A right Royal mess
Kit Hesketh-harvey finds this brilliant, experimental biography of Princess Margaret hilarious and tragic in equal measures
Biography Ma’am Darling Craig Brown (4th Estate, £16.99)
WHen presented to the Queen’s younger sister, one tongue-tied little girl fell silent. Her mother whispered encouragingly, ‘Just repeat what Daddy and I said’. The child piped up obediently: ‘O God, why do we have to have this difficult woman to lunch?’
Craig brown is, as Stephen Fry has said, ‘the wittiest writer in britain today’. This biography confirms it. If you want a book that will have you punching your pillow in helpless laughter, this is it. Moreover, he has invented an entirely new genre, of which it is a masterpiece.
‘born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism.’ The defining act of her life—her decision not to marry Group Capt Peter Townsend —seemed ever more cruelly unfair as subsequent royal remarriages boomeranged. but, ultimately, her unhappiness was her own fault: ‘She enjoyed playing with the boundaries of being royal’.
I knew her. She came to our shows. I recall the glinting diamonds of her tiara barely clearing the top of the royal box. Thereafter, we met on perhaps a dozen occasions. Mr brown would be witheringly unsurprised: ‘Princess Margaret felt most at home in the company of the louche, the theatrical, the camp, the cultured and the waspish. It was to be her misfortune that such a high proportion of them kept diaries.’
alvilde Lees-milne recorded the recondite joys of sitting on the same loo-seat that the Princess had recently vacated. (During the 1990s refurbishment of the Café royal in edinburgh, I wrested from the skip a twinkly lavender example of one such, which had been installed expressly for her. It encapsulated the kitsch glamour of the 1960s, as she still does).
‘She was cabaret camp, Ma’am camp: she was noel Coward, cigarette holders, blusher, Jean Cocteau, winking, sighing, dark glasses, bet Lynch, charades, Watteau, colourful cocktails at midday, ballet, silk, hoity-toity, dismissive overstatement, arriving late, entering with a flourish, exiting with a flounce, makinga-scene camp,’ writes Mr brown.
When Townsend announced his engagement to another woman, Princess Margaret spent the evening singing Abide with Me to her own accompaniment. Her engagement to antony armstrong-jones was announced shortly afterwards. The auguries were not good. That Turandot of social columnists, betty Kenward, had once snapped at armstrongJones: ‘Don’t you dare address me! I don’t talk to my photographers!’ evelyn Waugh suggested that the groom be made archbishop of Canterbury. ‘They can then rock and roll around Lambeth Palace. I understand Jones likes the smell of the lower Thames.’ The marriage soon turned just as whiffy. Cecil beaton wrote: ‘She was not very nice in the days when she was so pretty and attractive. She snubbed and ignored friends. but my God has she been paid out!’
Ma’am Darling makes for breakneck reading. Why it’s important, however, is for its literary form, which is innovative and unique. Like its subject, it operates at various removes from reality. It’s as if Laurence Sterne or auberon Waugh had taken up the genre. It’s meta-biography and that is its joy. among its ‘99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret’ are a weepmaking transcription of her Desert
Island Discs interview and her fantasy-obituary as Mrs Peter Townsend, a divorceé leaving behind two pugs, betty and Pip, inherited from the Duchess of Windsor. It evokes her far better than any diligent historical trudge ever could.
Then there are the pingingly funny footnotes. The author’s recital of Prince rupert Loewenstein’s 10 Christian names and four surnames knocked me fully out of bed. The list of the Princess’s ‘rumoured’ lovers—up to and wickedly including Dusty Springfield—sparked my decision to buy this book as a Christmas present for everybody I know, and for those I don’t.
by the end, one feels sorry for her. The trajectory from vivacious young fashion-plate to sad old trout is so poignant. Gore Vidal said that the Princess was ‘far too intelligent for her station in life …’ (She said of him: ‘The trouble with Gore is that he wants my sister’s job.’)
If my final response is one of welling republicanism, it’s not because abolishing the monarchy is philosophically desirable; it’s that to ask any fellow human being to sacrifice a life to its impossible demands is little short of sadistic.