Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(10)
The couple split up when their little “Flower” was just two years old, but did not divorce for another five years. He would have custody of his daughter on weekends and drop her off on Sunday evenings. Then, as Meghan told writer Sam Kashner, the trio would sit and eat dinner off their knees as they watched Jeopardy! “We were so close-knit,” she recalls, a memory perhaps seen through the forgiving prism of a child desperate for her parents to be united rather than accepting the bleak reality of a mother and father at odds. Others were not so sanguine, pointing to Tom’s bewilderment, not to say bitterness, that Doria had given their union so little time to prove itself. By the time Meghan was old enough to appreciate Jeopardy! they were divorced and living separate lives.
Founded in 1945 by Ruth Pease, Little Red School House is a Hollywood institution favored for the sons and daughters of LA’s showbiz elite. While parents rarely saw Johnny Depp, whose daughter attended the school, waiting outside the school gates, Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, used to pick up his daughter after school in a spray-painted Mercedes-Benz. Teaching—based around the four-stage program of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget—is eclectic, imaginative, and expensive: $18,800 for kindergarten, rising to $22,700 for grade 6. As the school chooses only the brightest and the best, older children have to take an exam before they are considered for entry. In 1983 Doria, who was now training as a social worker, and Tom enrolled two-year-old Meghan for preschool at the exclusive school.
The setup was convenient for all involved. Little Red School House was close to the ABC studios in Los Feliz, where Tom worked, and just a few minutes away from Doria’s work and her new home just south of Hollywood. Meghan would stay at the school until she was eleven years old. While reading, writing, and arithmetic were at the core of the school day, children could dip into a whole range of subjects, from Spanish to quantum physics. In summer, children worked in the community garden and hiked the nature trails at Leo Carrillo Beach or nearby Griffith Park.
The school’s stage shows, watched by proud parents, were another regular feature of the curriculum. When she was five, Meghan entertained the parents with a rendition of the song “The Wheels on the Bus,” and she was later featured in Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story. One Halloween Meghan and her friend Ninaki “Nikki” Priddy played two corpses discussing the size and comfort of their respective coffins. Another time she shared the lead in an adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Unfortunately, her costar, Elizabeth McCoy, came down with stomach flu just hours before the show began, leaving Meghan desperately trying to memorize both parts. “That was the worst experience of my life, trying to learn your lines,” Meghan told an apologetic McCoy afterward. Ironically, no one gave a thought to asking a little girl with an unkempt mane of blond hair, thick glasses, and an awkward, clumsy manner who was lurking in the chorus. Her name was Scarlett Johansson, now one of the world’s highest-paid actors.
McCoy, who these days is a renowned chef and scriptwriter, had another reason to thank Meghan. Two years Meghan’s junior, Elizabeth was a self-confessed weird kid. Intense, fiercely intelligent, and overweight, she was interested in offbeat subjects like UFOs, the occult, and ghosts. Other children thought her odd. Nor did it help that she suffered from petit mal seizures, a form of epilepsy that saw her going into a trancelike state from time to time that made her unreachable. As the seizures last for only a short time, children who have them are often thought to be daydreaming or not listening.
Meghan, Elizabeth was to discover, was not like many of the other kids, who either walked on by or mocked her. The first time Meghan saw Elizabeth suffering from a seizure she came to her aid, sitting holding her hand and comforting her. Elizabeth also remembers how she provided friendship when she was being taunted by the “mean girls,” as she describes them. She recalls: “I was bullied and miserable and my only salvation were the kids who liked me. I really liked Meghan a lot. She didn’t turn me away if I started talking about offbeat subjects. She listened. She was cool and had cool things to say. I liked being around her.”
It was clear that Meghan had inherited her mother’s strong sense of right and wrong, and was prepared to stand up for herself and for others. On one occasion the so-called mean girls announced that they were starting a “White Girls Only” club and wanted Meghan to join. “Are you kidding me?’ said Meghan to the gaggle of fellow pupils, dismissing them in a sentence. They went very quiet after that. That playground confrontation highlighted Meghan’s own concerns about her identity. She tells the story of how, around this same time, Christmas 1988, her father bought two sets of Heart dolls containing the traditional nuclear family unit of mother, father, and two children. He bought one with black dolls and one with white and mixed them together to represent Meghan’s own family. Then he wrapped them in sparkly Christmas paper and placed the box under the tree.
Her struggle to understand herself and where she was placed in the scheme of humanity instinctively made her more aware of those who had difficulties fitting in.
As Elizabeth McCoy recalls: “You never forget the people who were mean to you and who was nice. That’s why I have never forgotten Meghan. She was one of the most righteous people I have ever met. If someone was being treated unfairly she stuck up for them. On one occasion I made the girl who bullied me cry. I tried to apologize, and Meghan sided with the other girl because she was the one in tears.