The former Duchess of York was known for her lavish spending and that included spending an astonishing £515 on a teddy bear – despite not technically being able to fly it home
Sarah Ferguson’s lavish spending is the stuff of legend(Image: 60 Minutes Australia)
After marrying Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Sarah Ferguson’s tendency to spend vast amounts of money reached astounding proportions. One particular moment served to illustrate the former ski chalet girl’s wild excesses.
Shortly after marrying Prince Andrew – as he was then known – Fergie was fined almost £1,000 for packing over fifty pieces of excess luggage on a first-class flight home from New York.
The vast array of cases contained an estimated £33,000-worth of items she had bought on her trip, including a £515 teddy bear. And it wasn’t the only example of her astonishing spending.
A Heathrow baggage handler was quoted at the time as saying: “Not even Joan Collins has this much.” The palace declined to say who met Sarah’s expenses on that occasion.
Sarah’s financial advisor, John Bryan discovered that she was spending over £860,000 a year – a figure which included £150,000 on gifts, £50,000 on flowers and £50,000 on parties.
‘I married a prince,’ she said. ‘It was great'(Image: Hulton Archive)
Sarah had a typical upper-class girl’s work history before her marriage, including a stint cleaning ski chalets, and a job at a publishing company.
She told Swedish television show, Skavlan how she had undertaken a string of menial jobs: “I cleaned lavatories when I was 18 and graduates’ bedrooms; they all left it very messy.
“And then the waitress in a strudel house. I don’t cook, I just took the strudel out of the deep freezer and put it in the oven; that’s cooking.”
But, she concluded: “Then I married a prince, it was great.”
Sarah’s yo-yoing battle with her weight saw her spend a fortune on clothes(Image: UK Press via Getty Images)
However, like many outsiders, she didn’t realise how cash-poor the royals tend to be. Tina Brown, who has written a number of books about the Royal Family, explained: “The biggest problem in the Yorks’ union was — and always would be — money.
“Fergie was a crashing spendthrift married to a natural cheapskate who also happened to have much less cash than she had expected. Although far from broke, Andrew was entirely dependent on the Queen’s bounty.”
But Sarah would not, or could not, rein in her wild spending, and was constantly paying for lavish holidays and expensive restaurant meals. When she was not spending money on herself, she would shower friends and even quite casual acquaintances with expensive gifts.
By the time her marriage to Andrew collapsed in 1993, she reportedly owed in the region of £4 million to top peoples’ bank Coutts.
Andrew and Sarah seem now to be going their separate ways(Image: Ian Vogler / Daily Mirror)
But even after she and Andrew separated, Sarah was unable to entirely let go of her prince.
Tina Brown describes the moment in 2015 that Andrew walked into a restaurant where Sarah was dining with “an American media executive”.
The source told her: “Andrew came in and sat down and said to me, ‘What are you doing with this fat cow?’ I was so stunned by his level of sadism. She has to sing for her supper.”
The two were locked together in a toxic co-dependency, Brown says: “He bails her out when she’s in trouble, and she backs him up when he’s assailed by scandal.”
Sarah’s future is uncertain(Image: Getty Images)
But that relationship may, finally, have reached its end. The pair have been booted out of Royal Lodge after Andrew’s titles were stripped by the King.
Brown said said: “Andrew’s banishment to an as-yet unnamed property in windswept Norfolk on the Sandringham estate seems to have evaporated Fergie’s much-vaunted loyalty to her ex-husband, now that her freebie digs in a wing of Royal Lodge, 25 minutes from London, will soon have the locks changed.”
Royal expert Helena Chard says that Sarah’s future remains uncertain, but predicts that “she is determined to stand on her own two feet.”
“Sarah will not move in with Andrew,” Chard added. “Despite always being the faithful ex-wife, she realises it will do her no favours continuing her association with him.”