The royals - Kitty Kelley [167]
“The designer, Lindka Cierach, was going through hell getting Sarah slimmed down—and calmed down. We treated her at the clinic with needles and prescriptions, and my partner also treated her at Buckingham Palace, where she was living. But, after a few sessions, we washed our hands of her. She expected us to be on call for her around the clock: if she was bingeing, we were supposed to drop everything and treat her. If she was overwrought, we were supposed to tranquilize her. If she was hung over, we were supposed to give her massages. Whether it was food, sex, or alcohol, her appetites were out of control; she did everything to excess—everything. She abused herself with too much cocaine, too many amphetamines, too much Champagne. Food, food, food, and sex all the time.”
The spring of 1986 was a trying time for Sarah Margaret Ferguson, the twenty-six-year-old known as Fergie, who was engaged to marry Prince Andrew. “Sarah definitely needed help,” said Lindka Cierach, “and I tried to get it for her…. I would take her through the back door of the clinic and let her pay me for the treatments so no one would know.”
The announcement of her engagement to marry HRH Prince Andrew had thrilled her family. The Prince’s valet, James Berry, recalled her father’s reaction when the news became public. “He hopped up and down on one leg in sheer happiness, chewing his fingers on one hand, and letting out shouts of joy.”
“We did get quite emotional about it,” admitted Sarah’s stepmother, Susan Ferguson, who months later was still awestruck. The Socialist Worker, a British newspaper, had reported the news under the headline “Parasite to Marry Scrounger.” The February announcement had jolted the Queen’s press secretary, who had been advising reporters for months to disregard the relationship on the assumption that the exuberant Fergie would be just one more conquest for the Queen’s twenty-six-year-old son.
Andrew, who had developed a reputation as a love-’em-and-leave-’em bachelor, seemed to prefer actresses and models, and freckle-faced Fergie certainly did not fit the mold.
“I remember Michael [Shea] inviting two of us onto the royal yacht, Britannia, for a briefing on the Andrew and Fergie romance,” recalled Steve Lynas, then a reporter for Today newspaper. “Shea reassured us, ‘There is no chance of these two becoming engaged.’ We filed accordingly. But within a couple of days, the engagement was announced.”
One cartoonist greeted the news by drawing the couple as Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. They stood before a preacher. “Do you, Raunchy, take Randy Andy, to be your lawful…”
Burke’s Peerage, the bible of the aristocracy, was aghast that Prince Andrew, fourth in line to the throne, would choose a woman like Sarah Ferguson, “whose private life has, by the traditions of the royal family, been not only unorthodox, but well documented in the national press… six previous romances in six years… far more than Victorian in nature.”
Sarah’s father, Ronald Ferguson, a former army major, snorted with derision. “If she didn’t have a past at twenty-six,” he said, “people would be saying there was something wrong with her.”
Precisely because of her background, some thought Fergie was ideal for Andrew, who defined making love as “horizontal jogging” and whose idea of playfulness was to jam a live lobster down the front of his date’s bathing suit. His boisterous style puzzled his friends. “I asked him about this once,” said Ferdie Macdonald, who knew the Prince as a young bachelor. “ ‘Why are you always squirting girls with water, sir, and throwing things at them?’ I said. He seemed baffled. ‘They like it, don’t they?’ he said. ‘When I squirt them with water they squeal. Doesn’t that mean they like it?’ ”
Fergie, too, liked to play hard and play around. She made no apologies for her raffish love life. “I am a modern woman,” she said. She swore easily, smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, and swapped dirty jokes with the boys. In one of her first television interviews, she used the word “prick.” Wisecracking and raucous, she acted like the only dame