Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  * A more dramatic theft gave rise to the 2007 film The Bank Job, which is predicated on the hypothesis that sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret were at the centre of a raid on Lloyd’s Bank in Baker Street in 1971. The robbers had rented a leather-goods shop two doors down. Over the course of three weeks, they dug a tunnel forty feet long. The photographs had apparently been placed in the bank by Michael X, a criminal originally from the Caribbean, who was later hanged for murder in Trinidad. Though half a million pounds were indeed stolen from the bank, the film is more speculative in suggesting that the raid was organised by MI5, purely to suppress the photographs. The Heath government stopped further investigation of the raid by issuing a D-Notice, consequently fanning this rumour.

  * By a curious coincidence, ‘Everard’ was also the name of the close friend often mentioned onstage by the comedian Larry Grayson (1923–95). Dorothy Everard was perhaps best known for playing Pass the Parcel and dancing The Gay Gordons.

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  Tony found temporary accommodation in a small basement flat in West Halkin Street belonging to Jeremy Fry, his original choice of best man, and the supposed father of Snowdon’s illegitimate daughter. Margaret returned from Mustique on 2 March, her head wrapped in a turquoise scarf and dark glasses. A fortnight later, on 17 March, the Daily Express revealed that the royal couple were to separate. It was a busy time for news: on that same day, the prime minister, Harold Wilson, resigned, and the trial began at Exeter Crown Court of Mr Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton on charges of possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life. The life in question was that of Mr Norman Scott, the former male model who had, as luck would have it, once enjoyed a close friendship with Snowdon’s second choice of best man, the leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe.

  Two days later, Kensington Palace issued a statement saying that the couple had ‘agreed mutually to live apart’. This, in turn, found Auberon Waugh ‘thrown into gloom and despair’, though the source of his misery was less the content of the statement than its phrasing:

  ‘Wrong or redundant uses of “mutual” are a well known trap, as Fowler points out. In this case, the use is not so much incorrect as otiose,’ he pointed out. ‘Every agreement between two people is mutual – is it not? – or there would be no agreement.’ He condemned the announcement as an example of ‘New Proletarian Fine Writing, the English of John Lennon and Dave Spart’. The Royal Family, he continued, ‘has always shunned the world of letters, but at least until now it has had the good manners to make sure its English was respectable. If it can’t do better than this, we should send them all straight back to Germany.’

  The news travelled around the world, and even affected President Idi Amin of Uganda, who managed to pluck a message for all mankind from the ruins of the royal marriage: ‘I hope it will be a lesson to all of us men not to marry ladies in a very high position,’ he said. On a photographic assignment in Sydney, Snowdon, looking desperately upset, delivered an emotional interview on television. But Princess Margaret remained unmoved. ‘I have never seen such good acting,’ she said.

  A month later, Auberon Waugh confessed to being ‘seriously worried’ about Princess Margaret’s newly solitary state, fearing that ‘there may be no men left with enough heart for the job’. He had, he said, suggested to the Queen that she might place an advertisement in the personal columns of Private Eye, but Her Majesty had been hesitant, feeling that ‘this might cheapen the monarchy’.

  But then Waugh had a brainwave. ‘What about asking the Victoria and George Cross Association to Windsor? Surely, among their number we can find an unattached male who would not flinch from what has been described as the most gruelling job in Britain?’

  More conventional journalists remained busy with their wallets, placing temptation in the path of anyone with the slightest knowledge of the unhappy couple. The Daily Express offered Roddy’s commune £6,000 for a group photograph, to be handed over in cash, in a brown paper bag. ‘I said, why not?’ recalled Roddy. ‘So we all piled into the van and went back to the farm where we agreed to this photograph. Like a fool, I only kept £500 for myself and put the rest into the restaurant, which was in trouble. It was a silly gesture, but the sort of thing one does in a commune, I suppose.’

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  Like many innocents, Roddy was easily swayed. If a potential scoop was tactfully packaged as a bit of a laugh, he would happily go along with it, often with unfortunate results. In April, he turned up at Tramp nightclub in Jermyn Street wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘Roddy for PM’. Towards the end of 1977 he was approached by a Turkish leather merchant called Victor Melik with the offer of a recording contract. He leapt at it, explaining, ‘I’ve got a list of things I want to do in life, and one of them is to sing a record.’ Melik had high hopes that Roddy’s earnings could run to £250,000. ‘If we can find the right song for him and produce a hit,’ he told the press, ‘then the sky’s the limit … We think Roddy has a very good voice and has a great future. He will sing ballads in the John Denver style. I don’t think he is cashing in on his fame through Princess Margaret.’

  Having signed the contract, Roddy appointed a public relations adviser whose list of clients included a number of reassuring names from the world of light entertainment: Des O’Connor, Mike Yarwood, Norman Wisdom. Carefully-picked interviewers listened sympathetically as Roddy tried to explain how he had come to record a pop song. ‘I consulted the Princess before taking up the offer to make records and she likes the idea of my becoming a pop singer. We are always singing together. One of our favourites is “The Bells Are Ringing” … My musical career is my first priority. I know I’ve been quite a fickle character in the past and hopefully I can settle down to singing.’

  Roddy’s debut was on French television, in a duet with Petula Clark. On the first two takes, he had sprung to his feet a touch too soon; in the third, the champagne flute he handed to Clark was clearly empty. But the fourth take was considered good enough to transmit. It can still be viewed on YouTube: Roddy may look a little awkward in his fancy dinner jacket and fashionable flares, nervously jogging his leg up and down while miming to ‘L’Avventura’ in French (‘When you kiss me, everything under the sun is new … The adventure is to sleep every night in your arms’), but he doesn’t do too badly, all things considered.

  At the end of February 1978 he flew to Mustique for a holiday, but was ‘badly run down’, and went to hospital in Barbados. ‘His faeces were pitch-black,’ records Nigel Dempster, with off-putting omniscience, in his semi-authorised biography. Princess Margaret’s regular visits to Roddy’s bedside generated further headlines, and the headlines generated further comment, which in turn generated further headlines. ‘Here she is, going away with her boyfriend to a paradise island while we are being asked to tighten our belts,’ spluttered the Labour MP Dennis Canavan. Willie Hamilton was equally incensed: ‘If she thumbs her nose at taxpayers by flying off to Mustique to see this pop-singer chap, she shouldn’t expect the workers of this country to pay for it.’

  On his return to England, Roddy responded to their critics. ‘I would like to see Willie Hamilton or any of the others do all her jobs in the marvellous way that she does. People love the Monarchy and appreciate with their whole hearts the job she does. I shall go on seeing Princess Margaret when and where I want … I am a loyal and obedient servant of the Queen.’

  But Hamilton was no lapdog: a few words of reproof only encouraged him to sink his teeth deeper into the bone. ‘For anybody to say seriously that Princess Margaret works hard is absurd nonsense. She has had eight public engagements to date this year and that is in three months. In that time she has drawn about £14,000 – not bad for eight performances. The Royal Family themselves must be very disturbed by the defence coming from this quarter. I think this is the last thing they would want.’

  And so the tuttathon continued, each action sparking yet another reaction from politicians, columnists and readers: tut-tuts followed by more tut-tuts, then tut
-tuts at the tut-tuts, tut-tuts at the tut-tuts at the tut-tuts, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. Church leaders now joined in this Tuttelujah Chorus. The Bishop of Truro, Dr Graham Leonard, condemned the Princess’s holiday with Roddy as ‘foolish’ and called for her immediate resignation from public life.

  Meanwhile, Roddy, the put-upon anti-hero of a picaresque novel, wide-eyed and feckless, sheepish and gallivanting, opportunist and victim, was finding more and more offers strewn across his path, each promising something for nothing, or if not for nothing, then for not very much: an advance on a gardening book, Town Gardens, for Lord Weidenfeld; a monthly retainer of £1,000 from his manager, Claude Wolff; a weekly retainer of £150 to oversee the pots and plants at Bennett, a new nightclub in Battersea; and the chance to judge the Miss Great Britain beauty contest in Morecambe, alongside fellow judges the show jumper Harvey Smith, the knockabout comedian Harry Worth, the snooker champion Ray Reardon and the singer and comedienne Marti Caine. He also undertook a series of interviews in which whatever he said always came back to the one topic he was struggling so hard to avoid.

  ‘Staying with one woman indefinitely is out of the question. I’m far too selfish,’ he told Woman’s World. ‘I couldn’t bear to have a wife who snored or slept with the window open when I wanted it closed or did anything I didn’t want her to. And I have no desire to have children … I’m a yokel at heart. I don’t really like London much, though I must admit I love visiting for two or three days, being terribly naughty and then disappearing again.’

  These chatty outpourings didn’t help the Princess. ‘Such a pity Princess Margaret is threatening to let down the royal family,’ the liberal broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy said to his old friend, the British ambassador to France Nico Henderson. ‘His reactions are those of Mr Liberal Everyman,’ Henderson noted in his diary.

  At the end of April, Roddy was advised to make himself scarce. Accordingly he flew to Tangier, a city which for decades had pulsed with the hullabaloo of people making themselves scarce. On 19 May 1978, the reason for his scarcity became evident. From Kensington Palace came the official announcement: ‘Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon, after two years of separation have agreed that their marriage should formally be ended …’

  Within minutes, Roddy had been traced to Tangier, and asked for a comment, which he duly delivered with his usual level of chattiness. ‘I am saying categorically that I will never marry Princess Margaret. Circumstances – personal reasons – would prevent it. I don’t consider myself in any way responsible for the divorce. Of course I hope to see her again. One always likes to see one’s friends.’

  His album, Roddy, was finally launched in September 1978, amidst much fanfare, at Tramp nightclub. But it failed to take off. Having promised to make it their Record of the Week, Radio 2 dropped it in favour of Bobby Goldsboro’s Greatest Hits. Plans for an appearance on The Morecambe and Wise Show also came to nothing. Sales proved disappointing: in a fortnight, only thirteen copies had sold at London’s largest record store, HMV, compared to 460 copies of the soundtrack of Grease. ‘This album is not setting the world on fire,’ confessed its producer, Tony Eyers.*

  Things began to unravel. Llewellyn accused the owner of Bennett nightclub of exploiting his good name. ‘All I did was shove a few plants in a few pots, yet the world was made to believe I was director for publicity purposes.’ In turn, the owner suggested that it was Roddy who had been doing the exploiting. ‘Originally Roddy was just going to landscape the garden. Later, it was agreed that he would pose for photographs and supervise membership and be paid £7,500 a year. He even told us he would bring Princess Margaret to the club.’

  In the midst of these shenanigans, Princess Margaret was unflappable. Through it all, her devotion to Roddy remained unshaken. ‘Sometimes I think he is the only man to have ever treated Princess Margaret properly,’ observed Colin Tennant decades later. ‘For instance, they were playing gin rummy one day with Roddy keeping the score. Princess Margaret asked what it was, he passed over the pad, and when she turned the page, there was a message he had written: “You are looking very beautiful today.”’

  For all his undoubted sweetness, Roddy was a loose cannon. Soon after Princess Margaret’s Civil List allowance had been raised by £5,000 to £64,000 to take inflation into account, he ran into a spot of bother with the law. Upon leaving a party at Regine’s nightclub in celebration of Shirley Bassey’s twenty-five years in show business, he pranged an undercover police car with his Ford Transit. ‘After the accident,’ reported a police spokesman, ‘the van continued and the police car, a general-purpose unmarked red Chrysler Hunter, which had not been badly damaged, pursued it and stopped it in Kensington High Street near Kensington Palace Gardens.’

  Roddy’s Ford Transit finally came to a standstill after hitting a bollard. He pleaded innocent, or at least ignorant. ‘I wasn’t drunk at all, which was so silly,’ he said. ‘I had no idea I had touched another car. I did feel a bump or something, but nothing of importance, and drove on. Then, suddenly, I found I was being chased by half the police force of London.’ He was breathalysed, and found to be 80 per cent over the limit.

  From time to time the Princess and Roddy attended events together, but only if absolute discretion was assured. On a visit to London in July 1979, Andy Warhol spotted the two of them together at a party in the Savoy Hotel. ‘We were upstairs and we didn’t know the party was upstairs and downstairs,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘The downstairs party had Princess Margaret and Halston,* Liza* and everybody, and when we finally realised we were missing it, we went downstairs. Halston was nervous, but his party was terrific, had the best time. Victor* wanted me to meet Princess Margaret, and I didn’t but I got two pictures. Victor got two photos of Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn. They didn’t want to be seen together and they wanted to take his film away but Fred* said not to, that Victor was with Halston. Left the party about 4:00 went to Liza’s room. She was wearing a really beautiful see-through fabric dress with her hair brushed back like her mother used to wear it … It was a wig but I couldn’t tell.’

  In Fleet Street and beyond, the asking price for details of Princess Margaret’s racy affair with a younger man continued to rise. In January 1980, Roddy’s older brother Dai accepted £30,000 from the News of the World. He was, he explained, in ‘a very vulnerable position’, heavily in debt. ‘I’ve written Pa and Roddy notes telling them I’ve been a naughty boy and asking their forgiveness, but I had to go through with it. The money will pay off all my debts and give me a fresh start – it’s as simple as that.’

  In retrospect, the Llewellyn brothers may be seen as novice surfers on the waves of indiscretion that swept the British Isles in the decades to follow. Roddy gave interviews in which he condemned Dai’s ‘gross betrayal’. ‘If you write a load of tripe like that and describe your brother as a pansy, surely you must expect to run into flak? I said, David, you’ve cooked yourself here. You should get out of England. But of course he took no notice.’ Even the brothers’ complaints about indiscretions were hopelessly indiscreet.

  In turn, Dai poured out his heart to society’s father confessor, Nigel Dempster, in the sanctuary of the Daily Mail: ‘That’s the trouble with Roddy. He badmouths Pa and me to Princess Margaret and she is taken in by his side of the story … I’ve never let Roddy down, yet I’ve hardly known an instance when I’ve helped him and he hasn’t kicked me in the teeth … With Roddy, it’s always been, “Look at me, look at me.” He’s never been part of the set that I have, just hanging around the edges and resenting it. I have no interest in his friends – they are the most awful bunch of hippies and pooves and I can’t stand them. They sit around all evening talking about each other’s neuroses.’

  In November 1980, Princess Margaret was given a belated fiftieth birthday party at the Ritz Hotel. The owners – the Trafalgar House Group, of which Margaret’s old friend Jocelyn Stevens was deputy chairman – had offere
d exceptionally favourable terms, mindful of the publicity the event would induce.

  It was Roddy Llewellyn who had come up with the idea of a party in the Princess’s honour, but many of her more traditional friends had been reluctant to throw their hats in the ring, anxious to avoid getting on the wrong side of the Queen by associating their names with his. There was always a hint of Vito Corleone about Her Majesty – or, to put it another way, she is singularly blessed with what Evelyn Waugh once called ‘the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich’. Unable to rally everyone, Roddy dropped out. At this point, a committee made up largely of traditionalists took over the arrangements.

  Was Roddy to be invited? The committee was divided. Her Royal Highness wanted him, but Her Majesty did not. One of Margaret’s oldest friends, Dominic Elliott, sided with the Queen, which made Margaret so livid that she told him she never wanted to see him again. At this, Elliott resigned from the committee, and refused to come to the party.

  Eventually, a compromise was reached: Roddy would not be among the forty invited to dinner at the Ritz, but he would be permitted to pop in afterwards, along with 140 others, for drinks and dancing.

  But who was to give Roddy dinner? It was decided that the Tennants should forgo their invitation to the first part of the evening in order to look after him. Understandably, this upset them. ‘We feel just like the servants, being invited in after dinner,’ Lady Anne complained to a friend. In other families, it would have seemed extraordinary that an elder sister could dictate who was coming to her younger sister’s fiftieth birthday party; and odder still that the younger sister should go along with it. But this was the British Royal Family, and even on her birthday, Margaret’s personal wishes were subordinate to its continued prosperity.