Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(15)
It was clear that her dysfunctional family background and the separation and subsequent divorce of her parents when she was still a youngster were the concerns she grappled with. “I know that was difficult for her, one parent over here and one over there and neither particularly fond of each other,” recalls Mrs. Knudsen. While she was not the only girl on campus with divorced parents, what singled her out was the way she had managed them. Like many children of divorced parents, she had learned to become a skilled diplomat, mediating between her warring parents. This nihilistic parental interaction taught Meghan a valuable lesson: how to control her emotions. “She is very poised,” observes a school friend. “It could be hard for her. Sometimes she felt she had to pick sides.”
At the time she lived with her father, whose house was walking distance from the school in Los Feliz, and saw her mother on weekends. The older she became, the more she felt she was the one who was mothering her father. It was a source of friction, especially when she started dating. As a friend notes: “Typical teenage stuff.”
There were other issues, too, that clearly troubled her, though she did not discuss them publicly at the time. Fitting in was a constant concern. As she later recalled: “My high school had cliques: the black girls and white girls, the Filipino [sic] and the Latina girls. Being biracial, I fell somewhere in between. So every day during lunch, I busied myself with meetings—French Club, student body, whatever one could possibly do between noon and one p.m.—I was there. Not so that I was more involved, but so that I wouldn’t have to eat alone.”
Photographer John Dlugolecki, who photographed Meghan and other students throughout high school, commented that Meghan would often talk to his wife, Vicki Conrad, about her love of drama. Vicky in turn noticed that Meghan never appeared to be part of the African American or the Asian groups of girls, or any other ethnic clique. Dlugolecki also remarked that Meghan “was not considered mixed race by her peers,” adding, “We only ever saw her with Tom, never with the mom.” And so it came as a mild shock to members of faculty when they finally got to meet Doria. “Everyone thought [Meghan] was Italian because she was so light skinned,” recalls one former teacher. “Then we met her mother and realized she was biracial.”
As poised and confident as she seemed to her classmates, at Kairos, when she discussed her own demons, at least those about her family discord, it clearly enabled her to encourage her classmates to confront their own.
Mrs. Knudsen recalls: “You have to be very honest about who you are and be willing to share all the things that you struggle with, your successes and failures. She was articulate, confident, feisty, and spunky. I remember her saying, ‘Why can’t we do it this way, has anybody thought about that?’ She was always thinking about a better way to do something, not just complaining.”
For many students the retreat is a turning moment in their young lives, a time when they face up to their own emotional issues honestly. Realizing that their classmates have their own problems is seen as a critical catalyst. “It’s a time of truth telling, and the leaders are the ones who set the tone,” observes Mrs. Knudsen. “The atmosphere is: ‘I am willing to share my truth with you, and that makes you willing to share your truth.’ So there is a lot of crying, but it is healing crying. Everything out in the open, you realize everybody has to struggle and that nobody is perfect no matter how they look.”
While her fractured family background and her sense of isolation caused Meghan a great deal of heartache as she grew up, it also helped provide some of the psychological drive that would propel her toward her overarching ambition. From a young age, Meghan dreamed of becoming a famous Hollywood actor. She fantasized about winning an Oscar one day, practicing her acceptance speech in front of her bedroom mirror. As James Lipton, the venerable inquisitor for the long-running Inside the Actors Studio, never tires of reminding his audience, most actors come from broken homes. This often bitter experience gives them the emotional rocket fuel to power a star-making screen performance.
From day one at Immaculate Heart, Meghan threw herself whole-heartedly into the drama department. Besides being a stepping stone in following her dream, at school the drama department has a rather different function. It acts as a welcoming club, an unofficial sorority, and a close-knit family. As the winner of six Daytime Emmy awards told me: “You might be a misfit everywhere else, but here you have a sense of belonging.”
As well as taking to the boards, Meghan held numerous offices, including president of the school’s Genesian Players, a group devoted to the preservation of the performing arts that actively hosted or attended plays, dramatic festivals, and apprentice stage productions. However, as she didn’t hold a formal office, she was always at the edge of the student council, never quite a part of it.
Immaculate Heart, which counts supermodel and TV personality Tyra Banks, beloved sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore, and Lucille Ball’s actor daughter Lucie Arnaz among its alumni, was able to call on a rich roster of Hollywood luminaries to direct and produce plays and musicals.
There was leading voice coach Rachael Lawrence, choreographer and Jersey Boys star Joseph Leo Bwarie, and, most prominently, Gigi Perreau, a former child actor whose work is honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Perreau started her career in movies at the tender age of two when she played Greer Garson’s daughter in the 1943 film Madame Curie. By the age of ten she had appeared in twenty-five films, including working on set with Nancy Reagan in the 1950 thriller Shadow on the Wall. When she retired from acting work, Perreau, now seventy-eight, brought her experience to staging plays and musicals at her alma mater, as well as to teaching drama classes.