by Craig Brown
Strangely, not a single one of Princess Margaret’s numerous biographers ever mentions Payne by name, though they are all happy to plunder his material, ascribing it to ‘a royal servant’ or ‘a Buckingham Palace insider’. Only one of them – Noel Botham, a boozy old Fleet Street hack, as far from a courtier as could be – goes into the nature of the ungentlemanly act.
Botham summarises it thus: ‘After receiving the message from the kitchen, Tony had, so we’re told, kicked off the bedclothes and, stark naked, made a rude gesture saying, “That to the cook.”’
Botham then elaborates on the episode in his usual saloon-bar mixture of the lewd, the euphemistic and the grandiloquent: ‘Nature had been very generous to Tony Armstrong-Jones in endowing him magnificently in his most private appendage. This he had grasped and pointed in a light-hearted and jokey way, so the story went, which was soon recounted throughout London.’ Regardless of its rackety raconteur, this explanation seems the most plausible.
That same summer, Payne also saw more of the Princess than he considered quite appropriate, though perhaps rather less than he might have hoped for. Standing beside the swimming pool at Royal Lodge, he kept his beady eyes peeled as the couple frolicked in and out of the water. ‘Standing in the sun, her tanned skin glistening with water, my Princess looked absolutely adorable … Her supple figure was shown off to its best advantage in … a brief yellow bikini two-piece affair with a halter strap around the neck.’ He cast his mind back to the first time he saw her so scantily clad. He had just been sunning himself in the garden when the bell in the pantry rang: he was needed in the Octagonal Room. ‘Hurriedly buttoning my tunic, I trotted up. On opening the door, I gaped.’
The Princess was standing there in a bikini, a towel loosely draped around her shoulders. ‘Her body glistened and little droplets of water trickled down from her arms and legs … I was too astonished to speak. I simply stood and looked, my eyes taking her in from head to toe.’
The Princess stood, hands on her hips ‘and a pleased smile on her lips’. They exchanged glances. Payne felt himself blushing, ‘but she smiled more broadly than ever’ and asked him to bring them tea at the swimming pool at 5 o’clock.
‘Certainly, Your Royal Highness.’
The Princess was ‘apparently enjoying the situation. It was one of her playful moods.’
This fruity encounter inspired mixed feelings in Payne. ‘I felt at the same time awkward and in some way flattered that I had reached a point of intimacy with this Royal Princess which made her capable of standing before me, covered only in the briefest clothing that the law permitted without any apparent embarrassment – on her part, anyway. I flatter myself that so complete was our relationship that only to me did she ever show such a complete abandonment of her royal pedestal. No other servant could have been given that accolade.’
Parallels with the topsy-turvy world of Dirk Bogarde in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant also appear in what Payne describes as ‘a disastrous gaffe’ by Tony, which left ‘my Princess’ in ‘a state of white-faced supercharged Regal fury which was terrible to see’.
Towards the end of the Indian summer of 1959, Payne was in the sitting room of Royal Lodge, kneeling on the floor next to the cross-legged Princess, helping her sort through her records. She was in what he described as a ‘wonderfully happy frame of mind’, picking up each long-player, looking at its cover, perhaps humming a snatch from one of its songs.
After they had sorted through one pile, the Princess asked Payne to take the records to the car. Suddenly, the door burst open and in came Tony, saying, ‘John, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Be a darling, will you, and …’
Tony had clearly not seen Margaret, still tucked on the floor behind the sofa. ‘I could do nothing to stop him from greeting me in this breezy way – as if she were miles away,’ recalled Payne. ‘But something of the alarm I felt must have shown on my face, for he stopped short, the smile fading from his lips.’
The Princess jumped to her feet and stared stony-faced at Tony.
‘What on earth do you mean? Whom are you talking to?’
Tony was clearly discomfited. He had, he spluttered, no idea she was there. ‘I didn’t see you. I wanted John for something.’
‘“And what do you mean by ‘darling’?” asked Margaret fiercely, ignoring my presence.
‘“It’s an expression often used in the theatre world, Ma’am. I’m afraid I have picked it up …”’
The Princess stared at him coldly ‘for what seemed like half an hour’. She then broke the silence.
‘“You may go,” she said, looking at me frostily, her chin jutting out, her fists clenched at her sides.’
Closing the door behind him, Payne found himself ‘soaked in perspiration. Sweat trickled down the fingers which had been holding the records and I felt its prickly sting down my back.’
Why was the normally unflappable Payne quite so flustered by a mistake that was, after all, entirely Tony’s? He offers no explanation.*
* In his memoir Adventures of a Gentleman’s Gentleman, the former Palace footman Guy Hunting identifies Snowdon’s trademark smell as a ‘particularly stinky eau de Toilette called Zizzani with which he drenched himself’. He adds that ‘finding Snowdon was always pretty easy’.
* In her heavily disputed book The Royals, Kitty Kelley suggests that this passage contains an ‘allegation of having been the object of a sexual overture from Antony Armstrong-Jones’. This, she claimed, was the principal reason the Queen Mother ‘sued to prevent publication in England’.
41
On the morning of 21 April 1956, an up-and-coming young photographer arrived at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, charged with taking the photographs of the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to the Hon. Colin Tennant. Throughout the day, the bride’s father, the Earl of Leicester, referred to the photographer as Tony Snapshot, though he knew full well that his real name was Antony Armstrong-Jones. For the rest of his life, the photographer would blanch at the memory of this snub. Furthermore, he had been treated as a tradesman, obliged to use the servants’ entrance, even though he had overlapped with the groom at Eton. Nor had he been invited to join the wedding guests for champagne in the state rooms; instead, he had to make do with a cup of tea in the servants’ hall.
At that time, the social status of a photographer was roughly on a par with that of a tailor – above a hairdresser, but below a governess. Over the course of the 1960s the poor old governess was to find herself overtaken by the other three. The rapid social ascent of Armstrong-Jones, whose persona had a hint of both the tailor and the hairdresser, served as a beacon for this social upheaval.
Yet neither time nor status could soften the rebuff Armstrong-Jones had suffered at the hands of Colin Tennant. Up to Tennant’s death, and beyond, he felt unable to mention Tennant’s name without appending the epithet ‘that shit’. His loyal biographer Anne de Courcy records that, soon after his humiliation, Armstrong-Jones threatened Tennant, saying, ‘I’ll get even with you for that!’ He then added, perversely but prophetically, ‘I’ll marry your best friend!’
De Courcy interviewed both men for her biography – Armstrong-Jones at great length – so the memory of that perverse threat must have come from one or the other, or both. Or had there been a scullery maid or a court dwarf hidden behind the curtain, who tearfully confessed what she had overheard on that fateful day, half a century before?
Tennant’s equally loyal biographer, Nicholas Courtney, confirmed de Courcy’s evidence. ‘There was always bad blood between Colin and Tony, which Colin believed stemmed from that unintentional slight at his wedding … Tony always referred to Colin as “that shit”.’ When Courtney phoned him to request an interview, Tony exploded, ‘I loathed the man. I want nothing to do with his biography!’ And with that, he slammed down the receiver.
Was there a degree of sexual jealousy in the feud between Colin Tennant and Antony Armstrong-Jones? In the mid-1950s, Tennant had been widely tipped in the pre
ss as the front-runner for the Princess’s hand in marriage. Some in her inner circle thought it a strong possibility too. ‘I believe that Colin is serious and would enjoy being a Prince Consort,’ wrote Ann Fleming to Patrick Leigh Fermor. Others were not so sure. ‘The sudden arrival of Princess Margaret into our lives in the Fifties brought unfriendly reactions from some of the family,’ wrote his sister Emma Tennant after his death in 2010. ‘It was thought that we’d never find any privacy again, and, worst of all, if an engagement was announced between the Princess and Colin, then Colin was likely to become a pompous bore and all our fun and games would be over. That this didn’t happen we might have guessed. Colin remained as irrepressibly funny and unimpressed by people who thought highly of themselves as he had ever been. Princess Margaret, as is well known, could be offensively sure of her superior status.’
Half a century on, Colin Tennant claimed that marriage had never been on the cards. Though he and the Princess had indulged in ‘heavy petting’, they had certainly never embarked upon what he called ‘a serious affair’. Or so he told his biographer.
Like many euphemisms, ‘heavy petting’ is frustratingly opaque. Where does light end and heavy begin? The Cambridge English Dictionary defines heavy petting as ‘an occasion [sic] when two people kiss, hold, and touch each other in a sexual way, but do not have sex’. The Oxford English Dictionary goes a little further: ‘Erotic contact between two people involving stimulation of the genitals but falling short of intercourse.’ But what do Oxbridge lexicographers know of heavy petting? Only the more worldly Urban Dictionary goes the whole hog: ‘Foreplay ranging from breast massage to masturbating one’s partner, yet no coital contact.’
Was it Tennant who decided that things could only go so far, but no further? Or was it Margaret? The evidence suggests it was Margaret who pulled up the drawbridge. Tennant always found the Princess ‘ravishing, terribly funny, and such good company’, but he confessed to Courtney that, for her part, the Princess had never found him all that attractive. ‘I was not at all her type, unlike Peter Townsend, and then Tony and then Roddy. They were smaller, foxy, talkative men.’* He then added, sportingly, that, all in all, he was glad not to have fitted the bill: ‘If I had actually been more of a lover and less of a companion, we would not have remained such friends.’
In other circles, a youthful stint of heavy petting, however circumscribed, might have licensed the use of Christian names; but not in this case. A private letter penned from Mustique two decades later by Tennant to Princess Margaret begins ‘Madam’, and ends with the complaint that though ‘all is by no means gloom’, things are ‘rather flat without Your Royal Highness’.*
* In fact, Townsend was neither foxy nor talkative, and six foot two inches tall. A photograph of him standing immediately behind the Princess shows the top of her hair only just reaching the bottom of the knot on his tie, and her hair was always artificially puffed-up, lending it added height and volume. Incidentally, might her desire to be addressed as ‘Highness’ have been a form of wish-fulfilment, a subliminal reaction to her lack of inches?
* Beyond her family, her old dresser, Ruby Gordon, was the only person allowed to call her ‘Margaret’. Her insistence on being addressed as ‘Ma’am’, ‘Madam’ and ‘Your Royal Highness’, even by old friends and lovers, is a thread that runs through the life of the Princess. There was always an element of Hyacinth Bucket about her, a tendency to keep her high horse tethered for use at all times, even in the company of old friends. Clearly, the Princess felt that being called ‘Margaret’ involved crossing an invisible line which heavy petting did not. Or might she and her beaux have found a Chatterleyesque charge in the anomaly of maintaining social niceties while engaged in a steamy sexual encounter?
42
Staying at Balmoral in October 1959, Margaret received a letter from her old suitor Peter Townsend, telling her that he was engaged to be married to a Marie-Luce Jamagne, who was, he failed to mention, ten years her junior.
Her letter back was immediate, passionate and furious. She had been under the impression that, when they parted, they had both vowed never to marry anyone else; and now he had broken that vow.
‘She believed I had betrayed her,’ Townsend told his friend and co-author Anne Edwards, close to the end of his life. He had kept the letter, and let Edwards have a glimpse of it. ‘It was an angry, bitter letter, written in M’s hand on her personal stationery,’ Edwards explained. ‘She did indeed accuse him of betraying their great love and the vow they had both made when she made her decision to remain in England (for she would have had to leave, had they married) that neither would ever marry another. She also asked him to burn all of her love letters to him. He had saved a few and quite impassioned they were (in later years he told me he had destroyed these as well as that last letter from her).’
When Margaret received Townsend’s letter, Tony Armstrong-Jones was staying at Balmoral for the first time. She told him about it, and added that, on this particular day, a proposal was out of the question.
Anne Edwards believed that Princess Margaret married Tony Armstrong-Jones ‘out of pure spite towards Peter for marrying against their vow (which he had agreed to) … She was head over heels in love with Peter – the sad thing was she was also arrogant, loved being a princess with all its perks, and perhaps even harboured the idea that she could continue to have a secret affair with him and still be able to carry on otherwise as before.’
Shortly after Margaret received his letter, Townsend publicly announced his engagement to Marie-Luce Jamagne. David John Payne found himself having to deliver the evening newspaper to the Princess, its headline, ‘Townsend to Marry’, uppermost. For others, less bold, this might have posed a problem, but for Payne it was an opportunity. Normally he would have left the room after delivering the paper, but not today; he was eager to see her reaction. Of course Townsend had forewarned the Princess by letter, but Payne was not to know this, so he was on tenterhooks.
While he occupied his time emptying the ashtrays and ‘putting the settee cushions to rights’, the Princess continued to sit at her desk with her back towards him. ‘I watched her, fascinated, as she put down her pen, picked up the paper and leaned back in her chair … I had a premonition that something violent was going to happen.’
Suddenly, Margaret ‘flared into action’. She grabbed the paper with her left hand and hurled it across the room. Payne stood ‘rooted to the spot’, while Margaret returned to her desk and carried on writing, ‘as if nothing had happened’.
The following day, Margaret went to stay at a house party in Kent. Word went round that she was not to be shown any of the daily newspapers, and no one was to mention the news. When most of the party embarked on a walk, Margaret stayed behind, singing melancholy hymns to a piano accompaniment. One of them was ‘Abide with Me’, the hymn that was played as the Titanic went down.
Tony and Margaret finally became engaged at Christmas. Tony seems to have been in two minds about it too. There was so much he would have to give up, not least his other girlfriends, one of whom confided to a friend that Tony had wept on her bare breasts at the prospect of getting married to royalty.
Just before travelling up to Scotland to stay at Balmoral that October, Tony had carried on his affair with his old friend Jeremy Fry’s wife Camilla. Without him knowing it, Camilla was now pregnant with his child.
Polly Fry was born three weeks after the royal wedding, though it was not for forty-four years that she was to discover who her true father was. ‘Those were different times, back then,’ explains a member of their circle.
43
Never one to pass up an opportunity for an anecdote, Harold Macmillan claimed to have heard the news of the royal engagement from a distraught Duke of Gloucester. Apparently the Duke had greeted the prime minister on his arrival at Sandringham with the words, ‘Thank heavens you’ve come, Prime Minister. The Queen’s in a terrible state; there’s a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to m
arry her sister, and Prince Philip’s in the library wanting to change the family name to Mountbatten.’
On 22 February 1960, Macmillan passed the news to his cabinet. Later that day, he recorded the occasion in his diary:
I told ministers about Princess Margaret’s engagement. No-one was in any doubt as to what advice – shd advice be necessary – ought to be given to the Queen. I think myself that the marriage will be very popular. All our people like a ‘love match’ – and the D Mirror etc will like a commoner …
The engagement was officially announced four days later, on 26 February. In a television interview, Barbara Cartland, the prolific romantic novelist, expressed her joy. ‘No bride, whatever her class, is immune from feeling that love is the most wonderful thing in the whole world, and that applies to a certain princess who wrote to a friend saying: “No two people have ever been so much in love.”’
At the time she was criticised for this indiscretion, but in her memoir I Search for Rainbows she claims to have been quoting from an unnamed ancient Greek play. ‘But how satisfactory it is to add, however indiscreet I was then, that seven years later no two people have ever looked more in love than they do today.’
Cecil Beaton reacted with mounting fury. How could his callow young rival have pulled off such a coup? ‘Not even a good photographer!’ he yelled. Subsequently, he suffered two or three sleepless nights, self-reproach criss-crossing with self-analysis and self-pity as he desperately tried to work out quite why the news was causing him such misery. He finally put his finger on it: envy that nothing so momentous would ever happen in his own life, and envy also ‘that all my excitements and interests paled in comparison’.