1992 Meghan and her friends performed ‘Broadway comes to Hollywood’ at the annual end-of-term show, dancing to ‘Greased Lightning’ from the musical Grease and to the show-stopping ‘America’ from West Side Story.
The absolute highlight, though, came a year later at her graduation. She was still a couple of months short of her twelfth birthday when she put on a white mortar board to receive her ‘Elementary Diploma’. Then she stood in front of the school, watched by teachers and beaming parents including both Doria and Tom, and introduced the entertainment that she and Niki had devised. She told them, ‘We’re here to thank all the people who have made us feel really special over the past nine years.’
She and her friends then launched their entertainment tribute. Meghan wore denim shorts, a stripy t-shirt and Easy Rider shades for some enthusiastic moves to Chuck Berry’s timeless ‘Roll over Beethoven’. Perhaps the highlight was the class’s rendition of the 1957 doo-wop hit ‘Mr Lee’ by The Bobbettes. They changed Mr Lee to Mr T to show their appreciation of a favourite teacher, Mr Teryl.
And so it was time to cut the graduation cake and say goodbye to her first school, where she had been a big fish in a small pond, as the old cliché goes. Now, she would have to navigate the demands that middle and high school made on a teenage girl. She had shown some promise on stage and demonstrated a mature social conscience in someone so young. Moving forward, could she successfully marry the two?
4
Just like any other day at the Immaculate Heart High School for girls, the morning began with a prayer. The students did not have to cram into church or kneel in corridors, they just had to stop what they were doing, stand still even if they were late and hurrying to class and think quietly for a minute or two, listening to the words coming from the loudspeakers dotted about.
The greeting was familiar. ‘Good morning Immaculate Heart!’ It was the voice of Christine Knudsen, who chaired the theology department. Occasionally she would recite a formal prayer that might end with an Amen – after all, Immaculate Heart had been founded as a Catholic school – but more often than not she would choose some words of inspiration. Sometimes she would talk about a film or an important sporting event; she might mention Gandhi if it was 2 October, his birthday. She used an Eleanor Roosevelt quote to great effect: ‘You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.’ She encouraged the girls to think of the qualities that mattered in life, such as compassion, acceptance, fairness and personal integrity.
And she would always conclude with a rallying cry. If it was the start of the week, she would declare, ‘MAKE IT A GREAT MONDAY!’‘The idea is that we just take a moment to compose ourselves and reflect. It’s a great way to stop and be free to start class,’ explained the current school president, Maureen Diekmann.
On one particular morning, census forms were being handed out to the seventh graders in middle school during their English lesson. It was the usual kind of thing – just tick the box and move on. But for twelve-year-old Meghan Markle, it immediately presented a problem. There were four choices for ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic or Asian.
Meghan didn’t know what to do. She asked the teacher, who looked at her light-toned skin and told her to check ‘caucasian’ because that was how she looked. But Meghan was uncomfortable with that advice because, in her eyes, it was choosing one parent over another. Imagine looking Doria in the eye if she had done as suggested. She told Elle magazine, ‘I put down my pen; not as an act of defiance but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-the-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out.’
Instead she just left it unanswered, heartbreakingly: ‘I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt.’ That evening she told her dad what had happened. Tom was clear and clearly angry: ‘If it happens again, you draw your own box.’
The school prided itself on its diversity. Neither race nor religion was of paramount importance. Although it was founded by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1906, little more than fifty per cent of the pupils were Catholic by the time Meghan enrolled. She would have been thought of as Christian while other groups included Buddhists, Muslims and Hindi, as well as those who didn’t have a religion at all.
Even in the early days when all the teachers were nuns, the mindset was to be as welcoming as possible. The girls who did not share the Catholic faith were never told they were wrong. Despite being on one of the busiest junctions in the Los Feliz neighbourhood – Franklin and Western – the campus of Immaculate Heart was a tranquil urban oasis with plenty of space for conversation, laughter or some private moments. In the centre of the grounds was an inviting swimming pool that would have graced many of the movie-star mansions of Beverly Hills. Across the road was the building that housed the American Film Institute, just in case the pupils needed reminding that Hollywood was near.
Although the fees at the private school were expensive for those that could afford to pay the full amount, Immaculate Heart was not full of the children of millionaires; nor was it packed with celebrity offspring. Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, for instance, went to Marymount High School, another all-girl Catholic school on Sunset Boulevard; Jake Gyllenhaal and Ayda Field attended the Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City.
You can usually find at least one notable celebrity at any school in LA. Immaculate Heart was no exception. Until Meghan featured as an alumna, the best-known actress through the gates was probably the much-loved television and film star Mary Tyler Moore, who died in 2017.
Following her death, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Gabrielle Carteris, said, ‘At a time when independence for women was not the social norm, both the fictional Mary and the real-life Mary set an example, showing that women could take control of their lives and their careers.’ It was an example that Meghan Markle would follow.
Mary Tyler Moore was a role model for the girls at Immaculate Heart, although more so probably for the mothers and grandmothers of Meghan’s generation. An alumna more relevant to Meghan was Tyra Banks, who had graduated just a couple of years earlier. Tyra had shot up by three inches when she was eleven and had to contend with negativity and name-calling from bullies who would call her ‘giraffe’ and ‘light-bulb head’, but she had the last laugh. While she was still at the school she embarked on her successful career as a supermodel.
Tyra launched her TV career in 1993, just as Meghan started at Immaculate Heart, playing Will Smith’s childhood friend Jackie Ames in seven episodes of his popular sitcom, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She was only nineteen when she found fame. Meghan would have to wait far longer.
In some ways, Tyra has become a younger version of Oprah Winfrey, branching out into the world of broadcasting and philanthropy, and boasting a fortune estimated to be more than $90 million. As long ago as 1994, when Meghan was in eighth grade, Tyra started the Tyra Banks Scholarship so that disadvantaged African–American girls could attend Immaculate Heart. She recognised at a young age that not every girl of colour was going to become a supermodel.
In 1999, the year Meghan graduated, Tyra also founded TZONE, an annual seven-day camp designed to improve the leadership and life skills of similarly underprivileged girls in and around Los Angeles. Tyra wanted to build the self-esteem of pre-teen and teenage girls and help them to overcome gender stereotyping and body issues. The concept went nationwide in 2005 as the Tyra Banks TZONE Foundation.
For Meghan, her own confusion about her identity was not something that was going to disappear overnight. Despite the worthy philosophy
