Fred and Mary’s untold fairytale romance
IN AN OFFICIAL NEW BIOGRAPHY, FRED AND MARY OPEN UP ABOUT THEIR FAIRYTALE ROMANCE
Princess Mary and Prince Frederik’s untold love story has been revealed for the first time, with the couple sharing all the secrets of their fairytale romance in an official new biography.
Released to celebrate the royal heir’s upcoming 50th birthday, Under The Bar unveils every swoon-worthy detail of their early days of dating – and how Fred knew his Aussie love was ‘The One’ after the first night they met.
‘To me there was something inexplicably attractive about her,’ Fred tells. ‘First her very calm manner, the way she moved, her dark voice, which was very fascinating.’
In the book, Mary also tells the remarkable story of how a fortune teller at Sydney’s Paddington Markets predicted that she would meet a foreign man and become a star – just two weeks before their fairytale first encounter in 2000.
Revealing that the tarot reader was ‘looking very determined and directly’ at her as she strolled through the market, Tasmanian-born Mary says she was compelled to let the woman read her future.
‘It became an interesting hour!’ Mary reveals in Under The Bar. ‘The woman told me that I would leave the workplace where I had recently been employed and that I would soon meet a very worldly man. He was a foreign man and I would become very famous, a star, she even said.’
The woman went on to tell Mary that people ‘will come to know who you are, they will see you and hear you’, telling the then-28-year-old that she would also move to Europe.
The couple – who are now parents to four children – then go on to talk about their fateful first meeting. Revealing how Mary was supposed to go to a farewell party for an acquaintance, her friends instead persuaded her to go out with them.
The group went to Sydney bar Slip Inn, where Fred and several European royals – in town for the Sydney Olympics – were partying. The book goes on to reveal that a smoking Fred sat next to Mary and tried to make her believe that he was a Danish Olympic athlete!
‘We talked so well!’ Fred reveals in the book.
The jet-lagged prince then attempted to make his way home – but wound up on the dance floor with Mary, where they danced and talked all night.
‘I did not go home until three to four o’clock. Frederik dropped me off at Porter Street in a taxi, and before it disappeared round the next corner, he asked for my phone number,’ Mary reveals in the book. ‘I gave it to him and got a goodnight kiss on the cheek.’
The Tasmanian-born beauty reveals that despite being in love with a future king, their relationship was as sweet and uncomplicated as any new love.
With long-distance keeping them apart for much of their first year of dating, Mary says that she walked the streets of Sydney listening to Dido’s Here With Me when she was missing him a lot. To stay in touch, the pair spent hours talking on the phone, sending emails and handwritten letters.
Mary also tells that she sent Fred the book A Grief Observed by Narnia author C.S. Lewis, to help him through the grief of losing his grandmother – Queen Ingrid – the same way it had helped her through her mother’s death only years earlier.
The couple say many of their early conversations centered around music – with Fred ‘happy to learn’ that Mary is a fan of his favourite artist Led Zeppelin, while she taught her new beau to appreciate Robbie Williams.
After their relationship was made public, Mary says she moved to Paris so that it would be easier to see Fred. She also recounts a romantic surprise from Fred on New Year’s Eve in 2001, when she flew to Hamburg and was picked up by Fred’s good friend Jeppe Handwerk and his girlfriend Birgitte, before the three of them drove north to Denmark.
‘And in some dark place, where it was just snowing and snowing, we made a pitstop and there was Frederik suddenly. Then I hopped into his car,’ Mary tells.
Just two years later, Fred proposed to Mary in a ‘tiny old church’. But the prince’s close childhood friend Ellen Hillingso says he was never the same after his first meeting in Sydney with Mary, all those years earlier – and that a trip with the Sirius Patrol that same year inspired him.
‘He came back a changed man, and I’ll say that it’s now coincidence that these big events – Greenland, meeting Mary and Queen Ingrid’s death – are all in the year where he finds something authentic within himself,’ she says. ‘It’s almost mythical. During all times this man has gone on long trips to find himself.’