Diana's Nightmare - The Family (43 page)

Knowing the dangers of drug abuse, McNally had made his position quite clear during his years as king of the mountain in Verbier. 'I have a strict house rule that no one who has anything to do with drugs is allowed to stay with me,' he said. One young aristocrat, a woman, who admitted she had snorted cocaine at the chalet, nicknamed Cocaine Castle, confirmed that McNally didn't use narcotics himself.

But drug-users among the Verbier Set circumvented McNally's house rule. They were ruthless in the methods they employed to smuggle Category A drugs into the Swiss resort. One of the unsuspecting carriers was Ms Ventura, who had been invited to stay at the chalet one Christmas.

'I'd had a call two days before my departure saying that they couldn't get a turkey big enough for Christmas Day, which is actually quite believable because turkey isn't the thing in Switzerland. One of the Verbier Set delivered a turkey to me at my house all wrapped up in a Harrods box and ready to go in the oven. It was standing on top of my luggage in full view and I drove it with three kids, two of mine and one of a friend of mine, across three borders. The turkey was full of drugs, as it turned out, and I had been the perfect pigeon. I didn't know what was in it till the next day, although I was aware of girls in the house digging into it in the early hours of the morning. They were all in the kitchen doing something to the turkey.

'The next day we were having lunch at the top of the mountain and a friend of mine said, "I think you should know who your friends are." She had a violent row with her husband because he didn't want her to tell me. I didn't know what they were rowing about and then he stood up and threw his napkin on the table and walked away and said something like, "If you tell her, you can take the consequences." So I said, "What's all this about?" and she said, "Well, you just brought a turkey full of cocaine."

'I gathered the kids and came back to the chalet. I was absolutely distraught. I abhor drugs. It was the day before Christmas and I couldn't get hold of my solicitor. I didn't know whether I had become a criminal. I was being physically sick. I moved out of the house that evening and into a hotel. I confronted one of them later and told him how awful it was that I had been used as a drug courier and he said: "Well, you didn't get caught, did you?" Then he used an expression I remember very vividly because I'd never heard it before. He said, "Why are you getting your knickers in a twist?" I have confirmation from another of the men there that it was cocaine, cocaine for the season. Jail? Forget me. It would have destroyed the lives of my children.'

McNally was forty-five when he started his affair with Fergie, twenty-two years her senior. After stints as a journalist and as racing manager to Niki Lauda, the Austrian world motor-racing champion, McNally started to exploit an obvious source of revenue. Allsport, his Geneva-based company, sold advertising space on hoardings at Grand Prix tracks around the world. The global televising of motor-racing meant that corporate sponsors paid highly for the best sites.

When she moved into the chalet, Fergie cooked their favourite meals for the McNallys, steak and kidney for Paddy, sausage and mash for his two sons. McNally's protestations that he had no intention of marrying her did nothing to deter her. 'She was totally besotted and in love with Paddy McNally,' said a visitor to Verbier. McNally teased her about her weight but he also coached her on the slopes until, the tail of her home-made Davy Crockett hat flying behind, she was more than a match for many of the men on the most demanding black runs.

McNally's favourite watering hole was the Farm Club, the nearest thing Verbier could offer to Annabel's. He held court in a reserved alcove at a wooden table laden with bottles of Russian vodka. Acceptance into the inner circle was by invitation only. The social cachet it carried in this alpine enclave of Sloanedom was enormous. Young chalet girls eager for some of the magic to rub off on them gravitated towards his table.

Whenever he flirted with an attractive newcomer, Sarah would initially storm out in a rage and burst into tears. She once unceremoniously dumped a bucket of iced water over his head to cool his ardour. Gradually, she became adept at shutting out aspiring rivals. 'I'm Sarah,' she would tell the interloper, drawing herself up to her full five foot eight inches, 'I'm Paddy's girlfriend.'

Looking more vampish than sophisticated in skin-tight black leather trousers and high heels, she made sure the message hit home. She drank vodka, smoked Marlboro cigarettes and joined in the often waspish conversation. 'Sarah became used to a bit of heavy, sharp banter across the table,' said Dai Llewellyn, the convivial brother of Roddy, it was fast teasing and she was no slouch at it.'

In the spring of 1985, Diana put Sarah's name forward to the Queen as a guest at Windsor Castle during Royal Ascot. When the coveted invitation duly arrived at Fergie's home in Lavender Gardens, Clapham, she told McNally, who offered to drive her to Windsor. 'Sarah was still very keen to marry Paddy at that stage and she thought he might be jealous,' said a friend. 'But he just took it in his stride. Even when Fergie let him know that Andrew was taking an interest, he wished her well. She finally realised that he was never going to marry her so she accepted Andrew on the rebound.'

McNally attended the royal wedding at Westminster Abbey on 23 July, 1986, but showed no inclination to follow his erstwhile girlfriend down the aisle. He remained dedicatedly single. It was to McNally that Fergie turned when her marriage started to go disastrously awry. They met privately at a terraced house in Radnor Walk, Chelsea.

'She's a frightened little girl beneath that exhibitionist front,' said a friend. 'Once she got into the Royal Family, she tried to please everyone - Andrew, his parents, the courtiers, the public and the Press. She never really had a chance. It's only natural that she turned to Paddy for some good advice.'

Recognising the symptoms, Diana was one of the first to realise that Fergie should never have been there in the first place and even started to deny that she played any part in their romance. 'Diana initially welcomed Sarah's presence because of the interaction between them,' said a highly placed royal source. 'She is very competitive, but she was aware of the power of the courtiers and she warned Sarah about some of the things that had happened to her. Sarah thought she could handle it even if Diana was cracking under the strain. It worked well for a while, but Diana's own marriage was under increasing pressure. Arguments with Prince Charles, mainly over his friendship with Camilla, were followed by long, brooding silences. Diana had plenty of worries of her own.'

Once Fergie started to excite the attention of the media, the Princess put some distance between herself and her best friend. She wasn't interested in competing for the headlines she had dominated for so long. Moreover, most of the coverage was highly critical of Fergie's disastrous fashion sense, her penchant for accepting freebies and her perennial weight problems. Diana stepped back, became involved with charity work, notably among AIDS sufferers, and let Fergie get on with it.

'One reason Diana cut her off was that she suspected she was spying on her to ingratiate herself with Charles,' said a friend in whom the Princess confided. 'She believed Fergie was checking out the handwritten codes on her mail at the Buckingham Palace sorting office and telling Charles the names of people writing to her.' Diana had many similar fears, most of them unfounded.

When Fergie was pregnant with Beatrice in 1988, her father's sexual behaviour at the Wigmore Club created a scandal that affected her deeply. She tried to shrug it off but, although the Queen stood by her and Charles gave his polo manager his total support, it still hurt. She began bingeing from the refrigerator and her weight shot up. 'I really blimped out,' she said.

Diana was appalled by Major Ron's behaviour and she was deliberately cold towards him ever afterwards. She warned Fergie that her father was bringing her down. The Squidgy tapes revealed that Prince Charles, probably acting after a plea from Andrew, had co-opted Sir Jimmy Savile to try to help Fergie.

Diana: Jimmy Savile rang me up yesterday and he said, 'I'm just ringing up, my girl, to tell you that His Nibs has asked me to come and help out the Redhead, and I'm just letting you know so that you don't find out through her or him. And I hope it's all right by you.' And I said, 'Jimmy, you do what you like.'

Gilbey: What do you mean 'Help out the Redhead,' darling?

Diana: With her publicity.

Gilbey: Oh, has he?

Diana: Sort her out. He said, 'You can't change a lame duck, but I've got to talk to her 'cos that's the boss's orders and I've got to carry them out. But I want you to know that you're my number one girl.'

As the conversation had taken place on New Year's Eve 1989, Fergie's problems had been causing concern in the Family for at least two-and-a-half years.

The house-warming at Sunninghill on Friday, 5 October, 1990, should have been the start of a fulfilling life for the Yorks. Instead, it sharpened the decline of their marriage. Steve Wyatt turned up with his buddy, Johnny Bryan, according to an American friend, and the die was cast. For the first and only time, all the players were under the same roof together. Fergie and her mother had said a tearful farewell that day to Hector Barrantes at a memorial service arranged by Lord Vestey. The Duchess missed her stepfather, who had lost a long and painful battle against cancer of the lymph gland. However, she changed into a stunning emerald green dress, put a matching bow in her hair and greeted the guests to her extraordinary new home.

'About seventy people, including Prince Edward, Billy Connolly, Pamela Stephenson, Viscount Linley, Susannah Constantine, Elton John and Michael and Shakira Caine sat down to a lobster dinner,' said one who was there. 'The party had a jungle theme and the staff were all dressed up as Tarzan and Jane. Then about two hundred more people arrived and things really took off. Fergie cheered up and it was so much fun that no one wanted to leave.'

When he returned to his home in Cheyne Place, Chelsea, Johnny Bryan phoned Witney Tower Jnr, an old friend in New York. 'He said he had just been to this fabulous party at the Duke and Duchess of York's house,' said Tower. 'He said Elton John had played the piano and they stayed up very late. He said the Duchess was very nice and he had a good time.'

But Fergie couldn't settle down at Sunninghill despite its overstated luxury and an abundance of home help. She felt trapped and claustrophobic despite the wide open spaces of Windsor Great Park. 'It is very difficult to get any privacy - in fact, I don't have any,' she told Georgina Howell. 'Oh, there are times when I don't have anybody in the house and we can just be a family together. I sometimes give everyone the night off and go into the kitchen and make a cheese sandwich. But you have staff, you have security, you always have to be aware. You're always on show, twenty-four hours a day.'

Anyone familiar with Fergie's passion for champagne-style entertaining found this difficult to assimilate. Right to the end, she invited friends to no-expense-spared dinners and many stayed overnight, including Johnny Bryan. The refrigerator was stocked with such extravagant items as caviare, out-of-season strawberries and every conceivable flavour of exotic ice-cream. When Buckingham Palace sent her warnings about overspending, she would retort that she bought so much because she was not able to predict what Her Majesty's son would most enjoy on his weekends at home.

In reality, her relationship with Andrew was a sham. Their home life quickly became a nightmare because marriage was torture for her. She lacked confidence and no matter how well things might seem to be going, she felt threatened and anxious. She was incapable of being a slave to another person or a system. An inflated sense of her own identity did not allow her to hold anything back. If Andrew ventured an opinion, Fergie snapped back at him. 'Screw your neck in, Andrew,' she said impatiently in front of an interior decorator. The Duke walked away. An argument usually followed such an outburst. Andrew, however, had started to realise that something was wrong with his wife.

'The fact is that this young lady owes her status in life to that one memorable day (when she married Prince Andrew) and that's all that has changed her from being any other girl on the streets of London to the person she is,' said Gene Nocon, the Prince's photographic guru, from his home in San Diego. 'I've seen her character change and not for the better. You know she was such a nice person when we first met her, we are beginning to wonder if that niceness was just an interesting ploy. The real person is Prince Andrew. He's the person I met and still love. They don't come any better.'

There was one simple explanation for the extraordinary change in the Duchess. To deal with her weight problem, she had started taking courses of amphetamine-based slimming pills which were originally prescribed for her in Paris and later in Harley Street. Mixed with alcohol, they had disturbing, mood-altering side-effects. She not only lost weight but her self-control as well. 'I've tried everything, believe me, all the fad diets, the pills, the lot,' she said later. 'But all that is very bad for you.'

In Fergie's eyes, Andrew simply couldn't do anything right. When he played with his daughters, she told him to stop upsetting them even if they were just splashing about in the bath. At Eugenie's second birthday party, Andrew was asked to judge a face-painting competition among the excited young guests. He declined, saying ruefully: 'I'm only allowed to judge police horses and things like that.' Fed up with arguments, the Prince sought refuge in his study, where he watched videos, or he left the house altogether and spent hours playing golf.

Andrew had been the Family's prankster, the whoopee cushion king of the practical joke. This was a trait he inherited from his grandfather, George VI. Beneath the worried frown and despite his painful shyness, George had loved to enliven dull Family occasions with the howls of a victim who had fallen for one of his tricks. But when Andrew discovered that Fergie was laughing at him instead of with him, another of the King's characteristics began to surface - a bad temper, known in the Family as 'Hanoverian spleen'. The Prince had not been raised to deal with emotional problems, certainly not in a wife, and he took it badly. Some of their arguments bordered on domestic violence.