Meghan Misunderstood. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.

      In the US, what was really needed was ‘Loving’, the name of the couple that bravely took on racist laws and won. They had married in Washington, DC, in 1959 but were arrested when they returned home to Virginia, pleading guilty to ‘cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth’. They were offered one year in prison or a suspended sentence if they chose to leave their home state.

      They left but were rearrested in 1963 when they visited family, triggering a legal battle which they eventually won four years later at the Supreme Court. The Chief Justice concluded, ‘To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications … is to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty.’ Now there’s a national Loving Day every June in the US to celebrate the end of this absurd prohibition.

      On her wedding day Doria wore a simple white dress with flowers in her hair, while the groom put on a sports jacket, shirt and tie and carried a bunch of orange blossoms. It was a lovely afternoon and Doria, surrounded by her family, looking like a teenager in love, sparkled with happiness.

      They had been married for eighteen months when their daughter, Rachel Meghan Markle, was born before dawn on 4 August 1981 at the West Park Hospital in Canoga Park, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley just north of where the family lived in Woodland Hills. She was and will always be a California girl.

Tom, now thirty-five, was at the hospital and was ‘thrilled to tears’ when his baby was handed to him to hold for the first time. This time round he threw himself enthusiastically into the role of dad. She was, he declared, his ‘pride and joy’. His son, Tom Jr, confirmed that he was a changed man: ‘Before then, Dad’s work took priority over everything, but she became his whole world. She was her daddy’s princess.’

      He was still working all hours, though, a dedication that was more than paying off when his work on General Hospital was being more widely recognised within the industry. After being nominated twice, he and his fellow crew on the soap won a daytime Emmy for ‘outstanding achievement in design excellence’. This was big news. Before his retirement, Tom would end up being nominated nine times, testament to his ability in a crowded marketplace.

      Meghan was a very cute baby and her delighted father was always happy to be the first to pick her up if she was crying. One big difference to becoming a dad now than when he was a younger man back in Pennsylvania was that he was making good money and could properly afford a child. She became the ‘most special thing in his life’.

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       People are Fighting

      Doria, twenty-three when Meghan was born, was not faring so well. She had to cope with not only looking after a small baby but also maintaining the peace in such a fractious household. The two older siblings, who have been paid many times for interviews, have often changed their accounts of life in the Markle household, but one fact is clear: they were teenagers and Meghan was a newborn.

      Woodland Hills was a pleasant, middle-class, predominantly white neighbourhood in the Valley, as it was called. Meghan summed it up: ‘It was leafy and affordable. What it was not, however, was diverse. And there was my mom, caramel in complexion with her light-skinned baby in tow, being asked where my mother was since they assumed she was the nanny.’ While they have never publically acknowledged how difficult it was for them being an interracial couple in Woodland Hills back then, it’s easy to imagine it was a constant battle. Meghan herself has said that she was too young to understand that they were living with institutional prejudice. With hindsight, this was not the best location for them.

The Markle household was one where everyone seemed to have their own set of friends. Doria relied on her own mother, Jeanette, who had been at the maternity hospital with her, as well as friends interested in practising yoga, which had become a passion that would last a lifetime. When he wasn’t working, Tom liked to socialise with his TV circle and would bring his little daughter downstairs to proudly show her off when they went back to the house.

      Elder daughter Yvonne was often out on the town with other budding actors. Her father had helped her secure a walk-on, uncredited part in General Hospital but her career wasn’t going anywhere and she didn’t seem at all interested in helping with Meghan. Tom Jr was happy to smoke weed with his pals, although his father insisted they didn’t indulge around the new addition to the family.

      Perhaps inevitably, the presence of a young baby in such a fraught environment put a strain on Tom and Doria’s relationship. Some family friends have hinted that Tom found fault with everything – something a strong-minded woman like Doria was СКАЧАТЬ