IN the past year or so, Sarah Ferguson, the much-maligned Duchess of York, has been caught trying to sell access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew; has narrowly escaped going bankrupt; and was shut out of the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Among other memorable low points, she recalled one recent afternoon over lunch in the penthouse at the James Hotel here, was a rain-soaked weekend near Edmonton, Alberta, when she showed up to give a motivational speech at a Canadian resort.
“I got there, and it was a casino in the middle of nowhere, right?” said Ms. Ferguson, as she picked at a plate of sliced pastrami and a bowl of lettuce leaves. “I was working weekends. I was working 24/7 to pay for my staff. And I got to the tent and, because of the pouring rain, the water had come into the tent, and only eight people showed up. I took a photograph of the billboard that looked like Buffalo Bill had come to town.”
Ms. Ferguson scrolled though her BlackBerry until she found it: her airbrushed portrait pasted onto a piece of flimsy white paperboard. “I had gone from marrying the queen’s son to now being on a poster in a casino in the pouring rain in a tent in the middle of nowhere with eight people in the audience,” she said with a sigh and a roll of her azure eyes. “I’d got down to bowling alleys.”
Before there was Bethenny Frankel, Kelly Bensimon or Camille Grammer, there was Sarah Ferguson, the irrepressible royal housewife of Windsor. Few other English princess brides have lived their lives so like a reality television star: feuds with the in-laws; weight fluctuation calculated in the tabloids; romantic misadventures captured on film — and, after it all fell apart, a plucky extension of the personal brand with books and a spokeswoman gig for Weight Watchers.
So it seems only natural that when Ms. Ferguson’s self-hatred and poor judgment caused her to “go into the gutter,” as she described it, her rehabilitation would be played out on a small screen.
Who better to oversee her transformation than Oprah Winfrey? It was she who persuaded Ms. Ferguson last year to ditch an offer from “Dancing With the Stars” and become the subject of a six-part documentary called “Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World,” scheduled to be broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network beginning June 12.
Ms. Winfrey is attracted to people who need to be made over or done up or who are in the process of reinventing themselves. And Ms. Ferguson’s story in theory makes for compelling television. American audiences are practiced at seeing fallen potentates make a comeback (see Eliot Spitzer). And the British royalty, in particular, remains popular: an estimated 23 million Americans stumbled out of bed in the early hours of April 29 to watch the royal wedding live, with millions more watching it later online.
“With Catherine going up the aisle, you know what went through my head?” Ms. Ferguson said, referring to Ms. Middleton’s wedding walk at Westminster Abbey, retracing the steps that Ms. Ferguson took in 1986. “I feel like I’ve handed her the baton and said: ‘Well done. And you’ll do it right.’ I didn’t do it right, and now I am going to go get Sarah right.”
HOURS before her interview at the James Hotel, Ms. Ferguson arrived at 8 a.m. in the green room at Ms. Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, where she was taping her sixth appearance on “Oprah,” one of the host’s treasured final shows. Forced to jettison a staff of 12 last summer because she had no money to pay them, Ms. Ferguson was trailed by Martin Huberty, her personal assistant whom she has known since she was 16. With no makeup, her curly hair gathered in a knot, she looked like a suburban soccer mom in a knee-length navy and white pleated Ann Taylor skirt, her skin freckled and creased from too much sun.
She plopped into a makeup chair where a hairstylist crowned her head with orange and green curlers. “I lost 45 pounds on Weight Watchers,” the hairstylist whispered to Ms. Ferguson, who congratulated her.
A little before 9 a.m., Ms. Ferguson, 51, slipped into a black Michael Kors dress — the label had been snipped out — that hugged her shapely figure. When she walked onstage, carrying a blue-and-red flowered handkerchief that she later tucked under her left thigh (in case she began to cry), the mostly female crowd cheered wildly.
And she did not disappoint. Audience members nodded sympathetically as Ms. Ferguson dabbed her tears while watching a clip from the new series in which she describes the 1998 death of her mother by decapitation in a car accident. During breaks in taping, they were equally engaged. Ms. Ferguson demurred when Ms. Winfrey asked what kind of pajamas Queen Elizabeth wore, instead effusing about the more than 20 royal attendants available to her at Buckingham Palace before her divorce in 1996, including six ladies-in-waiting. “Get out!” Ms. Winfrey shouted, as the audience gasped. “No wonder you are finding Sarah!”
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