Mother of the Bride

SPOTLIGHT

She's not at all what you'd expect. No typical English matron frumpy in florals, Susan Barrantes, fortynine, who becomes Prince Andrew's mother-in-law on July 23, is practically the Ralph Lauren woman incarnate. She's the epitome of Polo style. "She has a face and body that twenty-year-olds yearn for," says Patricia Hipwood, wife of the English polo player Julian.

There she is in the vast Argentinean pampas, living in a cuckoo-clock house with her wolfhound and her polo-professional husband, no makeup, hair streaming, a lion's tooth slung over a nonchalant denim dress, exuding the brand of elegance Milena Canonero did for Out of Africa. Maybe that's it, actually: the type of Englishwoman Sarah Ferguson's mother brings to mind is that particular pioneering, empire-engendering kind—the driven, upper-class, right-thinking maverick. Transporting the Eton spirit to Nyasaland. Bringing a whiff of Ascot to the outback. Fighting malaria in Malaysia with a stiff gin and tonic. Katharine Hepburn ramrodbacked in The African Queen. Lady Hester Stanhope camping with the Bedouin on the wilder shores of love.

However picture-perfect the Andrew-Sarah liaison seems, Mrs. Barrantes's story reads like a Harlequin Romance. In 1973, after nearly twenty years of conventional marriage to the upright cavalry officer and royal polo manager Major Ronald Ferguson (and, interestingly enough, the admiration of Prince Charles during his older-woman phase), she bolted. Her Barbara Cartland hero was the world-class polo player Hector Barrantes, "a great bear of a man with the manners of the most civilized of Europeans," says Hipwood. He swept her off to Argentina and his pony ranch, El Pucara—the Fortress—outside Buenos Aires.

They've spent the last ten years as stars of the transatlantic polo circuit (recently curtailed by Britain's post-Falklands ban on Argentinean players). Their parties are memorable, and Mrs. Barrantes astonishes the other polo wives with her participation in her husband's game: "Susie darts backwards and forwards during matches, checking tack on horses, holding replacement mallets, issuing orders to grooms. After the game is over, Hector sits comfortably in a folding chair while Susie unbuckles his spurs and takes off his knee pads. She produces a gourd of mate tea and a towel to wipe away the sweat of Hector's exertions."

In the pampas she still seems forthrightly English, while at Royal Ascot she has a distinctly foreign glamour. Supplied with marmalade, silver polish, and flea collars by relays of British friends, she's making her own life somewhere in between.

MILES CHAPMAN