Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  For his own thirty-third birthday in October 1980, Roddy accepted an offer from the up-and-coming Northern club-owner Peter Stringfellow of a free party at the newly opened Stringfellow’s nightclub (‘the epitome of fine dining, service and certainly the most beautiful girls you will ever have the pleasure of meeting’). There he happened to meet a travel writer called Tania Soskin. They soon became an item. For a while he kept the news from Princess Margaret, but she began to sense that something was not quite right. ‘I forced the story out of him eventually,’ she told Nigel Dempster. ‘He told me he was in love and wanted to marry. I had absolutely no idea it had been going on.’

  Within six months, Roddy and Tania had become engaged. Princess Margaret seems to have taken the news with exceptional grace, even throwing a lunch party for them in celebration. ‘I’m really very happy for him,’ she enthused to Dempster. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t have afforded him much longer.’

  Roddy Llewellyn and Tania Soskin were married on 11 July 1981. Just over a fortnight later, cheering crowds gathered in London to celebrate the wedding of HRH the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. For the first time in years, it seemed as though, on the strength of a simple love story, the Royal Family had regained the loyalty and support of its people; from this day forward, nothing could possibly go wrong.

  (Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty Images)

  * Eyers’ more successful work included ‘I Love to Love (But My Baby Loves to Dance)’ by Tina Charles, ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ by Val Doonican, and ‘Little Arrows’ by Leapy Lee.

  * Roy Halston Frowick (1932–90), American fashion designer, commonly known by his middle name.

  * Liza Minnelli (1946–), American entertainer best-known for her role in Cabaret (1972).

  * Victor Hugo (1948–), Venezuelan boyfriend of Halston. His surname was believed to be a pun on his ‘huge-o’ private parts.

  * Fred Hughes (1943–2001), Warhol’s business manager.

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  3 May 1989

  The director of the National Theatre, Richard Eyre, goes to the opening of the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Aspects of Love with Max and Jane Rayne and Princess Margaret, who arrives with Norman St John Stevas. The Princess of Wales is also there. Eyre studies the two Princesses.

  Princess Di appears with her friends and, one gathers, her lover, giving us the opportunity to compare and contrast two princesses at close quarters. Princess Margaret gestures emphatically and rather self-consciously, keen to establish the persona of a ‘jolly’ girl, but if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady: small, frowning, drawn and unhealthy. Diana is pretty but not beautiful, tall, slightly awkward and faintly pitiable. Margaret talks to me about opera: ‘Can’t stand it. A lot of frightfully boring people standing still onstage and yelling.’

  Eyre asks her about Alan Bennett’s new play, A Question of Attribution, which features Sir Anthony Blunt and the Queen. ‘She’s quite tart about it. She didn’t approve of putting the head of state on stage, but would like to watch it from the wings. She’s wary of “Bennett”, she says.’

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  ‘I’ve always adored Margot,’ Princess Diana told her friend James Colthurst, before things took a turn for the worse. ‘I love her to bits and she’s been wonderful to me from day one.’

  At the party in Buckingham Palace to celebrate Diana’s wedding, Margaret walked around with a balloon jauntily attached to her tiara. Diana used to greet Margaret by throwing her arms around her neck; she was one of the handful outside the immediate family permitted to address her as ‘Margot’.

  This encouraged Diana to imagine that her friendship was boundless, and that as her marriage disintegrated, Margaret would take her side, and be happy to listen to her waspish comments about Charles. Instead, Margaret grew increasingly prone to avoid her.

  When it became clear that Diana had been the principal source for the revelations in Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story,* Princess Margaret sent her a furious note of reproof. Around this time, Margaret complained about her next-door neighbour to a friend: ‘Poor Lilibet and Charles have done everything they can to get rid of the wretched girl, but she just won’t go.’

  On the evening of the Prince of Wales’s forty-seventh birthday, Diana confided to twenty-three million viewers that there was a family conspiracy against her. ‘I was the separated wife of the Prince of Wales. I was a problem, full stop. Never happened before. What do we do with her? She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem. I’ll fight to the end, because I believe that I have a role to fulfil, and I’ve got two children to bring up.’

  ‘You really believe that it was out of jealousy that they wanted to undermine you?’ asked her interviewer, Martin Bashir.

  ‘I think it was out of fear,’ replied the Princess. ‘Because here was a strong woman doing her bit, and where was she getting her strength from to continue?’*

  For Margaret, this was the final straw. Her wrath was fierce and unstoppable. When the programme came to an end, she went around her Kensington Palace apartment turning over every magazine with the Princess of Wales on its cover. The next day, she made it clear to her children that they were never again to be friends with the woman she called ‘that wretched girl’.*

  To send a fellow resident of Kensington Palace to Coventry is not easy, as the chances of an encounter are so high. Nevertheless, Princess Margaret proved well up to the task, cutting Diana dead whenever their paths crossed.* Her son, Viscount Linley, liked to spend his afternoons tinkering with a sports car, but he would obediently dart behind the garage wall rather than risk a greeting from the persona non grata. ‘He went out of his way to avoid her,’ recalled Margaret’s chauffeur, David Griffin. When Diana bought something for Margaret’s daughter Lady Sarah’s first baby in July 1996, she gave the parcel to Griffin to deliver, rather than risk presenting it to her personally.

  Diana’s death did little to diminish Margaret’s animosity. It might even have served to increase it, or at least turned her triumphalist, for death belongs to that district of Coventry from which no one returns. ‘She didn’t like any of the emotionalism one bit,’ recalled Anne Tennant. ‘She said the hysteria was rather like Diana herself. It was as if when she died she got everyone to be as hysterical as she was.’

  Alone among the Royal Family, Margaret argued that Diana’s corpse should not be allowed to rest in the Royal Chapel, nor be honoured with a royal funeral. On the day of the funeral, all the other members of the Royal Family bowed their heads as the coffin passed, but Margaret offered it only the most cursory of nods, almost as though she were warding off a fly. She was furious, too, about the mass of flowers outside Kensington Palace, complaining that they would have to double-dig the ground to get all the wax out. Later, she led the opposition to a move to replace the statue of King William III outside Kensington Palace with one of the late Princess of Wales.

  ‘I’m not having that woman outside my bedroom window,’ she said.

  * In his book-of-the-book, published after Diana’s death, Morton makes it clear that the Princess of Wales’s participation in Diana: Her True Story was total. She was the organ-grinder, he the monkey; she even made last-minute changes to the blurb.

  * Twenty years on, watching the programme on YouTube is a spooky business. Diana looks like a vengeful ghost, her huge dark panda eyes looming reproachfully out of her ashen face as her damning words pour forth. Self-pity of this magnitude takes on a power in death denied it in life. ‘And all who heard should see her there! And all should cry, Beware! Beware! Her flashing eyes, her floating hair!’

  * The same sort of reaction was replicated in Clarence House. The Queen Mother refused to hear Diana’s name mentioned. After her death, the Queen Mother dutifully dressed in black, but would never utter her name.

  * She had already put in quite a bit of practice. She once boasted to a friend that she’d never spoken to Princess Michael of Kent, and never intended to. />
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  Margaret also made clear what she thought of the bubbly Sarah, Duchess of York, after a newspaper had published photographs of her lying topless on a sun-lounger on the Côte d’Azur with her big toe being sucked by her financial adviser.

  Yet it had all begun so well. The Duchess of York’s autobiographical account of the moment she exchanged wedding vows in July 1986 sounds a triumphant note, almost as though she had just come from the back of the field to reach the final of the hundred-yard Windsor sprint:

  In a trice, I had become Princess Andrew and the Duchess of York, as well as the Countess of Inverness and Baroness of Killyleagh. In the order of royal precedence I now outranked Anne and Margaret; among the women I stood fourth, behind the Queen, the Queen Mother, and the Princess of Wales.

  While we signed the marriage books, I replaced the flowers that had anchored my veil with a diamond tiara for my return trip down the aisle. It was my time to be Cinderella. I had stepped up as the country girl, now I would walk back as a Princess.

  But her triumph was to be short-lived. In 1992 a newspaper carried photographs of her topless with her ‘financial adviser’ John Bryan. The main photograph, published throughout the known world, had a surreal quality about it, the bald head of the businessman looking uncannily like another big toe.

  On the morning of the publication of the Daily Mirror exclusive – ‘FERGIE’S STOLEN KISSES’ – the Duchess was staying at Balmoral. Forewarned, she took breakfast in her bedroom, creeping down to apologise to the Queen at 9.30 a.m. The Queen, she recalled, was ‘furious’. At dinner that evening, she felt that everyone was staring at her. ‘I knew they must be seeing me topless, or being nuzzled by a bald American. The courtiers eyed me sneakily, discreetly. The butlers and footmen gaped, and I felt naked in their sight … I felt disgust in that dining room and a queasy fascination, as if they were looking at a burn victim.’

  Down in Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret took the publication of the Duchess’s topless photographs particularly hard. ‘She was more furious than I have ever seen her,’ noted one visitor. ‘And that is saying something.’ Over the telephone, Margaret impressed her fury on the Queen, who dutifully passed it on to the Duchess.

  On her return to Kensington Palace, the Duchess attempted to assuage any unpleasantness by sending Margaret a bouquet of mixed spring flowers, accompanied by a note of apology. They failed to do the trick. A handwritten letter arrived from Princess Margaret. It did not beat around the bush:

  Not once have you hung your head in embarrassment even for a minute after those disgraceful photographs. You have done more to bring shame on the Family than you could ever have imagined. Clearly you have never considered the damage you are doing to us all. How dare you discredit us like this and how dare you send me those flowers.

  The letter was leaked to the newspapers. Was Princess Margaret responsible for the leak? Given the circumstances, it is unlikely to have been the Duchess.

  From that day on, their relationship, never warm, turned freezing cold. Princess Margaret told friends that she had chided the Queen for still bothering with the fallen Duchess. But a quarter of a century on, Fergie seems to have recovered her bounce. In a later volume of autobiography, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself,* she passes on the secret of a happy life: one simply repeats the mantra ‘I love myself more than I ever imagined possible and others love me too,’ twenty-five times a day.

  In an interview to promote an accompanying TV series on the Oprah Channel, she took the trouble to recite her daily inventory of the parts of her body she had learned to love. ‘I love my hands and my wrists and ankles. I’ve got a really good waist and a great pair of bosoms. Plus the pins aren’t bad.’

  By the time of this notably upbeat broadcast, Princess Margaret had been dead for well over a decade.

  * The Duchess of York has published numerous volumes, among them distillations of her hard-won wisdom: What I Know Now, Reinventing Yourself with the Duchess of York, Moments, Dining with the Duchess and Dieting with the Duchess. Beneath a photograph of a pink flower in a forest on the back cover of Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself is a brief checklist headed ‘Wisdom from the Duchess’. It includes ‘Be open’, ‘Make time for quiet reflection and listen to your heart’, and ‘Face your fears’. It ends with the less reassuring ‘Free your mind and your bottom will follow’.

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  6 July 1975

  Princess Margaret attends the second night of Bow Down, a musical production by Harrison Birtwistle and Tony Harrison, at the Cottesloe Theatre.

  ‘A fairly disastrous evening,’ writes Peter Hall in his diary. ‘Princess Margaret was very affronted by the whole thing, and afterwards said she didn’t think she should have been invited. This surprised me, though Bow Down is certainly strong, cruel and somewhat upsetting.’

  20 July 1975

  A fortnight later, Peter Hall is walking across the Buckingham Palace reception rooms at the Queen’s Jubilee Party when he hears a voice crying ‘Cuckoo!’ It is Her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret.

  We paid our respects and chatted away. In the background the band of the Coldstream Guards were playing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan. The Princess invited me to choose the next piece of music. I said I would like something by Harrison Birtwistle. She didn’t find that funny and went into a long pout about her evening at Harry’s Bow Down. I, with enormous smiles, told her what frightful trouble her dislike of the production had caused us because what she thought had so disturbed the chairman. I then moved further through the crush and met Max Rayne. He asked me if I’d seen her. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘The Princess,’ he said. ‘I’m keeping well away from her.’

  14 March 1990

  Her Royal Highness attends a preview of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at the National Theatre. The National’s artistic director, Richard Eyre, is obliged to stand in the foyer to await her arrival.

  As she comes in she announces to me quite loudly that she can’t STAND Sondheim. She demonstrates this quite conspicuously throughout the evening. She raps me, quite painfully, and only half jokingly, at the end of the National Anthem, which Jeremy Sams has rearranged in a slightly arch fashion. She shifts restlessly during the show. At the interval grim comedy getting her a drink. Ice! Whisky! Water! and more whisky. She wasn’t hard work after the show. She talked to me about public speaking, which she hates. She said that Reagan enjoyed it; he knew he was a bad actor but was properly trained. Mary* was very touched by Princess Mgt saying that she’d liked Christopher Soames.* I didn’t tell Mary that she’d also said that she hadn’t liked Churchill, who had no time for her and her sister when they were children and she’d found him rude and self-interested.

  * Mary Soames (1922–2014), Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, wife of Christopher Soames.

  * Christopher Soames (1920–87), politician and diplomat.

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  The journalist and biographer Selina Hastings first met Princess Margaret at a dinner in the country with Prince Rupert Loewenstein.

  ‘I then had a boyfriend called Derek Hart who had done some work with Tony – he was on television, on the Tonight programme with Cliff Michelmore, and he and Tony were quite good friends partly because they’d won a libel against the Daily Express.

  ‘Then, through Tony, Derek became a very close friend – but nothing else – with Princess Margaret. He was very protective of her and she would often come to him when she was very unhappy about something. Sometimes she would ring up at two or three in the morning when she’d had quite a few glasses, in floods of tears complaining: “So-and-so’s just called me a cunt,” or something like that.

  ‘Derek became much closer to her when her marriage was breaking up. Occasionally the three of us used to have dinner in a little restaurant in Notting Hill called Chez Moi. We sat in an alcove screened from the rest of the diners. Princess Margaret always said she wasn’t going to have anythi
ng and then, just as Derek was about to call for the bill, she’d say, “Oh, I think I’ll have a little Dover sole!”

  ‘She once invited us for the weekend to stay at Royal Lodge. It was in the summer and it was boiling hot. She was terribly sweet, and she was so nice to me because she couldn’t have had the faintest interest in me. She had organised the archivist at Windsor Castle to show me whatever I wanted to see in the archive. She was always … not cosy, but always very, very nice. I was so touched that she had gone to the trouble to organise something that would interest me. She was more intelligent than a lot of people give her credit for: she used to go once a week to the V&A and she’d just concentrate on one object. When she went to New York, she knew exactly what she wanted to see, and she’d go to galleries and museums. Once when she visited New York, her host asked her what she would like to do, thinking that she’d want to go to Bloomingdale’s or Saks. Instead she chose to be taken to the Pierpont Morgan Library to look at the medieval missals. It turned out she knew almost as much about them as the curator did. The others aren’t like that. When Princess Anne went there for the first time, I was told that all she wanted was a set of hunting table-mats.