized license plate MEGNMEE, Meghan keeping up a rolling commentary; Nikki was the camerawoman. The duo dismissed the gay majority of West Hollywood with the jejune “We could walk down the street naked and no one would care.” They zoomed in on a woman who seemed to just have had collagen injections in her lips and they marveled at the houses along Beverly Glen and other wealthy enclaves in Beverly Hills and elsewhere.
Back home at her mother’s house, Meghan tried on her new outfits for the student gathering at the Beverly Hilton. She had a vision of how she wanted to project herself at Northwestern and had decided that she would focus on a monochromatic look, black and gray, a color scheme that would make her look stylish, sophisticated, and pulled together. With that in mind, she’d chosen a pencil skirt, tube top, and structured white open-front blouse that doubled as a jacket. It was a weird foreshadowing of the office wear she would don to play Rachel Zane over a decade later.
Meghan made that last summer at home count, but she was also troubled. She and her father weren’t getting along, and she was deliberately avoiding him. The emotional shutters had come down—Meghan going to stay with her mother and not even visiting her father’s house to pick up her mail. It was a situation that perplexed her friends as they knew that Meghan was the apple of her father’s eye. Not that any of his children, Tom Junior and Yvonne included, took advantage of his laissez-faire attitude. It was Meghan’s mother who was more a stickler for boundaries. Though she would join Meghan and her friends dancing to music on the radio or talking about makeup, she was stricter than her ex-husband. Meghan could twist him around her little finger. Yvonne often told the story of the time before Christmas when Meghan was looking at a jewelry catalogue and picking out a ring that Tom Senior had promised as her main festive gift. She teased her much older sister by saying that whatever her father bought Yvonne, Meghan would receive the most expensive gift as she was the most favored child. So, while the split between father and daughter was uncommon, her friends dismissed it as simply a summer storm. It was not the best send-off for her college career, as she was leaving behind her childhood home and also the girl she considered her sister, Ninaki Priddy.
Nikki had been her best friend since they could barely walk. As toddlers they were besties at the Little Red School House, spending countless sleepovers together, playing in the pool at Nikki’s parents’ modest three-bedroom home in North Hollywood. They remained close when they transitioned to Immaculate Heart, the duo traveling around Europe together with her parents, Dalton and Maria, and her kid sister Michelle. Nikki loved Paris so much that she studied at the Sorbonne the following summer. When they landed in London and posed in front of Buckingham Palace, they never for a moment thought that one day Meghan would be welcomed inside the black wrought iron gates. Now college and separation loomed, and they were trying to crowd every moment with laughter and fond memories.
Meghan looked around her dorm room and began unpacking. She was bunked in the freshman dorm known as North Mid-Quads and next door to the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house. She hadn’t decided yet if she would rush—the American college ritual where student women visit all the sorority houses and find one that suits them, then hope they will be selected to join it—or just stick to friendship groups in her dorm and classes. The first few weeks at a new college are difficult enough; there is a lot of judging and sizing up as hundreds of anxious teenagers, bubbling over with hormones and excitement, try to orient themselves both physically and psychologically. Rush merely exacerbates that feeling of vulnerability, of wanting to belong. Without a friend or even an acquaintance from back home, Meghan, a naturally gregarious character, worked hard at making new friends.
But her self-esteem was about to take a most unexpected blow. She had grown up in the melting pot that is Los Angeles. Her school, Immaculate Heart, was a kaleidoscope of girls of different colors and nationalities. Now, she discovered that even though the town of Evanston, where Northwestern University is based, is just a few miles from Chicago, the college itself is overwhelmingly white. African Americans make up a third of the town, but only 5 percent of the student body. There were even fewer biracial students. At Northwestern, she stood out.
Just one week into her first semester, as Meghan sat reviewing her class schedules for her chosen major, English, a dorm mate came up and asked: “You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?”
Meghan smiled weakly and nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. “And they’re divorced?’ her dorm mate continued. Meghan nodded. She gave her a knowing look. “Oh. Well that makes sense.” Meghan felt a stab. The snide remark cut her deeply. Makes sense how? she wondered. Of course, she understood the implication: that the failure of an interracial marriage was inevitable.
Los Angeles had been a huge multicultural bubble, and now Meghan was being exposed to narrow minds and outdated, provincial thin
king. This wasn’t the first nor would it be the last time she would hear or be subject to a crass racial slur. As she was light-skinned, many fellow students didn’t realize she was biracial, making her a fly on the wall as they made racist jokes or expressed bigoted opinions. This incident in particular stayed with her, shaping her reflections about how others around her viewed Meghan, her family, and her heritage. “My lasting memory of Meghan is her profound sense of self,” remembers Professor Harvey Young of his biracial student. “She was thoughtful and understood what it means to face prejudice and discrimination.”
But Meghan was just tough enough not to let it get too far under her skin—she was too busy cutting loose. Now that she wasn’t under the watchful gaze of her mother, she started wearing heavier makeup and experimented with highlighting her hair. Having made up her mind, she rushed Kappa Kappa Gamma and was initiated into the sorority, which was full of girls who were considered “intelligent hot messes.” As KKG member Melania Hidalgo observed, “The thing we all have in common is that we’re all very driven, ambitious, and passionate.” The sorority embraced her warmly. Meghan, was eventually elected the sorority’s recruitment chair, responsible for bringing in new girls into the KKG clan. As an outgoing, confident, and articulate young woman, she was well suited for the role of selling the sorority. Sometimes she was a tad too persuasive, some students, according to classmate Ann Meade, thinking her too assertive. For the most part fellow students remember her thirst for life and her “explosive personality” as a dynamic, self-possessed young woman.
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