Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  17

  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 sixteen.

  18

  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 obl
iged 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.*

  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* 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)

  * 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.’

  * One great too many.

  19

  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.’