Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson were close friends in their teenage years; however, it didn’t last, and by the time Diana passed, they were no longer speaking. And the reason behind their distance is shocking.
“Sadly, in the end, we hadn’t spoken for a year, although I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something into her head, it stayed there for a while,” the former Duchess of York wrote in her autobiography, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself.
“I wrote letters thinking that whatever had happened didn’t matter, that we should sort it out. And I knew she would come back.”
The day before Diana died, she reportedly called a friend and asked, “Where’s that redhead? I want to talk to her.” Sarah also recalled that while their friendship had their usual ups and downs, their “bond was never broken.”
Unfortunately, Sarah claims in her autobiography that she has no idea why they had a falling out. However, an earlier memoir, My Story: Sarah, the Duchess of York, is being cited for the reason. In the 1996 book, Andrew’s ex revealed that she contracted plantar warts from shoes she borrowed from Diana.
“When I lived in Clapham, Diana helped me by giving me all her shoes (and, less happily, her plantar warts) – we wore the same size,” Sarah recalled in that book.
Along with that, author Tina Brown wrote in her 2007 biography, The Diana Chronicles, “The divorced duchess had capitalized on a rather bland memoir, filled with kind words about her sister-in-law, except for one fatal sentence. She wrote that by borrowing Diana’s shoes, she had caught warts. Goddesses don’t have warts. Despite Fergie’s apologies, Diana never spoke to her again.“
Even though the two fell out, Sarah Ferguson spoke affectionately about her sister-in-law and friend since her passing. Exclusive comments to HELLO! in 2021 show this, with Sarah saying, “I think of her almost every day because she was the only person who truly understood and was there during that time in the ’80s, when we were all wearing such strange clothes.”
“She was already in the family before I was, and we had so much fun.”