For months, nobody could find Sarah Ferguson.
She left Royal Lodge when her husband, Andrew, was evicted at the beginning of February, slipping away from the Windsor estate that had been her home for decades, and simply vanished.
The rumor mill went into overdrive. She was in Australia. No, Argentina, where her late mother, Susan Barrantes, had lived. Actually, she was sofa-surfing on Priscilla Presley’s couch in Los Angeles. Maybe Dubai. Maybe Verbier, staying with her old flame, Paddy McNally. None of it was true.
Now she has been found, by U.K. tabloidThe Sun, at the Mayrlife Medical Health Resort in Altaussee, a sleepy Austrian village of 1,800 people on the shores of a glassy Alpine lake, surrounded by snow-capped mountains.
The resort is the kind of kooky-luxe place where Russian oligarchs block-book suites for their families and bodyguards, where Nicole Kidman and Rebel Wilson come to cleanse their guts and realign their chakras, and where a two-week “recuperative stay” will set you back tens of thousands.
The rack rate for Ferguson’s room is £2,000 ($2,700) per night, but The Royalist can’t be alone in suspecting that Fergie, queen of the freebie, ain’t paying retail.
The Sun reported this weekend that Sarah was residing in Room 101. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel1984, Room 101 is the torture chamber where prisoners are sent to confront their deepest fears.
For Fergie, the torture is of a more modern variety—the knowledge that no amount of goat-butter wraps, cryotherapy sessions, or “nasal reflex zone therapy” (yes, really) can make the Epstein problem go away.
The contours of this vanishing act highlight some of the key Sarah Ferguson messaging points: an addiction to luxury and a change of scenery, and a woman whose defining trait has always been a deep and corrosive insecurity, a conviction that something is wrong with her that can be fixed.
According to sources close to her cited by The Daily Mail and The Sun, Ferguson has barely left her two-bedroom chalet since checking in. She orders her meals via room service — bresaola ham with mozzarella is a favorite, along with chicken breast. She has not been seen on the resort’s walking trails, its private pier on the lake, or its clay tennis courts. A hairdresser visited on March 24.
I have been told that she speaks frequently with Princess Beatrice by phone, and Beatrice has been “extremely supportive”, even as her mother’s situation grows more precarious by the week. Eugenie, too, has stayed in touch.
The question everyone will now ask, of course, is: who is paying?
The trail of unpaid bills that has followed Ferguson through adult life is one of the great recurring themes in her biographer Andrew Lownie’s work.
There was the infamous case of Johnny O’Sullivan, her long-serving personal assistant, who waited years for wages that ultimately materialized only after anintervention by Jeffrey Epstein. There were endless debts, questionable commercial ventures, and a famous cash-for-access sting.
The idea that she is financing an Austrian spa break out of her own pocket strains credulity.
