The royals - Kitty Kelley [200]
His leased car accumulated so many parking tickets that he was arrested and fined $800. After paying the fine, he continued collecting parking tickets. Finally police booted and towed the car, and he was reduced to taking cabs. He hired an occasional limousine that he charged to his business—before the business collapsed. He rarely paid cash for anything, except occasional cocaine.* “Fergie sniffed a lot, too,” said Taki, who socialized with the couple. “I should know. I’ve done my share.”
Although Bryan was described as a Texas multimillionaire, he was born in Wilmington, Delaware. But at the age of nine he moved to Houston when his father divorced his mother and married a Texas heiress, Josephine Abercrombie. During this second marriage, his father began an affair with (and later married) Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz, the wife of the Sakowitz department store heir Robert Sakowitz—who was Steve Wyatt’s uncle.
Bryan bragged to one writer that he was part of “the American establishment” because his godfather was Felix DuPont, and his mother, who had married three times, was listed in the Social Register. He boasted to girlfriends that his mother had once dated Frank Sinatra and that his British-born father had graduated from the Harvard Business School.
“It is perhaps no coincidence,” said Pamela Zauderer Sakowitz after her divorce from Bryan Sr., “that Johnny’s father seemed to single out wealthy, influential, and sometimes married women for conquests, me included.” Although his father had married four times and very well, he had never married a duchess.
Skimming the surface of London society, John Bryan partied in expense-account restaurants and nightclubs like Annabel’s and Tramps. When he became the Yorks’ financial adviser, he moved into more rarefied circles. Still, the exclusive world of White’s and Brooks’s (private men’s clubs in London) eluded him. To British aristocrats he looked like an American hustler on the make. To the Duchess of York he looked like a man on a white horse.
He had promised to make her rich and restore her image. He revered her title as much as she did and commended her for correcting Maria Shriver on camera when the NBC-TV interviewer addressed her as Sarah Ferguson. “I’m Her Royal Highness,” Sarah pointed out. “I’m the Duchess of York.” Bryan emphasized to her the value of her title in the marketplace. “Your image is all you have,” he said over and over. “It is absolutely one hundred percent your biggest asset.”
Capitalizing on Fergie, he made her his biggest merger and acquisition. Within days of her separation from Andrew, Bryan took over her life. “When Sarah moved from Sunninghill Park to a rented house, Romenda Lodge in Wentworth, John assisted with details like staff contracts, rental negotiations, security, confidentiality agreements,” recalled her father, Major Ferguson.
After the move, Sarah said she would have a nervous breakdown if she didn’t have a vacation. So “J.B.,” as she and her children called him, arranged an extravagant six-week trip to the Far East. He planned the itinerary, complete with chartered flights, limousines, and luxury hotels. He said he paid for everything: $135,000. He joined the Duchess, her two children, their nanny, and their protection officers in Phuket, a resort island near Thailand, and traveled with them through Indonesia.
He was photographed traveling with the Duchess and described in the press as the unknown man who was seen carrying Princess Eugenie on his shoulders. He later explained that he was a family friend acting as a marriage counselor for the Duke and Duchess, trying to help them reconcile. He also said he had been asked by the Queen and Prince Andrew to handle Sarah’s finances. “It’s completely absurd to suggest that there is anything unprofessional in my friendship with the Duchess,” he said. “I am acting in a purely professional manner.”
Weeks later he and Sarah visited her mother on her polo pony breeding farm four hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Sarah wanted Bryan to advise Susan Barrantes on handling her husband’s estate.