The royals - Kitty Kelley [194]
The Duchess’s New York adviser had her hands full: “The newspaper stories about Sarah became so horrendous that I finally told her to stop giving interviews because her spontaneous comments were killing her. She would say something light and humorous that was invariably misinterpreted or came out sounding brash and stupid. So her secretary began telling reporters to submit their questions in writing. Sarah would fax the questions to me with what she’d like to say; I’d edit her comments and fax back what she should say. That worked for a while….”
The New York businesswoman tried to protect the Duchess from the press, but the Duchess’s worst enemy was the Duchess herself. She didn’t follow her friend’s advice or learn from her own mistakes. Instead she bemoaned her public image and blamed everyone around her—the courtiers, the press, the Princess of Wales (“I know she leaks stories about me,” Sarah said), her father, and even her husband, whom she now described to friends as “boring… a darling, but a boring darling.” She complained that Andrew did not make enough money to maintain a royal lifestyle. Enthralled by the big-spending ways of her new American friends, especially Croesus-like Texans, she set out to augment her income.
During her first pregnancy, she decided to write a children’s book, although she admitted that her best subject in school had been modern dance. Her headmistress at Hurst Lodge once described her in a school report as “an enthusiastic pupil who makes a cheerful contribution to life at the Lodge… [but]… consistently fails to do herself justice in written work.”
Undaunted, Sarah said she didn’t want to sound like a writer who swallowed the dictionary. So she put her name to a simple story about a helicopter called “Budgie” (slang for the budgerigar parrot) that is looked down upon by the bigger aircraft, until he does something heroic. “I sat down at the dining room table with a big pile of scrap paper, the backs of photocopied stuff and printouts,” the Duchess told Publishers Weekly, “and started writing with just one pencil.”
With that one pencil she made a fortune. She received a $1 million advance from Simon & Schuster, and within three years she had produced four Budgie books; they earned more than $2.5 million from serial rights, foreign rights, and paperback rights. Later, with the help of her financial adviser, she sold merchandising rights, including rights to cartoons, wind-up dolls, T-shirts, hats, and lunch pails. The books became best-sellers in England, despite literary critics who dismissed them as “bland and ghastly” and “utter rubbish.”
Sarah was so severely criticized for marketing her royal title that Robert Fellowes sternly suggested she consider donating at least 10 percent of her royalties to charity. She balked at first, saying Budgie was her only source of significant income. But she backed down as soon as she realized that the “suggestion” had come from Her Majesty. Sarah knew those royal demands usually came through the thin lips of Robert Fellowes. When she was accused of plagiarism,* she announced that she would donate† “a certain percentage.” But, after making the public announcement, she reconsidered and kept the royalties. Then her Budgie books hit severe turbulence.
An observant reader was struck by several similarities between Budgie—The Little Helicopter