World exclusive: Sarah, Duchess of York, in her most courageous interview yet
In a candid and courageous interview, Sarah Ferguson talks to Juliet Rieden about being cast out of court, the truth about Eugenie’s wedding, her unshakeable love for Prince Andrew and the day her mother walked out.
Sarah Ferguson arrives at The Weekly’s exclusive photo shoot like a hurricane waiting to blow. With her sister, Jane, by her side, the royal now known as Sarah, Duchess of York, surges forward to begin a flurry of greetings. Her treacly voice with its plummy aristocratic vowels echoes around the courtyard of the house we have hired to photograph her in, as with a hearty, firm handshake she repeats, “Hello,
I’m Sarah, who are you?”, to every member of The Weekly’s team.
Then, poised on the threshold, she stops and gathers the myriad thoughts that are swirling around her head, ideas she’s keen to get across in our interview. “We really must all be kinder to each other. Enough is enough,” she proclaims. Bullying is out of control, especially for redheads (she’s addressing me as a kindred strawberry blonde) and for her two daughters, sniped at in the newspapers each day, she explains, and then diverts to discuss her latest charity
work with trafficked women in India. “There’s so much to be done.”
Sarah is a veritable whirling dervish, a cauldron of creative ideas and projects that she’s burning to activate, and as I get to know her a little more over the next two days, I discover she’s also a beguiling combination of courageous and vulnerable, determined to conduct her life on her own terms, yet painfully aware of the mistakes she has made.
Beyond this, most of all, you can’t help feeling that Sarah Ferguson is aching to find her place in this world, and despite continual knockbacks, most of her own making, there’s some unquenchable spirit deep inside that inspires her to spring back up and battle on.
A troubled childhood
She was born Sarah Margaret Ferguson, the youngest daughter of Major Ronald Ferguson, who was polo manager to the Duke of Edinburgh and then Prince Charles, while her mother, Susan Mary Wright,
has a pedigree that pumps with rich blue blood. Sarah’s ancestry can be traced back to King Charles II and she boasts Australia’s former GovernorGeneral Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, as another royal relative. Indeed, the day after our photo shoot, Sarah and sister Jane – who settled in Australia in 1976 – were asked to the Sydney Cricket Ground to unveil a very special family plaque. It was to honour their great-great-grandmother, Lady Hampden, wife of former Governor of NSW, the 2nd Viscount Hampden, who in May 1896 laid the foundation stone for the SCG Ladies Pavilion. Sarah and Jane had no idea they were connected to the hallowed SCG and are thrilled that their names will now be etched on its walls.
Yet, despite her impeccable heritage, Sarah’s childhood was not happy, blighted especially by her parents’ divorce. And as we settle down to talk in her suite in the Double Bay hotel she has been calling home this week, she recalls with painful clarity the day her mother left them at the family farm in England’s home counties to elope with handsome polo player Hector Barrantes and live in Argentina.
Sarah was just 12 and Jane 14. “I’ll never forget it,” Sarah says. “You’d cut your hair,” older sister Jane injects as the two siblings fix on each other, rolling back to the day their worlds fell apart. “[My mother] came in and told me never to cut my hair [again],” Sarah recalls. “She said, ‘You’ve done the exact thing I told you not to do.’ I was at the bottom of the staircase, in my dungarees. You [Jane] were by the fireplace. Then she slammed the door and never came back. And didn’t say goodbye. She was obsessed with Hector.”
Did they see much of their mother after that? “No, she’d gone. She went, and that was it,” says Sarah. “In fact, she went before that. She used to [hide herself away from her family and] have hot baths every two hours.”
Four years later, Jane also left Sarah – and England – when her boyfriend Alex Makim, an Aussie who worked as her father’s polo hand, proposed and 19-year-old Jane married and escaped to her new husband’s family property on the Queensland-NSW border.
“You can’t underestimate the pain of loss,” says Sarah.
“Mum went first and then me,” explains Jane, now 59, and still living in Australia, though not with Makim. “She [Sarah] was left with poor Dad, who was still screaming for Mum.”
Survival mode
Sarah had to pull herself together fast and take control, a crisis management move she has been employing ever since. “I was the one who had to be wife – well, to look after him. It was tragic,” she says. “I remember he went down on his hands and knees on the night of their wedding [when Hector and Susan married in 1975] and when she [Jane] went to live in Australia [the following year] ... I’ll never forget it. He was grieving desperately. He never got over Mum, ever. He always left the door open for her [to come back],” says Sarah.
Last year, she wrote a letter to her late mother, who died in a car crash in 1998, just a year after Sarah lost two of her best friends. “Carolyn [Cotterell, née Beckwith-Smith] was first. She was my best friend. She died of melanoma. She was my finest angel in the world. Then Diana [Princess of Wales], then Mum.”
The letter was published in a mother’s day anthology and in it
Sarah forgave her mother for that life-changing abandonment, writing that the separation had actually made her stronger. Yet I wonder if this is really the case.
“I believe that had I not had to put up this massive wall to survive, I wouldn’t be here now. It sent me into survival mode,” explains Sarah.
Part of that survival involved comfort eating, kick-starting a food addiction that prompted the mean “Duchess of Pork” moniker, bandied about with great mirth and little empathy in the world’s tabloids and eventually resulting in a very successful collaboration with Weight Watchers. For the record, Sarah is looking incredibly trim today and eats tomatoes, egg mayonnaise and mandarins throughout our time together, a diet she says works for her.
“I became obsessed with food,” she continues. “Luckily, it was food and not any other addiction. That was very lucky. One therapist once told me, ‘The size of your bottom has saved your life’,” she says, laughing. “And it’s very true. Thank heavens for that.”
When she married Prince Andrew in 1986 in a fairytale wedding watched by 500 million around the world, everything changed. Sarah says it was – and will always be – “the best day of my life”. What happened next has been well documented, but, looking back, Sarah says it might have all been different if her Prince hadn’t been posted for months on end with the Navy.
“For the first five years of our marriage, I saw him for 40 days a year. I had so much time on my own because Andrew was at sea with no communication, no emails, no telephone, nothing.”
I suggest that had emails been around then, the royal couple could still be together. “Probably,” she says, with a sigh. “It was a very different time.”
During Andrew’s time away, Sarah launched herself into learning as much as she could about this family she had married into. “Sir Michael Tims was the Deputy Master of the Household. I used to live at the Palace and he would take me round after hours and tell me stories. He’d make history fun. How many horses did it take to bring in the fireplace at the sovereign’s entrance, and the tiny trapdoor behind Queen Mary’s painting. I loved it.”
She then dived into the Royal Archives and developed a fascination for Queen Victoria, which led to a later project, the movie The Young Victoria.
Cast out of court
“Andrew’s a great man. Together we’re very strong – we talk a lot.”
After the divorce, Sarah became a royal outcast and was no longer invited to Sandringham for Christmas, although she says she has a brilliant relationship with the Queen – “I love her”. Confounding royal watchers, she and Prince Andrew continued to live together in the family home, raising their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, in a textbook display of post-divorce co-parenting. They still live together on and off and are probably the most devoted divorced couple you could come across. Indeed, when she talks about her Prince, an uncharacteristic sense of calm descends on the Duchess.
“Andrew’s a great man. He’s a very gentle man, a very good man, and he’s one of the finest people I know,” Sarah says, with a warm smile.
“Together, we’re very strong and we talk a lot. I like the three Cs I made up – communicate, compromise, compassion. We’re better off not being married because we can both be free. We’re very free. He’s free and I’m free, and we like it like that, but we get the best of it. People always say, ‘Why don’t you two just get back together or get married, for heaven’s sake?’ Well, we don’t want to. We’re happy as we are. We call it ‘happily ever after’, just with a different end.
“It’s an amazing relationship. Nobody understands it and we are not going to change it for anybody. Nobody can understand it because it doesn’t fit into the norm, so therefore they think that it must be weird. It’s not. It’s the way our family works. We sit down all the time, all four of us … the York Family. The girls love it and we talk a lot.”
Prince Andrew has certainly stood by his former wife and ensured she has always had a home with them if she wants one. Yet Sarah claims to be a natural gypsy, although I sense a sadness beneath the declaration.
“It’s the way it is. I don’t really need a house. I don’t really want the responsibility of a house. I make my house everywhere. I am a gypsy, a nomad,” she tells me. “When I’m in England, I’m very lucky to be able to stay at the Royal Lodge with Prince Andrew. But it’s not really my home.”
She seems overjoyed to be in Australia and says she is planning to visit her sister much more. “I feel comfortable here. I think I probably like the sense of exploration. I love to be an adventurer.” She and Jane were not close as children, but have developed a stronger relationship as adults. “We’ve both got a funny, quirky sense of humour,” says Jane. “We read each other very well. I can tell when Sarah needs rescuing.”
Sarah and Jane were guests of honour at a charity ball the night before our interview, raising close to $3 million for St Vincent’s Hospital. Sarah confesses she was a little nervous facing the public, but was pleasantly surprised at the genuine warmth of the reception she received. “I am very impressed with how Australia has welcomed me because it means maybe there’s something changing in me that is attracting nice people to be kind.”
It’s no wonder she’s so relieved, for in Britain the Duchess is still a pariah and her family is regularly the subject of vicious gossip. “Oh my gosh ... Me and England. I was out of court, I am out of court. You know Anne Boleyn?” she says, laughing. “I’m just lucky that I’m not [actually] Anne Boleyn.”
The latest reports range from Princess Beatrice taking too many holidays, to Prince Andrew allegedly pleading with the Queen and Prince Charles to give Beatrice and Eugenie royal positions within the court and residences at Kensington Palace. Buckingham
Palace is declining to comment on the latter story, but in the sleek, trimmed down monarchy that Prince Charles is believed to be grooming, it’s hard to envisage a salaried position for the York daughters.
“I love the way they [Beatrice and Eugenie] are so strong because it’s
very hard with the press; some of them are horrible. It’s so cruel on all their relationships because they all [the Yorks and the Cambridges] get on so well, they love each other.”
As for Sarah, with the jailing of undercover British journalist Mazher Mahmood in October, there’s been a re-airing of the May 23, 2010, disaster when she was tricked by his now infamous Fake Sheikh, who recorded the Duchess allegedly trading introductions to her husband. “I think that the press has been very cruel and, yes, continue to be. The 23rd of May, 2010, did a lot of damage globally. Of course, he’s gone to jail now and I had to forgive him to move on,” she says, but the incident clearly still hangs heavily around Sarah’s neck. “I really work through the light and the dark within me, the demons. That’s why I forgave him because I have to look at my own sense of my side of the street. What was I thinking? Why was I selfsabotaging? I’ve still got a long way to go to get the confidence back.”
Through it all, it has been Sarah’s family – Andrew and the girls – she has leaned on. It’s a mutual support that she is proud to be a part of.
“What I believe is that we’re all souls and I’m so grateful that they chose me to be their mother, but I’m just their guide. I say that to Beatrice and Eugenie all the time. I’m here to guide you. And, luckily, I’ve made so many horrendous mistakes, you can learn from me and not do them yourself. My girls ring me up every moment and say we’re just so lucky because not many mothers are like you. We talk about everything. And all the girls’ friends come and see me, too,” she says.
On October 15, it was Sarah’s 57th birthday and again the Yorks were inseparable. “Andrew and the girls gave me dinner for 30 people at home,” she says. “In a speech, Beatrice said, ‘You’re my best friend, you’re my mother, you’re my everything, you’re my joy, you can make me laugh.’ It was just so extraordinary. Both girls doing that, it was very powerful.”
Sarah talks to her daughters daily and the phone has certainly been running hot recently. Princess Beatrice, 28, split up in July from her long-term boyfriend, business entrepreneur Dave Clark, 32, whom everyone imagined she would be marrying this year, while Princess Eugenie, 26, is supposedly engaged
– or is she?
“David is a good boy and he needs to go on and be Dave Clark and Beatrice needs to go and be Beatrice. It’s 10 years since she was 18 and they first got together, so now she’s living. It’s kind of fun. She called and said, ‘Now what do I do, Mum?’ She’s never been dating. But I’m happy for her that she’s starting a new journey.”
And as for Eugenie? The Duchess is adamant there’s no engagement to her boyfriend, 29-year-old nightclub boss James Brooksbank, and no wedding. Not yet at least. “Jack is an amazing man – I love him. And she loves him and they’re very, very happy, but I think the press always push things.”
Sarah’s own future is with her children’s books
– she is now an established author with Budgie The Little Helicopter and the Little Red series, and she’s planning a new series called Genie Gems (“Genie is Eugenie … and it’s about hope”). Then there’s a film following on from The Young Victoria, which Sarah produced in 2009. And finally and most importantly, her burgeoning global charity work for children and women in crisis. She has coined the word “philanthropreneur” and is excited about this new avenue.
“I’ve trademarked globally ‘philanthropreneur’ from the heart,” she says. “Prince Andrew went to
India and met women who’d been incarcerated through human trafficking. He called me and said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Why don’t we help them learn a trade, jewellery and design?’ ” Sarah now sells the handicrafts to Topshop and the proceeds go back to the women.
“I called it Key to Freedom. You’re giving these extraordinary people the chance to make their own living, so it’s entrepreneurship, but philanthropy was what opened my eyes to help them become entrepreneurs.”
It’s incredible how many times this Duchess has had to pick herself up, dust herself off and start all over again, but I suspect it’s a skill that will eventually triumph. “I think there is a little voice in me that never gives up. It’s just a little tiny voice. I’ve never taken an anti-depressant in my life. I love to laugh. I love being – it’s not happy, it’s better than happy.”
“I’ve still got a long way to go to get the confidence back.”