Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(11)
“Meghan called it like it was. She was going to defend those who needed it. Her attitude was: ‘I can see you are hurt and I’m going to protect you.’ She was a genuinely decent human being who looked out for people who needed help. She gave a damn about people other than herself.”
Even Elizabeth’s father, Dennys McCoy, an internationally known animation scriptwriter, singles out Meghan. He recalls: “She stood out because she was a level-headed kid who was smart and mature for her age. We were surprised that she became an actress. We thought she would be a lawyer.”
By the time she was ten, Meghan was fiercely switched on and loved to debate an issue, taking part in discussions about racism in America, most notably after the notorious beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, by LA cops in 1991, the Gulf War that same year, and the buildup to the 1992 presidential contest between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. During one classroom discussion about the looming war in the Gulf, a fellow pupil was in tears because he didn’t think his older brother, who was serving in the US military, would make it home. The issue became such a hot topic that the children, led by Meghan, staged a protest on the school grounds. They made banners and signs with antiwar slogans. Such was the interest that local TV station KTLA sent along a camera crew to film the protest.
Even nearer to home were the LA riots in late April and early May of 1992, which ignited after four Los Angeles Police Department officers, who were filmed savagely beating Rodney King, were acquitted of assault and using excessive force. As the burning and looting spread like fingers along LA’s thoroughfares, Meghan and her classmates were sent home. Meghan watched with wonder as ash from burning buildings floated onto her lawn. She thought it was snowing, but her mother knew better and told her to get into the house. Even when they returned to school there was a brooding sense of anxiety; the children, including Meghan, crowded around a second-floor school window as they watched police arresting a man acting suspiciously. In total the six days of rioting left sixty-three dead and more than 2,300 injured, and led to more than 12,000 arrests.
The experience awakened the nascent activist in her, and Meghan determined to use her influence when she could. She gained something of a reputation for writing to companies, especially food giants, about damaged or faulty packages and foods. Invariably she was sent bags of chips, cookies, and the like by the food companies as compensation and regularly brought the fruits of her letter writing to share among her school friends.
Her most memorable coup was when, at age eleven, she wrote a letter to the household products company Procter & Gamble for making a sexist commercial that used the tag line “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans” to sell dishwashing liquid. She and the rest of her classmates were watching the commercials as part of a social studies assignment. However, it was the reaction by two boys in her class to the dishwashing liquid ad that particularly incensed them. She recalls them saying, “Yeah, that’s where women belong—in the kitchen.” Meghan felt confused. She was angry and annoyed, knowing that they were wrong, but she also felt, as she later recalled, “small, too small to say anything in that moment,” as she wrote later about the incident.
She went home and told her father, Tom, who suggested that she channel her feelings into handwritten letters of complaint. Not only did she write to the soap company chairman saying that the phrase should be changed to “People all over America,” but also to Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady; Nick News anchor Linda Ellerbee; and prominent women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, who was based in Los Angeles.
While Hillary Clinton and Linda Ellerbee wrote letters of encouragement, and Gloria Allred also offered her support, according to Meghan, she never heard from Proctor & Gamble. However, when the ad aired again just a month later, she saw the fruits of her handiwork. It had been changed to say: “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” Her success once again had the TV cameras arriving at the school, this time with Ellerbee interviewing Meghan and her fellow pupils about her one-schoolgirl campaign.
“I don’t think it’s right for kids to grow up thinking these things, that just mom does everything,” Meghan told Ellerbee. “It’s always, ‘mom does this,’ and ‘mom does that.’” Sometime afterward, this and other incidents inspired her to join the Washington-based National Organization for Women. Meghan, as she proudly recalled, became one of the youngest if not the youngest member of the group, founded in 1966, which campaigns for women’s rights.
More than twenty years later, in 2015, Meghan reflected on this chapter of her life while giving a speech as the newly minted UN Women Advocate for Political Participation and Leadership.
“It was at that moment that I realized the magnitude of my actions. At the age of eleven, I had created my small level of impact by standing up for equality,” she said at the time. While her childhood experiences were the crucible that set her on the path to activism, her mother believes that she was hardwired from birth to try to make the world a better and more equal place. In short, she had a moral compass. Doria played her own part, strict at home but also ready to show her daughter that there was more to the world than Woodland Hills. She raised her to be what she called “a global citizen,” taking her to places like Oaxaca, Mexico, where Meghan recalls seeing children playing in the dirt roads and peddling Chiclets so that they could bring home a few extra pesos. When Meghan, then age ten, and her mother visited the slums of Jamaica, the schoolgirl was horrified to see such grinding poverty. “Don’t look scared, Flower,” her mother told her. “Be aware, but don’t be afraid.”