Finding Freedom Read online

  She was fresh off a luxurious girls’ weekend to the Greek island of Hydra—a trip she had organized to celebrate the upcoming wedding of Lindsay Roth, one of her best friends from college. As maid of honor, Meghan took her duties seriously, having arranged days filled with hiking, swimming, napping, and enjoying the local cuisine of the island, which, located two hours by boat from Athens, can be traveled only by bicycle or donkey.

  The weekend was a far cry from the typical Vegas-style bachelorette party of climbing into limos and getting wasted in clubs, all while wearing what Meghan called “headbands of the phallic persuasion.” Instead, the group of women found more sophisticated pleasures in the Mediterranean sun and sea, fresh Greek salads and fish, lots of wine, and one another’s company.

  The entire event was classic Meghan: simple yet indulgent, fun in a quiet and intimate way—and all meticulously planned. From the time she was a student, juggling school and jobs, through her years grinding out auditions for bit parts, to her becoming a successful TV star who continued to push the boundaries of her career by launching a popular lifestyle website, Meghan always had a plan. She worked hard not only crafting those plans but also seeing them through.

  Her trip to London was no exception. Shoes were just the start of the itinerary she had filled completely before arriving in London. Meghan had a list of restaurants she wanted to eat in, bars that she wanted to go to, and people she wanted to meet.

  It was an exciting time for the thirty-four-year-old. Her success in the competitive world of show business, which had started to open doors to opportunities of all kinds, was a product of the confidence, perseverance, and willingness to work harder than her peers that she had displayed since she was a little girl.

  Meghan’s self-assurance was partly due to her parents’ devotion to their daughter. Her mother, Doria Ragland, and dad, Thomas—who met on the set of General Hospital, where he was a lighting director and she a temp in the makeup department—split up after two years of marriage. But they remained unified in the one child they shared—co-parenting Meghan without much friction, sharing custody, and celebrating holidays together.

  There was no greater sign of Thomas and Doria’s dedication, however, than their commitment to Meghan’s education. Neither of Meghan’s parents went to college immediately following high school, even though Doria was in a club for gifted students at Fairfax High School in LA. After graduation, she went to work at the antiques store owned by her father, Alvin Ragland, and as a travel agent in the start of what would become a long string of jobs. Doria didn’t go to college until much later in her life because her family couldn’t afford for her to attend. And because of her own experience of struggling financially due to her lack of higher education, she always stressed to Meghan how important that was.

  When it came to Meghan’s schooling, both Thomas and Doria wanted the best of the best—starting with the Little Red Schoolhouse, a small, prestigious private elementary school that had been educating Hollywood’s elite (including Johnny Depp and Scarlett Johansson) since the forties. From there, Meghan attended Immaculate Heart, an all-girls Catholic middle and high school in Los Feliz.

  Keenly aware of how much her parents had sacrificed for her to attend such institutions, Meghan felt personal responsibility attached to her privilege. “Both my parents came from little, so they made a choice to give a lot . . . performing quiet acts of grace—be it a hug, a smile, or a pat on the back to show ones in need that they would be all right,” she wrote in 2016 on her lifestyle blog The Tig. “This is what I grew up seeing, so that is what I grew up being.”

  Meghan was driven. Always first to raise her hand when the teacher wanted an answer or a volunteer to read out loud, she had stellar grades and attendance. Her sense of accountability extended beyond the school grounds. As a young girl coming face-to-face with a homeless man on the streets, she begged her mother, “Can we help him?” It’s not unusual for children who have come across people in need to want to help, but the difference with Meghan was that she didn’t forget once they had moved on. The rest of the day, and long after, she was left with a nagging question: “What can I do?”

  At ten, Meghan first went abroad to Jamaica with her mother, who took her past the resorts that most visitors stick to and into the slums so she could get an education on how those less fortunate lived. At thirteen, Meghan volunteered in a soup kitchen on LA’s Skid Row. “The first day I felt really scared,” Meghan said. “I was young, and it was rough and raw down there, and though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed.”

  Wrestling with whether she should return to the soup kitchen, she turned to her theology teacher at Immaculate Heart, Maria Pollia. A Catholic Worker volunteer, Maria had a lot of experience in working with people living in the margins of society—and she wanted to inspire the young, earnest student before her to do the same.

  “Life is about putting others’ needs above your own fears,” Maria told Meghan. The young student returned to the soup kitchen.

  “That has always stayed with me,” Meghan said.

  Meghan’s willingness to help others and her drive to excel meant she often was deemed “fake” by classmates at school who felt it was impossible for anyone to be that “perfect.” However, Meghan never thought she was perfect. In fact, she often felt she had more to prove. Being biracial and not always knowing where she fit in, there was a part of her that just wanted people to see she was great at whatever she did. She didn’t like the idea of being seen as an underdog.

  In high school, Meghan’s drive continued to bloom. She joined every club, from the yearbook committee to the Genesian Players theater group. She was voted homecoming queen. A natural performer and someone who sought out praise, Meghan was coming into her own.

  Gigi Perreau, who taught Meghan acting for several years, said, “She was incredibly hardworking. I was bowled over by the strong work ethic she had at such a young age.” Meghan threw herself into even the smallest of roles, like when she played a secretary in a production of Annie.

  Thomas often helped out with set design for Meghan’s school plays and “came to as many of her presentations as possible,” Perreau said. “You would always see his face in the audience, beaming with pride for his little girl.”

  He also played a critical role in Meghan’s development as a feminist and, as she called herself, a “female advocate.” When she was eleven years old, her class was watching a TV show when a dishwashing liquid commercial aired with the tagline “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” A boy sitting nearby shouted out, “Yeah, that’s where women belong, in the kitchen!”

  Thomas encouraged Meghan, who was upset over the incident, to write letters of protest over the ad. She mailed off letters to “the most powerful people I could think of,” including First Lady Hillary Clinton, Nickelodeon news anchor Linda Ellerbee, and the dishwashing soap manufacturer—and they all responded. She received a letter from the White House; Nickelodeon aired an interview with Meghan; and the detergent manufacturer changed the commercial’s tagline to “People all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.”

  Meghan’s interest in acting turned into a career goal in high school, but her mother—always focused on the importance of higher education—advised her to get a college degree. And she wanted her daughter to have a career path in case acting didn’t fall into place for her. That wasn’t an issue for Meghan, who chose not to go on any professional auditions until she graduated high school and had already secured a place at Northwestern University.

  She had enrolled in the private college located in a Chicago suburb, ranked one of the top schools in the nation, when she booked her first bit part in a Tori Amos’s music video of the song “1000 Oceans.” Blink and you might miss Meghan’s cameo as a passerby examining an enclosed glass box with the singer inside, but she earned $600 and, within weeks, auditioned for another role in a Shakira video. (She didn’t get the part in the video—and in fac
t didn’t get another acting gig until she appeared on General Hospital in her last year of college.)

  At Northwestern, Meghan again found herself surrounded by mainly affluent students from affluent families. A work-study student, she juggled a full course load and part-time jobs to defray the cost of tuition and room and board. That was in addition to the babysitting she did to cover extra expenses, performing as a theater major, and volunteer work.

  “I can’t imagine how the days are long enough for you,” said a good friend who went with Meghan to pick up her latest work-study assignments from the school office. She marveled at her friend’s ability to balance the pressure and rigor of her academics with everything else.

  “How do you have time to do all this stuff?” her pal asked.

  By not partying like most of her normal college kids. Her friends would never run into Meg, as they called her, at a bar in the middle of the week. Friday nights, when her sorority sisters were all going out to parties, Meg was headed out to professors’ houses to babysit. She rushed Kappa Kappa Gamma, eventually living in the sorority house and making some of her closest friends, including Genevieve Hillis and Lindsay. But even Meghan’s Greek life was less Animal House and more Elle Woods. As rush and recruitment chairman, she was in charge of bringing new people into the sorority and making them feel welcome. She also raised money for charity with events like a dance marathon she participated in with her other sorority sisters. The women danced for thirty hours to benefit Team Joseph, a nonprofit working on a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “It got so tiring,” Meghan admitted.

  By her junior year, she had finished most of her credits, so with the help of her father’s older brother Mick, she secured an internship at the US embassy in Buenos Aires. No one in the family was quite sure what Uncle Mick did, whether his communications job in Buenos Aires was actually a cover for a job in the CIA. But regardless, his connections allowed a twenty-year-old Meghan to broaden her horizons beyond the stage.

  “I had always been the theater nerd at Northwestern University. I knew I wanted to do acting, but I hated the idea of being this cliché—a girl from LA who decides to be an actress,” Meghan told Marie Claire. “I wanted more than that, and I had always loved politics, so I ended up changing my major completely, and double-majoring in theater and international relations.”

  Meghan took the Foreign Service Officer Test, a prerequisite for a job as a State Department officer. When she didn’t pass the highly competitive test, she was extremely disappointed. She wasn’t used to failing. It was a major blow to the confidence she had always tried to protect.

  And so, in 2003, after graduating from Northwestern, Meg found herself back in LA. She was a struggling actress who supported herself between auditions with odd jobs, including a stint as a calligrapher. In 2004, she was hired by the Paper Source, a high-end stationery store in Beverly Hills, where she received a two-hour-long training session in calligraphy, as well as gift wrapping and bookbinding. While working there, she did the wedding invitations for the actress Paula Patton’s 2005 wedding to the singer-songwriter Robin Thicke.

  The first few years of her “hustling” for auditions, as she later described it, were marked with long periods without work. And when she did land parts—such as playing “hot girl” in the 2005 Ashton Kutcher romance A Lot Like Love—they weren’t exactly Academy Award–winning material.

  In 2006, she became a Briefcase Model on Deal or No Deal, one of twenty-six women wearing matching outfits and each holding a case with anywhere between 1¢ and $1 million. The NBC game show was not only a steady paycheck but also a hot new property. After the premiere in December 2005, its first season averaged between a whopping ten and sixteen million viewers per episode. While following seasons dipped considerably in viewers, it maintained a strong appeal, spawning a syndicated series and a host of tie-in products, such as video and board games.

  “Hello, ladies!” the host, Howie Mandel, said to the perfect rows of Briefcase Models on set.

  “Hi, Howie!” they replied in unison.

  That was the opening drill for the thirty-four episodes Meghan appeared in in 2006 and 2007. As Briefcase Model #24, she, like the rest of her fellow models, opened up her case whenever a contestant trying to win a million dollars called out her number.

  Meghan and the other women recorded up to seven episodes in a day. Shooting so many in such a tight block meant long days. Afterward most of the other models liked to go out together, sometimes not even waiting to take off their show makeup before hitting happy hour. Not Meghan. While she was friendly enough, she didn’t go out with the other women. “She was popular with all the other girls,” said Leyla Milani, a fellow Briefcase Model. “But as soon as we were done, she would be off to something else.” Just as in college, Meghan was working when her peers were blowing off steam. She even kept busy during breaks on the set of Deal or No Deal. “When other girls were gossiping or chatting,” Leyla said, “she would be by herself reading scripts and preparing for auditions.”

  After two seasons on the game show, Meghan was ready to put down her silver briefcase. Over the next three years, she kept up the auditions, booking a Tostitos commercial and small roles in a few films and TV shows, including Horrible Bosses, CSI: NY, Knight Rider, Without a Trace, and ’Til Death. In a two-episode arc on the CW reboot of 90210 in 2008, her character, Wendy, stirred up trouble when she was caught giving oral sex to playboy student Ethan Ward in a school parking lot. Meghan was hesitant to shoot the scene, but struggling actresses can’t be picky.

  She never stopped pushing, even when she thought she blew her audition for the series-regular role of the gorgeous and confident paralegal Rachel Zane, in Suits, a new show for the USA Network. Meghan didn’t cry or go home to eat a pint of ice cream. Instead, she called her agent.

  “I don’t think I did a good job in that room,” she told him. “I need to get back in there.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “Just focus on your next audition.”

  2

  When Harry Met Meghan

  When Meghan arrived in London, it had been five years since she moved to Toronto to star in Suits, and her life was worlds away from that of the struggling LA actress driving to auditions in a run-down Ford Explorer that she didn’t have enough money to fix when the automatic locks stopped working (and so spent five months entering through the trunk).

  While her role on the USA Network drama wouldn’t have put her on the A-list in cities like LA or New York, she was very quickly adopted as a Canadian celebrity. Even as her star rose, Meghan never stopped working to expand her opportunities. After hiring the London-based PR firm Kruger Cowne to promote her interests, she began commanding cash—upward of $10,000 an appearance—to turn up at red carpets, such as the September 2014 Marchesa Voyage for ShopStyle collection launch in New York City, or as a speaker, as she was for Toronto’s 2015 “Dove Self-Esteem Project” and the Women in Cable Telecommunications Signature Luncheon in Chicago that same year.

  When she signed with Kruger Cowne, Meghan also linked up with APA, one of the world’s largest commercial talent agencies, to develop her career as a lifestyle influencer based on The Tig, the blog she launched in 2014. A place to curate of all her passions (food, fashion, and travel—as well as social issues such as gender equality) filtered through an “aspirational girl-next-door vibe,” the blog was named after Tignanello—the full-bodied red wine that won her heart after the first sip.

  “It was my first moment of getting it—I finally understood what people meant by the body, structure, finish, legs of wine,” she wrote. “The Tig is my nickname for me getting it. Not just wine, but everything.”

  The Tig wasn’t the first time that Meghan had taken to the Internet to not only express herself but also to reach out to others. From 2010 to 2012, she wrote The Working Actress, an anonymous blog that detailed the pitfalls and triumphs of struggling to make it in Hollywood. She had always enjoyed writing in school
and even thought about becoming a journalist at one point, as it was an opportunity to channel her creativity and frustration. The blog captured the heartfelt moments of joy when she booked a job and the despair and rejection actors felt each time a role was lost in an industry often driven by appearance rather than by talent. While she never publicly acknowledged authorship of the popular blog, it was one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets that she was the face behind it—and she quickly became recognized for its clever advice and honest anecdotes.

  Where The Working Actress was raw and candid, The Tig was polished and optimistic. Whether it was Meghan walking a rugged coastline in a perfectly belted camel coat or a “Tig Talk” with famous pals like the actress Priyanka Chopra or a recipe for “spicy broccoli and hempseed stew,” the website was curated eye candy that she hoped would be “the breeding ground for ideas and excitement—for an inspired lifestyle.”

  The newest face in her working world was Violet von Westenholz, a PR executive from Ralph Lauren who had scheduled several events during Meghan’s summer trip to London, where the actress would be one of the many celebrity brand ambassadors for the label. In addition to the fashion world, Violet was also well-known in English society. Her father, Frederick Patrick Piers Baron von Westenholz, a former Olympic skier, was one of Prince Charles’s oldest and closest friends, so Violet and her siblings grew up skiing in Switzerland with Prince William and Prince Harry.

  On the calendar for the actress was Wimbledon. With Ralph Lauren as the fashion sponsor in charge of the official merchandise, Violet arranged the tickets and passes. On day two of the tournament, Meghan sat in the stands to support her friend Serena Williams. Meghan first met the tennis champ in at a Super Bowl party in Miami in 2010. Out of all the stars and athletes there, Meghan and Serena “hit it off immediately,” as Meghan later described. Connecting over “good old-fashioned girly stuff,” the women snapped photos of each other on their phones and laughed at their football skills.