The real Princess Margaret
Unpredictable, superior and witheringly rude, the queen’s unlucky-in-love sister seemed to suffer from a lifelong identity crisis, a new memoir by author Craig Brown reveals
SHE never quite got over the fact that she had to play second fiddle to her older sister. Viewers who’ve been watching the Netflix series The Crown have been fascinated by the turbulent relationship between Queen Elizabeth and her younger sibling, Princess Margaret. A new book sheds light on the queen’s sister, showing how privilege, her royal title and having endless time and little to do transformed her into an entitled snob who turned pickiness into an art form.
‘ IN 1993 Princess Margaret (then 62) stood by a dustbin piled with letters and documents, while her chauffeur put a match to them. For 26 years David Griffin drove Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister around. He once calculated that he spent more time with her than with his own mother, though he spoke to her very rarely. “She was part of the old school and she never changed from day one. She was very starchy, no jokey conversation. She called me Griffin and I called her Your Royal Highness,” he recalls.
By the end of a typical trip she’d have uttered a total of two words: “Good” and “morning”.
“There was no need to say more. She knew I knew the way. I saw myself as part of the car, an extension of the steering wheel. A proper royal servant is never seen and never heard.
“We preferred to work in total silence so we didn’t have to be friendly. We never used to try and chat. They used to say Princess Margaret could freeze a daisy at four feet by just looking at it.”
On a number of occasions the princess asked Griffin to drive her to Clarence House [her mother’s residence in London]. After a couple of hours she’d emerge with a large bin bag filled with letters, which she’d hand to him.
Back at Kensington Palace she’d put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and help him bundle the letters, still in their bags, into a metal garden dustbin in the garage before ordering him to set light to them.
“We did it several times over a period of years,” Griffin says. “A lot of it was old, going back donkeys’ years, but I saw letters from [Princess] Diana among them. We must have destroyed thousands of letters. I could see what it was we were burning. She made it very clear it was the highly confidential stuff that we burned.”
Even William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s treacly biographer, acknowledges that when it came to her mother’s correspondence Margaret had a touch of the pyromaniac about her.
“No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint,” he writes.
It’s likely that quite a few letters incinerated by Margaret were those she herself had written.
Her relationship with her mother was often stormy, particularly in the years 1952 to 1960, after the death of King George VI [Margaret’s father] and her sister Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, when she was in her twenties.
At the time Margaret and her mother were living in separate apartments in Clarence House, one above the other.
Household staff were struck by the princess’ rudeness towards the Queen Mother. “Why do you dress in those ridiculous clothes?” she once asked her in passing.
If her mother was watching a television programme she didn’t like Margaret would offhandedly switch channels without asking.
As she grew older Margaret turned pickiness into an art form. Far more than her sister, she was given to pulling rank. She once reminded her children (Lady Sarah Chatto and David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl of Snowdon) that she was royal and they weren’t, and their father (Tony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon) was most certainly not.
“I’m unique,” she’d sometimes pipe up at dinner parties. “I’m the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen.” It was no ice-breaker.
At these events her hosts knew to serve her first. The more obsequious would withdraw any dishes she refused – potatoes, for instance – so that others couldn’t have them either.
Nor were her fellow guests permitted to carry on eating once she had finished. The princess tended to wolf down what little food she ate, which meant that slowcoaches would have to down tools with half their food left uneaten, as protocol dictates.
The princess liked to one-up. I’ve heard from a variety of people that she’d engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been.
Having listened to responses like “Mama” and “doggy”, she’d say, “My boy’s first word was ‘chandelier’.” (Turn over)
(From previous page) But her strong competitive streak wasn’t always matched by ability. A regular fellow guest recalled one particular fit of bad sportsmanship during a game of Trivial Pursuit.
“We were playing and the question was the name of a curried soup. She said, ‘It’s just called curried soup. There isn’t any other name for it. It’s curried soup!’ Our host said, ‘No, Ma’am – the answer is ‘mulligatawny.’ And she said, ‘No – it’s curried soup!’ And she got so furious that she tossed the whole board in the air, sending all the pieces flying everywhere.”
She had a thirst for the put-down, particularly where food and drink were concerned. The author and photographer Christopher Simon Sykes remembers her arrival at his parents’ house one teatime. Full of excitement, the staff had prepared a scrumptious array of cakes, scones and sandwiches.
The princess glanced at this magnificent spread, said “I HATE tea!” and swanned past.
In the 1980s, when opening new district council offices in Matlock, Derbyshire, at 10am, she rejected an offer of coffee and asked for a gin and tonic instead. Having opened the offices, she was driven to open some sheltered bungalows for old people. A dish of coronation chicken had been specially cooked for her. “This looks like sick,” she said.
Her snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch. “I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,” she said to the architect who’d worked on Glamis Castle in Scotland.
To the same man, who’d been disabled since childhood, she said, “Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?”
Her more sympathetic friends managed to overlook such cruel remarks, believing them to be almost involuntary, or at least misguided. “I think she suffered from a perpetual identity crisis,” says one. “She didn’t know who she was. She never knew whether she was meant to be posh or matey, and so she swung between the two, and it was a disaster.”
It was almost as though, early in life, she had contracted a peculiarly royal form of Tourette’s syndrome, causing the sufferer to be seized by the unstoppable urge to say the wrong thing. When the model Twiggy and her then boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, were invited to dinner by the Marquis and Marchioness of Dufferin in the 1960s, their hostess warned them that Princess Margaret would be among the guests.
Before her arrival the marquis instructed them in royal protocol. “We were tipped off to stand if she stood, and to call her Ma’am. Fine, no probs,” recalled De Villeneuve.
Sitting close to the princess, De Villeneuve was shocked to find that her smoking was seamless. “When we started to eat, she lit a ciggie and then continued to chain-smoke, lighting one ciggie off another throughout the meal. Where’s the protocol in that?”
The princess ignored Twiggy – at that time one of the most famous women in Britain – until the very last moment. She then turned and asked her what her name was.
“Lesley, Ma’am. But my friends call me Twiggy.” “How unfortunate,” replied the Princess, and turned her back on her once more.
At this point Tony, never the most loyal husband, leaned over towards De Villeneuve. “You’ll get this with the upper classes,” he sighed.
MARGARET and Tony were a glamorous couple but their marriage was stormy. Home alone, they sniped and bickered. Each of their friends has a story to tell of their acid rows. Tony, a photographer, would shut himself away in his studio, telling her, “Never come in here without knocking!” On one occasion the princess yelled that she wasn’t prepared to entertain his friends, and slammed the door with such force that a mirror shattered. He’d flaunt his flirtations with other women and she’d react with fury.
Even when they went on holiday together Tony would do his best to avoid her. Staying with friends in Rome, he climbed out of a window and onto the roof. “It’s the only place I can get away from her,” he later explained.
Her snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch
Back home he took to leaving nasty notes on her desk, including one headed “Twenty Four Reasons Why I Hate You”, which particularly upset her.
On another occasion he left a note in her glove box saying “You look like a Jewish manicurist,” and on another, a note tucked into her bedside book, saying simply, “I hate you.”
Before a party or a public engagement, he’d make a point of reducing the princess to tears, ensuring that she’d appear puffy-faced and red-eyed on arrival.
They both had affairs. By early 1969 the comic actor Peters Sellers couldn’t stop boasting to friends that he was seeing Margaret. She had greeted him at Kensington Palace in a very low-cut dress, and things had gone on from there – or so he claimed.
Margaret dropped Sellers for Roddy Llewellyn, a landscaper who was 17 years her junior. In 1976 pictures of the princess holidaying with her toyboy lover on the Caribbean island of Mustique caused a stir when they made newspaper front pages.
Their publication accelerated her divorce. It was left to the princess’ private secretary, Nigel Napier, to break the news to Margaret by phone that her husband was moving out of Kensington Palace.
“Thank you, Nigel. I think that’s the best news you’ve ever given me,” she responded.
By 1980 her relationship with Roddy had fizzled out. As Margaret grew older the queen was alert to her loneliness and vulnerability. Sheltering at Balmoral [the royal estate in Scotland], the princess seemed, according to one member of the household, “almost like a poor relation. The queen felt very sorry for her.”
WHAT happened in the shower? Nobody quite knows. In February 1999 Margaret was on Mustique. Her guests at her villa, Les Jolies Eaux, were enjoying a relaxed breakfast when the cook rushed in.
There was steam coming from under the bathroom door, she said: the princess must be trapped inside. Unable to get a response from the bathroom, Margaret’s personal detective broke down the door.
He carried her out. It seems the accident had occurred because Margaret had made the easy mistake of mixing up the hand controls. There might also have been a faulty thermostat, which had heated the water to boiling point.
Intending to have a lukewarm shower, the Princess turned the wrong knobs at the wrong time; jets of searingly hot water shot out straight onto her feet. She was unable to move until her rescue, perhaps five or 10 minutes later.
Although her feet were badly scalded she insisted there was nothing seriously wrong with her. She struggled on for several weeks on Mustique, unable and unwilling to fly to a hospital. Eventually the queen organised a flight back to Britain on Concorde.
Margaret then spent months convalescing at Balmoral, but still refusing the skin grafts recommended by the doctors.
For a while her walking was restricted to just a few steps at a time. She gradually recovered but kept using a wheelchair, even though her elder sister considered it unnecessary.
When Margaret and her mother visited Buckingham Palace together an unseemly scene of wheelchair wars took place. The queen had seen to it that a footman would have a wheelchair ready for her mother, but as the lift doors opened onto the first floor Margaret made a dash for it.
“For God’s sake, Margaret – get out! That’s meant for Mummy!” remarked the queen. TOP: With her toyboy lover Roddy Llewellyn in 1978. ABOVE: The princess also reportedly had a brief affair with actor Peter Sellers.
In early January 2001 the princess’ health went rapidly downhill. A second stroke was followed by further strokes in the months to come: she lost her sight in one eye and most of the left side of her body was paralysed.
She was soon restricted to her wheelchair and sank into a depression. Often she refused to see anybody, including her mother. She spent most of her time in bed with the curtains drawn.
Just over a year later she died in hospital after suffering yet another stroke, aged 71. Four-hundred-and-fifty mourners attended her funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
“It’s a curious fact that if she had died in the middle of the 1960s the response would’ve been akin to that on the death of Diana,” Sir Roy Strong, a guest at so many of her dinner parties over three decades, wrote in his diary.
By the time of her death Strong’s friendship with the princess had cooled because he was fed up with her rude and entitled behaviour.
“This was a princess who never seemed to think of anything other than everyone’s role to fulfil her slightest whim. All of this was so sad because when young she had been beautiful, vivacious and at times quick-witted. But the downside won and that’s what the public in the end perceived.
“She was devoid of the common touch, attracting many to her circle who were sleazy glitterati and lived, it seemed, entirely for her own pleasure. The end was so tragic, a half-paralysed, bloated figure in a wheelchair but, I suppose, 50 years of cigarettes and whisky had effectively destroyed her system,” he wrote.
But writer Gore Vidal, a long-time friend, had a more sympathetic view. He declared that the princess had been “far too intelligent for her station in life”.
He claimed that she’d once told him the reason for her unpopularity: “It was inevitable; when there are two sisters and one is the queen who must be the source of honour and all that’s good, while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.” ’