The final pages of The Little Princesses are devoted to a portrait of Margaret at seventeen. Though sugar-coated, they leave a slightly bitter after-taste. ‘She is learning with the years to control her sharp tongue’ … ‘It is a grief to her that she is so small, and she wears shoes and hats that give her an extra inch or so’ … ‘Margaret is more exacting to work for than Lilibet ever was’ …
(Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
At one point, Crawfie grows worried about Margaret and speaks to the Queen ‘quite openly’ about her socialising: ‘I can do nothing with her. She is tired out and absolutely exhausted with all these late nights.’ Between the two of them, the Queen and the governess agree that in future Margaret must spend one or two nights a week quietly at home, rather than out gallivanting.
The memoir ends, rather abruptly, with the birth of Prince Charles in November 1948. At the end of the year, Marion Crawford was finally permitted to retire. By now Princess Margaret was eighteen years old, pert, wilful, and intent on pursuing a life unsupervised.
On 22 March 1949, the Conservative MP David Eccles was sitting in the chamber of the House of Commons, listening to a speech ‘so excessively boring’ that, for want of anything better to do, he suggested to a neighbouring MP that they should ogle a pretty girl who had come to hear the debate from the Speaker’s Gallery. The two made flirtatious signs to her, to which she was quick to respond. The next day, Eccles was surprised to hear that he had been flirting with the eighteen-year-old Princess Margaret. He was both annoyed with himself for having made such a mistake, and surprised she had responded so readily.
By the following year, Margaret’s adoption as a sort of national sex symbol had gathered pace. ‘Is it her sparkle, her youthfulness, her small stature, or the sense of fun she conveys, that makes Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret the most sought-after girl in England?’ asked Picture Post in the summer of 1950. ‘And this not only amongst her own set of young people but amongst all the teenagers who rush to see her in Norfolk and Cornwall, or wherever she goes.’
Though her face and her figure were similar to her elder sister’s, it was generally agreed that it was Princess Margaret who had that certain something. Was this because even the most hot-blooded British male felt that his future monarch existed on a plane beyond lust, while the younger sister was still flesh and blood? Or was Margaret blessed with more S.A., as it was known at the time? Did men detect a sparkle in her eyes which suggested that she, unlike her sister, might, just possibly, be tempted? In later life, Margaret could be surprisingly candid about her youthful impulses. She once told the actor Terence Stamp that as a teenager she entertained sexual fantasies about the workmen she could see out of the Buckingham Palace windows. It is hard to imagine the Queen ever sharing such secrets.
Nearly ten years after the Eccles incident, on 18 December 1958, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis gazed moonily as the Princess presented the Duff Cooper Prize to the fifty-two-year-old John Betjeman. Hart-Davis confessed to his old friend George Lyttelton that he had ‘completely lost my heart’ to her: ‘My dear George, she is exquisitely beautiful, very small and neat and shapely, with a lovely skin and staggering blue eyes. I shook hands with her coming and going, and couldn’t take my eyes off her in between.’
(The Times/News Syndication)
According to his friend Lady Diana Cooper, Betjeman himself was so overwhelmed by the presence of the young Princess that he was ‘crying and too moved to find an apology for words’. Looking on with the doubly hard heart of the academic and the satirist, his waspish friend Maurice Bowra, the chairman of the judges, penned ‘Prize Song’, a parody of Betjeman’s poem ‘In Westminster Abbey’:
Green with lust and sick with shyness,
Let me lick your lacquered toes.
Gosh, O gosh, your Royal Highness,
Put your finger up my nose,
Pin my teeth upon your dress,
Plant my head with watercress.
Only you can make me happy
Tuck me tight beneath your arm.
Wrap me in a woollen nappy;
Let me wet it till it’s warm
In a plush and plated pram
Wheel me round St James’s Ma’am …
Lightly plant your plimsolled heel
Where my privy parts congeal.
Bowra circulated this poem among friends, one of whom, Evelyn Waugh, pronounced it ‘excellent’.
Another poet, Philip Larkin, eight years her senior, continued to nurture a private passion for the Princess well into her middle age. ‘Nice photo of Princess Margaret in the S. Times this week wearing a La Lollo Waspie, in an article on corsets. See what you miss by being abroad!’ he wrote to the distinguished historian Robert Conquest in June 1981, when the Princess was fifty years old, and Larkin fifty-eight.
Alas, Larkin’s lust for Margaret never blossomed into verse, though he was once almost moved to employ her as a symbol of his perennial theme, deprivation. On 15 September 1984 he wrote to his fellow poet Blake Morrison that though the birth of Prince Harry had done nothing for him – ‘these bloody babies leave me cold’ – he had nonetheless ‘been meditating a poem on Princess Margaret, having to knock off first the booze and now the fags – now that’s the kind of royal poem I could write with feeling’. Stephen Spender, too, recognised a kindred spirit in the Princess. At the age of seventy he reflected that ‘being a minor poet is like being minor royalty, and no one, as a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret once explained to me, is happy as that’.
Her admirers came from less rarefied circles too. Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, a novel about the struggles of a young African-American man in a hostile society, was presented to her on a trip to Europe in 1956. He described his encounter in a letter to his friend and fellow novelist Albert Murray.
‘I was one of the lucky ones who were received by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, two very charming ladies indeed.’ The Princess was, he added, ‘the kind of little hot looking pretty girl … who could upset most campuses, dances, clubs, bull fights, and three day picnics even if she had no title’. At that time, the Princess had just turned twenty-six.
It was in the early 1950s that Pablo Picasso first began to have erotic dreams about Princess Margaret. Occasionally he would throw her elder sister in for good measure. From time to time Picasso shared these fantasies with his friend the art historian and collector Roland Penrose, once even confiding in him that he could picture the colour of their pubic hair.
Picasso often had dreams about celebrities. In the past, both de Gaulle and Franco had popped up in them, though, mercifully, never in a sexual context. But the two royal sisters were another matter. ‘If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies, they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!’ Picasso told Penrose with pride.
Having moved into his vast villa, La Californie, in 1955,