The royals - Kitty Kelley [169]
Susan Ferguson denied having an affair with Prince Philip during her first marriage and swore that she had been faithful to her husband. “It was Ronald who had been seeing other women,” she wrote in her memoir, “even while I was pregnant…. His flirtations caused me a lot of suffering…. I cried endlessly.”
But she did not write about her relationship with Prince Philip after the end of her second marriage. Her daughter Sarah, though, frequently touched on the secret romance. She mentioned to acquaintances in New York City that her mother had been with Philip in Argentina during a World Wildlife Fund visit in November 1992. “It was the night of the Windsor Castle fire, which also happened to be the Queen’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary,” recalled one of Fergie’s confidantes. “While Philip was with Susie in Buenos Aires, the Queen was by herself running pails at Windsor, trying to put out the fire.” Ronald Ferguson was not surprised. “I always suspected that Prince Philip had an eye for Susie,” he wrote in 1994. “Certainly, they remain friends to this day.”
After sixteen years of marriage, Susan Ferguson left Ron Ferguson for another man and lost custody of her children. Her two daughters remained in England with their father in the Hampshire village of Dummer, sixty miles southwest of London. Once the divorce was final, Susan Ferguson married Hector Barrantes, a dashing Argentinian, who had been Ronald Ferguson’s keenest rival on the polo field. The couple moved to Buenos Aires, where Barrantes raised and trained some of the world’s best polo ponies.
“Major Ron remained bitter for years,” said writer Nicholas Monson. “He was still bleeding about his divorce when I interviewed him in 1986, and asked if Argentina could not play England in polo because of the Falklands War. ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘Argentina can’t play here because one of those bastards ran off with my wife.’ ”
Major Ferguson admitted he was traumatized by his divorce. “It was a bit of a fright, to put it mildly, for everyone,” he said. “It meant that at that vulnerable age my daughters didn’t have Mother, so Father took over and did his best.” He never forgave his wife. “That woman, you must remember, deserted her children,” he told friends. He remarried in 1976 and started another family with Susan Deptford, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. Sarah jokingly introduced her to friends as “my wicked stepmother.” The second Susan Ferguson soon learned that she, too, would have to contend with humiliation by a philandering husband.
“It’s very acceptable behavior for some men,” said Ronald Ferguson after he was caught patronizing a massage parlor employing prostitutes. “In fact, it’s what I first liked about Prince Andrew. He had acquired quite a reputation as a ladies’ man, for which I was rather relieved. He was a normal young sailor who had had a string of girlfriends; it all seemed very healthy as far as I was concerned.”
Ever since Andrew’s publicized love affair with the American actress Koo Stark, the Prince had been described in the press as “Randy Andy.” During their romance, the tabloids had published nude pictures of Koo when she appeared as a lesbian in one of Britain’s biggest-earning soft-porn films. These photographs showed her taking a shower with another woman. Months later the tabloids published pictures of Andrew as he skinny-dipped in Canada: “It’s strip ahoy as naked Prince Andy larks about in the River.” One downmarket magazine printed the photograph with a poem:
A rose is red
Koo is blue
Andy is Randy
What’s HM to do?
On television,