The royals - Kitty Kelley [207]
The sixty years that separated the Queen Mother from the Duchess of York defined their differences. The older woman was traditional; the younger woman was modern. The former accepted the high price of membership in the royal family; the latter refused to pay the dues. Consequently the Dowager Queen was revered as a royal who retained the common touch; the young Duchess was reviled as merely common.
After the butler had read the Cannes story to the Queen Mother, he handed her the newspaper. But she waved it away in disgust. “Not even Wallis at her worst was this blatant,” she said, referring to her implacable enemy, the Duchess of Windsor. She ordered another gin and tonic and picked up the telephone to call her daughter the Queen.
“That was the kiss of death for Fergie,” said a Clarence House servant. “You can chart her downfall from that evening.”
Most of Sarah’s perquisites had already been stripped from her—the royal guards, the royal train, the royal duties, the royal invitations. Deprived of postal privileges, she was no longer allowed to send her letters free. She had been barred from accompanying her husband and their children to Windsor Castle over Easter, but the Queen felt bad about having to exclude her. As Sarah told her father, “I’m not going. Andrew’s going. Apparently the Queen wants me, but the rest of the family don’t.”
Sarah had lost her seat in the royal box at Wimbledon, and her life-size wax figure had been yanked from Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Denied entry to the royal enclosure at Ascot, she looked pathetic as she stood on the side of the road, clutching the hands of her children and waving to the Queen as she passed in her royal carriage. Without Her Majesty’s continuing tolerance, the Duchess would lose what little remained of her standing in British society. And she didn’t stand a chance of retaining the Queen’s affection without the goodwill of the Queen Mother.
Shunned by the Palace, the Duchess soon despaired. She sought help from a psychiatrist. But with no royal protection officers she no longer had privacy, and her psychiatric visits became public. A newspaper photographer followed her to the mental health clinic and snapped pictures of her arriving and leaving.
“It’s been terrible,” said Fergie. “All I can do is pray to the Lord for help.”
At the age of ninety-four, the Queen Mother knew better than to waste time on the Duchess. At this point she was worth only a telephone call. After the Queen Mother had a word with Her Majesty, she felt confident that the family would finally be rid of the troublesome young woman, who later embarrassed them even more by announcing that she had been tested three times for AIDS.
The Queen Mother knew there was still the pesky matter of a divorce settlement, but that was only money. Once it was paid, the Duchess of York would be nothing more than a red-haired footnote to history. The elderly Queen knew better than to get distracted by a sideshow. As the center pole holding up the big tent, she stayed focused on the main event and conserved her dwindling energy for what was happening inside the three-ring circus.
NINETEEN
The sixty-eight-year-old Earl Spencer was ill with pneumonia in a London hospital, and Diana visited him the day before she left to go skiing in Austria. She hadn’t spoken to her father for several months, and when she visited him, she took her children for their softening presence.
Unfortunately, none of the Earl Spencer’s other children had been speaking to him at the time of his death. “It is a matter of great regret,” said his son, Charles, “that no one was with him when he died.” The children had been feuding over the renovations of Althorp and had publicly criticized their father and stepmother for their plans to pay for the $3.5 million restoration. The children had accused the Earl and his wife of flogging the family name and selling off heirlooms, including eleven Van Dyck paintings, to “tart up” the dilapidated estate, as Diana described the redecoration of Althorp. She