Meghan Markle's Bigger Dreams

She isn’t letting the royal family get in her way.

- Vanessa Grigoriadis

Several years ago, Meghan Markle came into Elle magazine for a conference-room chat, hoping to dazzle the staff with her smarts and savvy. This was fairly common practice for actresses of some fame but insatiable ambition: charm the editors during the meet and greet, and maybe they’d assign a profile, even a cover story. This was not that long ago, and magazines were far from all powerful. But Markle was not yet a duchess, married before 1.9 billion TV viewers—around that time, she was begging friends for introductions to single tech entrepreneurs—and so not yet in a position to complain about, let alone flee from, the scrutiny of what later would turn out to be a torturously hostile media.

In fact, the opposite: Then, she was unusually solicitous of the press’s dimming spotlight. During the chat, Justine Harman, an editor at Elle at the time and now a podcaster, mentioned she was planning her nuptials, and Markle, who had long supplemented the actor’s lifestyle with the pre-princessy job of freelance calligrapher, asked Harman if she had found someone to do the wedding.

“This is really random, but I met with the actress Meghan Markle from Suits and she does amazing calligraphy,” Harman wrote her wedding planner afterward. “She offered to do my place cards for the wedding, which I assured her she doesn’t need to do! However, she is really eager to help out! Perhaps she could do the table menus?”