As she grew older, Princess Margaret turned pickiness into an art form, snubbing hosts who offered her items of food and drink that were not exactly what she wanted. Staying with friends on Corfu in the mid-1980s, she was invited to dinner by a neighbour who had never met her before. Prior to her arrival he went to an amazing amount of trouble, scouring the island for as many different types of whisky as he could find, so as not to be wrong-footed. When the evening came, he asked her what she would like to drink. ‘Famous Grouse, please.’ ‘Ma’am, that is the only one I haven’t been able to get.’ ‘Then I won’t have anything, thank you.’ And with that, she turned away to light a cigarette.
At times, it seemed as though she was taking a perverse pleasure in finding things not up to scratch. Hugo Vickers recalls the first time she came to dinner with him. ‘She said, “You won’t have a Robinson’s barley water,” and I said, “Of course I have,” and she looked a little disappointed.’
Her hosts knew to serve her first. The more obsequious would withdraw any dishes she refused – potatoes, for instance – so that others could not 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.
Far more than her sister, she was given to pulling rank. She once reminded her children that she was royal and they were not, and their father was most certainly not. ‘I am unique,’ she would sometimes pipe up at dinner parties. ‘I am the daughter of a King and the sister of a Queen.’ It was no ice-breaker. Even in her youth, she would accept invitations only on the understanding that the names of her fellow guests were submitted to her lady-in-waiting beforehand, accompanied by a full CV. Throughout her life she delighted in exercising the power of veto. One hostess remembers an Indian friend being blackballed, on the grounds that the Princess didn’t like Indians.
When exactly did she first show signs of being the world’s most difficult guest? By the age of twenty-eight she had already developed a reputation: when Cynthia Gladwyn, the wife of the British ambassador to France, heard that the Princess would be accompanying the Queen Mother on a visit to Paris in April 1959, she felt very put out. ‘This put a different complexion on the scheme,’ she recalled in her diary some time later. ‘… Her reputation, when staying in embassies and government houses, was not an encouraging one.’
Lady Gladwyn could not have been aware of an unfortunate incident a few days before. On the morning of a lunch in Rome held in the Princess’s honour, the ten-year-old daughter of a senior British diplomat had been taught to say grace. But when the big moment came, she grew tongue-tied. While the Princess and everyone waited expectantly, the little girl whispered to her mother that she had forgotten what to say.
‘You remember, darling,’ replied her mother encouragingly. ‘Just repeat what Daddy and I said before lunch.’
‘Oh God, why do we have to have this difficult woman to lunch,’ piped up the little girl.
The Gladwyns met the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret off their plane at Orly airport. They had flown direct from Rome after a meeting with the Pope. Her diaries suggest that Lady Gladwyn was ill-disposed towards Princess Margaret from the start: while she describes the Queen Mother as ‘radiant as always’,* the Princess is, she notes, ‘looking far from radiant’ in a ‘distinctly ordinary coat and skirt’.
Along with radiance, she emitted delight. Her authorised biographer, William Shawcross, chronicles this trail of delight. Wherever she goes, she delights everyone, and they are in turn delighted by her delight, whereupon she is delighted that they are delighted that she is delighted that … and so forth. If you shut his book too abruptly, you’ll notice delight oozing out of its sides. Returning from Australia, the young Elizabeth hears that the King is ‘delighted with the enthusiastic reception’. For her birthday, the King and Queen give her a Chinese screen. ‘She was delighted,’ reports Shawcross. Off on another trip, she leaves the children with Queen Mary. ‘The Queen was, as always delighted,’ writes Shawcross. In time, George and Elizabeth are elevated to King and Queen. Her husband bestows the Order of the Garter upon her. ‘She was delighted.’ She meets President Roosevelt, whom ‘she thought delightful’. She also found train drivers ‘delightful’, and ‘delighted’ in mimicry. After the coronation she visits Balmoral. ‘It was delightful,’ she says.
It clearly takes a certain steeliness to be quite so radiant, quite so delighted twenty-four hours a day. The famously effete Stephen Tennant, the brother of one of the Queen Mother’s early suitors, described her as ‘hard as nails’. The Duke of Windsor agreed, calling both his mother and his sister-in-law ‘ice-veined bitches’.
Queen Elizabeth II is also sometimes described as ‘radiant’, though less frequently so, perhaps because her efforts at radiance appear rather more dutiful. But from the age of twenty-five, Princess Margaret was rarely described as ‘radiant’, other than on her wedding day, traditionally an occasion on which the adjective is obligatory, to be withheld only if the bride is actually hauled sobbing to the altar.
On that April morning in Paris, Lady Gladwyn ascribed the young Princess’s determined non-radiance at Orly airport to her late nights ‘dashing around in Rome in a smart set’. She had mixed with aristocrats, artists and film stars, returning to the Rome embassy in the early hours of the morning. But this was, she felt, no excuse for her general off-handedness. ‘Princess Margaret seems to fall between two stools. She wishes to convey that she is very much the Princess, but at the same time she is not prepared to stick to the rules if they bore or annoy her, such as being polite to people.’ This was soon to become the accepted view of the Princess among those who bumped into her socially.
Her purpose in coming to Paris was twofold: to have her hair styled by the famous Parisian hairdresser Alexandre, and to be fitted for a dress by Dior. Any additional obligations she regarded as a bit of a chore. At a small cocktail party in the embassy, she proved to Cynthia Gladwyn that she was ‘quick, bright in repartee’, but also ‘wanting to be amused, all the more so if it is at somebody else’s expense’. This, she felt, was ‘the most disagreeable side to her character’.
After the cocktail party, they all went upstairs to dress for the forthcoming dinner for sixty in the State Dining Room. On the way, Margaret asked her hostess, ‘Will it be short or long?’ Lady Gladwyn sensed a trap. ‘I knew that this trivial detail had often been a stumbling block; that if it was decreed that we would all wear short dresses, she would embarrass everybody by making an entry in the most sweeping of ball dresses, and vice versa.’ Even at this early stage, she had taken against the young Princess. Did she merit such instant disapproval, or was it a perverse reaction to her fame?
Cunningly, Lady Gladwyn pre-empted any mischief by informing her guests that either long or short would be fine. It took some time before they discovered which way the Princess would swing. ‘Dinner was at 8.30 and at 8.30 Princess Margaret’s hairdresser arrived, so we waited for hours while he concocted a ghastly coiffure,’ complained Nancy Mitford, who was also present. When she finally emerged, she looked, according to Mitford, ‘like a huge ball of fur on two well-developed legs’.* As for her dress, she had managed to find a loophole. Lady Gladwyn recorded that it was not just short, but too short. According to her, ‘one Frenchman commented, “It began too late and ended too soon.”’ Nancy Mitford was also to repeat this witticism, adding, ‘In fact the whole appearance was excessively common.’
The Princess was placed next to Jean Cocteau, who recalled, perhaps fancifully, that she had told him, ‘Disobedience is my joy.’ After dinner, the other guests trooped into the ballroom for a performance by the vocal quartet Les Frères Jacques. The Gladwyns and the royal party entered last, by which time the others were all sitting down. At a similar event in Britain, everyone would have greeted the royal party by rising to their feet; but not in France. ‘Being French and republican and democratic and independent, and with nobody giving them the lead to rise, they remained as they were.’
The Queen Mother, ‘with perfect manners and comprehension of the situation’, didn’t look in the slightest bit put out, but just ‘smiled amiably and moved towards her chair’. Not so Princess Margaret. ‘She exclaimed imperiously, “Look! they’ve sat down!” and showed that she was displeased.’
Lady Gladwyn had already worked out who should sit on either side of the Princess for the performance, but the Princess was having none of it, plonking herself beside Cocteau, who had already been next to her at dinner. ‘She took such a fancy to him that she would hardly talk to anybody else the whole evening.’ At one point, the former French ambassador in London approached Lady Gladwyn. ‘I really must have a word with the Princess. Can you arrange it?’ She did her best, trying to edge him into the Princess’s little circle, but the Princess refused to catch her eye. ‘She was well aware of my tactics, and determined to ignore them. In the end I gave up.’
After church on Sunday – at which the Princess accepted a bouquet ‘with noticeable ingratitude, holding it by the stalks, with the heads of the flowers almost touching the pavement’ – Lady Gladwyn had planned a visit to two châteaux, on which several young people had been invited, to keep the Princess company. But shortly before they were due to set off, the Princess wriggled out of it. ‘The Princess came towards me and told me she had a cold and therefore could not come with us. Simultaneously she began clearing her throat, cooked up a few coughs, and said that her voice was going. The Queen Mother turned to me rather sadly and sweetly asked whether it would matter very much.’ Lady Gladwyn bit her lip. ‘Naturally I said that although everybody would be dreadfully disappointed, health was so important that if she felt ill of course she must not attempt to come.’ At this, the Princess disappeared upstairs to bed.
While Lady Gladwyn was hastily changing from her church clothes into her lunch clothes, her maid, Berthe, told her that the Princess had secretly arranged for Alexandre to come over in the afternoon to do her hair. ‘Clearly Princess Margaret’s cold was a fake,’ she commented huffily in her diary. In the car on the way to the first château, she told the Queen Mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Hambleden, about the Princess’s clandestine hair appointment. She was not, replied Lady Hambleden, in the least surprised: they were better off without her, and if the Princess had been dragooned into coming, she would have behaved disagreeably and spoilt the day for everybody else. ‘You will see that this tiresome incident will have no effect on Queen Elizabeth at all. She will enjoy the day as much as though it never happened. Nothing will disturb her happiness.’
And so it transpired: the day went swimmingly, the Queen Mother never more radiant. On their return to the embassy, Lady Gladwyn accompanied her upstairs to see how the Princess was. ‘Her elaborate coiffure showed that something rich and strange had been done to her. Nevertheless the farce of the cold was still kept up.’ The Princess was not sure whether or not she would feel well enough to come down before dinner.
Lying in her pre-dinner bath, Lady Gladwyn took a phone call from Lady Hambleden. A little apologetically, she explained that Her Royal Highness wished to know the names of anyone of importance who would be coming. Lady Gladwyn replied, tersely, that there was a list in all the rooms, that she was at present in her bath, and that she really could not be expected to trot out the names of all thirty guests off the top of her head. However, she did know that the French prime minister, foreign minister and ex-president would all be there. Presently, word arrived that the Princess’s voice had miraculously improved; she now felt well enough to come down to dinner.
‘We must at least give her credit for being a good actress, for she played the role of somebody with a loss of voice effectively, even though her occasional cough, more difficult to simulate, was less effective.’ Every now and then, forgetting she was meant to be ill, she began to speak perfectly normally. ‘But what was really remarkable,’ noted the undeceived Lady G., ‘was her lack of desire to please.’
She was due to return to London on Monday morning, after an early fitting for her dress by Dior. Accordingly, Lady Gladwyn put in a request to say goodbye. Princess Margaret told her to come to her room at 10 a.m.
As she entered, she found the Princess wearing a beautiful sweeping negligée. How was she feeling? Much better, said the Princess. By this time, Lady Gladwyn considered that she had earned the right to the last word.
‘As I curtseyed, I could not resist remarking, “I’m so glad, Ma’am, that having your hair shampooed did not make your cold worse.”’
* Of all the adjectives used to describe the Queen Mother, ‘radiant’ is surely the most frequent. During her lifetime it almost became part of her title, like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins or Shakin’ Stevens. Radiant this, radiant that: she might have popped out of the womb radiant, and continued radiating morning, noon and night. As time went on, it became hard to imagine her ever unradiant, but then again, she never had to put out the bins, or book a ticket online, or trudge around a supermarket with a twelve-pack of toilet paper. She seems to have achieved her perpetual radiance by ring-fencing herself from anything unpleasant or – a favourite word, this – ‘unhelpful’. She was singular in her pursuit of happiness, banishing anything upsetting from her walled garden of delight. She rarely attended funerals or memorial services, even of old friends, and was a stranger to deathbeds. Hugo Vickers cites a particularly chilling example of her ruthless contentment. When Sir Martin Gilliat, her loyal private secretary for thirty-seven years, was dying, she never once visited him. ‘Before he died, perhaps because of the pain of his terminal illness, or perhaps because, due to Queen Elizabeth’s ingrained dislike of dying friends, she had not gone to see him, Gilliat railed against his employer, declaring that he had wasted the best years of his life in her service.’
* Four years later, in a letter to Violet Hammersley written on 28 April 1963, Nancy Mitford varied the imagery slightly. ‘Pss M unspeakable, like a hedgehog all in primroses,’ she observed after seeing her at a wedding in County Waterford.