Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(18)
Summertime and the living was easy for Meghan. Freshly graduated from Immaculate Heart and with her Northwestern University future beckoning, Meghan packed her last Los Angeles summer with memories and then packed her suitcases for her first semester away from home. She would effectively be starting a new life. Not one of her classmates from Immaculate Heart or anyone she knew from LA was going to Northwestern, and she was determined to make a good impression. The orthodontics she had had during her high school years had gradually adjusted her bucked, gap-toothed grin, and now she was smiling widely without feeling self-conscious.
Once her dental work was complete she had some head shots taken to send out for auditions. As she was leaving for Chicago in the autumn, the best she could hope for was a day or two’s work on one of the many music or short videos that were being shot around town. She had already earned around $600 for a couple days of work in a Tori Amos video, “1000 Oceans,” which was shot in a parking lot in downtown LA. Meghan, dressed in a low-cut blue spaghetti strap top, appeared as one of a crowd curiously examining a glass box containing Amos, writhing around as she sang. It comes across as a kind of performance art—but to a melody. The four-and-a-half-minute video, directed by Erick Ifergan, climaxes with scenes of rioting kids facing police horses and hoses, a musical reprise of the LA riots. Amos’s video is, for dedicated Markle watchers, the first public appearance of one of Meghan’s most distinctive mannerisms, continuously brushing back her long hair from her face with her hand.
That weekend, she had another audition lined up, this time for a Shakira video. It was to be a high-energy dance fest, a world away from Amos’s vision of urban alienation. Meghan’s best friend Nikki Priddy was going to drive with her to the audition, then they were going to go shopping so that she could find something new to wear for the Northwestern students’ reception at the Beverly Hilton hotel. The meet and greet was her first chance to scope out her fellow undergraduates and to make some first impressions herself. During the day Nikki and Meghan also planned to goof around, filming LA street scenes—and themselves—with Nikki’s new video camera.
The audition for the Shakira video didn’t go quite as well as Meghan had hoped. It was fun to dance crazily, but afterward she told Nikki: “I am burning up, I was really nervous I was going to fall out of my top I was just shaking around so much.”
She knew her performance hadn’t won her a gig as a $600-a-day featured dancer, but she was hoping for a spot as an extra. It was less money and no real camera time, but still, it would be fun. As she waited in the audition room she ran into a girl she had met at the Tori Amos video shoot. It was the last time they saw one another; Meghan did not get a call back.
After hitting the mall, the two friends drove through Los Angeles in Doria’s Volvo station wagon with the personalized license plate MEGNMEE, Meghan keeping up a rolling commentary; Nikki was the camerawoman. The duo dismissed the gay majority of West Hollywood with the jejune “We could walk down the street naked and no one would care.” They zoomed in on a woman who seemed to just have had collagen injections in her lips and they marveled at the houses along Beverly Glen and other wealthy enclaves in Beverly Hills and elsewhere.
Back home at her mother’s house, Meghan tried on her new outfits for the student gathering at the Beverly Hilton. She had a vision of how she wanted to project herself at Northwestern and had decided that she would focus on a monochromatic look, black and gray, a color scheme that would make her look stylish, sophisticated, and pulled together. With that in mind, she’d chosen a pencil skirt, tube top, and structured white open-front blouse that doubled as a jacket. It was a weird foreshadowing of the office wear she would don to play Rachel Zane over a decade later.
Meghan made that last summer at home count, but she was also troubled. She and her father weren’t getting along, and she was deliberately avoiding him. The emotional shutters had come down—Meghan going to stay with her mother and not even visiting her father’s house to pick up her mail. It was a situation that perplexed her friends as they knew that Meghan was the apple of her father’s eye. Not that any of his children, Tom Junior and Yvonne included, took advantage of his laissez-faire attitude. It was Meghan’s mother who was more a stickler for boundaries. Though she would join Meghan and her friends dancing to music on the radio or talking about makeup, she was stricter than her ex-husband. Meghan could twist him around her little finger. Yvonne often told the story of the time before Christmas when Meghan was looking at a jewelry catalogue and picking out a ring that Tom Senior had promised as her main festive gift. She teased her much older sister by saying that whatever her father bought Yvonne, Meghan would receive the most expensive gift as she was the most favored child. So, while the split between father and daughter was uncommon, her friends dismissed it as simply a summer storm. It was not the best send-off for her college career, as she was leaving behind her childhood home and also the girl she considered her sister, Ninaki Priddy.
Nikki had been her best friend since they could barely walk. As toddlers they were besties at the Little Red School House, spending countless sleepovers together, playing in the pool at Nikki’s parents’ modest three-bedroom home in North Hollywood. They remained close when they transitioned to Immaculate Heart, the duo traveling around Europe together with her parents, Dalton and Maria, and her kid sister Michelle. Nikki loved Paris so much that she studied at the Sorbonne the following summer. When they landed in London and posed in front of Buckingham Palace, they never for a moment thought that one day Meghan would be welcomed inside the black wrought iron gates. Now college and separation loomed, and they were trying to crowd every moment with laughter and fond memories.