Even the once found America a place of freedom. The 1970 visit the and Princess Anne made to President Nixon’s USA saw the 21-year-old enjoying a cookout at Camp David and racing the President’s son-in-law the 898 steps from top to bottom of the Washington Monument. It also saw Nixon trying to pair Charles up with his daughter Trish. Years later, George Bush promised not to try and pair Charles with his daughters… By that time, the woman Charles did marry had added a whole new dimension to the story.
The 1985 American visit made by Charles and Diana highlight (under the facade of amity) the differences between the pair – and the fact that there was vastly more interest in Diana. She stole the show dancing with John Travolta at the White House; Charles could only escape from the humiliation amid the ponies and plants of ‘Bunny’ Mellors’ Virginia estate. Even when Diana smilingly presented the trophy to Charles at a Florida polo match, the American press wasn’t fooled. ‘Palace Dallas’, declared Time magazine, in reference to the popular soap.
In 1988 Diana made a solo trip to New York, cuddling dying children in the AIDS ward of Harlem Hospital (this at a time when the homes of AIDS victims were being set alight by hysterical mobs). Two years later, in Washington she took one dying three-year-old for a ride in the British Embassy Rolls Royce.
By the time her marriage had irretrievably broken down, and she was contemplating a new life, America seemed a likely site for it. Her 1994 trip saw her welcomed by Pavarotti and dining with Kay Graham, and having private talks with Hillary Clinton about the difficulties for a woman in public life. The next year saw a repeat performance, with the addition of a meeting with John F. Kennedy Jr. New York, on yet another of her frequent trips, would be the site of her meeting with Mother Theresa – they walked hand in hand through the Bronx Just weeks before her death, Christie’s New York held the $3 million auction of her clothes.
Just as Diana’s marriage was moving into its painful later phase, America also appealed to another royal rebel – Sarah Ferguson, ‘Fergie’, the Duchess of York, whose mother once eloped with an Argentinian polo player.
The 1988 visit she and Andrew made to California was described as ‘brash, vulgar, excessive’ by the British press (and indeed, it is hard to find any other words to describe that black and orange duvet dress!) But Americans from Pierce Brosnan and Jack Nicholson to the press were charmed. No wonder Fergie – in the intervals of racing golf carts on Walter and Lee Annenbergs’ desert estate, raiding the New York shops and guzzling what she frankly admitted were too many martinis – said that she could have been an American in a past life.
America would feature in the events of 1992 – the year Queen Elizabeth dubbed her annus horribilis. Fergie’s marriage foundered when she was pictured in all too public extra-marital horseplay. Both her first lover Steve Wyatt, a Texan oil millionaire, and her toe-sucking financial advisor John Bryan were Americans. Post- divorce, the mid-Nineties saw Fergie on a 4-year US earning spree trying to settle her enormous debts. Covering for Larry King as a tv host, making the reality mini-series Finding Sarah for Oprah Winfrey’s network; publishing books, becoming US spokesperson for Weight Watchers International – as witness the 2003 American Cancer Society Great American Weigh In – and even doing a 1998 cameo in Friends.
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 sent shock waves around the world – and America was no exception. The Royal Family’s belated reaction – the Queen’s apparent refusal even to fly a flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace – drew widespread hostility towards the monarchy. But while the royal establishment learnt some vital lessons – while Diana was established as an enduring icon – the States played a huge part in the redevelopment of the sister-in-law who is perhaps due for some fresh consideration.
Fergie’s determined rise, fall, and rise story buys into the favourite US narrative. ‘I failed in Britain’, she herself said. ‘And when I gave it a go in America I was ready to fail there too – but they have really embraced me.’ Two decades on her presence in Windsor Castle, at the wedding of her nephew Prince Harry, once another black sheep in the Royal Family, to an American would signal Sarah Ferguson’s rehabilitation.
But, as we now know, Fergie’s husband too was making some deeply disturbing American connections. It was in 1999 that he met Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and, later, convicted paedophile. The slow revelation of their friendship and its savage consequences for several young American women, would become one of the greatest threats to the modern British monarchy.
