Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  From their point of view, the bohemians enjoyed the cachet – ironic, satirical, tongue-in-cheek, but cachet nonetheless – of having a royal on display, a real-life Princess to lend a bit of pageantry to things. It didn’t really matter that she could be difficult. In a way, it was her party piece. If she happened to round off an evening with a display of her famous hauteur, then so much the better.

  As for Margaret, she never quite understood the stuff and nonsense to which she found herself drawn – or perhaps she understood the stuff, but not the nonsense. ‘What is a bohemian? What does it mean?’ she once asked a lady-in-waiting, in all innocence. ‘Well, Ma’am,’ came the reply, ‘with Tony it means he won’t always turn up to lunch when he says he will.’ Bohemians were, as she never quite appreciated, not entirely to be trusted: the moment you left the room they would start making their silly little remarks, and on returning home they were prone to penning catty little observations about you in their diaries.

  Her introduction to la vie bohème coincided with the first reference to her in a literary diary as ‘the Royal Dwarf’. The author was the femme fatale Barbara Skelton; the entry was for 2 December 1951, when Princess Margaret was twenty-one.

  That evening, Skelton and her first husband, the eminent man of letters Cyril Connolly, had been invited to a Tennessee Williams play, followed by a large party thrown by Lord and Lady Rothermere, at which, they had been promised, Cyril would be placed next to Princess Margaret. Cyril was almost giddy with anticipation, but Barbara remained defiantly unimpressed. ‘He had spent his day in preparation having nose-trims, haircuts and all his ear whiskers removed,’ she confided sniffily to her diary.

  On their arrival at the Rothermeres’, the fractious couple were ushered into a drawing room, and then downstairs, where there was a parting of the ways, with some guests allowed into the dining room, and others cordoned off into a sort of holding area for the also-rans. Barbara made for the dining room, but ‘on reaching the room where the supper tables were laid, I have the folding doors shut in my face by a swarm of butlers. Find myself in an adjoining room which has been turned into a bar where about four well-heeled couples have gathered and are quietly sipping champagne. They look at me, as much as to say, we got it too, but we’re pretending to like it in here.’

  A waiter offered her a bowl of soup. At that moment, Barbara spotted Cyril at the far end of the hall, ‘trying not to catch my eye’. Never one to nod things through, she rushed up to him and screamed, ‘It’s no good turning your back on me.’ But Cyril was already ‘being hustled away to the Royal Dwarf’s table by Diana Cooper’. With that, ‘he disappears through the magic doors and from the throwouts’ foyer I see him eating a hearty supper and beaming across at the Royal Dwarf’.

  Skelton stood fuming in the corner. She had clearly had a bit to drink. The way she remembered it, everyone was doing their level best to avoid her. The up-and-coming painter Lucian Freud came in and followed suit, but she was determined, and ‘pushing my way through the huddle of throwouts’, attempted to engage him in conversation. Suddenly, Lady Rothermere, from her chair at the royal table, spotted his dilemma, and beckoned frantically. ‘“There’s a place for another GENTLEMAN here,” she shouted, and came over to drag him away.’

  Stuck in her salon des refusés with no one to talk to, Skelton sat down with a glass and said out loud, to no one in particular, ‘There’s only one thing to do. Get drunk.’ She then pinioned Renée Fedden, wife of the diplomat and author Robin Fedden, and talked at her for a solid hour, after which, ‘with a look of desperation’, Mrs Fedden seized the opportunity to ask a man for a taxi fare before beetling off. Skelton asked this benefactor what on earth was the matter with her. ‘She doesn’t like you, my dear,’ he explained.

  At last, the smart dinner in the other room came to an end, and ‘Cyril reappears well-supped and beaming, followed by the rest of the privileged suppers. They all emerge with a healthy tan, the acclaimed heroes of a Shackleton expedition, and mingle with the throwouts.’

  Skelton judged that this was the perfect time to tell Cyril exactly what she thought of him, ‘but we are interrupted by Orson Welles, so I try to be offensive to him but he doesn’t notice’.

  Sensing trouble, Connolly told Skelton that he was going home, and left. Making no bones about her drunkenness, Skelton was beginning to draw comment even from those paid not to notice such things: as a waiter passed by, she overheard him mutter, ‘Fill her up.’ Undeterred, she dragged her friend Mark Culme-Seymour upstairs for a quick dance, but within seconds of launching themselves on the dance floor, they were interrupted by ‘a fearful crash’. Looking over her shoulder, she noticed an enormous vase in pieces on the floor. Though her dance partner said he didn’t think it was their fault, she nevertheless decided that now was a good time to leave for home, until it dawned on her that she had no money for a taxi.

  What Connolly never seems to have confessed to Barbara Skelton is that his own encounter with the young Princess that evening left much to be desired. The truth was to emerge twenty-three years later, following Connolly’s death. In an obituary of his old friend for the TLS, Stephen Spender recalled asking him what had happened on the night in question:

  He said (as I noted in my diary): ‘When we were introduced I expected she would say: “What, THE Cyril Connolly!” Instead of which she didn’t even look at me, but hurried by, followed by a Lady-in-Waiting saying: “Temper! Temper!”’

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  Social historians may point to Skelton’s 1951 diary entry as the first reference to Princess Margaret as a Royal Dwarf, but it was certainly not to be the last. In future, her height was often invoked by those who wished to scorn her, but as the years rolled by, it was joined by other weapons in their armoury.

  ‘Fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved Princess Margaret’, the maverick Tory MP Alan Clark wrote in his diary on Thursday, 10 June 1982. In a letter to Maya Angelou on 30 April 1992, Jessica Mitford remarked on ‘Princess Margaret, & smallness of her: Nancy used to call her the Royal Dwarf’. Writing to the actor Denis Goacher on 14 December 1975, the comic actor Kenneth Williams mentioned that ‘I saw Gordon Jackson in the canteen. He said he had been lunching with the Queen the day before. When he congratulated Princess Margaret on Snowdon’s documentary about midgets – “The Little People” – she replied “not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home I’m afraid” and he said “I suddenly realised, they’re all TINY! The Queen, and Margaret, and the mum …!”’

  Chatting to Snowdon in June 1980, James Lees-Milne noted in his diary, ‘How small he is, almost a dwarf …’ To Auberon Waugh, the Snowdons were ‘the two highest paid performing dwarves in Europe’.

  Nor was her sister spared. After Ted Hughes received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry from the Queen, he mentioned his alarm at her height to his editor and fellow poet Craig Raine. ‘“You know she’s small,” he said, shaking his head, “but you don’t know how small. She’s this big.” He measured an inch between his finger and thumb. “It’s like meeting Alice in Wonderland.”’

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  In August 1967, Cyril Connolly was given a second chance to impress the Princess, having been invited to a house party on Sardinia by Ann Charteris, who in a previous incarnation had been Lady Rothermere, but after a divorce, a marriage and a death was now Ann Fleming, the wealthy widow of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

  Ann Fleming described the comings and goings in a letter to the Duchess of Devonshire. Roy Jenkins had left a few days before, his departure followed by ‘a temporary lull shattered by the arrival of M. Bowra and further shattered by C. Connolly’.

  Connolly, it emerged, had been distracted by the presence in the sea below of ‘a flotilla anchored below our windows, the Snowdons and the Aga’,* a spectacle which was, observed Fleming, ‘better than the Derby through the field glasses’. Knowing that Princess Margaret was so near, Connolly found himself unable to relax. ‘Cyril made fearfully restl
ess by vicinity of Snowdons, saying not to meet them was like being in Garden of Eden without seeing God!’

  A man she described as a ‘local tycoon’, but failed to name, then phoned to invite Ann Fleming, and Ann Fleming alone, to dine with ‘Margaret and Tony’, as he breezily called them. When she told Cyril of her destination, he was ‘distraught’ at the idea of missing out, so she kindly engineered an invitation for him, and for Maurice Bowra too.

  This dinner proved a huge success. As she was leaving, Princess Margaret happened to mention that she and Tony had no plans for the next day. Ann Fleming noticed that this sent the tycoon into a state of apoplexy, as ‘the poor brute was lunching with me’, but she niftily solved the problem by inviting the Snowdons along too. ‘Cyril beams,’ she reported.

  Next morning Cyril rises at 11.30 and asks what I have ordered special for lunch, I say nothing since I can only communicate with Italians in deaf and dumb language.

  He scowls, and says did I notice what the Princess drank last night, I say no, he says it was white wine and martinis and may he go to hotel for the right stuff. I say yes, and have to pay enormous bill. Illustrious guests arrive, and since it is buffet I am the parlour maid; they stay till 3.30 and ask if they may return at 6.30 to record Maurice singing 1914 songs, I go to bed, they return at 5.30 from the sea and walk straight into my bedroom while I am struggling into skirt, then they have acrimonious discussion because she does not want to be alone while he water skis, finally he departs and we all talk daintily, then repair to her hotel swimming pool.

  Princess Margaret was, she continued, ‘marooned by the Aga who is gone to collect a new yacht’.

  From the side of the pool, Bowra and Fleming watched Lord Snowdon water-skiing in the distance, and ‘best of all princess and Cyril in pool, Cyril looking like a blissful hippo!’

  But once out of the pool, Connolly continued to disturb the equilibrium: ‘It would be OK without Cyril who complains of mosquitoes, food and climate, and only wants royalty and money; now he has met the Snowdons he dreams of being invited on the Aga’s yacht saying wistfully, “but if I was, I might be expected to act charades on water skis”!’

  For Maurice Bowra, the Sardinian jaunt proved most unsatisfactory. His final verdict on Princess Margaret was unequivocal. She was, he said, ‘a tremendous blood-sucker, and, like her sister, a bit of a sour puss’. Contemplating the advance of old age, he consoled himself with a list of things he need never do again: ‘Sardinia heads the list. Royalty comes jolly nearly as high.’ To Noel Annan, he even complained that the Princess had given him mumps.

  As for Sardinia, he thought it ‘a horrible place. Very ugly. No mountains, no olive trees, no cypresses, but lumps of rock and scrub. On this is planted a top bogus town, which would just do as the stage setting for Carmen in Costa Rica.’ It was populated, he complained, by ‘the English rich – Princess Margaret, American queens, lots of Austrians with Australian passports, Roman duchesses complaining about the disappearance of the British Empire. Not again.’

  The ‘American queens’ to whom he referred were, it transpires, the caustic novelist and essayist Gore Vidal and his boyfriend Howard Austen, who happened to be staying next door with Diana Phipps.

  All in all, Vidal didn’t enjoy his time there either, describing it as ‘a terrible place, made worse by the quarrelling Snowdons’. In a nightclub on her birthday, the Princess and Snowdon had what Vidal described as ‘a splendid row … they’re both nice separately but together hell’. Snowdon had spent his time pursuing his old hobby of flicking lit cigarettes at his wife, before going off to dance with Diana Phipps, leaving Margaret with Vidal.

  ‘Margaret said, “Let’s dance.” I said, “I don’t dance.”’

  The next day their paths crossed again, over lunch with Ann Fleming, who Vidal felt was ‘a witty, rather nasty woman’.

  Princess Margaret said, ‘I want to apologize to you for our behaviour last night. It was intolerable and I’ve been trying to write a letter of apology all day. Thank God we met at lunch and I can say it.’ Vidal accepted her apology. ‘She’s well brought up,’ he concluded. Shortly afterwards, reading the diaries of the duc de Saint-Simon, it occurred to him that ‘only the French master of social cynicism could have done the royal bickering justice’.

  * Not the costly cast-iron cooker, but His Royal Highness the Aga Khan.

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  At the start of the following year, 1968, the Tynans, Ken and Kathleen, threw a dinner party for eight at their house in Thurloe Square, SW7. The other guests were Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, Harold Pinter and his wife Vivien Merchant, and Peter Cook and his wife Wendy Snowden.

  The evening got off to a shaky start when Kenneth Tynan attempted to present Vivien Merchant to Princess Margaret. Keen to parade her anti-Establishment credentials, Merchant simply carried on talking to Peter Cook. ‘I put out my hand, which was refused, so I sort of drew it up as if it were meant for another direction,’ Princess Margaret told her biographer.

  And so to dinner, where Merchant, still in an uncooperative mood, found that she had been placed next to Lord Snowdon, who had recently photographed her playing Lady Macbeth at Stratford. ‘Of course, the only reason we artistes let you take our pictures is because you are married to her!’ she said, stabbing her finger in the direction of Princess Margaret. ‘Hereabouts,’ recalled Kenneth Tynan, ‘Harold began to drink steadily. Indeed, everyone did. Princess M. was awkwardly unruffled, but every word had registered on that watchful little psyche.’

  After dinner they all sat down to watch some blue movies, in line with Tynan’s desire to be at the helm of the permissive society. Prior to the showing, he had taken the trouble to warn Snowdon that ‘some pretty blue material’ awaited them. ‘It would be good for M,’ Snowdon replied, graciously.

  The first few films were English, and comparatively mild. ‘The English bits were amateurish and charming, with odd flashes of nipple and pubic bush, and the American stuff with fish-eye lens and zoom was so technically self-conscious that the occasional bits of explicit sex passed almost unnoticed – e.g. a fast zoom along an erect prick looked like a flash zoom up a factory chimney,’ Tynan wrote in his diary. ‘But when the Genet started the atmosphere began to freeze.’

  The Jean Genet film was Un chant d’amour (1950), set in a French prison and featuring cigarettes and penises in roughly equal proportions. Two years before the dinner party, a court in California had sat through the film twice before concluding that it ‘explicitly and vividly revealed acts of masturbation, oral copulation, the infamous crime against nature, voyeurism, nudity, sadism, masochism and sex’, and furthermore, that it was ‘calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices’. The ban was upheld by the US Supreme Court, and the film was still banned in the UK when Princess Margaret and her fellow guests sat down to watch what Tynan described as its ‘many quite unmistakeable shots of cocks – cocks limp and stiff, cocks being waved, brandished, massaged or waggled – intercut with lyrical fantasy sequences as the convicts imagine themselves frolicking in vernal undergrowth’.

  A barrier had been crossed, and everyone seemed at a loss as to how to get back. Instead, they just stared blankly at the screen, trusting that the moment would pass. On an earlier occasion, Princess Margaret had made, in Kathleen Tynan’s words, ‘small squeaking noises of disapproval’ when forced to endure a film about bullfighting. But now there was nothing but an icy hush. ‘Silence became gelid in the room,’ recalled Tynan. And then, at last, salvation: ‘Suddenly, the inspired Peter Cook came to the rescue … He supplied a commentary, treating the movie as if it were a long commercial for Cadbury’s Milk Flake Chocolate and brilliantly seizing on the similarity between Genet’s woodland fantasies and the sylvan capering that inevitably accompanies, on TV, the sale of anything from cigarettes to Rolls-Royces. Within five minutes we were all helplessly rocking with laughter, Princess M. included. It was a performance of genius … I hugged Peter for the funnie
st improvisations I have ever heard in my life.’

  Order having been restored, the guests departed with a spring in their step, though the spring in Harold Pinter’s step proved erratic. Having made his farewells, he tumbled all the way downstairs.

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  Throughout her life, Princess Margaret’s entrances into bohemia tended to set everyone on edge. Anti-monarchists in particular would react in a strange way to her presence, either becoming more obsequious or more aggressive, or – catastrophically – a rapidly alternating mix of the two. On the way to a gala dinner for the film My Fair Lady in January 1965, the Hollywood mogul Jack Warner gave his curvaceous young escort – who had changed her name to ‘Lady Scarborough’ for the occasion – a rapid tutorial in one of the most basic rules of royal etiquette. ‘Don’t say shit in front of the Princess,’ he said.

  In fact, the self-styled Lady Scarborough behaved impeccably in the Princess’s presence, while more seasoned members of society failed to catch the right tone. Lady Diana Cooper – never the Princess’s greatest fan – pointedly refused to curtsey, then came up later to apologise.

  ‘Oh, but I’m sure you did curtsey,’ replied the Princess.

  ‘No – ramrod!’

  My Fair Lady’s costume designer, Cecil Beaton, looked on aghast as the actress Rachel Roberts, ‘a bit tight’, tottered up to the Princess and said, more than once, ‘I don’t know what I call you,’ without waiting for a reply. Her husband, Rex Harrison, who played Professor Henry Higgins, that stickler for correct manners, attempted to butt in: ‘You call her Ma’am!’ but Roberts appeared not to hear, and kept repeating the same question, over and over again. Eventually, both Princess Margaret and Rex Harrison began chanting the same reply – ‘You call her Ma’am! You call her Ma’am!’ – while Roberts persisted in yelling, ‘I don’t know what I call you! I don’t know what I call you!’