Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  Vidal registered Princess Margaret’s easy-going approach to punctuality. ‘I should note that no one is supposed to attend an event after the Queen’s arrival but PM and I, at the Lodge, lingered over gin and tonics.’

  According to Vidal, not always the most reliable witness,* when they finally arrived at the party, ‘the Queen frowned at her sister’. Princess Margaret said, ‘How’s it going?’ to which the Queen replied, ‘We have shaken many hands.’ Vidal interpreted this as a curt nod to the number of Americans present: ‘the sovereign is not supposed to be touched by subjects: males incline their heads in a bow, females curtsy’.

  As Princess Margaret presented Vidal to the Queen, ‘I did the nod.’ The Queen said, ‘You are staying at the lodge. Which room?’ Vidal replied that he thought it was called the Blue Bedroom. ‘Suddenly, the Queen’s girlish voice was replaced by the voice of Lady Bracknell: “My room!” she boomed. Then she fled across the lawn.’

  Vidal’s acidic view of the Queen might be put down to rivalry. ‘The trouble with Gore,’ Margaret once observed, ‘is that he wants my sister’s job.’

  After the party, Princess Margaret and her guests returned to Royal Lodge. According to Vidal, Princess Margaret started reading aloud from Vidal’s latest novel, Duluth. ‘Some of the descriptions were very graphic but the several young men who had come back to the lodge with the house party were, happily, clueless.’

  Closing the book, the Princess told its author, ‘I don’t know what there is in me that is so low and base that I love this book.’

  Four years after her death, Vidal declared that the Princess had been ‘far too intelligent for her station in life’, adding that ‘she often had a bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society’. He claimed that she had once told him the reason for her unpopularity: ‘It was inevitable; when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honour and all that is good while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.’

  * In his final decade, Vidal’s aperçus became more and more crackpot. In different essays, he argued that Frank Sinatra was a charming man who had no connection with the Mafia; that there was a media conspiracy to demonise Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was simply an innocent young man with an exaggerated sense of justice; that there is ‘overwhelming’ evidence that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing was part of a plot by the US government to get President Clinton to sign an anti-terrorism act; that Anthony Hopkins is just ‘a solid, workmanlike English repertory actor’; that 90 per cent of all American paper currency contains drug residue; that Clinton was innocent of any sexual congress with Monica Lewinsky, who had been put up to it by the American tobacco industry; and that the Soviet Union had never been any danger to anyone. In his dotage, Vidal was doomed to become the victim of his own paranoid theories. One day he woke up insisting that he was the victim of radioactivity that had drifted to Italy from Chernobyl. The truth was less dramatic: he had a hangover. He saw increasing numbers of enemies everywhere. A few months before he died in 2012, he phoned his friend and biographer Jay Parini in a panic. ‘Get the next plane to LA at once. I need help. There are Somali pirates in my swimming pool.’

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  The language sounds more like his, but the sentiment was undoubtedly hers. Margaret thought the world cruel for seeing her as the negative version of her sister, yet it was also how she came to define herself. The journalist and author Selina Hastings feels this self-image had been shaped in childhood. ‘On one side she was given an inflated sense of her own value, while on the other her confidence was continually undermined by comparisons with her sister; she was very spoilt and indulged and made to feel a very special person indeed, while simultaneously being given clearly to understand that it was her sister who was important.’

  The abdication of their uncle King Edward VIII had ensured that Lilibet would one day be Queen. Lilibet was then ten years old, Margaret six. But courtiers were already speaking of providence: the crown would, they felt, be going to the better sister.

  ‘She was a wicked little girl,’ one courtier said of Margaret, and others agreed. ‘There were moments when I’d have given anything to have given her the hell of a slap,’ an unnamed courtier told the biographer of King George VI. To the sisters’ cousin Margaret Rhodes, Lilibet was always the sensible one: polite, thoughtful, well-behaved: ‘Princess Margaret was the naughty one. She was always more larky. She used to tease the servants. There was a wonderful old page and, as he carried the plates around the dining room, Margaret used to stare at him, trying to make him laugh. But she never got herself reprimanded. She got away with everything.’

  Selina Hastings thinks her character was at least partly shaped by her ever-increasing distance from the throne. ‘At each royal birth, the new Order of Succession appeared in The Times, Margaret’s position moving down from second to third to fourth with monotonous regularity, like a game of Snakes and Ladders, all snake and no ladder.’

  Perhaps as a consequence, she set great store by protocol, pulling rank as others might fiddle with their necklace or bite their fingernails. Lucinda Lambton remembers Princess Margaret upbraiding her when she was a child. ‘I was nine or ten and sat on the sofa, and she came over with cartoon imperiousness and she said, “One does not sit before Royalty sits.”’

  Her antennae for transgressions were unusually sensitive, quivering into action at the slightest opportunity. ‘I detested Queen Mary,’ she told Gore Vidal. ‘She was rude to all of us except Lilibet, who was going to be Queen. Of course, she had an inferiority complex. We were Royal, and she was not.’ Unlike her, Queen Mary had been born a Serene Highness, not a Royal Highness. The difference, invisible to most, was monumental to Princess Margaret, who treasured the definite article in Her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret. Lacking that ‘the’, her grandmother was in some sense below the salt.

  Margaret had been born to the King-Emperor at a time when the map of the world was still largely pink. Her sense of entitlement, never modest, grew bigger and bigger with each passing year, gathering weight and speed as the British Empire grew smaller and smaller, and her role in it smaller still.

  She remained conscious of her image as the one who wasn’t, and to some extent played on it: the one who wasn’t the Queen; the one who wasn’t taught constitutional history because she wasn’t the one who’d be needing it; the one who wasn’t in the first coach, and wouldn’t ever be first onto the Buckingham Palace balcony; the one who wasn’t given the important duties, but was obliged to make do with the also-rans: the naming of the more out-of-the-way council building, school, hospital or regiment, the state visit to the duller country, the patronage of the more obscure charity, the glad-handing of the smaller fry – the deputies, the vices, the second-in-commands. Her most devoted friends praised her stoicism for assuming the role of lightning rod. ‘For nearly five decades,’ said Reinaldo Herrera, ‘she bore with great dignity the criticism and envy that people dared not show the Queen.’

  Did she envy her elder sister? According to Crawfie, the young Elizabeth once complained, ‘Margaret always wants what I’ve got’ – but this is a traditional sibling complaint. It seems more probable that, deep down, what Margaret really wanted from Elizabeth was approval.

  On her desk in Kensington Palace she had a telephone with a direct line to the Queen in Buckingham Palace. Sitting next to her at a dinner party, the novelist and historian A.N. Wilson found himself tongue-tied.

  ‘I could think of absolutely nothing to say to her, and I heard myself asking: “Are you one of those millions of people who have dreams about the Queen?”

  ‘Her reply was as candid as it was revealing. Yes, she said, and it was always the same dream. She dreamed that she was disapproved of, she knew she had done something truly awful, something that transgressed everything that she had been brought up to believe, something which had made the Queen angry. Usually, in the dreams, it was nothing specific; but she could not rest until sh
e had heard her sister’s voice in waking life. Since the Princess kept later hours than her elder sister and sovereign, she would often, when she woke up midmorning and reached for the telephone, find that the Queen was already at work with secretaries, politicians or her boxes. All Margaret needed to hear was the voice: “Hello.” “Hello.” They would then hang up and the day could proceed without the black cloud of being “in disgrace” to depress the Queen’s vivacious but inwardly troubled younger sister.’

  Immediately after the Queen’s coronation ceremony, Anne Tennant had spotted Margaret looking tearful. ‘Oh, Ma’am, you look so sad,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister,’ replied Margaret, adding, ‘She will be busy. Our lives will change.’ For all their Martha-and-Mary differences, they had much in common, not least their uniquely peculiar childhood. But once Elizabeth became Queen, the gap between them grew wider, and harder to bridge. Though they were in constant touch, the Queen knew when to keep her head down. ‘How’s Margaret’s mood?’ she asked one of her sister’s friends before lunch at Royal Lodge. ‘Shall I venture out on the terrace?’

  As Margaret grew older, the Queen was alert to her loneliness and vulnerability. Sheltering at Balmoral, Margaret seemed, according to one member of the household, ‘almost like a poor relation. The Queen felt very sorry for her.’

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  In middle age, hurt by life, Margaret retreated into camp, becoming a nightclub burlesque of her sister. But she was never camp in the same way that the Queen Mother was camp. Her camp was not arch or sentimental. It did not strive to be inclusive, or merry, or to render the world as a romp. She didn’t twinkle or sparkle. She would never say ‘Such fun’ as though she meant it; she would take pains to inject the phrase with a dash of generalised irony. Nor was she camp in the service of something beyond herself. She had no wish to draw others in, and refused to offer them the illusion, however fleeting, of parity. Being thought ‘real’ or ‘down to earth’ is not what she wanted.

  She was of royalty, yet divorced from it; royalty set at an oblique angle, royalty through the looking glass, royalty as pastiche. At a fancy-dress party on Mustique she wore a Valkyrie outfit, hired for her by Colin Tennant from a Los Angeles costumier, and in it she mimed an aria from The Ring. For her fiftieth birthday, the Tennants gave her a gold-embroidered dress from India. ‘I’ve always LONGED to have a dress like that,’ she said. ‘It’s what a REAL princess would wear.’ She was royalty as Hokey-Cokey, one-foot-out, one-foot-in; royalty as real yet unreal; royalty as real as you want it to be, as the mood takes you.

  She was cabaret camp, Ma’am Ca’amp: she was Noël Coward, cigarette holders, blusher, Jean Cocteau, winking, sighing, dark glasses, Bet Lynch, charades, Watteau, colourful cocktails at midday, ballet, silk, hoity-toity, dismissive overstatement, arriving late, entering with a flourish, exiting with a flounce, pausing for effect, making a scene.

  (Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

  Ma’am Ca’amp is having a drink in a cut-glass tumbler delivered to you in the swimming pool and then ordering your hostess to bring the tumbler into the pool, even though she is fully clothed. Ma’am Ca’amp is her hosts’ compliance in these antics. Ma’am Ca’amp enjoys inverting expectations: to those expecting grace, it presents hauteur; to those wanting empathy, it delivers distance. To those in need of tradition, it offers modernity. To those in need of modernity, it offers tradition.

  It is languid, bored, world-weary, detached, bored, fidgety, demanding, entitled, disgruntled, bored. It carries the seeds of its own sadness and scatters them around like confetti. It looks in the mirror for protracted periods of time, but avoids exchanging glances with itself. It is disappointment hiding behind the shield of hauteur, keeping pity at bay. ‘I have never known an unhappier woman,’ says John Julius Norwich after her death.

  It is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse. It is hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be: no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting. The sun never shines as bright as it used to, and even the fiercest thunderstorm lacks any real sense of drama or pizzazz. As the curtain falls, Group Captain Charming has left her for someone more suitable and has gone to live in France, and Buttons, in his zip-up jumpsuit, has taken up with a wearying succession of younger lovers. When Cinderella dies, her little glass slipper is put up for auction, a memento of days of hope and innocence. The catalogue entry reads: ‘Only worn once.’

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  December 1991

  Friends take Princess Margaret to see The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett. In the interval, she smokes and sips nervously from a glass of Famous Grouse.

  ‘Do you think it’s hereditary?’ she asks.

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  ‘She and Tony were a glamorous couple,’ says the journalist Drusilla Beyfus, who was part of their circle. ‘But there was a halo of anxiety about the way things would go. Because quite soon it was apparent they weren’t getting on very well.’

  The breakdown of the Snowdon marriage calls to mind Patrick Hamilton’s famous play (and film) Gaslight, in which the villain, Jack Manningham, tries to convince his wife Bella that she is insane by subjecting her to a series of fiendish ploys. He hides items in her work-basket, then suggests she must have stolen them; he removes a picture from the wall, and tells her she must have taken it; he makes the lights go dim, then says she is imagining it; when she hears footsteps in the flat above, he assures her the flat is empty; he shows her his watch-chain, from which his watch has disappeared, and then finds it in her handbag. Eventually, she becomes hysterical. This is Jack and Bella, but it might as easily be Tony and Margaret.

  After three years of marriage Snowdon had grown restless, spending as much time away from home as he possibly could. In turn, Margaret grew more and more possessive, frantically phoning to find out where he was before bursting into tears when told he was elsewhere. Snowdon refused to let her come with him on his photographic assignments, and, once safely away, wouldn’t bother to contact her. She kept phoning him at work; he would instruct his assistant to tell her he was mid-shot. Through a succession of phone calls, she would trace him to a restaurant and turn up unannounced. His biographer writes of ‘Margaret’s almost hysterical possessiveness’. The closer she wanted to be, the more distant he became. He welcomed trips abroad.

  He was a busy bee, designing clocks, furniture, ski-wear, theatre sets. At the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon in 1969, he designed both the thrones and the audience chairs, the Perspex canopy, Prince Charles’s crown (complete with a golden orb made out of a ping-pong ball) and his own uniform as ‘Constable of the Castle’: the tight, zip-fastened affair in the style of Pierre Cardin, with a roll-collared jacket and skinny trousers, which first earned him the nickname of ‘Buttons’.

  Princess Margaret lacked her husband’s drive, waking late in the day, only to find herself with nothing to do. Her servants took care of all the household chores, leaving her with a succession of time-killing hobbies, such as washing her collection of seashells* and putting her spaniel Rowley in the bath and giving him a shampoo, then drying him with her hairdryer. ‘I’ve told them I have to wash Rowley because he wouldn’t like it if anyone else did,’ she explained. Once or twice she tried to emulate her husband’s capacity for design, but with limited success. For a while, she glued matchboxes onto tumblers so that she could strike matches while drinking, but it was a craze that never caught on.

  By 1963, Tony was already exhibiting Manningham tendencies. On holiday in Greece with Stavros Niarchos, the Princess asked her husband what she should wear to a barbecue party for her birthday that evening. ‘Oh, I think that ballgown you wore last week,’ said Snowdon casually. She went along with his suggestion. When she arrived downstairs in her ballgown she found that all the other guests were wearing jeans and sandals. Snowdon knew full well that his fingerprints would
remain undetected by all but her: his wife’s reputation for inappropriate grandeur preceded her, and facilitated his own cunning ruses.

  Home alone, they sniped and bickered. Each of their friends has a story to tell of their acid rows. Snowdon would shut himself away in his studio, telling her, ‘Never come in here without knocking!’ When she asked him if he’d be in for lunch, he pretended not to hear. In turn, the Princess yelled that she wasn’t prepared to entertain his friends, and slammed the door with such force that a mirror shattered. He would flaunt his flirtations with other women, and she would react with fury. At a dance, he spent too much time with a younger woman. The Princess interrupted them, and asked the woman if she was enjoying herself.

  ‘Very much so, Ma’am,’ she replied.

  ‘That’s enough, then, for one evening. Now run along home.’

  Even when they went on holiday together, Snowdon would do his best to avoid her, often in the showiest way possible: he liked an audience. Staying with friends in Rome, he climbed out of a window and onto the roof. ‘It’s the only place I can get away from her,’ he explained. In the winter of 1965 he lost his temper with Margaret after she insisted on accompanying him on a skiing trip. ‘She’s fucked up my holiday,’ he complained to friends.

  His revenge on Margaret for being Margaret was deliberate and sly. Knowing her hatred of being kept waiting, he dragged out the skiing so that it overran. His group returned late for lunch to find the Princess furious, but they couldn’t see why. True to plan, their sympathy for the poor put-upon husband grew as their respect for his demanding wife diminished. In this, Snowdon was just like Jack Manningham. Back home, he took to leaving nasty notes on her desk, including one headed ‘Twenty Four Reasons Why I Hate You’, which particularly upset her. ‘I can’t think of twenty-four reasons to hate ANYBODY,’ she said to a friend. On another occasion he left a note in her glovebox saying ‘You look like a Jewish manicurist,’ and on another, a note tucked into her bedside book, saying simply, ‘I hate you.’