Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, sits at a quiet café table chatting about royals and romance, two topics with which she has become intimately acquainted.
Britons have known her as a merry bride of Windsor, then a military wife, then a career-minded divorcee. Americans know her best in this latter chapter, when she came to the US to find her voice, her fortune and herself, as a children's book author, then a self-help maven. The former Weight Watchers spokeswoman is now a Hollywood producer, and her new movie is a love story set inside Buckingham Palace. The Young Victoria fills the big screen with the passionate 19th-century embraces of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Over lunch at Leopold's Kafe, a Georgetown destination for many Europeans, Ferguson brightens when asked if there has ever been another true love inside the stuffy palaces of the British royal family.
Her enthusiastic answer is her own with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, fourth in line to the British throne, the man she married in full fairytale style in Westminster Abbey in 1986, the father of her two daughters, and from whom she was publicly and painfully divorced in 1996. The enthusiasm is telling: Might there be something, behind the palace walls, rekindling?
As she talks about her true and deep romance with Andrew, "all we wanted to do was be with each other", she leaves the clear, lingering impression that her ex-husband is not a man she thinks of in the past tense. She suggests, with her words and the sparkle in her blue eyes, that divorce was not the end of their love story.
"I have never found a better man," says Fergie. "I don't do anything without his blessing."
In fact, she says, she and Andrew live in the same royal residence in Windsor, just outside London. The two are very close to their coming-of-age daughters, Princess Beatrice, 21, and Princess Eugenie, 19.
In the US, Ferguson is more open than she might be at home about her losses: Her mother was decapitated in a car accident in Argentina in 1998. The year before, Princess Diana, whom she describes as "my best friend", died in a Paris car accident. Ferguson's father, who suffered from melanoma, succumbed to a heart attack in 2003.
‘Happiest divorced couple'
Now 50, Ferguson says life has gotten easier with age. And it always helps to get along with the mother-in-law. A sign of Andrew and Sarah's ever-closer relationship was Queen Elizabeth's invitation last year to the family gathering at Balmoral Castle, ending a perceived ban on the duchess' inclusion. Ferguson called the queen "the greatest lady I have ever met in my life".
Her prince is still a prince and, in Ferguson's telling, their life is more modern arrangement than fairytale — something approaching a grown-up version of love on their own terms.
"We are the happiest divorced couple in the world," she says.
"If Andrew were sitting here right now he would say, ‘If only we had fought harder for our own love... '"
Ferguson has a few more lines around her eyes now, and beneath her famous copper hair she exudes a bit of steel in her voice, the confidence of age tempered by a lifetime being beloved and then belittled, all in the public eye.
Loneliness inside Buckingham Palace — something richly portrayed in The Young Victoria — came soon to Ferguson after 300 million people around the world watched the horse-drawn carriage procession at her Westminster Abbey wedding. Two weeks after she and Andrew married, Andrew was sent to sea as a British naval officer. The newlyweds saw each other for just 40 days in each of the first five years of their marriage.
She wishes, now, she says, that they had insisted on being together and said, "‘No. I am not going to do that." But in a royal family where military service for young princes is seen as a requirement and rules are made by palace forces whom Ferguson calls the "Gray Wind", Andrew was patrolling the coasts and she raised their infant daughters.
"People say, ‘Why aren't you married if you are so happy?'" she says, returning to her current status. "Why should I marry again? I am asking you, why?" she repeats. "Because everybody thinks to be happily married is the end of the happily-ever-after fairytale, because that is what we are brought up with? In very modern 2009, we are the happiest divorced couple. We are happy the way things are. ... We don't have to get married again in order to live happily ever after."
Having left behind her Weight Watchers days, Ferguson is enjoying being Hollywood Sarah. She pitched the idea for The Young Victoria to British producer Graham King when he was working on The Departed. She hoped he would enjoy a departure from the Boston mob saga, and instead would want to focus on the young, fun and romantic side of Britain's longest-ruling monarch, who is often pictured as the mourning widow with a black veil over her head. Victoria was less dour than her portraiture, and should you require evidence of passion: She had nine children with Albert before outliving him by 40 years.
Unique status
The movie focuses on their love and how the young couple navigated the palace handlers. It was filmed inside actual British palaces and landmarks, with Ferguson turning the proverbial keys: She helped arrange access and used her unique status as a former member of the royal family to help as needed. Her eldest daughter, Beatrice, has a cameo in the movie, which stars Emily Blunt.
Eugenie rings up on the cellphone, just as Ferguson is gushing infectiously about how it's "cool" to meet producer Martin Scorsese, Oscar-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes and other stars on the film. Just the night before, she was with her two daughters in Los Angeles, where they ended up giggling on the floor outside their hotel room after they were briefly locked out.
It's the kind of thing that wouldn't happen inside the royal bubble.
Criticised
And with their lineage and potential, her daughters are in the spotlight, tracked by the paparazzi at home and abroad. Ferguson has made sure they "know the rules for them."
Unlike their mother, who willingly married into the royal family, Beatrice and Eugenie "don't have a choice: They are princesses ... when they close the front door they are on ... nobody wants to see a bad-tempered princess."
As a young bride in Buckingham Palace, Ferguson's fashion sense and shape were criticised by the tabloids, which called her crass and compared her unflatteringly with her friend, Princess Diana. One, she recalls, even proclaimed that "82 per cent of men would rather sleep with a goat than with me."
In England, it has remained harder for her to reinvent herself. Shortly after separating from Andrew in 1992 and days after being with the royal family, she was photographed topless on the French Riviera with an American financier named John Bryan, who appeared to be paying some homage to her toes.
The monarchy, already in crisis because of the strained marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, was brought a notch lower in public esteem and many blamed Fergie, who was seen as a protocol-flaunting party girl.
Reputation rehab came mainly in the United States, where people generally admired her for being willing to work and not sit on her royal duff.
She has written 32 books in all and invented Budgie the Little Helicopter. She hit nearly every American city with Weight Watchers. She hosted TV shows and appeared on everything from an episode of Friends to The Tyra Banks Show to Larry King Live. She raised millions for charity.
She still prepares for life's financial ups and downs, she admits, and has a few projects in mind. Next, she says, she would love to have her own US television show, interviewing people over a cup of tea. She would like to expand what she calls "the Sarah brand", perhaps even starting her own line of food.
After chatting for well over an hour, she skips over the mousses and pastries beckoning from the cafe's glass case and orders a weak coffee. Her several assistants begin hovering; it's a busy Ferguson day that will end in Texas.
"Do I get an easier time here? Yes, a much easier time in America," she says. "Because people allow me to be myself. The British press has basically torn me to pieces for 18 years."
"I am a British citizen and a closet American," she says. On this side of the Atlantic, she says: "I am allowed to be Sarah. It's good to be Sarah. ... I believe I am what I am and who I am, and why is that not good enough?"
