by Kitty Kelley
“As mother of the bride, Edwina was delighted to have her future son-in-law flying about attending to everything,” said a friend, “because she was already overexhausted planning her charity excursion to the Far East. She left a few days after the wedding, and, sadly, died in her sleep on that trip while touring Borneo.”
The press coverage of the Mountbatten wedding conveyed the impression of a glorious union between a nobleman’s daughter and the common but worthy man of her dreams. The bride’s entrance into Romsey Abbey was heralded by trumpets playing “O Perfect Love.” And at the reception later, surrounded by members of the British and German royal families, the Duke of Edinburgh toasted the future of the bride and bridegroom.
“As long as they produce children and keep the bloodline going,” said Gwen Robyns, “that’s all that’s required. Whether the bridegroom is homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual doesn’t matter, as long as the marriage looks good on the outside and is kept up for public appearances. It’s worse for gay men within the aristocracy because it’s the duty of the oldest male to produce an heir to pass on the family name, the property, and the title. So they’ve got to get married, no matter what their sexual orientation is, which accounts for the long established tradition in Britain of homosexual men marrying women simply to breed. Makes no difference what they do later on the side as long as they do it discreetly. That’s the hypocrisy of it all.”
In his memoir, Palimpsest, writer Gore Vidal reflects on the homoerotic preference of men for each other that is accepted as a fact of life in Great Britain, especially in public schools. “Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind,” Vidal writes. “I suppose this is still news to those who believe in the two teams: straight, which is good and unalterable; queer, which is bad and unalterable unless it proves to be only a Preference, which must then, somehow, be reversed, if necessary by force.” Within the British aristocracy, marriage was the force.
“The love that dare not speak its name” was the way Oscar Wilde’s young male lover had described men’s sexual preference for one another in 1895. At that time, men like Oscar Wilde, who married women but loved men, were considered degenerates whose sexual acts were punishable by imprisonment. Sixty-five years later nothing had altered that concept in England, and in 1960, after the announcement of Princess Margaret’s engagement, sexuality again became an issue.
The whispering started soon after the Queen Mother announced her daughter’s engagement and impending marriage in May. Ordinary people were pleased that the twenty-nine-year-old Princess, who had partied aimlessly for five years since renouncing Peter Townsend, seemed to have finally found happiness. For the public, her marriage to a commoner would lower a class barrier between the monarchy and the people and bring them closer to the throne. For those within royal circles, the announcement caused an audible rumble in the tectonic plates that underpin the British establishment. Not only was the bohemian photographer a commoner whose parents were divorced, but he also had a mother who was Jewish. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy hardly considered him an appropriate suitor for the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen, a royal princess who was fourth in the line of succession to the throne.
“Princess Margaret has announced her engagement to Tony Armstrong-Jones,” wrote Noel Coward in his diary on February 28, 1960. “Tony looks quite pretty, but whether or not the marriage is entirely suitable remains to be seen.” He recorded further disapproval from the Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandra. “They are not pleased over [the] engagement,” he wrote. “There was a distinct froideur when I mentioned it.”
Ronald Armstrong-Jones was shocked that his son was considering such a marriage. “I wish in heaven’s name this hadn’t happened,” he said. “It will never work out. Tony’s a far too independent sort of fellow to be subjected to discipline. He won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to anyone. He will have to walk two steps behind his wife, and I fear for his future.”
Tony’s closest friends agreed. “I sent a telegram,” said classmate Jocelyn Stevens, a former magazine editor, “and said: ‘Never has there been a more ill-fated assignment.’ ”
The Times editorial page concurred. “There is no recent precedent for the marriage of one so near to the Throne outside the ranks of international royalty and the British peerage.”
Even the New Statesman, a liberal publication expected to be enthusiastic, withheld approval. The magazine said that the suitability of this particular commoner to become a member of the royal family must be judged “with a leniency which only a few years before would have been unthinkable.”
The Queen was the first sovereign in five hundred years to admit a commoner into her immediate family. She tried to remedy the situation by offering Mr. Armstrong-Jones a title, but he refused.* A year later, when his wife became pregnant, he decided he wanted his children to be titled, so he accepted the Queen’s offer to become the Earl of Snowdon, also Viscount Linley of Nymans. The Manchester Guardian expressed a “tinge of disappointment that the plain, honest Mr. Armstrong-Jones should have a title thrust upon him.” People said the newly minted peer had lost his appeal. “As the husband of the Queen’s sister, Tony Armstrong-Jones had one very big claim on the sympathy of the British people. He had no handle to his name. He was, in fact, one of us… now he has lost even that most precious asset which was his birthright.”
Those close to the Princess were concerned that she was marrying on the rebound. They knew that Peter Townsend had written to her on October 9, 1959, to say that he was marrying a beautiful young Belgian tobacco heiress, twenty years old, whom he had met in Brussels soon after he arrived in exile. “She might be rich,” said the Princess, trying to dismiss the news, “but she’s not royal.” Within hours of receiving that letter, Margaret had elicited a marriage proposal from Armstrong-Jones.
“It’s true,” Margaret admitted many years later. “I had received a letter from Peter in the morning, and that evening I decided to marry Tony. It was not a coincidence. I didn’t really want to marry at all. Why did I? Because he asked me! Really, though, he was such a nice person in those days. He understood my job and pushed me to do things. In a way he introduced me to a new world.” Margaret said she managed to keep Tony’s proposal a secret for several months “because no one believed he was interested in women.”
Described in the press as “artistic,” “campy,” and “theatrical,” Antony Armstrong-Jones, twenty-nine, was the only child of a lawyer. The father had long since divorced Tony’s mother and remarried an actress, whom he also divorced. When his son’s engagement was announced, Ronald Armstrong-Jones was living with an airline stewardess thirty years his junior. He quickly married her so as not to embarrass his son, who was only one year younger than his new stepmother. Years before, Tony’s mother had married an Irish peer and was now the Countess of Rosse, which gave Tony a seat on the edge of the aristocracy. He attended Eton determined to become an architect and went on to Cambridge, but after a year he flunked out.
When he was sixteen he contracted polio. After hospitalization and several months in leg braces, he rehabilitated himself by designing a pair of skis with which he exercised to strengthen his leg muscles. He eventually developed a bouncy walk to hide his limp. Still, he identified with the handicapped and showed compassion for them. In later years he served on charity committees to raise money for medical research into disability. He also invented a wheelchair on a motorized platform to allow the incapacitated to move easily from room to room.
Tony’s uncle was the theatrical designer Oliver Messel, who was a close friend to Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward. They encouraged the late court photographer Baron, who specialized in royalty and society, to take on Tony as an apprentice. After working for Baron for several months, Tony opened his own photography studio in the Pimlico section of London, and with immense charm and ambition he began pursuing his own royal assignments. He photographed the young Duke of Kent and
, after that sitting, photographed the children of the Queen’s equerry. The Queen then asked him to come to Buckingham Palace to photograph Prince Charles and Princess Anne.
A few months later the photographer met Princess Margaret at the home of Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. The Princess, normally imperious, allowed herself to be approachable that evening, although she insisted that Tony address her as “ma’am,” something she demanded of everyone because, as she said, it was her due as royalty. (A close friend, when asked what the Princess was like, said, “She needs to hear the crack of a knee at least three times before breakfast.”) Tony cleverly appealed to her vanity by asking her advice about a fashion shoot he was doing for Vogue magazine. He later invited her to his apartment—and she accepted.
Although they came from far different backgrounds, the Princess and the photographer shared similar temperaments. Clever, witty, and sharp-tongued, both were petite rebels who chain-smoked cigarettes and slavered over pornographic movies. The photographer, barely five feet seven, longed to escape his class-enforced position, and the Princess, five feet tall in her platform heels, enjoyed flouting the strictures of society. Together they began a most unconventional love affair under the amused gaze of the Queen Mother. The Princess, disguised in a scarf and sunglasses, frequently sneaked out of Clarence House and was driven to the photographer’s apartment in Pimlico, where he entertained her in his bedroom, which he had painted purple. Thriving on the glamour of show business, they socialized with the trendy celebrities of the day like Mick Jagger, David Frost, Peter Sellers, and the Beatles.
“Tone and Pet—their nicknames for each other—enjoyed exploring taboos—the strange, the dark, the bizarre—fetishes, that sort of thing,” said a friend, who related how the couple dressed up in each other’s clothes and posed for pictures.
As a little boy, Tony occasionally dressed up in women’s clothes. One evening, with the encouragement of his stepmother, an actress, he dressed up as a parlor maid to serve dinner to his father and grandfather. He later attended parties in drag, and two years before his engagement, he entered the field of dress design. During his courtship he shocked Princess Margaret’s footman by wearing her makeup and dressing up in her elaborate party dresses and veiled hats. “I gaped with astonishment,” recalled the footman, “but Margaret’s sides were splitting from laughter at the sight of Tony’s bare legs with such spindly calves which showed out from underneath the Princess’s maroon pleated skirt…. His feet tottered in a delicate pair of the Princess’s sandals with the laces untied.”
The footman, David John Payne, wrote about this incident of cross-dressing in a book that angered the Queen Mother, who sued to prevent publication in England. She did not want the royal family embarrassed by the footman, particularly his allegation of having been the object of a sexual overture from Antony Armstrong-Jones. The British court issued an injunction in the United Kingdom, but the book was published in Paris, where readers of France Dimanche learned what were presented as intimate details of Margaret’s courtship.
The footman, who resigned his position before the royal wedding, described an incident that he said left him shaken. He recalled leaving Royal Lodge at Windsor where he had been helping the Princess select records to take to London:
I got up and left while she remained seated on the floor. I was halfway through the door when it burst open and Tony Armstrong-Jones came into the room. Seeing me, he exclaimed: “John, I’ve looked for you everywhere. Have a seat, darling.”
My heart stopped. Obviously, Tony hadn’t noticed the Princess on the floor behind the sofa, which accounted for his familiar tone with me. He was interrupted by the sudden rustle sounds of her skirt as she hastened to get up.
She looked at him, her face livid with anger. “ ‘John, sit down, darling’? What does that mean? To whom are you speaking?”
Tony was totally caught off guard by these questions in a glacial tone. He blushed and began to sway from one foot to the other.
“Oh, madame,” said Tony. “I didn’t know… I didn’t see you. I was looking for John.”
“And what do you mean by ‘darling’?” asked Margaret in a fierce voice.
“It’s an expression used all the time in the theater, madame,” he stammered.
Margaret said nothing to him, turned towards me, and in her most majestic voice said, “You may retire.”
I left her still looking at Tony, who was nonplussed; she continued to look shocked. Then I left, and having closed the door, I realized I was soaked in perspiration.
Obviously unamused by her fiancé’s familiarity with her footman, the Princess was relaxed about the dress-up games that Antony Armstrong-Jones liked to play. She joined him and assumed the male role by wearing suits and ties. They took turns photographing each other. She took a picture of him dressed as a child; he took a picture of her posing in his tuxedo, holding a cigar. Already they epitomized the swinging new decade of the sixties, in which the lines of sexual identity were blurred.
Because his mother was a countess, Antony Armstrong-Jones was considered privileged, but to aristocrats he was still a commoner who was now marrying above himself. This bold social leap, coupled with his artistic pursuits, subjected him to a certain amount of sniping in the press. Shortly before his marriage, Newsweek described him suggestively as “the uncommon commoner who once was set upon and de-trousered at a country house party by high-spirited male guests who saw him strolling with a camera round his neck. He weathered that indignity, chin up, just as he is making no apologies for his Bohemian cool-cat friends and showing no embarrassment in the unprecedented wave of pub and club innuendoes about his private life.”
The bizarre sexual implications annoyed some of his friends, who emphasized that all-male dining societies are a tradition at certain English schools. “At some of the Oxford debauches, men regularly dress up as women in strapless gowns and high heels,” explained one man. “The most notorious all-male dining society there is is the Piers Gaveston Society, named for King Edward II’s catamite, who, by dictionary definition, is a boy kept for unnatural purposes. According to legend, the King’s catamite was killed by being sodomized with a hot poker. So, in comparison, the little escapade of Antony Armstrong-Jones getting de-trousered is quite tame.”
Without addressing the issue of sexuality head on, the press made snide insinuations about Tony’s circle of male friends, who were described as “confirmed bachelors,” a journalistic euphemism for homosexuals.
“Tony didn’t know if he was Arthur or Martha,” said the British novelist Una-Mary Parker. “We’re not talking Adam and Eve; we’re talking Adam and Steve.”
“Not so,” said one of Tony’s Cambridge classmates. “I’d say he was more bisexual than homosexual. He’d never limit himself.”
Another said, “Let’s just put that subject under what Sir Osbert Sitwell called an enormous tolerance for the untoward or eccentric.”
A few weeks before the wedding, Tony announced the name of his best man, and the press pounced like cats on a mouse. They reported that the best man, who was married, had been convicted of a homosexual offense eight years earlier.
“Prince Philip went wild. Tony was a little too swish for his taste anyway, what with his scarlet velvet capes and his long-haired friends who wore beards instead of shoes,” said a friend. “But when Tony announced that Jeremy Fry was to stand up for him at his wedding, the Duke of Edinburgh exploded. Fry was flagrantly homosexual.”
So, under pressure, Tony withdrew Fry’s name, and the Palace quickly announced that the young man had come down with a case of jaundice and would be unable to take part in the wedding. A few days later Tony chose Jeremy Thorpe to be his best man, but Scotland Yard investigators informed the Palace that Thorpe might be the target of homosexual blackmail and, obviously, not an acceptable choice. The Queen’s courtiers informed Tony that his friend could not be allowed to stand up for him in Westminster Abbey in the presence of royalty. Again Tony was forced publicl
y to retreat.
Because this would be the first royal wedding televised, the Palace insisted that a proper image be presented. The courtiers, whose responsibility was to protect the Crown from scandal, worried that people might think the Queen condoned “degenerate” behavior if she allowed a known homosexual to be part of the royal wedding party.
“Ridiculous, I know,” said a friend of Tony’s many years later, “especially since most of the royal household has always been homosexual, to say nothing of the aristocracy and the clergy; but that’s how prickly the Palace was about the issue in 1960.”
Tony was summoned to the Palace for a hurried meeting with the Queen’s courtiers. Hours later they announced that the third choice for Tony’s best man would be Dr. Roger Gilliatt, son of the Queen’s surgeon-gynecologist. He was married to the magazine editor Penelope Gilliatt, for whom Tony occasionally had worked. He was hardly a close friend, as Gilliatt acknowledged. “Armstrong-Jones seems like a nice chap,” he said, “but I don’t know him very well.”
Parchment wedding invitations engraved with the words “The Lord Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother is commanded by Her Majesty to invite…” were sent from Clarence House to two thousand people. The Palace did not release the names for fear of press inquiries regarding the marital status of some of the guests. The bridegroom’s father and both his former wives, plus their husbands, were included in the guest list. Meanwhile the bride’s disgraced uncle, the Duke of Windsor, and his twice divorced wife were pointedly excluded. “Ah, well, perhaps there’ll be a funeral soon,” said the Duchess of Windsor, blithely trying to bat aside the continued royal ostracism. Poking fun at herself, she added, “At least they can’t say I haven’t kept up with the Joneses.”
As the only royal dynasty to stake its claim to the throne on its opposition to divorce, the House of Windsor could no longer preserve the pretense that divorce barred participation in royal events. Few people realized it at the time, but this royal wedding lowered the divorce barrier forever.