Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  On February 27, 1967, the earl categorically denied that there was a rift. The couple made a concerted effort to appear cozy. Believing it was in their children’s best interests to be raised in a two-parent home, neither of them wanted a divorce or a formal separation. Although the concept of fidelity was rather fluid in their household, Margaret nevertheless decided to end her affair with Douglas-Home.

  On March 25, 1967, the princess sent a maudlin “Dear John” letter to her paramour: Trust me as I trust you and love me as I love you. Our love has the passionate scent of new-mown grass and lilies about it. Not many people are lucky enough to have known any love like this. I feel so happy that it has happened to me.

  She did, however, express the wish that the two of them could one day rekindle their romance. But after the breakup Douglas-Home became suicidal; and on October 15, 1968, the thirty-six-year-old amateur pianist took his own life by overdosing on pills. Princess Margaret did not attend his funeral.

  Meanwhile, Snowdon was enjoying a liaison with the daughter of the Marquess of Reading, Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, who turned twenty-three in November 1969. But the affair ended and the earl patched up his relationship with Margaret. The royal couple made another attempt at damage control by having themselves photographed looking affectionate as they romped in the Caribbean.

  However, the marriage continued to flounder. In the early 1970s, the princess’s name was linked with various men who visited Les Jolies Eaux, her home on Mustique, one of whom, according to biographer Theo Aronson, was Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stones front man eventually built his own home on the island. Actor Peter Sellers, known for his portrayal of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther classics, declared himself in love with the princess in the late 1960s, although at the time he was married to the blond bombshell Britt Ekland. The Sellerses were divorced in 1968. Aronson asserts that Sellers sent Margaret love letters expressing his fantasy about marrying her, confessing to a friend, the actor Laurence Harvey, that the princess had “the same cup size, exactly” as one of Sellers’s previous infatuations, Sophia Loren.

  Unfortunately for Sellers, Margaret considered him “the most difficult man I know.” Regardless of the actor’s flights of fancy, the princess was aware that he was a womanizer and never viewed him as a prospective spouse.

  By this time the Snowdons’ marriage had deteriorated to such an extent that although they remained loving parents to their children, they had taken to dealing with each other primarily by writing notes. The communiqués were hardly cordial. One day the earl left a missive on his wife’s dressing table titled “20 reasons why I hate you.”

  Verbal exchanges were even less civil. “Oh, God, you bore me,” Snowdon once told the princess when they were out in public. At the end of his tether one day, the earl unleashed an exceedingly bizarre insult intended to wound his wife on multiple levels: “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you!”

  Snowdon even had the gall to make out with a shopgirl under a table after the local Red Cross Ball in Barbados. Although he was caught in the act by the event’s host (with Margaret’s bodyguard in tow as well), the earl expressed no shame about his little episode of flagrante, telling the bodyguard to “Fuck off, arselicker.”

  Still, divorce remained unthinkable because of the scandal it would cause the royal family—the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, looming large in the memories of Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, and their mother. Additionally, the queen mum was rather fond of Snowdon and tended to view the couple’s marital woes as more attributable to Margaret’s behavior than to the earl’s.

  In 1973, the year the queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, wed Captain Mark Phillips, Cecil Beaton characterized Margaret as “a little pocket monster” while referring to Snowdon, his archrival in the world of fashion and society photography, as “the horrid husband.”

  “Poor brute, I do feel sorry for her,” Beaton opined, his pen dripping with inky crocodile tears. “She was not very nice in the days when she was so pretty and attractive. She snubbed and ignored friends. But my God, has she been paid out! Her eyes seem to have lost their vigour, her complexion is now a dirty negligee pink satin. The sort of thing one sees in a disbanded dyer’s shop window.”

  Margaret was still viewed as not pulling her weight when it came to public appearances; and as Parliament debated whether to abolish her Civil List annuity, particularly as she had a successful husband who could support her, the princess embarked on another love affair.

  A couple of weeks after her forty-third birthday, in August 1973, Margaret met twenty-five-year-old Roddy (Roderic) Llewellyn at the Café Royal in Edinburgh. Llewellyn was her physical “type”—slender, sandy-haired, and slightly feylooking—and they soon fell in love. The princess’s children were said to have quickly accepted the presence of their mother’s new boy toy in their lives.

  While the princess trysted with Llewellyn on Mustique, Snowdon was carrying on an affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, the ex-wife of renowned director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. By then the Snowdons were estranged, although the earl was still living at Kensington Palace and the royal couple maintained the pretense of civility at public engagements.

  Unlike his wife’s affair, Snowdon’s extramarital relationship was not a social mismatch. Although Llewellyn’s father had been an Olympic equestrian, Roddy fit the mold of aimless upper-class twit. What little employment he’d had, he’d secured primarily through nepotism. Like Robin Douglas-Home, Llewellyn was a manic-depressive who was often suicidal. He was also bisexual. Margaret’s relationship with Roddy was fraught with tension on a number of counts: Not only was there a significant difference in their ages, but Llewellyn was Margaret’s social inferior. His lack of experience in the workplace left him with scant understanding of a paramour who had a highly demanding and very public role. Margaret was also one of the most overbearing and imperious women in the kingdom, and her sexual appetite frightened her young lover, who had never before enjoyed a long-term relationship with a woman.

  Toward the end of 1974, Llewellyn panicked and bolted, spending three weeks in Turkey finding himself. He returned to London, and Margaret, but his friends realized he was psychologically unstable. Margaret, too, had become horribly depressed after Llewellyn’s disappearance. One evening, a male friend hosting a house party was interrupted by a frantic phone call from the princess, who was threatening to commit suicide by throwing herself from her bedroom window. Panicked, the gentleman rang up the queen, who remained unfazed by her sister’s dramatics. With characteristic sangfroid Her Majesty informed the caller to “carry on with your house party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor.” According to Theo Aronson, Queen Elizabeth referred to Margaret’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn as “my sister’s guttersnipe life.”

  In November 1975, the forty-five-year-old princess earned a private rebuke from Roy Strong, a self-proclaimed “devoted monarchist,” and director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In one of his diary entries, Strong recorded, “She is, as we all know, tiresome, spoilt, idle and irritating. She has no direction, no overriding interest. All she now likes is la jeunesse dorée and young men.”

  Margaret seemed uninterested in doing anything that would contradict Strong’s observation. Quite the contrary, in fact. In February 1976, Margaret and Llewellyn were photographed romping in the surf on Mustique by Ross Waby, an employee of News International, a conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch. Although the princess and her lover had not been the only ones in the original shot, the photo was cleverly cropped to make it appear that the bikini-clad princess was frolicking with her bare-chested twenty-eight-year-old gigolo. Even more damning was the Private Eye spoof of the image, which placed the heads of Roddy and Margaret on the bodies of a loinclothed Tarzan and a completely nude Jane, captioning their lampoon, “Margaret & Roddy: The Picture They Tried To Ban: ‘Eye’ Exclusive.”

  After the provocative photograph was published in the News of the World, there could be no more denials from Kensington
Palace; the Snowdons’ marriage was over. However, it was Margaret who moved first, citing her husband’s affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg and thereby casting herself as the wronged party in a potential divorce proceeding. On March 19, 1976, Kensington Palace issued a formal statement announcing the Snowdons’ official separation. It was an immense embarrassment for the crown and for the entire royal family.

  But Margaret’s sybaritic lifestyle showed no signs of abating. She continued to pal around Mustique with pop stars and ex-cons, getting herself snapped skinny-dipping with a number of male friends, and fueling the fires of critics who lambasted her dereliction of duty. Tabloid photo scandals inevitably followed.

  She supported Llewellyn’s interest in becoming a lounge singer and his fascination with horticulture. And when he suffered an upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage, she stationed herself at his bedside. However, these activities were not exactly in keeping with her obligations as a member of the royal family, and once again Margaret’s Civil List income became the subject of debate. Liberal MP Douglas Hoyle referred to the princess as a “parasite” and demanded that Margaret decide whether she wanted to continue “swanning around the West Indies or get on with her job.”

  On Sunday April 5, 1978, the Sun printed an article falsely alleging that the queen had presented her sister with an ultimatum: “Give Up Roddy Or Quit.”

  The Church then weighed in on the issue. Margaret was scolded by the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Graham Leonard, who reminded her that “if you accept the public life, you must accept a severe restriction on your personal conduct.” The bishop then suggested to the princess that she absent herself from society for a while in order to straighten out her private life.

  But according to Theo Aronson, it was Llewellyn who received a message from the highest circles requesting that he to skip town for three months. He departed for Africa, and on May 3, 1978, Margaret was hospitalized for hepatitis and advised to abstain from alcohol for a full year.

  On May 10, Kensington Palace announced that Princess Margaret was suing the Earl of Snowdon for divorce. Six weeks later the princess had her decree absolute. And on December 15, Snowdon wed Lucy Lindsay-Hogg.

  Nineteen seventy-eight was also the year that Group Captain Peter Townsend’s memoir Time and Chance was published, providing the public with some of the more intimate (if sanitized) details of their star-crossed romance.

  Margaret called it the worst year of her life. But her woes were far from over. Colin Tennant’s oldest son sold photographs of the princess impersonating Sophie Tucker, the singer nicknamed “the Last of the Red-Hot Mamas.” And, for the third time, Roddy Llewellyn’s older brother made a few bob on his brother’s royal affair, selling a serialized article to the News of the World.

  Worst of all, early in 1979 Roddy himself was nabbed driving while intoxicated with another woman in his car—Naima Kelly. Kelly’s husband sued his wife for divorce, citing Llewellyn as corespondent. Yet Margaret refused to hand Llewellyn his walking papers. People who knew them as a couple observed a genuine and mutual affection between them. Whatever his faults, Llewellyn was not a gold digger.

  That same year, Margaret landed in hot water during a formal visit to Chicago, where dinner guests at a charity reception heard her insult the Irish, referring to them as “pigs”—rather bad form in the presence of the windy city’s Irish-American mayor, Jane Byrne.

  The princess’s press got worse when she ostentatiously turned her back on California governor Jerry Brown at a Hollywood function after he inadvertently omitted the word “royal” in addressing her, and then informed Her Royal Highness that he could stay for only the first course because he had to attend another event that evening. When Brown’s girlfriend, the pop star Linda Ronstadt, casually touched the princess’s shoulder, Margaret “shrugged like a punch from a boxer,” observed another guest, the Britishborn actor Michael Caine.

  The forty-nine-year-old princess underwent plastic surgery to smooth out her jawline in January 1980. That year she logged several international visits, including one to Canada, where she was feted at a Wild West frontier-style event, but the populace was unimpressed by her presence. A Toronto Sun editorial asserted, “She is out West being given the top hat and curtsy treatment as if she were something special, rather than a Royal Baggage who has, by her lifestyle, forfeited all right to respect and homage.”

  Perhaps to avoid further bad press, Margaret did not attend Roddy Llewellyn’s thirty-third birthday party, hosted by disco owner Peter Stringfellow on October 9, 1980. However, a connection was made there that would sound the death knell for the royal affair. Llewellyn realized that he was falling in love with an old friend, Tatiana (“Tania”) Soskin. On Mustique the following February he confessed his passion for Tania to the princess and Margaret let him go, with her blessing. The couple was married in July 1981.

  But there was a far more significant wedding that month. After Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer exchanged vows on July 29, 1981, Margaret found herself characterized as “the Princess Diana of her day.” For many years the queen’s sister felt a kinship with Diana that she never had for any of her blood relations. And while the two women shared several interests, such as shopping, the arts, and palling around with pop icons, Margaret was quick to dismiss their reputation as mere glamour girls, remarking, “The Princess of Wales said all the things I was saying twenty-five years ago. Clothes aren’t her prime concern. They weren’t mine, as if we were just unreal figures straight from Dynasty,” Margaret insisted.

  Her own antics were yesterday’s news. Media focus was shifting to the foibles of the next generation of royals and their own soon-to-be-failed marriages and scandalous love affairs.

  Margaret and Snowdon’s children fared well, though. David, Viscount Linley became a highly respected cabinetmaker and restaurateur, wedding the Honorable Serena Stanhope in 1993. His younger sister, Sarah, now a professional painter, was married to Daniel Chatto the following year.

  During the 1980s, the princess’s name was perpetually linked with a string of men, and she also continued to enjoy her two biggest vices, “cigarettes and drink,” insisting “and I don’t see myself giving those up.” Misplacing her pack of fags one day, Margaret asked a nearby footman, “Where are my fucking Winstons?” But after a nonmalignant tumor was removed from her lung in 1985, she was asked to kick the habit for a while. The best she could manage were filter-tips.

  In the summer of 1992, a very nervous Margaret saw Group Captain Peter Townsend for the first time in thirty-four years. Now seventy-seven years old, he was visiting London from Paris, where he had been enjoying a happy marriage to Marie-Luce Jamagne. During the 1990s two different men stepped forward, each claiming to be the secret love child of Margaret and Peter, but their assertions were quickly and easily dismissed as fabrication and fraud. On June 9, 1995, Townsend died from stomach cancer at the age of eighty. Margaret was “saddened by the news,” according to the formal statement issued by Buckingham Palace.

  That year, Margaret’s Civil List income was terminated, although she was not the only royal to see her annuity dry up. By then the princess was receiving £220,000 annually, on which she was obligated to pay taxes; however she received one hundred percent tax relief on expenses related to her formal duties. The queen personally assumed the tab for the members of the royal family who had been dumped from the Civil List.

  In the spring of 1994 some of Margaret’s passionate correspondence with her former lover Robin Douglas-Home had been published in a book penned by royal watcher Noel Botham. The princess was mortified by the letters’ reappearance but declined to publicly discuss it, on the assumption that if she didn’t call attention to the issue it would quietly go away. The palace issued a statement that it was merely “an old story.” By then, the press had become sympathetic to the princess, recasting her oncewild behavior as that of a lonely woman searching for love and happiness.

  Snowdon had been searching, too, and with similar
luck, stepping out on his second wife as well. His lover of more than twenty years, the fifty-five-year-old journalist Ann Hills, committed suicide in 1997 by overdosing on pills and champagne. By then the earl needed a cane to ambulate, thanks to the effects of aging and his childhood bout with polio. Yet his physical impediments didn’t diminish his libido. After Ann Hill’s death, as his marriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg hit the skids, Snowdon took another lover, a magazine editor who bore him a son.

  The sixty-seven-year-old Margaret had a stroke while she was on Mustique in February 1998. Although she suffered no paralysis, she became forgetful on occasion and it took a long time for her to recuperate. And in early March 1999, as the result of a faulty thermostat, the princess badly scalded her feet when she turned on the bath tap instead of the shower. For health reasons, Margaret soon gave up her Caribbean retreat, Les Jolies Eaux. The burns she had sustained healed very slowly; the fact that she’d been a heavy smoker since the age of fifteen retarded the process as well. Margaret’s biographer Tim Heald claims that for several years she suffered from Raynaud’s disease, which affects the body’s circulation, an ailment that may also have been caused by her inveterate chain-smoking.

  With the help of painkillers, the princess soldiered on, maintaining her royal obligations. On January 3, 2001, Buckingham Palace revealed that she might have had another, milder stroke over the Christmas holidays. And on March 27, the seventy-year-old Margaret suffered a third stroke, losing the sight in one eye and nearly all movement on her left side. From then on, still as vain as ever, she couldn’t bear to be seen by men.

  The princess gamely attended her mother’s hundredand-first birthday celebration in August 2001. Wheelchair-bound and sporting dark glasses, she looked far worse than the queen mother.

  Margaret died on February 9, 2002, at King Edward VII Hospital. She was cremated and her remains were interred in St. George’s Chapel beside those of her father, and her mother, who died on March 30, 2002.