Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(9)
On their big day, Tom Senior, wearing a sportscoat and button-down shirt, and Doria, in a flowing white dress with baby’s breath flowers in her hair, took their wedding vows in the presence of Brother Bhaktananda. He stressed the merging of the couple was for the “highest common good” and to achieve union with God. The children of followers of Self-Realization have a reputation as being open, inquisitive souls. So, when Doria found herself pregnant just a year after tying the knot, she and Tom couldn’t wait for the new arrival. Further good news came when the news of Doria’s pregnancy coincided with Tom’s first nomination for a Daytime Emmy Award for his design and lighting work on General Hospital; he would later be nominated for eight more—not bad for a man who was officially colorblind. If 1980 had been a good year, 1981 was going to be even better.
As the months ticked by and the summer thermometer inched upward, Doria became impatient for the waiting to be over. With the daytime temperatures often in the high nineties, she was grateful that they had an evaporative cooler and that the rambling home was dark and shady. In his spare time, Tom Senior decorated the nursery, painting the walls and hanging Disney characters and angel pictures around the white-painted crib. Finally, at 4:46 in the morning of August 4, 1981, at West Park Hospital in Canoga Park, obstetrician Malverse Martin announced that Doria and Tom were now the parents of a healthy baby girl. This latest addition to the sorority of Valley Girls was, as her mother noted, a Leo. Typical Leos are supposed to be “Warm, action-oriented and driven by the desire to be loved and admired. They have an air of royalty about them. They love to be in the limelight, which is why many of them make a career in the performing arts.” Never has an astrological star sign been more accurate.
The arrival of Rachel Meghan Markle transformed her father’s life. “He was just so, so happy,” recalls Tom Junior. “He spent every single minute he could with her. My dad was more in love with her than anyone else in the world, and that included Doria. She became his whole life, his little princess. He was just blown away by Meghan.” Her seventeen-year-old sister Yvonne was more interested in clubbing and makeup than playing with a newborn. “‘Babies, yuck, no thanks,’ that was our feeling,” recalls one of Yvonne’s friends. She was a teenager having fun, and fun was certainly not babysitting for the new arrival. Not only did Yvonne often seem indifferent to the baby now nicknamed “Flower” or “Bud,” she had to have felt left out on the sidelines, her father utterly devoted to baby Rachel. Doubtless she recalled his frequent absences when she was growing up and felt somewhat jealous of the attention now focused on her baby half sister.
It became an understandable source of fiction that her father did not spend as much time as she would have liked in using his contacts to fix her up with acting or modeling jobs. That said, sometime down the road he did get her a walk-on part on General Hospital and an episode in the drama Matlock, in which she was killed off before the first commercial break. It seems that she never fully exploited these opportunities.
Not only did Tom spend every waking minute with his daughter, in his own quirky fashion he tried to impose a little discipline on the somewhat laissez-faire household in order to protect his little “Flower.” Though he had always said to his son that if he and his friends wanted to smoke weed they should do so only in the house, this instruction changed with the arrival of the baby. On one occasion Tom Junior and his friends were smoking a spliff in the sitting room while Meghan was in the nursery crying. His father announced loudly that he was going upstairs to change her diaper. Shortly afterward he appeared in the sitting room carrying a full diaper. He joined the boys on the sofa, took a spoon out of his pocket and started eating the contents of the diaper. Grossed out, the boys fled the house. Only later did he reveal that he had earlier spooned chocolate pudding into a fresh diaper. It was his way of stopping the boys from smoking weed when Meghan was around.
But that was about as far as discipline went. Their house was still generally party central, Doria’s friends coming over, smoking weed, playing music, practicing yoga—which Doria now taught—and barbecuing. From the outside it seemed to be one big happy family, Doria’s relations, especially her mother, Jeanette, babysitting for the recently wed couple. Even Tom Junior pitched in to give Tom and Doria a break. For the most part Tom and Doria seemed happy, but then their bickering started. As much as Tom loved Meghan, he loved his job, too; he was still a workaholic and thought nothing of spending eighty or ninety hours a week on set. And in his eyes, it was paying off, Meghan proving to be his lucky charm. After two nominations, in 1982 he and his colleagues on General Hospital finally won a Daytime Emmy for “outstanding achievement in design excellence.”
But it all came at a price. Doria had not signed up for this, dealing with his children, raising her own, kick-starting a career, and trying to run the family’s cavernous house. Though it was not Tom’s fault, they were living in a predominantly white neighborhood where, because of her dark skin and Meghan’s light skin, people thought Doria was the nanny. They often stopped her and asked, quite innocently, where the baby’s mother lived. It was a petty humiliation that she could do without.
It seemed, too, that Tom was wedded to work more than he was wedded to her. It was a feeling that had been shared by his first wife, Roslyn. Gradually, the harsh words and the fighting became the norm rather than the exception, Tom Junior and Yvonne recognizing the all too familiar sounds of a relationship breaking down. According to family friends, Tom’s constant criticism of Doria over matters small and large wore her down. There came a point where Doria decided that enough was enough and went back home to her mother, Jeanette. As a family friend observed: “Doria is not a doormat, that much I know. She spoke up for herself, protected herself and her daughter fiercely. Her head was on straight. I trusted her judgment.”