Margaret’s toyboy lover and why the Queen sided with Snowdon
LORD Snowdon, who died last week at the age of 86, was Antony ArmstrongJones when he married Princess Margaret in 1960. Today, in our final extract from ANNE DE COURCY’S explosive biography of the photographer, we reveal how the exposure of Margaret’s toyboy lover, against the backdrop of Snowdon’s wild affairs, led to their rancorous divorce.
TONY spent the years from 1968 to 1970 having a full-blown affair with a model, the daughter of Lord and Lady Reading, who were friends and neighbours of the Snowdons at their weekend retreat, Old House, in West Sussex. Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs — Jackie — was 21 and an acknowledged beauty when the affair began, but she had known Tony since she was 14, when he had first started dropping round to the family home.
He often joined them for meals at Margot Reading’s huge kitchen table (absent-mindedly, she had ordered it in yards instead of feet) and quickly charmed them all.
‘He was like a firework exploding into our lives,’ said one of the family later.
If Jackie’s parents had known what was going on, they would have been desperately worried that their daughter was entangled not simply with a man who was married, but with one who was married to the sister of the Queen. At the very least, a scandal of enormous proportions would have ensued.
But at first, the illicit couple aroused no suspicions, although there was a ‘near miss’ when Margaret, on her way back from a weekend with friends, asked her chauffeur, Larkin, to drop in at Old House.
Larkin, who knew much more about Tony’s activities than did his employer, wondered frantically what he could do to avert what he felt might be a catastrophic confrontation that would cause the Princess pain. Knowing how quick Tony was to pick up signals, he flashed the headlights of the car all the way up the track to the house. When they arrived, Tony was there to meet them.
After greeting Margaret affectionately, he turned to Larkin and said, with a meaningful look unseen by the Princess: ‘The Aston Martin wants some petrol in it — you’ll find some in the village.’
Larkin, whose responsibilities included filling the tanks of the royal cars, knew perfectly well that the Aston Martin had plenty of petrol.
Accordingly, he drove the car to nearby Staplefield opened the boot — to find JackieGreen where he curled up inside. From the village, she could walk back to her parents’ house openly and innocently.
When the story of the affair eventually broke in the Press, in January 1971, there were denials all round. But, pressed by her father, Jackie broke down and admitted it.
Lord and Lady Reading were furious. There were threats of horsewhipping and Tony was banned from their home.
The romance was over, and Tony felt the constraints of his life closing in on him. Professionally, however, he was at the top of the tree, not only as a photographer of renown but as a documentary-maker, lauded for the bravery and sensitivity of films about difficult subjects.
Born To Be Small, his film on what the world called dwarfs, or midgets, but whom Tony invariably referred to as ‘people of restricted growth’, was watched by 14 million when it was screened by the BBC in December 1971 and garnered excellent reviews.
As the noted film critic Alex Walker wrote: ‘Compassion is an easy word to write, but a rare thing to be able to feel these days . . . I can’t recall seeing or reading anything so affectionately revealing as TV showed me last night.’
The writer Quentin Crewe sent Tony a telegram in the small hours — ‘We were still talking about it at 1am’ — while his then wife, the novelist Angela Huth, sent one saying: ‘I don’t know how you avoided every pitfall and left one with tears but quite without words. It was brilliant.’
But such was Tony and Margaret’s relationship that she believed the film was a dig at her; since childhood she had always minded greatly that she was so small, ever since her grandmother, Queen Mary, would look down at her and remark: ‘Oh, I see Margaret hasn’t grown.’
Even four years later, when congratulated by the Upstairs Downstairs actor Gordon Jackson on her husband’s film, she responded: ‘Not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home, I’m afraid.’
A year later, Tony met the woman who would become his second wife. This was Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, the former wife of the talented film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
They met at a dinner party, and as Tony was by now working on another television film, about happiness, Lucy became his assistant. She was taller than Tony by several inches, slim and elegant, with the dark good looks of a Spanish marquesa.
She was shy, gentle, loyal and kind, less physical in her approach than Margaret and far more prepared to dedicate herself to the happiness of those she loved.
The film she worked on with him, Happy Being Happy, was broadcast in December 1973 and attracted the usual flood of fan letters. In his marriage, however, Tony was very far from happy. In a group photograph of the Royal Family taken at Christmas 1972, the togetherness evinced was only for the photographer Patrick Lichfield’s lens. The breach between the Snowdons had become an unbridgeable gulf.
At night, Tony would slip out of Kensington Palace and walk to Lucy’s flat in nearby Kensington Church Street. No one knew when he returned, but sometimes his wet footmarks would be seen in the hall early in the morning by the housekeeper.
Where most couples would have looked, individually, into their own hearts and minds to see if there was any way they could have spoken or acted differently, neither Margaret nor Tony possessed the necessary introspection for self-analysis.
As neither could bear to speak to the other, they communicated through the Princess’s private secretary, Lord Napier.
Napier dreaded having lunch with the warring couple, either in icy silence or with a shouting match bubbling beneath the surface, only to burst out at some unforeseen trigger word. One day, in a moment of confidence, Napier boldly told Tony what everyone close to them was thinking: ‘You cannot go on like this — you’re destroying each other.’ Tony agreed.
Yet astonishingly, even now, in the last gasps of their dying marriage, he and the Princess continued to sleep together. The attraction between them was too strong to be denied, and sexually he dominated her.
Tony would cross the bathroom that lay between their bedrooms then, in Margaret’s words (to three of the ladies-in-waiting to whom she was closest): ‘He would fling open my bedroom door, stand there with no clothes on and then — well, what could I do?’
He was, she said later, so masterful that she could only acquiesce. But Lucy’s invisible presence in their lives was a constant hurt to Margaret, who minded that Tony was in love with someone else.
She would refer to Lucy as ‘the thing’, and would say with heavy meaning: ‘Ugh — he’s working again.’ Her view was: ‘If that’s what he wants after me — well, really!’
But what would precipitate the final collapse was not Tony’s extra-marital activity, but Margaret’s.
Out of the blue, she had a new man. His name was Roddy Llewellyn and, aged 25, he was 18 years younger than her and an unlikely Lothario for an experienced Princess. He was working at the College of Heralds and doing some gardening on the side, yet compared with the career-minded Tony, he was a bit of a drifter.
Everyone noticed how extraordinarily like Tony he was in appearance. In character, however, they were poles apart. Roddy was thoughtful, kind and quite often depressed; though, on form, he was extremely funny.
He was fascinated by this sophisticated, voluptuous woman, so amusing and so easy to talk to, who made it plain how attracted she was to him. He was intensely grateful to her.
For Margaret, it was a case of falling in love again. Her comfort eating stopped and she lost weight. Her staff noticed that whenever Roddy came round to Kensington Palace she was in a happy mood. Away from him, she often wept.
Though the inoffensive Roddy did not seem the sort of rival to inspire virulent dislike in even the most jealous of husbands, he was to become a major ‘hate’ figure in Tony’s life.
What ate away at him was that, unlike Margaret’s previous infidelities, which usually lasted only a few weeks, this was no passing fancy.
He could see that she really did love her ardent young admirer, and for probably the only time in his marriage he felt threatened.
Roddy had a basement flat in Fulham, West London, which the Princess helped him furnish. What they didn’t realise at first was that Tony’s friend Bob Belton lived just a few doors away, and Tony would relieve his wounded pride by making unkind remarks from Belton’s balcony at the top of his voice.
‘What a peculiar garden down there,’ he would say, loud enough to be heard.
The chauffeur opened the boot and his boss’s mistress climbed out Tony could see Margaret loved her young suitor
‘Who on earth could have bought such vulgar plant pots?’ On evenings when he saw Margaret’s RollsRoyce parked outside Roddy’s flat, he would block it in by double-parking his Aston Martin.
Wanting space to be with her lover, the Princess asked Tony to move out of Kensington Palace. Angrily, he refused — it was, after all, his home, too, and, in part, his place of business. And he most definitely did not want Roddy coming and going as he pleased.
‘Tell your friend to keep out of my house,’ he shouted at her.
His resentment of Roddy continued to rankle, irrespective of his own affair with Lucy and the hurt it was causing the Princess. Tony’s view of the world remained resolutely self-centred.
For the uncertain Roddy, the looming presence of his lover’s husband was more than he could handle. He was struggling with the affair.
He had never had such a long relationship with a woman before, and now he was involved with one who was not only richer and older than he was, but who had a demanding, intense and possessive personality.
The physical side was also proving difficult to sustain, he told his brother. In every sense, everything was becoming ‘too much’.
One day he cracked. Leaping up from the restaurant table where he was having lunch, he rushed home, threw a few things in a suitcase and left for Heathrow, where he took the first available plane out of the country. It happened to be going to Guernsey. A couple of days later, he was back at Heathrow, where he caught a flight to Istanbul instead, and spent several weeks touring Turkey by bus.
Margaret was shattered by his sudden disappearance. Her marriage was over, her lover gone. Exhausted by nervous strain and in need of sleep, she took several of the Mogadon sleeping tablets she kept in her bedroom.
When she came to, it was clear to those around her that what she needed was prolonged rest and quiet to recover physically and psychologically.
Rumours flew around that she had tried to commit suicide or was having a nervous breakdown.
On doctor’s orders, visitors were banned, Tony especially.
Furious, he got into his car and drove round and round the cobbled courtyard in front of their home, blaring the horn. Later, he told Margaret’s friend how difficult he had found ‘seeing one’s wife have a nervous breakdown because her lover had left her’.
Roddy eventually returned to Britain after spending a few months in South America, and his relationship with Margaret resumed, although on less intense terms.
He went to live with a group of upper-class hippies (several of them titled) in a run-down Jacobean manor they were restoring in Wiltshire.
The Princess came to stay and mucked in happily with the others, drinking scrumpy and joining in the evening sing-songs. But word leaked out and the oddball community was besieged by the Press. Margaret was hitting the headlines again.
For the Queen, her sister’s indiscreet behaviour was increasingly a cause of distress. She believed that Margaret’s conduct in becoming involved with an indigent young man of no settled profession who was roughly half her age was, to say the least, undignified.
She was well aware of the difficulties in the Snowdons’ marriage, but hoped they could find a way of leading their own lives while remaining reasonably harmonious under the same roof.
Importantly for Tony, it appeared to the Queen and the Queen Mother that Margaret was the one standing in the way of this. Tony, they concluded, was more sinned against than sinning.
That had always been their take on the marriage. They all knew full well how difficult, spoilt and maddening Princess Margaret could be. But, in their presence, Tony was always at his best and sunniest, and any other aspect of his nature was hidden from them.
So their sympathies lay almost entirely with him. In the forthcoming maelstrom, he would emerge as the injured party. The end was rapidly approaching. Margaret removed her wedding ring, then sent Napier to inform Tony that in future he was not to accompany her to any public engagements. Tony wrote to the Queen.
‘The atmosphere is appalling for all concerned — the children, the staff, the few remaining loyal friends, and she and I both,’ he told her, in a sentence with which all at Kensington Palace would have agreed. He felt, he said, their life together had reached a stage he could no longer tolerate.
The Queen faced a nightmare situation. Divorce was a word not mentioned in the Palace without a shudder of horror. She begged him to do nothing precipitate, and Tony, mindful of her wishes, said no more. But the
The Queen thought Tony more sinned against than sinning
terminal state of the marriage could not be kept under wraps for ever. The Press were on to Roddy.
In February 1976, a journalist slipped through the security net on Mustique, the private island in the Caribbean where she and Snowdon had spent their honeymoon but was now Margaret’s holiday refuge (after the island’s owner, Colin Tennant, had given her a plot of land there as a wedding gift), and snapped ‘Mr and Mrs Brown’, as they called themselves on holiday.
Splashed all over a Sunday newspaper was a photograph, albeit a fuzzy one, of the Princess in a bathing costume sitting beside Roddy who was wearing Union Jack trunks.
The next day, an affronted Tony packed his bags and left Kensington Palace.
To the world, it seemed cut and dried: the indolent Princess had taken a lover who was nearer her son’s age than her own, and was luxuriating with him on a holiday island behind her hardworking husband’s back.
To the distress of the Princess’s friends, who had seen Tony’s cruel treatment of her and knew of his affair with Lucy, he had achieved the moral high ground.
The royal marriage finally ended in a ‘quickie’ postal divorce. There was no mention of adultery — just ‘irreconcilable differences’.
Five months later, in December 1978, Tony married Lucy.
Life with her was very different. Their home was not a palace, but a pretty, white stucco villa in Launceston Place, a quiet street in Kensington. The house was a personal gift from the Queen as part of the divorce arrangements (Tony also received £100,000 from Margaret).
Lucy knew that he would, as she put it, ‘push people to the brink’, but she vowed that she would stay with him through thick and thin — she would not be pushed ‘over the edge’.
A daughter, Frances, was born in July 1979. David and Sarah, his two children with Margaret, visited often and a warm relationship quickly built up with Lucy. Sarah, in particular, became extremely close to her stepmother.
Margaret’s attitude towards her successor mellowed — unlike Tony, whose feelings towards Roddy Llewellyn did not change. After spotting Lucy across the room at a reception at St James’s Palace, she called her over and the pair spent several minutes in easy chat.
Margaret was equally forgiving with Roddy when their affair finally petered out and he fell in love with someone else. Rather than lose the affection of someone to whom she had been so close, Margaret turned herself from lover into an older sister figure and forged an affectionate friendship with both him and his wife.
But with Roddy gone, friends noted that she needed male companionship ‘almost as if she were collecting scalps’, as one put it. Her drinking became legendary and she smoked constantly. She was still the enfant terrible of the Royal Family.
Tony, on the other hand, was as popular as ever. Unlike many marriage splits, there was no question of his severing contact with his former inlaws, nor forfeiting their affection.
After his first Christmas apart from them, he received a letter from Prince Charles: ‘Your jollity and effervescent wit has been greatly missed.’ It was Tony the Prince later chose to take his engagement pictures with Diana.
Tony’s special relationship with the Queen Mother remained untouched. He felt relaxed with his former mother-in-law. He amused her, she admired his work greatly, and she had no doubt that her daughter, rather than he, was responsible for the marriage not working.
Like the Boat Race cox he had been at Cambridge, Tony had steered a remarkable course through uncertain waters, managing what seemed impossible — to divorce the Queen’s sister and yet still retain the Royal Family’s love.
His career was better than ever, his work commanding huge fees, his domestic arrangements serene. At last, he seemed to have arrived at life’s sunny uplands. No one could have guessed how soon the sky would blacken.
The trouble was his relentless sex drive. Lucy had her suspicions that his old habit of extramarital flings had not died out. She once asked one of his assistants; the boy, torn between truthfulness and loyalty to his employer, gave a non-committal answer.
But the truth was that Tony had been cheating on her even before they were married.
ABRIDGED extract from Snowdon: The Biography by Anne de Courcy (W&N, £9.99). © Anne de Courcy.
Margaret was still the enfant terrible of the Royal Family