BEHIND THE FACADE
Royal BFF Lady Glenconner lived a painful life despite glamorous trappings
THE royal life might look glamorous, but the reality is often considerably less appealing. From stately homes and stables of servants to BFF with the Queen and Lady in waiting to Princess Margaret, Anne Glenconner, born Lady Anne Coke, the eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, fell from a fairy tale life into a hellish existence.
At a debutante dance at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Anne met the millionaire socialite Colin Tennant — “very good-looking, charming, a marvelous dancer, also part of Princess Margaret’s set and knew all sorts of glamorous people, writers and artists,” the author, 90, writes in her memoir, “Whatever Next? Lessons from an Unexpected Life,” (Hachette).
In 1956, she married Tennant. A virgin, she hoped he would teach her about sex with “gentleness and kindness.” But on their wedding night he threw a tantrum and decided she could learn the basics of sex at a private sex show in a Parisian brothel. (She felt like he was saying, “You’re hopeless at it — but you’ll get some good tips from watching this.”)
“As long as Colin and I were sleeping together our sex life was marked by criticism and disappointment,” she wrote.
The only time sex was great, she reveals, was in the Grenadines, when he spiked her drink with LSD and he made love to her while she hallucinated. It was, she says, uninhibited. The union went quickly downhill from there. “The simple truth is that I lived with domestic violence and abuse for most of my marriage,” writes Glenconner, who penned the 2019 bestseller “Lady in Waiting,” a glowing account of her royal style of life, but nothing about the dark side, until now.
Her husband’s “violent rages and outbursts were just his character and I simply had to endure them,” she asserts. Writing my autobiography made me look again at my marriage, and I feel able now to admit how frightful being Colin’s wife was at times.”
He had never told her that he had previously suffered two nervous breakdowns, recovering in a Swiss clinic. When she complained to her husband’s mother, she was advised to “give him a nice cup of cocoa at bedtime” to quell his violent outbursts.
In agonizing detail, Glenconner writes how he threw fierce tantrums and was intent on breaking her spirit, making her carry his luggage like a pack horse walking behind him.
“It started with screaming and quite soon went on to spitting, shoving and throwing things,” she writes. “He used to hurl things at me like a naughty child. He only beat me once, many years later, but that attack was serious enough to perforate my right eardrum, leaving me permanently deaf in that ear.”
She says the damage was done when he caned her head with his shark-bone walking stick, causing the eardrum to burst.
Her marriage to him “almost destroyed me,” but she accepted the extreme abuse because, “My life had parties, people, travel, with lots of remarkable friends.”
Moreover, this horrific union produced five children that she mostly raised, albeit with the help of a battalion of cooks, nannies and maids. Tragically, only three children survived. One son, a heroin addict, died of hepatitis, another son succumbed from AIDS.
Rumors spread that there was a Tennant curse.
So why has she spoken out so honestly about the cruelty now in print?
Encouraging her, she reveals, was, of all people, the Queen Consort of the UK, Camilla Parker Bowles, King Charles’ wife.
A decade into the marriage, Anne took a lover, whom she does not identify, and that relationship lasted more than three decades and involved occasional weekend trysts and luncheons together. But still, it made her realize what she was missing. Colin never understood, she observes, how she could have a lover who wasn’t as handsome as he was.
In 1958, two years after Colin married Anne, the playboy heir to an industrial bleach chemical fortune bought the island of Mustique in the Caribbean and transformed it from a mosquito-infested wasteland with no roads or running water into a jet-set paradise with wild, naked beach parties, drugs and frolicking celebrity guests — socialites and rock stars that included Mick Jagger.
Once Princess Margaret’s suitor and still obsessed with her, Colin gifted her with a plot of land on the island as a wedding present after she married Lord Anthony Snowden. It was on Mustique that Margaret carried on her infamous eight-year affair with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, that led to her divorce from Snowden.
Colin styled himself as king of the island and wore a gilded crown and a necklace of human bones.
The pair never divorced, but eventually lived separately.
When he died in 2010, Colin, who became Lord Glenconner upon the death of his father, left his estate to his manservant on Mustique, Kent Adonai, whom he described as his son.
Meanwhile, Anne Glenconner attributes finding peace thanks to a lifeline from Princess Margaret who, she writes, taught her about “stiffening one’s spine and getting on with it.”