The royals - Kitty Kelley [174]
Always a stickler for protocol, she had mastered the rudiments of form by the age of twelve, when she insisted her father dismiss a butler who didn’t know the difference between knickerbockers and plus fours. In a television interview after her engagement announcement, she was asked whether her uncle, who worked as a servant, would be invited to her wedding. “Of course he’ll be invited,” she said. “How absurd. But he’ll know the form well enough not to come.” Her comment was edited out of the interview. To a writer, she chided Prince Andrew for his less than elegant language. “He uses words that simply aren’t on,” she said. “He must have picked them up in the navy: mirror instead of looking glass; phone, mantelpiece, heads for lavatory—at least he doesn’t say toilet!”
As the Duchess of York, Sarah expected the salutation of Your Royal Highness upon introduction. After that she was to be addressed as ma’am. “It rhymes with Spam,” she said.
She knew she was entitled to a crest, so she designed one with a bumblebee and thistle and took the motto Ex Adversis Felicitas (“Out of Adversity Comes Happiness”).
After her marriage, she insisted on receiving public formalities from her family, which meant her father had to bow and her stepmother curtsy. She exempted her friends but instructed her staff to advise strangers about royal protocol. On foreign trips, especially to the United States, she had a written sheet of instructions issued to those present before she made her entrances:
1. Do not speak unless spoken to.
2. Do not offer to shake hands unless she shakes first.
3. Do not instigate any topic of conversation.
4. Address her by her royal title, which is not Your Majesty, but Your Royal Highness.
As Duke of York, Andrew received a pay raise from the Civil List to $100,000 a year in addition to his annual naval salary of $20,000. He also received income from a $1 million trust fund his mother had set up for him. But Fergie kept her $35,000-a-year job as a publishing assistant. The Queen paid for the $350,000 wedding and presented the bride with a diamond tiara, a diamond bracelet, and a diamond necklace. Her Majesty also gave the royal couple five acres of land and paid for the $7 million construction of Sunninghill Park, their forty-six-room mansion, which was five miles from Windsor Castle. “I did it for Anne,” said the Queen. “So of course I’ll do it for Andrew.” The rambling ranch-style house that Sarah and Andrew designed for themselves had twelve bedrooms, plus a swimming pool, a bomb shelter, and a medieval minstrel’s gallery. There were two master bedrooms and a master bath with musical toilet rolls that played “God Save the Queen.” The circular tub set in the middle of a white marble floor was so big that the builders called it HMS Fergie. Prince Philip said, “It looks like a tart’s boudoir.” The imposing residence was ridiculed as “a fifty-room pizza palace” and called “Southyork,” after the Southfork ranch in the 1980s television show Dallas.
On the morning of the wedding, crowds began assembling early to watch the royal procession of coaches and celebrities. Major Ferguson marveled at the masses of people, who were standing ten deep in some places along the streets. “Just look at all these people,” he said, “come to see my smelly little daughter.”
America’s First Lady, Nancy Reagan, had been preceded into Westminster Abbey by twenty-two U.S. Secret Service agents. Cosmetics tycoon Estee Lauder walked in behind movie star Michael Caine. Pop singer Elton John, in purple glasses and a ponytail, waved to the crowds, as did Prince Albert of Monaco. Minutes later Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arrived, but she was booed for having sent in mounted police to settle a miners’ strike.
The crowds erupted and cheered loudly when they saw the titian-haired bride, looking slim and lovely in her Victorian ivory gown. Royal trumpeters heralded her arrival as she stepped out of the glass coach. Trailed by 17½ feet of flowing satin beaded with anchors and the