Whatever else people are saying about her, Fergie sure is Texas` idea of royalty.
With papers back home calling her a ”frump,” the least popular member of the Royal Family and worse things than that, Her flaming-haired Royal Highness Sarah, Duchess of York, has hit this Texas coastal city on a five-day visit and received the kind of welcome you`d expect if she were the Houston Oilers returning home from winning the Super Bowl.
”She has a great love of life and is very natural, not unlike a Texan,” said socialitie Lynn Wyatt, wife of Texas oil zillionaire Oscar Wyatt and Fergie`s hostess during her stay.
”She`s my favorite royal,” said Houston teenager Sarah Curry, whose 4 1/2-hour wait at the barricades for the Duchess` arrival was rewarded with a nod and big royal smile. ”This is one of the greatest days of my life!”
”It`s really grand,” said Fergie, as winsome and sincere as her greeters could hope.
The local gush was appreciated. Mother of the fifth in line to the British throne-and five months` pregnant with the presumed sixth-appeared a little tired, subdued and in need of a lift-after a nonstop 11-hour flight from London in which her British Airways jetliner was struck by lightning (no one was injured).
She`s certainly gotten a lift-Texas style. ”We love ya, Fergie” signs are all over town (somehow, one cannot imagine ”We love ya, Liz” signs greeting her mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth).
Fergie got to see Houston high schoolers perform Shakespeare costumed as warring street-gang members and sat in the flight director`s chair at Houston`s Lyndon Johnson Space Center-where she expressed an interest in going up in a NASA shuttle.
Her relatively light schedule also included spending a night on an actual Texas ranch (owned by the Wyatts, it`s a little heavier on the pate and limos than baked beans and pickup trucks), as well as watching Monty Python`s Flying Circus star Eric Idle perform as an operatic singer in a Houston Grand Opera production of ”The Mikado.”
This is Fergie`s third visit to the United States since she married Prince Charles` younger brother Andrew in 1986, and it may prove to be her most successful. Her first-a solo trip to New York in January, 1988-to open the English Broadway hit ”Phantom of the Opera”-was marred when a youth demonstrating against British control of Northern Ireland was roughly knocked to the ground and arrested for running toward her motorcade with an Irish flag.
The following March, she and Andrew made a grand tour of the Los Angeles area that was wildly successful in America but criticized in Britain for its tackiness and vulgarity. On one gala occasion, she exchanged banter with a Hollywood drunk and wore a revealing dress that seemed to challenge fellow-guest Zsa Zsa Gabor in a cleavage contest.
A high for Houston
Since then, it`s been downhill. Her highly idiosyncratic fashion style has won her scorn in the British press as ”frumpy Fergie” and as a third-rate ”Carmen Miranda.”
She`s also been attacked for going off on holiday instead of attending to her job of making official appearances, for accepting too many free-loads
(”freebie Fergie”) and for leaving her year-old daughter, Princess Beatrice, too much with nannies. And her royal mother-in-law reportedly is angry because Fergie is donating to charity only a part of the royalties from her new children`s book, ”Budgie,” the story of a toy helicopter.
If Fergie has been in need of a lift, so has Houston. Only just beginning to recover from its long oil-slump recession, the city is currently embroiled in a raging controversy over a city councilman who used a racial epithet to deride a proposal to rename the local airport after Rep. Mickey Leland, who was killed in a plane crash in Africa earlier this year.
The city also is in an uproar over a plainclothes policeman who shot a 50-year-old cleaning woman to death after chasing her in an unmarked car, and another policeman`s shooting of an innocent dog while cruising the streets in a pickup truck.
A royal exclamation
Ever the game girl, Fergie went directly from the airport to her first stop on the tour: Houston`s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, one of only three such secondary school facilities devoted to the arts in the country.
After accepting flowers, greetings and screams of delight from Sarah Curry, chum Julie Carroll and some 160 other kids who had waited for hours, she went into the school, where she was treated to some off-key Mozart from a string section, some jazz from a saxophone group, some modern dance and a contemporary version of ”Julius Caesar.”
The last used a graffiti-bedecked freeway ramp instead of a set to depict the Roman senate and was acted by kids portraying street gang members (Caesar wore jeans and shades and Cassius was played by a girl wearing a halter top that would have beaten out both Fergie and Zsa Zsa at last year`s Hollywood gala).
The Duchess entered just as Caesar was being hacked to death with daggers.
”It was very, very explicit!” she said, coming on stage after the scene was done. ”I thought, `This couldn`t be ”Julius Caesar.” Rome didn`t look like this.”
She then asked the performers about their job prospects as actors, noting that 98 percent of actors in Britain are out of work.
”Yes (there are jobs),” said one of the youngsters. ”As waiters.”
A licensed helicopter pilot herself, Fergie seemed to take an especially keen interest in the NASA space center on her visit there Saturday morning. She went through a mockup of a space lab space station and a re-entry module, talked with astronaut Dr. Mary Cleave about what space travel is like, examined space food and space medicine exhibits and visited the big room that serves as the control center for space missions.
Taking a seat in flight director Wayne Hale`s command chair, she watched intently as a video tape of a shuttle take off, mission and landing was punched up on the big screen and explained by Hale and others.
In honor of her visit, an adjoining screen showed live satellite television pictures of England, with a big storm moving in from the west
(likely the one that hit her with lightning).
`Fashion victim` (cont.)
Fergie will not lose her ”fashion victim” reputation on this trip. Though it was night and temperatures had fallen into the 40s, she arrived wearing a short-sleeved yellow garden party dress with short white gloves and out-of-season (even in Texas) white shoes.
On the NASA outing, she wore a rather broad black and red suit, with wide shoulders and plunging neckline and with a huge black bow holding back her shoulder length red hair.
None of her outfits much revealed her pregnancy, however-in marked contrast to a group of six local radio-station-sponsored ”Fergie lookalikes” who showed up at one stop wearing hideous red wigs and pillows under their blouses. The least Fergie-like of the six proved later to be a man.
For her appearance at Friday night`s premiere of the Houston Grand Opera production of ”The Mikado,” the Duchess looked quite grand herself in a high-waisted beige Bedille Sassoon brocaded gown that bared her shoulders but nothing else.
The opera is performed in Edwardian English dress rather than the Japanese garb of the Gilbert and Sullivan original, and when she went backstage afterwards to congratulate Idle and the cast, she looked something like a cast member herself.
Obviously having fun, she supped with great appetite at a late night gala supper that followed, despite having had two helpings of Texas fried chicken at a private lunch earlier.
Saturday morning, wearing a rather smart green dress with black shoes and gloves, she displayed her most endearing side, visiting handicapped children and other patients at Houston`s Texas Medical Center Institute for
Rehabilitation and Research, at one point sitting down with 11-year-old auto accident victim April Begnaud of Groves, Tex., and discussing and examining the workings of her near-bionic, electric prosthetic arm.
”You`re an amazing girl,” said Fergie.
After overnighting at the Wyatt`s South Texas ranch, she planned a Sunday polo reunion in Houston with her father, royal polo manager Maj. Ronald Ferguson–himself a recent victim of London scandal sheets for his massage parlor visits–and then more opera. The Houston`s company`s celebration of 300 years of British opera was the principal reason for her visit.
Monday she is to travel to New York to meet with her book publishers and Tuesday she will return home.
Prince Andrew is not accompanying his wife on this trip. ”He was recently promoted (to lieutenant commander) and is very serious about his naval career,” said British embassy official Francis Cornish. ”You`re not going to see them wandering the world together hand in hand.”
One boon to Fergie on this trip is that the pack of British journalists usually assigned to Buckingham Palace, including those most responsible for making her life miserable, are off in Indonesia with Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who are making a simultaneous royal visit there.
