In the 1990s, two senior representatives from Sotheby’s, one tall and thin, the other rather more portly, came to Kensington Palace to assess her valuables. The Princess asked them what they thought.
‘Well –’ began the tall man.
‘No, not you – the fat one,’ snapped the Princess.
The rebuke became her calling card, like Frank Ifield’s yodel or Tommy Cooper’s fez. Who wanted to sit through her analysis of current affairs, or her views on twentieth-century literature? No one: the connoisseurs wanted to see her getting uppity; it was what she did best. If you were after perfect manners, an early night and everything running like clockwork, then her sister would oblige. But if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote.
Hoity-toity is what was wanted. For most recipients, hosts and guests alike, it was part of a package deal: once she had finally gone and the dust had settled, they were left with a suitably outrageous story – the ungracious royal! the bad Princess! – to last a lifetime. She had a small circle of lifelong friends, loyal to the last. Though they forgave her faults, they also liked to store them up, ready for repetition to others less loyal. ‘Princess Margaret’s friends are devoted to her,’ wrote A.N. Wilson in 1993. ‘But one seldom meets any of them after they have had the Princess to stay, without hearing a tale of woe – how she has kept the company up until four in the morning (it is supposedly not allowed to withdraw from a room until a royal personage has done so); or insisted on winning at parlour games, even those such as Trivial Pursuit which require a degree of knowledge which she simply did not possess; how she has expected her hostess to act as a lady-in-waiting, drawing back the curtains in the morning, and so forth.’
Ever discreet, Kenneth Rose would amuse his friends with the tale of the vintage Madeira (‘Exactly like petrol!’), but would bide his time before putting it into print, for fear of losing his friendship with the Princess. His oleaginous discretion was assured, and this was how he remained a frequent visitor to Kensington Palace. This discretion extended to the moment of Princess Margaret’s death, at which point he employed the anecdote to lend spice to her obituary in the Sunday Telegraph. Her death unleashed many such tales, rising like so many phoenixes from the ashes. For instance, in a diary for the New Statesman, the comedian John Fortune recalled an encounter with her at the BBC Television Centre in the early seventies.
First, he introduced her to his producer, Denis Main Wilson. ‘She asked him what he did. He stood up very straight and said: “Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part.” The Princess replied: “Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?”
‘After a few more minutes of conversation, I found myself saying: “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Princess Margaret, but I have someone waiting for me downstairs and I have to go.”
‘She fixed me with a beady look. “No you don’t,” she said. “No one leaves my presence until I give them permission to do so.”’
But, for all her haughtiness, Fortune detected ‘a look of mischief in her eyes’. ‘At that moment, I knew she didn’t mean it. Had she, perhaps, been waiting all her life for someone to tell her they had to go?’
Fortune felt that if he had replied, ‘Well, that’s too bad, I’m off anyway,’ then nothing would have happened. But he wasn’t prepared to take the risk. A formal conversation continued for a few more minutes, and then she said, ‘I’m very bored here. Isn’t there somewhere else in this place we can go and have a drink?’
He knew of a bar in Light Entertainment that stayed open late, so he raced down two floors, only to find the barman pulling the metal grille down. ‘“Stop, stop,” I cried, “open up again. Quick, Princess Margaret is coming.”’
‘Pull the other one …’ said the sceptical barman.
At that moment they saw what Fortune described as ‘the pocket battleship’ bearing down on them.
Fortune ordered two gin and tonics, one for himself and one for Princess Margaret. He then spotted a director of The Old Grey Whistle Test slumped against the bar, so he presented him to the Princess. ‘I think he must have been Australian, because within minutes the talk was of Sydney Harbour, convicts and the penalties for stealing a loaf of bread in the eighteenth century.
‘And what made it perfect,’ enthused the Princess, not getting the point of the story, ‘was that it was STALE bread!’ Within minutes, Fortune had made his excuses and left.
Throughout her adult life, Princess Margaret was happy to be tempted away from her solid bedrock of tweedy friends towards the more glittering world of bohemia. She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram. Her royal presence was enough to gratify the snobbish tendencies of the bohemians, while her snooty behaviour let them laugh at her behind her back, thus exonerating themselves from the charge of social climbing. Hers was a name to drop, generally to the sound of a tut-tut or a titter.
(Popperfoto/Getty Images)
The Princess was drawn to theatrical types, and they to her; they detected something camp in her, something of the pantomime dame, some element of irony in the way she adopted her royal airs, as though with a wink and a nudge she might at any moment reveal her haughty persona to have been no more than a theatrical tease. She enjoyed playing with the boundaries of being royal, popping out from under the red silk rope, and then, just as abruptly, popping back beneath it, returning to her familiar world of starch and vinegar. The Princess would draw bohemians to her with a smoky, nightclub worldliness, mischievously at odds with her position. Then, having enticed them in and helped them loosen up, she would suddenly and without warning snap at them, making it clear that by attempting to engage with her on equal terms they were guilty of a monstrous presumption.
A keen theatregoer, she went to see Derek Jacobi as Richard II at the Phoenix Theatre in 1988, sending word asking him to remain onstage at the end of the performance, so that she could meet him.
‘I did, and she kept me waiting,’ he remembered. ‘She had gone to hospitality, had a couple of whiskies, and then tottered through to say hello onstage half an hour later.’
After another show, she invited him to dine with her and some ballet friends at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Covent Garden. ‘There were eight of us and I sat next to her. She smoked continuously, not even putting out her cigarette when the soup arrived, but instead leaning it up against the ashtray. We got on terribly well, very chummy, talking about her mum and her sister, and she really made me feel like I was a friend, until she got a cigarette out and I picked up a lighter and she snatched it out of my hand and gave it to a ballet dancer called David Wall.
‘“You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close.”’
Bohemian