Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(19)
Meghan looked around her dorm room and began unpacking. She was bunked in the freshman dorm known as North Mid-Quads and next door to the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house. She hadn’t decided yet if she would rush—the American college ritual where student women visit all the sorority houses and find one that suits them, then hope they will be selected to join it—or just stick to friendship groups in her dorm and classes. The first few weeks at a new college are difficult enough; there is a lot of judging and sizing up as hundreds of anxious teenagers, bubbling over with hormones and excitement, try to orient themselves both physically and psychologically. Rush merely exacerbates that feeling of vulnerability, of wanting to belong. Without a friend or even an acquaintance from back home, Meghan, a naturally gregarious character, worked hard at making new friends.
But her self-esteem was about to take a most unexpected blow. She had grown up in the melting pot that is Los Angeles. Her school, Immaculate Heart, was a kaleidoscope of girls of different colors and nationalities. Now, she discovered that even though the town of Evanston, where Northwestern University is based, is just a few miles from Chicago, the college itself is overwhelmingly white. African Americans make up a third of the town, but only 5 percent of the student body. There were even fewer biracial students. At Northwestern, she stood out.
Just one week into her first semester, as Meghan sat reviewing her class schedules for her chosen major, English, a dorm mate came up and asked: “You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?”
Meghan smiled weakly and nodded, suddenly uncomfortable. “And they’re divorced?’ her dorm mate continued. Meghan nodded. She gave her a knowing look. “Oh. Well that makes sense.” Meghan felt a stab. The snide remark cut her deeply. Makes sense how? she wondered. Of course, she understood the implication: that the failure of an interracial marriage was inevitable.
Los Angeles had been a huge multicultural bubble, and now Meghan was being exposed to narrow minds and outdated, provincial thinking. This wasn’t the first nor would it be the last time she would hear or be subject to a crass racial slur. As she was light-skinned, many fellow students didn’t realize she was biracial, making her a fly on the wall as they made racist jokes or expressed bigoted opinions. This incident in particular stayed with her, shaping her reflections about how others around her viewed Meghan, her family, and her heritage. “My lasting memory of Meghan is her profound sense of self,” remembers Professor Harvey Young of his biracial student. “She was thoughtful and understood what it means to face prejudice and discrimination.”
But Meghan was just tough enough not to let it get too far under her skin—she was too busy cutting loose. Now that she wasn’t under the watchful gaze of her mother, she started wearing heavier makeup and experimented with highlighting her hair. Having made up her mind, she rushed Kappa Kappa Gamma and was initiated into the sorority, which was full of girls who were considered “intelligent hot messes.” As KKG member Melania Hidalgo observed, “The thing we all have in common is that we’re all very driven, ambitious, and passionate.” The sorority embraced her warmly. Meghan, was eventually elected the sorority’s recruitment chair, responsible for bringing in new girls into the KKG clan. As an outgoing, confident, and articulate young woman, she was well suited for the role of selling the sorority. Sometimes she was a tad too persuasive, some students, according to classmate Ann Meade, thinking her too assertive. For the most part fellow students remember her thirst for life and her “explosive personality” as a dynamic, self-possessed young woman.
As a sorority member, she also participated in the Northwestern University Dance Marathon, one of the biggest student-run charities in America. The year Meghan danced was the first time since the event’s inception in 1974 that a woman, Ginger Harrald, was the emcee, though she shared the duties with a male student. While the dance marathon was no longer the grueling win-or-die dancefest of the Depression era, the thirty hours Meghan spent on her feet, day and night, certainly helped her work off her “freshman fifteen,” the weight she had packed on from drinking, munching starchy dorm food, and making late-night trips to the twenty-four-hour Burger King.
Though the drinking age was twenty-one, Meghan, like so many other students, bought herself a fake ID card so that she could go enjoy the bars of Evanston. She was a regular at the Keg, a dodgy student favorite that was eventually closed down after numerous run-ins with city officials over underage drinking. Bouncers used to joke when students finally handed over a real ID once they had genuinely turned twenty-one: “Well, it’s about time.”
Of course, all this socializing did have a focus—the search for a boyfriend. More sophisticated and put together than most of her contemporaries, Meghan was seen as a cool catch. Normally she went for well-dressed Latin boyfriends like Luis Segura but changed gears during her time at Northwestern. Her first boyfriend was Steve Lepore, a chiseled, white, six foot five sophomore basketball player from Ohio. He made Meghan, at five foot six, feel petite. Her association with Lapore raised her stock with her KKG sorority sisters, who were “impressed she’d snared a hottie.” “They made quite the pair,” recalled a former classmate, but their relationship was short lived. For his junior and senior year, the high-scoring basketball star accepted a transfer offer to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Goodbye, Meghan; hello, basketball pro prospects.