It is 19 December 1976. Princess Margaret has just attended Christmas Supersonic at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, a charity concert organised by the Daily Mirror Pop Club. She is looking delightedly at the compere, Russell Harty, as he introduces her to the line of stars – Marc Bolan, Twiggy, Gary Glitter. A few minutes ago they were joining Marti Caine and Guys and Dolls for a rousing finale of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.
(Express Newspapers/Getty Images)
Twiggy is smiling at a witticism being made by Harty. She has clearly chosen to forgive and forget the Princess’s dinner-party dismissal of her name (‘How unfortunate’)* some years ago.
Apart from Twiggy, everyone in the photograph is now either dead or in prison. Nine months after it was taken, Marc Bolan – real name Mark Feld – died in a car crash near his home in Barnes. At the age of seventy, Gary Glitter – real name Paul Gadd – was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court of one count of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of thirteen. On 27 February 2015 he received the maximum sentence of sixteen years in prison.
Russell Harty died from liver failure caused by hepatitis C in 1988, at the age of fifty-three. Visiting him on his deathbed at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, his old friend Alan Bennett found him ‘festooned with wires and equipment, a tracheotomy tube in his throat, monitored, ventilated’. Before long, he realised that Harty was trying to tell him something. The nurse, an experienced lip-reader, thought he might be saying ‘Sherry,’ but Harty shook his head impatiently. Attempting to calm him down, the nurse disconnected Harty from his machine, removed his tracheotomy tube and pressed a pad over his throat, so that they could at last hear what he had been trying to say.
‘Ned Sherrin had supper with Princess Margaret last week,’ he said, ‘and she asked how I was. Twice.’
Harty died a few weeks later. Forty years before, in his schoolboy diary, he had taken the trouble to note down the news that HRH the Princess Margaret was suffering from a slight cold.