The middle brother, Fred, moved to Florida and found religion. He became the self-proclaimed leader of a little-known order called the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church and was known as Bishop Dismas F. Markle. The unusual ‘Dismas’ comes from the Greek and is generally acknowledged to be the name of the good thief, the man who repented on the cross next to Jesus. It’s not clear how many followers his church actually had, but some reports suggest it was about forty. Bishop Dismas has seen little of Meghan over the years – apparently she was aged six the last time they met – but to his credit has had nothing to say to journalists and very little to his friends about his family connections.
Tom, meanwhile, had grown into a strapping young man, but even he could not match his giant grandfather Isaac ‘Ike’ Markle, who stood 7 foot 2 inches tall and worked as a fireman on the railways. Tom was a popular figure at Newport High School. One of his contemporaries there, Loretta Strawser, who also lived on the same street as the Markle family, recalled that he was ‘a nice person to be around.’ Others remembered him as being laid-back and down to earth. He took an interest in the visual arts but it was only after leaving school that a hobby became a career.
First, though, he drifted from job to job, earning some going-out money. He set up the pins in a local bowling alley while he decided what to do next. He soon realised that he was never going to amount to much in Newport and needed to try his luck elsewhere. Although he didn’t go on to college, Tom spent the equivalent of his gap year in the Poconos, the mountainous resort area in the north of the state. He found work at a local theatre where he had to muck in helping with everything, including the important technical tasks backstage.
Tom didn’t return to Newport. Instead, he tried his luck in Chicago and found a job as a lighting technician at the WTTW television studios. He had to manage one potential problem with his career; he was colour-blind. It was testament to his dedication that he succeeded in keeping that hidden.
Instead, he thrived in his new direction in life, climbing his way up the ladder from the bottom rung. As well as his work at the TV station, he did extra shifts at the Harper Theater on Chicago’s South Side in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of the city, ten minutes down the road from where the family home of Barack Obama has become a tourist attraction.
Tom’s particular skill was lighting, and his flair soon grabbed the attention of the Harper’s new owners, newspaper proprietor Bruce Sagan and his wife Judith, who was particularly influential in the world of dance. It was a golden age for the playhouse and as well as prestigious productions of Chekhov and Pirandello, Tom was on hand to help with the first Harper Theater Dance Festival, which swiftly became one of the highlights of the arts calendar in Chicago.
Tom worked hard, but it was the sixties and he liked to play hard as well, hanging out with college and television friends and enjoying a free and easy lifestyle. He was nineteen when he met a young clerk at the Illinois Railroad Company. Roslyn Loveless was an elegant eighteen-year-old and they clicked immediately. She thought him ‘tall and handsome’ with a ‘great sense of humour and charming smile’.
Roslyn was soon expecting her first child and she and Tom moved into a one-bedroom apartment, got married and celebrated the birth of a daughter, Yvonne – who would later change her name to Samantha – in November 1964. Cracks in their relationship appeared soon after.
Roslyn gave a devastating account of those days in an interview with the Daily Mirror, a version of events that Tom has strongly denied, describing her accusation as ‘not valid’. According to Roslyn, he had a bad temper: ‘He would scream, “Fuck you”, “Fuck off”, “Leave me the fuck alone”, or “Get the fuck out of here.” Everything was fuck.’
An addition to the family, Tom Jr, in December 1965, did not improve things between the couple. For a while she moved to Newport, Pennsylvania, and lived with Tom’s mum and dad, Doris and Gordon, who were very kind but could not meet the financial demands of supporting a young mum and her two small children.
Back in Chicago, Roslyn claims that Tom lived the life of a single man, mixing in circles where cocaine was commonplace and enjoying the company of other women. She said he did not give her the money she needed even to feed the children properly and she was reduced to shoplifting in the local store just to get enough food.
A friend came to her rescue and said she could stay with her, so Roslyn and the children took flight from the family apartment. She refused to sign divorce papers in which it was said he had been a ‘true, kind and affectionate husband’.
They were eventually divorced in 1975, although by this time Tom had made the journey across country in pursuit of his personal dream to work in Hollywood. While he continued to work hard to make progress in his career, Roslyn and the children moved to Albuquerque in New Mexico to start a new life, encouraged by her brother Richard, who already lived in the city.
Tom didn’t completely forget his Pennsylvanian roots, returning every year for family and high school reunions in Newport. After struggling for eighteen months to get a start, he had carved out a good life for himself as a lighting director on General Hospital. The famous daytime soap began in 1963 and is the Coronation Street of American television, so it was a prestigious job.
He was living close to the beach in Santa Monica where his daughter Yvonne, a restless and ambitious teenager, joined him when she was fourteen. She had her sights set on a Hollywood career as an actress or model, or both.
When he became a teenager, Tom Jr joined the household as well. He had decided that high school in laid-back California would suit him better than New Mexico. They moved to a large and very comfortable four-bedroom family house on Providencia Street in Woodland Hills; down the road from an exclusive country club, it was a property that would probably fetch more than $1 million if sold today.
Yvonne and Tom Jr were typical teenagers – bickering and squabbling and preferring the company of their own friends and social lives. Their father kept out of things, immersing himself in his work. And then he met Doria on the set of General Hospital. She was undoubtedly a ray of sunshine in his life, a thoughtful and calming presence in the household, except, it seemed, for Yvonne, who apparently referred to her dad’s new girlfriend as ‘the maid’, which at best was the sort of casual racism that masqueraded as a joke, or at worst was blatantly racist.
Doria was twelve years younger than Tom, so, ironically, she was much closer in age to Yvonne, but that did not encourage any bond between them. One highlight in the uneasy household was when Doria invited them all to join the Raglands for Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house. Jeanette, Alvin, Joseph Jr and Saundra were all there and Tom Jr was impressed by the sense of family they had, something that seemed to be missing from the Markle clan.
Six months after they met, Doria and Tom married, two days before Christmas in 1979. She chose a venue and ceremony that reflected her growing interest in yoga and alternative religions. The Self-Realization Fellowship Temple on Sunset Boulevard stood out with its faux Moorish entrance, including gold orb-topped turrets and stone elephants. The Fellowship was founded in 1920 by the charismatic Paramahansa Yogananda, regarded by many as one of the twentieth-century’s most important spiritual figures and described by the Los Angeles Times as the first superstar guru.
He embraced the value of meditation and of Kriya yoga – influences that help give Doria an inner strength that has been of huge benefit to her daughter. Perhaps his most famous follower was the late Steve Jobs, the billionaire co-founder of Apple who would read Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi at the start of each year. He made sure everyone attending his memorial service was presented with a copy.
Doria and Tom’s ceremony was presided over by Brother Bhaktananda, a much-respected Buddhist priest in Los Angeles who followed Yogananda’s philosophy for a simpler, more thoughtful life. In 1979, an interracial marriage was still a big deal in the US. While in the UK, the drawbacks might have been based on social stigma and entrenched attitudes, in America there was a long history of legislation to overcome. Amazingly, that had only happened in 1967, little more than a decade earlier, when The Beatles were singing ‘All You Need is Love’.