The question from inquisitive reporters was straightforward enough — could Pauline Guinness confirm the whereabouts of her daughter Sabrina. With twinkling eyes, she gave her reply: ‘She’s you-know-where with you-know-who.’
That weekend in 1979, the beautiful
, 24, was at Balmoral with a bachelor Prince Charles, together with the Queen and Philip. It was common knowledge that the bride-hunting prince, then 31, was besotted with her.
Ash-blonde Sabrina was the girl with everything — staggeringly pretty, endlessly long legs, a bright mind and a sunny disposition, not to mention a Guinness heiress through her father, on the banking side of the billionaire brewery family. One male admirer summed her up as ‘a cross between Goldilocks and Alice in Wonderland’.
But after nine heady months together, Charles suddenly, though reluctantly, dropped her, and everyone knew why. Unlike Diana, who was only 19 and had kept herself ‘tidy’ when she got engaged to the prince two years later, Sabrina had lived a little, and the Queen knew it.
She’d been seen with some famous escorts, from pop stars Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger to Dai ‘Seducer of the Valleys’ Llewellyn and Tory politician Jonathan Aitken. She’d even spent time with Hollywood’s lascivious Jack Nicholson — as a Montessori-trained nursery teacher she worked for a year in Los Angeles looking after actor Ryan O’Neal’s precocious actress daughter, Tatum. For a future Queen, that libidinous roll-call would always have been a problem.
Even post-Charles she was still, arguably, the most eligible woman in Britain. Astonishingly, that is how she has remained for 34 years until last week, just a month short of her 59th birthday, when it emerged that at last she is to marry.
The question is why it’s taken all these years for Sabrina Guinness to have a diamond engagement ring on her finger for the first time in her life, placed there by that twice-divorced Lothario, playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, O.M., who is 76.
They have been together for more than a year, and are believed to have timed their engagement to coincide with the 87th birthday of Sabrina’s mother, now a widow living in Hampshire.
For Mrs Guinness, a great beauty herself in the Fifties, the betrothal of the last of her five children is her greatest wish.
‘She’s really delighted,’ says her son-in-law Keith Payne, a sculptor and painter who lives in Cork, Ireland, with Sabrina’s twin sister Miranda. ‘And you can imagine how Miranda feels — she and Sabrina have an almost psychic link.’
A long time ago the twin sisters shared a flat in London’s Kensington which they gloomily nicknamed ‘The Shelf’. They were 35 when Miranda married Payne, at that time a set designer for the Rolling Stones. It had been 11 years since Sabrina had captured the heart of the Prince of Wales, but as Miranda settled down in a happy married life, Sabrina remained single.
There certainly wasn’t a shortage of men. She was seen out (again) with Jagger, and dated actor Michael Douglas, who was reported as saying: ‘I love Sabrina.’
Singer Bryan Ferry came and went, as did Morgan Mason, politician son of the actor James Mason.
Her male friends were an eclectic bunch. On Millennium Eve, she was the partner of Labour politician Peter Mandelson at the Dome to join the Queen and the Blairs et al, Daily Mail informs.
