by Kitty Kelley
“The Queen was hopping mad,” recalled a secretary. “She said she didn’t see any difference between the prestigious publisher of T. S. Eliot and the lurid Murdoch press.”
Her Majesty had previously sued Murdoch’s Sun for publishing breakfast-in-bed details about Prince Andrew’s entertaining women in his private apartment at the Palace. “The women were always young and fanciable,” a former Palace pantry aide told the tabloid, “and Andrew was always so sure of his chances—so cheeky—that he would order double bacon and eggs the night before.”
In selling his story, the former aide violated the confidentiality agreement he had signed as a condition of employment. The Queen was more incensed by his breach of contract than she was by his revelations. But Murdoch’s paper paid the servant more than half ($3,500) of what he made in one year working for the Queen. So the former kitchen helper spilled the beans. He said Andrew’s lover, Koo Stark, romped through the Palace kitchen in short skirts and skimpy T-shirts, wearing the bright red dogtags that Andrew had given her after the Falklands War. The actress, four years older than Andrew, issued orders to the staff, organized picnics for herself and the Prince, and helped herself to the Queen’s favorite chocolates. The first installment of the story ended with a titillating headline about the Princess of Wales: “Tomorrow: When Barefoot Di Buttered My Toast.”
The Queen, who was on tour, contacted her lawyers in London, and within hours they obtained a permanent injunction. The next day’s headline: “Queen Gags the Sun.” The Queen then sued Murdoch for damages, and the Palace justified the monarch’s unprecedented action with a terse statement:
The servant has breached an undertaking of confidence which all palace employees sign. In this declaration, they agree not to make any disclosures about their work at the palace. It is a legally binding document under civil law.
“We might have to move toward some policy of sanction,” the Palace press secretary warned royal reporters. “The line must be drawn between legitimate public interest, which all members of the royal family recognize, and prurient interest in their private lives.” The Queen was awarded damages of $6,000. The Sun agreed to pay the amount to the Newspaper Press Fund, plus payment of the Palace’s legal costs.
The Duke of Edinburgh phoned his son and told him that his love affair with Koo Stark was over. “It’s finished, Andrew,” Philip said sternly. The twenty-three-year-old prince did not even think of protesting. He was too afraid of his father and too afraid of embarrassing his mother. In love, but immobilized with fear, he did not know what to do. So he did nothing. Despite avowals of love to Koo Stark and a marriage proposal, he now drew back. He never apologized or explained. He simply did not call her or accept her calls.
“Koo Stark’s life was ruined as a result of Andrew,” said her friend Louise Allen Jones.
Although stunned and heartbroken, Koo Stark departed gracefully and maintained a discreet silence. She married months later and tried to resume her acting career. But she could never shed the identification with Andrew. Her marriage ended in divorce several years later, but she did not see Andrew again for years. Although he dated other women, he remained in love with Koo until the Princess of Wales decided to distract him with her friend Sarah Ferguson.
Diana had met Fergie at a polo match before her marriage, and they quickly became friends. They shared a fascination with astrologers, clairvoyants, and tarot card readers and compared notes on each of their sessions. During her marriage, Fergie regularly visited the basement apartment of a London faith healer known as Madame Vasso, who placed her under a blue plastic pyramid and chanted. Fergie said the Madame cleansed her while performing psychic cures.
Sarah had attended Diana’s wedding and visited her several times in Kensington Palace when Diana was depressed, always making her laugh. She was the only person invited for lunch at Buckingham Palace on Diana’s twenty-first birthday. “She’s great fun,” Diana told Andrew, who was her favorite in-law. She submitted Sarah’s name to the Queen as someone young and single to include in the Windsor Castle house party for Royal Ascot week.
At the time, Fergie had hoped to marry Paddy McNally, a race car driver she had been living with on and off in Switzerland. She had proposed to him several times in their three-year relationship, but McNally, a forty-eight-year-old widower with children, kept saying no. Finally she issued an ultimatum: Either marry me or I’ll leave. He offered to help her pack.
“She’s been badly treated by men,” said her friend Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine.
As her father had done to her mother, McNally frequently reduced Sarah to tears by openly pursuing other women. Now, hoping to make him envious, she waved the Queen’s invitation for Royal Ascot. He responded by encouraging her to take advantage of the opportunity to socialize with the royal family. He even drove her to Windsor for the weekend and deposited her into the hands of a royal footman. McNally cheerily waved good-bye and told her to enjoy herself.
Over lunch before the races, Sarah and Andrew became acquainted. Rather, reacquainted: they had met as children, twenty years earlier, at a royal polo game. At this reunion he fed her profiteroles and she punched him in the arm, saying they were much too fattening. He tried to stuff them into her mouth, and she laughingly threatened a food fight. Both rowdy and rambunctious, they shared the same lavatory sense of humor and fondness for bodily noises—belches, burps, and grunts. “She whooped and hollered at all his fart jokes,” recalled the waiter who served them at Windsor Castle. “As a joke, she later gave him an anatomically correct doll, and he displayed the ghastly thing in his suite at Buck House.”
The gauche Prince, who banged his silverware on the table and helped himself to food before others were served, was described by some acquaintances as “Germanic, boorish, and a show-off just like his father.” Others applauded him as the only one of the Queen’s children “to pursue an honest-to-God job in the navy.” He also studied photography and played golf like a pro.
Like his great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father, Andrew had bypassed a university education to join the Royal Navy. When he went into the service, he was second in the line of succession, so he was accorded the privileges of royalty. He did not eat with the rest of the officers and insisted on having meals served to him in his private cabin. The chest patch on his flight suit read “HRH Prince Andrew.” His nickname was “H” for Highness.
In 1981 he made a twelve-year commitment to the navy. The next year, during the Falklands War, he distinguished himself as a helicopter pilot. By the time he met Sarah in 1985, he was a lieutenant aboard the frigate HMS Brazen. A few days after Royal Ascot, he returned to his ship. But before going aboard, he sent Sarah roses and signed the card “A.”
The Princess of Wales helped the courtship along by arranging to visit Andrew’s ship with her four-year-old son, Prince William. She invited Sarah as her lady-in-waiting, and the press turned out in full force to photograph them. Fergie was startled by the media clamor.
“God, what’s this all about?” she said with a gulp as photographers pressed in.
“Keep smiling,” whispered Diana as she held her son’s hand. “Whatever you do, just keep smiling.”
The Princess later invited Sarah and Andrew to spend private weekends at Highgrove, where the housekeeper remembers Fergie’s pocketing the crested stationery and asking for more. “I’ve just got to send some letters on Highgrove paper,” she said, giggling. “I promised a friend, who will be so terribly impressed.” The housekeeper brought her extra stationery along with her clean laundry. “Every time she came,” the housekeeper recalled, “we had to wash and iron all her dirty clothes.”
Most of the courtship was conducted on weekends in the privacy of friends’ country estates, where guests remember an unmistakable physical attraction between the couple and incidents of exuberant horseplay. On one winter weekend in 1985, during a game of hide-and-seek, Andrew hid under a table, and Sarah, who was blindfolded, crawled aroun
d the floor looking for him. When she found him, she pinched his behind—hard. “Steady on!” he shouted. “You’re not allowed to squeeze the royal bottom yet!” That evening he proposed.
Sarah replied, “When you wake up tomorrow morning, you can tell me it’s all a huge joke.”
The next morning Andrew proposed again and gave her a $37,000 ruby ring.
Sarah immediately called her father. “Dads, he’s asked me to marry him,” she yelled. “I made him propose twice, just to be sure.” She cautioned her father not to say anything until Andrew received the Queen’s permission to marry.
Intent on ingratiating herself with the royal family, Sarah spent weekends at Windsor when Andrew was home on leave. She took morning horseback rides with the Queen, something Her Majesty was never able to do with Diana, who was afraid of horses. Diana had been thrown as a child and broken her arm; since then she had not ridden. Unlike Diana, Sarah enjoyed playing charades and all the card games that Her Majesty liked. “Sarah cheats even more than my mother at Racing Demon,” the Queen told Sarah’s grandmother. The Queen called her future daughter-in-law by her Christian name. “It was never Fergie,” recalled an aide, “always Sarah.” Her Majesty enjoyed the spirited rapport between her son and his fiancée and observed approvingly, “He’s met his match this time.” Trading barbs with Prince Philip, Fergie laughed uproariously at his off-color jokes and asked him to teach her his favorite sport of competitive open-carriage driving. “I think she will be a great asset,” Philip told the press. Prince Charles agreed. “She’s so spunky, so enthusiastic,” he marveled. “Delightful company. Just delightful.”
Andrew was clearly besotted. “I know that the decision I made to marry Sarah was, and always will be, the best decision I have made, or ever will make in my life,” he said. He felt especially reassured when she announced plans to take forty hours of flight training so she could share his career as a helicopter pilot. “She’ll be a great navy wife,” he told his family.
In Andrew, Sarah had finally found a man who treated her respectfully. “The most important thing that I felt… is his amazing ability to make one feel like a lady, like a woman…. I just couldn’t get over how in my life outside, as I call it, there were so many men strutting around thinking that they were so smart while they were being so foul to women.”
Eager to prove herself, Sarah offered to accompany Andrew on one of his few royal duties. As the couple walked through the corridors of a convalescent home, she spotted the pool used for physical therapy and flippantly suggested that Andrew take a dip. She knew he was afraid of water and had not learned to swim. He smiled at her remark but looked slightly embarrassed. “Oh, dear,” she told a patient, “he thinks I’m getting too excited.”
Sarah raved to her father about her weekends at Windsor Castle. “She’s either in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family,” Major Ron told the press, “and I think it’s the latter.” The royal family welcomed Sarah Ferguson into their midst, but other people questioned her suitability. Some patricians felt she would make royalty a roadkill. “Mark my words,” predicted Ruth Fermoy, lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. “Nothing good will come from that common girl.”
At least one Fleet Street editor agreed with the straitlaced aristocrat. “Fergie will topple the House of Windsor,” predicted Brian Vine of the Daily Mail.
The fashion press took Sarah to task for being “stout,” “full figured,” and “Rubenesque.” One columnist called her “the future Duchess of Pork.” Another said, “She’s as hearty and down-to-earth as a potato.”
“I am not fat,” she said defensively, “and I do not diet. I do not have a problem. A woman should have a trim waist, a good ‘up top,’ and enough down the bottom but not too big—a good womanly figure.”
When hers was displayed at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, the sculptor, who had taken her measurements, would not divulge them. So one newspaper gleefully estimated 39-49-59 and said: “Here comes the bride, 41 inches wide.” During a ride up an escalator, the wind blew Fergie’s skirt above her knees as photographers snapped away. The picture was published over the caption: “Her Royal Thighness.”
“Fergie is a jolly hockey-sticks type of girl,” said one fashion editor. “A breath of fresh air. Lots of bounce. Yes, bounce. Very bouncy. Rather like a bouncing ball.”
Without makeup and her hair in a ponytail, Fergie looked like the country cousin lost in the city. Snobbish fashion designers considered her a disaster—all freckles and frizzy hair—but the public embraced her freshness and accepted her oversize dresses and run-down heels. So did the Queen, whose only advice to her future daughter-in-law was to wave more slowly. Fergie imitated the Queen’s wave, which she called “screwing in lightbulbs.” But she was as herky-jerky as a week-old puppy, never learned restraint. Instead she bounded into crowds like a glad-handing politician. “Hi ya, hi ya, hi ya,” she would say, pumping hands and collecting bouquets.
By then the Princess of Wales had become the darling of the British fashion industry, and in her designer clothes she radiated so much cinematic glamour that she was called the popcorn Princess. Reader’s Digest called her “The World’s Number One Celebrity.” An international survey of magazines in 1986 reported her face graced more covers than that of any other woman, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Fergie in her baggy jumpers and horizontal stripes was relegated to covers of Saddle Up and Weight Watchers.
“Some of the clothes Sarah wore were awful,” admitted her father, “but she would not be told.” Understandably, she was wounded by the unkind fashion commentary, especially the comparisons with the Princess of Wales. “I don’t want to be a Diana clone,” she wailed.
“Not to worry,” retorted British Vogue.
Fergie tried to pretend she didn’t care about being svelte and elegant, but she begged her wedding dress designer Lindka Cierach to make her look beautiful. She felt the pressure of five hundred million people who would be watching the wedding on television.
On the morning of the wedding, July 23, 1986, the Queen invested her son with the titles of Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killyleagh. His bride, Sarah, became Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York. The title had not been conferred since 1936, when the previous Duchess of York became the consort Queen. She was now Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and at the age of eighty-six she remained the most beloved figure in the country. Sarah’s sudden elevation to royalty entitled her to be addressed as Your Highness and to receive a respectful bob of the neck from men and deep curtsies from women, except for the only three in the realm who outranked her—the Queen, the Queen Mother, and the Princess of Wales. Fergie said she was “blissed out” by the title.
Always a stickler for protocol, she had mastered the rudiments of form by the age of twelve, when she insisted her father dismiss a butler who didn’t know the difference between knickerbockers and plus fours. In a television interview after her engagement announcement, she was asked whether her uncle, who worked as a servant, would be invited to her wedding. “Of course he’ll be invited,” she said. “How absurd. But he’ll know the form well enough not to come.” Her comment was edited out of the interview. To a writer, she chided Prince Andrew for his less than elegant language. “He uses words that simply aren’t on,” she said. “He must have picked them up in the navy: mirror instead of looking glass; phone, mantelpiece, heads for lavatory—at least he doesn’t say toilet!”
As the Duchess of York, Sarah expected the salutation of Your Royal Highness upon introduction. After that she was to be addressed as ma’am. “It rhymes with Spam,” she said.
She knew she was entitled to a crest, so she designed one with a bumblebee and thistle and took the motto Ex Adversis Felicitas (“Out of Adversity Comes Happiness”).
After her marriage, she insisted on receiving public formalities from her family, which meant her father had to bow and her stepmother curtsy. She exempted her friends but instructed her staff to advise strangers abou
t royal protocol. On foreign trips, especially to the United States, she had a written sheet of instructions issued to those present before she made her entrances:
1. Do not speak unless spoken to.
2. Do not offer to shake hands unless she shakes first.
3. Do not instigate any topic of conversation.
4. Address her by her royal title, which is not Your Majesty, but Your Royal Highness.
As Duke of York, Andrew received a pay raise from the Civil List to $100,000 a year in addition to his annual naval salary of $20,000. He also received income from a $1 million trust fund his mother had set up for him. But Fergie kept her $35,000-a-year job as a publishing assistant. The Queen paid for the $350,000 wedding and presented the bride with a diamond tiara, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond necklace. Her Majesty also gave the royal couple five acres of land and paid for the $7 million construction of Sunninghill Park, their forty-six-room mansion, which was five miles from Windsor Castle. “I did it for Anne,” said the Queen. “So of course I’ll do it for Andrew.” The rambling ranch-style house that Sarah and Andrew designed for themselves had twelve bedrooms, plus a swimming pool, a bomb shelter, and a medieval minstrel’s gallery. There were two master bedrooms and a master bath with musical toilet rolls that played “God Save the Queen.” The circular tub set in the middle of a white marble floor was so big that the builders called it HMS Fergie. Prince Philip said, “It looks like a tart’s boudoir.” The imposing residence was ridiculed as “a fifty-room pizza palace” and called “Southyork,” after the Southfork ranch in the 1980s television show Dallas.
On the morning of the wedding, crowds began assembling early to watch the royal procession of coaches and celebrities. Major Ferguson marveled at the masses of people, who were standing ten deep in some places along the streets. “Just look at all these people,” he said, “come to see my smelly little daughter.”
