Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret Craig Brown WINNER OF THE SOUTH BANK SKY ARTS LITERATURE AWARD 2018A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR‘A masterpiece’ Mail on Sunday‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ ObserverShe made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. Dudley Moore propositioned her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was in love with her.For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. “If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies” he confided to a friend, “they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!”Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding.In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma’am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.‘Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for decades now … Ma’am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny; also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity. He adores the spectacle of human vanity’ Julian Barnes, Guardian (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) COPYRIGHT (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk) This eBook first published by 4th Estate in 2017 Copyright © Craig Brown 2017 Craig Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover design by Anna Morrison While every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright-holders, in some cases this has proved impossible. The author and publisher would be grateful for any information that would enable any omissions to be made good in future editions of this book. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008203634 Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008203627 Version: 2018-05-23 DEDICATION (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) For my mother, Jennifer, born five days later; with love EPIGRAPH (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) My dreams Watching me said One to the other: ‘This life has let us down.’ Paul Potts Boredom: the desire for desires. Leo Tolstoy The love of place, and precedency, it rocks us in our cradles, it lies down with us in our graves. John Donne CONTENTS Cover (#ueda8fd9b-8055-5cd0-bc05-0ef0753a3e2a) Title Page (#u57f93c73-a354-572d-a2f7-695ce24bab4d) Copyright (#ub3cd5061-5e6a-5c79-9948-78724ceb8575) Dedication (#u9d8d011e-6065-51cc-ab16-32895dda5b4a) Epigraph (#ua2a00f43-7bb2-5a37-b735-4da20f997e50) 1 (#u58b46deb-32e1-5b0d-b40a-5f65dc650077) 2 (#u1ba285e4-5708-56bb-892b-91cac8623cb5) 3 (#u976957cd-d126-590b-a6a0-562964fc74e3) 4 (#u951631df-0f5d-5b88-a03e-d054b4fba50a) 5 (#u47153c2b-7e37-5de2-b9ae-3b5e532fe2bc) 6 (#u8ede0736-2d7c-5c20-87fa-7a03c4d57b9b) 7 (#u10f1a863-4273-57d4-80e0-c9278683f4f8) 8 (#u0368f53f-ed6f-53fa-94e0-e37357e48a0d) 9 (#u0aa49259-6605-557e-9b6f-e6be808a1ebf) 10 (#uf34f3c60-1c8a-5f7e-bc4e-d29930587af1) 11 (#u2d6d7f50-a9c6-5b6d-aeeb-b0dd1f2d9bbc) 12 (#u483eaa26-c317-5aba-824b-d7f68c0b2062) 13 (#u4b026c0c-eec3-5c54-85ab-0e523cd57ddb) 14 (#udf690bb9-0beb-5818-b161-a222c8578aa9) 15 (#u971fd037-264c-58dd-bcae-13cf5f819583) 16 (#u6fdc1aba-0bf7-5935-aaa4-60d7da5c24f2) 17 (#ua911f291-8184-550a-9792-6811c862c7e8) 18 (#ubadc3adf-9ef2-5ac0-a78d-14e91cda5c68) 19 (#u0c997da2-ed24-5207-9005-2fe5675e903a) 20 (#udf45a05e-d7a0-5ab8-8c70-36448b58706e) 21 (#u5f1db3a6-1d41-5eb6-a641-8c1b655f1a4a) 22 (#ude325a4a-a2c2-58b2-b172-2a6732079fe7) 23 (#u260b325c-f2b2-5afe-a03d-3e7f10c96e3d) 24 (#uea91ec4e-9de8-52cb-96a9-3a87a5299179) 25 (#u06dd7d30-ff2f-5179-8331-3c66c18e7720) 26 (#uea538d95-4631-507c-8cc5-b4cd0b0f22a9) 27 (#litres_trial_promo) 28 (#litres_trial_promo) 29 (#litres_trial_promo) 30 (#litres_trial_promo) 31 (#litres_trial_promo) 32 (#litres_trial_promo) 33 (#litres_trial_promo) 34 (#litres_trial_promo) 35 (#litres_trial_promo) 36 (#litres_trial_promo) 37 (#litres_trial_promo) 38 (#litres_trial_promo) 39 (#litres_trial_promo) 40 (#litres_trial_promo) 41 (#litres_trial_promo) 42 (#litres_trial_promo) 43 (#litres_trial_promo) 44 (#litres_trial_promo) 45 (#litres_trial_promo) 46 (#litres_trial_promo) 47 (#litres_trial_promo) 48 (#litres_trial_promo) 49 (#litres_trial_promo) 50 (#litres_trial_promo) 51 (#litres_trial_promo) 52 (#litres_trial_promo) 53 (#litres_trial_promo) 54 (#litres_trial_promo) 55 (#litres_trial_promo) 56 (#litres_trial_promo) 57 (#litres_trial_promo) 58 (#litres_trial_promo) 59 (#litres_trial_promo) 60 (#litres_trial_promo) 61 (#litres_trial_promo) 62 (#litres_trial_promo) 63 (#litres_trial_promo) 64 (#litres_trial_promo) 65 (#litres_trial_promo) 66 (#litres_trial_promo) 67 (#litres_trial_promo) 68 (#litres_trial_promo) 69 (#litres_trial_promo) 70 (#litres_trial_promo) 71 (#litres_trial_promo) 72 (#litres_trial_promo) 73 (#litres_trial_promo) 74 (#litres_trial_promo) 75 (#litres_trial_promo) 76 (#litres_trial_promo) 77 (#litres_trial_promo) 78 (#litres_trial_promo) 79 (#litres_trial_promo) 80 (#litres_trial_promo) 81 (#litres_trial_promo) 82 (#litres_trial_promo) 83 (#litres_trial_promo) 84 (#litres_trial_promo) 85 (#litres_trial_promo) 86 (#litres_trial_promo) 87 (#litres_trial_promo) 88 (#litres_trial_promo) 89 (#litres_trial_promo) 90 (#litres_trial_promo) 91 (#litres_trial_promo) 92 (#litres_trial_promo) 93 (#litres_trial_promo) 94 (#litres_trial_promo) 95 (#litres_trial_promo) 96 (#litres_trial_promo) 97 (#litres_trial_promo) 98 (#litres_trial_promo) 99 (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Other Books by Craig Brown (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) 1 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) 21 August 1930 ‘Her Royal Highness The Duchess of York gave birth to a daughter this evening. Both Her Royal Highness and the infant Princess are making very satisfactory progress.’ 31 October 1955 ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend. I am deeply grateful for the concern of all those who have constantly prayed for my happiness.’ 21 May 1958 ‘The Press Secretary to the Queen is authorised to say that the report in the Tribune de Gen?ve concerning a possible engagement between Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend is entirely untrue. Her Royal Highness’s statement of 1955 remains unaltered.’ 26 February 1960 ‘It is with the greatest pleasure that Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother announces the betrothal of her beloved daughter The Princess Margaret to Mr Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, son of Mr R.O.L. Armstrong-Jones Q.C., and the Countess of Rosse, to which union the Queen has gladly given her consent.’ 19 March 1976 ‘HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart. The Princess will carry out her public duties and functions unaccompanied by Lord Snowdon. There are no plans for divorce proceedings.’ 10 May 1978 ‘Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon, after two years of separation have agreed that their marriage should formally be ended. Accordingly Her Royal Highness will start the necessary legal proceedings.’ 9 February 2002 ‘The Queen, with great sadness, has asked for the following announcement to be made immediately. Her beloved sister, Princess Margaret, died peacefully in her sleep this morning at 6.30 in the King Edward VII Hospital. Her children, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, were at her side. Princess Margaret suffered a further stroke yesterday afternoon. She developed cardiac problems during the night and was taken from Kensington Palace to the King Edward VII Hospital at 2.30 a.m. Lord Linley and Lady Sarah were with her and the Queen was kept fully informed throughout the night. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and other members of the Royal Family are being informed.’ For Immediate Release Monday, 10 April 2006 London – Christie’s announces that jewellery and works of art from the Collection of Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, will be sold in London on 13 and 14 June 2006. This important and unparalleled historic sale will celebrate and pay tribute to Princess Margaret’s renowned beauty, style and taste. Comprising over eight hundred items, with estimates ranging from under ?100 to over ?500,000, the auction will feature a superb selection of jewellery and Faberg? as well as a broad range of furniture, silver, works of art and decorative objects. 2 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history – passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and even older memories – to the warm clasp of Crawfie, so full of do’s and don’ts; to Sir Roy Strong’s strange clothes and high demeanour; and her last afternoon tea with Peter; and Tony dancing attendance on her mother; and Roddy emerging from the sea at Mustique in his brand-new trunks; and the audience hooting with laughter at Dusty Springfield’s impertinent aside; and President Johnson steering her into dinner in the White House, his right palm lingering perhaps a little too long on her royal behind; and the old Queen, her grandmother, reprimanding her for erratic behaviour with a bouncing ball; and Lilibet’s voice down the telephone reassuring her once more that no harm had been done; and her mother laughing and saying ‘Such fun!’ before giving her that pitying look, and her father on his final evening bidding her good night, and see you in the morning. 3 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Yoo-hoo! Coo-EEEE! She shows up without warning, popping her head around the door of every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the twentieth century. Everyone seems to have met her at least once or twice, even those who did their best to avoid her. I first noticed her ubiquity when I was researching another book. Wherever I looked, up she popped. Can you spot her here, in the index to Andy Warhol’s diaries? Mansfield, Jayne Manson, Charles Mao Zedong Mao Zedong, Mrs see Chiang Ching Mapplethorpe, Robert Marciano, Sal Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos, Imelda Marcovicci, Andrea Marcus, Stanley Margaret, Princess Marianne (Interview staff) Marilyn (Boy George’s friend) Or here, in the diaries of Richard Crossman? Malta, withdrawal from Management Committee Manchester water supply Manchester Junior Chamber of Commerce Margach, James Margaret, Princess Marina, Princess Marquand, David Marre, Sir Alan Marriott, Peter It is like playing ‘Where’s Wally?’, or staring at clouds in search of a face. Leave it long enough, and she’ll be there, rubbing shoulders with philosophers, film stars, novelists, politicians. I spy with my little eye, something beginning with M! Here she is, sitting above Marie Antoinette in Margaret Drabble’s biography of Angus Wilson: Maraini, Dacia Marchant, Bill (Sir Herbert) Maresfield Park Margaret, Princess Marie Antoinette Market Harborough And here, in the diaries of Kenneth Williams: Manson, Charles March, David March, Elspeth Margaret, Princess Margate Margolyes, Miriam Would she rather have been sandwiched for eternity between Maresfield Park and Marie Antoinette, or Elspeth March and Margate? I’d guess the latter was more her cup of tea, though as luck would have it, there is a Princess Margaret Avenue in Margate,* (#ulink_a9dcccac-fec5-536b-9102-f4448a05b5ea) named in celebration of her birth in 1930, so, like it or not, her name, rendered both topographical and tongue-twisting, will be forever linked to Margate. Why is she in all these diaries and memoirs? What is she doing there? In terms of sheer quantity, she could never hope to compete with her sister, HM Queen Elizabeth II, who for getting on for a century of brief encounters (‘Where have you come from?’ ‘How long have you been waiting?’) must surely have met more people than anyone else who ever lived. Yet, miraculously, the Queen has managed to avoid saying anything striking or memorable to anyone. This is an achievement, not a failing: it was her duty and destiny to be dull, to be as useful and undemonstrative as a postage stamp, her life dedicated to the near-impossible task of saying nothing of interest. Once, when Gore Vidal was gossiping with Princess Margaret, he told her that Jackie Kennedy had found the Queen ‘pretty heavy going’. ‘But that’s what she’s there for,’ explained the Princess. * (#ulink_aeef2a2a-20d4-51ff-bc6e-2dc8ca1d65cc) At present the headquarters of the mobile hairdresser ‘Haircare at Home by Sharon’. As it happens, HRH Princess Margaret was fond of visiting her own hairdresser, almost to the point of addiction, often popping in twice in one day. 4 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) In her distrust of the unexpected, the Queen has taken a leaf from her grandfather’s book. King George V liked only what was predictable, regarding everything else as an infernal nuisance. A typical diary entry begins with an account of the weather (‘a nice bright morning, but strong wind’), accompanied, where appropriate, by a frost report (‘seven degrees frost this morning’). It then chronicles the exact time he had breakfast (‘up at 6.45, breakfast at eight with May’), and briefly mentions anyone notable he has encountered, and any advances he has made with his 325 stamp albums (‘The Prime Minister came to see me and we had a long talk. Spent the afternoon with Bacon choosing more stamps’). And that’s it. He disdains any sort of detail, telling or otherwise, about people and places. World events play second fiddle to stamps, clocks, barometers and bedtime. ‘The poor archduke and his wife were assassinated this morning in Serbia. They were in a motorcar. Terrible shock for the Emperor …’ he writes on the evening of 28 June 1914. He then adds: ‘Stamps after lunch, bed at 11.30.’ Few people have ever transcribed a conversation with his eldest granddaughter. Some remember what they said to the Queen, but have no memory of what she said to them, or indeed if she said anything at all. Gyles Brandreth is one of the few exceptions. At a drinks party in 1990, he found himself alone with her in a corner of the room. ‘There was no obvious means of escape for either of us, and neither of us could think of anything very interesting to say.’ But he didn’t leave it there. When he got home, he recorded their exchange in his diary: GB (GETTING THE BALL ROLLING): Had a busy day, Ma’am? HM (WITH A SMALL SIGH): Yes, very. GB: At the Palace? HM (SUCKING IN HER LIPS): Yes. GB: A lot of visitors? HM (APPARENTLY BITING THE INSIDE OF HER LOWER LIP): Yes. (PAUSE) GB (BRIGHTLY): The Prime Minister? (John Major) HM: Yes. (PAUSE) GB: He’s very nice. HM (NODDING): Yes, very. (LONG PAUSE) GB (STRUGGLING): The recession’s bad. HM (LOOKING GRAVE): Yes. GB (TRYING TO JOLLY THINGS ALONG): I think this must be my third recession. HM (NODDING): We do seem to get them every few years … and none of my governments seems to know what to do about them. (A MOMENT OF TINKLY LAUGHTER FROM HM, A HUGE GUFFAW FROM GB, THEN TOTAL SILENCE) GB (SUDDENLY FRANTIC): I’ve been to Wimbledon today. HM (BRIGHTENING BRIEFLY): Oh, yes? GB (DETERMINED): Yes. HM: I’ve been to Wimbledon, too. GB (NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE): Today? HM: No. GB (OH WELL, WE TRIED): No, of course not. (PAUSE) I wasn’t at the tennis. HM: No? GB: No, I was at the theatre. (LONG PAUSE) Have you been to the theatre in Wimbledon? (PAUSE) HM: I imagine so. (INTERMINABLE PAUSE) GB (A LAST, DESPERATE ATTEMPT): You know, Ma’am, my wife’s a vegetarian. HM (WHAT WILL SHE SAY?): That must be very dull. GB (WHAT NEXT?): And one of my daughters is a vegetarian, too. HM (OH NO!): Oh, dear. Her technique is to let others do the talking. Often – perhaps more often than not – the dizzying experience of talking to a stranger more instantly recognisable than your own mother, a stranger the back of whose miniaturised face you have licked countless times, is enough to start you spouting a stream of gibberish. While you do so, Her Majesty may occasionally say, ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘That must be interesting,’ but most of the time she says nothing at all. As a drama student in the mid-seventies, I found myself presented to her at a party, quite unexpectedly. Our host – who later explained that he thought she might want to meet one of the younger generation – told Her Majesty that I had recently had an article published in Punch, and then left us to it. ‘That must be interesting,’ she said. This was more than enough to convince me of her thirst to know more. Within seconds I was regaling her with my various complex and no doubt impenetrable theories of humour, while every now and then she was urging me on with an ‘Oh, really?’ or a ‘That must be interesting,’ and from there I proceeded to remind her of Bertolt Brecht’s theories of alienation (‘Oh, really?’), with particular reference to their application to comedy (‘That must be interesting’). I have learned since that the way the Queen signals the end of a conversation is to take one step backwards, but I did not know this at the time. Friends who witnessed our meeting from the other side of the room told me that, during the final half of my discourse on Brecht, Her Majesty took first one step back, then another, then another, then another, but still found herself trapped: for each of her steps back I took a step forward. Throughout her life, the Queen’s technique of giving nothing away has paid dividends. Nowadays, everyone seems content to interpret her silence as wisdom. The less she says, the more we believe she has something to say. Peter Morgan’s play The Audience and his film The Queen are both predicated on this paradox: her advisers and her prime ministers may prattle away, but, Buddha-like, it is Her Majesty the Queen, with her How long have you been heres? and her Have you come fars?, who remains the still, small voice of calm, radiating common sense. But her younger sister was another matter. As the second-born, the also-ran, she was denied the Chauncey Gardiner option. She could never have been another whitewashed wall, there for people to see in her whatever they chose to see. To impress on people that she was royal, Princess Margaret had to take the only other path available to her: to act imperiously, to make her presence felt, to pull well-wishers up short, to set strangers at their unease. If I had tried to tell Margaret about Bertolt Brecht she would have interrupted me – ‘Too tiresome!’ – before I had got to the end of the ‘Bert –’. Like a grand guignol version of her elder sister, she took a perverse pleasure in saying the wrong thing, ruffling feathers, disarming, disdaining, making her displeasure felt. One socialite remembers seeing her at a party at Sotheby’s in 1997. By that stage, people were so reluctant to be snapped at by her that there was a sort of compulsory rota system in operation. A senior Sotheby’s figure told the socialite that he would guarantee him an invitation to every future Sotheby’s party attended by Princess Margaret if he would promise to talk to her for five minutes on each occasion. Compare the Queen’s conversation with Brandreth to Princess Margaret’s dinner-party conversation, as witnessed by Edward St Aubyn and recreated in his wonderfully beady novel, Some Hope. As the main course arrives, the Princess asks her host, Sonny, ‘Is it venison? It’s hard to tell under this murky sauce.’ A few minutes later, the French ambassador, sitting next to her, accidentally flicks globules of the sauce over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress. ‘The Princess compressed her lips and turned down the corners of her mouth, but said nothing. Putting down the cigarette holder into which she had been screwing a cigarette, she pinched her napkin between her fingers and handed it to Monsieur d’Alantour. ‘“Wipe!” she said with terrifying simplicity.’ While the ambassador is on his knees, dipping his napkin in a glass of water and rubbing the spots of sauce on her dress, the Princess lights a cigarette and turns back to her host. ‘I thought I couldn’t dislike the sauce more when it was on my plate.’ The ambassador’s wife offers to help. ‘He spilled it, he should wipe it up!’ replies the Princess. She points to a spot the ambassador has missed. ‘Go on, wipe it up!’ She then complains about ‘being showered in this revolting sauce’. At this point, the table falls silent. ‘“Oh, a silence,” declared Princess Margaret. “I don’t approve of silences. If No?l were here,” she said, turning to Sonny, “he’d have us all in stitches.”’ Before long, Sonny’s seven-year-old daughter appears, having found it hard to get to sleep. Her mother asks the Princess if she may present her. ‘“No, not now, I don’t think it’s right,” said the Princess. “She ought to be in bed, and she’ll just get overexcited.”’ 5 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) More often than not, the presence of Margaret, HRH the Princess in an index signals yet another tale of haughty behaviour. In the autobiography of Cherie Blair she comes between Mandela, Nelson and May, Brian. The brittle wife of the former prime minister recalls the occasion she was talking to Princess Margaret at a gala performance at the Royal Opera House when the secretary of state for culture came over. ‘Have you met Chris Smith, our culture secretary, Ma’am?’ asked Mrs Blair. ‘And this is his partner …’ ‘Partner for what?’ said the Princess. At this point, writes Cherie Blair, ‘I took a breath.’ ‘Sex, Ma’am.’ This reply proved unwelcome. ‘She stalked off.’ But Mrs Blair remains unapologetic. ‘She knew exactly what kind of partner I meant. She was just trying to catch me out.’ Most of the stories follow another arc: the Princess arrives late, delaying dinner to catch up with her punishing schedule of drinking and smoking. At the table, she grows more and more relaxed; by midnight, it dawns on the assembled company that she is in it for the long haul, which means that they will be too, since protocol dictates that no one can leave before she does. Then, just as everyone else is growing more chatty and carefree, the Princess abruptly remounts her high horse and upbraids a hapless guest for over-familiarity: ‘When you say my sister, I imagine you are referring to Her Majesty the Queen?’ At such moments it is as though she has been released by alcohol from the constrictions of informality. After a succession of drinks she is able to enter a stiffer, grander, more subservient world, a world in which people still know their place: the world as it used to be. She had a thirst for the putdown, particularly where food and drink were concerned. Kenneth Rose,* (#ulink_04a70d5a-f092-56cf-8234-39bbd7434f62) the biographer of King George V, recorded her curt response when Lord Carnarvon offered her a glass of his very rare and precious 1836 Madeira: ‘Exactly like petrol.’ The author and photographer Christopher Simon Sykes remembers her arrival at his parents’ house one teatime. Full of excitement, the staff had prepared a scrumptious array of cakes, scones and sandwiches. The Princess glanced at this magnificent spread, said ‘I HATE tea!’ and swanned past. In the 1980s she paid an official visit to Derbyshire in order to open the new district council offices in Matlock. Among those on hand to receive her was Matthew Parris, at that time the local Conservative MP. ‘It was 10 a.m.,’ he recalled. ‘I drank instant coffee. She drank gin and tonic.’ Having opened the offices, she was driven to the north of the constituency to open some sheltered bungalows for old people. A dish of coronation chicken had been specially cooked for her. ‘This looks like sick,’ she said. The mighty and the glamorous were by no means excluded from these rebuffs. In 1970 the producer of Love Story, Robert Evans, and its star, his wife Ali MacGraw, flew to London to attend the Royal Command Performance in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and HRH the Princess Margaret. ‘All of us stood in a receiving line as Lord Somebody introduced us, one by one, to Her Majesty and her younger daughter. It was a hell of a thrill, abruptly ending when the lovely princess shook my hand. ‘“Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.” ‘“Fuck you too,” I said to myself, smiling back.’ It was almost as though, early in life, she had contracted a peculiarly royal form of Tourette’s Syndrome, causing the sufferer to be seized by the unstoppable urge to say the wrong thing. When the model Twiggy and her then boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, were invited to dinner by the Marquis and Marchioness of Dufferin in the 1960s, their hostess warned them that Princess Margaret would be among the guests. Before the royal arrival, the marquis instructed them in royal protocol. ‘We were tipped off to stand if she stood, and to call her Ma’am. Fine, no probs,’ recalled de Villeneuve. Sitting close to the Princess, de Villeneuve was shocked to find that her smoking was seamless. ‘When we started to eat, she lit a ciggie and then continued to chainsmoke, lighting one ciggie off another, throughout the meal. Where’s the protocol in that?’ The Princess ignored Twiggy – at that time one of the most famous women in Britain – until the very last moment. She then turned and asked her what her name was. ‘Lesley, Ma’am. But my friends call me Twiggy.’ ‘How unfortunate,’ replied the Princess, and turned her back on her once more. At this point, Lord Snowdon, never the most loyal husband, leaned over towards de Villeneuve. ‘You will get this with the upper classes,’ he sighed. ‘Well, I think it’s a charming name,’ chipped in the Marquis of Dufferin. * (#ulink_02fba0b4-6b45-5540-ade1-d1c57f193421) Often known as ‘The Climbing Rose’. 6 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘My boy’s first word was “chandelier”.’ But her strong competitive streak was not always matched by ability. A regular fellow guest recalled one particular fit of bad sportsmanship. ‘We were playing Trivial Pursuit, and the question was the name of a curried soup. She said, “It’s just called curried soup. There isn’t any other name for it. It’s curried soup!” Our host said, “No, Ma’am – the answer is ‘Mulligatawny’.” And she said, “No – it’s curried soup!” And she got so furious that she tossed the whole board in the air, sending all the pieces flying everywhere.’ Her snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch. ‘I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,’ she said to the architect husband of an old friend who had been working on Glamis Castle. To the same man, who had been disabled since childhood, she said, ‘Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?’ Her more sympathetic friends managed to overlook such cruel remarks, believing them to be almost involuntary, or at least misguided. ‘I think she was trying to be cheeky. She thought she was trying to reach a kind of intimacy,’ says one. ‘But she suffered from a perpetual identity crisis. She didn’t know who she was. She never knew whether she was meant to be posh or to be matey, and so she swung between the two, and it was a disaster.’ In the 1990s, two senior representatives from Sotheby’s, one tall and thin, the other rather more portly, came to Kensington Palace to assess her valuables. The Princess asked them what they thought. ‘Well –’ began the tall man. ‘No, not you – the fat one,’ snapped the Princess. The rebuke became her calling card, like Frank Ifield’s yodel or Tommy Cooper’s fez. Who wanted to sit through her analysis of current affairs, or her views on twentieth-century literature? No one: the connoisseurs wanted to see her getting uppity; it was what she did best. If you were after perfect manners, an early night and everything running like clockwork, then her sister would oblige. But if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote. Hoity-toity is what was wanted. For most recipients, hosts and guests alike, it was part of a package deal: once she had finally gone and the dust had settled, they were left with a suitably outrageous story – the ungracious royal! the bad Princess! – to last a lifetime. She had a small circle of lifelong friends, loyal to the last. Though they forgave her faults, they also liked to store them up, ready for repetition to others less loyal. ‘Princess Margaret’s friends are devoted to her,’ wrote A.N. Wilson in 1993. ‘But one seldom meets any of them after they have had the Princess to stay, without hearing a tale of woe – how she has kept the company up until four in the morning (it is supposedly not allowed to withdraw from a room until a royal personage has done so); or insisted on winning at parlour games, even those such as Trivial Pursuit which require a degree of knowledge which she simply did not possess; how she has expected her hostess to act as a lady-in-waiting, drawing back the curtains in the morning, and so forth.’ Ever discreet, Kenneth Rose would amuse his friends with the tale of the vintage Madeira (‘Exactly like petrol!’), but would bide his time before putting it into print, for fear of losing his friendship with the Princess. His oleaginous discretion was assured, and this was how he remained a frequent visitor to Kensington Palace. This discretion extended to the moment of Princess Margaret’s death, at which point he employed the anecdote to lend spice to her obituary in the Sunday Telegraph. Her death unleashed many such tales, rising like so many phoenixes from the ashes. For instance, in a diary for the New Statesman, the comedian John Fortune recalled an encounter with her at the BBC Television Centre in the early seventies. First, he introduced her to his producer, Denis Main Wilson. ‘She asked him what he did. He stood up very straight and said: “Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part.” The Princess replied: “Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?” ‘After a few more minutes of conversation, I found myself saying: “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Princess Margaret, but I have someone waiting for me downstairs and I have to go.” ‘She fixed me with a beady look. “No you don’t,” she said. “No one leaves my presence until I give them permission to do so.”’ But, for all her haughtiness, Fortune detected ‘a look of mischief in her eyes’. ‘At that moment, I knew she didn’t mean it. Had she, perhaps, been waiting all her life for someone to tell her they had to go?’ Fortune felt that if he had replied, ‘Well, that’s too bad, I’m off anyway,’ then nothing would have happened. But he wasn’t prepared to take the risk. A formal conversation continued for a few more minutes, and then she said, ‘I’m very bored here. Isn’t there somewhere else in this place we can go and have a drink?’ He knew of a bar in Light Entertainment that stayed open late, so he raced down two floors, only to find the barman pulling the metal grille down. ‘“Stop, stop,” I cried, “open up again. Quick, Princess Margaret is coming.”’ ‘Pull the other one …’ said the sceptical barman. At that moment they saw what Fortune described as ‘the pocket battleship’ bearing down on them. Fortune ordered two gin and tonics, one for himself and one for Princess Margaret. He then spotted a director of The Old Grey Whistle Test slumped against the bar, so he presented him to the Princess. ‘I think he must have been Australian, because within minutes the talk was of Sydney Harbour, convicts and the penalties for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century. ‘And what made it perfect,’ enthused the Princess, not getting the point of the story, ‘was that it was STALE bread!’ Within minutes, Fortune had made his excuses and left. 7 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Throughout her adult life, Princess Margaret was happy to be tempted away from her solid bedrock of tweedy friends towards the more glittering world of bohemia. She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram. Her royal presence was enough to gratify the snobbish tendencies of the bohemians, while her snooty behaviour let them laugh at her behind her back, thus exonerating themselves from the charge of social climbing. Hers was a name to drop, generally to the sound of a tut-tut or a titter. (Popperfoto/Getty Images) The Princess was drawn to theatrical types, and they to her; they detected something camp in her, something of the pantomime dame, some element of irony in the way she adopted her royal airs, as though with a wink and a nudge she might at any moment reveal her haughty persona to have been no more than a theatrical tease. She enjoyed playing with the boundaries of being royal, popping out from under the red silk rope, and then, just as abruptly, popping back beneath it, returning to her familiar world of starch and vinegar. The Princess would draw bohemians to her with a smoky, nightclub worldliness, mischievously at odds with her position. Then, having enticed them in and helped them loosen up, she would suddenly and without warning snap at them, making it clear that by attempting to engage with her on equal terms they were guilty of a monstrous presumption. A keen theatregoer, she went to see Derek Jacobi as Richard II at the Phoenix Theatre in 1988, sending word asking him to remain onstage at the end of the performance, so that she could meet him. ‘I did, and she kept me waiting,’ he remembered. ‘She had gone to hospitality, had a couple of whiskies, and then tottered through to say hello onstage half an hour later.’ After another show, she invited him to dine with her and some ballet friends at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Covent Garden. ‘There were eight of us and I sat next to her. She smoked continuously, not even putting out her cigarette when the soup arrived, but instead leaning it up against the ashtray. We got on terribly well, very chummy, talking about her mum and her sister, and she really made me feel like I was a friend, until she got a cigarette out and I picked up a lighter and she snatched it out of my hand and gave it to a ballet dancer called David Wall. ‘“You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close.”’ Bohemian society in sixties London was formed of an unresolved mix of egalitarianism and snobbery. Kenneth Tynan was as devoted to Princess Margaret as he was to the British working class, though he took care to keep the two enthusiasms separate. Tracy Tynan remembers her father arguing that her birthday party should be postponed because Princess Margaret would be out of town. But her presence at his arty get-togethers was unsettling. An actress who was sometimes a guest told me that the assembled iconoclasts – actors, writers, artists, musicians – would kowtow to Her Royal Highness while she was present, only to make fun of her the moment she left, imitating her squeaky, high-pitched voice, her general ignorance, her cackhanded opinions, her lofty putdowns, her air of entitlement. If a fellow guest’s over-familiarity had prompted her to execute one of her ‘Off with his head!’ reprimands, then they would have something extra to giggle about. The presence of the Princess would endow a party with grandeur; her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence. Beside these laughing sophisticates, the Princess could often appear an innocent. 8 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The baby had been expected any time between 6 and 12 August 1930. The mother, HRH the Duchess of York, planned to give birth to this, her second child, at her family seat, Glamis Castle. This was disappointing news for the home secretary, J.R. Clynes, who had been looking forward to a family holiday in Brighton in the first weeks of August. A socialist who had started work in a cotton mill at the age of ten, Clynes now found himself bound by law to be at hand for the royal birth. Some had suggested that Clynes could make a last-minute dash from London to Scotland the moment news of the first contractions came through, but his stuffy ceremonial secretary, Harry Boyd, was having none of it: if the birth was not properly witnessed by the home secretary, then the baby’s relatively high place in the line of succession – third for a boy, fourth for a girl – would be placed in jeopardy. Nothing should be left to chance. So, like it or not, Boyd and Clynes boarded the train to Scotland in good time, arriving at Cortachy Castle, where they would be staying, promptly on the morning of 5 August. A special telephone wire had been installed from Glamis to Cortachy, with a dispatch rider at hand in case the wire broke down. The two men were to have a long wait. Clynes, quiet and retiring, occupied his time with long walks, sometimes in the company of his hostess, Lady Airlie. Boyd, on the other hand, was more worked-up; he preferred to stay indoors, fearful lest he miss the vital phone call. Nor did he rule out the possibility of an accident, or some sort of muddle-up, or even sabotage. Had he spent too long out East? ‘I could not help feeling that his long residence in China was inclining him to view the situation in too oriental a light,’ Lady Airlie recalled in her memoirs. On the 11th, the three of them – the home secretary, the countess, the civil servant – were on red alert, sitting up all night, ‘sustained by frequent cups of coffee’, but it was a false alarm. On the 14th, Boyd lost his temper when Clynes said he was thinking of going sightseeing with Lady Airlie; on the morning of the 21st, ‘wild-eyed and haggard after sitting up all night’, Boyd telephoned Glamis for any news, and was told there was none. Unable to contain his nerves, he stomped out into the garden and started kicking stones. That same evening, just as they were dressing for dinner, the call from Glamis at last came through. Boyd, wearing only a blue kimono, a souvenir from his China days, was caught on the hop. ‘What? In an hour? We must start at once!’ With that, he leapt into his suit and rushed downstairs, where he found Clynes already waiting in his coat and Homburg. ‘Just look at that, Boyd!’ said Clynes, pointing to the sunset. ‘In such a night stood Dido …’ But Boyd was in no mood for an impromptu Shakespeare recital, and pushed Clynes headlong into the waiting car. They arrived at Glamis with barely half an hour to spare. At 9.22 p.m., attended by her three doctors, the Duchess gave birth to a baby girl. Once the baby had been weighed (6lbs 3oz), the home secretary was ushered into the bedroom to bear witness. ‘I found crowded round the baby’s cot the Duke of York, Lord and Lady Strathmore and Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, the Duchess’s sister. They at once made way for me, and I went to the cot and peeping in saw a fine chubby-faced little girl lying wide awake.’ The news that the King had another grandchild – his fourth – was greeted with forty-one-gun salutes from the Royal Horse Artillery in both Hyde Park and the Tower of London, together with the ringing of the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. The following evening, 4,000 people gathered in the Glamis village square and followed the Glamis Pipe Band up Hunter’s Hill as it played boisterous renditions of ‘The Duke of York’s Welcome’, ‘Highland Laddie’ and ‘The Earl of Strathmore’s Welcome’. With everyone gathered at the summit, two young villagers lit a six-hundred-foot-high brushwood beacon. Within minutes, its flames could be seen from miles around. 9 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Princess Margaret was born in 1930, the same year as air hostess and newscaster entered the language, and died in 2002, when googling, selfie, blogger and weapons of mass destruction first appeared. Is it just me, or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? Blas? first made the Channel crossing in 1930, subtly altering its meaning on the way: in its home country of France, it meant ‘sated by enjoyment’, while here in Britain it meant something closer to ‘bored or unimpressed through over-familiarity’. Also from France, or eighteenth-century France, came neglig?e, with that extra ‘e’ to show that it now meant a lacy, sexy dressing gown rather than an informal gown worn by men and women alike. Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson – a martini-like cocktail consisting of gin and vermouth with a cocktail onion – was introduced to fashionable society. In All About Eve (1950), Bette Davis serves her guests Gibsons, saying, ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’ Then again, learner-driver, washing-up machine and snack bar also came into being in 1930, yet it’s hard to relate any of them to Princess Margaret, who never learned to drive, nor to operate a washing-up machine. And, as far as I know, she never entered a snack bar. Also making their first entries that year were to bale out, meaning to make an emergency parachute jump, to feel up, meaning to grope or fondle, and sick-making, meaning to make one either feel queasy, or vomit, depending on the force of one’s reaction. Each of these three has something Margaret-ish about it, as do crooner and eye shadow and the adjective luxury. Two concepts dear to any biographer, but perhaps particularly dear to biographers of Princess Margaret, entered the language in the year of her birth: guesstimate and whodunnit. There also came a word that had been around for several centuries, but which, as a direct result of the birth of the little Princess in 1930, was to take on a life of its own. Horoscope. 10 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) At his office in Fleet Street, John Gordon, the editor of the Sunday Express, was struggling to come up with a fresh angle on the news of another royal birth. Then it came to him: why not ask Cheiro,* (#ulink_bfcc6e43-88f1-5516-9e28-548728149e4d) the most famous astrologer of the day, to predict what life might have in store for her? Cheiro had, in his time, given personal readings to, among others, Oscar Wilde, General Kitchener, Mark Twain and King Edward VII. The little Princess would surely be a doddle. Gordon telephoned Cheiro’s office, only to be informed by his assistant, R.H. Naylor, that the great man was unavailable. Instead, Naylor put himself forward for the task. His article, ‘What the Stars Foretell for the New Princess’, duly appeared the following Sunday. Naylor foretold that Princess Margaret Rose would have ‘an eventful life’, a prediction that was possibly on the safe side, since few lives are without any event whatsoever. Moreover, it would be decades before anyone could confidently declare it to have been entirely uneventful, and by that time people’s minds would have been distracted by other, more eventful, things. More particularly, Naylor predicted that ‘events of tremendous importance to the Royal Family and the nation will come about near her seventh year’. The article proved a huge success, so much so that Gordon proceeded to commission Naylor to write forecasts for the months ahead. As luck – or chance, or fate – would have it, one of his predictions was that ‘a British aircraft will be in danger between October 8th and 15th’. He was just three days out: on 5 October, on its maiden overseas flight, the passenger airship R101 crashed in Beauvais, France, killing forty-eight of the fifty-four people on board. Naylor’s reputation was made. John Gordon now hit on the idea of asking him to write a weekly column making predictions for all Sunday Express readers according to their birthdays. Naylor puzzled for some time over how to incorporate 365 different forecasts into a single column, and eventually devised a more off-the-peg system by dividing the sun’s 360-degree transit into twelve zones, each of them spanning thirty degrees. He then named each of the twelve zones after a different celestial constellation, and offered blocks of predictions for each birth sign. This was how the modern horoscope came into being. In the Princess’s seventh year, 1936, a series of events of tremendous significance to the Royal Family did indeed come about, exactly as predicted: the death of King George V, the abdication of King Edward VIII, and the accession of King George VI. Small wonder that Naylor was now regarded as something of a genius; before long he was receiving up to 28,000 letters a week from his bedazzled readers, anxious to know what fate had up its sleeve for them. By now, every other popular newspaper had taken to employing a resident astrologer; according to Mass-Observation, ‘nearly two-thirds of the adult population glance at or read some astrological feature more or less regularly’. One of the beauties of the horoscope, from the point of view of the astrologer, is that its followers are more than willing to forget or ignore any prediction that turns out to be wrong. In future, Naylor would be the beneficiary of this impulse to turn a blind eye. At the beginning of 1939, for instance, he confidently declared that ‘Hitler’s horoscope is not a war horoscope … if and when war comes, not he but others will strike the first blow.’ He also pinpointed the likely danger areas as ‘the Mediterranean, the Near East and Ireland’. Furthermore, he declared that the causes of any potential conflict would be: ‘1) The childless marriage; 2) The failure of agriculturalists … to understand the ways of nature and conserve the fertility of the soil.’ Within months, all these predictions had gone awry, but Naylor’s reputation remained rock-solid. Nearly ninety years on, the horoscope is quite possibly the most formidable legacy of HRH the Princess Margaret, who shared her birthday, 21 August, and her star sign Leo, with a varied list of famous characters, including Count Basie, King William IV, Kenny Rogers, Aubrey Beardsley, Dame Janet Baker and Joe Strummer of the Clash. * (#ulink_9ffc2d95-8d34-5b15-91be-309299e61fbd) Born William John Warner (1866–1936), he also went by the name of Count Louis Hamon. Cheiro combined his careers as a clairvoyant, numerologist and palmist with running both a champagne business and a chemical factory, though not from the same premises. 11 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) In my biographer’s delirium, as I looked at the list of Princess Margaret’s fellow 21 August Leos I began to notice spooky similarities, and then to think that, actually, she was just like them in every way: after all, King William IV was family, and Dame Janet Baker looked a bit like her, as well as being a near-contemporary (b.1933). The two of them were chummy, too: Dame Janet remembers the Princess saying, ‘Good luck, Janet – be an angel,’ to her before she sang the part of the Angel in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Westminster Abbey. Moreover, the Princess was a great fan of Count Basie, and vice versa: in 1957 Basie and his orchestra recorded ‘H.R.H.’, a song dedicated to her. Margaret also shared a louche, camp, decadent streak with Aubrey Beardsley, and might have identified with Kenny Rogers’ songs about being disappointed by love: ‘You picked a fine time to leave me, Tony’. And as for Joe Strummer, if the Margaret/Townsend romance were to be set to music, could there ever be a more perfect keynote duet than this? PETER TOWNSEND: Darling, you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go? PRINCESS MARGARET: If you say that you are mine I’ll be here ’til the end of time BOTH: So you got to let me know Should I stay or should I go? By now I was hallucinating. The Princess was everywhere and nowhere. It seemed as though everyone I bumped into had met her at one time or another, and had a story to tell, generally about her saying something untoward and an uneasy atmosphere ensuing. At the same time my brain was becoming entangled with the spaghetti-like argy-bargy of the Townsend affair, as knotted and impenetrable as the causes of the First World War. I would spend hours puzzling over the same not-very-interesting anecdote told about her by different people, each contradicting the other. Should I go for the most likely, the funniest, the most interesting, or even, as part of my noble effort to write a serious book, the dullest? And which was which? I found it increasingly hard to judge. Should I favour one version of events over the other, or should I risk boring the reader by doggedly relaying every variant? Just as the writers of the four gospels of the New Testament offer contrasting views of the same event, so do those who bear witness to the life and times of Princess Margaret. To pick just one example, here are two different versions of a quite humdrum little story about Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret, a cigarette and a cushion. I have put them side by side, for the purposes of compare and contrast. The first is from Of Kings and Cabbages (1984), a memoir by Peter Coats, former ADC to General Wavell,* (#ulink_7a3826ff-f8ec-5d85-b625-e940b1d51940) boyfriend of Chips Channon, and editor of House and Garden magazine, widely known by the nickname ‘Petti-Coats’: Tony Snowdon was having a mild argument with his wife, Princess Margaret, and, having lit a cigarette, flicked the match towards an ashtray and it fell into Princess Margaret’s brocaded lap. HRH brushed it off quickly and, rather annoyed, said, ‘Really, Tony, you might have burned my dress.’ To which came the reply, ‘I don’t care. I never did like that material.’ The princess drew herself up and said very grandly, ‘Material is a word we do not use.’ I admit to having told this story several times, and it always arouses a storm-in-a-cocktail-glass of discussion. What other word? Stuff, perhaps? So there we are. Now take a look at this second version of the same event, which comes from Redeeming Features (2009), an enjoyably baroque memoir by the interior decorator and socialite Nicky Haslam: We joined a party at Kate and Ivan Moffat’s, where the growing distance and determined one-upmanship between Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon was all too evident. Bored, Tony played with a box of matches, flicking them, lit, at his wife. ‘Oh, do stop,’ she said. ‘You’ll set fire to my dress.’ Tony glowered. ‘Good thing too. I hate that material.’ Princess Margaret stiffened. ‘We call it stuff.’ Which to pick? The Coats version is milder, the Haslam version more extreme. Coats has Snowdon lighting a cigarette and flicking a single match with the intention of making it land in an ashtray; Haslam has him playing with an entire box of matches out of boredom, and aiming and flicking the lit matches, one by one, at Princess Margaret. According to Coats, the Princess says, ‘Material is a word we do not use.’ Coats then speculates about a feasible substitute. But Haslam makes no mention of her declaring ‘Material is a word we do not use’; he simply has her observing, ‘We call it stuff.’ We will never know which version is true, or truer, or if both are false, or half-true and half-false. If you could whizz back in time and corner both men as they left the Moffats’ house, I imagine that each would swear by his own story, and someone else emerging from the same party – Lord Snowdon, or Princess Margaret, or one of the Moffats, for instance – would say that both of them had got it wrong, and the truth was more mundane, or more civilised, or more outrageous. To me, as the self-appointed theologian of that particular contretemps, Coats’ version sounds marginally the more probable. A succession of lit matches flicked across a sofa strikes me as a little too chancy and hazardous, particularly if flicked in someone else’s house. Moreover, ‘Material is a word we do not use’ sounds more imperiously Princess Margaret than ‘We call it stuff.’ On the other hand, Nicky Haslam is a keen observer of human behaviour, and has a knack for detail. Even if we agree to settle for a judicious mish-mash of the two accounts, we are still obliged to embark on a discussion of late-twentieth-century royal linguistics. Both accounts agree that ‘material’ was a word offensive to Princess Margaret, and perhaps even to the entire (‘we’) Royal Family. But why? As words go, it has a perfectly good pedigree: it dates back to 1380, and was employed by Geoffrey Chaucer. On the other hand, though ‘stuff’ may sound more aggressively modern, coarse and general, it in fact predates ‘material’ by forty years. ‘Stuff’ originally meant fabric – in particular the quilted fabric worn under chain mail. It was centuries before it was demoted into a catch-all term applied to anything you couldn’t quite remember the right name for. So the Princess’s etymological instinct turns out to have been spot-on. Or – forgive me – was her preference for ‘stuff’ over ‘material’ an unconscious throwback to her family’s Germanic roots? The German for material is ‘stoff’, so it’s possible the Royal Family’s liking for ‘stoff’ has been handed down from generation to generation, its basis lost in time. So much for that. As you can see, when push comes to shove, even the most humdrum royal anecdote can open up any number of different avenues of enquiry. For instance, who on earth were the Moffats? It would be easy to find out, and a true scholar would probably include their CVs either in the text itself or in a learned footnote. But there is only so much a reader can take. Does anyone really need to know?* (#ulink_2fe9ac0c-13e2-5436-b402-1e2e3d741615) And what about all the other words Princess Margaret didn’t like? Should I squeeze them in too? After all, she could take fierce exception to words she considered common – but she chose those words pretty much at random, so that people who weren’t on the alert would utter one of them, and set off a booby trap, with the shrapnel of indignation flying all over the place. The Princess strongly objected to the word ‘placement’, for example, yet it’s just the kind of word her friends and acquaintances would have instinctively used while dithering over who to place where around a dining table, probably thinking the word was rather classy. But no! The moment anyone said ‘placement’ – ka-boom! – all hell would break loose. ‘Placement is what maids have when they are engaged in a household!’ Princess Margaret would snap, insisting on the expression ‘place ? table’ instead. And the nightmare wouldn’t end there. Even those who had managed to shuffle to their allocated seats without uttering the dread word were liable to be caught out the next morning, at breakfast time, when the Princess would reel back in horror if she heard the phrase ‘scrambled eggs’, declaring irritably, ‘WE call them “buttered eggs”!’ And so a biography of Princess Margaret is always set to expand, like the universe itself, or, in more graspable terms, a cheese souffl?, every reference breeding a hundred more references, every story a thousand more stories, each with its own galaxy of additions, contradictions and embellishments. You try to make a haybale, but you end up with a haystack. And the needle is nowhere to be seen. * (#ulink_e02f85ea-e550-521e-a75d-16088a9fcb29) Field Marshal Wavell (1883–1950) once sat next to Princess Margaret over lunch. Tongue-tied at the best of times, he struggled to think of something to say. At last, he was seized by an idea! ‘Do you like Alice in Wonderland, Ma’am?’ ‘No.’ * (#ulink_3207a864-c066-5709-952b-6f3a5cc4da9b) Oddly enough, the answer is probably yes. As it happens, Ivan Moffat was a film producer and screenwriter (A Place in the Sun, The Great Escape, Giant). Born in Cuba in 1918, he was the son of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the nephew of Sir Max Beerbohm, and the uncle of Oliver Reed. In Paris in the forties, Moffat was friends with Sartre and de Beauvoir, and he had affairs with two notable women who appear elsewhere in this book – Lady Caroline Blackwood and Elizabeth Taylor. Kate, his second wife, was a direct descendant of the founder of W.H. Smith, and a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. So now you know. 12 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) In 1993, the sixty-two-year-old Princess Margaret stood by a dustbin piled with letters and documents, while her chauffeur put a match to them. David Griffin had been a professional driver for many years – double-decker buses, lorries, the 3 a.m. coach for Harrow Underground workers – before, one day in 1976, spotting a newspaper advertisement for a royal chauffeur. He leapt at it. ‘I wouldn’t say I was an absolute royalist. I just thought they were the ultimate people to work for, the pinnacle of the chauffeur world.’ He was to spend most of the next twenty-six years driving Princess Margaret around. He once calculated that he spent more time with her than with his own mother, though he spoke to her very rarely. ‘She was part of the old school and she never changed from day one. She was very starchy, no jokey conversation. She called me Griffin and I called her Your Royal Highness.’ By the end of a typical trip to Sandringham, she would have uttered a total of two words: ‘Good’ and ‘morning’. ‘There was no need to say more, she knew I knew the way. I saw myself as part of the car, an extension of the steering wheel. A proper royal servant is never seen and never heard. We preferred to work in total silence, so we didn’t have to be friendly. We never used to try and chat. They used to say Princess Margaret could freeze a daisy at four feet by just looking at it.’ During this time, the Princess owned a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith (fitted with a specially raised floor to make her look taller), a Mercedes Benz 320 for private use, a small Daihatsu runabout, and a Ford Transit minibus for ferrying friends around. As Griffin describes it, ‘Six or seven people would pile in and shout: “Orf we go on our outing.”’ The Princess herself had never taken a driving test. Why bother? Griffin’s day began at 8 a.m., when he gave the cars a thorough polish, inside and out. He then collected any letters to be delivered, a category that included anything of the slightest importance and quite a few of no importance at all. These would be handed to him by the Princess’s private secretary or a lady-in-waiting, or, every now and then, by Her Royal Highness in person. Occasionally he had to take a letter to her former husband, Lord Snowdon (‘very pleasant and nice with impeccable manners’), who would invariably ask him to wait while he composed a reply. But if Snowdon telephoned Kensington Palace to ask whether Griffin could collect a message for Princess Margaret, the Princess would usually reply, ‘No, he’s got other things to do.’ As long as she had no official duties, her daily routine remained unvaried. Shortly after 11 a.m., Griffin would drive her to her hairdresser, latterly David and Joseph in South Audley Street. ‘Then she would go out for lunch at a nice restaurant. Then she’d come back to the palace and have a rest.’ Around 4.30 p.m. he would drive her to Buckingham Palace for a swim in the pool. ‘Then she’d go to the hairdresser’s for the second time in one day. Then I’d drive her to pre-theatre drinks, then to the theatre, then a post-theatre dinner. And I’d finish about 3 a.m. Sometimes this would happen every night. And I’d always be up at 8 a.m. At the weekend, I’d drive her to the country. If she travelled to Europe, I’d get there first and pick her up at the airport in Prague, for example, so she never thought anything was different.’ On a number of occasions, the Princess asked Griffin to drive her to Clarence House. After a couple of hours she would emerge with a large binbag filled with letters, which she would hand to him. Back at Kensington Palace, she would put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and help him bundle the letters, still in their bags, into a metal garden dustbin in the garage before ordering him to set light to them. ‘We did it several times over a period of years,’ says Griffin. ‘A lot of it was old, going back donkeys’ years, but I saw letters from Diana among them. We must have destroyed thousands of letters. I could see what it was we were burning. She made it very clear it was the highly confidential stuff that we burned. The rest was shredded in her office.’ 13 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Where memoirs of servants are concerned, it suits those upstairs to pooh-pooh them. Their authors are embittered, they say, and wrote them for money, or to settle a score. Biographers of the Royal Family tend to follow suit, turning up their noses at the reminiscences of a butler or footman, while devoting page upon page to the unreliable gush of a distant relative. But even William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s treacly biographer, acknowledges that, when it came to her mother’s correspondence, Princess Margaret had a touch of the pyromaniac about her. In the preface to his 666* (#ulink_81671809-4563-5c11-ac7f-d1e896bf9dfb)-page doorstopper Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Shawcross acknowledges that ‘Princess Margaret … made little secret of the fact that in the 1990s she “tidied” her mother’s papers and consigned many of them to black bin-bags for burning.’ In his companion biography, Shawcross states that, around the time of Lord Linley’s wedding in 1993, ‘Princess Margaret was now engaged on one of her periodic “sortings” of her mother’s papers, which were still filed haphazardly in various drawers and bags and pieces of furniture in her rooms at Clarence House and at Royal Lodge.* (#ulink_3155464a-2758-5c50-97f1-b70f08614c58) She wrote to her mother at Birkhall, “I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. Keeping the letters for you to sort later.” Next day, she wrote, “Darling Mummy, I am sitting in your sitting room ‘doing a bit of sorting’ … I’ve nearly cleared the chaise longue and made an attack on the fire stool.”’ Naturally, Shawcross does his loyal best to make Margaret’s little fires appear perfectly respectable, even caring: ‘No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint.’ Shawcross writes of ‘large black bags … taken away for destruction’. He acknowledges that no one will ever know what went up in flames, ‘but Princess Margaret later told Lady Penn that among the papers she had destroyed were letters from the Princess of Wales to Queen Elizabeth – because they were so private, she said’. It’s likely that quite a few letters incinerated by Margaret were those she herself had written. Her relationship with her mother was often stormy, particularly in the years 1952–1960, after the death of King George VI and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, when she was in her twenties. The two of them were living in separate apartments in Clarence House, one above the other. As the Queen Mother’s authorised biographer, Shawcross is generally the smoothest of courtiers, tiptoeing around any unpleasantness with his forefinger pressed to his lips, yet he makes little attempt to conceal Margaret’s prickliness towards her mother. ‘Even her closest friends could not predict when her mood might change from gaiety to hauteur. Although she loved her mother, she was not always kind to her – indeed she could be rude,’ he writes. ‘On one occasion Lady Penn … said to Queen Elizabeth, “I can’t bear to see the way Princess Margaret treats you.” To which Queen Elizabeth replied, “Oh, you mustn’t worry about that. I’m quite used to it.”’ The household staff at Clarence House were also struck by Margaret’s shirtiness towards her mother. ‘Why do you dress in those ridiculous clothes?’ she once asked in passing, as the Queen Mother stood chatting to a lady-in-waiting. If her mother was watching a television programme she didn’t like, Princess Margaret would offhandedly switch channels without asking. Their preferred method of communication during these years was by letter, even though, most of the time, there was only a ceiling between them. A footman doubled as a postman, taking letters upstairs and downstairs, from one to the other, on an almost daily basis. Yet in his voluminous collection, Shawcross includes just twelve letters from the Queen Mother to Margaret, as opposed to seventy to her elder daughter, Elizabeth. Judging by their tone and content, most of them were written in response to heated accusations,* (#ulink_3842ad6b-aea7-5968-815b-145a5be09598) perhaps after a telephone had been hung up, or flung down. ‘My Darling Margaret,’ the Queen Mother writes from Birkhall on 9 September 1955, at the height of the Townsend crisis: I sometimes wonder whether you quite realise how much I hate having to point out the more difficult and occasionally horrid problems which arise when discussing your future. It would be so much easier to gloss them over, but I feel such a deep sense of responsibility as your only living parent, and I seem to be the only person who can point them out, and you can imagine what anguish it causes. I suppose that every mother wants her child to be happy, and I know what a miserable & worrying time you are having, torn by so many difficult constitutional & moral problems. I think about it and you all the time, and because I have to talk over the horrid things does not mean that I don’t suffer with you, or that one’s love is any less. I have wanted to write this for a long time, as it is a thing which might sound embarrassing if said. Your very loving Mummy. Margaret’s response, contained in a footnote, seems to acknowledge her own explosive nature: ‘Please don’t think that because I have blown up at intervals when we’ve discussed the situation, that I didn’t know how you felt.’ Their relationship remained tricky right to the end. In his less dewy-eyed biography of the Queen Mother, Hugo Vickers states that ‘There were those who were depressed by the way she [Margaret] could be openly rude to her mother when groups were about, though when alone with her, perhaps without an audience, she tended to be more sympathetic. But there was clearly some residual bitterness, and the Queen Mother did not always have an easy time with her younger daughter.’ For his biography Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts, Christopher Warwick was helped by the Princess herself, and was duly grateful: ‘I am, of course, greatly indebted to Princess Margaret, to whom … I offer my warmest and best thanks; not only for her time and co-operation, but also for asking some of her closest friends … to see me.’ But even this most tactful of biographers says that ‘It had to be admitted … that the Queen Mother was closer to her first-born, whose character was more like her own … The relationship between Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother] and Princess Margaret was almost stereotypically mother-and-daughter: each guaranteed at times to bait and irritate the other.’ Warwick points out that it took Princess Margaret thirty years to visit the castle her mother had bought in the early days of her widowhood. Following this one and only visit, Margaret concluded, ‘I can’t think why you have such a horrible place as the Castle of Mey.’ ‘Well, darling,’ replied her mother, ‘you needn’t come again.’ And she did not. So we leave the Princess, for the moment, in her garage at Kensington Palace, resplendent – a word much-loved by royal biographers – in her yellow rubber gloves, her eyes aglow from the blaze of her mother’s letters. ‘The smoke was so thick it made her eyes water and she had to leave,’ recalls Griffin. ‘We went back to Clarence House several times over a period after that to collect more letters and papers, and burned them all. I saw Diana’s name on a few, and even her crest and handwriting, and there were lots of others addressed to the King and Queen, so they were quite old. The Princess never said why she was doing it, but she was very determined that they should all be destroyed, thousands of them. I remember thinking we were putting a match to history.’* (#ulink_69e15ce8-7c23-5f87-96bf-c6b37a83c4f8) * (#ulink_e2e27df8-7ba3-5e30-b406-3d9aae5b6f5f) A coincidence. * (#ulink_e2e27df8-7ba3-5e30-b406-3d9aae5b6f5f) Her house in Windsor Great Park. * (#ulink_116db208-be40-5b8c-ade4-8a2325373eb1) Princess Margaret could be frosty with servants. Princess Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, claims that, on returning from an engagement, she would touch the television, testing it for warmth, just in case the servants had been watching when her back was turned. * (#ulink_a40c2bf7-1b5e-52a3-9492-ccb60500dfc7) Following Margaret’s death in 2002, Griffin was made redundant, and ordered out of his Kensington Palace tied cottage within forty-two days. Until that point he had been earning ?1,500 a month. There had been no shift system, and he was never paid overtime. Furious at his forced redundancy, he refused a Royal Service Medal. He now lives in a flat on the Isle of Wight, decorated with a mixture of reclining semi-nudes, press cuttings about Princess Margaret’s cars and a large photograph of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow he bought for himself from the royal fleet. He fitted it with the numberplate HRH 8N, which he bought from a dealer. He financed these purchases by selling a bundle of cards and notes from Princess Diana for ?10,500, among them a cartoon of two sperm declaring that they were swimming down someone’s throat. ‘Di and I used to compete to send the sauciest cards to each other, you see.’ 14 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) ‘We are born in a clear field, and we die in a dark forest,’ goes the Russian proverb. For fifteen years – from the age of two to seventeen – Princess Margaret was looked after by a governess, Marion Crawford; for both of them, this was their clear field. Marion Crawford – always known to the Royal Family as ‘Crawfie’ – was born in Ayrshire in 1909. She studied to be a teacher, with the aim of becoming a child psychologist. She wanted to help the poorest members of society, and ‘to do something about the misery and unhappiness I saw all around me’. But a chance meeting diverted her from this calling. The Countess of Elgin asked her to teach history to her seven-year-old son, Andrew. Crawfie became the victim of her own success: impressed by her teaching skills, the Countess persuaded her to stay on to teach her other three children, and then recommended her to Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, who was after a tutor for her daughter Mary. Mary later remembered Crawfie as ‘a lovely country girl, who was a very good teacher’. And so the ball was set rolling. In turn, Lady Rose recommended her to the then Duchess of York, who needed a governess for her little daughters Princess Elizabeth, aged five, and Princess Margaret Rose, aged two. The interview went swimmingly. Crawfie found the Duchess of York the homeliest of women. ‘There was nothing alarmingly fashionable about her,’ she recalled. ‘Her hair was done in a way that suited her admirably, with a little fringe over her forehead.’ Royal historians have credited, or discredited, Marion Crawford with obsequious, saccharine observations, but that initial view of her future employer surely has a sharp edge to it, with its needle-like suggestion of frumpiness. The Duchess sat plumply by the window at that first meeting: ‘The blue of her dress, I remember, exactly matched the sky behind her that morning and the blue of her eyes.’ It’s an eerie image, suggesting a disembodied royal, her dress merging into the sky, and with holes where her eyes should have been. So Crawfie was taken on as governess, and moved into 145 Piccadilly, the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of York and their two little Princesses. After a day or two, she was presented to His Majesty King George V. In a loud booming voice – ‘rather terrifying to children and young ladies’ – the King barked, ‘For goodness sake, teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask you. Not one of my children can write properly. They all do it exactly the same way. I like a hand with character in it.’ (Bettmann/Getty Images) On her arrival, Crawfie had been aware of a widespread rumour that little Princess Margaret Rose was rarely seen in public because there was something wrong with her. ‘One school of thought had it that she was deaf and dumb, a notion not without its humour to those who knew her.’* (#ulink_8191444f-6bd4-5cc1-a64c-e6b17af7338c) The rumour was eventually dispelled by news of a bright remark the little Princess had made over tea at Glamis Castle with the playwright J.M. Barrie. Barrie had asked Margaret if a last biscuit was his or hers. ‘It is yours and mine,’ replied Margaret. Barrie inserted the line into his play The Boy David, and rewarded Margaret with a penny for each time it was spoken onstage. From the start, Crawfie found her two charges very different. Elizabeth was organised, Margaret artistic; Elizabeth discreet, Margaret attention-seeking; Elizabeth dutiful, Margaret disobedient; Elizabeth disciplined, Margaret wild. ‘Margaret was a great joy and a diversion, but Lilibet had a natural grace of her own … Lilibet was the one with the temper, but it was under control. Margaret was often naughty, but she had a gay bouncing way with her which was hard to deal with. She would often defy me with a sidelong look, make a scene and kiss and be friends and all forgiven and forgotten. Lilibet took longer to recover, but she had always the more dignity of the two.’ The relationship between the two little Princesses was already set. ‘Lilibet was very motherly with her younger sister. I used to think at one time she gave in to her rather more than was good for Margaret. Sometimes she would say to me, in her funny responsible manner, “I really don’t know what we are going to do with Margaret, Crawfie.”’ Margaret’s Christmas present list for 1936 – their first Christmas in Buckingham Palace – shows how the elder sister took the younger in hand. Lilibet, aged ten, wrote it to remind Margaret, aged six, who would be expecting Thank You letters from her, and for what. See-saw – Mummie Dolls with dresses – Mummie Umbrella – Papa Teniquoit – Papa Brooch – Mummie Calendar – Grannie Silver Coffee Pot, Clock, Puzzle – Lilibet to Margaret Pen and Pencil – Equerry China Field Mice – M.E. Bag and Cricket Set – Boforts China lamb – Linda Far from being wholly anodyne, Crawfie’s memoir, The Little Princesses, is peppered with intimations of a perilous future for Margaret. Did Lilibet also sense that her younger sister might be in for a bumpy ride? ‘All her feeling for her pretty sister was motherly and protective. She hated Margaret to be left out; she hated her antics to be misunderstood. In her own intuitive fashion I think she saw ahead how later on Margaret was bound to be misrepresented and misunderstood. How often in early days have I heard her cry in real anguish, “Stop her, Mummie. Oh, please stop her,” when Margaret was being more than usually preposterous and amusing and outrageous. Though Lilibet, with the rest of us, laughed at Margaret’s antics – and indeed it was impossible not to – I think they often made her uneasy and filled her with foreboding.’ Of course, prescience benefits greatly from hindsight. By the time she wrote her book, Crawfie knew how the story was developing. Nevertheless, Margaret was only nineteen when The Little Princesses was first published; the dark forest lay ahead. Across fifteen years, Crawfie chronicles Margaret’s progression. A keen reader, she goes from The Little Red Hen to Black Beauty, and from Doctor Dolittle to The Rose and the Ring. The young Margaret proves an obsessive chronicler of her own dreams. For many of us, this is the hallmark of a bore, but apparently not for Crawfie or Lilibet. ‘She would say, “Crawfie, I must tell you an amazing dream I had last night,” and Lilibet would listen with me, enthralled, as the account of green horses, wild-elephant stampedes, talking cats and other remarkable manifestations went into two or three instalments.’ Margaret used her imagination in more pragmatic ways, too, employing an imaginary friend called Cousin Halifax, ‘of whom she made every use when she wanted to be tiresome. Nothing was Margaret’s fault; Cousin Halifax was entirely to blame for tasks undone and things forgotten. “I was busy with Cousin Halifax,” she would say haughtily, watching me out of the corner of her eye to see if I looked like swallowing that excuse.’ Little Margaret was also ‘a great one for practical jokes’. Like most, hers contained an element of sadism, particularly when perpetrated on those who couldn’t answer back. ‘More than once I have seen an equerry put his hand into his pocket, and find it, to his amazement, full of sticky lime balls … Shoes left outside doors would become inexplicably filled with acorns.’ Later, she was to marry a fellow practical joker, one of whose pranks was to secrete dead fish in women’s beds. For now, Margaret was developing a talent for mimicry, generally sharpened on her elder sister. Lilibet was, at that time, afflicted with a condition which these days would probably be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. In later life she could channel it into waving, cutting ribbons, asking strangers how far they had travelled, and so on and so forth, but in those early years it was more of a problem than a solution. ‘At one time I got quite anxious about Lilibet and her fads,’ wrote Crawfie. ‘She became almost too methodical and tidy. She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged just so.’ Crawfie was convinced that the best cure lay not in sympathy, but mockery. ‘We soon laughed her out of this. I remember one hilarious session we had with Margaret imitating her sister going to bed. It was not the first occasion, or the last, on which Margaret’s gift of caricature came in very handy.’ For all Margaret’s joie de vivre – perhaps because of it – people felt more comfortable with Lilibet than with her little sister. One elderly man in Scotland was devoted to Lilibet, but, says Crawfie, ‘he was frightened of Margaret. Old men often were. She had too witty a tongue and too sharp a way with her, and I think they one and all felt they would probably be the next on her list of caricatures! Poor little Margaret! This misunderstanding of her light-hearted fun and frolics was often to get her into trouble long after schoolroom days were done.’ Her lifelong love of keeping others waiting was already evident in adolescence; so was her easy, almost eager, acceptance of the privilege bestowed upon her at birth. ‘Like all young girls, she went through a phase when she could be extremely tiresome. She would dawdle over her dressing, pleased to know she kept us waiting.’ Crawfie hoped she had cured this shortcoming, but evidently not. On one occasion, ‘at adolescence’s most tiresome stage’, when Margaret was ‘apt at times to be comically regal and overgracious’, Lilibet’s suitor Philip, nine years Margaret’s senior, decided to take her down a peg or two. ‘Philip wasn’t having any. She would dilly-dally outside the lift, keeping everyone waiting, until Philip, losing patience, would give her a good push that settled the question of precedence quite simply.’ Crawfie makes free with the adjectives ‘tiresome’ and ‘regal’, but she only ever applies them to Margaret, never Lilibet. For Lilibet, life was all about doing the right thing. For Margaret it was, and would always be, much more of a performance. * (#ulink_7ffc83fb-e071-561c-890c-99d1be5cb6a4) Late in life, Jessica Mitford admitted that as a young woman she had tried to spread the rumour that both the Queen and Princess Margaret had been born with webbed feet, which was why nobody had ever seen them with their shoes off. Auberon Waugh attempted to play a similar trick with the children of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, noting in his Private Eye diary that young Peter Phillips had four legs, and ‘the mysterious Baby Susan … is said to have grown a long yellow beak, black feathers and to croak like a raven’. 15 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) December 1941 The two Princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, stage a Nativity play in St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth, in a gold crown and velvet tunic, is one of the Three Kings. The other two are played by evacuees; one of them has cocoa rubbed all over his face for his role as the Black King. The eleven-year-old Margaret plays the Little Child in the shepherd’s hut. She sings ‘Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild’ in what her governess describes as ‘a most beautifully clear voice’. December 1942 Prompted by last year’s success, the Princesses decide to stage a pantomime, Cinderella. The two girls argue about the price of admission. ‘You can’t ask people to pay seven and sixpence … No one will pay that to look at us!’ says Elizabeth. ‘Nonsense!’ counters Margaret. ‘They’ll pay anything to see us.’ Margaret grabs the title role for herself. ‘Margaret had long since made up her mind she would be Cinderella. Lilibet was principal boy,’ notes Crawfie. During rehearsals, the King complains that he can’t hear a word anyone is saying. He also complains that Elizabeth’s tunic is too short. ‘Lilibet cannot possibly wear that.’ But it is a great success on the night, with the younger sister the star of the show. ‘Margaret brought the house down,’ notes Crawfie. 1 June 1954 Denied by protocol the chance to tread the boards in public, the twenty-three-year-old Princess Margaret accepts the position of assistant director for a production of Edgar Wallace’s thriller The Frog. It is performed for charity for three nights at the Scala Theatre* (#ulink_df4311b7-ca39-52af-b652-4d9be8dc520d) in Charlotte Street, W1, by thirty young amateurs drawn from the upper classes, and stars Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, as a lavatory attendant, the Duke of Devonshire as a prison governor, the Hon. Colin Tennant* (#ulink_b4a4ce74-27ee-53bb-b3cc-146153ead302) in the title role (a serial killer), Billy Wallace as a police sergeant, Henry Porchester as a Cockney detective, and Mrs Gerald Legge as the heroine. Experts in these matters estimate that ten members of the company are titled, and a further ten are the children of peers. The first-night audience is very nearly as grand, and includes Baroness Alix de Rothschild, Prince Aly Khan, No?l Coward, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Professor Isaiah Berlin and Sir Bernard and Lady Docker, whose famous gold-plated Daimler is parked in a side street, guarded by a policeman. At the close of the show Princess Margaret makes a brief speech, telling the audience that they ought to give the cast ‘a jolly good round of applause’. Backstage, the cast consider the play a whopping success, and reminisce among themselves about the hilarious moments when lines were fluffed and cues forgotten. They remain unaware that some members of the audience are less amused, among them No?l Coward. ‘The whole evening was one of the most fascinating exhibitions of incompetence, conceit and bloody impertinence I have ever seen in my life … the entire cast displayed no talent whatsoever,’ he confides to his diary. ‘It was certainly a strong moral lesson for all of us never to be nervous again on opening nights. Those high-born characters we watched mumbling and stumbling about the stage are the ones who come to our productions and criticise us! They at least displayed no signs of nervousness; they were unequivocally delighted with themselves from the first scene to the last, which, I may add, was a very long time indeed.’ After the show, Coward goes backstage to shower the cast and its assistant director with unheartfelt praise. To his diary, he confides that he found Princess Margaret tucking into foie gras sandwiches and sipping champagne. The No?l Coward Diaries are published in 1982, nine years after his death. Margaret buys a copy, and finally gets to read what he actually thought of her show. Next to his comments, the Princess writes crossly in the margin: ‘I don’t like foie gras.’ 22 June 1984 Princess Margaret makes an appearance on Radio 4’s long-running soap opera The Archers. By mutual agreement, she plays herself in her real-life role as president of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The script dictates that she will be gracing the audience of a charity fashion show at the Grey Gables hotel in Borsetshire, with the equally real-life Duke of Westminster in attendance. The recording takes place earlier in the month. The Duke of Westminster travels to the BBC Pebble Mill studio in Birmingham to make his recording, but Princess Margaret prefers to be recorded in her small library in Kensington Palace. The Duke’s words and the Princess’s words will be spliced together later. When the small team from the BBC arrive – among them the actors playing the rustic entrepreneur Jack Woolley and his well-connected associate Caroline Sterling – the Princess expresses concern about the noise of plumbers elsewhere in her apartment, and the ticking of a clock. But the BBC engineer assures her it will be fine. In their short scene, Jack Woolley is overawed by the presence of the Princess at the Borsetshire fashion show. Playing herself, Princess Margaret sounds curiously flat and uninvolved, almost as though she can’t get to grips with her character; it takes quite a leap of the imagination to believe that she is not simply reading from a script. DUKE OF WESTMINSTER: Have you met Princess Margaret? JACK WOOLLEY: Me? Er, no, I don’t believe I … CAROLINE STERLING: She’s coming this way. Gerald – if you could – DUKE OF WESTMINSTER: Yes, of course. Ma’am, have you a moment? There’s somebody I’d very much like you to meet. PRINCESS MARGARET: Good evening. CAROLINE STERLING: Ma’am. JACK WOOLLEY: Your Royal Highness. PRINCESS MARGARET: It seems to be geng terribly well, doesn’t et? What a lahvely place this es. Hev you lived here long? JACK WOOLLEY: Have I … er … I er? CAROLINE STERLING: About 1965, wasn’t it Mr Woolley? JACK WOOLLEY: Was it? PRINCESS MARGARET: It rilly is a beautiful part of the weld. JACK WOOLLEY: Oh, oh yes indeed. I was born in Sturtchley you know. PRINCESS MARGARET: Well, it’s been very good of you to let us tek over your hertel. CAROLINE STERLING: It’s been our privilege, hasn’t it Mr Woolley? JACK WOOLLEY: Yes, yes I should say so. PRINCESS MARGARET: I think you’ve been very generous, but is the Duke was saying, we do need all the help we can get to mek this a viry special year for the NSPCC. JACK WOOLLEY: Well, if there’s anything else we can do, anything at all, you have only to get in touch. PRINCESS MARGARET: Careful, we might tek you up on thet. JACK WOOLLEY: Oh, but you can, you must. In fact I was saying that very thing to er Gerald here a moment ago. Hur! Wasn’t I Gerald? Hur! Hur! Hur! After their first run-through, the producer, William Smethurst, says, ‘That’s very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?’ replies the Princess. * (#ulink_73b736a3-56a7-5f23-9b43-fca8d4a86471) The concert sequences in the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night were filmed in the Scala Theatre. After a fire in 1969 it was demolished. An apartment block – Scala House – now stands in its place. * (#ulink_73b736a3-56a7-5f23-9b43-fca8d4a86471) To defend this book from a marauding army of footnotes, I am not offering dates, jobs, pen-portraits, etc., for every single person mentioned. As I will be going back and forth in time, I also intend to stick to one name per person throughout, regardless of any transformations owing to deaths, marriages or elevations. This means that, for instance, Colin Tennant will remain Colin Tennant throughout, even though, from 1983, he was Lord Glenconner. The same applies to his wife, who was born Lady Anne Coke, then became Lady Anne Tennant, and then Lady Glenconner. From now on she will be Anne Tennant, for no reason other than simplicity. As you may already have noticed, I call the heroine of this book Princess Margaret, HRH the Princess Margaret, Margaret, or the Princess, according to whim. 16 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The death of their grandfather, the abdication of their uncle, the accession of their father, the start of the Second World War: all these disruptions made it vital to offer the Little Princesses a sense of security, and all the harder for Marion Crawford to move on. But in 1947, at the age of thirty-seven, she finally resolved to marry her long-standing suitor, a fellow Scot called George Buthlay. How to break the news to Their Majesties? While they were away with their daughters on a tour of southern Africa, Crawfie seized the opportunity to broach the subject with old Queen Mary. ‘I made my deep curtsy and kissed the Queen’s hand. She then raised me, and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘“Come now, Crawfie, sit down and tell me all about it,” said Queen Mary in her kind way, meantime spearing for me a muffin on a small silver fork. Her Majesty never touches any food with her fingers.’ She had, she said, come to ask Her Majesty’s advice, as she was planning to get married. Her Majesty’s response was immediate and unequivocal. ‘My dear child. You can’t leave them!’ At this time, the Little Princesses were respectively sixteen and twenty years old. Crawfie tried to explain that she had, as she put it, ‘shelved the matter during the war years, feeling it was my duty then to stay’. But now the time had come to forge a life of her own. A life of her own! Queen Mary wouldn’t countenance such a thing. ‘I don’t see how they could manage without you. I don’t think they could spare you now.’ Reading their conversation today, it is striking that at no point does Queen Mary bother to enquire about Crawfie’s fianc?. On the return of Their Majesties, Crawfie sent a note to Queen Elizabeth asking to see her on ‘a very urgent and important matter of a personal nature’. She was duly summoned to the Queen’s sitting room, taking with her a photograph of her husband-to-be tucked cautiously under her arm. After making ‘my usual deep curtsy’, she presented the photograph to the Queen. ‘This, Ma’am, is the urgent personal matter I have come to see you about.’ The Queen perused the photograph. ‘She was obviously very surprised and somewhat disconcerted. She asked me his name, and I told her that it was George Buthlay and that he came from Aberdeen. She stood for a long time saying nothing whatever. I broke this uncomfortable silence presently and told her how at the start of the war I had wanted very much to marry, and had not done so because I felt I had a duty to Their Majesties, and considered it would be unfair of me to leave the Princesses when they most needed me. But now, I said, the time had come when I wanted a life of my own.’ ‘Why, Crawfie, that was a great sacrifice you made,’ said the Queen. All very sensitive, but her sympathy swiftly dispersed, leaving the path clear for a stubborn counter-offensive. ‘Does this mean you are going to leave us? You must see, Crawfie, that it would not be at all convenient just now. A change at this stage for Margaret is not at all desirable.’ Crawfie saw no escape. ‘I assured the Queen the last thing George and I wanted to do was upset Their Majesties’ plans in any way.’ In the end, having delayed for sixteen years, Crawfie married George ‘very quietly’ in Dunfermline ‘without any fuss’ the following year, just a couple of months before Lilibet married Prince Philip. Lilibet gave them a coffee set as a wedding present, and Margaret gave them three bedside lamps. But Crawfie’s job was not yet done: leaving her new husband behind in Scotland, she returned briefly to her position at the Palace, alone now with Margaret. The final pages of The Little Princesses are devoted to a portrait of Margaret at seventeen. Though sugar-coated, they leave a slightly bitter after-taste. ‘She is learning with the years to control her sharp tongue’ … ‘It is a grief to her that she is so small, and she wears shoes and hats that give her an extra inch or so’ … ‘Margaret is more exacting to work for than Lilibet ever was’ … (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) At one point, Crawfie grows worried about Margaret and speaks to the Queen ‘quite openly’ about her socialising: ‘I can do nothing with her. She is tired out and absolutely exhausted with all these late nights.’ Between the two of them, the Queen and the governess agree that in future Margaret must spend one or two nights a week quietly at home, rather than out gallivanting. The memoir ends, rather abruptly, with the birth of Prince Charles in November 1948. At the end of the year, Marion Crawford was finally permitted to retire. By now Princess Margaret was eighteen years old, pert, wilful, and intent on pursuing a life unsupervised. 17 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) On 22 March 1949, the Conservative MP David Eccles was sitting in the chamber of the House of Commons, listening to a speech ‘so excessively boring’ that, for want of anything better to do, he suggested to a neighbouring MP that they should ogle a pretty girl who had come to hear the debate from the Speaker’s Gallery. The two made flirtatious signs to her, to which she was quick to respond. The next day, Eccles was surprised to hear that he had been flirting with the eighteen-year-old Princess Margaret. He was both annoyed with himself for having made such a mistake, and surprised she had responded so readily. By the following year, Margaret’s adoption as a sort of national sex symbol had gathered pace. ‘Is it her sparkle, her youthfulness, her small stature, or the sense of fun she conveys, that makes Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret the most sought-after girl in England?’ asked Picture Post in the summer of 1950. ‘And this not only amongst her own set of young people but amongst all the teenagers who rush to see her in Norfolk and Cornwall, or wherever she goes.’ Though her face and her figure were similar to her elder sister’s, it was generally agreed that it was Princess Margaret who had that certain something. Was this because even the most hot-blooded British male felt that his future monarch existed on a plane beyond lust, while the younger sister was still flesh and blood? Or was Margaret blessed with more S.A., as it was known at the time? Did men detect a sparkle in her eyes which suggested that she, unlike her sister, might, just possibly, be tempted? In later life, Margaret could be surprisingly candid about her youthful impulses. She once told the actor Terence Stamp that as a teenager she entertained sexual fantasies about the workmen she could see out of the Buckingham Palace windows. It is hard to imagine the Queen ever sharing such secrets. Nearly ten years after the Eccles incident, on 18 December 1958, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis gazed moonily as the Princess presented the Duff Cooper Prize to the fifty-two-year-old John Betjeman. Hart-Davis confessed to his old friend George Lyttelton that he had ‘completely lost my heart’ to her: ‘My dear George, she is exquisitely beautiful, very small and neat and shapely, with a lovely skin and staggering blue eyes. I shook hands with her coming and going, and couldn’t take my eyes off her in between.’ (The Times/News Syndication) According to his friend Lady Diana Cooper, Betjeman himself was so overwhelmed by the presence of the young Princess that he was ‘crying and too moved to find an apology for words’. Looking on with the doubly hard heart of the academic and the satirist, his waspish friend Maurice Bowra, the chairman of the judges, penned ‘Prize Song’, a parody of Betjeman’s poem ‘In Westminster Abbey’: Green with lust and sick with shyness, Let me lick your lacquered toes. Gosh, O gosh, your Royal Highness, Put your finger up my nose, Pin my teeth upon your dress, Plant my head with watercress. Only you can make me happy Tuck me tight beneath your arm. Wrap me in a woollen nappy; Let me wet it till it’s warm In a plush and plated pram Wheel me round St James’s Ma’am … Lightly plant your plimsolled heel Where my privy parts congeal. Bowra circulated this poem among friends, one of whom, Evelyn Waugh, pronounced it ‘excellent’. Another poet, Philip Larkin, eight years her senior, continued to nurture a private passion for the Princess well into her middle age. ‘Nice photo of Princess Margaret in the S. Times this week wearing a La Lollo Waspie, in an article on corsets. See what you miss by being abroad!’ he wrote to the distinguished historian Robert Conquest in June 1981, when the Princess was fifty years old, and Larkin fifty-eight. Alas, Larkin’s lust for Margaret never blossomed into verse, though he was once almost moved to employ her as a symbol of his perennial theme, deprivation. On 15 September 1984 he wrote to his fellow poet Blake Morrison that though the birth of Prince Harry had done nothing for him – ‘these bloody babies leave me cold’ – he had nonetheless ‘been meditating a poem on Princess Margaret, having to knock off first the booze and now the fags – now that’s the kind of royal poem I could write with feeling’. Stephen Spender, too, recognised a kindred spirit in the Princess. At the age of seventy he reflected that ‘being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that’. Her admirers came from less rarefied circles too. Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, a novel about the struggles of a young African-American man in a hostile society, was presented to her on a trip to Europe in 1956. He described his encounter in a letter to his friend and fellow novelist Albert Murray. ‘I was one of the lucky ones who were received by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, two very charming ladies indeed.’ The Princess was, he added, ‘the kind of little hot looking pretty girl … who could upset most campuses, dances, clubs, bull fights, and three day picnics even if she had no title’. At that time, the Princess had just turned twenty-six. 18 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) It was in the early 1950s that Pablo Picasso first began to have erotic dreams about Princess Margaret. Occasionally he would throw her elder sister in for good measure. From time to time Picasso shared these fantasies with his friend the art historian and collector Roland Penrose, once even confiding in him that he could picture the colour of their pubic hair. Picasso often had dreams about celebrities. In the past, both de Gaulle and Franco had popped up in them, though, mercifully, never in a sexual context. But the two royal sisters were another matter. ‘If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies, they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!’ Picasso told Penrose with pride. Having moved into his vast villa, La Californie, in 1955, he set his sights on marrying the only young lady he deemed smart enough for it. There was, he said, just one possible bride for him: Princess Margaret. Not only was she a leading member of the British Royal Family, but she was also his physical type: shorter than him (at five foot four inches, he towered over her), with beautiful skin and good strong teeth. In pursuit of this fantasy, he ordered the waspish British art dealer Douglas Cooper to drop in on Her Majesty the Queen and request her younger sister’s hand in marriage. Picasso made it clear that this was more than a whimsy. He would not let the matter drop, growing more and more absorbed in plotting the right strategy. He would draw up a formal document on parchment, in French, Spanish or Latin, for Cooper to present to Her Majesty on a red velvet cushion. Cooper would be accompanied by Picasso’s future biographer John Richardson, who would arrive dressed as a page or herald, complete with trumpet. ‘If we didn’t have the right clothes, Picasso would make them for us: cardboard top hats – or would we prefer crowns?’ recalled Richardson. ‘He called for stiff paper and hat elastic and proceeded to make a couple of prototypes. His tailor, Sapone, would help him cut a morning coat out of paper.’ There would be no place in Picasso’s married life for his current girlfriend, Jacqueline: she would have to go to a nunnery. Picasso turned to Jacqueline. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ ‘No Monseigneur, I wouldn’t. I belong to you.’ By the end of their day of planning, the artist dressed Cooper and Richardson in the ties and paper crowns he had made for them, emblazoned with colourful arabesques. ‘Now you look ready to be received by the Queen,’ he declared, before checking that they knew how to bow with the appropriate panache. Picasso’s fascination with Princess Margaret stayed close to fever pitch for a decade or more. In June 1960, he missed meeting her when she paid a surprise visit to his Tate Gallery exhibition. Never again would he be offered a better opportunity for saying, ‘Come upstairs and let me show you my etchings.’ But he was stuck in France, which meant that Roland Penrose, the exhibition’s curator, was obliged to convey the Princess’s reactions by post. ‘My dear Pablo,’ wrote Penrose, giddy with excitement, ‘… on Thursday, a friend of the Duke informed me – in the greatest secrecy so as to avoid a stampede to the Tate of all the journalists in the world – that the Queen wanted to come in the evening with a dozen friends to see the show. I wasn’t to say a word to anyone and no official was to be present to show them the pictures, only me. And that’s exactly what happened. The Queen and the Duke arrived first and later the Queen Mother joined them.’ The Royal Family, he informed the great painter, ‘has never shone in their appreciation of the arts … your work really did seem to touch them, perhaps for the first time at the depths of their being’. Everyone had been bowled over by Picasso’s brilliance: ‘… yet again I must thank you – your superb presence surrounding us everywhere gave me confidence, and the eyes of the Queen lit up with enthusiasm – with genuine interest and admiration … I’d been advised not to insist on the difficult pictures and to avoid going into the cubist room – but I wasn’t happy about that and to my delight she went in with an enthusiasm that increased with each step – stopping in front of each picture – “Picture of Uhde”, which she thought magnificent, “Girl with a Mandolin”, “Still Life with Chair Caning”, which she really liked, the collages, the little construction with gruyere and sausage in front of which she stopped and said, “Oh, how lovely that is! How I should like to make something of that myself!”’ Penrose injected a note of suspense into his account by leaving until the very last moment the surprise entrance of Picasso’s intended. After the rest of the royal party had made appropriate noises about the great still life of 1931 (‘very enthusiastic’) and the paintings of the Guernica period (‘very disquieted’), ‘at last we reached the Bay of Cannes, which the Queen Mother found superb, when someone else joined us – and turning to me the Queen said, “May I introduce my sister Margaret?” And there she was, the beautiful princess of our dreams with her photographer husband …’ The Queen then said she would have to leave shortly, and asked Penrose to show her sister the entire exhibition all over again. Tactfully, he drew a veil over the persistent presence of Snowdon, scrubbing out ‘her photographer husband’ from the rest of his account, and focusing solely on the Princess: ‘When she asked me whether you were going to come I said I thought that, even though you had expressed no desire to come, you would be sad not to have been there to meet her this evening. And she smiled enchantingly and I think I glimpsed a blush spreading beneath her tan.’ Once the royal party had finally departed, Penrose scribbled a few notes, solely for his own consumption. These suggest that all the various members of the Royal Family – Princess Margaret being the last to arrive – were far more slothful in their appreciation of the artworks than he suggested in his letter to Picasso. In these jottings, ‘M’ is Margaret, ‘P’ is Philip, ‘Q’ is the Queen, and ‘QM’ the Queen Mother: Great interest in Uhde. Q. ‘I can see character in it.’ Q. ‘I like letting my eyes wander from surface to surface without worrying about what it means.’ M P coming in: ‘DO realise, darling, there are 270 pictures to see and we have hardly begun.’ ‘Why does he use so many different styles?’ Q. ‘These are the ones that make me feel a bit drunk, I’m afraid.’ P. La Muse, etc. ‘Why does he want to put 2 eyes on same side of face?’ Q ‘Did he love her v. much?’ M (Portrait of Dora) Bay at Cannes greatly appreciated by QM and Q. Meninas subtlety of colour, restraint and feeling of texture noticed & enjoyed by QM. Pigeons much admired. Portrait of Jacqueline noticed by M. ‘What a tremendous output! He is the greatest of our time’ QM. Some of Penrose’s more radical surrealist friends refused to stomach his sycophancy to royalty, but then they knew nothing of his role as the go-between for Pablo Picasso and the young Princess. One of the most indignant, the jazz singer and surrealist collector George Melly, wrote him a particularly huffy letter: What are you up to? I hope you will enjoy the little jokes HRH will presumably make in front of the pictures. Perhaps he will suggest that Prince Charles could do better. Honestly, I find the whole concept an insult to a great painter. What are you after? A title? An invitation to lunch at the palace? A ticket for the Royal enclosure? I wish to put it on record now that I shall lend no picture to an exhibition in the future under the aegis of yourself or the ICA. Melly signed the letter to his old friend ‘Yours disgustedly’. Perhaps if he had known of the great painter’s sexual obsession with the Queen and Princess Margaret, he might have been more supportive.* (#ulink_5f46cf58-9cea-5a74-8001-b620035a1d94) Five years later, Picasso was still nursing his unrequited love. On 28 April 1965, ‘with his wild, staring eyes’, he told Cecil Beaton, who had come to photograph him, that he was ‘a great admirer of Princess Margaret, with her long face’, but swore Beaton to silence, ‘otherwise someone will write a book about it’. As for Penrose, Melly’s snub left him undaunted. In June 1967, now Sir Roland Penrose CBE, he organised another Picasso exhibition at the Tate, this time of the sculptures. There was to be a dinner at the gallery on the evening before the private view, and furthermore, he told Picasso, ‘we have invited the girlfriend of your dreams, her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret, to preside, and she has graciously agreed, and tra! la! la!’ The day after conducting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon around the exhibition, Penrose sent a telegram to Picasso. Once again, he cut the unnecessary photographer husband clean out of the picture: LONDON VANQUISHED STOP ARE COMPLETELY INVOLVED WITH YOUR SCULPTURES STOP PRINCESS CAPTIVATED STOP PUBLIC FILLED WITH WONDER LOVE LEE ROLAND Two days later, on 11 June, he joined Picasso for lunch, and made a note of their meeting: ‘Gave Picasso catalogues of sculpture show. He was very keen to hear how it all went and what Margaret thought …’ Despite the persistent efforts of Richardson, Cooper and Penrose, Picasso’s passionate yearning for Princess Margaret was never reciprocated. In fact, quite the opposite. ‘Many years later, I told Princess Margaret the story of Picasso’s quest for her hand,’ recalled Richardson. ‘Like her great-great-great* (#ulink_f19dc333-c14e-5c94-8ed8-80921db00cdd) grandmother Queen Victoria, she was not amused; she was outraged. She said she thought it the most disgusting thing she had ever heard.’ But what if fate had dictated otherwise? (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images) * (#ulink_62dd18f8-d115-5f9c-a720-30b591c9fc20) In a review of David Sylvester’s book Magritte (1992), Melly pointed out that Sylvester ‘is not … particularly impressed by those pictures in which related objects merge to create a new object, though he acknowledges The Rape, where the woman’s body replaces the face, as one of the great icons of the century. He sees it as both horrifying and comic and, citing several people’s reaction to it, includes the unnerving observation that the navel suggests a nose eaten away by tertiary syphilis. I seem to remember, although he doesn’t confirm it here, that he once told me the originator of this alarming notion was Princess Margaret.’ * (#ulink_db1e1b71-a862-54b4-9342-312366d97832) One great too many. 19 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) From Pablo Picasso: Memoir of a Friendship, by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape, 1998) Pablo’s greatest mistake was to marry HRH the Princess Margaret. It was a decision that was to have the most atrocious consequences for his art, and was, I fear, to leave his reputation within the art world forever sullied. He had, of course, lusted after the Princess for a decade or more, but only from a distance. Despite a number of opportunities, he failed to meet her – whether through bashfulness or accident I know not – until 4 June 1967, when he insisted upon escorting her around his first major exhibition of sculptures at the Tate Gallery, with the sole proviso that no one else should be present. Aged eighty-five, he was over twice the age of the thirty-six-year-old Princess; in fact, he was a good deal older than HM the Queen Mother. But, sexually speaking, he was well up to scratch – he had married his thirty-four-year-old mistress Jacqueline Roque, just three years Margaret’s senior, in 1961 – and his worldwide fame, bullish charisma and dark, penetrating eyes continue to attract many female admirers. For her part, the Princess was undergoing one of the rockiest times in her somewhat restless marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones. The pair of them were getting on each other’s nerves; each had begun to seek solace elsewhere. Increasingly exasperated by her husband’s vanity, it may have amused Margaret to taunt him by flirting with the man universally acknowledged as the greatest artist of the twentieth century. At 10.30 p.m., under a cloak of secrecy, the exhibition’s curator, Roland Penrose, met Princess Margaret at a side entrance of the Tate, and took her through the deserted gallery to the doorway to the Picasso exhibition, where she found the artist standing, legs apart, hands on hips, ready to greet her. From the moment they set eyes on one another, their mutual attraction was overwhelming. ‘I had never seen Picasso like it,’ remembered Penrose. ‘He simply couldn’t take his eyes off her, even when he was attempting to point out specific details in the sculptures.’ Penrose felt duty-bound to accompany the Princess and the artist around the first two or three exhibits, but the couple soon made it clear that they wished to be left alone: ‘If I remember rightly, the Princess turned to me and pointedly asked me if I had nothing better to do. Accordingly, I made my excuses, and retired to the hallway.’ It was well past midnight before Picasso and Princess were to emerge from the exhibition. ‘I couldn’t help but notice that the Princess’s hair had lost a little of its shape,’ reported Penrose. ‘And Pablo was not even bothering to conceal that look of triumph with which I was so familiar.’ The two of them left together in the Princess’s car. As he went around the gallery, turning off the lights, Penrose noticed a discarded pearl earring on the floor alongside what many regard as Picasso’s most singularly erotic sculpture, Woman in the Garden. Over the next fortnight, while Lord Snowdon was away photographing Sir No?l Coward at his home in Jamaica, Picasso made repeated clandestine visits to Kensington Palace, often sporting a false-nose-specs-and-whiskers mask. He brought a large sketchbook with him, and as they entered her private apartment, Princess Margaret was insistent that no staff should disturb them. It is widely believed that Picasso’s late series of erotic drawings, The Kiss, springs from this period. The consequences of their liaison are now too well-known to require detailed repetition. On his return to Paris, Picasso informed his wife Jacqueline that he had no further use for her. When Lord Snowdon returned to his and Princess Margaret’s apartment in Kensington Palace in late June, he found all the locks changed. For a short time he stayed with the Queen Mother at Clarence House, before moving to what the press described as a ‘fashionable bachelor pad’ in South Kensington. Senior members of the Royal Family were outraged on Snowdon’s behalf, but there was nothing they could do. Princess Margaret was determined to marry Picasso at her earliest convenience. ‘Yes, I’m sure he’s awfully sweet, darling, and you know how much I love pictures – but they tell me he’s desperately Spanish, and one can’t help but worry that he simply won’t fit in,’ protested the Queen Mother. Determined not to repeat her mistake of twelve years previously, on 12 September the wilful Princess applied for an uncontested divorce, and on 15 December 1967 Kensington Palace issued this brief announcement: Yesterday, HRH The Princess Margaret married Mr Pablo Picasso in a civil ceremony. Representatives of the Royal Family were in attendance. The couple will live together at Kensington Palace. For the time being, the Princess will be styled ‘HRH The Princess Margaret, Mrs Pablo Picasso’. There will be no honeymoon. The marriage was, by all accounts, a disaster. From the start, Picasso resisted all attempts to incorporate him in royal duties. Whenever he bothered to attend an official function, he seemed to make a point of dressing improperly. There was a national outcry, for instance, when he attended Ascot in 1968 wearing a grubby blue smock rather than the regulation tailcoat. Prince Philip is said to have walked out of a private dinner party in Buckingham Palace, slamming the door, when Picasso turned up bare-chested in shorts and a floral sunhat. Convinced that he could be brought to heel, the Queen Mother persuaded the Queen and Prince Charles that Picasso’s artistic leanings would make him the perfect choice to design the setting for the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle in 1969. Grudgingly attempting to save his marriage, Picasso accepted the commission, but his designs were deemed inappropriate, and were subject to widespread condemnation. ‘The sight of a clearly nervous Prince of Wales wearing a cow-horn helmet making his formal entry on a bull made from papier-m?ch? was for most people the last straw,’ read a strongly-worded editorial in the Daily Telegraph the following day. Even the more go-ahead Guardian felt the entire ceremony ‘grotesque’: ‘There was simply no need for the sixty-one-year-old Garter King of Arms to be forced to dress as Pan in a bright green leotard, nor for the Queen Mother to be borne aloft on a bamboo platform by twelve minotaurs, each bearing a suggestive horn.’ Friends say that Princess Margaret was at first mesmerised by the forceful painter. If so, she soon came to regret her impulsiveness. ‘Women are machines for suffering,’ Picasso had told one of his mistresses in 1943, and he did not spare his British wife. The British public, who had extended such sympathy to the Princess during her Townsend years, and had rejoiced at her first wedding, now began to turn against her, condemning her as unfit for public office. Picasso’s reputation took a beating too, particularly from the avant-garde. Those who had once heralded him as a great revolutionary artist now chided him as an Establishment lickspittle. Consequently the prices commanded by his works began to plummet, and his dealers grew restless. By the end of the decade, the Picassos decided that it would be in their mutual interests to part. Their divorce was finalised in February 1970. Two months later, at the unveiling of Picasso’s Naked Woman Smoking Cigarette at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sharp-eyed critics noticed what they took to be the Poltimore Tiara perched on the head of the weeping subject. 20 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The serious-minded novelist John Fowles, four years older than Princess Margaret, shared the obsession of Pablo Picasso. In real life, as it were, he might well have cold-shouldered the Princess, as he had long considered himself an intellectual with no truck for social snobbery. But he cherished her as a fantasy object, particularly when comparing her with his more down-to-earth current girlfriend, whom he referred to in his diary only as ‘G’. ‘Physically I criticize her,’ he writes of poor Miss G on 13 March 1951. ‘That way I cannot blind myself. She is warm, nubile; but not beautiful. And I see her growing old quickly, fat, with the Jewish, Mediterranean strain coming out in her. I see her in all sorts of conditions – whenever they entail “chic”, she disappoints me. She has all the DH Lawrence qualities, heart and soul and heat, humanity, intelligence, and simplicity when it is needed, the qualities of peasant stock, but no aristocratic traits. And aesthetically I need a little more aristocracy, a little carriage, fine-bred beauty.’ Later in the same entry, he declares that ‘I think it would do me good to marry G just for this one reason. That I should then limit myself, and achieve a certain humility which is lacking at the moment. Shed some of my aristocratic dream-projections. For example, I have day-dreamed of seducing Princess Margaret. I suppose many men must have done that. For unattached men she must be an obvious evasion out of solitary reality.’ A year later, Fowles completed his first novel, The Collector, which he went on to sell for a record sum. It is the tale of a creepy man who kidnaps a beautiful young art student and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. In a letter to his publisher, Fowles explained that ‘the whole woman-in-the-dungeon idea has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle’. He had also been intrigued, he said, by a news story concerning ‘a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden’. In all his public utterances, Fowles took pains to express a more high-minded blueprint for his artistic purpose. In an essay on The Collector, he stated that by making his victim die in captivity, I did not mean by this that I view the future with a black pessimism: nor that a precious elite is threatened by the barbarian hordes. I mean simply that unless we face up to this unnecessarily brutal conflict (based largely on an unnecessary envy on the one hand and an unnecessary contempt on the other) between the biological Few and the biological Many … then we shall never arrive at a more just and happier world. But to his diary, he confided that the novel had also been inspired by My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think this must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used often to be famous people. Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a main sexual motive, the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has been constant. The imprisoning, in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned. 21 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) In Italy with his wife in September 1962, Fowles was still mulling over Princess Margaret, though by now his lust had curdled into irritation. Never blessed with the sunniest of dispositions, particularly when thinking of England, he complained to his diary of ‘The grey shock of England and the English … I haven’t had the extent of my exile from land and people so clear for a long time. They are foreign to me, and so the land seems foreign.’ He went on to chastise England for ‘a colossal lack of style, an almost total inability to design life’, and noted sulkily that ‘The British sit like a fat pasty-faced bespectacled girl at the European party.’ For a man so desperate to put his own country behind him, his choice of holiday reading that September was perverse, and harked back to his trusty old obsession: An extraordinary book we read in Rome – the banned-in-England My Life with Princess Margaret by a former footman. Written, or ghosted, in a nauseatingly cloying, inverted style: the man sounds like a voyeur and a fetishist. He constantly uses turns of phrase (and the sort of euphemism, in particular) that I gave the monster in The Collector. Again and again he praises, or smirks at, behaviour by the filthy little prig-princess that any decent person would despise; and the horror is not that he does this, but that one knows millions of silly men and women in America and here will agree with him. A whole society wrote this miserable book, not one man. 22 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The book in question had been banned in Britain after the Queen Mother gained an injunction against it. The judge agreed that Princess Margaret’s former footman, David John Payne, had signed an agreement preventing him from writing about his time in the royal household. But no such restriction existed in the US, where Payne’s work was serialised in Good Housekeeping magazine, and had now been published in book form. In 1959, while in service to Lord Rothermere, Payne heard of a vacancy for a footman at Clarence House. He passed the interview. ‘You are tall, smart, and seem to have the bearing required to carry out your duties,’ said the comptroller, Lord Gordon, hiring Payne at a basic wage of five pounds ten shillings a week. Gordon then introduced him to Jack Kemp, steward to the household, who in turn presented him to HRH the Princess Margaret. Payne’s first impression was of ‘a tiny figure, beautiful in a pink and white cotton dress, her dark hair brushed into a bouffant style and a shining double row of pearls round her throat … She extended her small white hand – I had time to see the smoothness of the skin and the care which had gone into the manicure of her nails – and we shook hands … Margaret at twenty-nine was a beautiful woman. Her face, not too heavily powdered, had been made up by an expert – herself, as it later turned out. Her eyebrows had been pencilled in and her lipstick smoothly formed in a delightful cupid’s bow. But her most striking, almost mesmeric features were her enormous deep blue eyes.’ From the start there is, as Fowles suggests, something voyeuristic, even fetishistic, about Payne’s memories of the Princess. And creepy, too: My Life with Princess Margaret is a strange, unsettling mixture of idolatry and loathing, suggesting they are two sides of the same coin. Payne is a forerunner of the Kathy Bates character in the film Misery, hero-worship turning, without warning, into almost passionate resentment, then back again, and all in the flicker of an eyelid. A few months later, now part of the furniture, Payne entered the Princess’s sitting room while she was lying full-length on the settee, her head pillowed on two pink brocade cushions and her dark hair spread out around her face. Her eyes were closed and she was concentrating on the music … She looked her very loveliest lying there in a midnight blue sequined cocktail dress with a tight bodice and flared skirt. She was lightly made up, her powder and lipstick applied with the delicate touch of an expert. Her shoulders above the low-cut neckline shone silkily in the soft lights. On the table by her side stood a half-glass of whisky and water and in the ashtray there were two or three inch-long stubs. She lay perfectly still, lost in the atmosphere of the romantic music, her eyes closed, her face serene. I stood there for a few seconds, inwardly moved by the sight of the lovely sleeping beauty. Small wonder if Princess Margaret felt unnerved by these creamily intrusive reminiscences: Payne slips into a room as stealthily as a cat-burglar, prowling around, gathering everything up for future use, always the observer, never the observed. ‘I was one of the very few servants who ever saw the Princess’s bedroom,’ he boasted. ‘She would often send me up to get a jewel case or some item she particularly wanted to take with her on a trip … Once the Princess and myself were used to each other, she had no second thoughts about sending me up on such errands to her innermost sanctuary.’ Throughout his time in her service, Payne seems to have been sizing up his mistress, her family and friends with the watchfulness of a boa constrictor. As Fowles suggested, the reader grows complicit with this particular Collector, perching voyeuristically on his shoulder as he slithers around the Princess’s private domain. Imagine, now, that you are with me as we walk up the main staircase and into the bedroom. It is deserted now, of course, but has been prepared for the Princess to retire. We tread the thick carpet of the corridor silently, with only the occasional creak of a floorboard to tell we are there … The 5-foot tall Princess has chosen a 6-foot, 4 inch bed topped by a foam-rubber mattress, firm but yielding gently to the touch … And just to complete the picture, Mrs Gordon has already laid out one of the Princess’s flimsy, full-length nylon nighties. And why stop there? Let us take a closer look. We can see a collection of nail files, jars of face cream, tubes of lipstick, and a brush set comprising two green bone-backed brushes edged in gold, and a hand mirror in the same material. Next to them Margaret has thrown an ordinary comb. Also lying there is a half-filled packet of tissues which she uses for removing her make-up at night. In the morning there will be half a dozen of them smeared with lipstick and powder tossed on the dressing table. Our tour continues into her bathroom, with its fitted carpet in oyster pink, its loo in the far left-hand corner, its white porcelain bath with two chromium-plated taps. Resting across the bath is a tray with compartments containing coloured scented soaps and a long-handled loofah. ‘There is no shower as such, but in one of the lockers of the bathroom there is a rubber tubing hand shower which can be plugged into the taps.’ Hitchcock’s film Psycho was released while Payne was still in service at Clarence House, Fowles’s book The Collector soon after he left. Back in the bedroom, Payne leers long and hard at the Princess’s bedside table, with its light-brown pigskin photograph case. ‘It is on the table near the lamp. Look closer and you will see that the case contains three small head-and-shoulders portraits of a man. You may recognize him. And you will not be surprised when I say that to me, they constitute one of the most significant things I encountered during my service with Princess Margaret. But more of that later …’ Those three bedside photographs are all, it emerges, of Group Captain Peter Townsend. 23 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) Ah! The Group Captain! The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers, bringing it up at the slightest opportunity. The two of them – the Group Captain and the Princess – had called it a day four years before, when she was twenty-five years old, but when you are royal, nothing is allowed to be forgotten. That is the price to pay for being part of history. Those who think of Princess Margaret’s life as a tragedy see the Group Captain as its unfortunate hero. He was the dashing air ace, she the fairy-tale Princess, the two of them torn apart by the cold-hearted Establishment. For these people, their broken romance was the source of all her later discontent. But how true is the myth? Peter Townsend entered the scene in February 1944, when he took up his three-month appointment as the King’s Extra Equerry. At this time he was twenty-nine years old, with a wife and a small son. Princess Margaret was thirteen, and a keen Girl Guide. The King took to him immediately; some say he came to regard him as a son. Three months turned into three years, at which point Townsend was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order; after a further three years he was promoted to Deputy Master of the Household. Following the death of the King in 1952 he moved to Clarence House, as comptroller to the newly widowed Queen Mother. When, precisely, did Townsend start taking a shine to the young Princess? For all the fuss surrounding him, it is a question rarely asked. In his autobiography Time and Chance, published in 1978, when he was sixty-four, he fails to set a date on it, insisting that when he first set eyes on the two Princesses, he thought of them purely as ‘two rather adorable and quite unsophisticated girls’. But by the time of Margaret’s fifteenth birthday in August 1945, he was already thinking of her in more affectionate terms. Describing a typical dinner party at Balmoral shortly after the end of the war, he writes that the gentlemen would join the ladies for ‘crazy games, or canasta, or, most enchanting of all, Princess Margaret singing and playing at the piano’. By now, he was clearly quite smitten: Her repertoire was varied; she was brilliant as she swung, in her rich, supple voice, into American musical hits, like ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August …’ droll when, in a very false falsetto, she bounced between the stool and the keyboard in ‘I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, which I’d overlooked before …’, and lovable when she lisped some lilting old ballad: ‘I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone.’ He accompanied the Royal Family on their 1947 tour of South Africa; by now the Princess was sixteen, and Townsend exactly twice her age. ‘Throughout the daily round of civic ceremonies,’ he recalls, ‘that pretty and highly personable young princess held her own.’ Margaret herself was more open, telling a friend, in later life, ‘We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather. That’s when I really fell in love with him.’ The tour ended in April 1947. In his autobiography, Townsend insists that he returned home ‘eager to see my wife and family’. But, as it happened, ‘within moments’ he sensed that ‘something had come between Rosemary and me’. He now takes a break in his narrative to detail the difficulties within his marriage. Townsend had married Rosemary Pawle in 1941. He paints it as a marriage made in the most tremendous haste. ‘I had stepped out of my cockpit, succumbed to the charms of the first pretty girl I met and, within a few weeks married her.’ At this point, Townsend launches into one of the most curious parts of the book, a rambling homily against the perils of sexual attraction. ‘I cannot help feeling that the sex urge is a rather unfair device employed by God,’ it begins. ‘He needs children and counts on us to beget them. But while He has incorporated in our make-up an insatiable capacity for the pleasures which flow from love, He seems to have forgotten to build a monitoring device, to warn us of the unseen snags which may be lurking further on. ‘Sex,’ he continues, ‘is an enemy of the head, an ally of the heart. Boys and girls, madly in love, generally do not act intelligently. The sex-trap is baited and set and the boys and girls go rushing headlong into it. They live on love and kisses, until there are no more left. Then they look desperately for a way of escape.’ One of the anomalies of this passage is that, when Townsend rushed into this particular sex-trap, he was rather more than a boy. In fact, he was a distinguished Battle of Britain fighter pilot of twenty-six, the recipient of the DSO and the DFC and bar. His marriage, he says, ‘began to founder’ on his return from South Africa. The couple’s problems were ‘intrinsic and personal’, principal among them his yearning to go back to South Africa and ‘Rosemary’s fierce opposition to my ravings about South Africa and my longing for horizons beyond the narrow life at home’. He argues that while ‘Rosemary preferred to remain ensconced in her world of the “system” and its social ramifications’, he was a rebel who reacted instinctively against ‘the conventional existence, the “system”, the Establishment, with its taboos, its shibboleths and its obsession with class status’. At this time the Group Captain was the equerry to the King, and had applied (unsuccessfully) to be a Conservative parliamentary candidate, neither the hallmark of a rebel. Halfway through 1948, the Princess shed the ‘Rose’ in Margaret Rose. It seems to have been her way of declaring that she was no longer a little girl but a young woman, a transition greeted with a certain lasciviousness by some of her biographers. ‘Never before had there been a Princess like her. Though she had a sophistication and charisma far in advance of her years, she was young, sensual and stunningly beautiful,’ observes Christopher Warwick. ‘With her vivid blue eyes … and lips that were described as both “generous” and “sensitive”, she was acknowledged to be one of the greatest beauties of her generation. In addition, she was curvaceous, extremely proud of her eighteen-inch waist … unpredictable, irrepressible and coquettish.’ Phwoarr! Tim Heald is equally smitten: ‘At eighteen, she was beautiful, sexy … the drop-dead gorgeous personification of everything a princess was supposed to be.’ Furthermore, she was ‘a pocket Venus … an almost impossibly glamorous figure’. Her emergence into adulthood had its drawbacks. She was burdened with a succession of royal duties, most of them bottom-drawer and dreary. ‘The opening of the pumping station went very well in spite of the gale that was blowing,’ she wrote in a letter that year to her demanding grandmother, Queen Mary. ‘I am afraid that one photographer rather overdid things by taking a picture of me with my eyes shut.’ A little later, she oversaw the official opening of the Sandringham Company Girl Guides’ hut. The speech she delivered reflects the nature of the occasion: Looking around me, I can imagine how hard Miss Musselwhite and the company must have worked … I do congratulate you on the charming appearance of your new meeting place. I have been in the movement ten years as a Brownie, a Guide and a Sea Ranger … I have now great pleasure in declaring this hut open. At the same time, her elder sister was opening bridges, launching ships, taking parades and welcoming foreign dignitaries. From now on, would Margaret have to measure her life in scout huts and pumping stations? Was that all there was? As her day job as her sister’s stand-in grew ever more mundane, who could blame her if she looked for excitement elsewhere? 24 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) ‘Without realising it,’ Peter Townsend writes of autumn 1948, when he was chosen to accompany the Princess to Amsterdam for the inauguration of Queen Juliana, ‘I was being carried a little further from home, a little nearer to the Princess.’ In August 1950, Townsend’s ongoing rebellion against the British Establishment continued along its mysterious path with his appointment as assistant master of the royal household, a promotion that elevated him to a smart carpeted office on the south side of Buckingham Palace, ‘a little paradise compared with the gloomy equerry’s room’. At home, though, ‘conjugal life, practically, emotionally and sentimentally, had come to a standstill’. Not so his enchantment with the Princess, who was now within an inch of her twentieth birthday. Townsend was entranced. ‘If her extravagant vivacity sometimes outraged the elder members of the household and of London society, it was contagious to those who still felt young,’ he writes, adding, a touch dolefully, ‘whether they were or not.’ Written when he was in his sixties, his memories of the young Princess retain their sense of wonder. ‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and in her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was, by nature, generous, volatile … She was coquettish, sophisticated. But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply.’ No one else, before or since, has written about the Princess in quite such adoring terms. By this time, a group of bright young blades surrounded the Princess. Townsend looked on with a sense of yearning, perhaps even entitlement. ‘I dare say that there was not one among them more touched by the Princess’s joie de vivre than I, for, in my present marital predicament, it gave me what I most lacked – joy. More, it created a sympathy between us and I began to sense that, in her life too, there was something lacking.’ While Princess Margaret admitted to having fallen in love with the Group Captain in the spring of 1947, when she was sixteen years old, Townsend claims to have noticed the first spark in their romance over four years later, in August 1951, following a picnic lunch in the middle of a day’s shooting. He was dozing in the heather when he became aware that someone was covering him with a coat. ‘I opened one eye – to see Princess Margaret’s lovely face, very close, looking into mine. Then I opened the other eye, and saw, behind her, the King.’ At this point, Townsend whispered to the Princess, ‘You know your father is watching us?’ In response she laughed, straightened up, and went over to her father’s side. ‘Then she took his arm and walked away,’ adds Townsend, ‘leaving me to my dreams.’ King George VI died early the following year. The Princess had been devoted to him, and he to her. ‘Lilibet is my pride. Margaret is my joy,’ he once said, adding on another occasion, ‘She is able to charm the pearl out of an oyster.’ Lilibet was dutiful and serious; Margaret wilful and fun. ‘She it was who could always make her father laugh, even when he was angry with her,’ wrote John Wheeler-Bennett, the official biographer of George VI. On one occasion she interrupted a telling-off by saying, ‘Papa, do you sing, “God Save My Gracious Me”?’ The King had burst out laughing, and all was forgiven. His death hit her hard. ‘It was a terrible blow for Princess Margaret,’ a friend remembered. ‘She worshipped him and it was also the first time that anything really ghastly had happened to her.’ Margaret confirmed this to Ben Pimlott, the biographer of her sister: ‘After the King’s death there was an awful sense of being in a black hole. I remember feeling tunnel-visioned and didn’t really notice things.’ In her grief, did she seek refuge in love? After the King’s death, everyone moved up or down a notch: Queen Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, and Townsend was appointed comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household. Only Margaret stayed the same, but now she had to live alone with her mother in Clarence House, eclipsed and to some extent marginalised by her sister, the new Queen, and with no clear role of her own. The following December, after eleven years of marriage, nine of them in the service of the Royal Family, Peter Townsend divorced Rosemary, who was named as the guilty party. Two months later she married John de L?zsl?, son of the fashionable society painter Philip de L?zsl?. That winter, according to Townsend, he and the Princess found themselves alone in the Red Drawing Room of Windsor Castle. They spoke for hours on end. ‘It was then,’ he writes, ‘that we made the mutual discovery of how much we meant to one another. She listened, without uttering a word, as I told her, very quietly, of my feelings. Then she simply said: “That is exactly how I feel, too.”’ Or that’s how his story goes. But had this impetuous young woman really managed to hide her feelings for a full five and a half years? And had the Group Captain somehow exercised a similar restraint?* (#ulink_71c1798d-2b15-543f-89b9-8830a1b3037e) According to Townsend, they pursued their romance in the open air, walking or riding, always ‘a discreet but adequate distance’ from the rest of the party. ‘We talked. Her understanding, far beyond her years, touched me and helped me; with her wit she, more than anyone else, knew how to make me laugh – and laughter, between boy and girl, often lands them in each other’s arms.’ Once again, he describes himself as a boy; but by now he was thirty-eight years old, and middle-aged. ‘Our love, for such it was, took no heed of wealth and rank and all the other worldly, conventional barriers which separated us,’ he continues. He doesn’t mention less romantic barriers such as age, children (by now he had a second son) and his recent divorce. ‘We really hardly noticed them; all we saw was one another, man and woman, and what we saw pleased us.’ The news of their pleasure, ‘delivered very quietly’, went down like a lead balloon with the senior courtier Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, at that time private secretary to the new Queen. ‘You must be either mad or bad,’ he informed Townsend. The Princess was to credit Lascelles with ruining her life. ‘Run the brute down!’ she instructed her chauffeur, decades later, when she spotted Lascelles, by now an old man, through her car window. Margaret had already confessed her love to Lilibet, who invited her and the Group Captain to dinner ? quatre with herself and Prince Philip, an evening that passed off, in Townsend’s view, ‘most agreeably’, though ‘the thought occurred to me that the Queen, behind all her warm goodwill, must have harboured not a little anxiety’. Margaret also told the Queen Mother. Townsend insists that she ‘listened with characteristic understanding’, though he attaches a disclaimer to this: ‘I imagine that Queen Elizabeth’s immediate – and natural – reaction was “this simply cannot be”.’ But one of the hallmarks of the Queen Mother was resilience, maintained by a steadfast refusal to acknowledge anything untoward. Whenever she caught a glimpse of something she did not like, she simply looked the other way, and pretended it was not there. Margaret, on the other hand, liked to let things simmer, sometimes for decades. * (#ulink_c56a4e1d-02a8-5632-b2e8-f50d365f2349) Possibly not. Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, John Larkin, recalled a conversation with his employer when she replaced her Rolls-Royce Phantom IV with a Silver Shadow. Larkin asked her if she wanted her old numberplate – PM 6450 – transferred to the new car. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It refers to an incident in my past best forgotten. I want something that doesn’t mean anything.’ Larkin worked out that ‘PM’ stood for Princess Margaret, and ‘6450’ stood for 6 April 1950. What had happened on that day? What was that incident in her past which was ‘best forgotten’? Was it, as some have calculated, the day on which the nineteen-year-old Princess lost her virginity to the Group Captain? 25 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) The romance became public at the Queen’s coronation on 2 June 1953, when Princess Margaret was spotted picking fluff off the Group Captain’s lapel. It was hardly Last Tango in Paris, but in those days interpersonal fluff-picking was a suggestive business. The next morning it was mentioned in the New York papers, but the British press remained silent for another eleven days. The People then printed the headline ‘They Must Deny it NOW’, above photographs of the two of them. ‘It is high time,’ read the front-page editorial, ‘for the British public to be made aware of the fact that scandalous rumours about Princess Margaret are racing around the world.’ The writer then added, perversely, ‘The story is, of course, utterly untrue. It is quite unthinkable that a royal princess, third in line of succession to the throne, should even contemplate a marriage to a man who has been through the divorce courts.’ Within days, the prime minister, the cabinet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the newspapers and the entire British public had got themselves into a flurry of alarm, delight, concern, horror, approval, dismay, condemnation, joy and despair. Everyone, high and low, had an opinion, for or against. Lascelles himself drove down to Chartwell to inform Winston Churchill of the developing crisis. ‘A pretty kettle of fish’ was the verdict of Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville – the very same phrase, incidentally, that Queen Mary had employed seventeen years before, on hearing that her elder son was intent on marrying a double-divorcee from Baltimore. Readers of the Sunday Express turned out to be three-to-one against the union. Mrs M. Rossiter of Whixley, York, declared that ‘I am not one of those who consider a married man with two children suitable for any girl of about 20.’ On the other hand, when the Daily Mirror conducted a readers’ poll, complete with a voting form, of the 700,000 readers who bothered to vote, a full 97 per cent thought that the couple should be allowed to marry. (Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images) Nella Last, who kept a diary for the Mass-Observation archive, noted that ‘My husband was in a dim mood – & Mrs Salisbury [their cleaner] was in one of her most trying. Her disgust & indignation about Princess Margaret being “such a silly little fool” held her up at times … “It’s not nice Mrs Last. I’d belt our Phyllis for acting like that. And a lot of silly girls who copy Princess Margaret’s clothes will think they can just do owt! … And fancy her being a stepmother … And I bet she would miss all the fuss she gets …”’ Churchill agreed to Lascelles’s curiously old-fashioned suggestion that Townsend be posted abroad, out of harm’s way, and so too did Lilibet. And so, on 15 July 1953, Townsend found himself shunted off into exile, to the almost transparently farcical post of air attach? to the British embassy in Brussels. The idea was that in two years’ time Margaret would be twenty-five, and would no longer require the official consent of the monarch, who would thus avoid being compromised. Those with harder hearts argued that absence makes the heart grow weaker, and that two years would be more than enough time for the fairy-tale romance to wither and die. Townsend was unable to say goodbye, as he had been whisked abroad before the Princess and her mother had returned from their official tour of Rhodesia. For his part, Lascelles was glad to see the back of him: in a letter to a friend he described him as ‘a devilish bad equerry’, sniffily adding that ‘one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence’. Life has its consolations, even in Belgium. A few months into his involuntary exile, Townsend went ‘by pure chance’ to a horse show in Brussels. There he watched ‘spell-bound, like everyone else, a young girl, Marie-Luce Jamagne, as she flew over the jumps with astonishing grace and dash’. As if in a fairy tale – or rather, a competing fairy tale – the horse fell, and the dashing young girl lay senseless ‘practically at my feet’. Townsend rushed over to her, and was reassured to learn from one of the judges that she would make a full recovery. At the time she landed at his feet, Marie-Luce was fourteen, a year older than Princess Margaret had been when he first set eyes on her, some eight years before. A friendship grew. Marie-Luce’s parents invited Townsend to their home in Antwerp. It became a safe haven. ‘It was always open to me and in time I became one of the family. That is what I still am today. Marie-Luce, the girl who fell at my feet, has been my wife for the last eighteen years.’ Quite how close had he grown to Marie-Luce by the time he returned to England, a year after his enforced departure? Did he mention her to Princess Margaret when they were briefly reunited in 1954? ‘Our joy at being together again was indescribable,’ he recalls in his autobiography. ‘The long year of waiting, of penance and solitude, seemed to have passed in a twinkling … our feelings for one another had not changed.’ We must take his word for it. By now they had only one more year to go until the Princess’s twenty-fifth birthday, when she would be free to marry without her sister’s consent. The next year, Townsend returned from his unofficial exile, prompting fresh speculation that marriage bells would soon be ringing. ‘COME ON MARGARET!’ ran the Daily Mirror headline, imploring her to ‘please make up your mind!’ Once again, everybody, high and low, had an opinion on the matter. Harold Macmillan noted, ‘It will be a thousand pities if she does go on with this marriage to a divorced man and not a very suitable match in any case. It cannot aid and may injure the prestige of the Royal Family.’ Mass-Observation’s Nella Last entertained similar misgivings, while her husband was resolutely against the match. ‘Mrs Atkinson came in. She had got me some yeast,’ Mrs Last recorded in her diary. ‘She said idly, “Looks as if you’re going to be right, that Princess Margaret will marry Townsend – seen the paper yet?” We discussed it. We both felt “regret” she couldn’t have married a younger man. Mrs Atkinson too has “principles” about divorce that I lack. We just idly chatted, saying any little thing that came into our minds, for or against the match. I wasn’t prepared for my husband’s wild condemnation or his outburst about my far too easy-going way of looking at things! I poached him an egg for tea.’ By now, the nation as a whole seemed to have swung behind the idea of the marriage. A Gallup poll discovered that 59 per cent approved of it, and 17 per cent disapproved, with the remainder claiming indifference. On 1 October the new prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden (himself on his second marriage), informed the Princess that it was the view of the cabinet that if she decided to go ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights, and forgo her income. Townsend and Margaret were reunited once more on the evening of 13 October. ‘Time had not staled our accustomed, sweet familiarity,’ Townsend recalled, fancily. But after a fortnight of press attention, things no longer seemed quite so straightforward. ‘We felt mute and numbed at the centre of this maelstrom.’ Ten days later, the Princess went to lunch at Windsor Castle with her sister, her mother and the Duke of Edinburgh. According to the Queen’s well-connected biographer Sarah Bradford, the Queen Mother grew tremendously steamed up, declaring that Margaret ‘hadn’t even thought where they were going to live’. Prince Philip, ‘with heavy sarcasm’, replied that it was ‘still possible, even nowadays, to buy a house’. At this, the Queen Mother ‘left the room, angrily slamming the door’. Towards the end of his life, Lord Charteris* (#ulink_ad64034d-7a7a-58e5-823f-01d99591bbdd) voiced misgivings about the Queen Mother’s behaviour throughout the Townsend affair. ‘She was not a mother to her child. When the Princess attempted to broach the subject her mother grew upset, and refused to discuss it.’ After this fraught lunch, the imperilled couple spoke on the phone. The Princess was, according to Townsend, ‘in great distress. She did not say what had passed between herself and her sister and brother-in-law. But, doubtless, the stern truth was dawning on her.’ The following day, The Times ran an editorial arguing against the marriage, on the grounds that the Royal Family was a symbol and reflection of its subjects’ better selves; vast numbers of these people could never be persuaded that marriage to a divorced man was any different from living in sin. Townsend himself regarded this argument as ‘specious’, and would never have allowed it to sway him. But, he claimed, ‘my mind was made up before I read it’. That afternoon, he ‘grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil’, and ‘with clarity and fluency’ began to write a statement for the Princess. ‘I have decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend,’ it began. With that, he went round to Clarence House and showed her the rough piece of paper. ‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ she said. ‘Our love story had started with those words,’ he recalled in old age. ‘Now, with the same sweet phrase, we wrote finis to it … We both had a feeling of unimaginable relief. We were liberated at last from this monstrous problem.’ * (#ulink_1c883d11-a31d-5585-b3c1-92c80ac2d418) 1913–99. Assistant private secretary to HM Queen Elizabeth II, later private secretary, and later still Provost of Eton. Aged eighty-one, and imagining he was speaking off the record, he gave an interview to the Spectator in which he called the Queen Mother ‘a bit of an ostrich’, the Prince of Wales ‘such a charming man when he isn’t being whiny’, and, most memorably, the Duchess of York ‘a vulgarian, vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’. 26 (#ubebacbea-06c5-570e-9c15-1d256ab24093) How does a fairy-tale romance turn into a monstrous problem? ‘I had offended the Establishment by falling in love with the Queen’s sister,’ was the Group Captain’s simple explanation. But was it sufficient? In Time and Chance, Townsend declares that ‘It was practically certain that the British and Dominions parliaments would agree – but on condition that Princess Margaret was stripped of her royal rights and prerogatives, which included accession to the throne, her royal functions and a ?15,000 government stipend due on marriage – conditions which, frankly, would have ruined her. There would be nothing left – except me, and I hardly possessed the weight to compensate for the loss of her privy purse and prestige. It was too much to ask of her, too much for her to give. We should be left with nothing but our devotion to face the world.’ When Time and Chance was published in 1978, it enjoyed a largely respectful reception, most critics commending the tact with which its author covered his relationship with Princess Margaret. ‘Balanced and charitable’, read a typical review. But one critic broke ranks. Alastair Forbes was a cousin of President Roosevelt, the uncle of the future US secretary of state John Kerry, and a friend of the well-connected, among them Cyril Connolly, Randolph Churchill, the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and Prince and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia. He was, however, seen as trouble by some of the more prominent royal households: Princess Margaret used to refer to him as ‘that awful Ali Forbes’, while Queen Elizabeth II was once heard to yell, ‘Will you please put me DOWN!’ as he lifted her up during a Highland reel. Like many of the most energetic stately-home guests, he traded in gossip, usually about those with whom he had just been staying. His fruity tales were peppered with nicknames, often based around puns. For instance, he retitled Temple de la Gloire, Oswald and Diana Mosley’s home outside Paris, ‘The Concentration of Camp’; Essex House, the home of James and Alvilde Lees-Milne, became ‘Bisex House’. Forbes was long rumoured to be some sort of non-specific spy, either for the CIA or MI6, or possibly both at the same time. His whole life was to some extent swathed in mystery, much of it of his own making. Sustained by a private income, he dabbled in politics and journalism and, in his sixties, took to reviewing books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. His prose had a Firbankian quality, its long, elegantly rambling sentences choc-a-bloc with foreign phrases, ribald asides, Byzantine names, incautious allegations and forensic examinations of abstruse questions such as ‘Did the Duke of Windsor have pubic hair?’ He had a morbid side to his character. At funerals, some detected an air of triumph emanating from him as friends, enemies and chance acquaintances were lowered into the soil. He was also something of an early bird at deathbeds, pen at the ready to transcribe any last words. It was death that brought his competitive streak to the surface: he had, for instance, made it his mission to be the last man to see Diana Cooper alive.* (#litres_trial_promo) Forbes was an egalitarian, in that he was as rude to the highest-born as to the lowest. Perhaps more so: he once dismissed Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as being on a par with the mottoes contained in Christmas crackers. His review of Peter Townsend’s autobiography, published under the heading ‘The Princess and the Peabrain’, followed this cock-snooking impulse. Throughout the piece he portrayed Townsend as an upstart – ‘What might be pardonable as the dream of an assistant housemaid was entirely unsuitable for an assistant Master of the Household’ – and his memoir as yet another attempt to cover the tracks of his social climbing. Rejecting the Townsend version of himself as a victim of love and circumstance, Forbes poured scorn over his every excuse and explanation: ‘How to consummate this mutual pleasure was the problem,’ writes the author in his best Monsieur Jordain style. You don’t say! His imagination, he adds, never at a loss for a clich?, ‘boggled at the prospect of my becoming a member of the Royal Family’. Boggled perhaps, but no more than it had been Mittyishly boggling away on the back burner for years. ‘All we could hope was that with time and patience, some solution might evolve.’ Meanwhile, he neither felt the slightest conscientious compulsion to resign from a position whose trust he had so weakly betrayed, his perverted taste for risk overcoming his sense of duty and gratitude to his Royal employers of eight years, nor did he feel able to say, after the fashion of those pretty inscribed Battersea enamel boxes: ‘I love too well to kiss and tell.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/craig-brown/ma-am-darling-99-glimpses-of-princess-margaret/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.