The Duchess of Diets
Here is what it’s like to be Sarah, the Duchess of York, on your first official day as spokeswoman for Weight Watchers International.
After a long flight from England, where it has just been announced that you finally paid off that $6.89-million overdraft, you are awakened at dawn and taken to a morning news show where, while getting made-up in a room full of chocolate doughnuts, someone asks when you’ll be appearing on “Melrose Place.” (Probably never, you say, because you have yet to be asked.)
By 9 a.m., you have exchanged air kisses in the KTLA-TV green room with Ed Asner and Ted Danson, gulped several cups of black coffee and survived a radio interview with Rick Dees, who, after sharing that he was the fattest kid in fourth grade, wonders, “If you were going to be beheaded at the Tower of London . . . uh, what would be your last meal?”
As always, you are endearingly honest.
“My last meal would be a baked potato with salty butter, mmmm, and with mayonnaise--homemade mayonnaise, mmmm--on the side. And chicken. And salad.”
“You are soooo perfect for Weight Watchers,” coos Dees.
And, of course, he is right.
If Weight Watchers is about fresh starts, new beginnings and never giving up, then who better to represent it than the former Miss Sarah Margaret Ferguson. No more the Fergie of fractured fairy tales, this is Mrs. Sarah York--svelte, solvent, confident “working mother” with appointments to keep and, yes, a product to sell.
Weight Watchers is paying $1 million for her services, and what they’re getting in the deal is the duchess herself--a royal package of world-class mistakes and world-class humility.
York came to California on Monday to inaugurate her reign as duchess of diets and to make a surprise visit to a noontime Weight Watchers gathering in Burbank. “We have a special guest here today to share her own story with us,” teased the group leader. “I can assure you she knows what we’re going through.”
That she does. “Well, last weekend I was quite naughty,” York immediately confesses. “It was the sausage rolls again. Do you know what a sausage roll is? It’s sausages wrapped in phyllo pastry cooked in fat in the oven. Yum!”
The former “Fergie” first sampled Weight Watchers when she was 19, but not even its gentle “healthy eating” approach could keep her away from sausages and such. By the time she was 28 and in the second year of her increasingly lonely marriage to Prince Andrew, she had ballooned to 203 pounds.
“When I was home waiting for him to come back from sea, I found eating was the only way to fill my heart--and hurt,” she told 42 moist-eyed Weight Watchers members who had skipped lunch to hear their new poster girl’s royal tips and join her in honoring three women who had shed more than 100 pounds each.
The duchess, now 37 and divorced, hasn’t lost that much weight. But she’s lost enough (she won’t say how much) to fit swimmingly into the “medium size” clothes in a closet still packed with “large, medium and tiny” frocks to accommodate her ever-changing girth.
“You should’ve seen me last week,” she confides, smoothing down the form-fitting jacket of her sleek brown suit. “I was terrified I wouldn’t fit into anything. . . . My problem, you see, is the bum. My daughters say, ‘Give us your wiggle, Mummy.’ Well, I’m not going to show you my wiggle, but I can tell you it’s like live ferrets, live ferrets jumping around in a bag.”
York traces her history of weight problems to when she was 12 and her glamorous mother left the family to move to Argentina with her lover, the dashing polo player Hector Barrantes. Although the duchess and her mother are both 5 feet, 7 inches, the similarity ends there. “It is horrible that my mother is absolutely beautiful and so so thin. She parades around in a bikini and there I am--in my sarong.”
*
Sarah describes her relationship with her own daughters, Beatrice, 8, and Eugenie, 6, as “fabulous! We do everything together, even roller-blading, which I hate.”
They do not, however, eat together. “After school when they’re having their little mayonnaise sandwiches cut in squares, it is very hard for me to keep my wits about me and my hands off their plates. But I don’t want to pay the price of being overweight again. . . . I’ve already paid some awfully high prices for the sins of my life.”
As always, it was the most memorable of those sins--the so-called toe-sucking incident--that continued to preoccupy many in the media here Monday. But just as she once tried to educate the pesky press on the difference between toe kissing (in which she concedes she participated) and toe sucking (in which she did not), the duchess now tries to enlighten the media about the pain of living with a weight problem.
She is not always successful.
“So what about this fat thing?” demands a newsman who ambushes her on her way to the Weight Watchers meeting.
“Fat? Fat? Whatever are you talking about?” the duchess shoots back. “It is a condition and it is something that causes many people a great deal of pain--including me. So, please, kindly watch what you are saying.”
“I really don’t think most people realize that I’m a very serious person, perhaps almost intense,” the duchess later confides. “I think I’ve found it the most difficult thing in the world to be perceived of as this jolly, bubble-headed girl, which is the opposite of what I am. What an injustice. It’s all too easy for everyone to say whatever I do is wrong. The bottom line is, it hurts for days. . . .”