Prologue
"I don't think before I act."
— SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS, SARAH, DUCHESS OF York repeated the words so often they were virtually a mantra: "I am my own person," she said. "I want to be myself." The problem was that Sarah, the woman beneath the top-heavy title which weighed her down like an over-jewelled tiara, did not know who she really was once she joined the Royal Family.
"You will tell me if I ever become too royal, won't you?" she begged someone who knew her well. When he later suggested she was becoming a trifle grandiose, she denied she had ever said it. She larked about with shopgirls in a designer's salon, then pulled rank with a ferocity that wiped the smiles off their faces. So often labelled headstrong and rebellious, she was misunderstood because, ultimately, she did not understand herself. "I just trust too many people, I'm too spontaneous and I don't think before I act," she said after four years of marriage. "I'm less spontaneous than I was, but only because I'm more aware of my responsibilities."
After five years, she knew what she definitely did not want and, in a very public fashion, she broke away from Prince Andrew and what she called the System. In the last interview she gave before the separation in March 1992, she told writer Georgina Howell: "I just wanted to get away. To get away from the System and people saying 'No, you can't, No, you can't, No, you can't.' That's what the System is."
"She seemed to me to be very crestfallen," Georgina Howell told the authors. "I got the impression that she had been trying very hard and hadn't got the credit due for her efforts. I thought she was very crushed."
At first scrutiny, Sarah Ferguson had seemed the perfect candidate to give Prince Andrew a thoroughly merited come-uppance after his years of philandering. She was his equal in so many ways and demonstrably his better in others. Even the natural advantage Andrew enjoyed as part of his birthright was not insurmountable. Sarah was elevated to Her Royal Highness the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced the couple man and wife in Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986. In terms of royal precedence, she outranked Anne, the Princess Royal, and Princess Margaret, and stood fourth only to the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Princess of Wales among women in all England and Wales.
Instant royalty, though, entailed even more dangers than instant fame alone because it embodied the power and privilege of a very real prerogative that few people were skilled enough to handle. That and the drawback of having to cope with one's in-laws, which in Sarah's case meant having the Queen, the Queen's mother, the Queen's husband, the Queen's sister and all the Queen's men stand in judgment on her every action. Or so it appeared.
The Yorks seemed so compatible they could have been made for each other, the joyous celebrators of this illustrious union had mistakenly decided, noting the physical magnetism which had drawn them together. If the initial passionate embraces witnessed outside the bedchamber were to be the touchstone of a lifelong partnership, the couple were ideally suited. At twenty-six, Sarah was an intelligent, sexually experienced young woman, well-endowed, sensual, vivacious and the exponent of a decidedly uninhibited sense of humour which Andrew found immensely appealing. Risque, some said. Filthy, said others. Her blue-grey eyes, however, gave a softer, more vulnerable quality to the promise of excitement that shone through her hair. Golden-red, some called it. Auburn, said others. Titian, said Prince Andrew gallantly, knowing she hated to be called a redhead.
The wedding picture was scarcely in its frame before people who had publicly admired her high spirits and beauty turned on her with a savagery that was bewildering in its intensity. She became Fergie the Frump, a walking disaster of fraught couture. Freebie Fergie signified her willingness to accept all the delights that her new status proffered. Diarists and headline writers loved to hate her.
"It used to bother me when I read criticisms of me in the newspapers," she said. "It was a mistake to read them. Now I have stopped." She might have tried to shrug it off, but she could still be hurt. The Killer Bimbos of Fleet Street saw to that. Most wounding of all, the Duchess of Pork testified to her weight problem. "I do not diet; I do not have a problem," she said and if she believed it nobody else did. She tried every diet from Cambridge to Crash, took courses of prescribed slimming pills, consulted unorthodox experts and worked out in the gym with manic energy because she so desperately wanted to lose weight. She was compared frequently and unfavourably with her sister-in-law, Princess Diana, whose own sylph-like figure, ironically, owed much to the cruel ravages of the eating disorder, bulimia nervosa. Even before the engagement was announced, Sarah's exploits with the outrageous Verbier Set were excavated from beneath the Swiss Alps, then passed off as growing pains common to the Sloane Ranger sisterhood of which she was a dedicated convert. One virginal royal bride was enough in the Equal Eighties.
Andrew, four months younger than his partner, was the Family's pin-up; its Robert Redford, in the words of Prince Charles. The Queen's favourite among her children, he was a war hero whose combat experience in the South Atlantic Campaign had matured him in ways that set him apart from Charles and Prince Edward. Charles was more a ceremonial warrior, and Edward had wisely side-stepped a career in the Royal Marines in favour of the theatre. They were all royals by birth, though, and Sarah was not. Like others before her, she found it incomprehensible that they were incapable of relating to ordinary people. Her Libran sun sign guaranteed that, in company at least, she would be an exciting communicator who could act as a stimulating foil to Andrew's shrewder Aquarian nature.
The couple had fallen deeply and deliriously in love with each other after Princess Diana had rekindled a childhood acquaintanceship by pushing them together during Ascot Week in June 1985. Maybe it would work, just maybe. The sceptics stifled their doubts and acquiesced to the popular notion that Sarah might well ruffle some of the stuffier shirts in the Palace. Perhaps she would survive where her predecessors, Antony Armstrong-Jones and Mark Phillips, had singularly failed. She tried, she really did; ultimately, though, she was defeated.
The wishful thinking that preceded her entry into the Royal Family had failed to appreciate the full power of the machiavellian intrigue which resided within the Queen's secretariat and Her Majesty's courtiers at Buckingham Palace. Monarchy's survival still depended largely on its mystique and distance from the masses. "Its mystery is its life," declared Walter Bagehot, the Victorian constitutionalist. "We must not let in daylight upon magic." But Bagehot did not have to contend with the insatiable appetite for royal trivia of a generation addicted to television and other outlets of a remorseless mass media. Virtually as soon as the honeymoon was over, the new Duchess of York showed that she intended to enjoy the spirit of another of Bagehot's homilies: "The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do." From day one, she threw open the shutters and let in daylight through curtains her mother-in-law would have wished to keep firmly shut. When the Duchess was told to obey, she reminded them that she was "not a person to obey meekly." Anyway, she had promised to obey only Andrew in her wedding vows. She was, in fact, temperamentally incapable of taking orders handed down from on high.
To Sarah, these initial skirmishes with Palace courtiers proved to her that an important principle was at stake: her inalienable right to "be myself." It was the very cornerstone of her self-esteem and she felt it was under attack. When the time came to explain some of her behaviour, she chose the unlikely venue of a drug-rehabilitation centre, where she told a small group of recovering addicts: "The Palace and the press want me to conform to an image—but I won't."
The superficial causes of what went wrong with her marriage were easy enough to list: Andrew's frequent and prolonged absences in the Royal Navy, Sarah's dedication to having "a fun time" which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of good taste, the pressures of motherhood to her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie and, above all, her extraordinary friendships with Steve Wyatt, the Texas oilman, and his American jetset buddy Johnny Bryan. It was her holiday on the French Riviera with Bryan—and publication of intimate photographs of Sarah and her self-styled financial adviser kissing beside a swimming pool— that proved the marriage was dead if not yet officially buried. Her membership of the Royal Family was instantly withdrawn. She packed her bags and fled Balmoral, the Queen's Scottish home, after the pictures were shown around the world.
The internal forces at work, however, were far more potent, partly because they were buried deep inside Sarah's psyche and tended to slip out unexpectedly. She had taken the symptoms of this inner conflict to a succession of faith healers, therapists, homeopaths, clairvoyants and astrologers. None could restore her to normality; none could save her marriage.
"She betrayed the image of a kind of iceberg of emotion, where a little is revealed and a lot concealed," said Georgina Howell. Marriage was torture for her because she lacked confidence and, no matter how well things might have seemed to be going, she felt threatened and anxious. She was incapable of being a slave to another person or to a system....
