Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

by Sally Bedell Smith

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  A CRISIS BREWING within Elizabeth II’s own family caused her great distress in the autumn of 1975 when the marriage of Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon collapsed. For the first five years after their wedding, they had been the toast of London—beautiful, magnetic, and stylish, celebrated for their lively parties with scintillating guests drawn from the arts and society. They had two children, David in 1961 and Sarah in 1964, and Tony was achieving even greater success through his photographic commissions and his work as artistic adviser to the Sunday Times magazine as well as an unpaid consultant to the Council of Industrial Design.

  But Margaret became bored, petulant, and increasingly possessive. Tony in turn buried himself more deeply in his work, escaping in the evenings to his studio at Kensington Palace and taking frequent assignments overseas. Despite their superficial compatibility—strong sexual attraction, quick wit, love of ballet and theater, and sybaritic enjoyment of parties in the evening and extended holidays in the sun at luxurious resorts—there were seeds of trouble from the outset. Margaret had married on the rebound from Peter Townsend. She had known Tony for only a year when they became secretly engaged late in 1959 shortly after Margaret heard that at age forty-seven Townsend was planning to marry a nineteen-year-old Belgian girl. “I received a letter from Peter in the morning,” she recalled, “and that evening I decided to marry Tony.” The princess was attracted to Tony at least in part because his creativity and uninhibited bohemian ways made him so different from her father’s former equerry.

  Margaret could not have known that Tony was a compulsive seducer. Both of them were solipsistic, craved constant entertainment, competed for center stage, and lacked the inclination or the ability to be introspective about their relationship. Tony wanted the freedom to come and go as he pleased. Margaret insisted on unrealistic standards of togetherness, even though he began his work early in the morning and she rarely appeared until close to noon, ready to socialize until the small hours.

  As the tensions between them festered, his teasing took on a sadistic edge, and their amusing banter exploded into ugly alcohol-fueled fights in front of their friends. He took to leaving notes around listing “things I hate about you,” while she loathed the cottage in the country that he had fastidiously restored. Each of them was repeatedly unfaithful. Among his dalliances was with the daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Reading, neighbors near his house in Sussex. Margaret’s lovers included one of Tony’s best friends, Anthony Barton.

  Publicly Tony was diligent about his role accompanying her on royal engagements, walking two steps behind and always allowing her to speak first. They were at their best on royal tours abroad, smiling amiably during endless meet-and-greet receptions. In November 1965 they conducted a charm offensive during a three-week tour of five cities in the United States that included a formal dinner at the White House. President Lyndon Johnson called the princess “little lady” and offered a prescription for a happy marriage that couldn’t have been more inappropriate for the royal pair: “First, let her think she’s having her way. Second, let her have it.”

  The Snowdons lived increasingly separate lives, especially after Margaret began escaping to a villa on the Caribbean island of Mustique given to her by her friend Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner). Although Margaret talked to her sister and her mother nearly every day, she was circumspect about her marriage. As the Queen Mother said to one of Margaret’s confidants, “I didn’t bring up my daughter to discuss her husband with me!” Both the Queen and the Queen Mother were dazzled by Tony’s artistry and ingenuity, not to mention his charm. In their company, he was always on his best behavior. “He pulled the wool over their eyes,” said Anne Glenconner. “The Queen probably didn’t realize what Tony was up to. It was not the sort of thing the Queen would talk about. She doesn’t gossip.”

  The Queen did see Margaret behaving badly—when she took out her frustrations in rude remarks to the Queen Mother, or when she flouted protocol by refusing to turn when her sister did during meals, leaving the Queen to stare at the back of her dinner partner’s head. She knew Margaret was drinking heavily; when her cousin Pamela Hicks had to cancel a party because of her husband’s problems with alcohol, the Queen said, “I understand. I’ve been through it with Margaret.” But as was her habit, the Queen avoided confronting the princess. “How’s Margaret’s mood?” she asked a friend of her sister before lunch at Royal Lodge. “Shall I venture out on the terrace?”

  In 1973 Margaret fell for Roddy Llewellyn, an attractive and pliant dilettante nearly eighteen years her junior. The liaison infuriated Tony, and the Queen was upset by her sister’s indiscretions, above all when Margaret began staying with Roddy at his bohemian upper-class commune in Wiltshire. By November 1975 the Snowdons had reached the breaking point. Tony sent a letter to the Queen telling her that “the atmosphere is appalling for all concerned,” and they needed to separate. Several weeks later the Queen replied, saying that Tony’s letter “had been devastating,” wrote Snowdon biographer Anne de Courcy. “She intimated that she was aware of how bad their relationship had become before saying that she realized the situation was now intolerable for both of them.” She asked only that they wait until after Christmas, and following discussions at the Palace, she advised that they make the separation announcement during the Easter holidays when their children could be with them. The Palace intended to say only that the Snowdons would “live apart” and that “there are no plans for divorce proceedings.”

  The Palace game plan blew up in late February 1976 when a tabloid photographer snapped a picture of Margaret and Roddy in their bathing suits, sitting together at a table in Mustique. Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World splashed the suggestive image of the Princess and her toy boy, prompting Tony to move out. Although he had his own inamorata, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, Tony managed to seize the moral high ground. He leaked the news of the separation to the Daily Express, which published it on March 17, two days before the planned announcement by the Palace. In the process, he eclipsed Harold Wilson’s resignation announcement on the 19th—which, ironically, the prime minister had timed in part to deflect attention from the simmering Snowdon scandal.

  Always deft with the media, Snowdon held his own press conference on the 17th in which he wished his wife well, asked for the understanding of their children, and professed his undying admiration and love for the royal family. His clever spin reinforced the view of Margaret as the guilty party, a self-indulgent and outré princess. “The Queen and the Queen Mother never took sides with Tony Snowdon over the separation,” said one of the Queen’s relatives, “but they never made an enemy of him. They realized their daughter and sister could be impossible to live with.” Snowdon kept in the good graces of the Queen and her mother by never saying another unkind word about Margaret, and by remaining forever silent about the rest of the royal family.

  Harold Wilson’s retirement came as a surprise, not only to the public, but to members of his own party, which elected as its leader Foreign Secretary James Callaghan. The new prime minister, who kissed hands on April 5, 1976, had also served as chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, so he was a known quantity in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. To honor the retiring premier, the Queen agreed to attend Wilson’s farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, the first time she had done so since Churchill left office twenty-one years earlier. The inspiration came from Charteris, and Wilson was flattered by the gesture. The sly wit of the Queen’s private secretary was unmistakable as well, when she referred in her speech to herself and Wilson as the tenants of tied cottages at either end of the Mall.

  THE QUEEN HIT her fiftieth birthday on April 21, 1976. She looked enviably youthful, a combination of good genes, healthy living, and an unfussy beauty regimen. “She doesn’t sit in the sun and she doesn’t hunt, which is very weathering,” said one of her good friends. Her brown hair, which now showed some gray strands, was tended by her longtime hairdresser, Charles Martyn. Facing for
ward rather than the usual bending backward, she rested her chin inside a sink equipped with a large sprayer to have her hair washed with egg and lemon shampoo. Between setting and drying, Martyn would spend an hour and a half creating her unvarying hairstyle as she reviewed a stack of correspondence in her lap, scarcely glancing up to check her reflection in the mirror. For her skin she used an assortment of Cyclax products including milk of roses moisturizer, and she washed with milk and honey cleanser. She spent little time applying makeup, with just a dusting of powder, and she used bright red lipstick because it was more visible in public.

  That June she hosted French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing for a state visit and shrewdly orchestrated a public show of support for the supersonic Concorde airplane, an Anglo-French venture that French officials regarded as a useful collaboration, despite concerns about its high cost. Giscard was apprehensive about the Concorde because he had heard the British had lost enthusiasm for it. Before the state banquet at Buckingham Palace, the Queen instructed Martin Charteris to depart from protocol and applaud loudly when she mentioned the airplane in her speech. Charteris clapped on cue, and because of his senior position as the Queen’s private secretary, he was joined resoundingly by the other British guests. At a press conference the next day, the French president said that after hearing the “spontaneous and loud applause,” he was reassured of Britain’s wholehearted support. Nicholas Henderson, a seasoned diplomat who watched the scheme unfold, considered it “a tribute to the Queen’s understanding of the workings of guided democracy.”

  The following month, she returned to the United States for the first time in seventeen years. The idea of a state visit around the Bicentennial of American independence had been broached by President Nixon in early 1973, eighteen months before his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. British officials thought the timing needed “careful consideration.” As Robert Armstrong, Heath’s principal private secretary, wrote to Martin Charteris at the time, “One would wish to consider whether it was right for The Queen to be associated in this way with the celebration of a rebellion from the British Crown.” He added that the British Ambassador in Washington, Rowland Baring, the 3rd Earl of Cromer (husband of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Esme Cromer), “has some feeling that there may be a certain degree of uninhibited zest about the American celebrations of the Declaration of Independence with which it might not be entirely desirable that The Queen should be associated.… A certain amount of ballyhoo is inseparable from this sort of celebration in America, which would conspicuously lack dignity.”

  Despite those initial misgivings, a grand six-day state visit was arranged, beginning on July 6 with a stop in Philadephia. “July 4th was really pushing it,” said David Walker of the British embassy. “Forgiveness can go so far.” Among the Queen’s entourage would be her good friend Virginia (Ginny) Airlie, the forty-three-year-old wife of the 13th Earl, who was her first American lady-in-waiting. Diminutive like the Queen, and described by Cecil Beaton as “a paragon of gaiety & dignity,” Ginny Airlie had been appointed in 1973. She had initially demurred, saying she was an American subject with six children, the youngest only two years old, and suggested that the Queen “should get someone more steeped in it all.” But the Queen had insisted. The unpretentious peer’s wife fitted well with the royal household and adapted readily to the royal ways she had observed at parties and during shooting weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral. Even so, Woman of the Bedchamber Susan Hussey couldn’t resist calling her “the American.”

  The royal party of twenty flew to Bermuda, where they embarked on Britannia for the three-day crossing to the United States. On the first night, they were hit with a force nine gale. Susan Crosland, the Baltimore-born wife of Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland, noticed that during drinks before dinner amid the lurching seas, the Queen looked “philosophical, almost merry, twenty yards of chiffon scarf flung over one shoulder.” Naval officer Philip, however, was “ashen and drawn,” much as he had looked in 1951 when he had been seasick during their stormy voyage across the North Atlantic. Now, as then, the Queen was the only one to resist the nausea.

  After coffee in the drawing room, the Queen grabbed the handle of a sliding door when a swell heaved the ship. As the door slid shut, the Queen exclaimed “Wheeeeee!” her chiffon scarf flying. The door slid open with another pitch of the waves, and again she cried, “Wheeeeee!” before turning to say “Good night.” The next morning at breakfast she announced, “I have never seen so many grey and grim faces round a dinner table.” Then a pause: “Philip was not well.” Another pause, this time with a giggle: “I’m glad to say.”

  A crowd of five thousand greeeted the Queen as Britannia docked at the same spot where William Penn had landed in 1681. It was a scorching day in Philadelphia as she walked from one historic spot to another among an estimated 75,000 well-wishers waving American flags and Union Jacks. Reporters were surprised by “her apparent eagerness to work a crowd.”

  At Independence National Park, she presented the six-and-one-half-ton commemorative Bicentennial Bell manufactured by London’s Whitechapel Foundry, which had cast the original Liberty Bell in 1752. “I speak to you as the direct descendant of King George III,” she said, noting that the Fourth of July “should be celebrated as much in Britain as in America … in sincere gratitude to the Founding Fathers … for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked that statesmanship ‘to know the right time, and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.’ … We learned to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own ways.… Without that great act in the cause of liberty, performed in Independence Hall 200 years ago, we could never have transformed an empire into a commonwealth.”

  That evening she endured the casual protocol violations of Frank Rizzo, the beefy mayor of Philadelphia and former policeman who had campaigned on the slogan “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” During an elegant dinner for four hundred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rizzo left her side to cruise the other tables and “press the flesh.” “What a fascinating man he is,” the Queen deadpanned. She escaped to the ladies’ room—euphemistically known in royal circles as an “opportunity to tidy” or a “health break”—before a reception for yet another six hundred guests.

  The temperature in Washington pushed one hundred degrees, but the Queen “never faltered in the day’s walk-about under a remorseless sun,” wrote Susan Crosland, who politely declined a revivifying pinch of snuff from Martin Charteris. After a welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn, President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, threw a white-tie dinner for 224 under a big tent in the Rose Garden hung with Japanese lanterns. Public television broadcast the banquet live, prohibited only from showing the Queen eating or dancing. In her yellow organza gown, diamond tiara, necklace, and earrings, Elizabeth II did not disappoint.

  Henry Kissinger’s wife, Nancy, smoked through the entire meal, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s wife, Happy, asked Philip about his German background. He retorted that he was Danish, prompting Happy to tell Tony Crosland, “Prince Philip is renouncing his German origins!” The East Room entertainment featured Bob Hope, followed by pop stars the Captain & Tennille, who sang their hit single “Muskrat Love” about a pair of rodents romancing by candlelight. Afterward, the Queen and Gerald Ford danced to “The Lady Is a Tramp,” the iconic Rodgers and Hart tune popularized by Frank Sinatra. The Queen and Philip didn’t leave for their quarters at Blair House until shortly before 1 A.M.

  After another nonstop day of appearances, Elizabeth II reciprocated the next evening with her own white-tie, four-course dinner for eighty-four at the British embassy, preceded by a reception for 1,600 on the lawn, where she was trailed by television teams carrying high-powered lights. Suddenly the cameras and lights disappeared. Elizabeth Taylor had arrived “to make her grand entrance,” recalled Michael Shea, then director of the British Information Services i
n New York. British ambassador Sir Peter Ramsbotham was fuming, but the Queen “was merely amused, seeing, for once, someone else at the center of media attention.”

  As she had in 1957, the Queen reached Manhattan by water, this time on the air-conditioned Royal Barge from Britannia. A hundredyard walkabout in lower Manhattan turned chaotic as crowds pressed to get near her and the police “were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm,” said Michael Shea. Not for the first time, she appeared cool amid the sweating multitude. “Luckily, I don’t mind the heat,” she said cheerfully.

  She again met with the Pilgrims and the English-Speaking Union, this time over luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. As the Queen and Philip were driven uptown in an open car to visit the eighteenth-century Morris-Jumel mansion in Harlem—Manhattan’s oldest house—she spotted a friend on the corner of Park Avenue and 61st Street. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There’s John Andrew!” The Anglican cleric waved and shouted back, “Hello, hello. I’ll see you tonight.” After she passed by, he thought to himself, “What a bloody fool. What a thing to say to the Queen.”

  The high point of her packed schedule that day was a visit to Bloomingdale’s, which was highly orchestrated, unlike her stop at a supermarket nineteen years earlier. This time store officials swept her from one exhibition to another on three floors. She saw reproduction Chippendale chairs, noting that the seats were wider than in Britain, and she marveled at the Calvin Klein models wearing trendy tweed midi-skirts. “Gracious, do you really wear skirts that long here?” she asked. Philip had his own jovial tour that included a pet rock and talking calculator in a display of best-selling novelties.