The royals - Kitty Kelley [275]
More than a decade after the stench of the royal son and daughter-in-law had been evaporated, the News of the World struck again. This time the tabloid caught the Duchess of York selling herself for a mess of pottage. At the time, people around the world were transfixed with horror, watching the video of BP’s oil spill forty miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico. Interrupting round-the-clock coverage of the worst environmental disaster in history, Fergie’s video on May 23, 2010, was almost comic relief.
Days later the disgraced Duchess announced she was going on The Oprah Winfrey Show to explain what had happened. For one long hour she braided herself into knots with a yarn about why she had accepted bribes and sold access to her former husband. She said she grabbed the first bag of money ($40,000) “for a friend of a friend,” who was in financial trouble. Then, seeing how easy that take was, she upped her ante and demanded $750,000 for full and complete access to Prince Andrew.
Watching the video of herself falling for the sting, she said, “Oh, I feel so sorry for her… Bless her… Oh, she’s completely drunk.” She talked about herself in the third person as if to draw a distinction between the greedy woman on camera and the humiliated person sitting in front of Oprah. Tripping over her rationale, the Duchess got tangled in her convoluted skein about accepting money for “a friend of a friend,” and Oprah, to her credit, said her explanation made no sense.
Oprah, whose net worth is $2.4 billion, could not fathom why the Duchess hadn’t simply asked the Queen for the $40,000 she claimed she needed “for a friend of a friend.” Obviously, Oprah’s producers had not told her that the door of Buckingham Palace had clanged shut on Sarah Ferguson in August 1992, when photographs of her romping topless on the Côte d’Azur splashed across the tabloids. She was having her toes sucked by her lover John Bryan, who she said was “just a friend.” He protested he was not sucking her toes: “I was kissing the arch of her foot.”
After that Sarah got the royal boot and a not-so-royal divorce settlement from the Queen’s favorite son. When Oprah asked if it was true that she had gotten only $20,000 a year in alimony, Sarah should have answered: “No, it’s not true.” Instead, she shimmied. “I wanted friendship with the boss,” she said, leaving the impression that she had given up great gobs of money to remain in the good graces of Her Majesty.
In fact, Sarah had demanded a lump-sum payment of $10 million, plus $5,000 a month in child support, and her title. She received $750,000 for herself, and a $2.1 million trust fund for her children, and she was stripped of her title, which meant she lost all of her royal perquisites: the royal curtsy, the royal guards, the royal train, the royal yacht, the royal trips, the royal invitations. She also lost her standing in British society.
So the plucky Duchess came to America and turned herself into a money-making machine. Over the next decade she made (and spent) in excess of $30 million. She hawked herself to the highest bidder, selling exclusive photo shoots for $25,000, exclusive interviews for $50,000 to $200,000. She signed children’s book contracts, including rights for a television series and merchandising