Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  ‘Nyair, they were my father’s.’

  ‘It’s said that on VE-night you were outside Buckingham Palace in the crowds joining in the peace celebrations?’

  Suddenly, her voice becomes animated. ‘Ears, INDEED we WAIR.’

  ‘Were you disguised in any way?’

  ‘Nyair. It was MOST EXCITING. We went out with a party of friends, of course they were all in uniform then, including my sister, who was in the ATS. We went everywhere, we rushed down the street. We hed an uncle with us – my mother’s brother – who was velly jolly and gay and encouraged us to behave bedly as usual.’

  She first heard her third record in a ‘treffic jem’: ‘Sixteen Tons’, by Tennessee Ernie Ford. ‘It chaired me up velly much.’

  ‘When did you carry out your first solo public engagement? Do you remember what it was?’

  ‘Well, I was twelve.’

  ‘As early as that?’

  ‘Ears. Eh went to present the school praizes at the Princess Margaret School in Windsor.’

  ‘Were you very nervous?’

  ‘Eh felt DREADFULLY sick, ears.’

  ‘The first of so very many. I have a list of your presidencies and patronages of various welfare organisations and children’s societies, a very long list, scores of them, and they must all be visited of course? … And of course you are now President of the Girl Guides?’

  ‘Ears, eh took over from my aunt, the Princess Rahl.’

  ‘– and you’re Colonel-in-Chief of several regiments?’

  ‘Ears, three.’

  ‘Someone with a taste for figures has listed about 170 engagements you fulfil in a year. Does that seem reasonably right?’

  ‘Well, Eh don’t think Eh’ve ever counted! One seems to keep pretty busy.’

  ‘It seems a lot of work. You have your own office staff, which arranges all the details?’

  ‘Oh ears, Eh couldn’t do without them.’

  ‘You’re usually accompanied by a lady-in-waiting. Are they appointed by yourself from among your personal friends?’

  ‘Ears, not particularly PERSONAW friends, some are appointed because they are SYOOTABAW, and they are perhaps a friend of a friend who – you know – hez recommended them …’

  ‘Right, we’ve got to number four.’

  ‘May I hev please a small portion of Brahms’ Symphony Number Two?’

  ‘Why did you choose this one?’

  ‘Eh think et’s the maist beautiful tune in the weld (sighs impatiently). In fact et’s beautiful all the way through, but Eh know we can only have a little bit of et.’

  Her next record?

  ‘Eh should like “Rule Britannia”, pliz. Eh would like a recording, pliz, of the Last Night of the Proms, with the people joining in and sanding veh patriotic, which is veh important nardays.’

  ‘Ma’am, you take a very active interest in arts organisations … Dancing has always delighted you.’

  ‘Eh’ve always loved the bellay, and from a long time ago, Eh’ve had something to do with it.’

  Plomley asks her whether she prefers classical to modern ballet. The classical, she replies. ‘I suppose because of the music … If the music is baird or non-existent or ugly, I find thet it takes away from the dancing.’

  ‘And you are a very regular theatregoer – all sorts of theatre?’

  ‘Ears, wall sworts of theatre, but I really like the bellay best.’

  ‘… You have a gift for mimicry, you’re a good musician and you love dancing. In other circumstances, do you think you would have been a performer?’

  ‘Nyair, I dain’t think so. Eh wasn’t any good at any of them. Eh mean, you’re kind enough to say that Eh’m a good mimic but Eh can’t ectually mimic people velly well. There are other members of my family who are better at that, end, erm, Em not a velly good musician. Eh can strum on the piano a little bit for other people to sing to. I never did any dancing other than ballroom dancing, so I dain’t think I would have been accepted at an waudition.’

  ‘Let’s have another record. What’s number six?’

  ‘May I have a bit out of Swan Lek, pliz … I think the conductor calls it number 13 waltz, second ect.’

  After Swan Lake, they talk about her teenage children. David, she reveals, is ‘velly good with his hends’.

  At no point in the programme are her marriage or divorce mentioned, nor any of her romances, before or after the marriage. But now Plomley broaches the subject of her sometimes erratic press coverage.

  ‘Few people have suffered more than you from wild and inaccurate and irresponsible press stories, especially in foreign papers. Can you laugh at them, or do you find them aggravating?’

  ‘Eh find them EXTREMELY eggrevating. Of course, if they’re ebsolutely invented, like sometimes they are, one can laugh at them with one’s friends. But Eh think that since the age of seventeen Eh’ve been misreported and misrepresented.’

  ‘A lot of it is beneath contempt,’ Plomley loyally chips in, ‘and of course you can’t keep on issuing denials.’

  ‘Well, they’re not worth denying, relleh, because they’re usually ineccurate.’ Is this a Freudian slip? Would she only consider denying those that were accurate?

  ‘Let’s get back to music. What’s record number seven?’

  ‘Well, this is a record – quate an eld record Eh think – about 1948, when Eh was a young –’ here she pauses, as though rootling around for the right word. ‘– thing and quite enjoying life’ – her voice sounds momentarily melancholic – ‘called “Rock Rock Rock” by Carl Ravazza end Sid Phillips and his Bend end long before what we know as rock.’

  ‘Now, the practical problems of survival on the island. You’ve made many visits to the tropics, you’ve visited many islands. Any deserted ones?’

  ‘Ears.’

  ‘What sort of shelter would you build?’

  ‘Eh think it would depend on what sort of stuff there’d be to build it with.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got palm trees and undergrowth.’

  ‘Well, then Eh think palm fronds and, erm, ears, that would do very well.’

  ‘Would you plan to escape?’

  ‘Oh ears, Eh like life too much to live on a desert island.’

  Her favourite record? ‘“Gaid Me Oh Thy Gret Redeemer”.’

  Her luxury? ‘Eh think Eh’d take a piano.’

  Book? ‘Eh should like War end Peace.’

  ‘A good long read.’

  ‘A good long read, and rather needs reading several times, so that would keep me geng for a lawng time.’

  ‘I should think it would! And thank you, Your Royal Highness, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.’

  ‘Thenk you, too.’

  ‘Goodbye, everyone.’

  In his history of Radio 4, Life on Air, David Hendy reports considerable criticism of this episode within the BBC. Already upset by Plomley’s ‘reluctance to follow up interesting statements, or to raise topical issues, or even to change the relentlessly chronological running order of his questions’, the powers-that-be felt that his handling of Princess Margaret almost brought the programme to a grinding halt. It was not helped by the Princess’s tendency towards the monosyllabic. Perhaps, thought the controller of Radio 4, Monica Sims, the Princess felt ‘she had to weigh every word’. A current affairs producer argued that Plomley had simply been too obsequious, while a BBC governor judged that the final result had been, quite simply, ‘terrible’.

  Some years later, sitting next to the novelist A.N. Wilson at a dinner party, Princess Margaret said that she couldn’t recall which luxury she had chosen on Desert Island Discs.

  ‘I believe it was one of your regiments, Ma’am,’ replied Wilson.

  47

  Back from honeymoon, their married life began swimmingly. Tony and ‘M’, as he called her, seemed set to become the golden couple of the Swinging Sixties, gaily swinging from royal to commoner, from grand to groovy, as and when the mood took them.

  As t
hough to usher in the new decade, 1A Kensington Palace had been submitted to a full refurbishment, closely supervised by Tony, who made sure the dining room was painted in apricot, and his dressing room had a dark-green carpet offset by tan cork walls and a gilded Napoleonic day-bed. A full staff had been assembled to look after the pair of them – butler, under-butler, footman, chef, housekeeper, kitchen maid, dresser, chauffeur. But at the drop of a hat the newlyweds were able to nip down to Tony’s old digs by the Thames, Tony in his black leathers on his Norton, Margaret, anonymous in her crash helmet, riding pillion. Once in Rotherhithe they could play at being a groovy young couple, smoking (Gauloises for Tony, Chesterfields for M) and frying sausages and drinking and having a high old time. ‘They were both very sweet and obviously very happy,’ Noël Coward observed in June 1961, having kicked off his evening at Kensington Palace and finished it in Rotherhithe, tossing empty Cointreau bottles into the Thames with gay abandon.

  Glamour feeds off glamour. Margaret’s new friend, the writer and journalist Angela Huth, asked them for dinner. ‘Happily, it worked. George Melly sang, Edna O’Brien and Shirley MacLaine entered into some profound, inextricable conversation; there were a couple of Rolling Stones, the barefoot Sandie Shaw and many others. She danced non-stop and stayed till dawn.’ Thus, the Snowdons leapt head-first into the sixties, mixing with others of the jet set, sipping their Napoleon brandy, living in a fancy apartment, knowing the Aga Khan, na, na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na.

  (Anwar Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images)

  Her style changed, to keep up with the times: shorter skirts, hairpieces, pale lipstick, heavy eye make-up. In 1962 the Earl of Snowdon (as he became in October 1961) took a black-and-white photograph of her in the bath, with diamonds and pearls in her hair, naked but for the Poltimore Tiara balanced on her beehive hairdo. The playful combination of formality and informality, regality and nudity, pomp and sex, clearly suited her. Never again in a photograph was she to look so happy or at ease. Out of sight is the glass case containing the collection of exotic seashells which she polished whenever she found herself at a loose end. But in the corner of the photograph Snowdon can be spotted in the bathroom mirror, like an apparition, sitting bare-legged, the camera to his eye. At the beginning of the year he had been appointed artistic adviser to the bright new Sunday Times magazine, a contract that gave him £5,000 a year, with an extra £500 in expenses for each feature he organised; he earned a further £5,000 a year from his work for magazines like Vogue.

  For that brief period, the two embodied the sixties dream: modern, go-ahead, and above all with-it. To complete the perfect picture, they were even in touch with the Beatles.

  48

  On 4 November 1963, the Beatles appeared in the Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales theatre, watched by HM the Queen Mother and HRH Princess Margaret. A mixed bag of entertainers included Flanders and Swann, Steptoe and Son, Max Bygraves, Marlene Dietrich (singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ and ‘Lili Marlene’), Charlie Drake and Pinky and Perky. Though the Beatles appeared seventh on the nineteen-act bill, they were the centre of attention.

  They kicked off their set with ‘From Me to You’, and went on to play ‘She Loves You’ and ‘Till There Was You’. At this point, John Lennon said, ‘For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewellery. We’d like to sing a song called “Twist and Shout”.’

  Backstage, they met Marlene Dietrich, with whom Ringo Starr was particularly taken. ‘I remember staring at her legs – which were great – as she slouched against a chair. I’m a leg-man: “Look at those pins!”’

  Afterwards they were presented to the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. ‘Where are you playing tomorrow night?’ asked the Queen Mother.

  ‘Slough,’ replied John.

  ‘Oh, that’s just near us.’

  They were never to appear in another Royal Variety Show. John Lennon recalled: ‘We were asked discreetly to do it every year after that, but we always said, “Stuff it.” So every year there was a story in the newspapers: “Why no Beatles for the Queen?” which was pretty funny, because they didn’t know we’d refused. That show’s a bad gig, anyway. Everybody’s very nervous and uptight and nobody performs well. The time we did do it, I cracked a joke onstage. I was fantastically nervous, but I wanted to say something to rebel a bit, and that was the best I could do.’

  (Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

  The following year, the Beatles went on a world tour on a scale unprecedented in terms of both mileage and popularity. In America alone they played thirty concerts in twenty-four cities in the space of thirty-two days, covering 22,441 miles. In Holland, 100,000 people lined the streets to see their car whizzing past. In Adelaide, their journey from the airport to their hotel was witnessed by 300,000 people, far more than had ever been recorded for a royal tour.

  On 6 July 1964 they returned to Britain for the Royal Premiere of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, at the London Pavilion, Leicester Square. The guests of honour were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, whom Lennon had renamed ‘Priceless Margarine and Bony Armstrove’ in his recent book of poems and sketches, In His Own Write.

  Lennon’s wife Cynthia was ‘determined to look gorgeous’, so spent days looking for the right clothes to wear. She finally found a full-length sleeveless dress in black and beige silk at Fenwick’s, which was, she declared, ‘one of London’s classiest department stores’. She teamed it with a Mary Quant black chiffon coat, bordered with exotic black feathers. Fenwick’s had agreed to shorten the dress, and to have it delivered in time for the premiere. But that morning it still hadn’t arrived, and she had begun to panic. Her mother rushed out to collect it for her, returning with barely half an hour to spare.

  Cynthia asked John if she should wear her hair up or down. ‘Let’s have a change – give us a bit of Brigitte and wear it up this time,’ said John, who at that time measured all women against Brigitte Bardot. ‘And don’t wear your specs. You look great without them. Don’t worry, I’ll guide you.’ With a black velvet bow in her hair, Cynthia set off for the premiere ‘feeling like a princess’.

  The Beatles brought traffic to a standstill in the centre of London, with 12,000 youngsters struggling to catch a glimpse of them. Passing through streets lined with cheering fans held back by rows of police, John looked out of the window of their chauffeur-driven car and wondered, in all innocence, what was going on. ‘Hey, fellers, what’s happening? Why are all these people around? What’s on, a cup final or something?’

  The band’s manager Brian Epstein told him that they were actually waiting to see the Beatles. Cynthia noticed John’s genuine surprise. ‘Despite the screaming crowds he’d been confronted with over the past nine months, he still wasn’t prepared for them.’

  Stepping out onto the red carpet, with flashbulbs popping, Cynthia found herself smiling and laughing ‘with unadulterated happiness’. Only a year ago, she reflected, she had been living at John’s Aunt Mimi’s house, hidden from the world, managing on a pittance.

  After the screening, the Beatles were presented to Princess Margaret. Cynthia spotted John blushing. ‘When it came to meeting royalty in the flesh, John was as much in awe as the rest of us. He was so pleased and proud that the Princess had come to see the film that his anti-establishment views flew out of the window and he stood red-faced as she spoke to him.’

  Cynthia felt that though Princess Margaret was fascinated by the four Beatles, she showed a conspicuous lack of interest in their entourage, including Cynthia herself. In turn, Cynthia found the Princess’s questions ‘clipped and superficial’, citing one as particularly dreary: ‘How are you coping with all the adulation?’ At one point, John attempted to draw Cynthia into their conversation: ‘Ma’am, this is my wife, Cynthia.’ But the Princess offered her only the most cursory glance. ‘Oh, how nice,’ she said, before returning her atte
ntion to John.

  After the premiere, there was a party at the Dorchester Hotel. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon arrived with a few friends. They were clearly enjoying themselves, and seemed set for the long haul. The twenty-one-year-old George Harrison began to feel peckish, so he approached the film’s producer, Walter Shenson, asking, ‘When are we going to eat?’

  Shenson explained the protocol: no one could eat until the Princess had departed. Harrison waited patiently, but after a further fifteen minutes he couldn’t take it any more. He went up to the Princess and said the words that so many people, before and after, dreamed of saying: ‘Your Highness, we really are hungry and we can’t eat until you two go.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Princess obediently. ‘Well, in that case, we’d better run.’

  Six months later, the Beatles were interviewed by Playboy magazine in America. ‘Is there any celebrity you would like to meet?’ asked the interviewer.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting Adolf Hitler,’ replied Paul.

  ‘Would you like to meet Princess Margaret?’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘How do you like her?’

  ‘OK.’

  The Beatles’ second film, Help!, was premiered a year later, on 29 July 1965, once again at the London Pavilion. Once again it was attended by Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, who had delayed their summer holiday just to be there.

  John Lennon invited his Aunt Mimi. No slave to the sixties, she failed to enjoy it. ‘So you liked “Help!”? Well I didn’t, although the Colour was very good,’ she wrote to a young Beatles fan, Jane Wirgman. ‘I went to the Premiere & it was like a mad house at the Show. I Sat immediately behind P. Margaret & when the Beatles came in I was panic Stricken, almost anyway. The girls in top balcony yelled & leaned over the edge & only for an attendant – one of them was nearly over.’

  Aunt Mimi was struck by the number of stars of stage and screen in the audience, ‘& Some of the most outlandish dresses and hair dos – all there to be Seen, not to See the film. It was for Charity. So did good.’