Margaret was spellbindingly sexy. But even she couldn’t tame Snowdon
He was so magnetic few women could resist — and he couldn’t say no either. Starting today, an explosive biography, based on hours of interviews with the legendary charmer
LORD Snowdon, who died last week aged 86, was plain Antony Armstrong-Jones when he wed Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister, in 1960. As our first extract from Anne de Courcy’s explosive biography, based on hours of interviews with him, reveals, he was a man of immense charisma who bewitched women with his wit, charm — and extraordinarily high libido.
WHEN antony armstrong- Jones, as he was then, met Princess Margaret, she was 27 and at the height of her beauty and charisma — poised, stylish and groomed to perfection. In one of the long, elegant evening dresses that made the most of her petite, feminine figure, swathed in furs and glittering with diamonds, she was an icon of glamour, exuding an aura of sophisticated, challenging sexuality, with a glance that could turn from melting to icy in a moment.
she was imperious, wilful, and if she was bored, showed it. at one small dance given in her honour, when her host asked her: ‘Ma’am, will you start the dancing?’ she replied: ‘Yes — but not with you.’
The premature death of her father, King George VI, in 1952, had been a massive blow to her, and one of the big problems of her life would be that no one would ever measure up to him.
The only man she had thought might do so was the royal equerry Peter Townsend, and she’d had to give him up because he was divorced.
The sad ending of this relationship meant that she aroused both chivalry and sympathy, while the country speculated eagerly about the men in her social circle.
For the equally charismatic and driven armstrong-Jones — already cutting a swathe through London’s most desirable girls while creating a name for himself as the photographer of the moment — she was a unique and intoxicating challenge.
Their first meeting was in early 1958, at a dinner party held by one of her ladies-inwaiting, Lady elizabeth Cavendish, who thought the young photographer’s originality and high spirits would appeal to the Princess. she sat them next to each other, and the two hit it off.
Quickly they established their mutual interest in the arts and ballet. ‘I enjoyed his company very much, but I didn’t take a lot of notice of him because I thought he was queer,’ the Princess later told her authorised biographer.
Far from being ‘ queer’ however, he was serially seducing women (‘if it moves, he’ll have it,’ summed up one close friend at the time), many of whom were the virginal 18-yearold debutantes he photographed.
It became a challenge to see if he could get them into bed — not easy in those pre-Pill days when pregnancy was every girl’s nightmare. However, he usually succeeded.
He was also holding down two longerterm relationships, one with dancer Jacqui Chan — an exquisite beauty who was his first real love — and one with actress Gina ward, the niece of an earl. It was when he met Margaret again a few months later — commissioned by one of her many dazzled admirers to photograph her — that their real rapport began.
with the utmost politeness, he made her change her clothes, her jewellery and her pose just as if she were any other sitter, while at the same time chatting away with his usual mixture of jokes and gossip about mutual friends.
Margaret, accustomed to unquestioning deference, had never met anyone like him.
secret visits to his Pimlico studio began. Dressed as anonymously as possible in tweed skirt, sweater and headscarf, she would slip through the small alleyway that led to the backyard and into the small basement sitting room where Tony would cook them a simple supper. Occasionally, he would whisk her off to his room at his friend Bill Glenton’s house in Rotherhithe; when he sprayed the hall with air purifier and installed soft, violet-tinted toilet tissue in the house’s single, communal lavatory, it was a hint that some special visitor was expected. at weekends, when Margaret joined her mother at Royal Lodge, Tony would drive to windsor to see her there. One excellent excuse for visits was his commission to take the 29th birthday portraits of the Princess.
In any case, so outre was the idea that the Queen of england’s sister was conducting a secret love affair with a photographer that this was the greatest protection of all against discovery.
For Tony, it was all incredibly exciting. He was used to pretty girls and aware of the effect his well-honed sexual expertise had on women. But Margaret was something different, gilded with the mysterious, mythic aura of royalty.
everything around her spoke of this. For a simple weekend country house visit, the names of fellow guests had first to be submitted to her lady-in-waiting, accompanied by a dossier on each one.
at every meal, the Princess was served first and no one could speak to her without first being addressed by her. In some houses, if she did not help herself to, say, potatoes, no one else could.
she was a challenge like no other — even to take the Queen’s sister on the back of his motorbike was almost unbelievable, and the thought of a relationship was overwhelming. when she made her interest plain, for once he was not the one controlling the situation.
and while he was tremendously impressed by the Princess for her beauty, intelligence and wit, he was
also enormously proud of himself for becoming her lover.
Each had extraordinary sexual magnetism, with a libido to match. When they entered each other’s force field of attraction, their mutual gravitational pull was irresistible and soon they were sexually besotted.
Yet, although by the summer of 1959 they were deeply in love, he was still leading his busy private life at full throttle. Girls still came and went at the studio, and although Jacqui Chan was less in evidence, he was still carrying on his affair with Gina Ward.
THERE was, too, another development that would return later to haunt him. At weekends, Tony often went to visit two of his closest friends, Jeremy Fry and his wife, Camilla, at their house, Widcombe Manor, near Bath.
Fry, tall and extremely good looking, had an overwhelming magnetic attraction — and taste — for men and women alike. Camilla was one of Tony’s old flames. All three knew each other intimately.
It was a time when moral codes were changing, and the Sixties — with its explosive mixture of sexual freedom and the breaking down of taboos — were just over the horizon.
Tony, with his urge to challenge accepted boundaries, was at the forefront of this new age. In the sophisticated world in which he and the Frys moved, where relationships of every kind flourished and where it was implicit that sexual orientation was a matter of preference, it was inevitable not only that they would be in the avant-garde of any such attitude, but also that their behaviour would represent it.
Jeremy’s passion for Camilla had waned and, frustrated, she found it easy to encourage a charming former boyfriend, while Jeremy and Tony were highly sexed. Alcohol and ‘ poppers’ — amyl nitrate stimulants — helped them all shed any remaining inhibitions. As one friend put it later, ‘it was a pretty good free-for-all there’.
During one of these romps in early September 1959, a child was conceived (later, when the pregnancy was confirmed, it was assumed that Jeremy was the father); soon afterwards, in October, Tony went to stay at Balmoral for the first time.
Again, no one attached any significance to his visit, thinking — if at all — that he was there in a professional capacity. While he was staying, the Princess received a letter from Peter Townsend telling her that he was getting married.
The Princess was stunned, and it is popularly supposed that Tony proposed to her that very day while they walked in the heather and she, out of pique, accepted. It wasn’t like that.
She was determined to show the world quite the opposite reaction and the truthful one — that she was over Townsend and his marriage would not wound her.
The decision to marry came several months later — at Widcombe Manor, which the Frys had offered as a ‘safe house’ for their courtship.
And it was here, at the scene of those recent frolics, that Margaret and Tony became secretly engaged.
Never has a royal love affair leading to an engagement been kept so quiet — but Tony’s sharp- eyed friends noticed something was up.
his style was changing from tight jeans and desert boots to well-cut dark suits and crisp white shirts. A conversation that Tony had with the young interior designer David hicks might also have given the game away, but didn’t.
‘I’m going to make a very grand marriage,’ said hicks. ‘Oh, really?’ said Tony. ‘ Who to?’ ‘ Lady Pamela Mountbatten,’ replied hicks proudly. ‘Oh, I don’t call that grand,’ responded Tony.
There were last-minute loose ends to be tied up, and he telephoned his lover Gina Ward, who was too staggered by his news to feel anything but shock and disbelief.
‘Tony, you’ll have an awful life,’ she told him. ‘ You can’t take this on. And, anyway, you’re in love with me!’
Only after the call was over did the pain of her own loss strike home, with the feeling that she had been ‘ broken into a hundred pieces’.
Jacqui had to be told, too. She was filming at Pinewood, and Tony delegated his friend Bob Belton to drive down and break the news. There was a long silence before Jacqui said: ‘ Well, I hope she can cope better than I could.’
As soon as the engagement was announced, warnings flew thick and fast.
Lady Elizabeth Cavendish asked the Princess if she was quite sure ‘because you won’t always know where he is and he won’t always want to tell you’.
One of Tony’s friends, Peter Saunders, warned: ‘ These people aren’t for you, Tony. They will chew you up and spit you out. I know it’s a physical thing at the moment, but at the end of the day, for goodness sake, don’t do it.’
Tony’s father, deeply upset, wrote: ‘Boy, you would be mad to marry Princess Margaret.’
When the Queen Mother telephoned society photographer Cecil Beaton and told him of the engagement, he said: ‘Oh how wonderful, you must be thrilled, Ma’am. how simply marvellous, he’s terribly clever and talented.’
When he put the phone down, he said in tones of disgust: ‘Silly girl!’
EVEN playwright Noel Coward, a fervent royalist, noted in his diary: ‘he looks quite pretty but whether or not the marriage is entirely suitable remains to be seen.’
To the ancient aristocracy and those close to the throne, the shock was immense.
here was the daughter of the last King-Emperor, brought up amid scenes of immense grandeur at a time when half the map of the world was red, about to marry not, as might have been expected, the eldest son of a duke with vast estates, but a man who as they saw it was not even in a ‘respectable’ profession, who took snaps for a living.
Yet Tony always had the Queen Mother’s support, and the Queen’s followed. From their point of view, his intelligence, natural finesse, excellent manners and obvious devotion to Margaret spoke heavily in his favour.
he got on well with Prince Philip, too — one of the Duke’s early letters has an arrow pointing to his signature ‘Philip’ with the words: ‘ Try and bring yourself to call me this!’
When the staff at Clarence house were assembled and told that Princess Margaret was engaged ‘to a photographer called Armstrong-Jones’, there was a long drawn-out ‘ooh’ of disappointment.
Few of the staff had heard of him, and most had expected the Queen’s sister to make a far grander marriage than to a man cruelly ( and monstrously unfairly) described by the novelist Kingsley Amis as a ‘dog-faced, tight-jeaned fotog of fruitarian tastes’.
After the wedding, a number of courtiers and servants had no hesitation in showing their hearty
TOMORROW: A MARRIAGE THAT TURNED INTO A WAR
disapproval. Margaret’s dresser, Ruby Gordon, did so by ignoring Tony’s presence and any orders he might give, and by various gestures that could — just — be put down to accident or forgetfulness.
Margaret kept a photograph of Tony under the glass of her dressing table and Ruby would carefully put the Princess’s silverbacked dressing-table mirror on top of it to hide it.
When she called on the Princess in the morning, she would bring one cup of tea only, setting it down firmly on the Princess’s side of the bed.
UndaunTed, Tony quickly adapted to royal protocol. He was the perfect consort, decorously following Margaret closely behind on official visits and always saying the right thing.
He happily participated in his new family’s customs, such as their private race on Gold Cup day at Royal ascot before the start of that day’s racing. The party would ride out of Royal Lodge and line up together to be started by an equerry.
‘ We went like the clappers,’ recalled Tony. ‘Princess Margaret always won. I was last every time. I couldn’t grip my horse because of my leg [affected by polio at 16]. Once, I couldn’t stop and was headed straight for the Queen. all I could do was yell and she just got out of the way in time.’
He even managed to negotiate the outdoor rigours of Balmoral — albeit, with his constant urge to be somehow ‘different’, breaking the dress code by turning up for shoots in a polo-neck sweater and his own- designed baggy knickerbockers, teamed with a black umbrella.
In all the heady excitement, the couple’s love was unmistakable and both found it difficult, as one friend put it, ‘to keep their hands off each other’.
But seeing each other at their best, happiest and most unselfish, neither Tony nor Margaret realised that, essentially, they were each accustomed to getting their own way.
They were the nation’s most glamorous couple in the early Sixties, and their parties were gatherings of the beautiful and the famous: the actor dudley Moore at the piano, Cleo Laine singing, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan playing the fool, poet John Betjeman telling stories.
Yet cracks were slowly appearing. Both were stars, used to being the focus of attention, and a certain competitiveness was almost inevitable.
The Princess was royal but Tony was magnetic, and wittier. There were arguments and, more ominously, the beginnings of the putdowns, then usually disguised as jokes, that would come to so unnerve her.
Tony was not born to walk two paces behind any woman and he was soon bored. Though he loved the perks and the prestige of being royal, the intoxication of being whisked to the theatre in mere minutes, flanked by outriders, of being stared at and admired, passed.
The contrariness in his nature, his almost subliminal instinct to irritate, to scratch, to push at boundaries, reasserted itself. He wanted, to use an idiom that was just coming in, ‘to do his own thing’.
Work was as essential to him as breathing, and he joined the Sunday Times Magazine as a photographer.
Left at home, the Princess became possessive, constantly trying to track him down by telephone or turning up unexpectedly at restaurants where she thought he was lunching.
It was the worst thing she could have done. In his solipsistic view of the world, Tony’s instinct was to push away a woman if he felt hemmed in by ‘clinginess’.
Increasingly, he refused his wife’s demands on his time. He would do something or meet someone only if he wanted to, not on her say-so.
He would shut the door of his workshop in the basement of Kensington Palace and refuse to come out, leaving Margaret — brought up by parents who never reprimanded her, and unfamiliar with the word ‘no’ — at a loss.
Margaret had never had lunch alone in her life and expected she would see Tony often during the day. Instead, she found herself alone, filling in time by washing the coral she had collected on holiday in the Caribbean, or sticking the sides of matchboxes on tumblers so she would have something to strike a match on if she wanted to smoke while drinking whisky.
She asked to accompany him on his photography sessions, unable to see that her presence would hardly make his sitters relax. among his Sunday Times colleagues, a tacit awareness developed that their star photographer welcomed assignments abroad.
What they did not know was that, once away, he hardly ever wrote to or telephoned his wife — who grew correspondingly more frantic in her efforts to maintain contact.
‘Where is he?’ she would cry unhappily. There was trouble ahead. Abridged extract from Snowdon: The biography by Anne de Courcy, published by W&N at £9.99. © Anne de Courcy To order a copy for £7.49 call 0844 571 0640 or visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk Offer valid until January 23; p&p is free on orders over £15.