The Royals

by Kitty Kelley

  Sarah stayed at Balmoral for three more days until Sir Robert Fellowes pointedly suggested she “might feel more comfortable taking the children home.” The suggestion carried the weight of an edict. Feeling the royal boot, she decamped.

  Since her separation, she had been prohibited from representing the royal family in public. She had shrugged off her exclusion from events like Ascot and Trooping the Color by saying, “What the hell? I’ll save on hats.” But she stopped laughing when she found herself locked out of her office at Buckingham Palace. She blamed the courtiers, whom she called “the Queen’s Rottweilers.”

  To her chagrin, newspapers around the world gave full play to her topless antics. “Monarchy in the Mud,” blared Italy’s La Stampa. The mass circulation Bild in Germany screamed, “Fergie Naked During Love Play.” The New York Daily News ran the photo of John (“I was not sucking her toes, I was kissing the arch of her foot”) Bryan under the headline “Toe Sucker and Duchess of Vulgarity.” USA Today: “The Lens Doesn’t Lie.”

  The editor of The Washington Post editorial page observed: “If your average American welfare mother had been photographed as she was, bare-breasted and fooling around with her lover in the presence of her toddler children, it probably would have been enough to get their caseworker a court order removing the kids from the home. We would have used words like ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘sick.’ ”

  But the Duchess’s mother defended her—sort of. “Sarah is not sorry because she was caught topless with Bryan,” Susan Barrantes told the Italian magazine Gente. “Being separated from Prince Andrew, she can do what she likes. But she is sad because she is sure… somebody… wanted to get at her and put her character in a bad light before the divorce.”

  John Bryan, who had tried but failed to get an injunction against publication of the photos, spun into action. “We’ll turn this around,” he promised Sarah. “You’ll see. We’ll turn this fucker around…. I’m going to have those Palace bastards by the balls.” He filed a $5 million invasion of privacy lawsuit in France against the photographer, who had dug a trench on private property and camped out for two days with his cameras’ high-powered lenses. Bryan also sued Paris-Match, saying the French magazine had intended to damage the Duchess. “From being an admired figure,” his lawsuit stated, “she has become a figure of ridicule.” A French judge agreed and awarded her $94,000, which she announced would go to the British Institute for Brain-Damaged Children. “It’s appropriate, don’t you think?” she said. “Most journalists are brain-damaged, too.”

  Still, she knew she looked foolish in the world’s press. “I’ve been criticized so much over the past seven years that I’ve lost all my confidence and self-esteem,” she said. She cried over the photo caption: “Fergie—The Final Footnote.” And she cringed when she saw sidewalk vendors in London selling chocolate toes. “It’s hell,” she told her father. “I can’t bear reading newspapers.” One English reporter wrote that since she had become the Duchess of York, “covering the royal family is like riding down a sewer in a glass bottom boat.” Some writers dredged history to draw mischievous parallels between Fergie and the fat, gaudy Caroline of Brunswick, who married the Prince of Wales in 1795. The English critic Max Beerbohm said of that promiscuous* Princess, “Fate wrote her a most tremendous tragedy and she played it in tights.”

  Sarah was not so carefree about her burlesque. She hid in her house for five days so she would not have to face people. One woman took pity and wrote a letter offering a “shoulder of friendship” to cry on.

  “I simply felt, ‘Poor thing!’ ” said Theo Ellert, who ran Angels International. The London-based charity raised money for children in Poland with leukemia. “The Duchess was at her lowest ebb, and when I suggested she come with me to Poland, she agreed instantly and said, ‘I need to think of others to take my mind off myself.’ ”

  John Bryan seized on the trip as an opportunity to repair her image. He was determined to showcase her as the do-gooding Duchess. “If we had to, we’d pay for the trip ourselves, so no one could accuse us of another Freeloading Fergie number,” he said to her secretary. “Forget the British press. We’ll get this on American television where it counts…. We’ll give exclusive access to someone like Diane Sawyer on Prime Time Live… she’s the best… she needs the ratings… but no personal questions… only a serious interview, substantive, about your work….”

  With frenetic energy he started negotiating behind the scenes. “He used a husband-and-wife team to front for him,” recalled the ABC-TV producer for Prime Time Live, “but he was definitely calling the shots.” Bryan told Sarah he would control the interview and the questions she would be asked. Diane Sawyer does not share that recollection. Sawyer’s producer recalled Sarah’s major concern was being asked about her relationship with the Princess of Wales and the rest of the royal family. “That worried her more than the toe-sucking pictures,” said the producer. At the end of the interview, Diane Sawyer slipped in a question about John Bryan. “What is the relationship? What can you tell us about him?”

  Sarah was prepared. “He’s done a wonderful job, helping me with all my financial work,” she said on the air, “and he’s been a fantastic friend.”

  “But he’s not just a financial adviser,” pressed Sawyer.

  “I didn’t say he was. I said he’s been a fantastic friend, helping me with financial work.”

  Despite her plucky performance, Angels International dropped her. “She had a bad image and they didn’t want her involved with them,” said Theo Ellert. “I said, ‘If you don’t want her, you can’t have me,’ and my services were dispensed with.” So Theo Ellert helped Sarah start her own charity, Children in Crisis, to raise money for youngsters in poor countries like Albania, Poland, and the former Yugoslavia. With this organization the Duchess finally had a vehicle for respectability. But she couldn’t follow the road map. “Sarah has had everything,” her father wrote in his memoir, “but she threw it away.”

  She tried to transform herself into a goodwill ambassador like the Princess of Wales but was criticized as self-serving. “I cannot think of anybody else I would sooner not appoint to this post [United Nations High Commission for Refugees],” said the Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn. “She is a lady short on looks, absolutely deprived of any dress sense, has a figure like a Jurassic monster, is very greedy when it comes to loot, no tact, and wants to upstage everyone else.” Fergie was not appointed.

  The Royal Army Air Corps would not accept her as its honorary Colonel in Chief because, according to a senior officer, she was “dowdy and we didn’t feel she had the right image.”

  When she took a group of mentally handicapped youngsters on a climbing expedition in Nepal, she was derided for checking into a suite at Katmandu’s most luxurious hotel. During the trek, she toted only her bottle of Evian water, prompting the Spectator to snicker:

  The grand old Duchess of York

  She had ten thousand men,

  She marched them up to the top of the hill

  And she marched them down again.

  When a twenty-two-year-old Sherpa accepted her invitation to leave his remote Himalayan village and return to Britain with her, she was accused of exploitation. “Perhaps the wayward duchess is simply keeping up the honourable aristocratic tradition of hiring a native and bringing him home,” sniffed the Daily Telegraph. The Sherpa, who had cooked her meals and carried her rucksack when she went mountain climbing, found himself doing much the same thing at Romenda Lodge. One woman said, “She was using him like a dogsbody, and he wasn’t being paid.”

  “He is a guest of the Duchess,” said her spokeswoman. “She thought it would be nice for him to see another part of the world.”

  Sarah, who was convinced that the Palace courtiers would use anything to hurt her chances for a hefty divorce settlement,* sent her Sherpa packing. Bryan tried to allay her fears, vowing again to negotiate “megamillions” for her. Eager to create a sympathetic climate, he tried to discredit her
husband.

  He called The People newspaper, a British version of USA Today, and said Prince Andrew was having an affair. “I know 100 percent he is going out with the girl, and I know she has spent the night a lot at South York,” said Bryan. “I will produce a name. But I want $30,000 because I’m going to have to go through his personal address book… and I want it on goddamn publication, baby. I want immediate payment.”

  The paper drew up a contract, and Bryan amended it three or four times. When he finally produced the name of Andrew’s alleged lover, the paper decided there was nothing to his story and didn’t publish it. Instead they printed their tape-recorded conversation with him: “Jetset John Demanded £20,000 for Andrew Lie.”

  Barely embarrassed, Bryan asserted it was just a practical joke. He said he was setting up the newspaper. But Sarah was livid. “She screamed at me, ‘You do not do that sort of thing to the Duke of York—it’s totally irresponsible,’ ” Bryan confided to a friend as he recounted his regular rows with the Duchess. On that occasion she threw him out of the house. But days later they made up, and he moved back in. As a welcome home present, she gave him a silver globe of the world, inscribed “Together We Can Conquer It.”

  After the damaging photographs of their cozy romp on the Côte d’Azur had been published, the couple decided to be discreet. In the belief that they could conceal their affair, they no longer appeared in public together. When Bryan traveled from London to Sarah’s house in Surrey, she sent a member of her staff to meet him at the train station. Disguised in a baseball cap and sunglasses, he hid in the trunk of her car and was smuggled into Romenda Lodge like stolen goods. Publicly Sarah professed to be confused about divorcing Andrew. She said she considered him to be “my very best friend.” But privately she complained about him. “I think she felt she could never go to bed with him again,” said Theo Ellert, “that their sex life had not been good from the beginning and couldn’t be saved now.” Mrs. Ellert made her comments after she and the Duchess had parted bitterly; she said Fergie had not supported her as chief executive of their charity. “I think she believed that I was deflecting the glory from herself.”

  Seeking guidance from everyone around her, Sarah consulted her circle of psychics, astrologers, and fortune-tellers. She called New Age mystics in Los Angeles, mediums in New York City, and channelers in London. She also consulted a Bosnian priest who was known at the shrine of Medjugorje as “the Eyes of Christ.”

  “Go back to your husband,” Father Svetozar Kraljevic counseled her. “The best thing for you, for your soul, for your children, and for the royal family is for reconciliation.”

  “I can’t,” moaned Sarah. “If I did, I would have to lead the life of a nun.”

  The monk recommended she spend time with some nuns in a convent in Bosnia. “They will teach you how to lead a celibate life,” he said.

  Dismissing his stern advice, she turned to her friend Alistair McAlpine, who wrote about their private lunch: “She has often asked advice, thanked the giver profusely, but gone the way she wished in the first place. Perhaps she feels that those who give her advice will go away satisfied with just the honor of having had her ask. How terribly she misunderstands human nature.”

  Sarah told Lord McAlpine that she wanted to divorce her husband. “He is so boring,” she said. “He only wants to play golf and watch science-fiction videos.”

  Lord McAlpine advised her against divorce. “It was at this point she informed me the Princess of Wales had had it in mind to leave her husband on the same day but had decided to postpone that event for a month or two, in the Duchess’s words, ‘to see how I get on.’ ”

  While Diana stayed on the bus, Sarah decided to hop off. But she said she was nervous about public reaction and the way she would be treated by the royal family. McAlpine explained, “She meant, of course, financially.”

  Like a squirrel scampering to find nuts, John Bryan scurried in all directions trying to generate money for Sarah. He was never off the phone. Bombarding the media with proposals, he hawked her to the highest bidder: $25,000 for exclusive photo shoots, $50,000 to $200,000 for exclusive interviews. He dictated the rules to journalists: he provided the questions and demanded editorial control of the answers. When he negotiated a cover story with Harpers & Queen magazine, he insisted on their best fashion photographer, then demanded copyright to the photographs. “Do you know how many pictures she uses in a year?” he argued. “We send out a thousand, maybe two thousand pictures sometimes. She needs pictures for charity brochures, programs, book jackets, Christmas cards… She wants free and unencumbered use of the pictures for private purposes, to exploit them any way she wants to.”

  In his demands the deal maker became as noisy and disruptive as a high-speed water bike roaring up the Thames. “Mr. Bryan had everyone curtsying and making tea,” recalled one frazzled editorial assistant. “He was remarkably quick to shout, ‘Ma’am, if you please,’ if one of us forgot for a moment to grovel to Her Royal Highness.”

  Put off by his hustle, the magazine finally withdrew from negotiations because Sarah would not be interviewed. She wanted her picture featured on the glossy cover but did not want to submit to questions. She phoned the editor, Vicki Woods, to try to change her mind. Miss Woods later wrote that she was exhausted from the round of “hideous telephone calls” she had been receiving from John Bryan.

  “Poor you,” Sarah told Miss Woods. “I know you think I just see myself as a celebrity… but I’m a serious person and I’m not doing this just so that I can get free Christmas cards or something….”

  The editor told the Duchess she could make her own arrangements with the photographer, but the magazine could not pick up the tab without getting an interview from her. Sarah pleaded Palace protocol. She told the editor: “It’s always me who has to carry the can; it’s always me who gets the blame for this kind of thing; it’s always my fault, and I’ve had enough of it; that’s why I want out of the whole thing, so I can get on with my own life…. I’m so tired of carrying the can for all of them. I’ve been the scapegoat of the Waleses for the past four years.”

  After the photo shoot, John Bryan called to taunt the editor about the pictures. “This is the hottest set of photos I’ve dealt with ever,” he said. “You really lost out…. We were only ever gonna [sic] do this in our style. She’s a goddamn pro. She’s not some dead, common, fucking trashy little model.”

  Over the next sixteen months he jetted from New York to London to Paris, making deals for Her Royal Highness. He tried to sell her as a model, a writer, an ambassador. He courted publishers and producers to sell Budgie—The Little Helicopter as a television cartoon series. “That property was totally dead when I got hold of it,” he recalled. “It had no credibility, nobody would deal with it—nobody would touch it with a ten-foot pole….”

  But he managed to sell Budgie for television, and then he sold commercial rights to Budgie trinkets: water wings, swimsuits, beach towels, greeting cards, gift wrap, night-lights, lampshades, balloons. The lucrative contract guaranteed the Duchess $3 million, plus a percentage of sales. The British media reported the transaction with a little awe and a lot of envy.

  The Queen Mother heard the news as she sat in her drawing room at Clarence House, sipping a gin and tonic. She would have two more tipples before she picked up the telephone and called the Queen.

  “I can assure you she was not drunk,” said a former butler, offended by the suggestion. “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother does not get drunk. And on that particular evening, she wasn’t even tipsy.”

  The Queen Mother listened carefully to the news report on television:

  The Duchess of York is set to make eight million pounds [about $12 million],” intoned the broadcaster, “as her book, Budgie—The Little Helicopter, takes off on TV channels around the world. The Duchess has sold her book to be made into a television series. She also signed licensing contracts with thirteen American firms to market souvenirs ranging from tablew
are to lavatory seat covers.

  “Lavatory seat covers? Did he say lavatory seat covers?” asked the Queen Mother.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the butler said with a sigh. “I’m afraid he did.”

  The Queen Mother motioned for another gin and tonic and requested the day’s newspapers. Within minutes her drink was freshened from the table that served as a bar in her living room. Finding the newspaper took a little longer; she rarely read anymore because of the cataract in her left eye. The butler appeared with a copy of the Daily Mail of that day, April 19, 1994, and opened the paper to the story that concerned her.

  She remained impassive as he read aloud the report of the Duchess’s weekend visit to Cannes: Sarah had held what she described as a “power dinner” for two hundred key buyers attending the world’s largest convention of television programmers.

  “I’m absolutely delighted,” Sarah was quoted as saying. “I’ve made merchandising deals all over the world from the little book I wrote in 1989.”

  The Queen Mother sighed but appeared benignly detached. She had never uttered a word of criticism about Sarah Ferguson—publicly. She had even feigned serenity when she heard about Fergie’s clowning at her expense. The boisterous Duchess had been seen tearing through the food halls of Harrods department store in London, where she spotted a biscuit tin bearing the Queen Mother’s likeness. She astonished onlookers by banging on the lid and shouting, “Are you in there, dear?”

  During monthly planning meetings with her staff, Sarah further rattled sensibilities by referring to the death of the Queen Mother as a way of getting out of engagements she did not want to do. One participant recalled, “If there was a tricky commitment in the offing, she would say, ‘Oh, well, look on the bright side—the Queen Mum might die and we’ll have to cancel everything because of mourning.’ ”

  From the pinnacle of public esteem, the Queen Mother gazed down on Sarah Ferguson. On the surface both women shared certain characteristics. Each was a commoner who had married the second son of a monarch to become the Duchess of York; each was the mother of two daughters. Both were friendly, ingratiating, strong-willed women who thrived in the spotlight; both were outrageous flirts who loved being the center of male attention. The Duchess gravitated to young heterosexuals, while the Queen Mother contented herself with elderly homosexuals. She called them “my knitting circle” and “the Queen’s queens.” So indulgent was she toward her high-camp coterie that she once buzzed the Clarence House pantry and said, “When you old queens stop gossiping down there, this old queen up here needs a drink.”