Back from honeymoon, their married life began swimmingly. Tony and ‘M’, as he called her, seemed set to become the golden couple of the Swinging Sixties, gaily swinging from royal to commoner, from grand to groovy, as and when the mood took them.
As though to usher in the new decade, 1A Kensington Palace had been submitted to a full refurbishment, closely supervised by Tony, who made sure the dining room was painted in apricot, and his dressing room had a dark-green carpet offset by tan cork walls and a gilded Napoleonic day-bed. A full staff had been assembled to look after the pair of them – butler, under-butler, footman, chef, housekeeper, kitchen maid, dresser, chauffeur. But at the drop of a hat the newlyweds were able to nip down to Tony’s old digs by the Thames, Tony in his black leathers on his Norton, Margaret, anonymous in her crash helmet, riding pillion. Once in Rotherhithe they could play at being a groovy young couple, smoking (Gauloises for Tony, Chesterfields for M) and frying sausages and drinking and having a high old time. ‘They were both very sweet and obviously very happy,’ Noël Coward observed in June 1961, having kicked off his evening at Kensington Palace and finished it in Rotherhithe, tossing empty Cointreau bottles into the Thames with gay abandon.
Glamour feeds off glamour. Margaret’s new friend, the writer and journalist Angela Huth, asked them for dinner. ‘Happily, it worked. George Melly sang, Edna O’Brien and Shirley MacLaine entered into some profound, inextricable conversation; there were a couple of Rolling Stones, the barefoot Sandie Shaw and many others. She danced non-stop and stayed till dawn.’ Thus, the Snowdons leapt head-first into the sixties, mixing with others of the jet set, sipping their Napoleon brandy, living in a fancy apartment, knowing the Aga Khan, na, na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
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Her style changed, to keep up with the times: shorter skirts, hairpieces, pale lipstick, heavy eye make-up. In 1962 the Earl of Snowdon (as he became in October 1961) took a black-and-white photograph of her in the bath, with diamonds and pearls in her hair, naked but for the Poltimore Tiara balanced on her beehive hairdo. The playful combination of formality and informality, regality and nudity, pomp and sex, clearly suited her. Never again in a photograph was she to look so happy or at ease. Out of sight is the glass case containing the collection of exotic seashells which she polished whenever she found herself at a loose end. But in the corner of the photograph Snowdon can be spotted in the bathroom mirror, like an apparition, sitting bare-legged, the camera to his eye. At the beginning of the year he had been appointed artistic adviser to the bright new Sunday Times magazine, a contract that gave him £5,000 a year, with an extra £500 in expenses for each feature he organised; he earned a further £5,000 a year from his work for magazines like Vogue.
For that brief period, the two embodied the sixties dream: modern, go-ahead, and above all with-it. To complete the perfect picture, they were even in touch with the Beatles.