DIARY
VICKI WOODS Anybody who writes for a living, as I do off and on, enjoys seeing his or her own name in print. Writers must love it, as the editors of low-paying magazines like this one know only too well; how else could they fill their pages with contributions from journalists grown fat and rich after a life- time's punditting. Bylines, once rarely allowed, are almost universal now. In British letters only die Economist still reso- lutely resist their romantic pull and insist on nameless contributions. All love affairs, of course, get taken for granted after a while. The shocked and heady thrill that virgin journalists feel after the hurly-burly of their first couple of bylines diminishes, over the years, into a sober and uxorious peace.
So last week I felt like someone who'd been pulled through an orgy backwards. I sat on the Inter-City 125 staring bemusedly at my own name winking up at me from the front pages of the nation's tabloids (all the front pages of all the nation's tabloids, in fact), feeling as though I'd woken up in the wrong bed. A writer's name sits properly at a little distance from a story. It was a fear- ful experience to find mine down there in the body copy as a character in the story itself: the story the tabloids wrote being 'Fergie Hits Out At Charles and Di' in which I figured as the 'top magazine editor' to whom Fergie 'lashed out' in an 'astonish- ing outburst' thus: 'I'm sick of taking the blame for royalty'; 'I'm tired of carrying the can for all of them' and 'I've been the scapegoat for the Waleses for the past four years.' What I wrote in Harpers was a piece broadly about the commercialisation of royalty, after a photographic session we organised was hijacked by the Duchess of York's 'financial adviser' John Bryan. (No — make that financial adviser without inverted commas, since 'financial adviser' means something different these days, doesn't it?) In common with most people, I hadn't even realised that the Duchess's affairs — seemingly down to the last crossed T — were still managed by her already notorious financial adviser. The article described our attempts to get the Duchess photographed and interviewed for the April issue. I lost patience with the hoops John Bryan expected the magazine to jump through and also with the petulant and babyish self-justification that the Duchess employed when things went wrong. The tabloids quoted large chunks of the article wholesale: in most cases ringing me up first to check them. All the quota- tions were accurate and fairly edited. The papers weren't judgmental of me nor of the Duchess (though they laid into John Bryan somewhat). The Sun has a fairly cheery how's-your-father sort of relationship with ol' Ferg, as it happens: so next day they ran a vigorous rebuttal of the rest of the tabloids, saying 'Fergie Ditches Bryan'. Well, we wish, as they say in America, but she hasn't.
hose Spectator readers who take only the FT and the Wall Street Journal in addi- tion to this organ will have found the above a piddling nonce of a story. Take heart: this being my third diary is my last before the editor returns next week.
wrote up my experiences with the Duchess of York and her financial adviser because I was so surprised at how cynical the commercial negotiations became, because I was stunned to realise just how much her financial adviser is pulling her strings and because the Duchess doesn't seem to be able to understand the differ- ence between life as a public person (which a royal duke's wife is, and a separated royal duke's wife is probably not) and life as a Hello! celebrity. Sarah Ferguson spent her time hedonistically, unintelligently and on the whole rather guisily in a Swiss ski resort until her problematical marriage, but we don't care about that nor blame her. Dur- ing her marriage she received all the care- ful help and advice that Buckingham Palace is famous for, and we don't care about that either. Big girls don't cry. But after her marriage, she finds herself trapped in a crazy limbo and for this we have some sympathy. She lives in a bubble: few people do. The Queen lives in a bub- ble, which contains people, party games, political attitudes, furniture and frocks from the 1940s. She is dressed every morn- ing by a dresser and she doesn't understand that a 'menu' is something from which everyone except queens chooses their food. Her daughter curtseys to her assiduously: the nearer the throne, the better to bend the knee. Liege men of life and limb — or footmen at the very least — are always on hand to murmur the next thing: 'The leader of Westminster Council, your Majesty; Miss Joan Collins, your Majesty; Her Majesty, your Majesty.' Sarah Ferguson has had firsthand experience of this bubble, and — indeed — marched up the aisle at Westminster Abbey inside it. Now she is outside it. But there are other bubbles. Rich people have no country but wealth: moving from Palm Beach to New York to Aspen to Greece to London in jets and boats and chauffeured cars which isolate them from the plebs; and Sarah Ferguson has had firsthand experience of this bubble, too. There is also the celebrity bubble, ill which the more neurotic film stars and opera-singers and purveyors of popular music live, where agents and bookers and bodyguards and minders take the place of courtiers or body-servants. This — faute de mieux — is the bubble that untalented Sarah Ferguson is trying to live in from now on, with an entourage of secretaries, mani- curists, dressers, hairdressers, 'financial advisers' and all.
Iwrite from Aspen, Colorado, where my children are whizzing up and down slopes in borrowed ski-clothes. Aspen is not a politically-correct destination this season for lengthy reasons centring on the noxious anti-homosexual lobby in the States. But I have a feeling all will be well by next sea- son. Last night, as we watched television in the Hotel Jerome, I heard a gurglingly cheerful, wisecracking, American voice talking about Fergie and the 'editor-in- chief of a British magazine. (Editor-in- chief, eh? Not some snotty two-pipper.) The machine-gun impact of the soundbite quote and soundbite link, taken together with the lightning editing of the clips (Fer- gie grins! Fergie tosses her head! She jumps from a car! She leaps from a train! Whoops — she's off!) made it completely incomprehensible: it wasn't until I saw my own cross face saying — agonisingly slowly — 'I think . . . you could say . . . she's been pretty badly . . . advised' that I realised I'd been interviewed for American television. The programme was Entertain- ment Tonight, the Duchess of York's natu- ral resting place.
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