Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  He was skilled at keeping his audience onside by taking care to conceal his workings: his mischief was delivered by sleight of hand. The rest of the Royal Family, particularly her sister and mother, considered him charming. Margaret accused Tony of being ‘oily’ towards them. Years of experience had taught them that she was in the habit of being capricious and demanding. Tony played on this history, goading and enticing his wife into temper tantrums in front of them, while quietly slipping into the role of long-suffering victim. ‘He could be fiendishly cruel,’ observed a friend.

  Before a grand party or a public engagement, he would make a point of reducing the Princess to tears, ensuring that she would appear puffy-faced and red-eyed on arrival. When they were due to set off for official appointments he would keep her waiting, knowing that her reputation for tardiness preceded her. On their way, he would open the window of their car wide, so that the wind would blast her perfect hairdo out of shape. According to their chauffeur, John Larkin, a furious row would then ensue, with the Princess shouting, ‘Put that window up!’ and Snowdon refusing to do so. A Private Eye cover from the period shows the couple beaming in the back of a chauffeur-driven car. ‘What’s all this about us rowing in public?’ asks the Princess. ‘Shut up you fat bitch and keep smiling,’ replies her husband. Like so many Private Eye covers, it touched on the truth.

  In 1966, Snowdon managed to persuade Princess Margaret to seek psychiatric help. He booked an appointment for her with Dr Peter Dally, a distinguished consultant psychiatrist attached to Westminster Hospital. A pioneer in the treatment of anorexia nervosa, Dr Dally was also a writer, the future author of a psychological portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1989) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Manic Depression and the Life of Virginia Woolf (1999).

  ‘Tony sent me to him,’ Margaret told a friend. ‘He said it would be the answer. But I only lasted one session – I didn’t like it at all. Perfectly useless!’

  She never went back. Perhaps her sole treatment was hampered by royal protocol, which dictates that it is the royals who ask the questions, not those to whom they are presented. Possibly the Princess regarded Dr Dally’s most tentative enquiry – ‘Now, what would you like to talk about?’ – as an impertinence.

  (Copyright Pressdram Ltd, reproduced with permission)

  Yet somehow the hour must have been filled. Did she talk about her mother and father? About her relationship with her elder sibling? And what was it about the session that she particularly disliked? Did she go to Dr Dally, or did he come to her? What was she wearing? Did she inform Dr Dally before she left him (or he left her) that she did not intend to continue her treatment, or did she dither and make excuses, telling his secretary that she didn’t have her diary to hand?

  Biography is at the mercy of information, and information about the Royal Family is seldom there when you want it. Or rather, there is a wealth of information, but most of it is window-dressing: the shop itself is shut, visible only through the front window, its private offices firmly under lock and key.

  This is what makes biography the most sheepish and constrained of the arts, and the least like life; and royal biography doubly so.

  * She liked to keep things clean, even as a young woman. Late in life, she informed one visitor to Kensington Palace that before the Clean Air Act of 1956 ‘I had to wipe every single leaf of my camellias by hand.’

  64

  At the annual Royal Variety Performance, a small selection of the Royal Family sits in the Royal Box while a bewildering array of different acts – jugglers, singers, ventriloquists, dancers, comedians – take to the stage for a few minutes at a time.

  Once the show is over, the performers line up onstage as the Royal Family members conduct a whistle-stop walk. The effect is said to be almost hallucinogenic, as though all the celebrities of any given year had been thrown into a pot, boiled down and merged in a particularly gooey sort of celebrity marmalade.

  Take, for instance, the Royal Variety Performance of 7 November 1949, which was held at the London Coliseum ‘in the presence of His Majesty King George VI, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, HRH Princess Elizabeth and HRH Princess Margaret’. Within the space of a couple of hours, the Royal Family had witnessed, among many others, Noele Gordon singing songs from Brigadoon, Michael Bentine performing a string of impersonations and Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Louise’ and ‘Valentine’. Also on the bill was the comedian Johnny Lockwood, who hit his nose against the revolving stage while singing ‘When I Go Into My Dance’, and was forced to continue his rendition with a handkerchief pressed to his face in a vain attempt to staunch a heavy nosebleed. For the finale, the HM Royal Marines Band and the Sea Cadet Corps took to the stage to play a medley of military marches.

  Backstage, the nineteen-year-old Princess Margaret, wearing an off-white tulle dress patterned with diamanté, cut with wide cape shoulders, exchanged pleasantries with many of the performers, among them the Australian acrobatic troupe the Seven Ashtons, the comedy dancers Elsa and Waldo, and Borrah Minevitch’s Harmonica Rascals.

  Nineteen years later, on 18 November 1968, she was backstage at another Royal Variety Performance, shaking hands with, among others, Engelbert Humperdinck, Mike Yarwood, Sacha Distel, Manitas de Plata, the Czechoslovakian State Song and Dance Ensemble, Ted Rogers, Des O’Connor (who had hosted the evening), Arthur Askey, Ron Moody, Val Doonican, Lionel Blair, Petula Clark and Frankie Howerd.

  This photograph* shows her exchanging pleasantries with Petula Clark.* Frankie Howerd is beaming at the Queen Mother, who is just out of shot. Meanwhile, the three Supremes – Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong – all in tight white sparkly dresses, are getting ready to be presented. Cindy Birdsong can be seen taking a sideways glance at Princess Margaret. She has what can only be described as a sceptical look on her face.

  The Supremes’ performance had taken an unexpectedly radical turn – quite a rarity in a Royal Variety Performance. Halfway through their rendition of ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story, Diana Ross had embarked on a spoken tribute to Dr Martin Luther King, who had been assassinated seven months before. ‘There’s a place for us,’ she said, as the music continued to play. ‘A place for all of us. Black and white, Jew and gentile, Catholic and Protestant. Let our efforts be determined as those of Dr Martin Luther King, who had a dream that all God’s children … could join hands and sing. There’s a place for us, black and white … and the world of Martin Luther King and his ideals.’

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

  The audience, more used to tapping their toes, greeted her speech at first with a baffled silence, followed by perhaps equally baffled applause. ‘There was a two-minute standing ovation, and the Royal Family cheered wildly,’ recalled Mary Wilson, with a touch of wishful thinking, in her autobiography Dream Girl. Once the Supremes had left the stage, Frankie Howerd came on and received a lot of laughs when he said, ‘I’m the surprise … I thought you might like a bit of relief, after all that drama!’ To close the show, the Supremes returned to the stage with the rest of the cast. Facing the Royal Box, they sang ‘God Save the Queen’.

  Mary Wilson was to recall the evening with mixed emotions. Had she been snubbed by Princess Margaret? ‘Though we had enjoyed doing the show, because we were meeting royalty and had memorized all the protocol, we weren’t exactly loose. Everything was quite proper and formal; we knew not to speak until spoken to, and not to address a royal, and so on. We stood in line, with Diana first, then me, then Cindy. Princess Margaret walked up to me, extended her hand, then – so quietly that no one else could hear – she whispered in her prim, high-pitched voice, “Is that a wig you’re wearing, Mary?” I did all I could to suppress a giggle. When I realized that she was very serious about it I thought how bizarre it was that a member of the Royal Family could be so candid. Here I’d grown up in the projects and I had more sense than to ask someone a question like that. But then I thought how great it was to have these experiences, and how glad
I was to be a Supreme.’

  * The same photograph cropped up ten years later, on the cover of Private Eye, at the time of the Princess’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn, with Frankie Howerd saying, ‘Isn’t the Queen with you?’ and the Princess replying, ‘No, he had to go to the recording studio.’

  * Ten years later, Petula was to sing a duet of the song ‘L’Avventura’ on French television with the Princess’s lover Roddy Llewellyn.

  65

  It is 19 December 1976. Princess Margaret has just attended Christmas Supersonic at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a charity concert organised by the Daily Mirror Pop Club. She is looking delightedly at the compere, Russell Harty, as he introduces her to the line of stars – Marc Bolan, Twiggy, Gary Glitter. A few minutes ago they were joining Marti Caine and Guys and Dolls for a rousing finale of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.

  (Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

  Twiggy is smiling at a witticism being made by Harty. She has clearly chosen to forgive and forget the Princess’s dinner-party dismissal of her name (‘How unfortunate’)* some years ago.

  Apart from Twiggy, everyone in the photograph is now either dead or in prison. Nine months after it was taken, Marc Bolan – real name Mark Feld – died in a car crash near his home in Barnes. At the age of seventy, Gary Glitter – real name Paul Gadd – was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court of one count of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of thirteen. On 27 February 2015 he received the maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison.

  Russell Harty died from liver failure caused by hepatitis C in 1988, at the age of fifty-three. Visiting him on his deathbed at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, his old friend Alan Bennett found him ‘festooned with wires and equipment, a tracheotomy tube in his throat, monitored, ventilated’. Before long, he realised that Harty was trying to tell him something. The nurse, an experienced lip-reader, thought he might be saying ‘Sherry,’ but Harty shook his head impatiently. Attempting to calm him down, the nurse disconnected Harty from his machine, removed his tracheotomy tube and pressed a pad over his throat, so that they could at last hear what he had been trying to say.

  ‘Ned Sherrin had supper with Princess Margaret last week,’ he said, ‘and she asked how I was. Twice.’

  Harty died a few weeks later. Forty years before, in his schoolboy diary, he had taken the trouble to note down the news that HRH the Princess Margaret was suffering from a slight cold.

  * See here.

  66

  In January 2017, Princess Margaret makes an unexpected appearance in my kitchen in Suffolk. She is much prettier than I have always imagined her to be, and friendlier too. She mentions that my last book has just been remaindered, and is now selling for £3.75. But she says it in a very kindly, unbitchy way, with no intent to cause offence.

  After a short time, I remember to ask her what she wants to drink.

  ‘When I was last here, you gave me a Flimsy, so I might have a Coloured Flimsy, if you have one?’ she says.

  I go blank. I have no idea what a Flimsy is. But I don’t want to admit it to the Princess. I quietly ask my wife what a Coloured Flimsy is. She says it might be another name for a Dubonnet.

  I go downstairs to see, as all the drinks are now in my library on the ground floor of our house. Princess Margaret follows me down. Just as we are about to go into the library together, I panic: if she follows me in, she is going to see all my work related to her laid out over the table and the floor. What to do? I feel boxed in. I have no alternative but to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but you can’t come in.’

  Princess Margaret looks momentarily put out, but she seems to take it well, even though I haven’t offered any sort of explanation.

  But the question of her drink is still not settled. I decide that honesty is the best strategy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but I can’t remember what exactly a “Flimsy” is. Is it a Dubonnet?’ While I am saying this, I remember that she’s recently given up alcohol.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she says, perfectly politely. ‘Just give me water.’

  The next minute, she is in the library, perusing the Willie Rushton cartoons on my wall, and making approving comments about them. At this point, I am struck by another wave of panic, much the same as the one before, but freshly experienced: she’s bound to see all the books and papers about herself scattered around the room. And then what will I do? I wake up in terror.

  Once I have woken up, I realise that one of my Willie Rushton cartoons is a caricature of Princess Margaret lying on the ground looking very tarty, brandishing a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  67

  Robert Brown, an accountant from Jersey, believes himself to be the illegitimate son of Princess Margaret.

  Brown is registered as having been born in Nairobi on 5 January 1955, though the birth was not officially registered until 2 February of the same year. His parents are registered as Douglas and Cynthia Brown, who are both now dead.

  Brown thinks that, in its later stage, the Princess’s pregnancy was covered up by body doubles; he was then moved to Kenya, for adoption by Cynthia Brown, who had been a model for Hardy Amies. He believes that his true father may have been Princess Margaret’s lover Robin Douglas-Home, who committed suicide in 1968.

  For some time, Brown has harboured an instinctive conviction that he was not the natural son of the Browns, who had always been more distant from him than from their other children, his supposed siblings. Douglas and Cynthia Brown would sometimes forget his birthday, and never discussed his birth with him. His first idea was that he was related to King Edward VIII; he then wondered if Prince Philip might be his father.

  ‘Cynthia gave me my birth certificate in my early twenties in a rather stiff, matter-of-fact way – a pure statement of fact in a slightly stressed monotone. It struck me as odd at the time – on her part devoid of emotion, slightly embarrassed, and her manner did not invite discussion,’ he says. ‘Odd for a mother, but maybe not in the circumstances, given she would have played a part, if only of silence, in the registration of the birth.’

  Since Princess Margaret’s death in 2002, Brown has fought to obtain secret court papers relating to her will. He thinks that these documents will show that Buckingham Palace, the attorney general and a senior judge conspired to cover up the Princess’s last testament, in which, he suspects, details of his birth were included. In an early court hearing, lawyers for the Royal Family dismissed him as ‘a fantasist seeking to feed his private obsession’. In 2007, Geoffrey Robertson QC told the court that Brown was ‘a perfectly rational man who seeks peace of mind’, but Sir Mark Porter, president of the Family Division, described Brown’s claim as ‘imaginary and baseless’.

  Brown has a childhood memory of meeting a woman he now believes to have been Princess Margaret. ‘The woman told me to stand on a tree-trunk and repeat, “I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal” again and again. It was meant to be fun, but it wasn’t. There was a poignant subtext to it. I had a gut feeling that there was a royal connection, even though my logical side said there must be some other explanation.’ Princess Margaret paid an official visit to Kenya in October 1956, when Brown would have been a year and nine months old.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my head that I am right,’ Brown told a reporter from the Guardian in 2012. ‘I can understand that people are sceptical because it seems to be childhood fantasy stuff, but it is not like that with me … Hopefully I am not a nutcase. I am either right or I am wrong.’

  An obviously intelligent and articulate man, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Princess Margaret, Brown was initially in two minds about pursuing his case. ‘It took me ages to do anything about it because though my instinctual side suggested that it was correct, and my emotions said it was correct, my rational side said that’s nuts, how could they have covered up a pregnancy, it’s the stuff of fan
tasy, there must be some other explanation for the memories that you have.’

  Critics of his theory point out that Princess Margaret attended a dress show in London on 1 December 1955, and a performance of Cinderella on Ice at Earl’s Court a week later. Had she been eight months pregnant, it would, they say, have been evident. On 21 December she attended the Royal Family’s annual staff party at Buckingham Palace, and led the dancing with Cyril Dickman, a Palace footman. Lady Rosemary Muir recalled Princess Margaret attending her son Alexander’s christening at Woodstock on 8 January. ‘There was no evidence she had just given birth. I should know, having just done so myself … These claims are absolute poppycock.’

  In January 1992, the seventy-seven-year-old Peter Townsend was visited at his home outside Paris by a man who introduced himself as Philip Thomas. ‘The purpose of his unannounced visit was to inform me that he had reason to believe that he was the son of HRH Princess Margaret and that I might well be his father!’ Townsend explained in a letter to Sir Martin Gilliat, the Queen Mother’s private secretary.

  Townsend told Thomas that he would never discuss the Princess ‘on any account’, but he offered him a glass of wine, and the two men had a conversation about Welsh rugby. When Thomas got in touch with him again a year later, Townsend contacted his solicitor. ‘Silly as this may be,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot resist the following observations: considering that (as he confirms) he was born in Swansea on 25 April 1956, it is not likely that P.M., whom he claims to be his mother, would (as he also confirms) have made an official visit to Port Talbot on 26 April 1956.’