by Craig Brown
Afterwards, both Princess Margaret and Aunt Mimi went to the after-party at the Dorchester. They made no further contact, but Aunt Mimi was not bothered. ‘John was in great form & our table was in an uproar and Jane Asher* is really a delightful girl.’
On Tuesday, 4 March 1969, Margaret spent six hours at Twickenham Film Studios watching Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers shooting The Magic Christian. Described by its producers as ‘an essentially genial indictment of capitalist society’, the film was really just a hotchpotch of famous actors doing unexpected things: Richard Attenborough as a rowing coach; Raquel Welch whipping female galley slaves; Peter Sellers as Sir Guy Grand, the richest man in the world; John Cleese as the director of Sotheby’s; Wilfrid Hyde-White as an alcoholic captain; Laurence Harvey performing a striptease while reciting Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’; and Yul Brynner in drag singing Noël Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ to Roman Polanski. Margaret spent a lot of time chatting with Paul McCartney, who happened to be visiting the set too.
Just over a week later, on the morning of Wednesday, 12 March,* Pattie Boyd, the wife of George Harrison, drove to London from their bungalow in Esher to pick up a dress from the showroom of Ozzie Clark. George and Pattie were due to attend a party on the theme of ‘Pisces’ thrown by the artist/singer Rory McEwen in Chelsea that evening. She was keen to look her best; after all, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were due.
Coming out of the shop with her new dress, she noticed that, in her absence, someone had placed a packet of Rothmans cigarettes on the dashboard of her car. Inside the packet was a small lump of hashish, a phone number, a man’s name and the message ‘Phone Me’. Pattie placed the cigarette packet in her handbag and set off back to Esher. Once home, she had a bath, and was drying herself when the doorbell rang.
At the door was Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of the Drugs Squad, along with eight other policemen and a police dog called Yogi, specially trained to sniff for drugs. Another half-dozen policemen then arrived through the back door, and there were even more in the greenhouse.
‘We’re looking for dangerous drugs,’ explained Det Sgt Pilcher.
‘I’m terribly sorry but we don’t have any,’ replied Pattie, a former convent-school girl.
The police search uncovered the hashish in her handbag. Though she told Det Sgt Pilcher how it came to be there, he was unconvinced. She telephoned her husband at the Beatles’ Apple office at 3 Savile Row. ‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘It’s a bust.’
George was sceptical, so she handed the phone over to Det Sgt Pilcher, whose commanding tones quickly convinced George that she was not pulling his leg. He immediately set off for Esher, together with a lawyer and the Beatles’ press officer, Derek Taylor.
As they waited for them to arrive, Pattie asked Det Sgt Pilcher what he hoped to achieve from the raid. ‘To save you from the perils of heroin,’ came the reply. Another policeman entered the room with a small brick of hashish, weighing 570 grams, which he claimed Yogi had just sniffed out in a bedroom cupboard, hidden in one of George’s shoes.
‘You’re lying,’ said Pattie. ‘If we had that much hash we certainly wouldn’t hide it in one of George’s shoes. And if you’re looking for grass, we keep it in the sitting room, on a table in a cigarette box.’
The atmosphere had grown a little tense, so they all had a cup of tea. One of the policemen asked if they could switch on the television. Pattie agreed. While some watched, others made a stab at conversation.
One of them asked, ‘Have the Beatles been doing any new music lately?’
‘Yes,’ snapped Pattie. ‘But you’re not going to hear it.’
The mood remained sticky until the arrival of George. ‘The police were obviously excited to meet him,’ recalled Pattie. ‘They stood to attention and were almost elbowing each other out of the way to get closer to him.’ Looking at the assembled officers, George, the most spiritually-minded of the Beatles, calmly observed, ‘Birds have nests and animals have holes, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head.’
‘Oh, really, sir?’ replied Det Sgt Pilcher. ‘Sorry to tell you I am arresting you …’
Pattie and George were escorted to Esher police station, where they were questioned and fingerprinted, before being formally charged and released on bail. ‘We got home feeling gloomy,’ recalled Pattie. ‘So George said, “Come on, let’s go to the party.”’
On their arrival in Chelsea, they found Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon already there. The Harrisons joined their group. ‘Hey, you can’t believe what happened,’ George said. ‘We got busted.’
‘What a shame!’ said Princess Margaret.
‘Can you help us?’ said George. ‘Can you use your influence?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’ said Princess Margaret, with a look of horror.
At that moment, Pattie’s younger sister Paula came over, removed a joint from her purse, and lit it. ‘I couldn’t believe it, it was the early evening of the same day that we’d just been busted and there was my sister trying to hand Princess Margaret a joint!’
Everyone looked daggers at Paula. Failing to read the signs, she dutifully passed the joint to Princess Margaret. ‘Here, do you want this?’
Margaret immediately turned on her heel and left the party, taking Lord Snowdon with her. Between them, the Harrisons had thus been responsible for curtailing two of the Princess’s appearances in the space of five years.
At the end of the year, on 11 December 1969, the Princess encountered the Beatles for one last time when she attended the premiere of The Magic Christian at the Odeon, Kensington. Unfortunately, her arrival was upstaged by John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerging from a white Rolls-Royce, bearing a banner saying ‘Britain Murdered Hanratty’.
* Paul’s actress girlfriend at the time.
* The same day, incidentally, on which Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman.
49
The most sixties of the Snowdon inner circle was Peter Sellers, the comic actor whose extraordinary talent for mimicry seemed to have invaded his body, depriving him of a fixed accent, or even a fixed character. This allowed him to be whoever he wished to be, but with no way home. Himself something of a chameleon, Snowdon was mesmerised by Sellers, and in turn Sellers was, in the words of the screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, ‘completely obsessed with royalty. He was always going on about Princess Margaret. His biggest thrill was to present people to her.’
In February 1964 Sellers brought his young fiancée, the blonde Swedish actress Britt Ekland, to meet Tony and Margaret. On their way to Kensington Palace he drilled her in the correct way to address the Queen’s younger sister: ‘Your Royal Highness’ on first being presented, and ‘Ma’am’ thereafter. A preliminary curtsey was mandatory.
As things turned out, Her Royal Highness was as relaxed as could be. The four sat down to what Ekland described as a ‘quite informal’ lunch: consommé, roast beef, red wine. Over the brandy, Snowdon put it to Ekland that she might just possibly like to pose for what he described as ‘glamour pictures’.
‘What a good idea!’ exclaimed Princess Margaret, at her most easy-going. ‘He’s actually quite good, Britt, if he remembers to put film in the camera!’ Ekland took this remark as an affectionate tease. But did it also hint at Snowdon’s lasciviousness?
If so, Margaret was happy to aid and abet him. ‘The Princess showed me to her first-floor bedroom to change,’ recalled Ekland. ‘They each had their own separate bedrooms and bathrooms, and Tony came through and tossed me one of his shirts. I was in a tweed costume and once the royal couple had gone I slipped off my jacket and blouse and bra and exchanged it for the shirt.’
Meanwhile, Sellers and Snowdon were hunting out suitable places for their forthcoming shoot. They settled on the wide hallway, and opened the front door to let in a blaze of sunlight. This ensured that the silhouette of Ekland’s breasts would be clearly visible through the shirt.
The session went like a dream, and from that point on, according
to Ekland, ‘we became close friends of the Royal couple’. Peter and Britt and Tony and Margaret: theirs was a very sixties friendship, a symbol of fame’s sudden new supremacy in the British class system. Of her two new friends, Britt found Tony the easier; he was always ‘well-meaning, friendly and considerate’, whereas Margaret ‘wasn’t any less friendly but I think we were always conscious of her position and sometimes she was to impose that if anyone upset her’.
It wasn’t long before Sellers was taken up as court jester to the wider royal court. Shortly after their marriage, he and Ekland were invited to Windsor Castle for a shooting party. On receiving the invitation, Sellers ordered himself a £1,200 shotgun from James Purdey & Sons, plus a shooting jacket, breeches and boots, with a deerstalker hat to complete the picture. The couple soon became regulars at Windsor: Prince Charles, in particular, was a starry-eyed fan of the Goons, and to this day is known to bring fixed smiles to the faces of weekend guests with his unstoppable medley of Goon impersonations.
‘We were now very much part of the royal social whirl; hardly a week went by without contact somewhere,’ Britt Ekland remembered years later. On one occasion, everyone played charades after tea at Windsor Castle. ‘By now I was so beetroot that in portraying a “lobster” in the game Prince Philip had no difficulty in guessing my disguise, while Sellers warmed to the occasion throwing in Goon-like animations to confuse everyone.’
Weekending with mutual friends in Kent, Peter Sellers created a short film in which Princess Margaret impersonated Queen Victoria and Lord Snowdon a one-legged golfer. Sellers himself resurrected his ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ Indian doctor, and Ekland played an old-fashioned Hollywood vamp. At one point in the film, Sellers announces that he is about to perform his famous quick-change impersonation of Princess Margaret. He then nips behind a screen, and hurls his shirt, jacket and trousers over the top of it; a split-second later, Princess Margaret emerges as if by magic, blowing theatrical kisses to camera. The film ends with the assembled company linking arms to sing ‘We’re Riding Along on the Crest of a Wave’ from The Gang Show.
Sellers spent £6,000 – £80,000 or so in today’s money – editing the film and adding a musical score. He then gave it to the Queen for her thirty-ninth birthday, after going with a group comprised of the Queen and Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Sellers and Ekland to see Spike Milligan starring in Son of Oblomov.
The friendship between the two couples blossomed at roughly the same pace as their marriages deteriorated. In June 1966, Cecil Beaton was agog to hear all the latest gossip from his new butler, Ray Gurton, who had previously been employed by Sellers. ‘He was paid £25 a week but never had a moment off as even when in one of his many cars Sellers would telephone to Ray: “Go up to nanny and tell her she’s sacked. She’s a cow.” At three in the morning: “We’re on our way home. We’re passing through Berkeley Square now. See that hot soup is ready for us in seven minutes.”
‘He has become accustomed to the promiscuous sex, the violent rows, the hysteria and the bad manners, and he finds our household slightly dull in comparison. Nevertheless there are moments. But he tells Eileen of the Sellerses and the Snowdons, and he does not think much of either party. Once Sellers was having lighting for some sculpture installed in the garden and asked Tony’s advice which he was giving when Margaret, sucking at a long cigarette holder, sidled up and asked, “Don’t you think it would be better if –” to which Tony answered her by telling her to piss off.’
As her marriage fell apart, Britt Ekland grew nauseated by the vast sums her husband spent on sucking up to the Snowdons. Peter would supply Tony with any number of photographic lenses, cameras and flash-guns, and let him have his customised silver-blue open-topped Aston Martin for the knockdown price of £3,000. ‘I would squirm with embarrassment at the demeaning lengths he would stoop to in order to ingratiate himself with the Royal Family. It was contemptible.’
Sellers welcomed the Princess onto the set of the zany James Bond spoof film Casino Royale, not least because it offered a chance to get even with his old enemy Orson Welles. ‘The fact that Princess Margaret was stopping by every day at my house was unknown to Sellers,’ said Welles. ‘One day she came to the set to have lunch with Peter, or so he claimed. He couldn’t wait to tell the cast and crew who he was dining with. Then she walked past him and said, “Hello, Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!” That was the real end. That’s when we couldn’t speak lines to each other. “Orson, I haven’t seen you for days!” absolutely killed him. He went white as a sheet, because he was going to present me!”’
By 1968 both marriages were in a state of collapse. Sellers’ principal object of desire was no longer Britt, but Margaret. Around this time, his personal clairvoyant, Maurice Woodruff, expressed his concerns to the comic actor Harry H. Corbett, best known as the junior rag-and-bone merchant in Steptoe and Son. ‘Peter is getting himself all in a twist over Princess Margaret,’ said Woodruff. ‘He keeps hinting that he’s on the brink of a big affair with the Princess and wants me to give it my blessing … I know he wants me to be more positive but I’m damned if I’m going to encourage him. I can’t see it and I’m not going to make something up just to keep him happy.’
Corbett gave the matter consideration. ‘Well, you can’t knock the bloke’s taste. She’s a gorgeous piece of stuff, you’ve got to admit.’
Sellers refused to take his clairvoyant’s advice.* A few weeks later Woodruff reported: ‘Peter has come right out in the open and admitted he is in love with the Princess. It is very worrying. He says he is splitting with Britt and has started an affair with Margaret. If so, then it can only end badly.’
Shortly after the divorce of Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland in December 1968,* Sellers was looking around for a suitable Christmas present for the Snowdon children. His eyes lit on Buttercup, a pony belonging to Victoria, his three-year-old daughter by Britt. Later the same day, Buttercup was delivered in a horsebox to Kensington Palace. Victoria never saw her again. She was heartbroken. ‘She loved Buttercup beyond anything else,’ recalled Britt.
By early 1969, Sellers couldn’t stop boasting to friends that he was having an affair with Princess Margaret. She had greeted him at Kensington Palace in a very low-cut dress, and things had gone on from there – or so he claimed.
In the spring he escorted her to Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho. Scott read a poem to the audience, specially written by Spike Milligan: ‘Wherever you are, wherever you be, please take your hand off the Princess’s knee.’ The Daily Mirror cited this as proof of an affair, but Sellers issued a public denial. ‘We are just good friends. You mustn’t read anything else into it.’ Some suspected that this was simply another way to draw attention to the rumour. He told friends and acquaintances that he was in love with her, and that he wanted all her love letters to be buried with him. These letters have never been discovered. Was it all another of his fantasies?
One night, Sellers employed his uncanny skills as a mimic to phone Princess Margaret in the guise of Lord Snowdon, telling her the ins and outs of his affair with Lady Jackie Rufus-Isaacs. Halfway through, he sensed a froideur on the other end of the phone, and realised he had taken the joke too far. Typically of Sellers, what had started as a giggle had fast descended into torture. Not knowing how to undo the Princess’s distress, he ended the conversation without revealing his true identity.*
Fuelled by marijuana, he told his friend Laurence Harvey of the ill-judged telephone conversation. He was worried that the Princess had by now twigged that it had been him all along. Would their relationship ever recover? He loved her, he said. ‘The whole thing is, you see, she has the same size breasts as Sophia Loren. The same cup size exactly.’*
Harvey attempted to reassure him. ‘In my experience, actresses and princesses have the most dreadful memories for trivia,’ he said.
Princess Margaret finally dropped Sellers after teaming up with Roddy Llewellyn. By that time Sellers had already married and divorced a
third wife, Miranda Quarry, and had become too volatile to remain an acceptable royal escort; in the middle of a row with Quarry over the correct way to pass the port, he had let off steam by releasing all her pet birds from their cages and hitting them around the room with a tennis racquet.
* If he ever gave it: Woodruff had a reputation for telling his clients what they wanted to hear.
* ‘He bit off more than he could screw,’ was apparently Snowdon’s comment. On a single night in April 1964, Sellers suffered eight heart attacks in three hours, having taken too much amyl nitrite before sex with Ekland. The response of the film director Billy Wilder was brusque and to the point: ‘You have to have a heart before you can have a heart attack.’
* Sellers was always more at home being someone else. Due to appear on the Michael Parkinson chat show in 1974, he withdrew at the last moment, saying, ‘I can’t walk on just as myself.’ After a brief negotiation, it was agreed that he could assume a role. He eventually walked on dressed up as a member of the Gestapo.
* 34C, at least in the case of Sophia Loren; no official announcement was ever issued concerning Princess Margaret’s cup size.
50
As we have seen, Princess Margaret was drawn to the world of well-heeled bohemia: writers and musicians and actors and other fast-living artistic types who could nevertheless be relied upon to show a fair measure of deference. She liked the louche hours they kept, their smoking and drinking, their refusal to take responsibility or to do the right thing. In this she differed from her sister, who, given the choice, would make a beeline for trusty fresh-air types, in their wellingtons and their Land Rovers; sensible, unflashy men and women who would never let one down or poke fun at one behind one’s back, people in whose company one always knew where one stood.