Despite the persistent efforts of Richardson, Cooper and Penrose, Picasso’s passionate yearning for Princess Margaret was never reciprocated. In fact, quite the opposite. ‘Many years later, I told Princess Margaret the story of Picasso’s quest for her hand,’ recalled Richardson. ‘Like her great-great-great* grandmother Queen Victoria, she was not amused; she was outraged. She said she thought it the most disgusting thing she had ever heard.’
But what if fate had dictated otherwise?
(Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
* In a review of David Sylvester’s book Magritte (1992), Melly pointed out that Sylvester ‘is not … particularly impressed by those pictures in which related objects merge to create a new object, though he acknowledges The Rape, where the woman’s body replaces the face, as one of the great icons of the century. He sees it as both horrifying and comic and, citing several people’s reaction to it, includes the unnerving observation that the navel suggests a nose eaten away by tertiary syphilis. I seem to remember, although he doesn’t confirm it here, that he once told me the originator of this alarming notion was Princess Margaret.’
* One great too many.
From Pablo Picasso: Memoir of a Friendship, by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape, 1998)
Pablo’s greatest mistake was to marry HRH the Princess Margaret. It was a decision that was to have the most atrocious consequences for his art, and was, I fear, to leave his reputation within the art world forever sullied.
He had, of course, lusted after the Princess for a decade or more, but only from a distance. Despite a number of opportunities, he failed to meet her – whether through bashfulness or accident I know not – until 4 June 1967, when he insisted upon escorting her around his first major exhibition of sculptures at the Tate Gallery, with the sole proviso that no one else should be present.
Aged eighty-five, he was over twice the age of the thirty-six-year-old Princess; in fact, he was a good deal older than HM the Queen Mother. But, sexually speaking, he was well up to scratch – he had married his thirty-four-year-old mistress Jacqueline Roque, just three years Margaret’s senior, in 1961 – and his worldwide fame, bullish charisma and dark, penetrating eyes continue to attract many female admirers.
For her part, the Princess was undergoing one of the rockiest times in her somewhat restless marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones. The pair of them were getting on each other’s nerves; each had begun to seek solace elsewhere. Increasingly exasperated by her husband’s vanity, it may have amused Margaret to taunt him by flirting with the man universally acknowledged as the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
At 10.30 p.m., under a cloak of secrecy, the exhibition’s curator, Roland Penrose, met Princess Margaret at a side entrance of the Tate, and took her through the deserted gallery to the doorway to the Picasso exhibition, where she found the artist standing, legs apart, hands on hips, ready to greet her.
From the moment they set eyes on one another, their mutual attraction was overwhelming. ‘I had never seen Picasso like it,’ remembered Penrose. ‘He simply couldn’t take his eyes off her, even when he was attempting to point out specific details in the sculptures.’ Penrose felt duty-bound to accompany the Princess and the artist around the first two or three exhibits, but the couple soon made it clear that they wished to be left alone: ‘If I remember rightly, the Princess turned to me and pointedly asked me if I had nothing better to do. Accordingly, I made my excuses, and retired to the hallway.’
It was well past midnight before Picasso and Princess were to emerge from the exhibition. ‘I couldn’t help but notice that the Princess’s hair had lost a little of its shape,’ reported Penrose. ‘And Pablo was not even bothering to conceal that look of triumph with which I was so familiar.’ The two of them left together in the Princess’s car. As he went around the gallery, turning off the lights, Penrose noticed a discarded pearl earring on the floor alongside what many regard as Picasso’s most singularly erotic sculpture, Woman in the Garden.
Over the next fortnight, while Lord Snowdon was away photographing Sir Noël Coward at his home in Jamaica, Picasso made repeated clandestine visits to Kensington Palace, often sporting a false-nose-specs-and-whiskers mask. He brought a large sketchbook with him, and as they entered her private apartment, Princess Margaret was insistent that no staff should disturb them. It is widely believed that Picasso’s late series of erotic drawings, The Kiss, springs from this period.
The consequences of their liaison are now too well-known to require detailed repetition. On his return to Paris, Picasso informed his wife Jacqueline that he had no further use for her. When Lord Snowdon returned to his and Princess Margaret’s apartment in Kensington Palace in late June, he found all the locks changed. For a short time he stayed with the Queen Mother at Clarence House, before moving to what the press described as a ‘fashionable bachelor pad’ in South Kensington.
Senior members of the Royal Family were outraged on Snowdon’s behalf, but there was nothing they could do. Princess Margaret was determined to marry Picasso at her earliest convenience. ‘Yes, I’m sure he’s awfully sweet, darling, and you know how much I love pictures – but they tell me he’s desperately Spanish, and one can’t help but worry that he simply won’t fit in,’ protested the Queen Mother.
Determined not to repeat her mistake of twelve years previously, on 12 September the wilful Princess applied for an uncontested divorce, and on 15 December 1967 Kensington Palace issued this brief announcement:
Yesterday, HRH The Princess Margaret married Mr Pablo Picasso in a civil ceremony. Representatives of the Royal Family were in attendance. The couple will live together at Kensington Palace. For the time being, the Princess will be styled ‘HRH The Princess Margaret, Mrs Pablo Picasso’. There will be no honeymoon.
The marriage was, by all accounts, a disaster. From the start, Picasso resisted all attempts to incorporate him in royal duties. Whenever he bothered to attend an official function, he seemed to make a point of dressing improperly. There was a national outcry, for instance, when he attended Ascot in 1968 wearing a grubby blue smock rather than the regulation tailcoat. Prince Philip is said to have walked out of a private dinner party in Buckingham Palace, slamming the door, when Picasso turned up bare-chested in shorts and a floral sunhat.
Convinced that he could be brought to heel, the Queen Mother persuaded the Queen and Prince Charles that Picasso’s artistic leanings would make him the perfect choice to design the setting for the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle in 1969. Grudgingly attempting to save his marriage, Picasso accepted the commission, but his designs were deemed inappropriate, and were subject to widespread condemnation.
‘The sight of a clearly nervous Prince of Wales wearing a cow-horn helmet making his formal entry on a bull made from papier-mâché was for most people the last straw,’ read a strongly-worded editorial in the Daily Telegraph the following day. Even the more go-ahead Guardian felt the entire ceremony ‘grotesque’: ‘There was simply no need for the sixty-one-year-old Garter King of Arms to be forced to dress as Pan in a bright green leotard, nor for the Queen Mother to be borne aloft on a bamboo platform by twelve minotaurs, each bearing a suggestive horn.’
Friends say that Princess Margaret was at first mesmerised by the forceful painter. If so, she soon came to regret her impulsiveness. ‘Women are machines for suffering,’ Picasso had told one of his mistresses in 1943, and he did not spare his British wife. The British public,