The Sunday Times (Perth, Australia)
February 20, 2000, Sunday
THE Duchess of York was probably feeling an undercurrent of insecurity when she gave a 40th birthday dinner party for her former husband Andrew yesterday. Friends say there is a new spring in his step, and that Fergie is uneasily aware that she is not the cause. He is, they say, a new man.
So what has changed? Lots.
For the first time since Fergie and he got to know each other properly 15 years ago, sailor Andrew appears to be slipping anchor and moving out into open romantic waters. Ever since their 1992 separation and subsequent divorce, Fergie has kept a wifely watch on his social life, almost as though they were still married. For the past two years she has been back in the marital home, Sunninghill Park, near Windsor, and her constant presence has put a brake on his social activities.
He may be 40 but she’s the only girl with whom he has ever had a serious relationship. There has been incessant speculation that, but for opposition from his family, the Yorks might remarry. But the Andrew who hurried back to Fergie, whoever he was seeing, has changed.
“He is rather tight-lipped about Fergie these days,” says a friend. “He appears to me to be rather hands-off in his attitude towards her, almost as though he is putting up with her. Of course, he is still very fond of her, not least because she is the mother of his daughters, but I doubt if it’s romantic any longer. He is definitely no longer interested in marrying Fergie again.”
The transition has its roots in new friendships he made at a dinner party in London’s Mayfair, which have drawn him into a lively circle of beautiful women. The dinner took place in Marks, the private dining club off Berkeley Square, and that night he found himself enjoying the company of two couples. One was property man Rupert Cordle and his wife Camilla, and the other Robert Sangster’s son Ben and his wife Lucy.
The wives are 32-year-old identical twins, and Andrew quickly discovered that one of their great friends is the Countess of Derby, the former Cazzy Neville with whom he stepped out briefly before, his friends claim, Fergie stepped in to disrupt the romance. Cazzy, happily married to the Earl of Derby, 37, for five years, joined her friends in taking it upon themselves to introduce the prince around.
Before long, the naval officer with a reputation for spending long evenings watching TV and videos, found himself being invited to dinner parties all over London.
Fergie always seemed to be away on business in New York or in Italy with her friend the Count and they felt sorry for him, says one of their circle. So they brought him into their set and he took to it like a duck to water. Frequently at dinner parties, he would find himself seated next to a beautiful and unattached young woman.
“Cazzy likes to make sure he is in good company,” says one friend. “And Andrew goes shooting with Teddy (the Earl).”
Most of the prince’s social activities take place during the week, when he is working at the Naval Staff Directorate in Whitehall, using Prince Charles’s old apartment at Buckingham Palace as his base. At weekends he likes to be with his daughters at Sunninghill Park. He was back this week from another social excursion with yet another new and perhaps surprising friend, the late Robert Maxwell’s business consultant daughter Ghislaine, 40, after whom the crooked tycoon named the yacht from which he fell to his death.
For almost a week Andrew had been a guest of A- list party girl Ghislaine at the Manhattan apartment on the smart Upper East Side she shares with New York property developer Jeffrey Epstein, 50.
While in New York, Ghislaine took Andrew to a fashion show, at the headquarters of designer Ralph Lauren. The prince even went backstage afterwards and chatted to models. He looked remarkably comfortable among the willowy creatures, especially as the once-portly prince, privately known among Buckingham Palace staff as “Three Puddings”, has shed some weight. It is hardly surprising that Tatler, the glossy social magazine, recently named him the most sought-after dinner party guest. It had been almost two decades since anyone had really noticed him socially; since his bachelor days of dating Koo Stark and Vicki Hodge, when he earned the sobriquet Randy Andy. For weeks an “I love my Fergie” lapel badge given to him at the Staffordshire Massey Ferguson tractor factory was pinned to his office door at the palace. Recently, it disappeared.
Meanwhile, at Sunninghill Park, where she has separate quarters and shows no sign of leaving, the staff still call Fergie “Maam”. The shedding of Fergie as his prop must have taken a great act of will because of his practice of always turning to her for advice. Some friends think it may well have something to do with his thoughts about reaching the crossroads of his 40th birthday and, as he says, learning from the failures and building on the successes.
But there is another the story about Andrew’s new-found self-reliance. The longer he is linked with Fergie and not married to her, he is prevented from one quiet ambition that he chose not to mention in the formal interview to mark his birthday which was issued by Buckingham Palace on the Internet last week.”He loves his daughters,” says a friend. “But he would love to have a son one day. That, of course, would mean a second marriage.
NEWSPASTE 