Cruel or kind? The day Meghan posted rings back to her ex
She’s carefully cultivated her endearing image. But now royal author Andrew Morton portrays a very calculating princess-to-be ...
WHEN Meghan Markle made the decision to end her marriage to film producer Trevor Engelson in 2013, she acted swiftly – and some might say callously.
Instead of flying from her new home in Toronto to Los Angeles, where the couple had shared a bungalow, to return her engagement and wedding rings in person, she simply sent them back to him by post.
Engelson, whom she’d met when she was an aspiring actress and who had mentored her to stardom in the TV series Suits, had been devastated by his wife’s ‘out of the blue’ request for a divorce barely two years after they married.
It is an image far removed from what we have seen thus far of the royal bride-to-be – a sweetnatured and compassionate woman who can barely believe her good fortune at getting engaged to a prince.
Doubtless there is a measure of truth in this. However, in his book, to be published this month, renowned royal biographer Andrew Morton portrays the 36-year-old actress in a very different light, suggesting a far more complex – and possibly calculating – character. Though Morton describes his book as ‘an oldfashioned story of a local girl makes good’, he shows how Meghan has harboured dreams of becoming a princess since she was a teenager. Her ambition is to ‘become Diana 2.0’, according school friend Ninaki Priddy.
In extracts published this weekend, the author also presents Meghan’s capacity for ruthlessness, describing how she has expunged people she once held dear from her life as she set about elevating her social and professional status.
Morton’s depiction of Meghan builds on my own portrayal of her in an exclusive Daily Mail series last year, and draws on many of the same sources. However, the author who made his name in 1992 with Diana: Her True Story, which exposed the shockingly dysfunctional marriage of Charles and Diana, takes the extraordinary narrative further.
It begins with Meghan’s own dysfunctional upbringing, which did much to shape her character. Her father, Thomas, was a leading Hollywood lighting director in his mid-30s when he met her mother, Doria, who was 12 years his junior and temping in his studio.
They married and were overjoyed when, a year later, Meghan was born, in August 1981.
But their happiness was fleeting. As Morton recounts, they lived in a predominantly white suburb where neighbours would mistake her black mother for the nanny or nursemaid.
On top of this, Thomas worked 80 or 90 hours a week, leaving his young wife to care alone for Meghan and her step-siblings, Thomas Junior and Yvonne (who later took the name Samantha) – her husband’s teenage children by his first marriage. With baby Meghan the apple of her father’s eye, her half-sister resented her from the outset. And while she was upstairs in her crib, Thomas Jr, then 15, admitted to Morton that he would smoke cannabis downstairs with his friends.
Matters came to a head when his father caught them passing a joint around. To get them out of the house, he dreamt up a grotesque ruse. After changing Meghan’s nappy, he fetched a spoon from the kitchen and pretended to eat from it, Morton writes. In fact, he had filled a clean nappy with chocolate pudding, but his son’s friends were duly repulsed and never returned.
By the time Meghan was two years old, Doria had had enough and moved out. As they shared her custody, Meghan was shunted between them.
According to one of her teachers, this caused Meghan difficulties – ‘one parent over here, one over there, neither of them particularly fond of each other’. However, according to a school-friend, mediating between the warring factions taught Meghan how to control her emotions.
AT two, her parents enrolled her in the Little Red School House, an exclusive creche for Hollywood stars’ children, where she began performing in plays. In one of her early performances, a girl with tangled blonde hair, jam-jar glasses and an awkward manner was in the chorus line. Today, Scarlett Johansson is the world’s highest-paid actress.
At nine, her father, who was then working on the raunchy comedy Married…with Children’, would pick her up from school, then take her to the set with him until the day’s filming had finished.
Around this time, in 1990, Thomas Markle had a stroke of luck although it quickly turned sour. After winning $750,000 in the California State Lottery (using Meghan’s birth date to select his numbers) he decided to keep the windfall secret because he was still embroiled in a financial wrangle with Doria over the divorce.
To avoid registering his name with the authorities, he sent a friend to Chicago to collect his prize-money. According to Tom Jr, however, the devious plan backfired when this surrogate swindled his father out of the money.
With this troubled background what was it that kindled a young American girl’s fascination with the British royal family, 6,000 miles distant from Los Angeles – and why in particular did Diana become her heroine?
Morton dates the origins of Meghan’s obsession back to September 6, 1997, when, aged 16, she watched the funeral of Diana with her friends, ‘tears coursing down their cheeks at the poignant moment when the cameras zoomed in on the royal coffin’ .
Diana’s death was, Morton notes, a seminal event in Meghan’s life.
She was gripped by a subsequent debate, during a school philosophy lesson, on the paradox of a glamorous and world-renowned humanitarian – and loving mother – whose life was cruelly cut short.
Afterwards, she and her school friend Suzy Ardakani watched old videos of Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles, in 1981.
Meghan had an acute sense of social justice from a young age – campaigning to ban a ‘sexist’ soap TV powder advert at just ten years old. Later she and her friends worked at the Hippie Kitchen, a homeless shelter frequented by crack cocaine addicts, in a tough area of Los Angeles.
She also began standing up against racism (although at least one of her teachers mistakenly thought the light-skinned Meghan was of Italian extraction until her mother made a rare visit to the school) and she befriended a classmate who was picked on because she had epilepsy.
For a young girl, this was courageous and laudable, of course. What better woman for a young girl to model herself on than someone who had lent her allure to causes such as Aids and a ban on land-mines?
However, remembering the TV interview Meghan and Harry gave to mark their engagement, these new revelations about her teenage fixation with Diana do beg a rather awkward question.
During that first appearance before the British public, last November, Meghan said this: ‘Because I’m from the States, we don’t grow up with the same understanding of the royal family and so, while I now understand very clearly that there’s a global interest there, I didn’t know very much about him (Harry).’
Morton’s book suggest this remark was rather disingenuous.
During her school-days, Meghan, who wore braces on her teeth and dressed conservatively, as her mother insisted, was something of a tomboy.
But when she left California to study theatre and international relations, at Northwestern University, in Illinois, Morton says she cut loose. The more sophisticated Meghan joined a society full of girls considered ‘intelligent hot messes’ (youthful parlance for bright, and chaotically beautiful) and was considered a ‘cool catch’.
Morton has traced her first college boyfriend, a ‘chiselled, white 6ft 5ins tall basketball player from Ohio’, whom he names only as ‘Steve’.
The relationship was short-lived, however, for Steve was ‘committed to his sporting ambitions, while Meghan was a party animal.
The scene now switches to Buenos Aires; the next stop on Meghan’s extraordinary journey.
Her uncle, Mick Markle, was a US government communications systems specialist (and some in the family said CIA spy) who helped her secure an internship at the US embassy, in Buenos Aires.
HER time there was enjoyable but for one frightening incident, on 21st birthday, when the convoy of limousines she was travelling in was assailed by a mob of anti-American protesters.
Meghan was so intrigued by the diplomatic world that she sought to make it her career, but abandoned this plan after failing the three-hour Foreign Service Officer test. She headed back to Los Angeles to pursue her acting ambitions.
Vying for minor parts with thousands of Hollywood hopefuls was a ‘scratchy, hand-to-mouth existence’, but her fortunes improved after she met Trevor Engelson, on a night-out in a dive-bar in West Hollywood. A brash, fast-rising film producer, more than 6ft tall, with reddish blonde hair and blue eyes, the New Yorker captivated her with his verbosity and unbridled optimism.
Meghan and Trevor set up home together, and were clearly besotted with one another.
However, if Meghan hoped he would cast her in his films, she was wrong.
One of the few roles he gave her was a minor part in Remember Me, a film whose plot centres on 9/11, starring Robert Pattinson. According to the author Engelson’s reluctance to provide her with meaningful work ‘was to become a constant source of conflict for the couple’.
It meant that she was forced to accept demeaning jobs, such as appearing as a ‘briefcase girl’ in the game-show Deal Or No Deal.
According to Morton plenty of celebrities dropped by hoping ‘to get up close and personal with the girls’ including Donald Trump, who was making an appearance to promote his show, The Apprentice. By the time Meghan and Engelson were married, in a Jewishstyle wedding at a Jamaican beach resort, in 2011, she was about to start filming the second season of Suits and on her way to becoming an established star.
It meant her living in Toronto, where the series is filmed, for nine months of the year. Engelson moved his office to New York, an hour away by plane, in an effort to see her more regularly, and they kept in touch via Skype and FaceTime. However, as Morton notes, ‘all too soon, cracks began to appear in the marriage. What once endeared now irritated.
‘He was not the only one to experience the Meghan chill. Her friends in Los Angeles noticed the change in her now that she was on her way up. She no longer had time for mates she had known for years.’
Immersed in a powerful new circle of friends, including Jessica Mulroney, daughter-in-law of Canada’s former prime-minister Brian Mulroney (who is expected to be her maid of honour at next month’s wedding) Meghan told Trevor she wanted a divorce in the summer of 2013.
‘It was such a bolt from the blue,’ Morton writes, ‘that even at a distance of five years he can barely contain his anger.’
‘I have zero to say about her,’ he has said to inquirers.
By then, however, ‘her stock and standing were rising. She was invited to film premieres, she launched a clothing line, and became friends with a host of celebrities… she advocated for the UN and undertook meetings at the World Bank and the Clinton Foundation.
As her celebrity stock rose, so did her price tag. She was learning she could charge a fee just for turning up. Meghan’s rate? Upwards of $20,000 for an appearance.
Her friend, writer Lindsay Roth, also made Meghan the ill-disguised central character in a chick-lit novel about an ambitious actress called What Pretty Girls Are Made Of.
Perhaps in an indication of where Meghan and her friends were by now training their sights, Ms Roth sent a copy of the book to Kate Middleton. What Morton doesn’t say in the book (but I have discovered) is that Palace officials sent her a warm letter of thanks.
A couple of years, and much determined networking, later, the wheel of fortune Meghan had set in motion spun to a halt in a manner she surely couldn’t have envisaged, even in her teenage dreams.
She found herself on a blind-date with Prince Harry. The meeting, in the summer of 2016, was reportedly orchestrated by Violet von Westenholtz, a baron’s daughter who did PR work with Ralph Lauren – for whom Meghan happened to be a ‘brand ambassador’.
Last autumn, when their engagement was imminent and a meeting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace beckoned, Morton writes revealingly, Meghan prepared for the occasion by making secret excursions to the Rose Tree Cottage ‘ a little slice of England in LA’, where she practised sipping tea.
It was to be the biggest moment of her life, and – consummate actress to the last – Meghan was determined to rehearse her part to perfection.