Day Queen’s sister took a nosy round Bowie’s pad
QUEEN Elizabeth always made sure she had left London for Balmoral before allowing the great unwashed to snoop around Buckingham Palace during the summer.
Yet her sister, Princess Margaret, was, I learn, just as nosy about other people’s homes as any troublesome tourist.
TV personality Susannah Constantine, who was the girlfriend of Margaret’s son, David, the Earl of Snowdon, for six years in the 1980s, has made the extraordinary revelation that the princess would secretly enter the holiday homes of the rich and famous who lived on Mustique in the West Indies.
Margaret was given a ten-acre plot on the southern tip of the tiny island as a wedding present from flamboyant Scottish aristocrat Colin Tennant, the 3rd Lord Glenconner, who transformed Mustique into a playground for the jet set.
‘She loved snooping round people’s houses,’ says Susannah, 61. Referring to the sinister housekeeper in Daphne du Maurier’s gothic novel Rebecca, she adds: ‘She was like Mrs Danvers, and had a master key for every house on the island.’
Susannah says she stayed on Mustique with King Charles’s aunt ‘five or six times’. Among the homes they entered was a Japanese- style villa called Britannia Bay House, which belonged to David Bowie. It was designed to look like a temple, decked out in clashing animal print.
‘We went to his house and snooped around — no security,’ Susannah says on The Travel Diaries podcast. ‘She went, “This would look very nice in downtown Tokyo”, because it was sort of Balinese-esque. That was her sort-of put-down.’
Other famous names who have owned homes on Mustique include Sir Mick Jagger and the Guinness family.
Margaret’s property on the island, Les Jolies Eaux, was a private sanctuary where she entertained friends including ‘toy boy’ Roddy Llewellyn, the landscape gardener with whom she had an eight-year affair.