Patrons of The Arts

At the famous Post Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery, George V contemplated a Cezanne. His wife was on the other side of the room. ‘Come over here, May,’ he bellowed, ‘there’s something that will make you laugh.’ Later his loathing for this artist’s pictures reached such a pitch that he attacked the frame of one with his stick.

The Queen does not like the opera, nor the ballet for that matter. But in 1977, Jubilee Year, a visit to Covent Garden was unavoidable. Courtiers tried to make helpful suggestions. ‘How about The Marriage of Figaro?’ ‘Is that the one with the pin?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ they said, fearing the worst. ‘I’ve seen it,’ said the Queen terminally.

Rising at the end of a performance of Don Quixote, Princess Margaret said, ‘Brenda would have liked the donkey.’ It seems Brenda is not only Private Eye’s name for Her Majesty the Queen.

On her rare visits to the opera, the Queen is not always treated with kid gloves. Lord Drogheda once made a speech from the stage in which he said, ‘Now that Her Majesty has found the way, perhaps she will come more often to the opera.’

The Kennedys and the Windsors did not really have much in common. During a rather sticky formal dinner, Gore Vidal recounts, the Queen suddenly said to Jackie Kennedy, ‘You like Art, don’t you?’ Before she knew what was happening Mrs Kennedy found herself hurtling through room after room at Buckingham Palace, past fabulous Titians, Rembrandts and goodness knows what. Only in front of a Van Dyck did they pause for the Queen to say, ‘That’s a good horse,’ before charging on.

Princess Margaret was a mistress of the flat contradiction. When Derek Granger, the well-known film producer, escorted her into the theatre to see Anything Goes, he remarked that the recorded singer they could hear was Cole Porter. It was hardly such a controversial thing to say. The show was after all by Cole Porter and there was even a huge photograph of him in place of the curtain. Besides he was quite certain. But Princess Margaret didn’t see it like that. ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘I know Cole Porter’s voice and that’s not it.’ Then she said, ‘By the way, you’re standing on my frock.’ In the second half Derek Granger found himself replaced as the Princess’s neighbour by Sir Ian McKellen.

At the World Travel Market at Olympia in 1987, the artist Richard Walker had to present his prize-winning picture to Princess Anne. It so happened that it was very large and seeing him struggling up on to the stage with it, she said, ‘I bet you wouldn’t have done it so big if you’d known you were going to have to lug it round all day.’

George V told Sir Thomas Beecham that he liked La Bohème: ‘It’s the shortest one I know.’ He couldn’t even bring himself to use the word ‘opera’.

In the late 1970s, to gain inspiration for her décor at Windsor, the Queen visited one of the hotels at Heathrow Airport.

Her Majesty does not consider it her place to comment on any theatrical performance she might have seen – even when it has been as monumental and unsurpassed as Maria Callas’s Tosca of the early 1960s. But the Queen did, however, go so far as to remark on the prettiness of her frock when she met the diva afterwards.

The Queen was once greatly exercised when a number of bishops took to wearing scarlet cassocks. It would seem that the Queen has an ancient right to pronounce on ecclesiastical modes. She complained that they looked like ‘something out of a Fellini film’, referring presumably to the outrageous, ecclesiastical fashion show at the end of Roma. How astonishing that she had even heard of such a film.

In her old age, Queen Mary, long known for her unbending regality, took to visiting the New Lindsey Theatre in Kensington, which favoured more challenging work. Here she saw Pick-up Girl, an American play about adolescent sex and VD.

At the end of a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the ballet, Derek Granger was in the midst of correctly thanking Princess Diana for coming and so on when she interrupted. ‘Oh, nonsense,’ she said, ‘I’m delighted to be here. What do you think I’d be doing otherwise?’ This was a question Derek Granger didn’t feel able to answer. ‘I’d be at home with a tray on my knees watching EastEnders’.

As they were going in to the premiere of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Princess Diana remarked to its producer: ‘You must have seen it so many times. Why don’t you go to sleep and I’ll wake you up at the end.’

It was at a party hosted by Maureen Dufferin and Ava, that Princess Margaret’s performance of ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ was subject to heckling. Somebody shouted, ‘Shut up, you old bag.’ Horrified guests turned round to see the artist, Francis Bacon, very much the worse for wear.