Blue movies and casual flings - the amazing truth about Princess Margaret's marriage

12 April 2012

At the age of 30, Princess Margaret was beautiful, lively, flirtatious - and still single.

That she had star quality was not in doubt, but she was widely perceived as a tragic figure who had been denied the opportunity to marry the man she loved.

The end of her love affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend had been played out in public, and even republicans could see that she had become an object of ghoulish fascination.

Margaret nevertheless managed to enjoy a few dalliances, undetected by the Press. And, in February 1960, most people were taken by surprise when the Queen Mother announced the engagement of her 'beloved daughter' to society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones.

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Volatile: Antony Armstrong-Jones who became known as Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret pictured towards the end of their marriage

Public reaction was enthusiastic. The pretty, smiley Princess was not going to be left on the shelf, after all.

There were exceptions to the general rejoicing, though. Among the first sceptics was one of the groom's oldest friends, the publisher Jocelyn Stevens, who employed Armstrong-Jones on his magazines. He cabled Tony from America: "Never has there been a more ill-fated assignment."

Noel Coward, during a lunch with Marina, Duchess of Kent, and her daughter, Princess Alexandra, detected a certain 'froideur' when the subject of the engagement came up.

And novelist Kingsley Amis was openly mocking. "Such a symbol of the age we live in," he sneered, "when a royal Princess, famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless, is united with a dog-faced, tight-jeaned fotog of fruitarian tastes such as can be found in dozens in any pseudo-arty drinking cellar in London. They're made for each other."

Elsewhere, there was considerable relief that the lucky man was not from the old 'Princess Margaret Set'.

The beginning of the 'swinging Sixties' was no time for dukes' sons and chinless wonders. Nor was there any suggestion of 'convenience' or 'arrangement': the young couple were very obviously in love.

They were, in many ways, well-suited - sharing a love of the arts and a strong streak of irreverence.

Almost 50 years later, Lord Snowdon, as Armstrong-Jones became, recalled a secret game that he and the Princess used to play together at dinner parties - 'the bread game'.

Whenever another guest uttered a clichÈ, he or the Princess would tear off a piece of bread and push it into the middle of the table. The one with the most bits of bread in the middle at the end of the meal was the winner.

The magic of the game was that no one else realised it was being played. It was their private way of cocking a snook at the rest of the world.

But the irreverence was inevitably more pronounced in him than in her. Margaret was naturally cheeky, prone to mockery and mimicry, but, in the final analysis, she was a king's daughter and a queen's sister - two facts she seldom forgot, and then not for long.

He, on the other hand, was an outsider. Right from the start, he had misgivings about marrying into the Royal Family.

His friend, the journalist John Moynihan, recalls that in the days before the announcement, he and Armstrong-Jones had shared a girlfriend and "[Tony] wept on her bare breasts when he revealed that he was dreading getting engaged to "royalty"."

Even in the early days, the marriage was never easy or straightforward. The Princess's staff, long accustomed to dealing with a single mistress, regarded her husband as an interloper.

They talked about him "raiding the larder" or "making off with the car", as if he were not entitled to help himself to food in his own house or to drive the Rolls-Royce parked in his own garage.

Snowdon had particular problems with Ruby MacDonald, the bossy termagant who was the Princess's dresser (her sister, Bobo, performed a similar service for the Queen).

It was Ruby's custom to bring up an early-morning tray for her royal mistress.

Even today, Snowdon looks back with disbelief on the tray routine. Each morning, it came; each morning it held just a single teacup and a single glass of orange juice. There was nothing for him.

Eventually, there was a battle of wills and the dresser was dismissed. The Royal Family, though, were less easily dealt with than a stroppy servant.

Along with their associates, they treated Snowdon as if he had come from 'the gutter', he told me.

The use of the word 'gutter' seemed an extreme way of expressing the gulf that seemed to exist between him and his in-laws. In our conversations, he used it often and with feeling.

Certainly, there was a definite sense that Princess Margaret was marrying 'beneath herself'.

The Duke of Gloucester apparently greeted Harold Macmillan at Sandringham with the words: "Thank heavens you've come, Prime Minister. The Queen's in a terrible state - there's a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to marry her sister."

But those who mattered, namely the Queen and the Queen Mother, had in fact raised no doubts about the suitability of the match. And, anyway, Armstrong-Jones's background would have been considered by most people as upper-class, or at worst uppermiddle.

His father was a wealthy QC and his mother was a countess - married, second time around, to the Earl of Rosse. By average standards, Armstrong-Jones was almost grand.

But that didn't stop royalty and a certain sort of aristocratic courtier from sneering at his relatively newly double-barrelled name, his supposedly common Welsh ancestry and his lowly occupation.

They scoffed that he had no idea how to deal with servants - such as Ruby - because he had never had any of his own.

Such condescension annoyed him, particularly when he visited Balmoral for the first time. He didn't fish, which the family didn't hold against him. After all, what would a mere photographer be doing with fishing? It was also assumed - correctly - that he wouldn't shoot.

But Armstrong- Jones was a competitive little man and, back in London, he signed up at a shooting school. When he next returned to Balmoral, he was able to shoot rather better than most of the royal party. "They hated that even more," he remembered with a cheerful smile.

Back home, his wife's ladiesinwaiting complained that they could do nothing right in his eyes.

One said that he would summon her to his office and point to a letter on his desk, which she could barely see, and demand angrily: "What is the meaning of this?" He took apparent delight in leaving her to guess what the letter might be about and what she had done wrong.

He also seemed to make a point of prevaricating over the many joint invitations he and the Princess received. If the lady-in-waiting said: "Yes, Mr Armstrong-Jones would be pleased to accept," he would ask her what on earth made her think he could possibly want to take up such an invitation.

If, on the other hand, she declined on his behalf, she would be greeted with indignation.

At official functions, there was embarrassment over where to place this new commoner-appendage - on the platform or in the gangway? On a tour of the Wedgwood porcelain factory, the instructions were for him to go round 'a dozen yards in the wake of Her Royal Highness'.

After two years of this kind of treatment, he decided that he simply wasn't cut out to be a conventional royal consort. So he accepted a fulltime job as a photographer on the new Sunday Times colour magazine, edited by his old Cambridge friend, Mark Boxer.

At this stage, the Snowdons were still openly in love - and unable to keep their hands off each other, according to friends.

It was noted that on an official visit to Jamaica, they spent most of their spare time in bed together. "Good for them!" said the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, who was on the same trip.

In their social life, the couple enjoyed the company of interesting but - as far as royalty was concerned - unlikely friends. There was a particularly surreal dinner at the home of the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan - renowned for being the first man to say 'f***' on television.

The other guests were the comedian Peter Cook and his wife, and the playwright Harold Pinter and his then wife, actress Vivien Merchant.

The evening got off to a bad start when Merchant was introduced to the Princess and merely extended a vague hand while continuing her conversation with Cook and remaining seated.

At dinner, Merchant sat next to Snowdon, who had just taken a picture of her as Lady Macbeth. Jabbing a finger at Princess Margaret, she told him: "The only reason we artistes let you take our pictures is because of her."

Everyone heard, including the Princess. They all started to drink 'steadily'.

After dinner, Tynan decided to show blue movies. He had warned Snowdon in advance, who retorted that it would do his wife good. "The atmosphere began to freeze," Tynan recorded, when he screened a silent film about convicts in love.

It was full of penises, intercut with lyrical fantasies set in undergrowth. "No one was laughing now," recalled Tynan.

Mercifully, Peter Cook came to the rescue by supplying an improvised commentary in the style of a Cadbury's Flake commercial. "Within five minutes, we were all helplessly rocking with laughter, Princess M included," wrote Tynan.

This was all very sophisticated and very Sixties, but the relationship between the Princess and her husband was becoming a roller-coaster of highs and lows. By the late Sixties, they had two much-loved children, but even their friends could see that the marriage was ailing.

On one occasion, Lieutenant Colonel 'Johnny' Johnston, an old friend of the Princess, arrived for dinner. Afterwards, Tony disappeared. When it was time to go, Johnston told me, "the Princess and I went off for me to say goodnight to Tony. We went into his room and he was on the phone.

"It was obvious he was talking to someone he shouldn't have been. He had been caught in the telephonic equivalent of in flagrante delicto."

Johnson learned the next day that, after his departure, the situation had quickly deteriorated. Words had been exchanged, objects thrown.

The marriage was clearly in disarray. One reason was that Snowdon was often away on photographic assignments, where he indulged in a series of casual liaisons. Margaret, too, had a brief fling - with Snowdon's old Cambridge friend Anthony Barton.

Barton was godfather to the Snowdons' daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, so it was practically a family affair. The Princess later confessed tearfully to Barton's wife, which was probably ill-advised.

A year or so later, Margaret had a brief but passionate liaison with aristocratic nightclub pianist Robin Douglas-Home, who subsequently committed suicide.

Then in 1969, Snowdon embarked on a serious affair with Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs, daughter of the Marquess of Reading. Life at Kensington Palace had degenerated into 'open warfare', said one of her ladies-in-waiting.

One victim of this marital strife was Lt-Col Freddy Burnaby-Atkins, Margaret's private secretary.

By 1970, the Princess was often away - usually in the Caribbean, without her husband - and in her absence, Burnaby-Atkins would represent her on official occasions.

However, the official car he needed for his work was often being used by Snowdon - to visit his girlfriend - and Burnaby-Atkins felt his position was being undermined.

Matters came to a head one Monday morning, when the private secretary was due to represent the Princess at a memorial service for a distinguished judge. An hour or so before his scheduled departure, he was called by the chauffeur to inspect the Rolls-Royce.

The car, parked 'all skew-whiff', was covered in mud - so filthy that it could not possibly be used to convey the Princess's representative to St Paul's Cathedral.

He took a taxi instead, and was embarrassed to be seen climbing out of it as the Dean and Chapter waited to receive him on the cathedral steps.

Furious, he wrote a note to Snowdon, saying that his behaviour was completely out of order and compromised the dignity of the Princess.

It was the first of a number of such missives, and Burnaby-Atkins was eventually fired, he told me, because 'Tony didn't like the little notes'.

Snowdon was certainly capable of being awkward. When he and his wife were invited to the Badminton horse trials by the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, he refused on the grounds that horse trials bored him.

The Beauforts were rather pleased - but, at the last minute, Snowdon announced that he was coming after all. And when he turned up, he infuriated the Duke by saying that hunting was cruel. He then went on to say that the competitors at Badminton must be terrified.

"Equestrians are never terrified," said the Duke angrily. "Only cissies are terrified." At this point, the Duke started to attack the fire in his drawing room with a poker.

The Princess, anxious to calm him down, said: "Tony doesn't mean terrified - he means nervous."

"No," said Snowdon, "I mean terrified."

The Duke continued banging at the fireplace - but so ferociously that he bent the poker. "Damn it, damn it!" he shouted. Snowdon left that afternoon without saying goodbye.

But the lowest point of the marriage was reached when the couple were invited to visit Australia. The invitation from Canberra was addressed to the Princess.

"If Lord Snowdon were to accompany you, it would give us added pleasure," it said. Alas, his presence could no longer give any pleasure to his wife.

When Snowdon said yes, he would like to go, she said that she would cancel the trip. After a tussle, he withdrew, and the Princess went alone.

On her return, she had a long chat with the museum director, Sir Roy Strong. He noted in his diary that she "raved about Snowdon and how awful he was - alienating the chauffeur and going off at weekends without telling her where or with whom."

Who was most at fault? There are always two sides in any marriage break-up, but I found it fascinating that so many people I talked to disliked Snowdon in a visceral way.

Interestingly, even those who liked him were inclined to blame him more than Princess Margaret for what went wrong. There was also an almost universal sense that, charming though he may have been, he was not easy.

The beginning of the end came in 1973, when Colin Tennant, an old boyfriend of the Princess, introduced her to Roddy Llewellyn, the 26-year-old son of the showjumper Sir Harry Llewellyn.

Roddy was 17 years younger than Margaret, and good-looking in a slightly androgynous way. They got on spectacularly well, and she soon invited him to Mustique, the tiny Caribbean isle where she always felt happiest.

The island was then owned by Tennant, who had given a parcel of land to Margaret when she married.

More than four decades on, Snowdon could barely bring himself to hear the name Tennant - or Lord Glenconner, as he became. "That sh**," he said. The wedding gift had been for Margaret alone - "Odd, don't you think?" said Snowdon.

The house she'd subsequently had built on Mustique, Les Jolies Eaux, was her favourite place. And it was always off-limits to her husband, who, in any case, preferred to unwind at a cottage in Sussex.

In Mustique, life was relaxed, mildly bohemian, very informal and quite intimate. It was here that Margaret's relationship with Roddy flourished.

Before long, it was acknowledged, and even accepted, by many of her close friends - though Margaret did not choose to take him with her everywhere.

She went alone, for example, to the home in Oxford of the novelist Angela Huth, an old friend. There, she met Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an author of successful books on nannies, public schools and the sexologist Dr Kinsey.

Other guests included the young novelist Martin Amis, broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne and his wife, and film director Bryan Forbes and his actress wife, Nanette Newman.

But it was on Gathorne-Hardy that Margaret alighted, after having her glass of whisky 'generously replenished'.

They talked of this and that until the Princess leaned against him rather heavily and said: "I don't live with my husband any more, you know."

Gathorne-Hardy told her: "Well, I'm divorced - or rather, divorcing. It is an extremely upsetting process."

He had once met Snowdon at an advertising agency, he added. Margaret leaned against him again and said in a low voice: "As a matter of fact, I'm going to leave him. It's going to be announced in a few weeks. Please tell no one." And he didn't.

The split duly came, though not quite as the Princess had planned. One Sunday, fuzzy snaps appeared in a tabloid of Margaret and Roddy on Mustique - she in a bikini, he in swimming costume. The pictures were 'intimate' enough to appear 'compromising'.

Snowdon summoned his wife's private secretary, Lord Napier, to his office. What was the meaning of this, he demanded to know.

An exasperated Napier told Snowdon not to be ridiculous. He knew perfectly well what the meaning was. The relationship between his wife and Llewellyn had been going on for ages, and Snowdon himself had been conducting an affair (which would eventually lead to marriage) with the television producer Lucy Lindsay-Hogg.

Snowdon then buzzed his own secretary, Dorothy Everard, and said crisply: "Dotty. We're leaving." Turning to Napier, he told him: "We'll be out by the end of the week."

Napier was elated. He had a problem, though: how was he going to relay the news to Princess Margaret on Mustique? Communications on the island were relatively primitive, and there was no secure line.

In fine melodramatic mode, he hit on the idea of using a code. So, when he finally made contact with the Princess on the phone, he told her: "Ma'am, I have been talking to Robert and he has given in his notice."

There was a pause. Then the Princess spoke. "I'm sorry, Nigel. Have you taken leave of your senses? What exactly did you say?"

Very slowly, like a secret agent in an old film, Napier repeated: "Robert has given notice." Another pause.

Only then did the Princess, evidently remembering that her husband's third Christian name was Robert, cotton on.

"Oh, I see," she said. "Thank you, Nigel. I think that's the best news you've ever given me."

True to his word, Snowdon was gone by Friday. The marriage was over.

Abridged extract from Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled, by Tim Heald, published by Weidenfeld on July 5 at £20. ° Tim Heald 2007. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.

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