Ma’am Darling

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Ma’am Darling Page 31

by Craig Brown


  As photographs of Princess Margaret go, it seemed at first glance unexceptional. She had not been caught off-guard; in fact she looked very much on duty, as though her smile would not last a split-second beyond the click of the shutter. From her point of view it must have been just another photo.

  Yet even the most fleeting look at the photograph revealed something very bizarre indeed, something unheard-of in royal photographs, something so outrageous and out-of-place that it was, quite literally, unspeakable.

  At the moment the shutter clicked, the natural downward trajectory of the fabric of William’s trousers was being sent askew by a bluff diagonal: this most bashful of young men was clearly struggling unsuccessfully to contain an erection, an erection that he could no more hope to disguise than the mayor of Paris might hope to disguise the presence of the Eiffel Tower.

  As everyone who has ever been an adolescent boy can attest, at that age – and William would then have been around eighteen – erections pop up, of their own accord, without warning, at frequent yet distressingly random intervals, and with a stubborn disregard for the propriety of their possessor. It is, of course, perfectly possible that William found himself sexually aroused by the proximity of HRH Princess Margaret, who was, even at that relatively late stage, still regarded, at least in the more stately circles, as something of a firecracker. But for those of us in the younger generation, these were racy days – at school, posters of Raquel Welch striding out of the sea in her fur bikini and Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle lounging topless on her peacock chair were all the rage – and, even for a fairly conventional adolescent, the sight of the portly Princess Margaret in a formal blue dress with handbag and pearls seems unlikely to have pressed the right buttons, or popped the wrong ones.

  A more likely scenario would have found William being called by his mother when his erection was already in progress, as it were. He would then have found himself unable to come up with a suitable excuse for a cover-up – you can’t really say ‘Hang on! I’ll just finish this paragraph!’ when you’re being called for a photograph with Her Royal Highness – and simply hoping that the Princess would keep looking straight ahead, his mother would concentrate on focusing her camera, so no one would notice, and the photo in question would be from the waist up.

  So what happened when the royal photograph arrived back, full-length, from the chemist? Perhaps William’s mother simply glanced at it, checking that neither William nor Princess Margaret had their eyes closed, or was pulling a funny face, before pasting it into the visitors’ book. Or did her glance stray below their waists? Is a mother genetically predisposed to blank out the shadow of a son’s erection? Or did she notice that something was awry, but decide to go ahead and paste the whole photograph in regardless – lock, stock and, as it were, barrel?

  And what of William himself? Did he – does he – wince whenever he saw the photograph stuck in pride of place in the visitors’ book? Or did he too fail to notice the sundial protrusion? Or was he – and this is frankly the least likely of the possible scenarios – secretly rather proud of having maintained an erection in these most unarousing of circumstances?

  Had they been a more bohemian family, they might have stuck the photograph in the book simply to épater le bourgeois. There is a story I have often heard, a sort of royal urban myth, I suppose, that demonstrates this sort of behaviour, and the love/hate, push-me/pull-you tug between deference and disdain. Princess Margaret – or, sometimes, the Queen – is staying the night with a family somewhere. At one point she goes to the loo, and unwittingly leaves behind what in technical parlance is known as a ‘floater’. After she has left, the family fish the floater out of the loo, and place it in one of those rubber-sealed jars usually reserved for pickling eggs or onions, or bottling marmalade. For years to come, they apparently bring out the jar on social occasions, explaining its provenance to hoots of delight from their friends.

  Whether true or not, this is a singular story about bohemia and snobbery. They only bother to preserve the turd because they believe it to be special: after all, it belongs – or belonged (at what point does a turd cease to be the property of the person who brought it into the world?) – to the sister of the Queen. On the other hand, their only purpose in showing it off is to demonstrate the absurdity of the very same snobbery that found them fishing it out of the loo in the first place.

  But Michael and William’s family were not of this brash, guffawing sort. They would not have found anything in the slightest bit amusing about a photograph of their eldest son displaying an erection beside the Queen’s sister.

  They had left a large space in their book for a photograph of William and Princess Margaret, and they had no alternative detumescent photograph up their sleeves to put in its place. Granted, it would have looked odd to just leave a gap, but why didn’t his mother simply get a pair of scissors and cut the two of them off at their waists?

  Or perhaps she simply didn’t look at the photograph long enough to notice her son’s erection, and stuck it in the album without a second glance. Other members of the family may well have clocked it, but I suspect they would have found it far more embarrassing to raise an objection and have the photo removed than to say nothing and let it remain where it was. And so it stayed there, a monument – eccentric, yes, but also rather touching – to the reticence of the English upper classes.

  83

  1 December 1992

  Princess Margaret attends a preview of Carousel at the National Theatre. After meeting the cast, she is escorted to the front door by Richard Eyre, who makes a note of their brief conversation.

  ME: I’m glad you enjoyed the show.

  SHE: I didn’t. I can’t bear the piece.

  84

  What became of Crawfie?

  The last time we set eyes on her, all those years ago, she had just married George Buthlay in Dunfermline, having put off the marriage for sixteen years to ensure the future wellbeing of her royal charges.

  The next phase of her story begins with Crawfie’s fateful decision to publish a memoir of her days as the royal governess. Some authors blame this on the avarice of her new husband. ‘There is no question that Buthlay was a bad influence on Crawfie,’ writes Hugo Vickers in his sharp biography, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. ‘We can but speculate how this thirty-eight-year-old spinster adapted to married life with such a man. He was a philanderer, both before and after the marriage, he manipulated her and fuelled her anger. Prodded by him, she became irritated by her pay, felt that her pension was inadequate, was unhappy with the meagre wedding presents she had received from the Royal Family, and even became dissatisfied with the CVO she was given on retirement in January 1949, apparently feeling a DCVO would have been more appropriate.’

  In March 1949, shortly after Crawfie had retired with her husband to a grace-and-favour cottage at Kensington Palace, she asked her old employer to approve her plan to write a series of articles for an American magazine about her time as governess of the two little Princesses. In April, Queen Elizabeth posted her reply in a letter marked ‘Private’:

  My Dear Crawfie,

  I am so sorry to have been so long in giving you my views about the questions you asked me, but, you know they were extremely difficult to answer especially as I fear that the answers are still the same as I gave you when you came to see me. I do feel, most definitely, that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster, and if you, the moment you finished teaching Margaret, started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again. I know you understand this, because you have been so wonderfully discreet all the years you were with us …

  At this point the Queen’s letter changes gear, moving, with the discreetest of little jolts, from supplication to threat.

  Also, you would lose all your friends, because such a thing has never been done or even contemplated amongst the people who serve us so loyally, and I do hop
e that you will put all the American temptations aside very firmly. Having been with us in our family life for so long, you must be prepared to be attacked by journalists to give away private and confidential things, and I know that your good sense & loyal affection will guide you well. I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money & persistent editors, & say No No No to offers of dollars for articles about something as private & as precious as our family.

  In June, Crawfie began to write her pieces with the aid of Dorothy Black,* a prolific novelist who also found the time to write a column for the Ladies’ Home Journal. By August the work was completed and sent to America, where it was edited to suit the magazine’s readership. ‘I hope you will trust Beatrice and me to take fullest advantage of your rich material in a way which will give it the broadest possible appeal,’ wrote Bruce Gould.*

  The finished version was then delivered, via Nancy Astor, to the Queen, in the hope of gaining her approval, as well as her permission to reproduce facsimile copies of letters sent to her by various members of the Royal Family, including the little Princesses. Crawfie was confident that everything would go according to plan, and that ‘the Queen will not only agree but also write a preface in her own handwriting’.

  As it turned out, the Queen was furious: ‘We have worried greatly over this matter, and can only think that our late & completely trusted governess has gone off her head, because she promised in writing that she would not publish any story about our daughters, and this development has made us very sad …’

  Through her private secretary, she expressed her disapproval of the ‘repugnant’ project, and called for a minimum of thirteen alterations to the text. These included a story that, having drawn ‘Royal Flush’ during a game of charades, the Duchess of Kent had mimed pulling a lavatory chain. Crawfie made the requested changes, and by so doing, convinced herself that the entire manuscript now had royal approval. This was wishful thinking. The Queen’s fury was never to subside.

  The cold-shouldering of Crawfie now began in earnest. At Christmas no card arrived from the Queen, and though Queen Mary managed one, it was accompanied by no present. Before long Crawfie and her husband were, in the unequivocal words of one courtier, ‘shunned by colleagues from top to bottom’. In her turn, Crawfie retreated into a sort of siege mentality, becoming increasingly indignant at the way she had been treated. In a letter to Bruce Gould, signed by her but probably composed by her more belligerent husband, she described the Queen’s refusal to send a Christmas card as ‘absolutely childish’:

  I have no fear of what might be called ‘consequences’ because I have adhered to the terms of my understanding with the Queen, and if she decides to be unfriendly, or worse, she will be the loser. If any action on Her Majesty’s part is brought to bear on me to my detriment, I shall not hesitate to expose it in the Press if necessary, and if an attempt should be made to eject me from this house and/or deprive me of my pension, I shall fight in Court and have the facts made public if I am driven to do so.

  During the period of serialisation, the Ladies’ Home Journal added 500,000 copies to its circulation, which now reached two million. The book version of The Little Princesses hit the number one position in the American non-fiction charts. With the $80,000 they gained from the deal, Crawfie and her husband acquired a substantial house in Aberdeen, 60 Rubislaw Den South, which is nowadays valued at just under a million pounds.

  With her ties to the Palace entirely severed, Crawfie may have felt she had nothing left to lose. Accordingly, she trotted out three more books of varying shades of bland, on Queen Mary, Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth. Her burgeoning career as a writer came to grief, however, when in June 1955 Woman’s Own published her ebullient accounts of that year’s Trooping the Colour and Royal Ascot. She had in fact written them in advance of the events they purported to describe. This meant that when both were cancelled at the last minute, poor old Crawfie turned into a national figure of fun.

  Never again would she appear in print. George died in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. At some point between his death and her own, Crawfie attempted suicide. She finally passed away in an Aberdeen nursing home, Hawkhill House, on 11 February 1988. At her poorly attended funeral, wreaths from the Royal Family were nowhere to be seen. Asked about her later in life, Princess Margaret replied simply, ‘She sneaked.’

  * Dorothy Delius Allan Black (1890–1977) was the niece of the composer Frederick Delius. Her mother Clare wrote a memoir of him: Frederick Delius: Memories of My Brother. Dorothy herself wrote ninety-eight novels, among them Romance – The Loveliest Thing (1925), Someday I’ll Find You (1934), Never Leave Me (1941), My Love Belongs to Me (1942), Two for Mirth (1942), Alone Am I (1944), The Gay Adventure (1945), Well Done, Belinda! (1952), Her Heart Was in the Highlands (1955), Forsaking All Others (1956), Paradise for Two (1963), O Come, My Love (1967), Love Endureth (1968) and Love Belongs to Everyone (1972). At the age of eighty-four she published her last three novels, Where Love Is, From Faraway and It Had to Be You.

  * Co-editor, with his wife Beatrice, of the magazine.

  85

  Princess Margaret attended a benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979 for the Invalid Children’s Aid Society. Introduced by the Princess’s great admirer, the chat-show host Russell Harty, the star of the evening, Dusty Springfield, arrived onstage in a glittering white trouser-suit, and launched straight into her 1968 top ten hit, ‘I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten’.

  Later on, when she came to sing ‘We are Family’, Dusty placed a special emphasis on the line ‘I got all my sisters with me’. Was this a nod to the high proportion of lesbians in her audience?

  After singing ‘All I See is You’, she said, ‘It’s nice to see that all the royalty is not confined to the royal box,’ a risqué remark that was received with whoops and cheers, though not from those in the Royal Box. Far from it: Princess Margaret was spotted leaving her seat for what a member of the Royal Albert Hall staff described as ‘a fag and gin break’, lending credence to the rumour that she had indeed taken offence.

  Two-thirds of the way through, Dusty left the stage to execute a rapid change of costume, and returned dressed in a lilac trouser-and-tails suit. Glancing up at the Royal Box, she caught sight of the Princess chatting away to a lady-in-waiting. She then sang the opening lines to her next song – ‘Quiet please, there’s a lady on stage’ – before pausing theatrically. Whether she intended it as a reprimand or not, it was followed by a loud round of applause.

  At this point, she took the opportunity to address the audience. ‘There wasn’t much time to change,’ she said. ‘This song is really for those people who have been legends in their time. I’m sure you know who you are.’ Once again, the crowd roared. ‘Sometimes, the ladies I’m speaking of give too much of themselves, sometimes not enough. This song is for all those people, all those women, no matter who they are.’

  After the concert, Princess Margaret was escorted backstage to meet those involved. When she came to Dusty Springfield she walked past her without a word, even though Dusty’s manager had just handed her a cheque for £8,000, made out to the charity.

  Had the Princess been offended by the suggestion that she should keep quiet? Did she disapprove of Dusty’s crack about royalty and the Royal Box? Nobody knew for sure. But the next day, Dusty Springfield received an envelope through the post, containing a typed apology to the Queen, with a space left for her signature. The return address was Kensington Palace. Had the envelope been sent by Princess Margaret? Springfield certainly thought so. She signed it, and sent it back.

  Decades later, Fred Perry, Dusty’s lighting designer and stage director for twenty-five years, confessed that to his ‘horror and regret’ it was he who had caused the trouble.

  ‘We were sitting in Dusty’s house in Los Angeles, going over the upcoming show, and she was trying to come up with a funny line along the line that John Lennon had used at the Royal Show when t
he Beatles played in the sixties … Knowing of Dusty’s loyal gay following, I came up with the line, “It’s nice to see that all the royalty is NOT confined to the Royal Box!” She was appalled, but laughed her head off and said, “They’ll never let me get away with that” … Anyway, Dusty used the line, pissed off Princess Margaret, and the rest, as they say, is history.’

  Perry denied that the Princess had blanked Dusty, though he did remember her being extremely brusque. ‘I have the full-length version of that tape and when going down the line, Princess Margaret spoke to everyone on the line. When she got to Auntie, she shook her hand, murmured thanks, and moved on. It’s a definite snub, but at the time, none of us knew why. She had actually requested a couple of songs from albums of Dusty’s that she had never sung as part of her regular shows, so we knew she was a fan …

  ‘I am still baffled all these years later when I recall that this was about the time that PM was under fire for spending far too much time with a failed pop singer named Roddy something or other, on the island of Mustique, which, as far as I am concerned, caused a lot more trouble for the Royal Family than one simple line said with affection at a fund-raising concert.’

  Margaret and Dusty were photographed together only once, following a charity concert at the London Palladium ten years earlier. In the photograph, Dusty curtseys to a smiling Princess Margaret. The line of performers also includes the eccentric singer Tiny Tim, who for some reason is carrying a large Union Jack bag, Lou Christie, David Bowie and Eddy Grant of the pop group the Equals, then sporting dyed blond hair.

  (PA Images)

  There are striking parallels between the two women. They both enjoyed a sixties heyday, and favoured vivid evening gowns, heavy mascara and bouffant hair. They had an indefinable air of camp, and attracted a strong gay following. They were waspish, demanding and dissatisfied. And, as time went by, they both came to personify loneliness. The image of them as disappointed women was fuelled by the public’s keen sense of schadenfreude: once the talk of the town, they had taken wrong paths, and their best days were behind them. The title of one of Dusty’s signature tunes was ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself’, but it may just as well have been Margaret’s.

 

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