The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  In a lighthearted farewell toast in Washington, D.C., he said: “A gentleman of the press asked me, rather tactlessly, I thought, why there was a bigger crowd outside the cathedral than when I was last here on my own. The answer, of course, is that they all turned out to see my new clothes.”

  The audience responded appreciatively and laughed again when he referred to his wedding as a production of sanctified show business. “My wife and myself have been completely overwhelmed by the extraordinary, enthusiastic, and friendly welcome that we’ve received here,” Charles said. “Perhaps it’s the fact that we got married four years ago in a rather well-known ecclesiastical bull ring in London and it wasn’t actually filmed in Hollywood.”

  Although most of the attention was focused on Diana with her youth and beauty, Charles, not surprisingly, charmed several older women. “I must admit I found him the more interesting of the two,” wrote U.S. Chief of Protocol Selwa Roosevelt in her memoirs. “He was well read, spoke beautifully, had his father’s charm and a great sense of humor.” But President Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, was more candid. “We all loved Charles,” she said, “but Diana was stupid. Someone should tell her that it doesn’t play well—that dopey looking-up-through-the-eyelashes bit of hers.”

  By the time she returned to London, the Princess of Wales had become a walking monument. British opinion polls said she was the country’s greatest tourist attraction—a bigger draw than Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament combined. One national survey calculated that from 1983 through 1985 she had generated $66.6 million in revenue from magazines, books, and tourists. She was hailed as the only member of the royal family to shake hands without gloves, to sign autographs, to kiss heads of state, and to embrace AIDS patients. She brought charm to the stolid House of Windsor, and on the evening of December 23, 1985, she also bestowed sex appeal.

  She had accompanied Prince Charles to a benefit at Covent Garden for London’s Royal Opera House. During the intermission, she excused herself. Leaving him alone in the royal box, she quietly slipped backstage to prepare a surprise.

  When the curtain went up, a reed slim blonde twirled from the wings to center stage in a slinky white satin slip with spaghetti straps. People gasped audibly when they recognized the dancer, who was swaying to the pop music of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl”:

  Uptown girl,

  She’s been living in her white bread world

  For as long as anyone with hot blood can

  And now she’s looking for a downtown man.

  In her white satin heels, the Princess of Wales (five feet ten) towered over her partner (five feet two), Wayne Sleep. The royal ballet dancer, who was in the Guinness Book of Records for making more scissor-legged leaps than Nijinsky, was hardly noticed. All eyes were riveted on Diana.

  She had secretly rehearsed the routine in Kensington Palace as a Christmas present for her husband. She presented it to him in front of 2,600 people who had never seen royalty slink seductively across a stage.

  “The Prince nearly fell out of his chair,” recalled Sleep, “especially when she did the kicks over my head…. That kick routine brought the house down…. I could not believe how good she was. She was so confident and so sure of herself that she even curtsied to the royal box.” Sleep gathered her up in his arms and carried her off stage. “I was the one who was nervous,” he said, “knowing that I was holding the future Queen of England.”

  Roaring approval, the audience gave the pop Princess a standing ovation. Then they gave her eight curtain calls, and she took her bows, looked directly at her husband, and smiled. And she wanted to do an encore. “I said no,” said Sleep, “because they would start nitpicking. She’s a good dancer, but she isn’t a professional. She started to do it again, and I had to drag her off. She loved it.”

  Diana returned to the stage months later to make a video of herself dancing to the theme song of Phantom of the Opera. After seeing the Andrew Lloyd Webber show six times, she told the manager of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London that she wanted to be filmed dancing to the love song “All I Ask of You.” She said it was to be a gift for her husband’s birthday. Because it was a request from the Princess of Wales for the Prince, the theater manager agreed to make the stage and orchestra available to her. She admitted later that the video was never intended for Charles but, rather, for her own private use.

  She did not object when the official photographer for the Opera House sold his pictures of her daring dance with Wayne Sleep for thousands of dollars. “It was the sexiest performance I’d ever seen at Covent Garden,” said the photographer.

  Unfortunately, the Prince, who had stood up to applaud his wife publicly, berated her in private for flaunting herself in an undignified manner. He rejected her gift of dance as a narcissistic exhibition and said it was just another one of her ploys to upstage him. He took no pride in her talent. Instead he felt humiliated and consoled himself in the comforting arms of his mistress.

  FIFTEEN

  Sarah Ferguson was one patient we never wanted to lay eyes on again. She was obnoxious—rude, demanding, and coarse,” said Stephen Maitin, a London practitioner of homeopathy. “A few months before her wedding, she came to our Victoria Street clinic to be treated for obesity. She was brought in by her wedding dress designer, who was frantic to get her in shape.

  “The designer, Lindka Cierach, was going through hell getting Sarah slimmed down—and calmed down. We treated her at the clinic with needles and prescriptions, and my partner also treated her at Buckingham Palace, where she was living. But, after a few sessions, we washed our hands of her. She expected us to be on call for her around the clock: if she was bingeing, we were supposed to drop everything and treat her. If she was overwrought, we were supposed to tranquilize her. If she was hung over, we were supposed to give her massages. Whether it was food, sex, or alcohol, her appetites were out of control; she did everything to excess—everything. She abused herself with too much cocaine, too many amphetamines, too much Champagne. Food, food, food, and sex all the time.”

  The spring of 1986 was a trying time for Sarah Margaret Ferguson, the twenty-six-year-old known as Fergie, who was engaged to marry Prince Andrew. “Sarah definitely needed help,” said Lindka Cierach, “and I tried to get it for her…. I would take her through the back door of the clinic and let her pay me for the treatments so no one would know.”

  The announcement of her engagement to marry HRH Prince Andrew had thrilled her family. The Prince’s valet, James Berry, recalled her father’s reaction when the news became public. “He hopped up and down on one leg in sheer happiness, chewing his fingers on one hand, and letting out shouts of joy.”

  “We did get quite emotional about it,” admitted Sarah’s stepmother, Susan Ferguson, who months later was still awestruck. The Socialist Worker, a British newspaper, had reported the news under the headline “Parasite to Marry Scrounger.” The February announcement had jolted the Queen’s press secretary, who had been advising reporters for months to disregard the relationship on the assumption that the exuberant Fergie would be just one more conquest for the Queen’s twenty-six-year-old son.

  Andrew, who had developed a reputation as a love-’em-and-leave-’em bachelor, seemed to prefer actresses and models, and freckle-faced Fergie certainly did not fit the mold.

  “I remember Michael [Shea] inviting two of us onto the royal yacht, Britannia, for a briefing on the Andrew and Fergie romance,” recalled Steve Lynas, then a reporter for Today newspaper. “Shea reassured us, ‘There is no chance of these two becoming engaged.’ We filed accordingly. But within a couple of days, the engagement was announced.”

  One cartoonist greeted the news by drawing the couple as Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. They stood before a preacher. “Do you, Raunchy, take Randy Andy, to be your lawful…”

  Burke’s Peerage, the bible of the aristocracy, was aghast that Prince Andrew, fourth in line to the throne, would choose a woman like Sarah Ferguson, “whose private life has, by th
e traditions of the royal family, been not only unorthodox, but well documented in the national press… six previous romances in six years… far more than Victorian in nature.”

  Sarah’s father, Ronald Ferguson, a former army major, snorted with derision. “If she didn’t have a past at twenty-six,” he said, “people would be saying there was something wrong with her.”

  Precisely because of her background, some thought Fergie was ideal for Andrew, who defined making love as “horizontal jogging” and whose idea of playfulness was to jam a live lobster down the front of his date’s bathing suit. His boisterous style puzzled his friends. “I asked him about this once,” said Ferdie Macdonald, who knew the Prince as a young bachelor. “ ‘Why are you always squirting girls with water, sir, and throwing things at them?’ I said. He seemed baffled. ‘They like it, don’t they?’ he said. ‘When I squirt them with water they squeal. Doesn’t that mean they like it?’ ”

  Fergie, too, liked to play hard and play around. She made no apologies for her raffish love life. “I am a modern woman,” she said. She swore easily, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and swapped dirty jokes with the boys. In one of her first television interviews, she used the word “prick.” Wisecracking and raucous, she acted like the only dame dealt into the poker game. She said “yah” instead of “yes.” When a BBC reporter asked what she had had for breakfast, she quipped, “Sausages and a migraine.”

  She said she suffered severe migraine headaches because of the frequent falls from her ponies when she was a child. A daredevil athlete, she won championship ribbons for skiing, swimming, and horseback riding. After competing in a steeplechase at midnight, she was awarded honorary membership in the Dangerous Sports Club, enabling her to wear the DSC badge of golden crutches. She was the only woman in the race. She never outgrew being the roughhousing tomboy who climbed trees and played pranks. She walked like a cowhand, with bowed legs and big strides, and she talked out of the side of her mouth.

  Her classmates at Hurst Lodge, a boarding school in Sunningdale, Berkshire, remember her for her hearty appetite. They called her “Seconds” because she lined up twice for every meal. Expansive and enthusiastic, she was also generous, sometimes embarrassing her friends by sending them huge bouquets and expensive presents. To support herself, she worked odd jobs—sales clerk, messenger for travel agents, waitress, driver, and tour guide. To pay for ski trips to Switzerland, she worked as a chalet girl and cleaned hotel rooms.

  Barely educated beyond high school, she took a course at Queen’s Secretarial College in London. “She does not show the influence of too many schools,” noted one of her teachers. When she finished at the bottom of her class, she bragged that she’d barely learned how to type. Shrugging happily, she said, “I’d rather ride than read.”

  Her father also preferred horses to books. When Major Ron, as he liked to be called, was accused of using his daughter’s engagement to better himself, he insisted he did not need social advancement, especially through the royal family. “My mother was born Marian Louisa Montagu Douglas Scott, daughter of Lord Herbert Montagu Douglas Scott, the fifth son of the sixth Duke of Buccleugh,” he said. “To my amusement, Mother’s family have always regarded their Buccleugh lineage as being socially superior to that of the Windsors!” Ferguson made sure the press knew that his family tree included four dukes and such ancestors as King Charles II and his mistress Lucy Walters. The Major was also a cousin of Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary.

  The Times wrote that Sarah Ferguson descended from landed gentry, landowners rather than aristocracy, with generations of service in the cavalry: “Every generation, down to her father, has held a commission in the Life Guards,” the newspaper noted. “It is a family of old money, but not much.”

  The pursuit of money became a necessity in 1970, when Major Ron accepted the unpaid position of polo manager to Prince Charles. Having flunked the examination to become a colonel in the Life Guards, which ended his advancement in the military, the Major resigned from the army. He opened an office in the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, where he tacked a pinup calendar on the wall. Even as a civilian he insisted on his military rank. “Most people address me as Major,” he told a writer who had called him Mr. Ferguson. He entitled his memoir The Galloping Major.

  The Prince of Wales was twenty-one years old when he offered Major Ferguson the honorary job of arranging his polo games, and Ferguson, a passionate polo player, accepted gratefully. He solicited corporate sponsors like Cartier and Rolex, who were eager to be associated with the Prince of Wales, and asked them to underwrite polo tournaments and cover the Prince’s expenses. This lucrative patronage also included handsome compensation for the Prince’s polo manager himself.

  “Ronald was delighted to get the offer from Prince Charles,” recalled his first wife, Susan. “It allowed him to spend a lot of time with the Prince, and it also enabled Ronald to stay in the world which interested him most, the world of horses.”

  Two years later, in 1972, the Fergusons separated when Sarah and her sister, Jane, were teenagers. Ronald Ferguson intimated to friends that his wife, Susan, had had a love affair with Prince Philip when the two men played polo together during the 1960s. Susan Ferguson, with her long hair and lean legs, was so sporty and elegant that designer Ralph Lauren once considered asking her to pose for a Polo ad. “She was definitely Philip’s type,” said her daughter. Publicly all Major Ferguson would say about his wife and Prince Philip was that the Queen’s husband “certainly found my wife Susie’s company much more enticing than mine.”

  Susan Ferguson denied having an affair with Prince Philip during her first marriage and swore that she had been faithful to her husband. “It was Ronald who had been seeing other women,” she wrote in her memoir, “even while I was pregnant…. His flirtations caused me a lot of suffering…. I cried endlessly.”

  But she did not write about her relationship with Prince Philip after the end of her second marriage. Her daughter Sarah, though, frequently touched on the secret romance. She mentioned to acquaintances in New York City that her mother had been with Philip in Argentina during a World Wildlife Fund visit in November 1992. “It was the night of the Windsor Castle fire, which also happened to be the Queen’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary,” recalled one of Fergie’s confidantes. “While Philip was with Susie in Buenos Aires, the Queen was by herself running pails at Windsor, trying to put out the fire.” Ronald Ferguson was not surprised. “I always suspected that Prince Philip had an eye for Susie,” he wrote in 1994. “Certainly, they remain friends to this day.”

  After sixteen years of marriage, Susan Ferguson left Ron Ferguson for another man and lost custody of her children. Her two daughters remained in England with their father in the Hampshire village of Dummer, sixty miles southwest of London. Once the divorce was final, Susan Ferguson married Hector Barrantes, a dashing Argentinian, who had been Ronald Ferguson’s keenest rival on the polo field. The couple moved to Buenos Aires, where Barrantes raised and trained some of the world’s best polo ponies.

  “Major Ron remained bitter for years,” said writer Nicholas Monson. “He was still bleeding about his divorce when I interviewed him in 1986, and asked if Argentina could not play England in polo because of the Falklands War. ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘Argentina can’t play here because one of those bastards ran off with my wife.’ ”

  Major Ferguson admitted he was traumatized by his divorce. “It was a bit of a fright, to put it mildly, for everyone,” he said. “It meant that at that vulnerable age my daughters didn’t have Mother, so Father took over and did his best.” He never forgave his wife. “That woman, you must remember, deserted her children,” he told friends. He remarried in 1976 and started another family with Susan Deptford, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. Sarah jokingly introduced her to friends as “my wicked stepmother.” The second Susan Ferguson soon learned that she, too, would have to contend with humiliation by a philandering husband.

  “It’s very acce
ptable behavior for some men,” said Ronald Ferguson after he was caught patronizing a massage parlor employing prostitutes. “In fact, it’s what I first liked about Prince Andrew. He had acquired quite a reputation as a ladies’ man, for which I was rather relieved. He was a normal young sailor who had had a string of girlfriends; it all seemed very healthy as far as I was concerned.”

  Ever since Andrew’s publicized love affair with the American actress Koo Stark, the Prince had been described in the press as “Randy Andy.” During their romance, the tabloids had published nude pictures of Koo when she appeared as a lesbian in one of Britain’s biggest-earning soft-porn films. These photographs showed her taking a shower with another woman. Months later the tabloids published pictures of Andrew as he skinny-dipped in Canada: “It’s strip ahoy as naked Prince Andy larks about in the River.” One downmarket magazine printed the photograph with a poem:

  A rose is red

  Koo is blue

  Andy is Randy

  What’s HM to do?

  On television, the satirical revue Spitting Image caricatured the handsome Prince as a nude puppet, holding up a glass of Champagne with links of sausage draped over his upper thigh. The Palace threatened to sue the show’s producers, but the Director of Public Prosecutions urged royal restraint. “If I were you,” he said to the Queen’s lawyers, “I’d forget about it, because if you prosecute, they’re going to turn up in court with that puppet.” The palace backed off.

  Weeks later, Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot’s publisher, announced plans to publish a book with the photograph of the naked Prince Andrew puppet.* This time, instead of threatening a lawsuit, the Palace tried the tactic of shame.

  “The Queen’s press secretary rang me up,” recalled Mathew Evans, chairman of Faber & Faber, “and said, ‘We are very disappointed that a publisher of your standing is marketing this tasteless book. We request that you do not reprint any more copies.” Evans immediately upped the print order to five hundred thousand copies, and the book became a national best-seller.