The Heartbreaking Truth About Fergie vs. Diana

When Sarah Ferguson married Prince Andrew and became the Duchess of York, Princess Diana was thrilled.

She and Sarah, whose schoolgirl nickname "Fergie" was fully adopted by the media on sight, were distantly related (fourth cousins) and had reconnected a year before Diana's 1981 wedding, which Sarah attended, sitting in the front pew at St. Paul's Cathedral. 

Their mothers were old friends and the daughters had become partners in crime—almost literally, such as when they dressed up as cops to crash Andrew's bachelor party, went to a nightclub instead and were promptly mistaken for kiss-o-gram girls.

"It was so hot in the wig and my feet were killing me—the shoes were two sizes too small," Diana later relayed the particulars of the evening to a guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party, the BBC reported at the time.

But that was the effect that the vivacious, fun-loving Fergie had on Diana, who, wanting a kindred spirit to tote the weary royal load with, had sat Sarah next to her eligible brother-in-law Andrew at a luncheon during Royal Ascot.

Fergie, in turn, adored her sister-in-law, whom she has called one of the funniest and most beautiful people she's ever known. Incidentally, she was also glad to have a confidante who had already been in the trenches for a few years.

And Diana was indeed fully entrenched.

By the time Sarah and Andrew got together in 1985, Diana had been married to Prince Charles for four years—and while she had the agog adoration of the press and plenty of common people in her court, her relationship with her husband and his family was already suffering under the weight of unmet expectations and an astounding lack of straight-forward communication.

"Maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family who ever had a depression or was ever openly tearful," Diana, who suffered postpartum depression after Prince William was born in 1982, told Panorama's Martin Bashir in 1995. "And obviously that was daunting, because if you've never seen it before how do you support it?"


Asked how that affected her marriage, she replied, "It gave everybody a wonderful new label—Diana's unstable and Diana's mentally unbalanced. And unfortunately that seems to have stuck on and off over the years."





E!