The original paparazzi princess
A new book reveals how the Queen’s rebellious younger sister Margaret became the tabloids’ first and most famous subject, writes Harry Mount
At their engagement press conference last week, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle showed what relaxed media professionals they are. Both of them have been well trained in front of the cameras for years — Harry as a paparazzi target since birth; Meghan as a screen actress.
In the half-century-long battle of the British monarchy versus the tabloids, Harry and Meghan are light years ahead of his parents’ and grandparents’ generation. But still, even he had to launch a defensive strike last year, when he published a press release attacking the media’s intrusion into the relationship.
Tomorrow, Harry can get a glimpse of his great aunt Margaret’s (or Margot, as he and Prince William called her) dazzling days in the media spotlight when series two of The Crown begins, taking events from the Suez Crisis in 1956 to the birth of Prince Edward in 1964. This time, much of the focus is on Princess Margaret, magnificently played by Vanessa Kirby, as she exploded sexily into the swinging 60s with reckless abandon. We first see the rebellious princess in 1956, aged 25, still seething at the Queen for denying her “the perfect match” with Group Captain Peter Townsend. She’s hitting the Martinis, staying up until 4am and trawling London’s nightclubs, casting caution to the wind in a two-fingers-up to the strictures of the royal household.
Margot falls for Tony Armstrong Jones, the dashing photographer who flits between motorbike and limo with consummate ease. Armstrong Jones is confident, charismatic and supersonically over-sexed. In The Crown, he proposes to the princess halfway through a vigorous, sadistic sex session. Together, the Snowdons (as they became known when he was given an earldom after their marriage) made a glamorous, mediafriendly couple like nothing the Royal Family had ever seen.
The papers were largely on the side of the tiny, fragile princess, whose father died in 1952 when she was only 21, and whose prospects of love had been destroyed by royal protocol. They remained onside too in 1960 when she married Armstrong-Jones. That he himself was a Sunday Times photographer brought the press deep into the royal fold. Through the 60s, the Snowdons, like Prince Harry and Meghan, were celebrities as much as they were royal figures.
In his new book, Ma’am Darling, Craig Brown reveals how, sometimes, Margaret would drop the royal facade and let the celebrity world in — and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she would lift the drawbridge and bark at “civilians” for failing to show her due respect. The celebrities kept on seeing her, of course, despite the rudeness. Who can resist an invitation with the words “princess” and “palace” on it? But, behind her back, they turned on her. Brown says: “Cecil Beaton and Roy Strong would fawn all over her and then write unbelievably waspish stuff about her in their diaries when they got home. Noël Coward and some others thought she was a marvellous singer and pianist. But others weren’t so sure. Francis Bacon started heckling her when she sang at a party. I’d guess she was the first modern royal to pursue bohemia. She’d mix with Mick Jagger and Edna O’Brien and so on. And, of course, she married a showbizzy husband.
“The union of arts and royalty is fraught with peril,” Brown observes. “It’s dangerous for royals to mix with arty types because they always turn on you.” The union of royalty and the press also began to unravel in the 70s as the Snowdons’ marriage began to fall apart. Both parties had affairs but the press were particularly transfixed by Princess Margaret’s fling with Roddy Llewellyn, the gardener and baronet, 17 years her junior. When the press learnt she gave him a pair of Union Jack underpants, all remnants of deference were flung to the winds.
Princess Margaret was also photographed on Mustique with John Bindon, an actor and ex-con. Bindon — as the press took delight in reporting — was renowned for his party trick of attaching six half-pint mugs to his generously sized member, although reporters could never agree whether he dangled the mugs or balanced them on it.
Princess Margaret had her own explanation for her excoriation by the press that had nothing to do with half-pint mugs or Union Jack pants. “It was inevitable,” she told Gore Vidal. “When there are two sisters and one is the Queen, who must be the source of honour and all that is good, while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.” Margaret, observes Brown, “dug herself into that role”.
By the time of the Royal wedding in 1981, the press genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Both Charles and Diana colluded with the media. In 1994, Charles conceded in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that he had been unfaithful. But Princess Diana was always the more gifted handler of the press, as she showed in her masterly act in media manipulation, the kohl-eyed interview with Martin Bashir in 1995.
The final act in the vicious tussles between the press and the monarchy came in a Paris underpass in 1997. Looking back on that horrific evening, and on Princess Margaret’s fall from grace with the press, Harry and Meghan, for all their mediasavvy brilliance, might be best advised to follow granny’s example. The Queen has never given an interview and has never said anything out of turn or controversial.
She, though, belongs to the age of deference, to a pre-tabloid age. Her sister, born four years later, belonged, tragically, to the other side of the deferential divide.