The royals - Kitty Kelley [171]
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.”
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