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LONDON - Life inside Buckingham Palace was bleak and undermining, and new royal family members were left alone and unsupported, the Duchess of York says in an interview to be broadcast this week.
The duchess makes the comments about her life with the royal family during the late 80s in a "therapy" interview with Dr Pamela Connolly, wife of the comedian Billy Connolly.
She tells of her great love for her ex-husband and her conviction that he was "the best of the lot".
The marriage to Prince Andrew stood no chance, she feels, because she saw so little of him.
She had planned to "live at port with him in a cottage"' so they could be together when his naval career permitted. Instead, she was banished to a lonely life on the second floor of the palace and became a public servant.
The Yorks spent only 40 days a year together during the first five years of their marriage.
"They told me what to do," the duchess says, referring to the royal family and their guardians of protocol, the "men in grey"'.
Once, she was told never to open the curtains wide in case the public saw her.
The Shrink Rap programmes by Dr Connolly - formerly the comedian Pamela Stephenson - chart five celebrities - the duchess, actors Stephen Fry and Robin Williams, disgraced politician David Blunkett and TV's Sharon Osbourne - through difficult childhoods and the emotional chaos created by fame.
Dr Connolly said: "There is a personality cluster, or a group of types, that may be drawn to the limelight because of experiences of abandonment or of not being accepted as children."
The duchess, it emerges, may have unconsciously repeated some of her most traumatic experiences in childhood by joining a dysfunctional family on an even grander scale. She even appears to have replicated her sibling rivalry with elder sister Jane by competing with the public popularity of the Princess of Wales.
Conceding that it was "very frightening following a brilliant star like Diana", she says: "Diana once said to me, 'It is OK. I am at the top of the pedestal. You are at the bottom. I can only fall off'."
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