The royals - Kitty Kelley [198]
On her return flight to London, she started drinking again. After two glasses of Champagne she began throwing sugar packets at her father. She lobbed wet towels at his mistress and tossed peanuts around the cabin. “Then Sarah pulled a sick bag over her head,” recalled the Major’s mistress, “and started making telephone noises into it. We shrieked with laughter like silly schoolgirls.” Other passengers watched the rumpus. Among them, three journalists taking notes.
“The way that story was embroidered,” huffed Major Ferguson, “convinced me more than anything else that the press was out to discredit my daughter.”
Two months later, on March 19,† 1992, the Palace announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were separating. The Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, privately briefed the BBC correspondent, who reported, “The knives are out at the palace for Fergie.” The BBC man said the Queen was very upset with the Duchess, and the rest of the royal family considered her unsuitable to be among them.
“I was furious,” recalled her father, “and rang Sir Robert Fellowes, and told him how monstrous I thought it was… it was unforgivable.”
The courtier responded coolly. “It’s my job,” he said, “to protect the family, and particularly the Queen. I have to.”
“You don’t have to go that far,” said Ferguson.
Eventually the press secretary apologized to Sarah for his indiscretion and offered his resignation to the Queen, who did not accept it.* Rather, four years later, she knighted him.
“Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” That’s the word Lord Charteris used—in triplicate—to damn the Duchess. Charteris, the Queen’s former private secretary, denounced Sarah in a Spectator interview with journalist Noreen Taylor. And a columnist for The Mail on Sunday, John Junor, condemned the Duchess as “highly immoral.” He ran her down as the “royal bike”—ridden by everyone.
By this time she was thoroughly disgraced as a wife and as a mother. But even more disheartening for her was the news that the man she called the love of her life, Steve Wyatt, was leaving her life for another wife: he was marrying an American society beauty, Cate Magennis. When he told Sarah the news, she struggled to wish him well. But she admitted later that she almost cried. After the wedding she said, “I can’t have the man I love because he’s got married. What’s the matter with me? Why wouldn’t he marry me?”
In Wyatt’s wake, another smooth-talking Texan was already circling in the waters. “If you want to ride swiftly and safely from the depths to the surface,” Truman Capote wrote in a novella, “the surest way is to single out a shark and attach yourself to it like a pilot fish.”
For the next three years it would be difficult to distinguish between the shark and the pilot fish, but the Duchess was about to embark on the ride of her life.
EIGHTEEN
He’s absolutely brill about money,” burbled the Duchess of York. “Really, really brill.”
In her slangy way, Sarah was describing John Bryan to her husband as brilliant. She recommended they sit down with the thirty-five-year-old American to discuss their finances. “He can help,” she said. “I just know he can.”
By 1991 the Duke and Duchess were spending four times their annual income, and the Queen was balking at paying their overdrafts. Sarah, who spent wildly, refused to cut back. The worse her marriage became, the more money she spent, running up staggering bills. Her kitchen staples included caviar, raspberries (in season and out), a variety of imported cheeses, and at least thirteen flavors of ice cream. In one year she spent $102,000 for gifts and $84,560 on psychics. Then Steve Wyatt introduced her to his friend Anthony John Adrian Bryan Jr., known to his family and