This piece was originally published in 2011. We’re republishing it now after Sarah Ferguson’s daughter, Princess Eugenie, married Jack Brooksbank at St. Georges Chapel in Windsor on Friday morning.
As her new show, Finding Sarah, debuts on Oprah’s OWN network, the Duchess of York sets the record straight and reveals her plans to leave the past behind. Check out the interview and behind-the-scenes video below, and then read the 2007 story where she revealed details about her friendship with Princess Diana.
Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, is having tea in a hotel room in Manhattan. When we are introduced, I mention that we happen to have the same birthday. “Oh?” she says, blinking her wide blue eyes. “Have you had a horrible life?” It’s the sort of wry self-deprecation that once made the fresh-faced English rose known as Fergie such a welcome breath of fresh air to her countrymen and to Britain’s royal family. But times have changed. Buckingham Palace is gearing up for a glamorous wedding, Prince William and Kate Middleton’s, and Ferguson has not been invited.
“Ah, well,” she says with a wistful smile and a shrug. “My girls”–the princesses Beatrice, 22, and Eugenie, 21–“are going. They’re a part of the royal family, and they’re a tremendous credit to me. People move on, you know?” she adds by way of expressing her feelings about not being one of the 1,900 guests. In fact, she has never met Kate Middleton. “I understand that they didn’t invite me. I’m divorced from Prince Andrew. I think it’s a new chapter and a fresh page.” It’s very good news and Diana would be very proud.”
There is so much she would like to put behind her–a lifetime of debts and scandals that have so delighted the carping British tabloid press–and yet Ferguson, 51, still seems unable to feel totally comfortable in her own skin. When she had her photograph taken earlier in the day, she says, she became nervous at all the attention. “I got rather shy and modest and feeling a bit round like a teapot,” she says. Her struggles with her weight have been mercilessly documented, and she herself has written five books with Weight Watchers, for which she has been a spokesperson.
“I felt very insecure, actually,” she goes on. “I said, ‘Oh, nothing’s gonna fit.’ I got Beatrice on the line, and I said, ‘Beatrice, look, Mum’s having a freak-out.’ And so she spoke to the stylist and said, ‘Look, it’s okay, this is how you deal with Mum.'” Beatrice suggested finding a structured look that accentuated her mother’s trim waist. “And she calmed everything down.”
Of her relationship with Beatrice and Eugenie–students at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at Newcastle University, respectively–she says that “the only thing I know I’ve done 100 percent right is be a good mother. I’m proud to say I’m the best mom I know. People say to me, ‘What is your brand identity?’ And I say, ‘I’m a global mother.'”
What often gets lost in the news of the entity she ruefully calls “the other Fergie” is the woman who has raised untold millions for charity. Ferguson has devoted herself to a long list of charitable organizations, including her own, Children in Crisis (founded in 1993), which helps educate more than 250,000 children annually in seven countries around the world. “She has spent an inordinate amount of time doing charity work,” says her friend Lady Clare Milford Haven, “and I think not enough emphasis has been put on that. She has a big heart, and she is a hugely loyal and supportive friend. She’s also a great mom.”
But unfortunately people are more often interested in talking about that other Fergie–the one of the topless “toe-sucking” incident of ’92, who was also caught in a sting last year by The News of the World. On May 23, 2010, the tabloid released a hidden-camera video showing Ferguson as she apparently attempted to sell access to Prince Andrew, the U.K.’s special representative for international trade and investment, to a man she believed was a wealthy Indian businessman for £500,000 (about $725,000).
“It shocked me to the roots of my whole being,” she says now of the scandal. Buckingham Palace issued a statement denying that Andrew had any prior knowledge of his ex-wife’s activities, which Ferguson staunchly confirms. “He felt very, very sorry for me,” she says. “He was so angry that I should have been trapped, ’cause he knows me. He knows I would never, ever put him in a position that would compromise him, ever!”
“Yes, okay, you’ve made many mistakes, but it still doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person.”
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in the wake of the scandal, the duchess explained her behavior by saying she had been drinking and was desperate for money to help a friend and was herself facing “substantial” debts compounded by the collapse of her lifestyle company, Hartmoor. (Her income from her divorce settlement is reportedly only £15,000, around $24,750, a year.)
Now she claims it was all a big misunderstanding. “I didn’t do that, selling access,” she says, furrowing her brow. The masquerading Indian mogul, she explains, “said he wanted to start a business with me, and I said, ‘If you’re going to invest in my business, with that comes my family, because we’re all a team together.’ But the way it came across in the video, it was so horrible, because they cut it and edited it and changed it, chopped it.” As if knowing this all sounds a bit like rewriting history, she adds, “It was a huge lapse in judgment.
“People misconstrue who you are,” Ferguson says plaintively. “They think you’re this, but in fact you’re that. Yes, okay, you’ve made many mistakes, but it still doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. You’ve just taken a few wrong turns.”
It’s this latest “wrong turn,” however, that finds her more alienated than ever from Buckingham Palace. Her relationship with the queen, which she famously chose over a big divorce settlement, is experiencing a chill. As always, the duchess has nothing but glowing things to say about her former mother-in-law. The queen, Ferguson says, “is the most wonderful, forgiving, nonjudgmental person I know.”
Meanwhile, she remains very close to her former husband. They have co-habitated off and on ever since their divorce (she now lives in a wing of his official residence, Royal Lodge, in Windsor), raising their girls as a family unit, although they are not romantically involved.
“He’s a great man,” Ferguson stresses, “and a first-rate father and the bestest friend.” With help from Andrew, she says, she is once again debt free. “I love him. He’s my soulmate. It’s actually what we said in front of God at the altar: We honor and respect each other until death do us part. The only thing is, he has girlfriends and I have boyfriends.” (She doesn’t have a boyfriend now, but she says, “I would love a boyfriend.”)
“I really was in love. We both were madly in love.”
If she had it to do all over again, she says, “I would have fought for Andrew and I to be together after we got married and he went to sea [with the Royal Navy] and I saw him 40 days a year for the first five years of our marriage. I would have never let anyone come between us. Actually, one of the people [at Buckingham Palace], who shall remain nameless, said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re just a naval wife. Put up with it. Everyone else has to.’ I would say, ‘No, I’m going to be with him.’
“I really was in love. We both were madly in love. I remember walking up the aisle,” she says of their July 1986 wedding, “and how he turned round and looked at me in his naval uniform.”
She says that the buzz around the royal wedding has her feeling “nostalgic. It brings back huge memories. I look at it and think, I was once that bride. It’s very sad. You’re happy for them, of course, but it’s sad because you’d love to do it all over again, but with the awareness that you have now.”
Her new awareness is thanks in part to Oprah, who, after interviewing Ferguson, recognized a prime candidate for the brand of self-help she is known for dispensing. It seems only natural that Fergie would have her own reality show–which she prefers to call a “documentary series.” In June, OWN will premiere Finding Sarah, which Ferguson describes as “a woman’s search for really, truly knowing herself and how you find self-worth.”
Over six episodes, Ferguson asks self-improvement gurus like Dr. Phil, Suze Orman, and life coach Martha Beck to help her “get sorted.” “Dr. Phil told me, ‘You’re an addict, Sarah,'” she says. “I looked at him, thinking, Rats, what kind of addiction do I have? And he said to approval and acceptance, and I went, Yay! It’s fantastic, because you’ve now labeled my problem and I can deal with it.
“And Suze Orman,” she adds, “she said you don’t have a money problem; what you have is an addiction to giving out so much. I felt I had to buy a lot of presents because I never thought I was worthy.”
She goes on, “I think my financial problems have come from desperately trying to please, from my addiction to approval and to thinking that I’m not worthy, so I have to buy people’s love. What I didn’t have until Oprah came into my life,” she adds, “and [the reason] I am so grateful to her, was the toolbox to know how to handle the twists in the road.”
“I have a very lucky life. I’m able to travel. I have great friends who have been very generous.”
Her problematic pattern of debts and scandals “won’t happen again,” she says, “because I’m awake now. I’m aware of my behavior.” It’s finally time to put the hurts of the past behind her, she says: when her mother, Susan Barrantes, left when she was 12 to join her polo-player lover in the Argentine pampas; when her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, endured scandals of his own. “I was raised by the housekeeper,” says Ferguson.
The vibrant duchess suddenly looks rather fragile. “I’m very lucky, though,” she says. “I have a very lucky life. I’m able to travel. I have great friends who have been very generous. I’ve got a wonderful family. Andrew and the girls are really the most extraordinary people you’ll ever meet.
“So the fairy tale does go on,” she says with a faint smile. “It’s just that my fairy tale has a slightly different ending.”
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