The Australian Women\'s Weekly - June 2018

JUNE 2018 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 45

WHO

Doria

Ragland?

She loves yoga, dancing to soul music and has

strong humanitarian values. William Langley

says Prince Harry’s mother-in-law will be a

breath of fresh air in the sometimes-stuffy

House of Windsor.

Which is just as well. For, amid

all the excitement over the royal

wedding, the woman who shaped this

most intriguing of royal brides has

been largely overlooked.

Doria was born into a poor black

family, the descendants of slaves, in

Cleveland, Ohio, where her father,

Alvin Ragland, sold second-hand

furniture from a market stall. Hoping

to improve their lot, the Raglands

uprooted to California in the late

1950s, and settled in Fairfax, a Los

Angeles district. Alvin and his wife,

Jeanette, divorced soon afterwards,

but not before securing Doria a place

at one of the better local schools,

Fairfax High, where fellow former

pupils remember her wearing a “wild

Afro” and grooving to soul music.

After leaving, Doria took various

short-lived jobs, including selling

incense and crystal mala beads to
local hippies, before landing an
apprenticeship as a make-up artist
at a Sunset Boulevard studio making
the still-running TV soap opera,
General Hospital.
The show’s lighting director was a
big-framed, bearded divorcee called
Tom Markle. He was white, 12 years
older than Doria and twice her size,
but they hit it off immediately, and
were married within a few months of
meeting. The 1979 wedding was an
Eastern mystic-style affair, conducted
by a saffron-robed local Yogi known
as “Brother Bhaktananda”. Meghan
arrived on August 4, 1981.
Doria isn’t giving interviews but it
is safe to say that she hasn’t changed
too much since those free-wheeling
early days. Her pet name for Meghan
GETTY IMAGES. is “Flower” (as in lower child), and

she has instilled her daughter with

those same strong liberal values that

come both from her Sixties’ upbringing

and Doria’s own personal experience

of discrimination.

As Joe, her half-brother, says: “Doria

has seen life from both sides, and

she’s very okay with what she is now.

I don’t think she’s going to be too

worried about meeting royal people.”

In the early days of their marriage,

Tom’s career lourished (he later won

an Emmy award), and the Raglands

lived comfortably in a hacienda-style

villa on the Paciic coast. But his long

work hours and perfectionism are said

to have taken a toll on his home life,

and in 1987 the couple divorced.

Doria has never remarried, and

there are no accounts of post-Tom

relationships. For several years after

the divorce she appears to have →

A ROYAL special