A dinner party, and the actor Derek Jacobi is getting on terribly well with the Queen’s sister. She takes out a cigarette, and he reaches for a lighter. She snatches it from his hand. You do not light my cigarette, dear.
You are not that close. It was a small moment, and that was exactly why the people who knew her kept telling it. Nobody was harmed, no law was broken, but a pleasant evening turned in a single gesture into a lesson about where he stood. Jacobi told it years later with a kind of wonder, as though he still could not quite believe how fast the temperature had dropped.
That speed was the thread running through almost everything written about Princess Margaret in private. A reviewer of her life described how she could switch in an instant from surprisingly warm openness to withering, icy disdain. Another said she would close up like a clam if people became too familiar. The warmth was real.
So was the door that slammed behind it. And the people who dined with her, drove her, cooked for her, and poured her drinks spent half a century trying to understand which of the two women was underneath. Most of those voices were gathered in one place in 2017, when the satirist Craig Brown published a book called Ma’am Darling, built from 99 short glimpses of her drawn from memoirs, letters, diaries, and interviews. The following year it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
Her oldest friend hated it. Anne Glenconner, who had served at her side since 1971, called it that horrible book. I do not know why people want to rot her like that, she said. Begin with the public woman, because she was dazzling.
In the years after the Second World War, Margaret was the most glamorous woman in Britain. She led a fast crowd the newspapers called the Margaret set through the 400 Club, the Café de Paris, and the Mirabelle. She sang, played the piano, and wore the new couture. When she married in May of 1960, about 2,000 guests filled Westminster Abbey, and a worldwide television audience of about 300 million watched her walk up the aisle.
She lent her name to more than 80 organizations and served as president of the Royal Ballet. The people who sat at her table described something else. Her own authorized biographer, Christopher Warwick, was a friend and defender, and even he gave the clearest account of her method. She could squash a conversation, he said, by the correction of a spelling or a pronunciation.
When she felt threatened, she would pull rank, and she could do it beautifully. That phrase is the one to hold on to, because rank was the only instrument she was always carrying. At some point in the evening, somebody would forget and lean in too far and reach for the lighter. And the answer would come back the same way it came back to Jacobi.
Oh, no. You are not that close. The witnesses who knew her longest kept pointing at something older and sadder beneath the habit. They pointed at a little girl who had been handed a rank and no role at all, and who learned very early that rank was the only thing in the world nobody could take from her.
She was born at Glamis Castle on the 21st of August, 1930, the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. At home they called her Margo. For the first six years of her life, the two little girls belonged to a younger son’s household, royal but safely off to one side. Then, in December of 1936, her uncle, King Edward VIII, gave up the throne.
Her father became King George VI almost overnight. Elizabeth became the heir. Margaret, at six years old, found herself second in line, in a family lifted without warning into the very center of the monarchy. Her grandmother, Queen Mary, teased her for her size.
You tiny little thing, I can hardly see you. Margaret gave her own verdict on that grandmother. I detested Queen Mary, she said. She was rude to all of us except Lilibet, who was going to be queen.
There, in a single sentence, is the shape of the life. One sister was going to be queen. The other was going to be something nobody had ever properly defined. There is no office for the king’s second daughter.
No duty written down. No throne waiting at the end of the corridor. Only the title, the protocol, and a long lifetime to fill. At dinner parties she would sometimes announce it outright.
I am unique, she is said to have told the table. I am the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen. Every claim in it is borrowed. It names her father and her sister.
It leaves her own part blank, because there was no part to name. In her 20s, she discovered what it would cost to keep her rank. Group Captain Peter Townsend was an airman who had served in her father’s household as equerry. He was 16 years older.
He was also divorced, and in the Britain of the 1950s that was the whole problem. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, Margaret needed her sister’s consent to marry until she turned 25. Marriage to Townsend would have cost her her place in the line of succession and her income from the civil list, which by the middle of the 1950s stood at £6,000 a year. Love was priced.
Keep the man and lose the rank, or keep the rank and lose the man. On the 31st of October, 1955, she gave her answer in a statement to the world. She had decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend. Mindful of the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.
Archbishop George Carey, who anointed her before she died, remembered a lasting grief. She was sad, he said. The love of her life was forbidden from her. Her authorized biographer told a cooler story, that the two had fallen out of love.
What is beyond dispute is the outcome. At 25, the most glamorous young woman in the country had been shown in the most public way possible that her feelings came second to her position. She kept the position. And the rank she had kept at such a price became something she would never again allow anyone to forget.
There was one rule of royal life that let her use it every night of the week. Nobody may leave before the princess. In Paris in 1959, dinner was called for half past eight, and at half past eight the hairdresser arrived. The novelist Nancy Mitford was among the guests.
Dinner was at 8:30, she wrote, and at 8:30 Princess Margaret’s hairdresser arrived. So we waited for hours. She would arrive at least two hours late, by Craig Brown’s account, and nobody could eat before she came. If she did not want pudding, nobody else would have it.
She loved to stay up late because she would always get up at 11:00 in the morning. The critic Brian Sewell remembered an evening where she kept us up until 4:00 in the morning, kippering us with her cigarettes. The editor Graydon Carter described a dinner in New York where the meal ended, the coffee came and went, and Margaret just stayed, smoking and drinking. When she finally left after midnight, the remaining guests felt like survivors of a difficult airplane landing.
The remarks were remembered word for word because the people who heard them could hardly believe a princess had said them. A guest at one of her dinners made the mistake of referring to the Queen as my sister. The reply came back cold. When you say my sister, I imagine you are referring to Her Majesty the Queen.
At a party in Beverly Hills in 1965, Judy Garland reportedly called her a nasty, rude little princess. When the model Twiggy was introduced, the princess learned her name and said two words. How unfortunate. The most famous story concerns Elizabeth Taylor’s enormous Krupp diamond.
Margaret called it vulgar. Taylor let her try it on and then said, Does not look so vulgar now, does it? In October of 1979, only weeks after the IRA murdered Lord Mountbatten, the princess visited Chicago. A columnist reported that at a reception with the mayor she had said, The Irish, they’re pigs.
The denial was immediate. Her private secretary said there was no truth in the allegation whatsoever. Whatever was or was not said in that room, the story had consequences. Security around her was doubled, and on the 24th of October the FBI raided an address in search of a suspected IRA gunman.
The people who could not go home at 4:00 in the morning were the ones who worked for her. David Griffin was her chauffeur, and he said that on many journeys the only two words she spoke were good morning. He had a line for the look that went with the silence. They used to say that Princess Margaret could freeze a daisy at 4 ft by just looking at it.
A footman, David John Payne, remembered a weekend at a country house where the host offered to add tap water to her whiskey. The reply was withering. No, Dennis. Not that.
I want water in my whiskey. That is not water. John knows what I mean. Fetch my special water immediately.
The special water was Malvern, bottled spring water, and it had to arrive sealed. For a woman who handed out such cold treatment in public, the answer lay inside her marriage. She had married Anthony Armstrong-Jones in May of 1960, and he was created Earl of Snowdon the following year. Over the years that followed, the marriage curdled, and the cruelty in it ran in both directions.
Someone was leaving notes in her rooms, tucked into the books she was reading and slipped among her gloves. The author was her husband. One, in the standard account, read, You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you. Others took the form of lists headed with the reasons he hated her, the number varying between 20 and 24 between the sources.
The princess who could freeze a daisy at 4 ft was going home to find sentences like that waiting in her glove drawer. The woman her guests feared was not the most frightening presence in her own house. There were darker signs of what the marriage was costing her. In 1974, when a younger man she had grown close to left suddenly for Turkey, she reportedly took an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Her explanation afterward was simple and tired. I was so exhausted because of everything, she said, that all I wanted to do was sleep. In March of 1976, the palace announced that she and her husband would live apart. The divorce was final on the 11th of July, 1978, the first divorce of a senior member of the royal family since 1901.
That same month she was diagnosed with gastroenteritis and alcoholic hepatitis. Her authorized biographer has always denied that she was ever an alcoholic. Other voices from her own circle reached for a sadder word. John Julius Norwich is quoted as saying, I have never known an unhappier woman.
Yet in those same bitter years, there was one place on earth where nobody left notes in her gloves. It was a small island in the Caribbean. Her friend Colin Tennant had bought the whole island of Mustique in 1958 for £45,000. When Margaret married in 1960, he offered her a wedding present and asked whether she would like a piece of jewelry or a piece of land.
She chose the land, ten acres of it. In 1968 she asked Tennant for a house. It was designed by Oliver Messel and finished in 1972. She called it Les Jolies Eaux, the pretty waters.
It had five bedrooms, and it was the only house she ever owned. Every other roof over her head belonged to someone else. On Mustique, the witnesses describe a different woman. Anne Glenconner remembered her sleeping in Colin’s pajamas with string tied around her ankles to keep off the mosquitoes.
There is no footman fetching sealed water in that picture, no chauffeur counting two words. There is only a small woman in borrowed nightclothes far from London. In September of 1973, the Glenconners introduced her to Roddy Llewellyn, a young garden designer 17 years younger than she was. He gave her back everything Snowdon had drained from her, her biographer wrote.
Happiness, confidence, self-esteem. In February of 1976, a photograph was published of the princess and the young man together in swimsuits on Mustique. Within weeks, the palace announced the separation. Roddy stayed in her life for years.
When he married in 1981, Margaret stayed close to both him and his wife, welcoming her former lover’s wife into her circle. Anne Glenconner served her for 31 years, and she remembered a princess who offered to clean your car, turning up in a pair of marigold gloves and asking, Would you like me to clean your car? The most striking thing she remembered happened far from any dinner party. In the years when AIDS first reached Britain, there was a place in London called the Lighthouse, a refuge for young men who had the disease.
Princess Margaret used to go to the Lighthouse, Glenconner said, long before Diana. We never went for the photographers. She was not huggy-feely, but she would sit in their rooms, make them laugh. Glenconner had a personal reason to remember it.
Her own son, Henry, had AIDS. People were terrified of AIDS then, she said, but she would hug Henry. At a time when many people were afraid to touch a patient at all, the woman whose chauffeur said she could freeze a daisy with a look put her arms around her friend’s son. There were no cameras.
There was no press release. The body that had carried both performances for half a century on too little sleep, too many cigarettes, and too much whiskey began to give way. Surgeons removed part of her left lung on the 5th of January, 1985. The first stroke came on the 23rd of February, 1998, on Mustique.
Then came an accident in the bath at the villa in which she scalded her feet so badly that she was left in pain and largely in a wheelchair. Further strokes followed in 2001 and took part of her sight. Her last public appearance came in December of that year, in a wheelchair behind dark glasses. On the 8th of February, 2002, she suffered another stroke.
Heart trouble followed in the night. At half past six the next morning, she died at King Edward VII Hospital in London. She was 71. She was cremated at Slough, the first royal cremation in more than a century, and her ashes were placed in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor beside her father.
Roddy Llewellyn could hardly believe the paperwork. She was simply listed as number eight at the crematorium, he said. Can you imagine that? Four years later, Christie’s in London sold more than 800 lots of her jewelry and Fabergé.
Every single lot found a buyer. The total came to £13,658,728. Part of the money went to the Stroke Association. Go back to the witnesses one last time and let them stand in their two lines.
There were the people who were never that close. The chauffeur who heard two words a journey. The footman sent for the special water. The host corrected at his own table.
The actor who reached for the lighter. The guests kept awake until 4:00 in the morning. To every one of them she showed the rank and nothing but the rank. And there were the people who were that close.
The friend in the borrowed pajamas. The young men in the Lighthouse laughing. The son of her lady-in-waiting held when others were afraid to touch him. To them she showed the woman behind the rank.
After the funeral, the Queen spoke to Anne Glenconner. Glenconner remembered the words. Thank you so much for introducing Princess Margaret to Roddy, the Queen said, because he made her really happy. A dinner party somewhere in the long years before all of that.
A small woman with a cigarette in her hand and an actor reaching for the lighter, and the flame snatched back before it could touch her. Oh, no. You’re not that close.
For most of the people who ever met her, that was the whole story.