Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  68

  Given time, neurologists may well establish a firm connection between mental illness and the writing of books about the Royal Family. But which comes first? Are mad men driven to write about royalty? Or does writing about royalty drive men mad?

  The authors of royal books divide into fawners and psychos. The fawners employ the adjectives ‘radiant’, ‘gracious’, ‘vivacious’, ‘jubilant’ ‘delightful’ and ‘enchanting’ with unusual frequency. They coo over the most banal royal remark, treating it as proof of sanctity, but are seldom able to decide whether the royal in question is praiseworthy for being so exceptional, or for being so unexceptional. Ever since the television documentary The Royal Family was first screened in 1969, the trend has been towards praising the unexceptional. Despite it all, the biographers seem to say, They are just like Us. They chat, they squabble, they breakfast, they barbecue: praise them! praise them!

  Royal biographers relish detailing the gorgeous ordinariness of the Royal Family. In other biographies, anecdotes are employed to highlight idiosyncrasies; in royal biographies, they are more likely to be there to celebrate the commonplace; the punch-line is that there is no punch-line.

  Witness this paragraph from Charles Higham and Roy Moseley’s Elizabeth and Philip: The Untold Story:

  The Queen and Prince Philip drove themselves to the polo ground. Philip drove a station wagon, the Queen her favourite Rover. Sometimes, instead of changing into polo gear at the castle, Prince Philip was seen changing, quite uncomfortably, in his automobile, sitting sideways, the door open, pulling his breeches on. Then he would stand up to fasten the belt.

  And so it goes on:

  One wet day, the Queen was seen driving her car quite fast to the back of the tent. The Queen Mother was seated beside her, with a tartan rug rolled up in her arms, along with various magazines. The Queen pulled up sharply, jumped out of the Rover, walked briskly up to a white-coated attendant, and asked about the pitch and whether the rain had damaged the grass or would threaten the horses. The Queen Mother was left behind to get out of the car and make her own way to the spectator seats. On another occasion, the passenger door refused to open, and –

  Enough! For royal biographers, there is no division between the interesting and the uninteresting; in fact, the less interesting anything is, the more they are interested. The assumption behind this assiduous chronicling of royal normality is that there is something inherently special, almost other-worldly, about it. Even when the veteran royal oleaginist Godfrey Talbot gushes over the Queen Mother’s ‘effortless smile’ in his BBC Book of Royal Memories, he seems to be suggesting that such supreme effortlessness could not have come about without supreme effort.

  Rare is the royal biography that fails to quote Walter Bagehot’s line, ‘Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.’ But, through his nervousness, Bagehot seems to acknowledge that the mystery of monarchy is no mystery at all, but rather a neat illusion, the magic no more than a conjuring trick. After decades of daylight, one is forced to ask two questions. If they are so ordinary, why are they so special? And, if they are so special, why are they so ordinary?

  In many royal biographies, the humdrum is peppered with intimations of the divine. Ingrid Seward’s Sarah, a pioneering biography of Sarah, Duchess of York, written before the first of the Duchess’s numerous falls from grace, is packed with chummy, girl-next-door detail: her father, Major Ron, likes watching repeats of The Two Ronnies; giant teddies ‘jostle for position’ on the sofas of the Yorks’ new house; her husband Andrew is ‘very good with children and loves just being at home with his wife and two baby girls’; and ‘like the Queen and the Queen Mother, Sarah loves brooches’. Yet there are also constant reminders (‘The Duchess of York exudes energy; she fills a room with her presence’) that this is no ordinary human being.

  The psychopaths, on the other hand, blame the Royal Family for all that is wrong with the world, and attribute diabolic motives to everything they do. In this way, they too invest them with superhuman powers.

  In her day, the Queen Mother attracted many more fawners than psychos. Penelope Mortimer’s 1986 biography of her now seems at the vanguard of dottiness. Mortimer describes Her Majesty in the war years as looking ‘remarkably plain’, before going on to condemn her as a sex vixen: ‘Sexuality was her most formidable characteristic. This doesn’t mean that she invited anyone to bed. On the contrary. High moral principles, by inhibiting activity, produce an enormous reserve of sexual power. It was this power that transformed her husband from an inarticulate nobody … she is the most successful sex-symbol that British royalty has ever known.’

  In other instances, royal biographers are beset by split personalities, their inner sycophant battling with their inner psychopath. Anthony Holden spent the first half of his career genuflecting to the Prince of Wales (‘Prince Charles has more natural intelligence than most previous heirs apparent, and a more conscientious spirit than a nation has any right to expect’), before executing what journalists term a ‘reverse ferret’ and spending the second half of his career pulling the Prince of Wales to pieces, complaining that, among other misdemeanours, he ‘used his unelected office to bankrupt British architects’. Even Hugo Vickers, one of the most reliable royal biographers, can sometimes seem conflicted. He concluded Debrett’s Book of the Royal Wedding (1981) with the judgement, ‘He [Prince Charles] is indeed fortunate to have found in Lady Diana Spencer somebody who is, in his words, “pretty special”.’ Yet in his biography of the Queen Mother (2005), he reveals that he was simultaneously detailing his beady misgivings about that very same royal wedding in his private diary: ‘The Royal Wedding,’ he wrote, ‘is no more romantic than a picnic amid the wasps.’

  Royal biographers who are either authorised or semi-authorised end up in hock to their masters and mistresses. The acknowledgements in Anne de Courcy’s 2008 biography of Lord Snowdon begin: ‘I would like to express my great gratitude to Lord Snowdon. He was the perfect biographical subject, not only because of his brilliant talent, campaigning work for others, colourful life, complex and interesting personality, and kindness giving up hours of his time to lengthy taped interviews but because he never once attempted to influence what I wrote. It only remains to add not only my admiration but also my affection.’

  De Courcy acknowledges that ‘The material in this book is primarily based on many hours of talk with Lord Snowdon, who also gave me full and unfettered access to his files and archives.’ At the back of the book, she offers brief source notes for each chapter: ‘Most of the material in this book, unless otherwise stated, comes from Tony himself, as the result of taped interviews and of the access to his files that he generously gave me.’

  Though de Courcy offers an extremely thorough (and not entirely starry-eyed) account of Snowdon’s life and career, more than one reviewer felt that her affection for her subject was sometimes in danger of slipping into infatuation. Others disagreed. ‘How refreshing to read a biography in which the author is half in love with her subject,’ wrote Richard Davenport-Hines in the Sunday Times. ‘There are none of the usual patronising putdowns, envious backbiting or mean-spirited cavilling in Anne de Courcy’s portrait of the Earl of Snowdon.’

  On page 155, de Courcy offers her account of the end of Princess Margaret’s affair with Robin Douglas-Home, who committed suicide eighteen months after they broke up. Apparently, in March 1967, having been told by Snowdon to call off the affair,

  the Princess telephoned Douglas-Home and told him she would never be able to see him again. To Tony she said, ‘He wasn’t nearly as good a lover as you, darling’ (a phrase that she would use again to her husband several times in the future).

  It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to trace the source of this information. It could only have been Tony or Margaret, and by the time the book was published, Margaret had been dead six years. History is written by the victor.

  69

  Tony’s simmering enmity meant that Co
lin Tennant saw precious little of Princess Margaret over the early years of her marriage; and whenever they did bump into each other, the wedding gift would pass unmentioned. But the deterioration of her marriage prompted a revival in the old friendship. Dining with the Tennants in 1968, she asked whether the plot of land on Mustique was still on offer, and if so, did it include a house? Caught on the back foot, Tennant answered yes to both questions. Deftly, the Princess had just managed to negotiate herself a free home.

  By the end of the dinner she had invited herself to stay on the island. Before she arrived, Tennant staked out a suitable patch of land. Wearing a trouser suit as protection from the mosquitoes, the Princess surveyed it approvingly. Oddly enough, it would be the first and last piece of land she ever owned.

  She immediately set about claiming more: when Tennant’s back was turned, she pulled up his stakes and replanted them further afield, awarding herself more acreage. Realising her ploy, Tennant waited until her back was turned and then returned the stakes to their original holes. This pas de deux continued for a while, back and forth, but Margaret proved the more determined, and finished her stay with a full ten acres. Finally she persuaded Tennant that Tony’s uncle, the theatre designer Oliver Messel, would be just the person to design a house, for two reasons: a) she would gain a suitably glamorous home, and b) the involvement of his beloved uncle might jolt Tony into joining her on Mustique. As things turned out, Tony never revisited the island, and spent his time complaining to Margaret that Tennant was cynically using her to promote it.*

  For his part, Tennant affected to miss Tony. ‘I was sorry T could not bear me, because he was perfect for PM,’ he wrote in notes for an autobiography he died before completing. ‘An occasional drop of his Angostura into our Gin Fizz would have jazzed up our Jolie Eaux.’

  Margaret finally moved into her house, the aforesaid ‘Les Jolies Eaux’, in 1973. She furnished it mainly with free gifts hoovered up during her annual visits to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Her tableware was donated by successive porcelain factories, parting presents for official visits. ‘The whole place was really terribly plain,’ recalled Tennant. ‘There was a sofa facing the sea with a comfortable armchair on either side with a basketry kind of coffee table in front. There was no evidence at all of her being a Royal person other than a rather small reproduction of the picture of The Queen by Annigoni which hung beside her desk.’

  There were, however, clues elsewhere, not least in Tennant’s frantic preparations for her twice-yearly visits. ‘He collapsed with exhaustion when Princess Margaret left the island,’ recalls Nicholas Courtney. ‘He put every ounce of energy into making it fun for her.’ And few conventional tourists arrive with a royal protection officer and a lady-in-waiting dancing attendance.

  The Princess’s timetable on Mustique was unvarying. Rising at 11 a.m., she would take a cup of coffee with her lady-in-waiting. On one occasion the lady-in-waiting in question, her cousin Jean Wills, tried to slip out for a quick walk before their coffee appointment, only to be caught red-handed and, according to Tennant, ‘soundly berated’.

  Margaret would then make her way to the island’s hotel, the Cotton House, for a cigarette and a pick-me-up, thence to the beach, where she would swim a very slow breaststroke, her head held high, as though the sea itself might try to take advantage, while a member of her court swam alongside her, employing side-stroke so the Princess could see his or her face. To minimise the irritation of sand sticking to the Princess’s feet as she got out of the sea, Colin Tennant would make sure that a basin of fresh water was to hand.

  On the beach, she cut an imposing figure, or figurine. ‘She stood erect but lacked height,’ recalled Tennant, ‘but had an hourglass figure with a lumpy bosom. All day she wore a whaleboned thronged garment, laced at the back with a short, frilled skirt of her own design. It appeared to be armour-plated.’

  And so to lunch, for which she would join a group for a picnic on the beach, a table having been laid before their arrival. This picnic generally consisted of chicken in Hellmann’s mayonnaise topped off with a salad, though sausages were sometimes served, in the interests of variety.

  In the evening, the Princess would change into what a friend describes as ‘one of her kaftany things’. Dinner was invariably at the Cotton House, sometimes to musical accompaniment by a dance band from St Vincent, the table decorated with flowers ordered by Tennant, flown in from Trinidad. ‘It may look like frivolity,’ he observed, ‘but making these visits a success takes constant imagination.’ If the Princess chose to dine at home, the meal would be cooked by a Mrs Lane, helped by her daughter, who went by the name of Cloreen. The dinner menu was unchanging. The first course consisted of shrimp cocktail in a pink sauce served in a V-shaped glass. The Princess was under the impression that the pink sauce was a closely guarded native secret, handed down from generation to generation. Which it was, in a sense: they made it from Hellmann’s with a dash of Heinz tomato ketchup. Then came chicken or lamb in a watery gravy, with ice cream to follow.

  How risqué was the Princess’s life on Mustique? By all accounts, it was a curious combination of the jaunty and the ceremonial, the tone pitched somewhere between a lunch party at Balmoral and a hen party on Ibiza, any sauciness underpinned by deference, so that things rarely got out of hand. Anyone who overstepped the mark could expect a swift tongue-lashing from the Princess.

  Buxom in her floral swimsuit, tipsy in the foreign sun, her adherence to protocol remained doggedly intact. Those who arrived too late or left too early could expect to be taken down a peg or two. On one occasion, Raquel Welch arrived for lunch halfway through pudding, beaming blithely at her hostess, as if under the illusion that she had done nothing wrong. It must have resembled one of those moments in Goodfellas when a podgy henchman, his life already hanging by a thread, carries on joking away while his fellow stooges hold their breath, knowing that this time he has gone too far. In response, the Princess took a good long slug on her cigarette holder, exhaled slowly, and then stared pointedly at her wristwatch.

  The sun shone brightly on Mustique, but there was always the risk of frost.

  * Tennant certainly recognised that the popularity of the island among the jet set was bound up with her presence on it. He once declared that he lived ‘by the three Ps – the people, the Press and the Princess’, so he tried to remain on the best possible terms with all three. There were other benefits to his royal association: he would sometimes be allowed to join his wife, the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, on the more carefree royal tours.

  70

  Princess Margaret’s biographers are unsure what to think about John Bindon. Who was he? What did he get up to? Can he be trusted? How far did he go?

  Tim Heald introduces him as ‘the least appealing’ of the ‘doubtful characters’ attracted to Mustique in the 1970s. In a footnote, he offers this brief pen-portrait: ‘John Bindon (1943–1992). Violent criminal of exhibitionist disposition who visited Mustique and claimed to have had an affaire [sic] with Princess Margaret.’

  Theo Aronson follows suit, introducing Bindon as a sure sign of the way in which Mustique in the 1970s was ‘beginning to act as a magnet for some of society’s more disreputable elements’. Bindon was, he continues, ‘an East Ender with a criminal record who visited the island on a couple of occasions. He briefly met the Princess, who was said to be amused by his cockney rhyming slang and his hilarious stories of his time in gaol.’

  Nigel Dempster followed suit, describing him as ‘an East Ender with a criminal record’. Bindon had, he says, ‘been twice to Mustique, and had been boasting in Brixton Jail while on remand awaiting trial that he was an intimate of the Princess, and had photographs of them together to prove his relationship’.

  John Dennis ‘Biffo’ Bindon was the son of a taxi driver. He was born in 1943, in Fulham, a good few miles from the East End. His first ten years went comparatively smoothly, but at the age of eleven he was charged with malicious damage. A few years later he was co
nvicted of possession of live ammunition and sent to borstal.

  Aged twenty-five, he appeared to have come good, having been presented with the Queen’s Award for Bravery for diving into the Thames near Putney in a failed attempt to rescue a drowning man. However, Bindon was later heard boasting that he had pushed the man off Putney Bridge, and had dived in to save him only when he spotted a policeman coming.

  Dividing his time between the antiques trade and ‘security’, Bindon happened to enter a pub while Ken Loach was filming Poor Cow in 1967, and found himself with a walk-on role. He went on to act in Performance, Quadrophenia, The Mackintosh Man and various episodes of Hazell, The Sweeney and Softly, Softly. His knack for playing thugs was boosted by the fact that he was one.

  In 1978 he was charged with killing a violent gangster called Johnny Darke in a fight outside a pub in Putney. Once again, he successfully played the philanthropic card, convincing the jury that he had rushed to the defence of a man who had been knifed in the face by the deceased. Bindon thought the jury was swayed by the testimony of the actor Bob Hoskins, who appeared as a character witness. ‘When Bob walked in, the jury knew I was OK.’ He was acquitted.

  In 1982, he pleaded guilty to employing a section of pavement as an offensive weapon; he explained that he had been upset when his victim, a man he described as ‘short and weedy’, accidentally bumped into him during his birthday celebrations. Two years later he was given a two-month suspended sentence for holding a carving knife to the face of a detective constable. In 1985 he was cleared of causing damage to an Earl’s Court restaurant, and in 1988 he was cleared again, this time of threatening to petrol-bomb the home of a mother of three.