Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

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  As the sixties gave way to the seventies, so respect gave way to rebellion, and the chances of disturbance increased.

  The songwriter Leslie Bricusse recalls sitting in a Mayfair restaurant with his wife and the actor Laurence Harvey, Harvey’s girlfriend, the model Paulene Stone, and the comedian Dudley Moore.

  Across from us, Peter Sellers was having dinner with Princess Margaret, Tony Snowdon, and Bryan and Nanette Forbes. Great hilarity was issuing from both tables, ours the more raucous on account of Dudley’s outrageousness. He had perfected the super-slurred drunken voice that he was later to use to Oscar-nominated acclaim in the film Arthur, and he was on a deadly Dudley roll that had us convulsed with laughter throughout the meal. The more we laughed, the more outrageous he became. We finished dinner ahead of the others, and went by to say hello as we left. I detected a slight envy that they hadn’t been at our table, having the fun we’d been having. Dudley, drunk with success at his surefire humour, was on a high. He just wouldn’t give up. He lurched over to their table, playing it drunker than ever, gave Princess Margaret a sweeping courtly bow and slurred, ‘G’d evenin’ your Royal Highness … I s’pose a blow-job is out of the question?’

  In 1977, at a party thrown by Lady Rothermere, Princess Margaret took to the stage to a huge round of applause, seized the microphone, and instructed the band to play a selection of tunes by Cole Porter. She then burst into song, in a voice that was, according to Lady Caroline Blackwood, ‘very off-key’.

  Egged on by the spirited cheering of the well-behaved, the Princess launched into a raucous version of ‘Let’s Do It’, winking and wiggling her hips. But before long, the sound of jeering and booing could be heard from the back of the ballroom. It emanated from the painter Francis Bacon, who had been brought along, uninvited, by his fellow painter Lucian Freud.

  The Princess faltered, then rushed off stage, scarlet-faced, to a phalanx of flustered ladies-in-waiting. Uncertain what to do next, the band stopped playing. ‘It was that dreadful man, Francis Bacon,’ says a red-faced partygoer. ‘He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in. It’s really quite disgraceful.’

  But Bacon was unrepentant. ‘Her singing was really too awful,’ he explained years later. ‘Someone had to stop her. I don’t think people should perform if they can’t do it properly.’

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  Born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism. Attempting to straddle the two, wanting to be treated as both equal and superior, and vacillating, from one moment to the next, between the easy-going and the hoity-toity, her behaviour often led to tears before bedtime.

  Writing to Maya Angelou on 30 April 1992, Jessica Mitford, the most radical of the Mitford sisters, recalled one such awkward moment. She and her American husband, Bob Treuhaft, had been invited to dinner at Edna O’Brien’s house with ‘all sorts of actors, etc.’. After dinner, ‘a new crowd came, Gore Vidal & followers, plus Princess M’.

  Things got off to a bad start. Why wouldn’t they? Jessica was by nature unaccommodating, particularly towards members of the Royal Family. ‘I rather loathe the Royals, esp. Princess M,’ she confessed – or boasted – to Angelou earlier in the same letter.

  On entering O’Brien’s drawing room, the Princess had ‘plunked herself next to me on a small love-seat in the drawing room. “How’s Debo?” she asked in her silly little voice … So I muttered, “I suppose she’s all right,” edging away.’ At this point, Bob joined them. A radical lawyer whose clients included the Black Panthers, he had never shown any inclination to fall in with the manners and customs of the English upper classes.

  ‘Bob comes over, so I say, “This is my husband Bob Treuhaft.”

  ‘“Typical English introduction!” says Bob. “What’s your name?”’

  He clearly didn’t know who she was, or if he did, he wasn’t saying. This would have discombobulated the Princess.

  ‘Princess M comes over all royal & says, “Decca, please present your husband to me.”’

  But Jessica was never one to fall in line. ‘“I can’t think why you can’t simply SAY your name,” says I, so she calls over a sort of Gold Stick character to do it right. “May I present Mr Treuhaft?” Such bosh, when she shows up with the Gore Vidal heavy drinking, heavy drugging set.’

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  The distinguished literary biographer Michael Holroyd found himself sitting next to Princess Margaret at a dinner party. She began by imitating Edna O’Brien’s breathy Irish accent. She then launched into what he took to be another impersonation, and he laughed dutifully, even though he couldn’t quite identify it. ‘If I may say so, Ma’am,’ he purred, ‘I think that’s your funniest yet.’ At that point there was a sudden silence: the Princess had been speaking in her own voice.

  ‘What happened then?’ Holroyd was asked, when he recounted his faux pas to the Princess’s biographer, Tim Heald.

  ‘I seem to remember that she spent rather a lot of time talking to the person on her left.’

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  It is 29 May 1984. Princess Margaret is the guest of honour at the Sony Radio Awards at the London Hilton Hotel. Among those lined up to greet her is Boy George, who is at the peak of his fame.

  In February he won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and together with his group, Culture Club, Brit Awards for Best British Single (‘Karma Chameleon’) and Best British Group. He has recently been judged the most famous person in Britain by Tatler magazine, just above HM the Queen at number two. Princess Margaret’s name features nowhere in the top one hundred: the rapid growth in the celebrity population over the previous ten years or so has diminished her own fame, which has been overtaken even within the Royal Family, by, among others, Princess Diana, Princess Michael of Kent, and Prince William, who is just short of his second birthday.

  Princess Margaret is wearing a green and white print dress. Towering over her is Boy George, well over six foot, in black sequins under a shocking-pink overcoat. The contrast could not be more extreme, though in their liberal application of make-up – heavy eye-liner, blusher, bright red lipstick – the two have something in common. Nevertheless, they look uneasy.

  Princess Margaret dispenses a brief handshake to Boy George before moving on. A few minutes later, she is asked to pose with him for a more formal photograph. ‘I don’t know who he is,’ the Princess is overheard telling an aide. ‘But he looks like an over-made-up tart. I don’t want to be photographed with him.’

  Her remark causes a stir. At first, Boy George appears unbothered. ‘It’s her royal prerogative if she doesn’t want to talk to me,’ he tells reporters. ‘I’m just a peasant.’ Later in the evening he is escorted to the door by the hotel’s head of security, having been apprehended in the ladies’ toilet.

  The following day, a spokesman at Kensington Palace issues a denial that the Princess ever uttered the offending words, implausibly suggesting that she had been referring to his make-up resembling ‘commedia dell’arte’.* In response, Boy George grows more combative, saying, ‘If I had been rude to her, I would apologise.’ Later, a spokesman for Culture Club explains that this did not in fact mean that Boy George was demanding an apology.

  Boy George is a garrulous character, unused to turning the other cheek. Asked by a reporter what he thinks of Princess Margaret’s supposed snub, he replies, ‘I don’t think I’m special, but I do object to having been called a tart. It’s a damn cheek. I bring more money into this country than she does. Princess Margaret went to school for elocution and I come from the gutter, which just goes to show you can’t buy manners.’

  Once he gets going, he finds it hard to stop. ‘She’s not a happy person,’ he adds. ‘It shows in her face.’

  (ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo)

  A week later, a new waxwork of Boy George is unveiled in Madame Tussaud’s amidst much hoo-ha. Princess Margaret’s waxwork, which once occup
ied pride of place, could be seen tucked in somewhere towards the back on the far right of an extensive Royal Family group, two along from Captain Mark Phillips.

  * The same spokesman, Lord Napier, was also responsible for issuing a denial that Princess Margaret had referred to ‘Irish pigs’ during a fund-raising tour of the United States in October 1979; she had, he insisted, been talking of Irish jigs. In his Private Eye diary, Auberon Waugh, a natural contrarian, noted that, far from causing upset by her remark, ‘all over the country people are raising their glasses to toast the Bonnie Princess’. However, this seemed to annoy him. ‘For the last fifty-six years,’ he wrote, stealthily adding seven years to her age, ‘this woman has been flouncing around embarrassing everybody with her rudeness, self-importance and general air of peevish boredom. Now it looks as if everything will be forgiven for the sake of one bon mot.’

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  Of all her friends in the world of the arts, it was the acerbic Gore Vidal, of all people, who remained most loyal to the Princess. They enjoyed each other’s camp, dismissive wit, and each fostered the other’s innate sense of grandeur. Margaret was, wrote Vidal’s friend and biographer Jay Parini, ‘an important figure in his mind if not his life … a bold reminder to himself that he was important, and that he moved in the highest social circles’.

  To honour Vidal’s fiftieth birthday, on 3 October 1975 his friend Diana Phipps presented him with a collage of his most illustrious friends, with the occasional deadly enemy thrown in for good measure. She had constructed it by cutting out headshots and sticking them onto an illustrated scene of debauchery in ancient Rome. Apart from Vidal himself, those depicted included Graham Greene, J.K. Galbraith, Lady Diana Cooper, Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, along with Vidal’s old rivals William F. Buckley (lying vanquished beneath Vidal’s left foot) and Norman Mailer (kneeling in obeisance). But in the most prominent position, standing on a staircase above a semi-naked Vidal, was Her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.

  Vidal threw a fiftieth birthday party at Mark’s Club in Mayfair for fifty people (‘50 for 50,’ in the words of his partner Howard Austen). Fame seems to have been the principal qualification for an invitation: the guests included Ryan O’Neal, Tennessee Williams, Kenneth Tynan, Claire Bloom, Tom Driberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Miller and Lady Diana Cooper. Lady Antonia Fraser brought her new boyfriend, Harold Pinter; Lee Remick happened to be in London, so was sent a last-minute invitation. But his real catch was HRH the Princess Margaret. As Parini puts it: ‘Gore was happy with the dinner. He didn’t like turning fifty. Who does? But he and Tennessee got to talk, and he really liked Pinter. That Princess Margaret came mattered to him a lot. (So much for Jackie [Onassis] and her sister, Lee: this was real royalty.)’

  Vidal placed the Princess on his right during dinner, and was glued to her throughout the reception beforehand. ‘I looked across the room and saw Gore with Princess Margaret on one side of him and Tennessee Williams on the other,’ recalled the English writer John Bowen. ‘She had a long cigarette with a holder. Tennessee Williams just giggled at her.’

  After dinner, Kenneth Tynan gave a speech, addressing his fellow guests as ‘Comrades’, since Vidal’s birthday celebrations happened to coincide with the last day of the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool. Clive James followed this with an ode to Vidal, which, according to Tynan, was ‘delivered (because of nerves) too fast, but much appreciated’. After the party, Tynan and his wife dropped Princess Margaret back at Kensington Palace before returning home, ‘tipsily to fuck, for the first time in many weeks’.

  The next day, Tynan attended what he called a ‘post-party lunch’ at Marguerite Littman’s house. Tennessee Williams entered, ‘blandly euphoric on speed’, and immediately started complaining to his hostess. ‘You did a terrible thing to me last night. You know what she did? She told me to sit beside Princess Margaret and give her a bit of a giggle – that’s what she said. I don’t know Princess Margaret, and anyway I expect she’s quite a stupid person – so how could I give her a giggle?’

  Tynan asked Williams what he had said to the Princess. Accounts of his reply differ slightly, but here is Tynan’s former wife Elaine Dundy’s:

  TENNESSEE: I’m afraid we can’t talk to each other, Ma’am, because we live in such different worlds.

  MARGARET: What world do you live in?

  TENNESSEE: Are you acquainted with the opera La Bohème, Ma’am? That’s my world.

  Though Tennessee Williams was not to know, some seven years previously Princess Margaret had told Cecil Beaton that she ‘loathed’ his plays. ‘I hate squalor! Tennessee Williams makes me feel ill!’

  Vidal first met her in Rome in 1965, having been introduced by their mutual friend Judy Montagu. ‘Like so many good-looking women, Princess Margaret likes plain-looking women like Judy,’ he said some years later.

  He immediately warmed to her. ‘The Princess arrived with her husband and turned out to be quite splendid, droll, with at least three manners, all beguiling,’ he wrote to his cousin Louis Auchincloss. ‘One: gracious lady visiting the troops. Two: bitchy young matron with a cold eye for contemporaries. Three: a splendid Edith Evans delivery (Q. Victoria with slow measured accents): “We are not partial to heights” she intoned gravely over a chicken wing, “not partial at all.” That took care of Switzerland.’

  At this first meeting, the two of them gossiped about President Kennedy’s visit to Buckingham Palace four years previously: Vidal’s stepfather had gone on to marry Jackie Kennedy’s mother. He always liked to trumpet the family link.

  The guest list for the wedding had, he told Margaret, been subject to intense negotiation, the Queen having vetoed Jackie Kennedy’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill, because she was on her second marriage, and her husband Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, because he was on his third. Jackie, he said, had in turn threatened to veto the entire occasion, forcing the Queen to relent. But, as Jackie told Vidal (or so he claimed), and Vidal now passed on to Princess Margaret, ‘The Queen had her revenge’: President Kennedy had said he would like to meet the Duchess of Kent, and Jackie had wanted to meet Princess Margaret – but neither had been invited.

  When Vidal told the Princess of these to-ings and fro-ings, the Princess ‘nodded thoughtfully’.

  ‘That could’ve been true – I know I rang my sister, furious at not being invited, and she said, “Ah, I thought since you were pregnant you wouldn’t want to bother!” Too maddening!’

  Vidal informed Auchincloss that the Snowdons were both ‘renowned cadgers’, adding that ‘She admitted as much when I said how much I liked the Romans because they are lovely to be with but, like cats, when one was gone that was that.’ The Princess told him that people often accused her of this, adding, ‘“and I suppose it’s true. But there isn’t time. How many people do you write letters to? Regularly?” I said very few … “You see,” she said triumphantly, “I write none!”’

  In 2009, seven years after her death and three years before his own, Vidal published Snapshots in History’s Glare, a picture book that included a photograph of the Princess, cigarette in her right hand, glass in her left, on the balcony of La Rondinaia, Vidal’s Italian clifftop villa. ‘Princess Margaret on a trip to visit us on the Amalfi Coast,’ reads the extended caption. ‘In the foreground is her son, Lord Linley. Today he is, deservedly, the most celebrated cabinetmaker in England.’

  He praised the Princess for letting Linley do what he wanted, rather than forcing him along a traditional royal path. He did not underplay his own influence in these matters. ‘I … take some credit for my having persuaded her to forget about fashionable schools or, indeed, Oxbridge itself, to be followed by the military.’ He was clearly unaware that Bedales, where Lord Linley was educated, has long been one of the most fashionable schools in Britain: alumni include Daniel Day-Lewis, Cara Delevingne, Minnie Driver, Gyles Brandreth and Lily Allen.

  Also in the book is an informal group shot taken at Vidal’s house on the
Princess’s trip to Hollywood in 1978. ‘Like many British royals, she was fascinated by the place,’ observed Vidal. In the front row is what he refers to as ‘a batch of Tynan children’. Behind them stands the Princess, sandwiched between the film director Tony Richardson and the mustachioed Jack Nicholson. Vidal pokes his head between Nicholson and the Princess, and appears to be whispering something in her ear.

  The juxtaposition of the Princess and Jack Nicholson, she in a flowery, low-cut frock and a string of pearls, he in a double-breasted suit and tie, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, is particularly bizarre. He was soon to start filming The Shining with Stanley Kubrick, in which he played a writer who turns homicidal. For now, he stands still, his left hand in his jacket pocket, as though about to pull out a gun.

  In 1983, Princess Margaret invited Vidal to a house party at Royal Lodge. ‘You can easily recognise it,’ she said. ‘It is very pink.’ There were, he reported, ‘three or four other houseguests’, but, in an unprecedented fit of discretion, he failed to name them. It was a bright hot summer weekend. They all ‘swam in an ancient pool full of drowning bees’.

  On the Saturday evening they were due at a lavish birthday party in Ascot complete with an orchestra and a Ferris wheel. Though they were both keen gossips, Princess Margaret failed to mention that it was she who had negotiated her sister’s acceptance of the invitation, having made it clear to her hostess that she would invite the Queen only on condition that Princess Michael was not invited.