The royals - Kitty Kelley [188]
“The Princess of Wales escapes such censure because she is prettier,” wrote Sunday Times columnist Craig Brown, “and less, well, obvious than the Duchess of York. It is the peculiar capacity of the duchess to mirror modern Britain, its gaudiness, its bounciness, its rumbustious lack of mystery.”
Within the first year of her marriage, the Duchess of York became the Duchess of Yuck. She took 120 days of vacation, yet she complained about overwork. She carried out 55 royal duties during the year, compared with 429 for Princess Anne. That earned Sarah Ferguson the title the Duchess of Do Little. When she gained fifty pounds during her first pregnancy, she was dubbed the Duchess of Pork. When she accepted free first-class plane tickets, free hotel suites, and free limousines, she became “Freeloading Fergie.” She also accepted free watches from Cartier and free luggage from Louis Vuitton. As the Duchess of Dough, she expected payment for interviews and asked designers to give her expensive clothing. French couturier Yves St. Laurent agreed to, but British designer Zandra Rhodes turned her down flat, saying, “I don’t need the publicity.”
Sarah careened into controversy like a drunk with vertigo. She was seen in public playfully tossing bread rolls at her husband. On another occasion she emptied a salt shaker in his hair and squirted him with Champagne. As the auctioneer for a charity benefit, she exhorted bidders to pledge more money. “Come on, George,” she hollered at one startled man, “your wife wants it b-i-g.” At a private party for a Middle Eastern emir, she dropped to the floor in front of forty guests and screamed at a female stripper, “Take it off! Take it off!”
“Fergie thinks by throwing food around, she can identify with the lower orders, which only revile her vulgarity,” said columnist Taki Theodoracoupolos. “If you want to clear a room in London and get rid of stragglers who’ve stayed on too late, just say: ‘Oh, Fergie. At last. How are you?’ People will start running. Whenever Philip wants to make the Queen laugh, he picks up the phone and says, ‘What? You say that Fergie has been hit by a truck and run over?’ ”
The press even took potshots at her when she went deer hunting with the royal family in Scotland and bruised her forehead on the telescopic sight of her rifle. One columnist said she was sorry to hear that Fergie had hurt herself while “pursuing the innocent girlish pleasure of murdering a large mammal for sport.”
“To a certain extent,” admitted her father, “becoming Duchess of York did go to her head. She didn’t always read the rule book properly. In the royal family, certain privileges are there for the taking, but there have to be limits. Sarah thought she could get away with much more than she did. In those early days, Andrew should have been strong enough to guide her and advise her, but he didn’t.”
Andrew did not hesitate to rebuke her in public when she acted up, especially if she had been drinking. Once, after he corrected her, she wheeled on him. “Why do you have to keep embarrassing me and pointing it out in front of other people when I get things wrong?” she asked. “It’s not very charitable. Sometimes you’re as bad as your father.”
Fergie, who resented her negative press coverage, tried to ingratiate herself with reporters, while Andrew ignored them. “Don’t talk to them,” he advised her. “They’re knockers. They create heroes and then knock them down.”
“What can I do?” she said to a friend. “Andrew tells me to take no notice, but he’s away on his ship, not in the midst of things.”
The press criticism abated slightly in February 1988 when the Yorks agreed to a tour of Los Angeles to promote British arts and industry. Sarah, three months pregnant, arrived wearing French couture. But she quickly disclosed that her underpants were made in Britain.
“My knickers are from Marks and Sparks,” she chirped, using the nickname for Marks & Spencer, the budget department store where middle-class