In a resurfaced interview, Sarah Ferguson disclosed her genuine sentiments about marrying Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – or Prince Andrew as he was known at the time. In the personal and informal atmosphere of her own residence, Sarah prepares a pot of tea while speaking candidly about entering the Royal Family.
The interview, recorded in 1994 as part of the Ruby Wax Meets series, has re-emerged after the American broadcaster posted it to her own Ruby Wax YouTube Channel. At that point, Sarah’s public image remained tarnished by the controversy surrounding her relationship with American financial manager John Bryan, who had been photographed kissing her feet while she sunbathed topless.
Sarah and Andrew completed their divorce in 1996, having previously announced their separation in 1992. However, while confiding in Ruby, she continued to speak warmly about her former husband. Asked whether she “got what she always wanted” after marrying a prince, Sarah said she wanted “the man,” but not necessarily all the trappings of royalty.
“Who cares about the furniture when you’ve got the man,” she said, “I’m not materialistic.” Stepping into Buckingham Palace for the first time, she explained, is an overwhelming experience.
“Adrenaline runs overtime, big time,” she recalled, adding: “It’s absolutely terrifying.” Andrew and Sarah never actually resided at the Palace, choosing instead to spend their married life at Sunninghill Park – a 665-acre estate near Ascot in Berkshire. However, she still remembers the rigid protocols at the Palace, extending even to the precise degree to which windows could be opened.
“In summer, you long to open the windows right up, but you’re only allowed to open them so much, because you must keep the line of the windows at the same level.”
Reflecting on her fling with John Bryan, Sarah admitted: “I had the most appalling character judgement, and with John – he’s a very believable person. I didn’t know I was playing with fire.”
She acknowledged that for much of her life she remained “completely unaware” of what was happening around her, remarking that she looked back on her earlier behaviour and was astonished at how “silly” she had been.
Sarah attributed many of her historical mistakes to feelings of “abandonment.” Her parents divorced in 1974, when Sarah was 15, and a year later, her mother Susan departed the UK and relocated to Argentina with her new husband, polo player Héctor Barrantes.
She described how, during visits to her mother in Argentina, she felt overshadowed by Argentinian girls of her age, who all appeared to her to be tall, slim and attractive.
At the age of 16, she began experimenting with slimming pills and injections. Her initial experience was peculiar, she recalls: “It was in this small village in the middle of South America – can you imagine how crazy I was to do that? – no prescription, nothing.”
She concedes that she has absolutely no idea what she was injected with, yet the slimming drug “changed her into another person”.
Whether it was the direct consequence of the medication remained unclear to Sarah. However, shortly afterwards, she recalled: “I got so angry with my mum, I nearly drew a knife on her.”
Despite abandoning the slimming treatments after just a few days, Sarah remained firmly convinced that the toxic side-effects of the drugs lingered with her for many years.
Combined with her abandonment issues, the slimming treatments sent her into a self-destructive spiral: “Because I had such self-loathing,” she told Ruby, “I wanted to prove to myself that I was this awful person.”
Ultimately, she revealed, it was encountering and wedding Andrew that proved her salvation. Yet even following the breakdown of that marriage, she still regarded him as her “best friend.”
Tactfully sidestepping the widely-speculated question of whether they might one day remarry, she said: “I think we just take each day as it comes.”
More than three decades on from that intimate afternoon conversation, Sarah and Andrew find themselves more estranged than ever, with the disgraced former prince brooding in a Norfolk farmhouse, while his ex-wife is said to be jetting between health spas across the globe, desperate to distance herself from the shame of the former couple’s close ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – an association that has proved to be the undoing of the Yorks.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.express.co.uk ’
