The royals - Kitty Kelley [192]
“This must be such a disappointment for you,” he said, peering over his steel-rimmed glasses. Turning to leave, he added, “I know it is for Her Majesty.”
Fellowes, or “Bellowes,” as Fergie called him, was her father’s first cousin and a man she came to detest. She dreaded his visits to her office. He always arrived looking dour and brandishing a pile of clippings that chronicled her latest misadventure. She told friends she got a stomachache as soon as she saw him approaching her door. “He could hardly wait to show me the story of the MP who said I was flagrantly abusing the royal name,” she said.
“He was her Lord High Executioner,” said a New York businesswoman whom the Duchess had adopted as her unofficial adviser. “Bad-news Bellowes, as we called him, made Sarah’s life a living hell. She had to stand alone against that unremitting Palace machine which wanted nothing so much as to extinguish her delightful spirit. She had no one to help her. Not even her husband. As much as Andrew loved Sarah, he would not defend her against the courtiers. He was simply too terrified of them.
“She felt the weight and power of the monarchy crashing down on top of her; she knew she was in trouble, but she had no adult in her life to advise her. No one in the Palace wanted to help her. The Queen adored her, but the Queen is not the power in the Palace. Prince Philip runs everything, and once he had decided that Sarah was not worth the trouble she was causing, she was finished. Away at sea every week, Andrew was never there for her. Neither was the Princess of Wales, who saw her as a rival. Sarah’s mother was dealing with a dying husband in Brazil. Her sister, Jane, was dealing with her own divorce in Australia. And Sarah’s father was no help whatsoever after he became involved in his own sex scandal. So, as her friend, I stepped in and tried to help.”
The New Yorker advised the Duchess to improve her image by performing more royal duties and becoming active with charities for crippled children and the mentally retarded. “I told her to take a page from Diana’s book,” the adviser said. She explained the on-again, off-again friendship between the Duchess and the Princess as fraught with rivalry and petty jealousies. “Sarah felt that she was being sacrificed to make room for Diana as the future Queen. She resented the unfair comparisons in the press between them—Diana was depicted as a loving mother while Sarah looked like a wench who abandoned her children for months on end to go on luxury holidays.”
Her ski guide in Switzerland, Bruno Sprecher, described her as a woman who did not like other women. “She could always ski well,” he said, although she stopped every twenty minutes for a cigarette, “and was great chums with the men in the party, but she didn’t like female competition.”
Her New York adviser saw it differently. “Unfortunately, Sarah was too forthright for her own good. She admitted she never liked babies much before she had her own. Diana, of course, was portrayed as a madonna who adored children. But Sarah had reservations about Diana as a mother, especially when she tried to alienate her boys from Charles. She [Diana] constantly asked the little Princes, ‘Who loves you the best? Who loves you more than anyone else in the whole world?’ And the boys were supposed to say, ‘You do, Mummy. You do.’ Sarah felt that was troubling. She also did not agree with the hateful picture Diana painted of Charles, who, Sarah said, was just not that bad. Obtuse, yes, but definitely not the monster Diana said he was.”
The New York adviser continued: “Sarah never publicly criticized the Princess of Wales—she wasn’t that stupid—but there were many times when she felt badly used by Diana. For instance, the Princess was no comfort to her during the lurid business with her father. [In May 1988 Major Ron was exposed by the tabloids as a regular patron of massage parlors. Private Eye ran a competition for anagrams of “Ronald Ferguson.” Winners were “organ flounders” and “old groaner’s fun.” Four years later his love affair with