Royals
The Royal Rift That Destroyed Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson’s Decades-Long Friendship
Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson’s friendship ended after Ferguson’s memoir revealed a wart joke and alleged story-selling, a new book claims.
There was a time when young royal wives Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson were the best of friends. Having known one another since their teenage years, the wife of now King Charles and the wife of the prince and duke now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, were known for bucking Buckingham Palace tradition, forging a deep friendship that never recovered after Ferguson published her 1996 memoir, My Story.
Sarah Ferguson’s Confession Angered Princess Diana
A new book titled Entitled, detailing the lives of the former Duke and Duchess of York, alleges that Diana was furious that Ferguson had written about her at all without her permission, but was especially outraged over one small allegation.
“The two women, once close, had not spoken for months after Sarah had written about her sister-in-law, against Diana’s wishes, in her memoir and made a joke about catching a verruca (wart) from one of Diana’s shoes,” author Andrew Lownie wrote in his book, per Fox News.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Lownie took it further, explaining there was a little more to their feud than just an anecdote about shoes.
“In fact, the reality was that Diana was very concerned that Sarah Ferguson might well be selling stories about her, and that relationship was never repaired, though Sarah Ferguson pretended it had,” Lownie said.
Both women divorced their royal husbands in 1992, but Ferguson remained close to Mountbatten-Windsor and even shared a residence with him until last year. Diana tragically died in a deadly car accident in 1997, just a year after Ferguson’s first memoir was published. In 2011, Ferguson addressed the rift in her second memoir, Finding Sarah, and what may have happened had Diana lived.
“I wrote letters, thinking whatever happened didn’t matter, let’s sort it out,” she wrote, according to People. “And I knew she’d come back. In fact, the day before she died, she rang a friend of mine and said, ‘Where’s that Red? I want to talk to her.'”
