The royals - Kitty Kelley [168]
She said she suffered severe migraine headaches because of the frequent falls from her ponies when she was a child. A daredevil athlete, she won championship ribbons for skiing, swimming, and horseback riding. After competing in a steeplechase at midnight, she was awarded honorary membership in the Dangerous Sports Club, enabling her to wear the DSC badge of golden crutches. She was the only woman in the race. She never outgrew being the roughhousing tomboy who climbed trees and played pranks. She walked like a cowhand, with bowed legs and big strides, and she talked out of the side of her mouth.
Her classmates at Hurst Lodge, a boarding school in Sunningdale, Berkshire, remember her for her hearty appetite. They called her “Seconds” because she lined up twice for every meal. Expansive and enthusiastic, she was also generous, sometimes embarrassing her friends by sending them huge bouquets and expensive presents. To support herself, she worked odd jobs—sales clerk, messenger for travel agents, waitress, driver, and tour guide. To pay for ski trips to Switzerland, she worked as a chalet girl and cleaned hotel rooms.
Barely educated beyond high school, she took a course at Queen’s Secretarial College in London. “She does not show the influence of too many schools,” noted one of her teachers. When she finished at the bottom of her class, she bragged that she’d barely learned how to type. Shrugging happily, she said, “I’d rather ride than read.”
Her father also preferred horses to books. When Major Ron, as he liked to be called, was accused of using his daughter’s engagement to better himself, he insisted he did not need social advancement, especially through the royal family. “My mother was born Marian Louisa Montagu Douglas Scott, daughter of Lord Herbert Montagu Douglas Scott, the fifth son of the sixth Duke of Buccleugh,” he said. “To my amusement, Mother’s family have always regarded their Buccleugh lineage as being socially superior to that of the Windsors!” Ferguson made sure the press knew that his family tree included four dukes and such ancestors as King Charles II and his mistress Lucy Walters. The Major was also a cousin of Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary.
The Times wrote that Sarah Ferguson descended from landed gentry, landowners rather than aristocracy, with generations of service in the cavalry: “Every generation, down to her father, has held a commission in the Life Guards,” the newspaper noted. “It is a family of old money, but not much.”
The pursuit of money became a necessity in 1970, when Major Ron accepted the unpaid position of polo manager to Prince Charles. Having flunked the examination to become a colonel in the Life Guards, which ended his advancement in the military, the Major resigned from the army. He opened an office in the Guards Polo Club in Windsor, where he tacked a pinup calendar on the wall. Even as a civilian he insisted on his military rank. “Most people address me as Major,” he told a writer who had called him Mr. Ferguson. He entitled his memoir The Galloping Major.
The Prince of Wales was twenty-one years old when he offered Major Ferguson the honorary job of arranging his polo games, and Ferguson, a passionate polo player, accepted gratefully. He solicited corporate sponsors like Cartier and Rolex, who were eager to be associated with the Prince of Wales, and asked them to underwrite polo tournaments and cover the Prince’s expenses. This lucrative patronage also included handsome compensation for the Prince’s polo manager himself.
“Ronald was delighted to get the offer from Prince Charles,” recalled his first wife, Susan. “It allowed him to spend a lot of time with the Prince, and it also enabled Ronald to stay in the world which interested him most, the world of horses.”
Two years later, in 1972, the Fergusons separated when Sarah and her sister, Jane, were teenagers. Ronald Ferguson intimated to friends