by Kitty Kelley
During the move from his apartment in Cadogan Square, Steve Wyatt left behind 120 photographs from his May 1990 holiday in Morocco with Sarah and her two children. A mover found the casual snapshots, recognized the Duchess of York, and sold the photos to a tabloid. Sarah was traveling to Palm Beach with her father and his mistress when she received the call from her husband prior to publication.
Andrew was aboard his ship when the Palace contacted him about the pictures. The Queen’s press secretary suggested that the Duke tell his wife. So Andrew dutifully called Sarah, who took the call in the Palm Beach airport. She screamed at him for not defending her.
“It’s not like you didn’t know about those pictures,” she said. “You saw them. You knew about the holiday. You wanted me to go. Why didn’t you say that? Why do you never defend me to those bastards?” She slammed the phone down and that night got drunk. Very drunk.
She admitted overindulging when she addressed the Motor Neurone Disease Association the next day. “I had too many mai tais last night,” she told the group. She brightened up during her visit to the Connor Nursery in West Palm Beach, where she posed for pictures with black children suffering from AIDS. That evening she attended a dinner party at the restricted Everglades Club in Palm Beach and the next day was severely criticized in newspapers for lending royal presence, even unintentionally, to a club that bars blacks and Jews.*
On her return flight to London, she started drinking again. After two glasses of Champagne she began throwing sugar packets at her father. She lobbed wet towels at his mistress and tossed peanuts around the cabin. “Then Sarah pulled a sick bag over her head,” recalled the Major’s mistress, “and started making telephone noises into it. We shrieked with laughter like silly schoolgirls.” Other passengers watched the rumpus. Among them, three journalists taking notes.
“The way that story was embroidered,” huffed Major Ferguson, “convinced me more than anything else that the press was out to discredit my daughter.”
Two months later, on March 19,† 1992, the Palace announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were separating. The Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, privately briefed the BBC correspondent, who reported, “The knives are out at the palace for Fergie.” The BBC man said the Queen was very upset with the Duchess, and the rest of the royal family considered her unsuitable to be among them.
“I was furious,” recalled her father, “and rang Sir Robert Fellowes, and told him how monstrous I thought it was… it was unforgivable.”
The courtier responded coolly. “It’s my job,” he said, “to protect the family, and particularly the Queen. I have to.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” said Ferguson.
Eventually the press secretary apologized to Sarah for his indiscretion and offered his resignation to the Queen, who did not accept it.* Rather, four years later, she knighted him.
“Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” That’s the word Lord Charteris used—in triplicate—to damn the Duchess. Charteris, the Queen’s former private secretary, denounced Sarah in a Spectator interview with journalist Noreen Taylor. And a columnist for The Mail on Sunday, John Junor, condemned the Duchess as “highly immoral.” He ran her down as the “royal bike”—ridden by everyone.
By this time she was thoroughly disgraced as a wife and as a mother. But even more disheartening for her was the news that the man she called the love of her life, Steve Wyatt, was leaving her life for another wife: he was marrying an American society beauty, Cate Magennis. When he told Sarah the news, she struggled to wish him well. But she admitted later that she almost cried. After the wedding she said, “I can’t have the man I love because he’s got married. What’s the matter with me? Why wouldn’t he marry me?”
In Wyatt’s wake, another smooth-talking Texan was already circling in the waters. “If you want to ride swiftly and safely from the depths to the surface,” Truman Capote wrote in a novella, “the surest way is to single out a shark and attach yourself to it like a pilot fish.”
For the next three years it would be difficult to distinguish between the shark and the pilot fish, but the Duchess was about to embark on the ride of her life.
EIGHTEEN
He’s absolutely brill about money,” burbled the Duchess of York. “Really, really brill.”
In her slangy way, Sarah was describing John Bryan to her husband as brilliant. She recommended they sit down with the thirty-five-year-old American to discuss their finances. “He can help,” she said. “I just know he can.”
By 1991 the Duke and Duchess were spending four times their annual income, and the Queen was balking at paying their overdrafts. Sarah, who spent wildly, refused to cut back. The worse her marriage became, the more money she spent, running up staggering bills. Her kitchen staples included caviar, raspberries (in season and out), a variety of imported cheeses, and at least thirteen flavors of ice cream. In one year she spent $102,000 for gifts and $84,560 on psychics. Then Steve Wyatt introduced her to his friend Anthony John Adrian Bryan Jr., known to his family and friends as “Johnny.” He promised to come to her financial rescue. “Johnny stepped in,” said columnist Taki, “and took over the Fergie account—so to speak.”
A self-described financial wizard, John Bryan understood the art of making deals. He knew the intricacies of Swiss bank accounts and offshore tax shelters. He unraveled the mysteries of high finance and reduced complex transactions to simple logic. He reassured people like Sarah and Andrew, who did not know how to manage their money. After Bryan explained the tax advantages of incorporating Sarah’s publishing ventures and funneling her Budgie profits through a corporation, Andrew and Sarah eagerly incorporated. Bryan helped set up ASB [Andrew Sarah Bryan] Publishing Inc. and, at Andrew and Sarah’s insistence, became a member of the board.
Susceptible to gurus, astrologers, and fortune-tellers, the Duke and Duchess were drawn to the fast-talking American. Their goals were his goals: to make money—big money—or, as he put it, “megamillions.”
During their first meeting, recalled a secretary who was in the room, Bryan endeared himself to the Duke of York by offering to restore the Duchess’s image in the press. “Most everything written about her is rubbish,” Bryan told them. Andrew nodded in agreement. Despite their marital problems, he remained devoted and wanted the rest of the world to see his wife as he did.
“Sir,” Bryan said respectfully, “I want to show Her Royal Highness’s commitment to charity and emphasize the good work she does which enhances the royal family.” Sarah beamed as Bryan pitched his fastball without a pop. He spoke with quiet authority. As he later told one writer, he operated on the principle of “softly, softly… catchee monkey.” Within fifteen minutes of their meeting, the organ-grinder had softly snared the Duke of York.
Andrew and Sarah sat spellbound as the American spun their debts into assets. He made their financial future look glowing. The bald sorcerer sounded as though he could sell toupees to Rastafarians. He was a fast talker who made gypsy moths look like butterflies.
“He was clever, and he certainly knew business,” said a British man who had known Bryan since he had moved to London. “But he was as ambitious as the Gordon Gecko character in [the movie] Wall Street. Johnny was hard charging, high energy; he lived on the edge. As you Americans say, he performed without a net.”
John Bryan executed his high-wire act with style. He understood packaging and the importance of the first impression. He looked rich. He wore custom-made suits, hand-tooled leather shoes, and gold cuff links. He skied, golfed, and played squash in private clubs. He competed fiercely on the tennis court. He dated models and debutantes.
But there was little behind his fancy facade. He possessed none of the hallmarks of wealth—no property, no portfolio. He spent most of everything he earned—and more. When his businesses in New York City, London, and Munich ran out of money, and he became insolvent, he left town.
He did it first in New York City. Following graduation from the University of T
exas in 1979, he received a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He moved to Manhattan and started a small communications company with $1 million that he had raised from private investors. He promised them big profits, but after four years the company went broke.
“I lost over $50,000 on the guy,” said Taki. “I based my investment on my friendship… and I have to say I’m deeply disappointed. He said it was a sure thing, we couldn’t miss, and that my $50,000 would turn into millions. After the company failed, he went doggo for a while, and then turned up [in London] with Fergie.”
The British Home Office wouldn’t give him a work permit because it wasn’t convinced he could support himself. His London apartment, which doubled as his office, was rented. So was his furniture. He also rented a country house in Gloucestershire. “That’s where I met him,” recalled journalist Rory Knight Bruce. “He was dressed in American tweeds and smoking a joint.”
His leased car accumulated so many parking tickets that he was arrested and fined $800. After paying the fine, he continued collecting parking tickets. Finally police booted and towed the car, and he was reduced to taking cabs. He hired an occasional limousine that he charged to his business—before the business collapsed. He rarely paid cash for anything, except occasional cocaine.* “Fergie sniffed a lot, too,” said Taki, who socialized with the couple. “I should know. I’ve done my share.”
Although Bryan was described as a Texas multimillionaire, he was born in Wilmington, Delaware. But at the age of nine he moved to Houston when his father divorced his mother and married a Texas heiress, Josephine Abercrombie. During this second marriage, his father began an affair with (and later married) Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz, the wife of the Sakowitz department store heir Robert Sakowitz—who was Steve Wyatt’s uncle.
Bryan bragged to one writer that he was part of “the American establishment” because his godfather was Felix DuPont, and his mother, who had married three times, was listed in the Social Register. He boasted to girlfriends that his mother had once dated Frank Sinatra and that his British-born father had graduated from the Harvard Business School.
“It is perhaps no coincidence,” said Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz after her divorce from Bryan Sr., “that Johnny’s father seemed to single out wealthy, influential, and sometimes married women for conquests, me included.” Although his father had married four times and very well, he had never married a duchess.
Skimming the surface of London society, John Bryan partied in expense-account restaurants and nightclubs like Annabel’s and Tramps. When he became the Yorks’ financial adviser, he moved into more rarefied circles. Still, the exclusive world of White’s and Brooks’s (private men’s clubs in London) eluded him. To British aristocrats he looked like an American hustler on the make. To the Duchess of York he looked like a man on a white horse.
He had promised to make her rich and restore her image. He revered her title as much as she did and commended her for correcting Maria Shriver on camera when the NBC-TV interviewer addressed her as Sarah Ferguson. “I’m Her Royal Highness,” Sarah pointed out. “I’m the Duchess of York.” Bryan emphasized to her the value of her title in the marketplace. “Your image is all you have,” he said over and over. “It is absolutely one hundred percent your biggest asset.”
Capitalizing on Fergie, he made her his biggest merger and acquisition. Within days of her separation from Andrew, Bryan took over her life. “When Sarah moved from Sunninghill Park to a rented house, Romenda Lodge in Wentworth, John assisted with details like staff contracts, rental negotiations, security, confidentiality agreements,” recalled her father, Major Ferguson.
After the move, Sarah said she would have a nervous breakdown if she didn’t have a vacation. So “J.B.,” as she and her children called him, arranged an extravagant six-week trip to the Far East. He planned the itinerary, complete with chartered flights, limousines, and luxury hotels. He said he paid for everything: $135,000. He joined the Duchess, her two children, their nanny, and their protection officers in Phuket, a resort island near Thailand, and traveled with them through Indonesia.
He was photographed traveling with the Duchess and described in the press as the unknown man who was seen carrying Princess Eugenie on his shoulders. He later explained that he was a family friend acting as a marriage counselor for the Duke and Duchess, trying to help them reconcile. He also said he had been asked by the Queen and Prince Andrew to handle Sarah’s finances. “It’s completely absurd to suggest that there is anything unprofessional in my friendship with the Duchess,” he said. “I am acting in a purely professional manner.”
Weeks later he and Sarah visited her mother on her polo pony breeding farm four hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Sarah wanted Bryan to advise Susan Barrantes on handling her husband’s estate. Bryan told Susan he could make* her “megamillions” if she wanted to make a film about playing polo in Argentina.
Throughout the summer of 1992 he and Sarah were seen shopping in New York City, partying in London, and dancing in Paris. Still, he insisted their relationship was strictly platonic. When Clive Goodman of News of the World asked him about a romance, Bryan snapped, “Even such a suggestion is not just rude, it’s impertinent and insulting.” By then he had moved his clothes into her closet at Romenda Lodge and put his slippers under her bed.
With military precision he began organizing her finances. A big spender himself, he said he was startled by her spending, which he calculated at $81,000 a month. He told her she was spending almost $1 million a year—far more than she was making. She shrugged. She was still the daughter-in-law of the richest woman in the world. “It was madness,” he said later, “spending for the sake of it, with no thought for the present, let alone the future.” At the time, he joked about setting up a charity called Duchess in Distress.
The financial adviser was captivated by his investment. When the writer Elizabeth Kaye compared him to Cinderella, John Bryan did not disagree. “I am like Cinderella,” he said. “It’s a kind of wonderful love story.” He fully expected to marry the Duchess after her divorce, but his friend Taki was skeptical. “It’ll never happen,” Taki predicted. “He doesn’t have enough money for Fergie.”
Making himself indispensable, Bryan supervised her investments, her vacations, her wardrobe, even her diet. “It’s very important to Johnny that Sarah look good and continue to keep her weight down,” said his mother. Nothing escaped his attention. He even arranged her furniture. He called reporters regularly to tell them about her efforts for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. He said proudly that she generated 25 percent of the charity’s income.
The grateful Duchess rewarded him with lavish gifts: a $1,500 Louis Vuitton trunk embossed with his initials; a Tag Heuer watch; Turnbull & Asser shirts with an oversize pocket for his mobile phone; a coffee machine from Harrods; silk burgundy boxer shorts; a trip to Paris; and a $20,000 birthday party under a canopy with a jukebox playing his favorite songs.
For her thirty-third birthday he reciprocated with $1,000 worth of lingerie, including a $330 teddy and a $22 garter belt.
“They tried to top each other with extravagance,” said a friend, who decided that John Bryan won with his trip to Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1992. “At least in terms of radioactive publicity.” He was alluding to the fallout from photographs that were secretly taken through the far-seeing lens of a long-range camera as the Duchess and her lover cavorted by a pool. She was without the top of her red-and-yellow-flowered bikini, and the pictures from that topless romp on France’s Côte d’Azur produced a mouthwatering scandal.
Sarah was captured on film as she lolled on a chaise alongside Bryan, whose bald head gleamed in the sun. The camera caught him lifting her foot to kiss her instep. Click. He massaged her leg, nuzzled her shoulder, and rubbed her breasts. Click. Click. She slathered suntan oil on his bald head. He climbed out of his chaise and lay on top of her. Click. Click. Click. She put her arms around him and kissed him on the lips
. Click. Click. They shared a cigarette. Playing alongside them were Sarah’s two children; next to the children were their two royal protection officers, sunbathing. They later lost their jobs.
The embarrassing photos were published when Sarah was vacationing with the royal family at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. She had arrived with her estranged husband and their children for a week. On the morning of Thursday, August 20, 1992, the Duke and Duchess appeared for breakfast while the children remained in the nursery. Sarah and Andrew had been warned that the photos were to be published, but they had not seen them. So they were unprepared for the shock: the front page of the Daily Mirror featured John Bryan in swimming trunks lying on top of Sarah, who was bare-breasted. “Fergie’s Stolen Kisses,” blared the headline. The Evening Standard ran the photos under the banner “Duchess in Disgrace.”
When Sarah saw the newspapers on the table, she went white. “I almost heaved,” she recalled. Within seconds the Duke of Edinburgh was standing at her side. Months before, he had dressed her down for attending Elton John’s fortieth birthday party when newspapers said the singer was involved in a sex scandal. He criticized her for lending her royal presence to someone who was the subject of lurid headlines. She felt vindicated when the rock star collected a $1.8 million out-of-court settlement from the Sun for falsely accusing him of using the services of a male prostitute. But by then Philip had moved on to blame her for embarrassing the royal family by going on a ski holiday during the Gulf War. So now Sarah braced herself for another blast.
But Philip, who was known to be a womanizer, looked at her with sympathy. “Look,” he said softly, “you may like to know that there but for the grace of God go I.” He straightened his shoulders and announced loudly that he intended to go grouse hunting with Charles and Andrew. Abruptly he turned and strode out of the room.