If you’ve seen Channel 10’s telemovie Mary: The Making of a Princess, you’ll know the shocked look on fictional Mary’s (played by Emma Hamilton) face when a Copenhagen palace aide informs her that back in Australia, someone went through her rubbish to find a treasure trove of personal items, and scolds her for not shredding anything.
Whether or not this dramatised version of events is exactly how the discovery played out is anyone’s guess, but Ben McDonald, the man who rifled through her bins and struck gold, can tell you exactly what happened at her home in Sydney.
Former private investigator turned Sydney paparazzi photographer Ben McDonald.
Back then, in the early 2000s, Ben was a corporate fraud and insurance private investigator and had been hired by Danish media for $1200 per day to dig into Mary’s past to find out more about their future Queen. And dig he did – right into her wheelie bin on garbo night.
As confronting as this sounds to the average punter, Ben concedes that, for a P.I., this was standard operating procedure.
“It just so happened that that on this particular day we did the bin search, she had been cleaning up to go overseas,” Ben recalls, in an exclusive interview with Woman’s Day online.
“She’d thrown out a whole lot of letters, cards, lists, photos. She’d literally thrown out her whole closet. We’d hit the jackpot!”
For Ben, the most interesting item was a picture of a then baby-faced Mary with model Sarah O’Hare – who would go on to become Sarah Murdoch when she married media tycoon Lachlan.
Mary had mysteriously destroyed this picture of herself with model Sarah O’Hare.
“It was the only thing she’d ripped into tiny pieces so people were interested in why she might do that. We meticulously repaired it,” says Ben.
“The other thing of value was her Victorian driver’s license. When the time and place is right, it should go back to its original owner. For now, it’s in my safe!”
Princess Mary’s old Victorian driver’s license.
However, when looking for a deeper insight into what makes Mary tick, it’s her list-writing that is most intriguing.
“At the time it stood out to me that she was quite meticulous, quite particular… She likes things ‘just right’, for example writing ‘Ice (lots), flowers – for the bathroom’ and ‘Aeroguard (for mozzies),” Ben says.
“She takes all the little details into account. I remember thinking that with such attention to detail she’d make a great private investigator – or a wedding planner!”
Mary’s meticulous list.
While much has been made of Operation Bin Search, for Ben, that was a small part of a 24/7 project – one that Mary herself was very well aware of.
“It was interesting to see the transition of her becoming media savvy and knowing she would be pictured,” says Ben.
“She would be walking along casually, and then she became aware she was being photographed. All of a sudden, the chin comes up, the nose is in the air, and she starts strutting! She was enjoying the process and thrill of recognition. Sometimes she would say hello and smile.”
As Mary’s relationship with Fred progressed, so did her fame, which meant more photographers were on her tail.
“She would go for runs and sometimes she would veer around you with a big grin on her face,” Ben remembers, adding that she soon became an expert at evading snappers when she didn’t want to be seen.
“Even in the early days she was a very good driver. Then there was a point where she had obviously had some evasive driving training and photographers couldn’t keep up with her. We were cautious too, because of the Princess Diana situation overseas.”
For Ben, revealing the real Mary became a turning point for him, too. He decided after a decade of being a private investigator, he would become a photographer, which has led him to owning his own business, Matrix Media.
The job has sent him on assignments photographing Leonardo DiCaprio in Mozambique, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as they awaited the birth of their daughter Shiloh in Namibia, and Shane Warne and his then-wife Simone’s secret but brief marriage rekindle in Fiji.
But when asked about how he feels about his fleeting role in Mary: Making of a Princess and how her incredible story launched his new career, Ben merely describes it as being all about her.
“Her going from commoner to princess is an Australian fable now,” he says. “It will probably never happen again.”
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