Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(35)
The band Paramore was scheduled to entertain the crowd, and Food Network star Andrew Zimmerman would broadcast live during half time. Ever the good sport, Meghan joined model Chrissy Teigen, a former colleague on Deal or No Deal, and other celebrities, including former pro quarterback Joe Montana, comedians Tracy Morgan and Tom Arnold, and the celebrity chef Guy Fieri in a beach game, which Meghan’s team won.
After the show Meghan won much more: a new, influential friend, tennis legend Serena Williams. At the time, Williams held seventeen world and US tournament singles titles and almost as many for winning doubles tournaments. More important, she had parlayed her fifteen-year career as a super athlete into lucrative endorsements, including her own fashion line, and even some acting gigs.
“We hit it off immediately, taking pictures, laughing through the flag football game we were both playing in, and chatting not about tennis or acting, but about all the good old fashioned girly stuff,” Meghan later wrote. “So began our friendship.”
What also impressed Meghan was that she was able to say, “Check out my website.” Or rather websites. She had an online clothing label as well as Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit accounts and a regular newsletter.
That was the light bulb moment. Meghan had been mulling over a website for some time, but seeing how someone as busy and as successful as Serena controlled her own site gave her confidence that she too could follow suit—or Suits. Her thinking was reinforced by an approach from an ecommerce company who offered to create a site with her name front and center. At first she was excited by the idea. “It will be your name, meghanmarkle .com, and we can run it for you,” they told her. Essentially her name would drive consumers to the site. While there would be some created content, the aim was to sell clothing and bric-a-brac from which Meghan would receive a percentage of sales. She pondered their offer, then she stood back for a moment and took a breath. As tempting as it sounded, the more she thought about it, it just didn’t feel right. “There was so much more I wanted to share,” she explained to friends. Meghan wanted a place where she could showcase her deeper self, where her voice would be heard, and where if there was ecommerce it would be thoughtful and ethical, rather than just marketing the latest fast fashion and trend. She wanted to stress the importance of giving back. Dumping a bucket of cold water over herself on the roof of golfer buddy Rory McIlroy’s Manhattan apartment for the ALS Challenge and then posting an Instagram of the result wasn’t quite enough, though it did raise money for a good cause, research into motor neuron disease.
She left the website idea percolating in the background. With Suits on hiatus, she flew to Vancouver in western Canada to appear in a Hallmark Channel TV movie called When Sparks Fly in which she played Amy, a plucky reporter sent back to her bucolic hometown to write a human interest piece about growing up as the daughter of fireworks manufacturers. Her old boyfriend is about to marry her high school best friend, and suddenly Amy realizes that maybe the big city life wasn’t for her after all. It was a pleasing trifle and a paycheck, but that was about it. The plot about a difficult return home was the polar opposite of her next excursion, a visit to her alma mater, Northwestern University.
If she needed any more proof that she had an audience that went beyond the confines of Suits, she only had to look at the line snaking around the Ryan Auditorium as six hundred students shuffled forward for a coveted seat to see Meghan and the rest of the Suits family.
Communication studies freshman Nikita Kuekarni, who waited five hours for the event, was breathless with excitement. “I didn’t think it was real when people first told me about it. I thought people were messing with me. I was excited to have Meghan come!”
Meghan basked in the attention from the Northwestern students, comparing shared college experiences and discussing her character’s development. She gave her adoring audience a tour of the mind of her alter ego, Rachel Zane: “She’s layered and humanized; even though she seems so confident, she really has all these insecurities and vulnerabilities, and I relate to that as a woman and I think the fans will too.”
After the chat she posed for photos, signed posters, and later she and fellow star Rick Hoffman, who plays Louis Litt, recorded a promo video for the Northwestern University Dance Marathon, a charity fund-raiser in which Meghan had participated as a freshman.
This was the fourth stop of seven for the Suits university tour, which included the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of Arizona, Boston University, Harvard, and Columbia. It was a bid by the network and show’s producers to reward their highly engaged collegiate audiences by treating them to a preview screening of the winter midseason premiere.
With the website now moving to the front burner, she contacted a friend, photographer Jake Rosenberg. A graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design, Rosenberg had started Coveteur.com six months after graduating with a degree in industrial design. While he loved photography, he was excited about branding and design. During a photo shoot in 2011, he and a fellow twentysomething, stylist Stephanie Mark, ended up creating a site devoted to snapshots of beautiful closets and snippets of subjects’ homes. “We thought it would be fun and interesting to see what it is really like in stylish people’s homes and closets,” says Mark. The pair did six photos shoots and posted them on their new site, which crashed from the amount of traffic. They immediately realized they were onto something that might be profitable as well as fun.