Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

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  99

  14 May 1995

  Princess Margaret attends David Hare’s play Skylight.

  It is set in a first-floor flat in north-west London.

  ‘Patterned carpets which have worn to a thread and a long wall of books’ is how the playwright sets the scene. ‘The kitchen area at the back of the room looks cluttered and much used.’

  The only female character, Kyra Hollis, ‘is just past thirty. She is returning to her flat, blue with cold. She has a heavy overcoat wrapped round her, and is wearing thick woollen gloves. She is carrying three large plastic bags.’

  After it is over, Princess Margaret is asked if she found the play depressing.

  ‘It was a bit like one’s own life,’ she replies.

  (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Frances Wilson and Terence Blacker for reading early drafts, to A.N. Wilson, Selina Hastings, Maggi Hambling, Polly Devlin, Robert Harris, Susanna Johnston, Hugo Vickers, Christopher Sykes, Eleanor Bron, Mary James, Johnny James, Lucy Lambton, Francis Wheen and David Jenkins for their help, and to my editors at 4th Estate, Nicholas Pearson, Lettice Franklin and Robert Lacey, for their skill and encouragement.

  My darling wife Frances has been amazingly sympathetic throughout, especially considering that she has had her own Russian royals to worry about. Our children, Tallulah and Silas, are both now professional writers, and very proud of them we are, too.

  SOURCES

  To keep things as brief as possible, I am mentioning each source only once, so as to avoid the froggy choruses of ibid-ibid-ibid that so often clog up the notes at the back of books.

  Wherever possible, I have concentrated on individual accounts of personal encounters with Princess Margaret, as described in a range of letters and diaries. These include: The Letters of Kingsley Amis; The Diaries of Cecil Beaton: The Unexpurgated Beaton and Beaton in the Sixties; Writing Home by Alan Bennett; Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960 and Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, both by Isaiah Berlin; John Betjeman Letters Vols I and II; The Richard Burton Diaries; The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries; Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon; The Alan Clark Diaries; Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to her son John Julius Norwich 1939–1952; The Noël Coward Diaries; The Letters of Noel Coward; The Crossman Diaries; In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor; National Service: Diary of a Decade at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre; The Letters of Anne Fleming; John Fowles: The Journals Vols I and II; The Diaries of Donald Friend Vol. IV; The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn; My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor and A Positively Final Appearance, both by Alec Guinness; Peter Hall’s Diaries; Mandarin: The Diaries of Nicholas Henderson; The Letters of Ted Hughes; The Christopher Isherwood Diaries Vols I, II and III; Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985; Letters to Monica by Philip Larkin; King’s Counsellor: The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles; The Diaries of James Lees-Milne: Ancestral Voices, 1942–43, Prophesying Peace, 1944–45, Caves of Ice, 1946–47, Midway on the Waves, 1948–49, A Mingled Measure, 1953–72, Ancient as the Hills, 1973–74, Through Wood and Dale, 1975–78, Deep Romantic Chasm, 1979–81, Holy Dread, 1982–84, Beneath a Waning Moon, 1983–85, Ceaseless Turmoil, 1988–92, and The Milk of Paradise, 1993–97; The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters Vol. III, 1958; The Macmillan Diaries Vol. I: The Cabinet Years and Vol. II: Prime Minister and After; Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford; Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford; The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson Vol. III; Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980–1988 by Michael Palin; Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose (which contains invaluable documents relating to the artist’s crush on the Princess); The Diaries of A.L. Rowse; Tears Before Bedtime by Barbara Skelton; New Selected Journals 1939–1995 by Stephen Spender; Splendours and Miseries: The Roy Strong Diaries 1967–1987 and Scenes and Apparitions: The Roy Strong Diaries 1988–2003; Burnt Diaries by Emma Tennant; The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan; The Kenneth Tynan Letters; The Andy Warhol Diaries; The Diaries of Auberon Waugh: Four Crowded Years 1972–1976 and A Turbulent Decade 1976–1985; The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh; The Letters of Evelyn Waugh; Mr Wu & Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper; The Kenneth Williams Diaries; and The Kenneth Williams Letters.

  For background material, I have plundered all the biographies of Princess Margaret. Of these, I found particularly useful Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled by Tim Heald and Princess Margaret: A Biography by Theo Aronson. Nigel Dempster’s HRH The Princess Margaret: A Life Unfulfilled is strong on the Roddy Llewellyn years. Noel Botham’s Margaret: The Last Real Princess is unreliable, but sometimes strays into the realms of accuracy, notably when dealing with the Princess’s brief romance with Robin Douglas-Home. It also contains her letters to him, on which I have drawn. Being semi-authorised, Christopher Warwick’s stiffer A Life of Contrasts is more upright and forgiving. The use of the negative in the subtitles of Princess Margaret biographies – ‘Unfulfilled’, ‘Unravelled’, and so forth – seems to have been pioneered by Willi Frischauer in his Margaret: Princess Without a Cause, published in 1977.

  Snowdon: The Biography by Anne de Courcy is a treasure trove of information about the Snowdons’ stormy marriage. In Time and Chance: An Autobiography, Peter Townsend plays his cards pretty close to his chest, but his reticence gives the book a certain magnetic quality. I have made extensive use of Townsend’s recollections of his relationship with Princess Margaret.

  The view from below stairs is often pooh-poohed by royal biographers, but I tend to find servants’ memoirs more candid and therefore more interesting than those of grandees. Consequently, I have made good use of Marion Crawford’s scorned but charming The Little Princesses and David John Payne’s fascinating, though rather more sinister, My Life with Princess Margaret. Both Adventures of a Gentleman’s Gentleman by Guy Hunting and Backstairs Billy: The Life of William Tallon by Tom Quinn are full of amusing high-camp stories about life at court. Lord of the Isle: The Extravagant Life and Times of Colin Tennant (2012) by Nicholas Courtney, the former general manager of Mustique, is straightforward and level-headed.

  Hugo Vickers’ Elizabeth: The Queen Mother offers by far the fullest account of the rise and fall of poor old Marion Crawford. For things Crawfie, including her letters to and from the Queen Mother, I am also indebted to the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University. Vickers’ biography also sheds new light on Princess Margaret’s uneasy relationship with her mother. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross, and its companion volume, Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, both present the twinkly, authorised version, but remain an invaluable source. Those in need of something madder and a good deal more sour may prefer to opt for Queen Elizabeth: A Life of the Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer.

  There are countless dogged and dutiful biographies of HM the Queen, most of them ploughing through the same dreary old ma
terial in the same dreary old way. A cut above the rest is Gyles Brandreth’s witty and unabashed Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage, but I have also plucked bits and pieces from Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith; Royal: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II by Robert Lacey; Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times by Sarah Bradford; Sovereign: Elizabeth II and the Windsor Dynasty by Roland Flamini; The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and Her People by Andrew Marr; and The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II by Ben Pimlott. The Duke: A Portrait of Prince Philip by Tim Heald is good-humoured and fair-minded.

  More general works of reference include Princess Margaret’s Wedding Book (1960); Debrett’s Book of the Royal Wedding (1981); Debrett’s Book of the Royal Engagement (1986); The BBC Book of Royal Memories; The Book of Royal Lists by Craig Brown and Lesley Cunliffe; Voices Out of the Air: The Royal Christmas Broadcasts 1932–1981; and The Royal Encyclopedia, edited by Ronald Allison and Sarah Riddell. Background on the Royal Family can be found in King George VI: His Life and Reign by John Wheeler Bennett; King George V by Kenneth Rose; and King Edward VIII by Philip Ziegler. Thatched with Gold: The Memoirs of Mabell, Countess of Airlie, has lots on the Princess’s birth. Margaret Rhodes’s otherwise kindly memoir, The Final Curtsey, reveals unexpected shards of cattiness whenever Princess Margaret puts her head round the door.

  Princess Diana is in danger of attracting almost as many biographies as HM the Queen. The most reliable of those I have read are Sarah Bradford’s Diana, and Diana: Story of a Princess by Tim Clayton and Phil Craig. Those in search of something brassier might enjoy The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown. Diana: Her True Story – In Her Words by Andrew Morton (1998) includes transcripts omitted from his original Diana: Her True Story (1992), which is now rightly regarded as the Dead Sea Scrolls of Diana Studies.

  My appetite for royal kitsch makes me a devoted reader of Sarah, Duchess of York’s unstoppable outpourings, not least her original autobiography, My Story (1997), and its infinite follow-ups, some of them, such as What I Know Now: Simple Lessons Learned the Hard Way (2003), sadly available only in America, where there is more of a taste for these things. Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself (2011) is, as its title suggests, a classic of the genre. Sarah by Ingrid Seward offers a portrait of the Duchess before her repeated falls from grace. Those looking for something less wordy and more picture-based would do well to dig out Knockout: The Grand Charity Tournament, subtitled A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Event of the Year, with an introduction by HRH the Prince Edward. It is a colourful memento of the pivotal royal event of 1987, sometimes wrongly referred to as It’s a Royal Knockout. Kitsch galore may also be found in The Royals by Kitty Kelley.

  James Pope-Hennessy’s ‘The King over the Millstream’, posthumously published in A Lonely Business: A Self-Portrait of James Pope-Hennessy is a delightfully beady sketch of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in exile. Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor by Hugo Vickers is similarly compelling. The Last of the Duchess by Caroline Blackwood is, like many mad books, full of piercing insights.

  Princess Margaret is set in her times in David Kynaston’s wonderful panoramic history of post-war Britain, collectively titled Tales of a New Jerusalem, which also contains particularly rich pickings from the Mass-Observation archive. Gossip 1920–1970 and International Gossip 1970–1980, by Andrew Barrow, are both full of tiny little details that graver authors tend to overlook.

  Ma’am Darling is peppered with allusions to other works. Glimpse 2 is a pastiche of the final paragraph of Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey. Glimpse 32 was inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Glimpse 61 has echoes of Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’.

  For information about the many fruity and/or dodgy characters whose lives intersected with Princess Margaret’s, I raided Brewer’s Dictionary of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics by my old friend William Donaldson; also Bindon by Wensley Clarkson; Confessions of a King’s Road Cowboy by Johnny Cigarini; By Appointment by Andy Dempsey; The Truth at Last: My Story by Christine Keeler; High on Arrival by Mackenzie Phillips; Papa John by John Phillips; Jeremy Thorpe by Michael Bloch; and A Very English Scandal by John Preston.

  Princess Margaret was drawn to inhabitants of the worlds of art and show business, as they were to her. Stories about these often bizarre alliances and confrontations may be found in True Britt by Britt Ekland; The Life and Death of Peter Sellers by Roger Lewis; The Music Man: The Autobiography of Leslie Bricusse; Dream Girl: My Life as a Supreme by Mary Wilson; The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success and Betrayal by Mark Ribowsky; An Affectionate Punch by Justin de Villeneuve; The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper by John Richardson; A Prince Among Stones: That Business with the Rolling Stones and Other Adventures by Prince Rupert Lowenstein; The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans; What’s it All About? by Michael Caine; Watch Me by Anjelica Huston; Take it Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George; Can I Go Now?: The Life of Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s First Superagent by Brian Kellow; Dancing with Demons: The Authorised Biography of Dusty Springfield by Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham; Dusty: An Intimate Portrait by Karen Bartlett; As Luck Would Have It by Derek Jacobi; Tainted by Experience: A Life in the Arts by John Drummond; Elizabeth Taylor by C. David Heymann; Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton – The Marriage of the Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger; and Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life by Tracy Tynan.

  For glimpses of Princess Margaret’s meetings with the Beatles, I drew on The Beatles Anthology; The John Lennon Letters; A Twist of Lennon and John, both by Cynthia Lennon; The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines; John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman; and Wonderful Today: The Autobiography of Pattie Boyd.

  Other books that have come in handy include, in no particular order: Know the Truth by George Carey; The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor by A.N. Wilson; Dreams about HM the Queen and Other Members of the Royal Family by Brian Masters; Twentieth Century Words by John Ayto; The Picnic Papers edited by Susanna Johnston and Anne Tennant; Memoirs by Kingsley Amis; Redeeming Features by Nicholas Haslam; John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love and Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter, both by Bevis Hillier; Betjeman by A.N. Wilson; The Life of Noël Coward by Cole Lesley; James Lees-Milne: The Life by Michael Bloch; Cyril Connolly: A Life by Jeremy Lewis; Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography by Cherie Blair; Maurice Bowra: A Life by Leslie Mitchell; New Bats in Old Belfries by Maurice Bowra; Life on Air: A History of Radio Four by David Hendy; Double Act: A Life of Tom Stoppard by Ira Nadel; Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography by Adam Sisman; The Life of Kenneth Tynan by Kathleen Tynan; Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini; Palimpsest: A Memoir by Gore Vidal; Snapshots in History’s Glare by Gore Vidal; Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir by Gore Vidal; Kings, Queens and Courtiers by Kenneth Rose; Angus Wilson by Margaret Drabble; Chance Witness by Matthew Parris; Of Kings and Cabbages by Peter Coats; Nigel Dempster and the Death of Discretion by Tim Willis; Christie’s catalogues for the sale of Property from the Collection of Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon Vol. I: Jewellery and Fabergé and Vol. II: Silver, Furniture and Works of Art; The Queen and The Audience, both by Peter Morgan; Skylight by David Hare; Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn; The Collector by John Fowles; and More Matter by John Updike.

  News reports and articles from hundreds of newspapers and magazines have been extremely useful, prime among them: ‘How We Loved Her’ by David Jenkins, Tatler, December 2014; John Fortune’s New Statesman diary, 25 February 2002; A.N. Wilson’s Spectator diary, 11 May 1990; ‘For Better or for Verse’ by Craig Raine, Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2005; interview with Terence Stamp by John Preston, Sunday Telegraph, 4 February 2013; Frank Kermode on Stephen Spender, London Review of Books, December 1985; obituary of Cyril Connolly by Stephen Spender, TLS, 6 December 1974; interview with Jonathan Aitken by Geoffrey Levy, D
aily Mail, 22 October 2016; ‘The Princess Who Never Knew Her Place’ by Selina Hastings, Sunday Telegraph, 16 November 1986; obituary of Betty Kenward, Daily Telegraph, 26 January 2001; obituary of Betty Kenward, New York Times, 1 February 2001; ‘The Years with Jennifer’ by Vicki Woods, Spectator, 23 March 1991; ‘The Beatles and Royalty’ by Bill Harry, Mersey Beat, 28 October 1964; ‘Letters from Gore Vidal to Louis Auchincloss’, New Yorker, 24 June 1996; article on Princess Margaret by A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard, 11 February 2002; interview with the Beatles, Playboy, 28 October 1964; interviews with David Griffin in Guardian, 3 December 2002, Daily Mail, 14 March 2016, and Isle of Wight County Press, 30 December 2002; article on Lysistrata by Germaine Greer, TLS, 16 July 1999; interview with Robert Brown, Guardian, 19 December 2013; interview with Lord Charteris, Spectator, 5 January 1995; ‘The Princess and the Peabrain’ by Alastair Forbes, Spectator, 18 February 1978; and obituary of Lord Snowdon by Philip Hoare, Independent, 13 January 2017.

  Internet sites such as YouTube are a treasure chest, allowing one to watch any amount of news footage of Princess Margaret. Those interested in the curious tale of Robert Brown may wish to see him putting forth his claim there. From the Anglican Communion News Service website I retrieved Nicholas Witchell’s interview with George Carey, 15 February 2002. Mustique-island.com provides prospective tenants with important information about renting Les Jolies Eaux. The Let’s Talk Dusty website is a mine of information about Dusty Springfield. On Spotify, I listened to Dusty Springfield Live at the Albert Hall.

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