Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(8)
Doria’s arrival also coincided with Yvonne exploring the dark tenets of black magic, according to Tom. Even as a little girl Yvonne had had a fascination with the macabre, once bringing a moldering gravestone that she had found in the basement of their apartment block in Chicago into her bedroom. This time around, as her brother Tom recalls, she bought a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, installed an altar in her bedroom, played with a Ouija board, burned black candles, and dressed in the all-black uniform of the goth. It may have been no more than a rebellious teenage obsession, and her brother never witnessed her performing any satanic rituals, but he was still disturbed by her “weird” behavior. She left the house when it was dark and rarely returned before dawn. One of Yvonne’s friends recalls those years, saying that she and Yvonne would dress up and go out dancing, especially if a British band was in town. “We put on our makeup and got all decked out,” she recalls. “We were out having fun.” The ritual of boy meets girl, rather than anything satanic, was their aim.
Much of the back and forth between brother and sister was certainly more taunting and teasing than witchcraft. On one occasion, according to Tom Junior, she came to the flower shop where Tom Junior worked part time to borrow money from her brother. While he and his colleague Richard, a Christian Scientist, were dealing with customers she picked up Richard’s Bible and drew a pentagram, the sign of the devil, on one page with her red lipstick. Before leaving she wrote “666,” the mark of the beast, on another page. Young Tom had his revenge when he called the house, telling his sister that Richard was so traumatized by what she had done that he had run into the road and was hit by a bus. His ruse had her racing back to the flower store to check on Richard’s condition.
Certainly Doria could be forgiven for wondering what she had got herself into when faced with this bickering, back-biting brood. It was one thing falling in love with a man twelve years her senior; it was quite another being thrown headlong into his fractious family with brother and sister continually squabbling. A strong personality with a level head on her shoulders, Doria brought a sense of family to the gloomy house.
When she arrived, everyone was used to going their own way. Tom Senior worked every hour of the day and night, Yvonne was out clubbing with her friends while Tom Junior was smoking weed with his own crowd. She brought them together as a family, Doria seen as “the cool hippie peacemaker “who liked a joint herself.” She soon became friendly with their near neighbor Olga McDaniel, a former nightclub singer, Doria spending hours with her shooting the breeze and smoking a joint. “The best way I can describe Doria is that she was like a warm hug,” observed Olga’s daughter. Her masterstroke was to take Tom Junior to the animal shelter and help him pick out a family dog, which he named Bo. The noisy new arrival, a golden retriever–beagle mix, soon ruled their five-bedroom home in the leafy valley suburb of Woodland Hills.
At Thanksgiving Doria invited the Markles to join the Ragland clan, including her mother, Jeanette; her father, Alvin; her half brother, Joseph; and half sister, Saundra, for a true Southern feast of sweet potato pie, gumbo, ham hocks, and beans. “Good times,” recalls Tom Junior. “When I first met them, I was uneasy and nervous, but they were really warm and inclusive, the kind of family I had always wanted. They were happy assed people with a real sense of family.”
That sense of family was formalized when, on December 23, 1979, Doria and Tom Senior were married at the Self-Realization Fellowship temple on Sunset Boulevard, just east of Hollywood. The venue was Doria’s choice, the new bride adhering to the teachings of Yogananda, a Hindu yoga guru who arrived in Boston in 1920 and preached a philosophy of breathing and meditation as part of the yoga routine to help followers on their path to enlightenment. Hollywood stars Linda Evans and Mariel Hemingway, Apple founder Steve Jobs, and ex-Beatle George Harrison all followed his teachings. Even in such an enlightened setting, mixed marriages were still uncommon.
Less than half a century before Tom and Doria’s wedding, California had repealed anti-miscegenation laws that banned marriages between black and white people. However, it was not until 1967 for anti-miscegenation laws to be declared unconstitutional throughout the nation by the United States Supreme Court, with their landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia.
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman, were married in Washington, DC. When they returned to their home in Virginia they were arrested in their bedroom under the state’s Racial Integrity Act. Judge Leon Bazile suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for twenty-five years. They appealed the judgment, but Judge Bazile refused to reconsider his decision, writing, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”
The Lovings, supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese American Citizens League, and a coalition of Catholic bishops, then successfully appealed to the US Supreme Court, which wrote in their decision, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival… Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” condemning Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law as “designed to maintain White supremacy.” While this judgment decriminalized miscegenation, mixed race couples were still looked upon with suspicion by many, confronted by casual racism and sometimes outright hostility. Racism remains a pungent fact of daily life for many African Americans.