Tony’s simmering enmity meant that Colin Tennant saw precious little of Princess Margaret over the early years of her marriage; and whenever they did bump into each other, the wedding gift would pass unmentioned. But the deterioration of her marriage prompted a revival in the old friendship. Dining with the Tennants in 1968, she asked whether the plot of land on Mustique was still on offer, and if so, did it include a house? Caught on the back foot, Tennant answered yes to both questions. Deftly, the Princess had just managed to negotiate herself a free home.
By the end of the dinner she had invited herself to stay on the island. Before she arrived, Tennant staked out a suitable patch of land. Wearing a trouser suit as protection from the mosquitoes, the Princess surveyed it approvingly. Oddly enough, it would be the first and last piece of land she ever owned.
She immediately set about claiming more: when Tennant’s back was turned, she pulled up his stakes and replanted them further afield, awarding herself more acreage. Realising her ploy, Tennant waited until her back was turned and then returned the stakes to their original holes. This pas de deux continued for a while, back and forth, but Margaret proved the more determined, and finished her stay with a full ten acres. Finally she persuaded Tennant that Tony’s uncle, the theatre designer Oliver Messel, would be just the person to design a house, for two reasons: a) she would gain a suitably glamorous home, and b) the involvement of his beloved uncle might jolt Tony into joining her on Mustique. As things turned out, Tony never revisited the island, and spent his time complaining to Margaret that Tennant was cynically using her to promote it.*
For his part, Tennant affected to miss Tony. ‘I was sorry T could not bear me, because he was perfect for PM,’ he wrote in notes for an autobiography he died before completing. ‘An occasional drop of his Angostura into our Gin Fizz would have jazzed up our Jolie Eaux.’
Margaret finally moved into her house, the aforesaid ‘Les Jolies Eaux’, in 1973. She furnished it mainly with free gifts hoovered up during her annual visits to the Ideal Home Exhibition. Her tableware was donated by successive porcelain factories, parting presents for official visits. ‘The whole place was really terribly plain,’ recalled Tennant. ‘There was a sofa facing the sea with a comfortable armchair on either side with a basketry kind of coffee table in front. There was no evidence at all of her being a Royal person other than a rather small reproduction of the picture of The Queen by Annigoni which hung beside her desk.’
There were, however, clues elsewhere, not least in Tennant’s frantic preparations for her twice-yearly visits. ‘He collapsed with exhaustion when Princess Margaret left the island,’ recalls Nicholas Courtney. ‘He put every ounce of energy into making it fun for her.’ And few conventional tourists arrive with a royal protection officer and a lady-in-waiting dancing attendance.
The Princess’s timetable on Mustique was unvarying. Rising at 11 a.m., she would take a cup of coffee with her lady-in-waiting. On one occasion the lady-in-waiting in question, her cousin Jean Wills, tried to slip out for a quick walk before their coffee appointment, only to be caught red-handed and, according to Tennant, ‘soundly berated’.
Margaret would then make her way to the island’s hotel, the Cotton House, for a cigarette and a pick-me-up, thence to the beach, where she would swim a very slow breaststroke, her head held high, as though the sea itself might try to take advantage, while a member of her court swam alongside her, employing side-stroke so the Princess could see his or her face. To minimise the irritation of sand sticking to the Princess’s feet as she got out of the sea, Colin Tennant would make sure that a basin of fresh water was to hand.
On the beach, she cut an imposing figure, or figurine. ‘She stood erect but lacked height,’ recalled Tennant, ‘but had an hourglass figure with a lumpy bosom. All day she wore a whaleboned thronged garment, laced at the back with a short, frilled skirt of her own design. It appeared to be armour-plated.’
And so to lunch, for which she would join a group for a picnic on the beach, a table having been laid before their arrival. This picnic generally consisted of chicken in Hellmann’s mayonnaise topped off with a salad, though sausages were sometimes served, in the interests of variety.
In the evening, the Princess would change into what a friend describes as ‘one of her kaftany things’. Dinner was invariably at the Cotton House, sometimes to musical accompaniment by a dance band from St Vincent, the table decorated with flowers ordered by Tennant, flown in from Trinidad. ‘It may look like frivolity,’ he observed, ‘but making these visits a success takes constant imagination.’ If the Princess chose to dine at home, the meal would be cooked by a Mrs Lane, helped by her daughter, who went by the name of Cloreen. The dinner menu was unchanging. The first course consisted of shrimp cocktail in a pink sauce served in a V-shaped glass. The Princess was under the impression that the pink sauce was a closely guarded native secret, handed down from generation to generation. Which it was, in a sense: they made it from Hellmann’s with a dash of Heinz tomato ketchup. Then came chicken or lamb in a watery gravy, with ice cream to follow.
How risqué was the Princess’s life on Mustique? By all accounts, it was a curious combination of the jaunty and the ceremonial, the tone pitched somewhere between a lunch party at Balmoral and a hen party on Ibiza, any sauciness underpinned by deference, so that things rarely got out of hand. Anyone who overstepped the mark could expect a swift tongue-lashing from the Princess.
Buxom in her floral swimsuit, tipsy in the foreign sun, her adherence to protocol remained doggedly intact. Those who arrived too late or left too early could expect to be taken down a peg or two. On one occasion, Raquel Welch arrived for lunch halfway through pudding, beaming blithely at her hostess, as if under the illusion that she had done nothing wrong. It must have resembled one of those moments in Goodfellas when a podgy henchman, his life already hanging by a thread, carries on joking away while his fellow stooges hold their breath, knowing that this time he has gone too far. In response, the Princess took a good long slug on her cigarette holder, exhaled slowly, and then stared pointedly at her wristwatch.
The sun shone brightly on Mustique, but there was always the risk of frost.
* Tennant certainly recognised that the popularity of the island among the jet set was bound up with her presence on it. He once declared that he lived ‘by the three Ps – the people, the Press and the Princess’, so he tried to remain on the best possible terms with all three. There were other benefits to his royal association: he would sometimes be allowed to join his wife, the Princess’s lady-in-waiting, on the more carefree royal tours.