by Kitty Kelley
The press even took potshots at her when she went deer hunting with the royal family in Scotland and bruised her forehead on the telescopic sight of her rifle. One columnist said she was sorry to hear that Fergie had hurt herself while “pursuing the innocent girlish pleasure of murdering a large mammal for sport.”
“To a certain extent,” admitted her father, “becoming Duchess of York did go to her head. She didn’t always read the rule book properly. In the royal family, certain privileges are there for the taking, but there have to be limits. Sarah thought she could get away with much more than she did. In those early days, Andrew should have been strong enough to guide her and advise her, but he didn’t.”
Andrew did not hesitate to rebuke her in public when she acted up, especially if she had been drinking. Once, after he corrected her, she wheeled on him. “Why do you have to keep embarrassing me and pointing it out in front of other people when I get things wrong?” she asked. “It’s not very charitable. Sometimes you’re as bad as your father.”
Fergie, who resented her negative press coverage, tried to ingratiate herself with reporters, while Andrew ignored them. “Don’t talk to them,” he advised her. “They’re knockers. They create heroes and then knock them down.”
“What can I do?” she said to a friend. “Andrew tells me to take no notice, but he’s away on his ship, not in the midst of things.”
The press criticism abated slightly in February 1988 when the Yorks agreed to a tour of Los Angeles to promote British arts and industry. Sarah, three months pregnant, arrived wearing French couture. But she quickly disclosed that her underpants were made in Britain.
“My knickers are from Marks and Sparks,” she chirped, using the nickname for Marks & Spencer, the budget department store where middle-class British housewives shop.
In anticipation of the royal visit, Chinatown merchants had put up a banner: “WELCOME FERGIE AND WHAT’S-HIS-NAME.” Andrew grinned at it good-naturedly. Stuffed into his pin-striped suit, he looked as if he had just won the all-you-can-eat contest. On his previous visit to Los Angeles, he had been called a royal brat after turning a spray-paint hose on the press. The British Consulate had had to pay one American photographer $1,200 in damages and issue an apology.
“I was given the check to repair my cameras,” recalled photographer Chris Gulken. “I was told: ‘Her Majesty wishes you to know that this money comes from Andrew’s personal funds and not from the public funds of the British people.’ ”
A Los Angeles television commentator reported Andrew’s 1984 trip to California as “the most unpleasant British visit since they burned the White House in the War of 1812.”
The Prime Minister was so distressed by Andrew’s press coverage that she commissioned a confidential study from public relations specialists in the London office of Saatchi & Saatchi to try to tone down Andrew’s image. Mrs. Thatcher’s report was sent to the Queen, who refused to read it. She said, “I hardly think I need advice on family matters from that frightful little woman.”
On this trip Andrew was better behaved. Arriving in Long Beach on the royal yacht, Britannia, he and Sarah spent ten days touring Southern California. They visited schools and supermarkets, where she blew kisses and he signed autographs. She appeared with tiny American and British flags in her hair and told photographers, “Check out the hair, boys.” During their tour of Bullocks Wilshire, the Los Angeles department store, the couple visited the boutiques of several British designers. Andrew spotted a black suede jacket that he admired, so the president of the store had the jacket gift-wrapped for him. Andrew accepted the present and then decided he would prefer something more contemporary, like a navy blue suede bomber jacket. The store made the switch.
Schoolchildren, who had never met a duchess before, crowded around Fergie and peppered her with questions about living in a castle. She said the hardest part was going to the bathroom. The youngsters grew wide-eyed as she told them about the Queen’s old-fashioned toilets. “You’ve got to pull up on the loo, not push down,” she explained. “I always bungle it.”
The British press branded her as coarse as a braying donkey. Once described as a breath of fresh air, she became a skunk at the garden party. “She’s an international embarrassment,” complained London’s Sunday Times. “Americans will likely retreat to their more refined dinner parties, there to cap each other with anecdotes about the awful vulgarities of the British.”
That evening the Duchess swept into a party decked out in the diamonds she had received from the Queen. Sparkling in her tiara, necklace, earrings, and bracelet, she quipped to onlookers, “Clock the rocks.” When someone asked her whether she liked Gilbert and Sullivan, she said she preferred Dire Straits. One London journalist cringed. “We wanted a silk purse,” he said, “and we got a sow’s ear.”
But Americans were charmed by the vivacious redhead, especially the movie stars, who lined up in Hollywood to meet her. Morgan Fairchild curtsied breathlessly, and Pierce Brosnan was speechless. “I didn’t know what to say to her,” he admitted with a blush. Jack Nicholson was not so reticent.
“She told me she was disappointed she wasn’t sitting next to me,” he said with a characteristic leer. “I told her that maybe she was lucky she didn’t, because I didn’t know what I might have done to her, if I had.”
Fergie hurried up to John Travolta to tell him the Princess of Wales was still bragging about their dance at the White House. “She told me that Diana never stops talking about it,” said Travolta, beaming.
At one gala dinner the Duchess appeared in a gown that looked like a playing field of pink tulle waffles topped with pink satin roses. London’s Sunday Times commented disdainfully, “She looked like she came in third in a Carmen Miranda look-alike contest.”
The next night, at the Biltmore Hotel, Sarah appeared in a long black gown wrapped with galloping puffs of orange silk. The designer Mr. Blackwell pronounced the dress “God-awful” and pushed her to the top of his Worst-Dressed List for 1988 as “the Duchess who walks like a duck with a bad foot.” Her long red hair was twirled and twisted into a hive of fussy curls held in place by diamond combs with corkscrew ringlets cascading to her shoulders. The effect was startling, even by Hollywood’s excessive standards.
As she approached the microphone that evening, she looked around at the audience of 750 people, who had paid $1,000 each to be in the presence of royalty. She winked broadly at Roger Moore, the master of ceremonies, and spotting the actor George Hamilton, she smacked her lips. “All these men around here,” she said lustily.
An exuberant male guest shouted, “We love you, Fergie!”
She yelled back, “I’ll see you later.”
“That was it for Fergie,” said columnist Ross Benson, shaking his head sympathetically. “That was the beginning of the end. I filed a story that she had been a great hit in the United States, but the rest of the British press turned on her with a vengeance. They said her behavior was disgraceful, and with the inherent snobbishness of this country, they dismissed her as the ill-bred daughter of a stable boy in a blazer.”
The Yorks traveled from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, where they were weekend guests of Walter and Lee Annenberg at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ 208-acre desert estate. The former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and his wife greeted the royal helicopter on their private runway. The Annenbergs had arranged for a flotilla of golf carts with Rolls-Royce hoods to transport the Duke and Duchess, their dressers, their aides, their guards, and their luggage.
Fergie hopped out of the helicopter with a large gold clasp in her hair fashioned like a guitar with the word “ROCK” on it. Andrew wore tasseled loafers. They jumped into two of the Annenbergs’ golf carts and, like little children in bumper cars, drove up and down the runway with clownish abandon.
The next day they attended a polo game and a black-tie dinner party in the evening at the Annenberg estate. “Oh, it’s just for a few friends,” said Mrs. Annenberg of her party for one hundred peopl
e. U.S. State Department dogs sniffed for bombs as the movie stars and socialites arrived. Actor Michael York (“No relation,” joked Fergie) took pictures, and the Duchess asked Frank Sinatra to sing her a song; he obliged with “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
“I’m offended—absolutely—by the criticism the Duke and Duchess have received from the British press,” snapped Los Angeles’s Chief of Protocol. “Mayor Bradley found the Duchess to be great fun, and their royal tour of Southern California was a huge success.”
Other Americans rallied to Fergie’s side, finding the madcap Duchess immensely likable with her manic mugging and breezy asides. “It doesn’t matter that Fergie’s fashion statements sometimes end up with a question mark,” said USA Today. “When a personality sparkles like hers, she could wear a lampshade and still light up a room.”
Fergie, in turn, appreciated Americans. “I love visiting the United States,” she told a National Press Club audience in Washington, D.C., several years later, “because Americans are so nice to me. I could’ve been an American in my last life.” The audience cheered, apparently not realizing that the Duchess believed in reincarnation. She said she especially enjoyed her trips to New York City. “That’s where I really load up,” she said about her marathon shopping sprees. On one return trip to London, an airline charged her $1,200 for fifty-one pieces of excess baggage.
“Those U.S. jaunts began to cost her dearly in terms of her image here,” said British journalist Ingrid Seward, who was also a personal friend.
But Sarah didn’t care. With her husband away at sea, she was bored. So she began flying the Concorde to New York, where her presence triggered shameless jockeying among the nouveau riche. The social cachet of her title drew moguls and tycoons, who scrambled to meet her. “She’s very pretty,” said multimillionaire Donald Trump, “very bubbly, with lots of personality.”
Sarah never failed to amuse and entertain. She regaled her new friends with anecdotes about the royal family. Citing the Queen’s appreciation for bawdy humor, she repeated Her Majesty’s favorite jokes and included the story of the state visit of Nigeria’s General Gowon.
She said the Queen had met President Gowon at Victoria Station and was riding with him in a carriage when one of the horses lifted its tail and broke wind.
The Queen turned to President Gowon. “Oh, I do apologize. Not a very good start to your visit.”
“Oh, please don’t apologize,” said Gowon. “Besides, I thought it was one of the horses.”
After a few drinks Sarah continued with her repertoire of gamy jokes, her favorite being one about the Queen as a guest on a radio show called What Is It? The answer is given to the audience by a panel of experts before the guest appears. The guest gets twenty questions to figure out the answer.
The night the Queen appeared as a guest, the answer was “horsecock.”
The no-nonsense monarch got down to basics with her first question. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” she asked.
“Animal,” replied the panel.
“Can you kiss it?”
“Why, uhmmmm, yes… I suppose one could kiss it, if one were so inclined.”
“Is it a horse’s cock?” asked the Queen.
Sarah howled with laughter as she delivered the punch line, which startled one of her hostesses. “She certainly wasn’t what I expected of a duchess,” her hostess said carefully, “but she was lively and always sent us a thank-you.” Sarah’s letters, mailed from Buckingham Palace, arrived on her personal stationery, which featured a small crown atop a large “S.”
An accomplished impressionist, Sarah also entertained her new friends with impersonations of her in-laws. She imitated Prince Philip by goosestepping around the room like a German soldier, barking out orders. Then she scrunched her face into a scowl and said, “This is Her Majesty when we call her Miss Piggyface.” She mimicked the Queen’s walk with her handbag dangling from her arm. Next, to the astonishment of her audience, she picked up a kitchen knife and knighted her host’s dog. As she placed the stainless steel blade on either side of the pup’s ears, she piped, impersonating the Queen, “Arise, Sir Rutherford.”
The Duchess met her match for outrageous behavior at a New York City dinner party given by her first literary agent, Mort Janklow, who seated her across from author Norman Mailer.
“I’ve never read any of your books,” she admitted, “so which one should I begin with?”
“Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” replied Mailer.
“What’s it about?”
“Pussy,” he said.
There was an audible intake of breath from the writer Tom Wolfe, but the Duchess did not blanch.
“You know, Mr. Mailer,” she said, “the most interesting thing for me at this moment is watching everyone’s face at this table.”
Mailer was impressed by her quick response. “She fielded it nicely,” he said, recalling the evening with a tinge of regret. “I had a devil in me that night…. I said the book had an interesting discussion of the differences between pussy and cunt. I must say she was terrific. A lot of people were offended, but Sarah Ferguson couldn’t have been nicer about the whole deal, making a point of telling a lot of nice Nellies she wasn’t the least bit offended, and I felt bad about it afterward because she got trashed in the papers, and I expect it didn’t do her any good in England.”
When Sarah returned to her office in Buckingham Palace, she was greeted by the unsmiling face of Sir Robert Fellowes, who had been promoted to the powerful position of the Queen’s private secretary.* He walked in brandishing a pile of press clippings.
“Well, we didn’t do very well again today, did we?” he said, shaking his head with disapproval. He dropped the stack of newspaper stories on her desk as if they were dead mice. She glared at him.
“Oh, Robert, really,” she said with exasperation.
“This must be such a disappointment for you,” he said, peering over his steel-rimmed glasses. Turning to leave, he added, “I know it is for Her Majesty.”
Fellowes, or “Bellowes,” as Fergie called him, was her father’s first cousin and a man she came to detest. She dreaded his visits to her office. He always arrived looking dour and brandishing a pile of clippings that chronicled her latest misadventure. She told friends she got a stomachache as soon as she saw him approaching her door. “He could hardly wait to show me the story of the MP who said I was flagrantly abusing the royal name,” she said.
“He was her Lord High Executioner,” said a New York businesswoman whom the Duchess had adopted as her unofficial adviser. “Bad-news Bellowes, as we called him, made Sarah’s life a living hell. She had to stand alone against that unremitting Palace machine which wanted nothing so much as to extinguish her delightful spirit. She had no one to help her. Not even her husband. As much as Andrew loved Sarah, he would not defend her against the courtiers. He was simply too terrified of them.
“She felt the weight and power of the monarchy crashing down on top of her; she knew she was in trouble, but she had no adult in her life to advise her. No one in the Palace wanted to help her. The Queen adored her, but the Queen is not the power in the Palace. Prince Philip runs everything, and once he had decided that Sarah was not worth the trouble she was causing, she was finished. Away at sea every week, Andrew was never there for her. Neither was the Princess of Wales, who saw her as a rival. Sarah’s mother was dealing with a dying husband in Brazil. Her sister, Jane, was dealing with her own divorce in Australia. And Sarah’s father was no help whatsoever after he became involved in his own sex scandal. So, as her friend, I stepped in and tried to help.”
The New Yorker advised the Duchess to improve her image by performing more royal duties and becoming active with charities for crippled children and the mentally retarded. “I told her to take a page from Diana’s book,” the adviser said. She explained the on-again, off-again friendship between the Duchess and the Princess as fraught with rivalry and petty jealousies. “Sarah felt that she was being sacrificed to make roo
m for Diana as the future Queen. She resented the unfair comparisons in the press between them—Diana was depicted as a loving mother while Sarah looked like a wench who abandoned her children for months on end to go on luxury holidays.”
Her ski guide in Switzerland, Bruno Sprecher, described her as a woman who did not like other women. “She could always ski well,” he said, although she stopped every twenty minutes for a cigarette, “and was great chums with the men in the party, but she didn’t like female competition.”
Her New York adviser saw it differently. “Unfortunately, Sarah was too forthright for her own good. She admitted she never liked babies much before she had her own. Diana, of course, was portrayed as a madonna who adored children. But Sarah had reservations about Diana as a mother, especially when she tried to alienate her boys from Charles. She [Diana] constantly asked the little Princes, ‘Who loves you the best? Who loves you more than anyone else in the whole world?’ And the boys were supposed to say, ‘You do, Mummy. You do.’ Sarah felt that was troubling. She also did not agree with the hateful picture Diana painted of Charles, who, Sarah said, was just not that bad. Obtuse, yes, but definitely not the monster Diana said he was.”
The New York adviser continued: “Sarah never publicly criticized the Princess of Wales—she wasn’t that stupid—but there were many times when she felt badly used by Diana. For instance, the Princess was no comfort to her during the lurid business with her father. [In May 1988 Major Ron was exposed by the tabloids as a regular patron of massage parlors. Private Eye ran a competition for anagrams of “Ronald Ferguson.” Winners were “organ flounders” and “old groaner’s fun.” Four years later his love affair with Lesley Player became public, and she admitted to aborting his child; then Prince Charles fired him as his polo manager.] Diana shrewdly put as much distance as she could between herself and the Major, even ushering her children off the polo grounds so they wouldn’t be contaminated by his presence. Sarah was hurt and humiliated by her father, but, as she said, Diana’s family wasn’t so exemplary that she could act holier than thou.”