Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(32)
When she returned home, she discussed with Trevor the prospect of adding to their family. She wanted a dog. So just before Christmas she and Trevor found themselves gazing at a pair of six-week-old puppies at a pet adoption agency in Los Angeles. They had only recently been rescued from being put down at a dog shelter. One of the Labrador mixes was black; the other was golden. As luck would have it, David Branson Smith, the screenwriter son of a biographer of Princess Diana, Sally Bedell Smith, adopted the black puppy, whom he called Otto; Meghan took the yellow puppy, whom she named Bogart. She had talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, Portia Di Rossi, to thank for the final decision. As Meghan was communing with the tiny pooch, Ellen tapped on the glass of the viewing area and yelled: “Take the dog!” As Meghan recalls: “So I brought him home because Ellen told me to.” Soon the adorable Bogart had ousted pictures of herself and her husband on her Instagram feed. She turned the pooch into a much-photographed star, the puppy bogarting the joint social media feed.
In February 2013 Meghan emailed David Smith to say that she and Trevor “always wondered if (Bogart) and his brother would recognize each other… Kind of a sweet thought.” Schedules were consulted and the two brothers had a reunion on the beach at Malibu. As Sally Bedell Smith in the London Sunday Times recalled: “Otto bounded out of David’s car straight towards Bogart. For the next hour they romped around like, well, long lost brothers.” Meghan filmed and posted the reunion like a social media pro, exclaiming: “Oh my God, how sweet, they’re really the same size.” They never saw one another again, though two years later, in 2015, Bogart was joined by another rescue dog, a beagle mix that Meghan named Guy.
By then the other “guy” in her life was long gone. Even though Trevor opened an office in New York—only an hour’s flight to Toronto—to expand his business, cracks began appearing in their marriage. What once endeared now irritated. Meghan, a self-confessed perfectionist who was as fastidious as she was controlling, had tolerated Trevor’s scattered approach to life for years. He was notorious for arriving late, his clothes rumpled, his hair disheveled, and often as not a new stain on his seersucker jacket. “Sorry, bro,” was a constant refrain as he hurtled from meeting to meeting, always just behind the clock.
Her home in Seaton Village was a vision of order and crisply ironed perfection. When she flew back to their Los Angeles home after Trevor had been in solo residence for a few weeks, not so much. Though Trevor would consistently visit, he often felt like an outsider, his presence an irritating distraction.
Whether she wanted to admit it to herself or not, Meghan, who once said that she couldn’t imagine life without Trevor by her side, was now building a new world for herself. As Toronto was becoming more her home than Los Angeles, the dynamics in their relationship subtly altered. She was her own woman now, earning a steady income, making new friends on set and off, no longer dependent on her man’s money. Or his connections.
A five-hundred-dollar Vitamix blender symbolized the growing divide. She insisted that her favorite kitchen appliance from their West Hollywood home come with her to Toronto, packing it into the backseat of her car, which was being moved by truck to Canada, even though it would have been just as easy to buy a new one. It sat on the kitchen counter in the Toronto house, a material reminder that her home was no longer in Los Angeles.
While Meghan saw her star rising, her husband’s career appeared to be treading water. During this time he produced Amber Alert, a low-budget thriller about a pair of reality show contestants who spot a car containing a kidnapped child. Though it was an intriguing premise, the movie did little box office business and garnered fewer favorable reviews. With no new projects requiring his attention and with Suits on hiatus, Trevor took Meghan on a cycling vacation to Vietnam. It didn’t help that he got sick with food poisoning as a result of Meghan sampling obscure local dishes like a female version of the TV globetrotter Anthony Bourdain. Their escape to exotic locales, which once provided a backdrop for their love, only served to highlight the distance between them.
He was not the only one experiencing the Meghan chill. Her friends in Los Angeles noticed the change in her now that she was on the way up. She no longer had the time for friends she had known for years, canceling lunches on short notice or expecting them to rework their own schedules to accommodate the busy life of the rising star. A networker to her fingertips, she seemed to be carefully recalibrating her life, forging new friendships with those who could burnish and develop her career. New folk like talented fashion stylist Jessica Mulroney, who worked with Sophie Trudeau, wife of the present Canadian prime minister, and her TV personality husband Ben, the son of the former Canadian prime minister, now came into her orbit, seeing them regularly at the newly opened Soho House in Toronto. As she was expanding her social horizons, her LA circle felt they were being left behind.
Though she might be getting above herself, everyone expected Trevor to keep her feet planted on the ground. So her Californian friends were genuinely shocked when she announced the end of her two-year marriage in the summer of 2013.
As her maid of honor, Ninaki Priddy, told writer Rebecca Hardy: “I knew they fought sometimes, but it wasn’t anything huge. The only obstacle was the distance because she was living in Toronto and Trevor was based in LA. I thought they were maneuvering through it. Trevor would take his work to Canada and run his office remotely.”