The royals - Kitty Kelley [196]
“Do you really feel that strongly?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” said the Major. “Stop. Now.”
“You surely can’t expect me to stay in on my own night after night,” she retorted. She didn’t speak to her father for six months.
“Other people advised Sarah to stop seeing Steve Wyatt,” admitted Major Ferguson, “and they weren’t spoken to for months, either.”
Steve Wyatt had been adopted by his mother’s second husband after his natural father, Robert Lipman, was convicted of killing a woman during a drug overdose and served six years in prison for manslaughter. Steve idolized his freewheeling stepfather, Oscar Wyatt, and rarely referred to his natural father. If asked about him, Steve implied that Lipman had died before he was born. From his mother, Steve had learned the basics of moving in high society; he flattered rich wives and deferred to their rich husbands.
Steve and Sarah spoke the same New Age language of mystics and channelers and crystals full of electromagnetic fields that they fancied as healing and restorative. She told him about the voices she heard in her head and the spirits that protected her from harm. He told her he slept with one of Madame Vasso’s pyramid shields over his bed to protect his psyche. He meditated every morning and ate a macrobiotic diet. “He bored everyone to tears by talking about diets and good karma and the rest of the bullshit modern Americans pollute us with,” said the columnist Taki.
Wyatt despised cigarettes, so Sarah tried not to smoke in front of him. A physical fitness enthusiast, he said, “Mah body is mah temple.” The Duchess said she’d like to start worshiping. Both laughed heartily.
The day after the dinner party, Oscar Wyatt proposed an aerial view of his 29,000-acre ranch near Corpus Christi; he flew Sarah in his private helicopter and allowed her to take over the controls. Steve marveled at her flying skill. “Did your husband teach you how to do that?” he asked.
“My husband doesn’t have much time to teach me anything,” she said.
“What a waste,” said Wyatt. He was entranced with the Queen’s daughter-in-law and let her know.
Sarah had given him her private phone number at the Palace and told him to call her when he returned to London. When he did, she immediately invited him over for drinks. He reciprocated with parties, restaurant dinners, and holidays. She visited him in his apartment in Cadogan Square. Weeks later she introduced him to her unsuspecting husband, and when Andrew returned to sea, she brought Wyatt into their Berkshire home. She invited him to their housewarming party, to their daughter’s christening, and to dinner with her in-laws. She even gave him a place of honor next to the Queen.
Shortly after Andrew returned to his ship in January 1990, Sarah called him, saying she felt despondent. She asked how they could continue a marriage that was subjected to month-long separations. Andrew reminded her of what he had said before they married: he was a prince and a naval officer before he was a husband. He suggested she was feeling overwhelmed because of her pregnancy, but she insisted she wanted to escape from their marriage and the Palace courtiers. “I want to live in Argentina with my mother,” she wailed. Their conversation was tape-recorded by a stranger, who had eavesdropped on his scanner, and sold the tape to a British newspaper.
Andrew rushed home for the March 23, 1990, birth of his second daughter and stayed six weeks. While he and the nanny took care of the new baby, Steve Wyatt flew Sarah and two-year-old Beatrice in a private plane to Morocco for a holiday. The next month Wyatt flew Sarah to the South of France, where his mother had rented a villa. Weeks later, in August 1990, he asked her to entertain Dr. Ramzi Salman, Iraq’s oil minister, at Buckingham Palace. Sarah did not hesitate.
She invited her lover and his Iraqi business acquaintance to dinner in her second-floor suite at the Palace. Naively she did not consider the political ramifications