The only friend I have had who met Princess Margaret was the US poet Mark Strand. This happened at a New York cocktail party, and must have been an incongruous encounter. Strand was extremely tall, very deliberate of speech and gait, well mannered and craggily handsome – the overall effect was of Clint Eastwood’s bookish, better-looking older brother. The princess was not tall – indeed, she was christened “the Royal Dwarf” in 1951 – was sharp of speech and not jam-packed with noblesse oblige. She was, however, famously royal, so when she reached into her bag, extracted a cigarette and pointed it towards Strand, he knew his (republican) duty. He dug out some matches and prepared to fire up the princess. But she stopped him: no, she said, she couldn’t abide book matches. Obligingly, he turned to a passing guest, borrowed a lighter and indulged her fastidiousness. The party moved on. A while later, he found himself sitting on a sofa with the princess. She took another cigarette from her bag, swiftly followed by her own lighter. “Isn’t this fun?” she remarked, showing him a gold item with “007” engraved on it. Sean Connery had given it to her, she told him. Then she contentedly lit her own cigarette.
There are other examples of such petty nicotine power play in Craig Brown’s roistering quasi-biography of the chain-smoking princess. She once invited Derek Jacobi to dinner at a Covent Garden restaurant; he thought they were getting on pretty well, until she took out a cigarette and he politely raised a lighter in her direction. She snatched it from his hand and passed it swiftly to a neighbouring ballet dancer with the rebuke, “You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close.” Keith Waterhouse, at a reception, alarmed at watching the ash get longer and longer on the royal fag, began to reach for an ashtray; but she found a quicker solution by tapping the ash off into Waterhouse’s passing palm. This was a cheap way of establishing precedence: cheap in both senses.
She was, according to Brown, “the world’s most difficult guest” from her mid-20s onwards: bossy, demanding, volatile and petty. As he puts it, she conscientiously set people “at their unease”. She exploited to the full the royal protocol of guests not being allowed to sit down to dinner, or leave, or even go to bed, until the royal party had done so themselves. Nor could anyone carry on eating after Margaret had stopped. She liked to run with a well-heeled artistic crowd, imagining it to be “bohemian” – though the true bohemia of the talented yet impoverished was unknown to her. Most of the “bohemians” she mixed with were successful ex-if-ever-bohemians: few would call Kenneth Tynan or Gore Vidal or Cyril Connolly or Noël Coward or Cecil Beaton or Sir Roy Strong bohemian. Though she bent to their interests, sang and danced with them, sat through Tynan’s blue movies and declined Jack Nicholson’s cocaine, she nevertheless imposed her protocol and her rudeness on them. And all bowed to it. When she was presented to Robert Evans, the producer of Love Story, at the film’s London premiere, she said to him: “Tony [Lord Snowdon, her husband] saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.” Evans smiled back. “Fuck you too,” he replied – but, alas, only to himself. No one ever seems to have said it aloud to her – though a drunken Dudley Moore, deeply in character as Arthur, did once cross a restaurant and say to her, “G’d evenin’ your royal highness … I s’pose a blow-job is out of the question?”
It is evident (and not just from this book) that being royal is bad for the character. What is equally and dismayingly clear from Ma’am Darling is the corrosive effect on others of intimacy with royalty. The princess’s arty set danced attendance on her, then went home and wrote bitchy things in their diaries, and having thus purified themselves, returned the next day to dance further attendance. She may have been a dismissive snob, but her royal presence was as warm and bronzing as a John Lewis sun lamp. And if they felt guilty at where their tan had come from, they turned their own snobbery back on her. Since she was royal, the most satisfying way to diminish her was to imply that she was the opposite of royal. Nancy Mitford described her as “excessively common”; Cecil Beaton thought she was “vulgar” and Snowdon “common beyond belief”; Alan Clark found her “revoltingly tastelessly behaved”; to Christopher Isherwood she was “quite a common little thing”. (I remember being told early on that to call anyone “common” was to condemn yourself out of your own mouth.) Nor was it just her manners. There were also her looks. Snowdon, when their marriage was falling apart, left her a note saying she looked like “a Jewish manicurist”. Even Richard Eyre – not one of her immediate circle – compared her to “a Maltese landlady”. She certainly kept the diary-writers busy.
Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for several decades now. His distinguished mentors were William Donaldson and Auberon Waugh, and you can often catch an echo of their sly style in his prose. Here is a classic chapter opener:
After leaving Shrewsbury school,
Roddy Llewellyn was deemed too
short, at five feet nine inches, to join
a Guards regiment. Instead he went
to work at one of his father’s factories
in Newport, dipping the push-buttons
for telephones into electroplating vats.
Ma’am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny; also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity. His general approach to his fellow humans is benignly sceptical, while convinced that if you look carefully enough, everyone is fundamentally absurd and probably self-deceiving, and at their most absurd and self-deceiving where sex and money and rank are concerned. He adores the spectacle of human vanity, perhaps best exemplified for him by the eager figure of Strong, whom the princess, despite all his attentions and devotions, alas, finally, disappoints (though Strong fails to wonder if he ever disappointed her). Brown tends to smile more on the world’s rogues and chancers – such as the criminal John “Biffo” Bindon, who might (or might not) have been the princess’s lover – while keeping his severity for those who are most up themselves. Llewellyn is treated gently, like a rather harmless plant; the Peter Townsend romance is given a good scouring as to when and where and what exactly happened; while few good words (and many bad ones) are found for Snowdon, whom Brown accuses of gaslighting Margaret as their marriage fell apart.
One of the traditional problems for the satirist is the transition from short-form to long-form. Brown solved this brilliantly in his previous book, One on One, a 101-chapter daisy chain of improbable but true meetings around the world and across the 20th century, with its end returning to its beginning. In Ma’am Darling he adopts a 99-chapter approach, with each section characterised as a “glimpse”. This allows him the flexibility to drop in a chapter of merely a few lines, and to go off at short or long tangents as the whim takes him – to be himself as much as possible. But quasi-biography, such as he has chosen to write, remains, alas, still a form of biography. There are lives to be described, and motives to be explored, and characters to be moved through time. As early as chapter 11, Brown is chafing at these normal responsibilities of a literary form he considers in the main to be “sheepish and constrained”. Thus, he relates how different people would describe the same princessy event, and yet each of them would describe it somewhat differently, leaving him in a quandary as to which version he should or could believe. To which the world’s biographers would riposte: tell us about it! This is merely base camp for them.
So: John Julius Norwich believed that he had “never known an unhappier woman” than Princess Margaret; while Norman St John Stevas asserted confidently that she was “not at all unhappy”. Gore Vidal claimed she was “far too intelligent for her station in life”, and St John Stevas that she was “one of the most intelligent, one of the cleverest women I have ever met”; while Robert Harris found her “dimmer than I’d expected”. Later in the book, there are many recorded accounts of precisely how many pint or half-pint beer mugs John Bindon could dangle from his apparently extensive penis, a discordancy that makes Brown throw up his hands at ever discovering the objective truth about the matter. His pseudo-seriousness in laying out the different versions of “Biffo’s party trick” makes for great fun, but in deciding that it undermines the very possibility of truthful biography, he misses two factors. One, it’s perfectly plausible that Beer-Mug Biffo performed his trick in different ways on different occasions, and that all accounts are true, or truish, and that slight variations are unimportant. And second, it is in any case the normal duty of any chronicler to decide which witness is the more credible.
This balking at the very form he has chosen leads Brown to throw in parody chapters in which, for instance, Margaret actually marries Townsend, or has a tryst with Picasso, or becomes queen in place of her sister. (I confess I took Brown’s account of her appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1981 to be a – rather long-winded – parody, until I checked the date and the record choices and realised it was actually a transcript.) You suspect these counterfactuals are more to give Brown a change of air than to increase the reader’s enlightenment. One of the stranger and more bookish rumours about the princess, vented by a reviewer in the TLS, is “that Princess Margaret, having read Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, craved to see Nether Stowey. Accordingly she instructed her pilot on the way back from an official chore to circle several times around the Somerset cottage.” Whether this is the reviewer’s own story, or comes from the book under review, is unclear; so is the date of the review. It sounds like some late-night literary fantasy, or the answer to some party game. And Princess Margaret’s reading, as evidenced by Brown, is not usually at the level of Coleridge: Early Visions (1989). She enjoyed PG Wodehouse, Graham Hancock and Gore Vidal’s Duluth – from which she once read aloud at Royal Lodge in the author’s proud presence. Books in her possession at her death, and which came up at the Christie’s sale in 2006, included presentation copies from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Harold Acton, Margot Fonteyn and Coward, as well as Liberace’s autobiography – though there is no evidence of which, if any of them, she read. Like many, she chose War and Peace as her desert island companion. Did the princess actually get through 402 pages of Holmes and then order a pilot of the royal flight to buzz Coleridge’s cottage? It sounds more than improbable, but the percentage of truth, if any, in the story would be a question for the traditional foot-slogging biographer. Instead, Brown gives us a chortling 11-page riff, describing this unverified event in 31 styles. This homage to Raymond Queneau, for all its facility and bravura, remains functionally inert; though it’s easy to imagine Brown’s relief at having ticked off another of his 99 chapters.
When starting to make notes for this review, I tried to keep my inner republicanism at bay by writing down three headings: “List of Kind/Generous Things Done or Said”; “List of Witty/Intelligent Things Said”; and “List of Interesting Opinions”. Later I added “List of Inventions”, solely in order to record this fact: “For a while,” Brown writes, Princess Margaret “glued matchboxes to tumblers so that she could strike matches while drinking, but it was a craze that never caught on.” By the end of his book, my list of the princess’s Interesting Opinions stood at zero. The Kind/Generous Things Done or Said column was empty until p337, when an interview with Selina Hastings suddenly offers an account of the princess quite at odds with most other testimony in the book: as being warm, sweet, nice and thoughtful (until Hastings received the traditional slapping-down at the dinner table). And after Margaret’s death, friends pointed out that she had preceded Diana in discreetly visiting Aids victims at the Lighthouse.
But it was the list of Witty/Intelligent Things Said that most surprised me. She clearly had a sharp and amusing tongue, even if her wit seems to have been best fuelled by grumpiness or disapproval. When Vidal told her that Jackie Kennedy had complained that she found the Queen “pretty heavy going”, Margaret replied, “That’s what she’s for.” In 1984 she agreed to appear in The Archers, acting out her real-life role as president of the NSPCC alongside the duke of Westminster; the script called for them both to be visiting a charity fashion show at Grey Gables. The duke travelled to Pebble Mill studio to record his segment; Princess Margaret stayed at Kensington Palace and let the BBC come to her. She then read out her lines of dialogue with Jack Woolley and Caroline Sterling in a “curiously flat and uninvolved” manner. The producer, trying to get her to loosen up, said, “That was very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?” Princess Margaret replied, “Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?”
In a chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition called “Princess Margaret’s Facelift”, JG Ballard reflected on the paradox of modern fame and the psychology of the public who sustain it. The stars we elect and revere are both infinitely remote and yet scrutinised in their smallest gesture. “Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us.”
Princess Margaret is a good example of this fissiparous tendency. In some men – Picasso and Jeremy Thorpe, John Fowles and Peter Sellers – she provoked romantic/sexual fantasy. For others, like the pathetically infatuated Vidal, she personified “real royalty” as opposed to the ersatz Kennedy version. To intellectuals, she offered the lure of inverted snobbery. For egalitarians she proved yet again how class and money, free of talent or work, can run together and enrich one another while remaining careless of ordinary mortal life. Such needs are so powerful in their satisfactions that perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter what Princess Margaret was actually “like”. And so maybe Brown is right, and biography, “sheepish and constrained”, would be an inappropriate literary form to apply to her.
• Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
