The royals - Kitty Kelley [202]
When Sarah saw the newspapers on the table, she went white. “I almost heaved,” she recalled. Within seconds the Duke of Edinburgh was standing at her side. Months before, he had dressed her down for attending Elton John’s fortieth birthday party when newspapers said the singer was involved in a sex scandal. He criticized her for lending her royal presence to someone who was the subject of lurid headlines. She felt vindicated when the rock star collected a $1.8 million out-of-court settlement from the Sun for falsely accusing him of using the services of a male prostitute. But by then Philip had moved on to blame her for embarrassing the royal family by going on a ski holiday during the Gulf War. So now Sarah braced herself for another blast.
But Philip, who was known to be a womanizer, looked at her with sympathy. “Look,” he said softly, “you may like to know that there but for the grace of God go I.” He straightened his shoulders and announced loudly that he intended to go grouse hunting with Charles and Andrew. Abruptly he turned and strode out of the room.
Sarah stayed at Balmoral for three more days until Sir Robert Fellowes pointedly suggested she “might feel more comfortable taking the children home.” The suggestion carried the weight of an edict. Feeling the royal boot, she decamped.
Since her separation, she had been prohibited from representing the royal family in public. She had shrugged off her exclusion from events like Ascot and Trooping the Color by saying, “What the hell? I’ll save on hats.” But she stopped laughing when she found herself locked out of her office at Buckingham Palace. She blamed the courtiers, whom she called “the Queen’s Rottweilers.”
To her chagrin, newspapers around the world gave full play to her topless antics. “Monarchy in the Mud,” blared Italy’s La Stampa. The mass circulation Bild in Germany screamed, “Fergie Naked During Love Play.” The New York Daily News ran the photo of John (“I was not sucking her toes, I was kissing the arch of her foot”) Bryan under the headline “Toe Sucker and Duchess of Vulgarity.” USA Today: “The Lens Doesn’t Lie.”
The editor of The Washington Post editorial page observed: “If your average American welfare mother had been photographed as she was, bare-breasted and fooling around with her lover in the presence of her toddler children, it probably would have been enough to get their caseworker a court order removing the kids from the home. We would have used words like ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘sick.’ ”
But the Duchess’s mother defended her—sort of. “Sarah is not sorry because she was caught topless with Bryan,” Susan Barrantes told the Italian magazine Gente. “Being separated from Prince Andrew, she can do what she likes. But she is sad because she is sure… somebody… wanted to get at her and put her character in a bad light before the divorce.”
John Bryan, who had tried but failed to get an injunction against publication of the photos, spun into action. “We’ll turn this around,” he promised Sarah. “You’ll see. We’ll turn this fucker around…. I’m going to have those Palace bastards by the balls.” He filed a $5 million invasion of privacy lawsuit in France against the photographer, who had dug a trench on private property and camped out for two days with his cameras’ high-powered lenses. Bryan also sued Paris-Match, saying the French magazine had intended to damage the Duchess. “From being an admired figure,” his lawsuit stated, “she has become a figure of ridicule.” A French judge agreed and awarded her $94,000, which she announced would go to the British Institute for Brain-Damaged Children. “It’s appropriate, don’t you think?” she said. “Most journalists are brain-damaged, too.”
Still, she knew she looked foolish in the world’s press. “I’ve been criticized so much over the past seven years that I’ve lost all my confidence and self-esteem,” she said. She cried over the photo caption: