As the sixties gave way to the seventies, so respect gave way to rebellion, and the chances of disturbance increased.
The songwriter Leslie Bricusse recalls sitting in a Mayfair restaurant with his wife and the actor Laurence Harvey, Harvey’s girlfriend, the model Paulene Stone, and the comedian Dudley Moore.
Across from us, Peter Sellers was having dinner with Princess Margaret, Tony Snowdon, and Bryan and Nanette Forbes. Great hilarity was issuing from both tables, ours the more raucous on account of Dudley’s outrageousness. He had perfected the super-slurred drunken voice that he was later to use to Oscar-nominated acclaim in the film Arthur, and he was on a deadly Dudley roll that had us convulsed with laughter throughout the meal. The more we laughed, the more outrageous he became. We finished dinner ahead of the others, and went by to say hello as we left. I detected a slight envy that they hadn’t been at our table, having the fun we’d been having. Dudley, drunk with success at his surefire humour, was on a high. He just wouldn’t give up. He lurched over to their table, playing it drunker than ever, gave Princess Margaret a sweeping courtly bow and slurred, ‘G’d evenin’ your Royal Highness … I s’pose a blow-job is out of the question?’
In 1977, at a party thrown by Lady Rothermere, Princess Margaret took to the stage to a huge round of applause, seized the microphone, and instructed the band to play a selection of tunes by Cole Porter. She then burst into song, in a voice that was, according to Lady Caroline Blackwood, ‘very off-key’.
Egged on by the spirited cheering of the well-behaved, the Princess launched into a raucous version of ‘Let’s Do It’, winking and wiggling her hips. But before long, the sound of jeering and booing could be heard from the back of the ballroom. It emanated from the painter Francis Bacon, who had been brought along, uninvited, by his fellow painter Lucian Freud.
The Princess faltered, then rushed off stage, scarlet-faced, to a phalanx of flustered ladies-in-waiting. Uncertain what to do next, the band stopped playing. ‘It was that dreadful man, Francis Bacon,’ says a red-faced partygoer. ‘He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I just don’t understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in. It’s really quite disgraceful.’
But Bacon was unrepentant. ‘Her singing was really too awful,’ he explained years later. ‘Someone had to stop her. I don’t think people should perform if they can’t do it properly.’