by Robert Lacey
After work he would go out many nights to the Café de Paris near Leicester Square, photographing cabaret artists from the balcony – where he got a break from one of his Liverpool hospital visitors, Marlene Dietrich, who agreed to give him half an hour one afternoon on the empty stage.
‘I wanted smoke in the picture,’ he later recalled, ‘but as there wasn’t enough from her cigarette, I had three people under the piano puffing out cigar smoke.’206
Nearly 12 hours later, after the last show was over, Tony was back at the Café de Paris in the small hours of the morning, showing Miss Dietrich his sheets of contact prints, which she examined with a forensic eye.
‘All right, my dear boy,’ she said in a low, seductive voice that Tony liked to imitate whenever he repeated the oft-told story. ‘I like my face in this-a-one, but I like the smoke in that-a-one.’
‘But Miss Dietrich,’ Tony replied, ‘these pictures have to go to press at nine o’clock. It’s frightfully difficult, and I really don’t know how to do it.’
‘My dear,’ she told him, ‘all you do is put the negative of my face in the enlarger and shade this part back with your hands. All right? Then you take the negative of the smoke and print that one, shading the other bit. You have four hours, so go along and do it.’
1960 – New recruit: Antony Armstrong-Jones at work
‘I followed her instructions,’ Tony would conclude, ‘and she was absolutely right.’207
The moody Dietrich photograph – the singer later used it for one of her album covers208 – got Armstrong-Jones firmly noted in Fleet Street as the celebrity snapper of the moment, and in June 1956 came Photocall, the first public exhibition of his work, at the prestigious Kodak Gallery in Kingsway.209 The show featured striking portraits of ballerina Anya Linden, dress designer Christian Dior, the painter Pietro Annigoni, actresses Edith Evans and Ingrid Bergman and, most memorable of all, Laurence Olivier playing an angry Archie Rice in the film of John Osborne’s The Entertainer. For this, Tony had indulged in a rare piece of retouching to enlarge the natural gap between Olivier’s front teeth, emphasising the decaying doom of his character’s ferocity.210
With fame and money, Tony was able to step up the tempo of his already busy love life. Work and sex were his guiding lights – a day without either, he used to say, was a day wasted. To start with, his companions were mainly men: the interior designer Tom Parr with whom he frequently holidayed, the stage designer Carl Toms with whom he later shared a flat in New York, the choreographer John Cranko, whom he would welcome to his studio with a full-blooded kiss on the lips – to the delighted horror of his female assistants – and his gloriously camp uncle Oliver Messel, who would invite his nephew to Venice, wandering the canals and alleyways with him through the night. ‘We would end up in some gay bar,’ Tony fondly recalled, ‘at five in the morning.’211
So, was Antony Armstrong-Jones gay? Many years later his biographer Anne de Courcy dared to put the question directly to the great man in one of their weekly conversations, prompting a very, very long pause as he stared out of the window.
‘I didn’t fall in love with boys,’ he eventually replied. Then he added reflectively, after another long pause – ‘But a few men have been in love with me.’212
That is certainly not a ‘Yes’. But if you study the words carefully, it is definitely not a ‘No’ either. In his memoir Redeeming Features, interior designer Nicky Haslam writes of enjoying ‘a very brief romance’ with Armstrong-Jones about a year before the photographer’s marriage to Princess Margaret213 – and when Margaret herself first met her future husband, over dinner in 1958 at the Chelsea home of her lady-in-waiting Elizabeth Cavendish, ‘she was far from convinced,’ in the words of her approved biographer, Christopher Warwick, ‘that he was interested in women’.214
The issue became public – though the newspapers at the time politely declined to air it in any detail – when Tony’s close friend, the chocolate heir Jeremy Fry, had to step down as best man for the royal wedding in May 1960. A criminal conviction had been discovered in his past – a £2 fine at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court for ‘importuning for immoral purposes’ (soliciting a man for sex).215
This is the Jeremy Fry whom we meet in Episode 207 of The Crown, cavorting in bed with his wife Camilla and making up an energetic sexual ‘threesome’ with Tony to the music of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony (Lento Cantabile Semplice). Over the music, the two Frys take a break from their exertions to congratulate Tony on how much more expert his lovemaking has become since he started dating the flower-like Jacqui Chan (Trinidad and Tobago-born of Chinese descent), then starring in the West End in The World of Suzie Wong.
‘I really can’t keep up anymore,’ says Jeremy.
‘And you’re more imaginative …’ adds Camilla. ‘So, don’t give her up. Whatever you do.’216
The scene is ‘invented’, but it is also the truth, for Tony Armstrong-Jones’s sexual appetites were, by all accounts, omni-voracious. ‘If it moves, he’ll have it,’ explained one of Tony’s friends and sexual partners to Anne de Courcy in the early 2000s – and that was when the photographer was over 70.217 His lifelong amatory energies made distinctions between homo- and hetero-sexual activity irrelevant.
‘He couldn’t buy a packet of cigarettes,’ recalled the young actress Gina Ward, ‘without flirting with the man or woman behind the counter.’218 In her case, the flirting was while watching Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne act Dürrenmatt at a Boxing Day matinee in 1957. She had only met Tony that morning in his studio.
The man himself was most generously endowed physically, according to those who knew him intimately. ‘It was like having a baby backwards,’ recalled one lady, smiling broadly, decades later, at the memory of her three weeks of romps with the future Lord Snowdon.219 Princess Margaret soon discovered that the apparently gay photographer she had met at dinner was most definitely interested in women, and she wasted no time. Their affair took off passionately through the spring and summer of 1959 – though Her Royal Highness occupied just one compartment of Tony’s life in those summer months, along with Gina, Jacqui, the two Frys and goodness knows who else, parcelled out to separate compartments of their own. Each and all of them, for the most part, along with the now-rampant Princess Margaret, were jumping into bed with Tony in total ignorance of the others.
‘He’s a monster,’ said his friend Andy Garnett, the furniture designer – a platonic friend – when once discussing Tony’s promiscuity and deep-rooted emotional deceptiveness. ‘But I love him.’220
Another platonic friend who knew Tony very well took a less indulgent view. When Jocelyn Stevens, who might have been expected to welcome the huge boost to the fame of his star Queen photographer, heard the news of Tony’s engagement to the Princess at the end of February 1960, he declined to join in the general rejoicing. ‘NEVER,’ he cabled gravely from his estate in the Bahamas, ‘WAS THERE A MORE ILL-FATED ASSIGNMENT.’221
Suddenly Tony seemed to feel the same. Had he trapped himself? When he rang up to share the news with Francis Wyndham, then an editor on Queen, his voice was shaking, and he wondered if he was having a nervous breakdown. Wyndham suggested that he should get away for a break. ‘But I’d only have to come back,’ Tony replied.222
Getting practical, he went around to Tom Parr’s flat to ask, apparently on a whim, if he could look through Parr’s photograph albums of all their holidays together as an ‘item’. He then delved fixedly through the three large volumes, page after page, studying every little photograph with surprisingly detailed interest. Later Parr realised that his old partner must have been searching for snapshots from the early years of their relationship that might have been deemed compromising in some way.
Gina Ward was dealt with over the telephone – ‘broken into a hundred pieces,’ as she later recalled, by the total surprise and harshness of the news. ‘You’re in love with me!’ she cried out. ‘You’ll have an awful life!’223
Jacqui Chan
did not even receive the courtesy of a phone call. She was told by the photographer Robert Belton on the evening before, just hours ahead of the announcement, dispatched by Tony down to Pinewood where she was filming. ‘Well,’ she responded, sitting in Belton’s car in the pouring rain, ‘I hope she can cope better than I could.’224
There was another girlfriend, unnamed, who later told the writer John Moynihan how Tony had broken the news to her while they were in bed together – weeping his tears, she recalled with some precision, onto her ‘bare breasts’ as he bemoaned the prospect of his forthcoming royal servitude.225
So that makes at least three women – Gina Ward, Jacqui Chan and Ms ‘Bare Breasts’ – who all believed that they were enjoying close and committed sexual relationships with Tony in the very months when he was sleeping with the Queen’s sister and was getting ready to propose to her – as Margaret would later put it to Christopher Warwick, ‘in a roundabout way. It was very cleverly worded.’ The unusual marriage proposal sequence depicted in the episode, with the couple lying side by side in bed together, seeks to reflect that: ‘Will you forgive me if I don’t go down on one knee?’
And then there was Camilla Fry. We do not know how or when she and Tony said goodbye to each other. But at the end of May 1960 – three weeks into the royal couple’s honeymoon – Camilla gave birth to a daughter, Polly, who, DNA tests would later establish beyond doubt, was the child of Antony Armstrong-Jones.226
Episode 207’s depiction of the official engagement party draws its inspiration from a formal reception held at Buckingham Palace two days prior to the wedding on 6 May 1960, along with an earlier private celebration for the couple held at Clarence House on 31 October 1959 by the Queen Mother, who was an enthusiastic champion of both Tony and the marriage.
Senior courtiers at the Palace, on the other hand, troubled by rumours of the new recruit’s promiscuity. At the time of the engagement, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, the Queen’s private secretary from 1952–3, who had retired in 1953, confided to the diarist Harold Nicolson that ‘the boy Jones has led a very diversified and sometimes a wild life and the danger of scandal and slander is never far off’.
Nicolson himself went on to note: ‘At least Mr. Jones is not a homo, which is rare these days.’ As already discussed, however, Nicolson’s assumption has been largely disproved by the evidence of the ‘homos’ who were close to Tony in the 1950s. So their testimony would seem to add an intriguing strand of bisexuality to the complex mixture that was Antony Armstrong-Jones.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘DEAR MRS KENNEDY’
JUNE 1961–NOVEMBER 1963
‘THE “WIND OF CHANGE” IS BLOWING THROUGH THIS continent,’ Harold Macmillan historically announced to the assembled members of the South African Parliament on 3rd February 1960. ‘… Whether we like it or not, this growth of [African] national consciousness is a political fact, and we must all accept it as a fact.’227 Listening in Cape Town, the British Prime Minister’s immediate audience – the Anglo-Dutch enforcers of apartheid, 95 per cent male and 100 per cent white – did not like what they heard, and they acknowledged his message with lukewarm applause.228
But further north the cheers rang out – starting with the new, would-be independent nations of ‘black’ Africa, for here was the current chief executive of the British Empire effectively throwing in the towel. Macmillan was saying that Britain’s African colonies could now have their freedom whenever they wanted – with no haggling or bloodshed – a momentous and historical declaration. And in 1960 few people welcomed that declaration more warmly than Macmillan’s own boss and Sovereign, Queen Elizabeth II, the custodian of Britain’s imperial crown.
Episode 208 of The Crown, ‘Dear Mrs Kennedy’, examines Elizabeth II’s pioneering endorsement of African liberation in the 1950s and 1960s, suggesting that it may have been influenced by the Queen’s personal contacts with America’s glamorous First Lady, the wife of President Jack Kennedy, who features in part of this episode. But this is dramatic invention.
Peter Morgan has explained how he wished to highlight the post-1960 advent of Jackie Kennedy on the world scene – super-model and, apparently, super-brain – suddenly a rival to Elizabeth II’s hitherto unchallenged pre-eminence. Jackie had recently enjoyed a huge triumph in Paris, charming and winning over the previously anti-American General de Gaulle, by speaking fluent French to the grumpy French president so dazzlingly that JFK joked that he was just a sideshow. It would be quite natural, Morgan suggests, for Elizabeth II to have felt a little up-staged by the First Lady’s talents, and this episode shows how her own diplomatic work in Africa solidly outshone anything that Jackie Kennedy ever accomplished.
Queen Elizabeth II was firmly committed to the cause of liberating Africa’s colonial states long before she met Jack and Jackie Kennedy in London in June 1961. In fact, her own liberal attitude towards the break-up of the British Empire would certainly have played a role in what her Prime Minister knew he could say in Cape Town – since, as head of Her Majesty’s Government, Macmillan was speaking in the name of the Crown. And the domestic corollary of this – the Queen’s consistent stance throughout her reign in support of racial equality – has also been part of her personal lifelong vision, for which she alone deserves the credit.
At the end of the 1950s, Kwame Nkrumah was the proud President of Ghana, the former West African colony of the Gold Coast that had become Britain’s first African colony to win its independence in 1957. This was largely thanks to Nkrumah’s own fighting attitude – Ghana means ‘Warrior King’ in the language of the Soninke people who ruled the ancient empire of Ghana from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Nkrumah twice spent some time in a British jail, and, outside Africa, he was seen by many as an anti-Western troublemaker in the mould of Egypt’s President Nasser. Nkrumah encouraged this comparison – he had been drawn to his Egyptian wife Fathia on the basis of her pro-Nasser and anti-colonialist views.
Nkrumah spoke out loudly for pan-African unity, just as Nasser championed pan-Arabism to counteract the infiltrating power of the West. And like Nasser, Nkrumah built much of his foreign policy around playing off the US and the Soviet Union, the two major Cold War powers, against each other in order to finance his new nation’s self-sufficiency with the favoured ‘open sesame’ of the day – a hydroelectric power project. It was America’s refusal to finance Egypt’s Aswan Dam that had provoked Nasser’s occupation of Suez in 1956. Now, early in 1960, Harold Macmillan was worried that American failure to finance Ghana’s Volta Dam project might provoke a similar backlash by Nkrumah, turning him permanently towards the Soviet Union and prompting him to stalk out of the British Commonwealth – taking other black African leaders with him.
Nkrumah’s surprising and sentimental disappointment as an African mover and shaker was that he had never had the chance to meet Queen Elizabeth II herself. He felt let down when Downing Street and the Palace had cautiously sent her aunt, the Duchess of Kent, to attend Ghana’s independence celebrations in 1957,229 consoling himself with the promise that Her Majesty would visit Ghana’s capital, in 1960 as part of the tour she was already planning of Britain’s West African connections and dependencies to start the new decade.
But in the summer of 1959, Elizabeth fell pregnant with the child who would turn out to be Prince Andrew (b. February 1960). She would not be able to travel for more than a year, and she had studied the dispatches from Accra sufficiently to know what a disappointment that would be to Ghana’s President. ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she told Martin Charteris, her assistant private secretary, ‘which I have been trying to do for some time, and that means I won’t be able to go out to Ghana as arranged. I want you to go and explain the situation to Nkrumah and tell him to keep his mouth shut.’230
The courtier duly flew out to Accra to pass on the message to the Prime Minister, who, as Charteris later related to the Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott, received the news in silence. After several minutes, Charteris fel
t he should try repeating the message – to be greeted by still more profound silence. After waiting several further minutes, Charteris tried for a third time, asking the great man, then just approaching his fiftieth birthday, if he understood the situation.
‘I put all my happiness into this tour,’ Nkrumah finally replied. ‘Had you told me my mother had just died, you could not have given me a greater shock.’231
By the time Elizabeth was finally ready to visit West Africa in November 1961, the Ghanaian situation had changed. In January that year Nkrumah had joined up with Nasser and other ‘Third World’ nationalist leaders to sign the African Charter of Casablanca, which courted Soviet Premier Khrushchev and took an aggressively anti-Western line. Nkrumah’s foreign policy was pro-Soviet in many respects. Before the Queen’s arrival, he had been on a lengthy tour through Communist Eastern Europe, proclaiming Ghana’s solidarity with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
More seriously, Nkrumah had abolished Ghana’s network of regional assemblies and altered the constitution to create what was in effect a one-party state. As President of the new republic of Ghana, he still paid nominal homage to the Queen, but only just – raising the question in London as to whether a state whose leader made anti-British speeches while denying traditional British civil liberties to its citizens was entitled to stay inside the Commonwealth.
Days before Elizabeth was due to depart on 9 November 1961, Nkrumah arrested 50 of his most prominent domestic opponents and also expelled all his British military advisers. Then a terrorist bomb went off in Accra, blowing both legs off his grand presidential statue – which raised serious questions about the safety of the Queen if she were to go out with him in public. Macmillan dispatched his Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys to inspect and check the Queen’s intended route, but it was Elizabeth herself who took the crucial decision.232