The royals - Kitty Kelley [204]
The grand old Duchess of York
She had ten thousand men,
She marched them up to the top of the hill
And she marched them down again.
When a twenty-two-year-old Sherpa accepted her invitation to leave his remote Himalayan village and return to Britain with her, she was accused of exploitation. “Perhaps the wayward duchess is simply keeping up the honourable aristocratic tradition of hiring a native and bringing him home,” sniffed the Daily Telegraph. The Sherpa, who had cooked her meals and carried her rucksack when she went mountain climbing, found himself doing much the same thing at Romenda Lodge. One woman said, “She was using him like a dogsbody, and he wasn’t being paid.”
“He is a guest of the Duchess,” said her spokeswoman. “She thought it would be nice for him to see another part of the world.”
Sarah, who was convinced that the Palace courtiers would use anything to hurt her chances for a hefty divorce settlement,* sent her Sherpa packing. Bryan tried to allay her fears, vowing again to negotiate “megamillions” for her. Eager to create a sympathetic climate, he tried to discredit her husband.
He called The People newspaper, a British version of USA Today, and said Prince Andrew was having an affair. “I know 100 percent he is going out with the girl, and I know she has spent the night a lot at South York,” said Bryan. “I will produce a name. But I want $30,000 because I’m going to have to go through his personal address book… and I want it on goddamn publication, baby. I want immediate payment.”
The paper drew up a contract, and Bryan amended it three or four times. When he finally produced the name of Andrew’s alleged lover, the paper decided there was nothing to his story and didn’t publish it. Instead they printed their tape-recorded conversation with him: “Jetset John Demanded £20,000 for Andrew Lie.”
Barely embarrassed, Bryan asserted it was just a practical joke. He said he was setting up the newspaper. But Sarah was livid. “She screamed at me, ‘You do not do that sort of thing to the Duke of York—it’s totally irresponsible,’ ” Bryan confided to a friend as he recounted his regular rows with the Duchess. On that occasion she threw him out of the house. But days later they made up, and he moved back in. As a welcome home present, she gave him a silver globe of the world, inscribed “Together We Can Conquer It.”
After the damaging photographs of their cozy romp on the Côte d’Azur had been published, the couple decided to be discreet. In the belief that they could conceal their affair, they no longer appeared in public together. When Bryan traveled from London to Sarah’s house in Surrey, she sent a member of her staff to meet him at the train station. Disguised in a baseball cap and sunglasses, he hid in the trunk of her car and was smuggled into Romenda Lodge like stolen goods. Publicly Sarah professed to be confused about divorcing Andrew. She said she considered him to be “my very best friend.” But privately she complained about him. “I think she felt she could never go to bed with him again,” said Theo Ellert, “that their sex life had not been good from the beginning and couldn’t be saved now.” Mrs. Ellert made her comments after she and the Duchess had parted bitterly; she said Fergie had not supported her as chief executive of their charity. “I think she believed that I was deflecting the glory from herself.”
Seeking guidance from everyone around her, Sarah consulted her circle of psychics, astrologers, and fortune-tellers. She called New Age mystics in Los Angeles, mediums in New York City, and channelers in London. She also consulted a Bosnian priest who was known at the shrine of Medjugorje as “the Eyes of Christ.”
“Go back to your husband,” Father Svetozar Kraljevic counseled her. “The best thing for you, for your soul, for your children, and for the royal family is for reconciliation.”
“I can