The royals - Kitty Kelley [190]
The next night, at the Biltmore Hotel, Sarah appeared in a long black gown wrapped with galloping puffs of orange silk. The designer Mr. Blackwell pronounced the dress “God-awful” and pushed her to the top of his Worst-Dressed List for 1988 as “the Duchess who walks like a duck with a bad foot.” Her long red hair was twirled and twisted into a hive of fussy curls held in place by diamond combs with corkscrew ringlets cascading to her shoulders. The effect was startling, even by Hollywood’s excessive standards.
As she approached the microphone that evening, she looked around at the audience of 750 people, who had paid $1,000 each to be in the presence of royalty. She winked broadly at Roger Moore, the master of ceremonies, and spotting the actor George Hamilton, she smacked her lips. “All these men around here,” she said lustily.
An exuberant male guest shouted, “We love you, Fergie!”
She yelled back, “I’ll see you later.”
“That was it for Fergie,” said columnist Ross Benson, shaking his head sympathetically. “That was the beginning of the end. I filed a story that she had been a great hit in the United States, but the rest of the British press turned on her with a vengeance. They said her behavior was disgraceful, and with the inherent snobbishness of this country, they dismissed her as the ill-bred daughter of a stable boy in a blazer.”
The Yorks traveled from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, where they were weekend guests of Walter and Lee Annenberg at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ 208-acre desert estate. The former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain and his wife greeted the royal helicopter on their private runway. The Annenbergs had arranged for a flotilla of golf carts with Rolls-Royce hoods to transport the Duke and Duchess, their dressers, their aides, their guards, and their luggage.
Fergie hopped out of the helicopter with a large gold clasp in her hair fashioned like a guitar with the word “ROCK” on it. Andrew wore tasseled loafers. They jumped into two of the Annenbergs’ golf carts and, like little children in bumper cars, drove up and down the runway with clownish abandon.
The next day they attended a polo game and a black-tie dinner party in the evening at the Annenberg estate. “Oh, it’s just for a few friends,” said Mrs. Annenberg of her party for one hundred people. U.S. State Department dogs sniffed for bombs as the movie stars and socialites arrived. Actor Michael York (“No relation,” joked Fergie) took pictures, and the Duchess asked Frank Sinatra to sing her a song; he obliged with “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
“I’m offended—absolutely—by the criticism the Duke and Duchess have received from the British press,” snapped Los Angeles’s Chief of Protocol. “Mayor Bradley found the Duchess to be great fun, and their royal tour of Southern California was a huge success.”
Other Americans rallied to Fergie’s side, finding the madcap Duchess immensely likable with her manic mugging and breezy asides. “It doesn’t matter that Fergie’s fashion statements sometimes end up with a question mark,” said USA Today. “When a personality sparkles like hers, she could wear a lampshade and still light up a room.”
Fergie, in turn, appreciated Americans. “I love visiting the United States,” she told a National Press Club audience in Washington, D.C., several years later, “because Americans are so nice to me. I could’ve been an American in my last life.” The audience cheered, apparently not realizing that the Duchess believed in reincarnation. She said she especially enjoyed her trips to New York City. “That’s where I really load up,” she said about her marathon shopping sprees. On one return trip to London, an airline charged her $1,200 for fifty-one pieces of excess baggage.
“Those U.S. jaunts began to cost her dearly in terms of her image here,” said British journalist Ingrid Seward, who was also a personal friend.
But Sarah didn’t care. With her husband away at sea, she was bored. So she began flying the Concorde to New York, where her presence triggered shameless jockeying