How Fergie and Princess Diana Really Were Pitted Against Each Other

The truth was, Diana and Fergie appreciated each other, and often needed each other, but the nature of the attention paid to them—by the press and their shared family—inevitably caused, in addition to flashes of envy or jealousy, the sinking belief within each one of them that she wasn't as good as the other.

A former Palace advisor mused to royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith for her 1999 book Diana in Search of Herself, "I wonder what would have happened if Sarah had not been there, because the two of them were trying to break the system."

In What I Know Now, Fergie admits to "straining to emulate Diana's panache." The press was obsessed with the Princess of Wales and fawned over her looks, her style and her figure. The athletic, curvaceous Fergie was at first lauded as a bubbly dose of fresh commoner air when she started seeing Andrew, the exciting redheaded counterpart to the blond glamour-puss.

Together they were the "Merry Wives of Windsor."

Soon enough, however, everyone was a fashion critic and quick to point out the duchess' fluctuating weight, while she was desperate to stay slim. And Diana, while she was charming the daylights out of everyone, suffered from bulimia for years.

"It became fat Fergie against wonderful Diana," The Sun's Harry Arnold, the late journalist who was first with the news that Charles and Diana were an item in 1980, told The Diana Chronicles author Tina Brown.

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