name. Despite one or two well-known alumni, this was not a celebrity or elite school.
Doria had moved into a spacious second-floor apartment on South Cloverdale Avenue, three miles from the school. It may not have been as leafy as Woodland Hills but the street was wide, clean and tidy with small front lawns dotted with flower borders and palm trees. It was a pleasant, safe neighbourhood in midtown LA.
To help pay some bills and also because she didn’t want to be stuck at home all day, Doria started looking for work. Under the terms of the divorce agreement, Tom had joint custody and agreed to pay $800 a month towards Meghan’s upbringing. While Tom could afford the school fees at the Hollywood Schoolhouse, pupils whose parents could not meet them could apply for assistance grants. The school was quite liberal-thinking in its attitudes at a time when it would not have been derided as ‘woke’.
Intriguingly, it was during her time at elementary school that the first signs of the two passions in Meghan’s life began to form: standing up for what was right and wanting to be a performer. For the former, Debbie Wehbe, who was headmistress while she was a pupil there, gives credit to both Tom and Doria for encouraging her ‘belief systems’.
Meghan’s love of performing was evident at the annual end-of-year shows when all the children were encouraged to make the best use of their talents. When she was five, Meghan took centre stage to sing the old favourite, ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. Right from the start, Tom would be there proudly taking photos of his daughter. He literally took pictures of her every day.
Importantly, Meghan found a best friend at the school. Ninaki Priddy, known as Niki, would turn out not to be a friend for life, but growing up they shared many memorable moments. For Niki’s ninth birthday party, Meghan took a leading role in a jokey, spontaneous show where she pretended to be a queen surrounded by her servants. The whole thing was captured on video by Niki’s mum Maria and was just some back-garden fun, but it did reveal how much the camera loved Meghan and, even at this age, she could be the centre of attention in any group. Over the years, Niki collected almost as many shots of Meghan as Tom Markle did, diligently sticking into albums happy photographs of the two girls at home, at school or on trips abroad.
From an early age Doria encouraged Meghan to be aware of the whole world and not just her little patch of Los Angeles. She was working for a travel agency that opened up opportunities to take her daughter with her on some wonderful holidays. While there was sun and beaches, culture and laughter, there was the occasional more sobering experience of those less fortunate.
She took her to see the slum areas of Jamaica, a genuine eye opener for a little Californian girl who could scarcely comprehend the unbearable poverty of what she was seeing. Her mother had soothing words: ‘Don’t look scared, Flower. Be aware but don’t be afraid.’
In Oaxaca City, in southern Mexico, she saw for herself poor street children selling sweets to earn a few pesos to buy food. It was a stark dose of reality that illustrated the unfairness in the world. Doria had taken Meghan there for the famous Day of the Dead Festival – ‘Día de los Muertos’ – which is nothing like as grim as it sounds. The celebration, which begins on Halloween, marks the three days when the spirits of lost loved ones visit the living and is infused with a sense of fun and a carnival atmosphere: truly a party spirit.
Meghan fell in love with Mexico – the people, the culture and, perhaps best of all, the food. But she never forgot her mum’s life lessons. In one of her essays for Elle magazine, she wrote, ‘My mum raised me to be a global citizen with eyes open to sometimes harsh realities.’
Doria also encouraged Meghan from about the age of seven to join her for ‘mommy-and-me’ yoga sessions. Meghan was not keen: ‘I was very resistant as a kid but she said, “Flower, you will find your practice – just give it time.”’ As with many things, Doria would be proved right in the end.
It’s too easy to say that it was Tom who encouraged her acting while Doria was more serious. She spent most of her time with a mum who had more boundaries and limits in place, but Doria still liked to have fun and would dance carefree around the apartment to her favourite music. She loved the mellow soul of Al Green. And Tom was there when needed to lend a hand and support her ideals. Generally she would spend the week at her mother’s and weekends with her father. When he dropped her back, the three of them would usually sit down, eat dinner from a tray on their laps and watch the game show Jeopardy! together.
Both parents strengthened her social awareness and they were both givers, much more so than takers. They would deliver meals to people in hospices, dig out the coins in their pockets for the poor living on the streets and at Thanksgiving they would buy a turkey or two for the homeless shelters. These gestures helped to form Meghan’s character.
A grim period in modern Los Angeles history also had a lasting effect on her. In 1991, when Meghan was ten, police officers in the city were caught on film giving a savage beating with batons to a black motorist called Rodney King. His injuries included skull fractures, broken bones and teeth and permanent brain damage.
The following April, a predominantly white jury with no African–Americans found four police officers not guilty of using excessive force, even though the beating had continued for fifteen minutes. Los Angeles erupted into five days of rioting and violence. It seemed that everywhere in South Central LA something was being set on fire and the whole area resembled a war zone. There was nothing remotely Hollywood about this.
Meghan and her schoolmates were sent home for their safety. She remembered there was ash everywhere, settling on lawns and porches. Meghan shouted, ‘Oh my God, Mommy, it’s snowing.’ Doria responded firmly, ‘No, Flower, it’s not snow. Get in the house.’
Meghan’s social conscience was well-developed for her age. The current headmistress of the Hollywood Schoolhouse, Ilise Faye, observed: ‘She had a voice. She was one of those children that would stand up for the underdogs. She would stand up for what she believed in, and she was the leader among her friends.’
That leadership was evident when she heard that one of her classmates was upset about the Gulf War. The boy in question was in tears because his elder brother was in the military and was due to fly out to the Middle East. Meghan helped to organise a protest at her school against the conflict, carrying a homemade placard that stated, ‘Peace and Harmony for the World’.
The following year, at the age of eleven, Meghan’s class had a social studies assignment that involved watching and commenting on various advertisements. First up was one for Robitussin cough syrup, which suggested it was ‘Recommended by Dr Mom’. Meghan’s response was what about ‘Dr Dad’?
The commercial that had the biggest effect on her, however, was for Ivory clear dishwasher liquid, a kitchen product from corporation Proctor & Gamble. She couldn’t help but notice that it began, ‘Women are fighting greasy pots and pans …’
She was angry at the blatant sexism: ‘I said “wait a minute, how can they say that?!”’ She was even less impressed when two boys in the class piped up, ‘Yeah, that’s where women belong, in the kitchen.’ That evening she told her dad all about it and he suggested that she write to the company in person. She sat down and composed a letter in her already immaculate handwriting urging them to change the wording of the commercial to ‘People are fighting greasy pots and pans’.
Tom also suggested that she write to some powerful people as well, so she sent a letter to the new First Lady, Hillary Clinton, the renowned civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred, and to broadcaster Linda Ellerbee, host of Nick News W5 on the Nickelodeon cable channel. The long-running news programme for school-age children had only recently started in 1992.
Meghan secured a famous victory and the advertisement wording was changed to ‘People are fighting …’ just as she had hoped. She appeared on Nick News to talk about it: ‘I don’t think it’s right that kids grow up thinking these things – that mom does everything.’
And she had a message to other children: ‘If you see something you don’t like or are affected by on television or any other platform, write