Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  A couple of months later, Nicky Haslam was on the receiving end of numerous calls from both Margaret and Tony. ‘The telephone at the studio crackled with breathy, infatuated yet imperious messages for Roddy, or late-night commands along the lines of “Get your friend out of my wife’s bed” for me.’

  As the Princess’s relationship with Roddy blossomed, Haslam noticed her becoming increasingly standoffish towards him. ‘When I asked one of the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting why her boss was now rather cold … the answer was probably because I’d had a close friendship with Roddy before Margaret had. Oh dear, I thought. Wait till she finds out about my earlier one with Tony.’

  Meanwhile, Roddy, always short of cash, had been refused a pay rise of £2 a week from the College of Arms. Learning of his plight, Colin Tennant pulled strings, and within weeks Roddy had become the personal assistant to Algy Cluff, who was making a fast fortune from North Sea oil. Sadly, a brief stint managing a mobile disco offered a poor grounding in the ins and outs of the international oil business. ‘It was obvious to everyone at Cluff’s that I didn’t have a clue what was happening,’ Roddy explained. ‘I was whisked around the City all day by Rolls and occasionally asked to produce pieces of paper.’

  In emotional turmoil – ‘She had vamped him, and he couldn’t quite manage it,’ says a friend – he packed a suitcase, went to Heathrow airport and caught the first available plane, regardless of its destination. As it happened, it took him to Guernsey, a starchy, uneventful island upon which a single night proved more than enough. The next day he flew back to Heathrow, and from there to Istanbul. On the plane he got into conversation with a travel agent in the next seat, and told him that he was having an affair with a married woman, that it had all got too much for him, that the sex had become a problem, that he was growing a beard as a disguise, and that he was vaguely planning to go to India. Roddy was the trusting, chatty type, much given to sharing confidences.

  He spent the next three weeks travelling around Turkey in a bus. Upon his return to London he found his desk at Cluff Resources occupied by someone more single-minded in his pursuit of oil. Meanwhile, Princess Margaret, in a similar state of disequilibrium, had taken a handful of sleeping pills, not quite dangerous, but sufficiently powerful to force her to cancel official engagements in Wolverhampton. A Kensington Palace spokesman explained that Her Royal Highness was suffering from ‘a severe cold’.

  At the start of 1975, Roddy remained unsettled. On a whim he flew to Barbados with a friend, who described him as being ‘on a permanent high, behaving very irrationally, drinking rum and hardly eating anything’. At one point, he touched down on the island of Mustique. But it was bad timing, to say the least: Princess Margaret was having her parents-in-law to stay. Back in Barbados, Roddy was prescribed tranquillisers, and then bundled onto a plane back to London. The tranquillisers released his remaining inhibitions. On the flight, he walked up and down the aisle brandishing a Sunday newspaper, pointing to a photograph of himself and the Princess and telling perfect strangers, ‘Look, that’s me, that’s my picture!’ On his return to London he was admitted to Charing Cross Hospital, where he stayed for three weeks.

  Meanwhile, back in Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret was growing increasingly distressed by her husband’s affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, whose flat was just around the corner in Kensington Square. ‘There he was, living in my house, thinking he could have a lovely affair. I asked him for a separation but he laughed in my face. I would only know he was back at night when I heard him banging about in the bathroom – it was all hours. And he was drinking a lot of vodka in the morning, a bottle of wine at lunch and he even used to take a bottle up to his room afterwards. He was like an alcoholic. He was becoming a virtual stranger and we would meet on the stairs and growl at each other. And I had to go on behaving as if nothing was happening.’

  How do we know all this? Where did it come from? It is in fact a direct quote from the Princess herself, talking to Nigel Dempster, who was by now the principal exporter of Kensington spice to the world beyond. Margaret first encountered him at a dinner party in 1971, where he had amused her by telling her how he had gained a recent scoop involving a bachelor bishop and a buxom young lady. With his eagle eye, he had spotted a 40D cup brassière on the clerical washing-line. The Princess always liked to be kept up to date with the indiscretions of others.

  Throughout the 1970s, and beyond, Princess Margaret remained in regular touch with Dempster. She became, in playground slang, a tell-tale-tit, feeding him stories to cast her enemies in an unflattering light. In this she was not alone: family feuds within Kensington Palace were often fought in the pages of the Daily Mail or the Daily Express. An acquaintance of Dempster refused to believe him when he claimed that key members of the Royal Family were among his regular sources. Dempster invited him to sit in his office for a morning. Sure enough, within the space of a couple of hours, calls came through from both Princess Margaret and another princess, who were at that time not speaking to one another.

  Some years later, as the seventies gave way to the eighties, Dempster presented Princess Margaret with a seventeen-page synopsis of a proposed biography. They spent two hours polishing it up together, the Princess making helpful corrections and suggestions. In his gossip columns, Dempster always followed the tradition of attributing her quotes to ‘a close friend’ or ‘a source close to the Palace’, but the finished book was full of direct quotes attributed to her. ‘She was eager to make sure that it was accurate, because she has never had a chance to put forth her case before,’ Dempster explained to the New York Times on the book’s publication in 1981. ‘Princess Margaret figures that she has paid her dues, and that now it is time for her to get on with the next phase of her new life.’ Her compulsion to talk to the press, and to settle scores, prefigured Princess Diana’s by a dozen years, yet it did nothing to soften her condemnation of Diana when Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story appeared, out of the blue, in June 1992.

  In the early summer of 1975 – a time when albums by Tangerine Dream, Steeleye Span, Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield were high in the charts – Roddy Llewellyn was invited to put up £1,000 to join an unusually blue-chip commune based on Surrendell Farm near Malmesbury. The communards reckoned they could add to their agricultural income by opening a restaurant in Bath. In the event the farm was to have its electricity and phone cut off, and the restaurant, ‘Parsenn Sally’, was to close, having accrued debts of £28,000. But while that summer lasted, the dream of a hippy paradise remained intact.

  Back with Roddy, Princess Margaret enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere of the commune, with its unexpected touch of glamour: the up-and-coming young actress Helen Mirren was sometimes a fellow guest. Margaret even helped with the farm’s garden; she had always been a dab hand with the secateurs, snipping away with gay abandon at the burgeoning undergrowth. The ethos of Surrendell was free and easy. On one occasion Margaret gave the American singer John Phillips,* of the Mamas and the Papas, a lift down to the farm, and their friendship endured. ‘She and John got on like a house on fire,’ said Genevieve Waite, Phillips’s long-time partner. At a party at Colin Tennant’s Scottish castle they sang ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ together, and later, at Kensington Palace, a jaunty medley of Cole Porter songs.

  * Older members of the Royal Family can still reveal themselves as surprisingly out-of-date as regards home interiors. Only a few years ago, the Queen went for a meal for the first time with neighbours near Sandringham. A few weeks later, she saw their son in London. ‘So unusual, to have your dining room as part of your kitchen,’ she said.

  * In a crowded field, Phillips (1935–2001) was possibly the most debauched person ever to have formed a friendship with a member of the Royal Family. After his death, his daughter Mackenzie claimed in her autobiography High on Arrival that he had subjected her to a ten-year incestuous relationship. He himself confessed in his autobiography, Papa John, that at one period in his life he was injecting himself with heroin
every quarter of an hour. Moreover, his golden retriever Trelawny once ‘gobbled up a bag full of mescaline caps and then ran in circles for three days without stopping … then he just stared at himself in the mirror for twelve hours’.

  72

  For two and a half years the Princess’s office at Kensington Palace was able to dismiss rumours of an affair with Roddy Llewellyn as so much gossip and tittle-tattle. Partly thanks to Colin Tennant’s beady eye, anyone looking remotely journalistic was turned away from Mustique. This meant that the press had no firm evidence of an affair. But in February 1976 a New Zealand journalist managed to slip through the net, and photographed the pair sitting at the beach bar together, the Princess in her floral swimsuit. From then on, Margaret and Roddy were sitting ducks, perfect targets for finger-wagging from the politicians, tut-tuttery from opinionators, and tomfoolery from satirists.

  ‘I suppose young Roddy Llewellyn knows what he is doing gallivanting around the tropical island of Mustique with a foreign lady old enough to be his mother,’ wrote Auberon Waugh in his Private Eye diary on 22 February 1976. ‘… I am sure that Marje Proops would agree with me when I suggest that a prolonged association between people of very different age groups seldom comes to much good. But if Roddy is too shy to write to either of us for advice he should go for a quiet word with Group Captain Peter Townsend in the French village near Rambouillet where he has retired and where he is famous for his scarred and hunted look.’

  Those in search of less sophisticated comedy could find it in every bar and on every street corner. ‘Have you heard that Roddy Llewellyn’s taken up acting?’ went one of the jokes doing the rounds at that time. ‘He’s got a small part in Charlie’s Aunt.’

  From the Labour benches in Parliament, the veteran republican Willie Hamilton called on the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, to withdraw the Princess’s income. ‘Even when she is here, a lot of her so-called engagements are audiences which last perhaps a couple of minutes. There are charity balls and premieres which are really entertainment, yet which are called official engagements.’

  That August, Princess Margaret and Roddy went to a raucous house party at The Glen. Their fellow guests included John Phillips, Bianca Jagger and Prince Rupert Loewenstein.* The weekend culminated in an amateur concert performance for friends and neighbours, at which Princess Margaret dressed up in a slinky black dress, a feather boa and a curly blonde wig, and pretended to be Sophie Tucker, performing her risqué ‘Red Hot Mama’ routine.

  Anne Tennant took photographs, then placed the negatives in a drawer for safekeeping. But they were purloined by her son Charlie, a heroin addict; through a dodgy third party he sold them to the Daily Mail for £7,000, of which only £100 found its way back to Charlie.

  Photographs of the Princess and Roddy were at a premium. At one time or another, various members of the Tennant family had struggled, not always successfully, with the temptation of putting them to good use. One such photograph had been taken when Mustique had been infected by the incautious 1970s craze for streaking. ‘Colin went through a short “streaking” period and would drop his trunks at the earliest opportunity,’ recalled his friend and biographer Nicholas Courtney. At a picnic on the beach, Tennant had turned to the Princess. ‘Would you mind awfully, Ma’am, if I were to remove my swimming trunks?’

  ‘So long as I don’t have to look at IT,’ replied the Princess, ring-fencing the final word with a withering emphasis. But her squeamishness did nothing to deter Tennant, who stripped naked and persuaded Roddy Llewellyn and Courtney to follow suit. The Princess herself remained firmly in her carefully upholstered floral chintz swimming costume.

  Tennant borrowed Llewellyn’s camera and took a snap of the Princess with the stark-naked Llewellyn and Courtney on either side of her, the skirts of her swimming costume enveloping, or at least obscuring, her two companions’ private parts. In turn, the Princess took photographs of the three naked men performing comical poses together.

  Tennant took care to remove the film from Roddy’s camera. He wanted to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, without realising that the wrong hands were none other than his own. Rather than destroy the negatives, he arranged for them to be developed by his local chemist in Scotland; he then squirrelled the prints away in the bottom drawer of his desk.

  Years later, in her published diaries, Tennant’s arty half-sister Emma revealed that she had been plotting to steal either these photographs, or others in a similarly fruity vein. With the proceeds, she hoped to finance an avant-garde literary magazine called, coincidentally, Bananas. Timing her arrival at The Glen for an hour when everybody would be out at the swimming pool, she stole her way through the hall and into the drawing room, where she uncovered her sister-in-law’s photograph albums in their usual safe place. Sifting through them, she found the recent snaps of Mustique. ‘Palm trees of course, one or two of them set at picturesque angles to show we are really in the Caribbean here – without them one could imagine a house party in the south of England on a hot day. Upper-class families are sprawled on wicker chairs, one lordling actually hurling what seems to be a bread roll in a picture of Basil’s Bar … Women, dukes’ daughters and ex-wives, in huge hats as if at Ascot …’

  Eventually, she chanced upon the most coveted photograph of all, ‘and I deliver it from the confines of four little grey tucks in the stiff grey paper. I thrust Princess Margaret – there’s no time to see if she’s actually naked, but the picture gives at first glance that impression – into my shirt, open-necked on this fine summer’s day. Roddy Llewellyn comes into my bosom, too: he’s very much in focus, attentive, even loving, clearly an amorous couple is what this holiday snap announces.’

  At this point, Colin came into the room. Quick as a flash, Emma returned the album to its place, and stood upright. ‘I feel the purloined photo cut into my flesh, anchored by the top of my bra, and I wonder, for the first time as I am ashamed to own, whether it will really fetch the money needed to start up a literary magazine. However, I can hardly fish it out now, the consequences being too extreme even to imagine.’ Back in London, ‘glamorous friends … advise me crisply on the subject of selling P.M. in semi-flagrante’. The journalist James Fox told her that Paris Match paid best.

  But she had too many qualms to be able to follow through on her dastardly plan. Paralysed by conscience, she stowed the offending photograph in a volume by Diderot. A week or two later, she learned that her sister-in-law had noticed the disappearance of the photograph, and had called in the Peebles police. All the staff were now being cross-questioned. Deciding that her escapade had gone far enough, Emma attempted to flush the offending photograph down the lavatory, but it kept bobbing to the surface, so she fished it out, locked the bathroom door, employed a pair of nail scissors to cut it into pieces, and then tried to flush them all down again. Alas, ‘the faces and other portions of Princess Margaret and her companion floated determinedly through repeated flushings. Finally, maddened and punished by their resolve never to go down, I had to pick out the pieces and wrap them in old newspaper before consigning them dangerously to the bin.’*

  Some time later, in February 1976, a selection of Mustique photographs appeared in the News of the World. In some of them Roddy was wearing the very same Union Jack swimming trunks he had bought with Princess Margaret on their first shopping trip together. True to form, Willie Hamilton demanded in the House of Commons that the Princess be ‘sacked’. A week later, the same photographs were published again, this time in full colour, in Paris Match. ‘Few believed Colin when he said that he had nothing to do with the sale,’ observes Courtney in his biography.

  Their publication accelerated the Snowdons’ separation. Even within the confines of Kensington Palace, the Princess’s embarrassment presented Tony with a golden opportunity: he was now perfectly placed to portray himself as the wronged party. He declared that he felt humiliated, that his position was ‘quite intolerable’, and that a separation was the only possible sol
ution. ‘Lord Snowdon,’ Margaret was to tell Nigel Dempster years later, ‘was devilish cunning.’

  The day after the photographs appeared in the News of the World – a Monday – Snowdon summoned the Princess’s private secretary, Lord Napier, and showed him the newspaper. ‘What’s going on?’

  Though Snowdon proved adept at playing the part of the startled cuckold, Napier remained unconvinced. Everyone in Britain, and many further afield, had been aware for months that Princess Margaret had been having a fling with Roddy Llewellyn. Nor was Snowdon blameless in that department: he himself was in the middle of his long affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, whom he was eventually to marry. Napier told Snowdon to stop being so ridiculous.

  At this point Snowdon buzzed his secretary, Dorothy Everard.* ‘Dotty, we’re leaving.’ Then he turned to Napier. ‘We’ll be out by the end of the week.’

  This left Lord Napier with the tricky task of telling Princess Margaret, who was still on Mustique. Aware that the phone line was leaky, he couched what he said in a wary mixture of code and euphemism.

  ‘Ma’am, I have been talking to ROBERT. He has given in his notice. He will be leaving by the end of the week.’

  Unfortunately, the Princess did not catch his drift. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? What ARE you talking about?’

  Napier repeated what he had to say, extra slowly: ‘ROBERT – has – given – in – his – notice. He – will – be – out – by – the – end – of – the – week.’

  At this point, the Princess suddenly clocked that Robert was her husband’s third name. ‘Oh, I SEE! Thank you, Nigel. I think that’s the best news you’ve ever given me.’

  * Full name Rupert Louis Ferdinand Frederick Constantine Lofredo Leopold Herbert Maximilian Hubert John Henry zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1933–2014), banker and financial adviser. Best known for his highly successful management of the business interests of the Rolling Stones for nearly forty years. In 2005, Jagger, Richards and Watts earned £81.3 million while paying tax at 1.6 per cent.