Duchess Meghan's Family Drama: Inside the Markle Family Breakdown.
Meghan Markle, a.k.a. the Duchess of Sussex, has become the darling of the British press and a royal Cinderella story.
But her American family presents a more complicated story.
Vanessa Grigoriadis digs deep to uncover the untold truths that turned one of the year's biggest stories into a fractured,
Kardashianified royal fairy tale.
Meghan Markle will never, in all likelihood, be Queen.
But among the many benefits of marrying Prince Harry and becoming Duchess of Sussex is that she and Harry will have their own domain,
a special relationship with the 53 Commonwealth countries,
in many of which Meghan's mixed-race American background will be an asset.
On her intricately planned 16-day tour of a few of these formerly colonized territories in the South Pacific, her first trip as an HRH,
she ruled with her characteristic, almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity,
exhibiting the type of spontaneous human interaction with which the royals have long struggled.
In Sydney, she fell to her knees to greet a wheelchair-bound 98-year-old war widow, and in New Zealand,
she directed underlings to distribute petits fours to a passel of children in a town square.
In Dubbo, New South Wales, she labored over a baked banana bread, then presented it to a family of fifth-generation farmers.
"She said if you go to someone's house, you always bring something, so she did,"
said the farmer's daughter, overwhelmed by the honor of eating princess bread.
"She said she was worried about the bananas, that she'd put too many bananas in it,"
except "the Duke said there's never too many bananas".
But when Meghan arrived at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, Fiji, this perfection was pierced.
She was on hand to deliver a speech about the importance of funding girls' education,
her clavicle swathed in a ceremonial necklace resembling a dozen calves' feet sprouting orange and pink peonies,
and she proceeded with humanizing detail and flawless diction:
"As a university graduate, I know the personal feeling of pride and excitement that comes with attending university,"
she explained, her raven tresses gently pulled back from her face.
"It was through scholarships, financial-aid programs,
and work-study where my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition that I was able to attend university," she continued.
"And, without question, it was worth every effort".
Within a day, a dissenting voice piped up from a world away,
part of what has become Meghan's own personal chorus: her American family.
Her half-sister, Samantha Markle, a 53-year-old blonde with MS who is confined to a wheelchair,
began tapping out tweets, soon to be converted into headlines.
Insisting "Dad paid for her college education," Samantha added, "I love my sister but this is ridiculous".
She also called Meghan "delusionally absurd".
And this week, the most important voice in the chorus, Meghan's father, Thomas Markle,
went on Piers Morgan's British morning TV show to complain about his daughter's "ghosting" of him,
and to ask the queen herself to intervene in the family squabble.
Even if she's not the monarchy's most important princess—this honor goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton,
one day to be queen consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in her way as Princess Di.
She is the only female self-made millionaire in the royal family,
her fortune coming from her work on Suits and on film; one of the oldest pregnant royals in a century (she's 37);
and the first bi-racial person in a family of people who used to powder their faces to make themselves whiter.
As a royal, she's not allowed to make political statements, but she's an acknowledged feminist who advocates for gay rights,
and for her first charitable endeavor, she collaborated with the mostly Muslim survivors of the Grenfell fire.
This soon-to-be mom to the first (known) bi-racial baby in the history of the monarchy represents the new and modern,
all that America has given and will, if our politicians let us, continue to give to the world.
She's like the one percent Gal Gadot. Even her gaffes are merely evidence that she's shaking up the royal family,
which is dedicated to conservatism and self-perpetuation.
When she refuses to wear nude-colored stockings to official events, as royals tend to,
and goes bare-legged in the summer humidity, we cheer.
When she closes her own car door, instead of waiting for a valet, it's fraught with down-to-earth, woman-of-the-people symbolism.
Her public performance has been near-flawless.
She came from nowhere, and re-invented the way the British royal family could behave.
But of course Meghan didn't come from nowhere, exactly.
She came from the American hinterland, from an aspirational, peripatetic, and, yes, dysfunctional family,
with whom she shares many traits, even if she sometimes seems to want to deny them.
Where the British have generations of Plantagenets and Tudors, Americans have Jay Gatsby,
a man who loved clothes as much as any princess ("I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before") and a past he liked to keep hidden.
Meghan isn't Gatsby, exactly—she hasn't expunged her background.
But there's something of Fitzgerald's antihero in Meghan's preternatural American re-invention.
She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are touchstones),
people who believe that the future doesn't at all have to be governed by the past.
According to a Hollywood source, when her star was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed
as a "Sayonara Zara" party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her closet to her guests.
The blowup between Meghan and some of her biological family has been a rare fiasco for the Duchess,
aided and abetted by elements that include the British tabloids' dexterity at fomenting race- and class-based discord,
the royal family's usual resistance to change, and the unbridled loopiness and more than occasional meanness of some Markles
(her half-sister has called Meghan "the Duchess of Nonsense").
It has also pointed up an essential difference between our two countries:
Brits often can't escape their families, or even their class, whereas our myth is based on striking out on one's own.
Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary,
emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her tumultuous background.
The story of her biological family is a sprawling American epic, both up-by-the-bootstraps and shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves,
generations' worth of new beginnings, of which Meghan's is the most spectacular.
There are appearances by slaves and slave owners, cross-country journeys in pursuit of the American Dream,
and the eventual attainment of a middle-class Angeleno life that played out for most of her family like a stoner shaggy-dog tale.
Royal historians have dug deeply through the ancestry of Meghan's mother, Doria Ragland,
as with anyone newly incorporated into royal lineage, and located her first known ancestor:
a slave born in 1830 in Jonesboro, Georgia, the setting for Gone with the Wind,
named Richard Ragland (the surname most likely came from the man who enslaved him).
A generation later, during Reconstruction, many Raglands lit out for Southern California;
in the 1950s, Doria's parents moved from Ohio to Los Angeles, too. Her father ran an antique store, 'Twas New.
Doria, gentle and loving, met Meghan's father, Tom, in LA, though he had been raised on the East Coast.
He was the youngest of three sons in a creative family in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania.
One of his older brothers joined the air force and became an international diplomat.
The other is the bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church in America, which is a church that I,
as a practicing member of the Eastern Orthodox religion, was surprised never to have heard of before.
At one point the church had a few hundred parishioners, though the Association of Religion Data Archives' listing for the number of today's flock is blank.
Tom, taciturn but lighthearted, enjoyed making practical jokes and putting on plays.
After high school, he moved to the Poconos to work in theater, then to Chicago, eventually becoming a lighting designer.
He married for the first time at 19, having two kids—Samantha and her brother,
Thomas junior—before divorcing in the early 1970s and setting out for the West Coast, sans famille, to try his luck in Hollywood's big leagues.
When he met Doria, he was working as the lighting director of ABC's long-running daytime soap General Hospital,
on which nurses and doctors have lusty affairs while also performing heroic heart transplants.
Doria, 12 years his junior, was a trainee makeup artist for the soap.
The groovy couple was married at Sunset Boulevard's Self-Realization Fellowship, shrine of the Hindu guru Yogananda,
located down the street from the compound of the Church of Scientology.
Doria and Tom moved in together a couple of years before Meghan was born,
along with Samantha and Thomas junior, who had relocated to LA after living with their mom.
The teenage siblings were unruly. Samantha was auditioning for film and TV parts,
or working the Lancôme counter at the Beverly Center and as an extra on A Different World, Lisa Bonet's spin-off of The Cosby Show.
According to a biography by Andrew Morton, Meghan: A Hollywood Princess,
Thomas junior spent time smoking weed with his friends at the family home in Woodland Hills, a burb in the Valley. Ragland,
who eventually opened a small boutique selling sundresses in a Topanga mall, wasn't averse to joints, either, according to Samantha.
They were a family of the type of low-level creatives who abound in Hollywood, enjoying an offbeat life in the sunshine.
When Meghan would pitch a tantrum in her high chair, scattering peas on the floor,
her dad would encourage her and even get in on the action himself, throwing more peas.
Once, when Thomas junior and his friends were smoking weed in the living room while she cried in her room,
Tom senior left to tend to her, then reappeared with a full diaper.
He pulled out a spoon and began eating the contents, later revealing that he'd filled the diaper with chocolate pudding.
The startling and sensational descended in Meghan's life with some regularity,
though even as a little girl she was centered and ambitious.
Tom and Doria divorced when Meghan was two. (Samantha and Thomas junior were on their way out of the house).
Meghan lived with one parent, then the other, until her adolescence, when she lived with Tom full-time.
In what must have been a dissonant experience for Meghan, after her day at an all-girls Catholic school,
he would pick her up and bring her along to work with him on the set of Married . . . with Children.
Meghan loved girlie things, and had well-honed methods of dealing with the chaos and uncertainty of her dysfunctional family.
She kept her closet neat, and even as an adolescent stored her Betsey Johnson shoes in their original boxes,
wrapped in tissue paper, until she was ready to wear them next.
"I remember busying myself and being the president of every club," she has said of her schooling.
"Not because I actually wanted to, but because I didn't want to eat alone at lunchtime.
This overachiever mask I wore was really just the way I battled feeling displaced".
It was far from a perfect childhood, but magic always hovered nearby.
In Los Angeles, the American Dream isn't only made by grit, but rather by moments of luck.
If there is an altar to which Hollywood bows, it's the one of serendipity. And in 1990, Tom, who already made a TV salary,
reportedly bought a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck not dissimilar to the one required to transform a California girl into a British princess.
Meghan attended private school and Northwestern, majoring in international affairs and theater.
She was the first person in her family to go to college.
It's certainly a partial explanation for the current conflict that, while Meghan's good fortunes only multiplied from her father's doting,
poor investments and family feuds led to a diminishment of Tom's bank accounts.
Samantha maintains that Tom paid Meghan's tab when she enrolled at Northwestern and that if Meghan worked at all,
as Samantha has tweeted, "it was only for extra shoe money and party money".
In 2016, Tom filed for bankruptcy. And Meghan did omit mention in Fiji of Tom's contribution to her college education;
she attended college supported by her parents and also financial aid.
Though hardly "delusionally absurd" not to mention them in her Fiji speech, she could have made the choice to include them.
Meghan followed her father back to Hollywood after a short stint working at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires (her diplomat uncle has claimed he set her up),
making her way from roles as suitcase girl on Deal or No Deal to guest spots on CSI to a female lead in Suits.
Her starter marriage to a fast-talking movie producer broke up soon after it began,
partially because the two had to spend months apart when Suits began filming in Toronto.
Meghan dated a popular Canadian chef and started the Tig, her lifestyle blog; it was one part Goop and another Martha Stewart,
with a consistently eloquent tone and a dollop of social justice before the topic became trendy.
The image Meghan created for herself was free-spirited and earthy;
but not entirely consistent with who she really was, according to those who know her.
"Meghan's goal was always becoming a household name," says an acquaintance in the television world.
"She's insanely smart and poised, but very, very guarded. She's not a person you can actually be friends with.
She's the type of person who is best friends with her stylist".
In Toronto, Meghan became a regular at Soho House, an exclusive club drawing the city's film, social, and banking set.
She began hanging out with an international crowd, including a power stylist—Jessica Mulroney,
best known for styling Justin Trudeau's fabulous wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau;
and Bahrain-born Misha Nonoo, at that time married to Alexander Gilkes,
the British founder of online auction house Paddle8 and a close friend of Harry's.
"Meghan was socializing with foreign heiresses—upper-crust, smart, ambitious," says a friend of Nonoo's.
"They have everything and they want everything". Meghan also alighted on her fairy godmother:
Violet von Westenholz, a British Ralph Lauren public-relations director whose father,
an Olympic skier, is besties with Prince Charles.
Von Westenholz knew Harry was looking to become serious with the right woman, and passed him Meghan's contact information.
The trajectory of her family was moving in other directions.
They stopped having holidays together and some eventually stopped speaking to each other.
Money problems were a near-constant. Samantha filed for bankruptcy in 2003, joined by Thomas junior in 2012.
He claimed at the time that he had $10 in cash and $88,000 in debts.
After running into problems with a boutique she'd opened in Los Angeles, Doria also filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the royal family's personal wealth, which encompasses castles and endless swaths of British countryside and crown jewels,
including a 530-carat cut diamond, the world's largest, to squabble over, has been estimated at $85 billion.
So it's no surprise that, to some of her family, Meghan's ascension was viewed
as an opportunity to play the Kardashian game while acquiring their own measure of royal wealth and fame.
To be continue...
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