Once the island was full, the party started. Colin had planned every hour meticulously: a boat trip to see the wreck of SS Antilles, which had come aground on the coral reef a few years before; there were calypso singers who sang among everyone, making up lyrics about many of the guests, and Dana Gillespie, who was famous for singing “Andy Warhol,” written by David Bowie, sang at the Cotton House. There were lunch parties held at different people’s houses—at the architect Arne Hasselqvist’s, the rum was served from an enormous old copper sugar pan. And then the finale, the Golden Ball, although Colin got so stressed in the run-up that he collapsed and had to be given an injection by the doctor to revive him for the night. It did the trick, and soon enough he was rushing around in his usual high-octane state of excitement.
It did look spectacular. People have often commented that they think Colin wanted Mustique to be where fantasies came true, and it certainly looked more like a dream than reality that night: everything was gold—the trees had been painted, the grass sprayed, and even the beach had been covered with gold glitter. Colin got some of the local lads oiled up, and they wore nothing at all except a gold-painted coconut strategically placed down below.
When people thought Colin had pulled out all the stops, there would be one more. He was always coming up with ideas to impress the guests, as though they were the audience for some great theatrical production—which, really, was what the parties were. Suddenly, more golden boys appeared on the beach carrying a litter, enclosed by gold streamers. They put it down, and out stepped Bianca Jagger.
The photos of the Golden Ball, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, became iconic, especially those of Mick and Bianca Jagger: Mick looked slightly weird in a sort of pixie straw hat sprayed gold, and Bianca dressed as a character from Gone with the Wind, wearing a gold crinoline. The photos were published, and Colin was thrilled because he was also dressed up to the nines, in a skin-tight white satin suit, laced with gold. I was less thrilled because somebody had suggested that I should paint my face gold, but it had the most terrible effect, highlighting every wrinkle and crease. I spent a lot of the party trying not to smile.
That night made Mustique famous forever, mainly down to the golden boys dancing around Princess Margaret. Even for the mid-seventies, the scenes were an unusual sight.
The parties continued over the years, and Mustique’s reputation grew, the most splendid being Colin’s sixtieth-birthday party, in 1986, which he spent two years planning.
Several American guests flew in on Atlantic Records’ company jet and some famous people were scattered around, like Jerry Hall, who, by the time of Colin’s sixtieth birthday, had replaced Bianca.
Most of the guests, though, were relations: my mother and sisters loved coming out, and a great many rum punches and daiquiris were consumed. Old friends Ingrid and Paul Channon came with their children, who were a great hit with ours because they entered into all the games with such energy, lots of the Guinness family, a few of Princess Margaret’s other Ladies in Waiting, and friends like Prue Penn, whom I have always loved and laughed a lot with. Patrick Lichfield was there, busily taking photographs, including one of Princess Margaret’s bottom as she leaned over to have her portrait taken by someone else, and Laura Brand, the rather eccentric sister of Lord Hambleden, who always wore sombreros and was always in the sea. Sadly, a few years later Laura drowned. She and her husband Micky were in Grenada and she went for a swim. Micky was on the beach when all of a sudden, her hat floated past, out to sea. All of our children were at the party, with many of their friends and endless cousins, and just like Colin’s fiftieth birthday, the celebrations for his sixtieth went on for a week. It made the headlines—“Bring your own jewels,” one paper said, and another described Colin as the “ringmaster of a crazy aristocratic circus.”
Well: Princess Margaret did bring her own jewels to “The Peacock Ball” and wore them with the dress Carl Toms, an iconic set and costume designer, designed especially for her. She looked ravishing in ivory silk with gold embroidery, which set off her diamond tiara perfectly. Princess Margaret loved her dress, telling me she’d been waiting all her life to wear a dress that made her feel like a princess. Her son David came with his lovely girlfriend Susannah Constantine, who went on to be one half of the television duo Trinny and Susannah presenting the BBC series What Not to Wear.
Princess Margaret was thrilled with her son David’s outfit—he had a huge white peacock headdress, which was much admired. Thank goodness Colin had a crown or he might have been rather envious, but when Princess Margaret crowned him “King of Mustique” during the ball, it was clear he was thoroughly enjoying himself and was glad that everybody else had made such an effort with their outfits.
Colin organized the start of the Peacock Ball so that everybody could make a grand entrance. Jerry Hall sashayed in wearing an almost identical dress to mine, remarking, “You have the same color as me,” and I wanted to say, “No, you have the same color as me,” but I didn’t.
The ball marked the grand finale of the weeklong celebrations, in the same way that the Golden Ball had been the last huzzah for Colin’s fiftieth. The press described all the parties as “decadent” and “louche.” It would be hard to argue against those descriptions—Colin chartered a newly built boat called Windstar for a week, complete with masseurs and chefs at the guests’ disposal. There was also a huge collection of pornographic films that kept the younger ones rather too busy, and Colin got very ratty with them all for spending so much time in their cabins.
Being on Windstar was like being on a moving island. Colin had thought of every detail, even the clothes: we had gone to India twice to choose the outfits. There were T-shirts made to mark the occasion and Indian clothes for the parties, which were laid out for guests when they arrived on board so they could pick from a vast selection.
We sailed around the islands, stopping off to have lunch or play games—there were treasure hunts on Bequia, where Colin had gone to great lengths to produce a collection of life-size cardboard cut-outs of various people, including one of the Queen. He had gone off beforehand, lugging the cardboard cuts-outs around the island, hiding them in all sorts of places. There were shrieks when a group of guests found the Queen in a restaurant bar, and giggles when someone exclaimed, “Princess Margaret’s in the jungle!”
The real Princess Margaret was on Mustique preparing the party she gave—a picnic on Macaroni beach. She had sent an invitation to all the guests beforehand, but that was where the formality stopped. It was like an extravagant summer fête, with coconut shies, a roll-top bath full of champagne, and rum punch galore. People rushed or staggered around all afternoon playing games, with great peals of laughter, until the early hours.
As soon as one party finished, another would begin. All sense of time and responsibility was put on pause as we floated around from one island to the next. Raquel Welch, the American actress, threw a party with her husband, André, on their boat, which was decked out in red velvet and chandeliers, looking rather like a brothel. Princess Margaret was always mildly irritated by Raquel, because royal etiquette dictates that members of the Royal Family should always be the last to arrive, but Raquel made that impossible for Princess Margaret because she was always late.
Everybody was so relaxed and had so much fun, as though Mustique was just one private estate. That was one of its obvious attractions, especially for anyone famous—it felt private. It is still known for its privacy today. Colin was very clever in insisting that nobody could be on the island unless they had a house or a room at the hotel. This meant that the press couldn’t get on because, even if they arrived at the jetty, they were turned away. The Cotton House has only twelve rooms and the houses rent for huge sums of money, so the exclusivity and privacy has always been maintained.
The Queen’s visits cemented the idea that Mustique was also a playground for the aristocracy, which was probably, on balance, nearer to the truth, simply because most of the party guests were members of my
or Colin’s family, far outweighing the rock stars. The Queen’s first visit was in 1977 with the Duke of Edinburgh, who always made me nervous—he made everybody nervous and knew it. When Princess Margaret had told us that the Queen was planning on visiting, we knew we should spruce up Mustique to make it look as good as possible for her. The village people didn’t have any smart clothes and there was nothing to buy, even on St. Vincent, so Colin rang up his mother, Pamela, and asked her to organize clothes for the villagers—shirts for the men and dresses for the women.
The boat arrived with Pamela, who brought all the parcels of clothes with her. Lugging them up to the house, we opened them and discovered, to our horror, that Pamela had bought a job lot of Victorian garments.
“What have you done?” Colin asked his mother.
“I thought it would be more fun for everybody.” She was delighted with the idea.
We gave the clothes to the villagers without admitting they were vastly out of date. They assumed they were the proper dress for the Queen of England’s visit. I suppose they were, just not that Queen! I helped the women into their crinolines and the men put on their striped trousers and top hats and, despite being very hot, they loved wearing them.
I taught the ladies how to curtsy, and the men how to bow, and they all brought chairs down to the quay to wait for Britannia to come into view. They had been told to stand up once the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came to shore, but they didn’t move. I’m not sure how impressed they were—I think they were expecting the Queen of England to arrive in her robes and the crown.
The first thing the Queen said to Princess Margaret was “I had no idea Mustique was in a Victorian time warp.”
The first thing the Duke of Edinburgh said to Colin when he came ashore from Britannia was “I can see you’ve ruined the island.” Colin was dashed by the remark, especially because he had gone to such lengths to plan the itinerary with the Duke in mind.
Fortunately the planning paid off because the Duke of Edinburgh really enjoyed snorkeling among the sharks who were giving birth at Black Sand Bay, while Princess Margaret delighted in showing the Queen around Les Jolies Eaux, proud of the life she’d made on Mustique. She then had a picnic with the Queen, who took to the water afterwards. This was extraordinary as she very rarely swims anywhere, presumably because she doesn’t want to be photographed. With no press on the island, she swam in Macaroni Bay.
The Duke of Edinburgh changed his mind about the island. When he was leaving, he turned to Colin, saying, “I really like your island. I really loved my time here.”
The following week Nick Courtney, the general manager of the Mustique Company, the island’s management company initially set up to sell houses, was showing people around the island, and when he got to Macaroni Bay, he said, “The Queen swam here last week, and we haven’t changed the water since.”
It was certainly a radically different visit from that when Princess Margaret had come ashore from Britannia during her honeymoon in 1960, seventeen years before. The Queen didn’t deal with flying mice or plastic chairs strapped to a trailer pulled by a tractor. Nor did she have to sip sorrel cordial or be clad in striped pajamas tied up with string to protect her from the mosquitoes. The island had been transformed to the Paradise Colin had known it could become.
Mustique seemed to be a hit with everybody, but I quietly resented the parties that Colin continued to throw because of the expense—some of them cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. There was nothing I could do to stem that extravagance, nothing I could do to rein Colin in. The money was hemorrhaging out. We didn’t have an endless supply, yet Colin spent it as though we did.
Glen was also a drain on money, especially during and after the 1979 oil crisis, by which Colin’s family bank was affected, and the bills went through the roof. When we needed more money, Colin would simply sell a painting or two. He always said that once he had walked past a painting enough times he didn’t mind selling it, always being able to shut his eyes and see it if he wanted to or go to the Tate if he really missed it. Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge was a rather wonderful painting he sold, just like that, when he needed to pay off a debt. Some of the paintings I wasn’t too attached to, but I was really upset when he decided to sell Girl in Bed, which was a portrait of my school friend Caroline Blackwood, painted by her husband at the time Lucian Freud. Lucian was also upset: he took offense at Colin selling his whole collection of Freud paintings, marking the end of their friendship.
By the time that the Peacock Ball was being organized in the mid-eighties, Colin had sold anything hugely valuable and was running out of options. But he said it was all worth it because the parties made Mustique famous and therefore more profitable. I think from that point of view he was proved right: it attracted the top rock stars, from David Bowie, who bought Mandalay Villa, to Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of the band Roxy Music—Jerry Hall’s boyfriend before she left him for Mick Jagger—and Bryan Adams, as well as multitudes of celebrities from all over the world. Not only did the celebrities come, but they made it more than just a place where they sunbathed in private, some especially so: ever since Mick Jagger bought his house, now thirty years ago, he has made an effort to be part of the local community, giving money for a new school and joining in with village life by playing cricket, which Patrick Lichfield also loved doing.
I’d quite often go into Basil’s Bar and find Mick joining in with a live singer performing an acoustic set. One New Year we organized a skit in which Mick was the doctor and we told everybody he was looking for people to play patients. Of course the whole community turned up, wanting to be cast for the part, longing for him to examine them. David Bowie, too, was a very charming man, immediately sitting my twins on his lap the first Easter he was there, completely at ease with everybody as though we were all old friends.
For a place so small, it certainly has exceeded the expectations I had when I first set foot on the island. Amazing, really, because it still hasn’t got all the mod-cons that other places have—there is a small supermarket but nothing major, and there is no golf course or marina and not a single nightclub. I think the reason it’s so popular is that it has kept Colin’s distinctive bohemian spirit and adopted it as its own.
Still today it attracts the same sort of people as it did all those years ago, from the Royal Family to the social elite. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge take their children, the newest generation of Jaggers have grown up there, and people from the fashion world are still drawn to it: model sisters, the socialite granddaughters of Janie Stevens, Poppy and Cara Delevingne; Tom Ford, who named one of his pink lipsticks “Mustique”; and Tommy Hilfiger, who based a fashion campaign on Basil’s Bar, flying Basil to New York to make his signature rum punch for the launch.
I am rather relieved there are no more fancy-dress parties to organize or go to, and I will never again cover myself with gold paint. My favorite thing about Mustique now was my favorite thing about it then: swimming. Colin rarely came with me because he had had a fear of being out of his depth ever since one of his Oxford friends had drowned. When he did appear, he would often get very anxious and start yelling for me or the children to come back, worried we were going out too far. He preferred to stay in the shallows, eating mangoes with the children, satisfied that all the sticky juice could be washed off.
But while most people came to Mustique for the flamboyant parties, I liked waking up in the morning and walking down to the beach on my own. It’s hard to beat those beaches: there are no big concrete hotels or car parks or anything to detract from the beauty. The waves come over the coral making the water frothy in the shallows, so it feels like swimming in champagne. I’ve always loved the sea and for the twelve years Colin and I ran Mustique as a cotton estate, I had the glorious beaches to myself. Just me—no fancy dress, no theatrics, no rum punch. Just me and the sea—absolute bliss.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Royal Tour
IN THE HEYDAY of Mustique, Princes
s Margaret and I would go from dressing up in extravagant costumes to going all over the world on royal engagements. During the three decades I was the Princess’s Lady in Waiting, I accompanied her on several royal tours abroad, from Canada, where we dressed up in Victorian clothes and went to a rodeo, to Cairo, where we watched the Royal Ballet with Madame Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian President, who, at seeing the ballet dancers falling over, clapped enthusiastically, not realizing they were actually collapsing because the floor was too slippery, causing disaster.
All the tours were memorable, some especially so. The first tour I went on was to Australia. I had never been there before so I was thrilled when Princess Margaret asked me to accompany her, in October 1975, for a ten-day trip full of different engagements around the country. It was around this time that stories about Princess Margaret’s marriage were appearing in the British press although they were, at this point at least, restrained. The Australian press, however, were far less polite and the barrage of questions and comments started as soon as we disembarked from the plane. The reporters were brash and rude, haranguing Princess Margaret, shouting, “Why haven’t you brought Tony, Ma’am?” and “Where is Tony?”
I could see she was upset and unsettled by this onslaught, so Nigel Napier and I came up with a plan we hoped would appease the press. We knew Princess Margaret had a knack with men of all ages so we held a cocktail party on the train, inviting a whole lot of the press to come. By the end of the twelve-hour train journey from Canberra to Melbourne, Princess Margaret had charmed them all and the result was a succession of much nicer headlines.
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