Diana's Nightmare - The Family (41 page)

British-born but LA-based, Catherine is the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and fashion millionaire Howard Oxenberg. As a teenager, she had been named as a possible bride for Prince Charles. After her long-playing role as Joan Collins' daughter, Amanda Carrington, in
Dynasty,
she played the Princess of Wales in American TV's
The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana.
'I feel a tremendous amount of compassion for Diana, for her sense of becoming a woman through motherhood,' said Catherine, who has a young daughter called India. 'Ten years ago she was naive and struck with fantasy - you would never have guessed what lay beneath the surface.'

The actress was also the cousin of another Mustique holidaymaker, the Duke of Kent. 'I remember queuing up for food at one of those incredible parties Colin Tennant gave and standing right next to me were the Duke and Duchess of Kent,' said a former visitor. 'The man who stood next to me said, "Look at that!" and I remember staring down and seeing that the Duke of Kent has only got four toes.'

Despite the island's general air of informality, Margaret insisted on royal protocol being observed unless she was in a playful mood. This grated on some visitors who believed a more egalitarian style was appropriate to the holiday setting.

'I was staying at Patrick Lichfield's house in the mid-Eighties and Princess Margaret was next door,' recalled Marcelle d'Argy Smith, editor of
Cosmopolitan
magazine, i mean, that Ma'am thing is a bit much on holiday; it really is. Everybody does it all the time and it is pathetic. I just cannot curtsy or bow. The very first time I met her I remember saying, "Hello, Ma'am, you are still not smoking after all that?" It had been all over the newspapers that she had been in hospital. But she was quite pleasant to talk to. Every single night she insisted on coming in and watching
Fawlty Towers
re-runs and this dominated the entire household of eight or ten people. I remember Patrick at that time was married to Leonora (Lady Leonora Grosvenor) who said, "Patrick, you have got to stop this. If she comes in one more time, I will go mad."

'Margaret is probably quite good fun and I don't think she is malicious in any way, but they (the royals) have no conception about how selfish they are. You cannot blame them entirely, watching the antics of the people around them. They live in an unreal world because everybody does what they want them to do. Nobody will say, "Come on, we are completely bored with this, Margaret, let's do something else." '

MARGARET had tried just about everything else. It was no wonder she identified with Basil Fawlty, the argumentative, accident-prone hero of the comedy series. Conflict of one kind or another had been her talisman long before Princess Michael and the Duchess of York started to interest followers of royal scandal. As her neighbour at Kensington Palace, Diana had seen at first hand the lifestyle that had turned the royal lodger in Apartment 1A into a sick woman.

The drawing room of Margaret's home, which occupied four storeys in the north wing of the Aunt Heap, had long been the scene of some of the raunchiest parties in the Royal Borough, 'I used to dread being invited back to Kensington Palace after the theatre,' said a leading West End designer. 'One of Margaret's friends would issue the invitations and you were expected to attend. These parties went on until the early hours. You couldn't leave until she went to bed.'

Margaret played down her reputation as a hard- drinking night owl. 'When my sister and I were growing up, she was made out to be the goody-goody one,' she said. 'That was boring, so the Press tried to make out that I was wicked as hell.'

During the Sixties, the Partytime Princess had frolicked with some of the greatest ravers of the age, including Mick Jagger. She and the young, androgynous Rolling Stone attended a rave-up held in the grounds of Prince Rupert Loewenstein's Kensington mansion. All the guests were requested to dress in white, so Jagger turned up in a white party dress. 'Nothing created more of a stir than the couple of the evening - Mick Jagger and Princess Margaret - who compared hem lengths, then shook it up on the dance floor,' recorded Christopher Andersen in his unauthorised Jagger biography.

She grew very attached to Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, who often squired her to the unisexual parties that pleased them both. 'Brian had exquisite taste in clothes, the arts and the presents he gave,' said a friend. 'The night he met Margaret he was living at the Grosvenor House Hotel and I picked him up to take him to the Dockland Settlements Ball. He was meeting royalty for the first time and he was so nervous about impressing Margaret that he borrowed my cuff links for good luck. They were the same pair I had lent John Lennon for the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan TV appearance in America.' Margaret was devastated when Epstein died from a drug overdose at his new home in Chapel Street, Belgravia, just one month before his thirty-third birthday.

At one West End premiere, Margaret astonished everyone by turning up in a low-cut, tight, green dress, the bosoms of which had two large white hands sewn on to them. 'She was sharp and witty,' said the designer, 'and full of frustrated energy. I told her I went to SLADE art college and she quipped, "Oh, you're a slave, are you?" '

In some ways it is not surprising that many of her high hopes are now broken, that though she still inspires the loyalty of her friends, she is spending her sixties broken in health and sometimes in spirit,' remarked Richard Davenport-Hines in
Tatler.
'Yet she might have coped with her difficulties if she had been born half a generation later. All the inherent difficulties of being second-best princess have been hugely aggravated by being the princess who grew up in the stultification of the Forties and Fifties and had to cope with the social revolution of the Sixties and Seventies.'

Certainly no one could accuse Margaret of not trying to have a good time, no matter what the prevailing social climate. Barely out of adolescence, she turned to fast company who used drink and drugs to add spice to the post-war years of austerity. She had inherited two of her father's vices: a weakness for nicotine and a fondness for alcohol.

One of her friends was Robin Douglas-Home, a tall, blond Army officer of impeccable aristocratic birth. He was the grandson of the sixth Earl Spencer on his mother's side and the nephew of the fourteenth Earl of Home, later the Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, on his father's. After Ludgrove prep school, he had gone to Eton and taken a commission in the Seaforth Highlanders. Quitting the Army to write novels and advertising copy, he also worked as what
The Times
grandly called 'a Mayfair cocktail-time pianist'. Whenever the Margaret Set went on the town, the winsomely handsome Robin was invariably at the keyboard playing his signature tune,
I'm in the Mood for Love.

Margaret made sure he was among guests invited to the smart house parties she attended, sometimes sending her car to pick him up at his flat off Hill Street, Mayfair. Her favourite party piece was to sing Cole Porter songs to his accompaniment. When the Queen and Prince Philip danced to his romantic music at Buckingham Palace, his place among the gilded youth of his day seemed assured.

'Close friends believe that if Robin had cared - or played his cards right - he could have married Princess Margaret long before Antony Armstrong-Jones came on the scene,' wrote royal author Unity Hall. 'The fact he had no money would hardly have stood in his way. Prince Philip was penniless when he married the young Princess Elizabeth.' But Robin passed up his chance and pursued another princess, the very blonde and beautiful Princess Margaretha of Sweden. It was fifteen years before he fatally tried to correct his mistake.

In her twenty-eighth year, Margaret sat for Cecil Beaton at Clarence House, one of six solo sittings she favoured him with between 1949 and 1960. The Beaton collection clearly showed her evolution from a 'five foot two, eyes of blue' teenager into an experienced young sophisticate. The 1958 post-Townsend portrait could easily have made the cover of
Vogue,
but it was far more than a mannequin shot of the period. There was a movie-star quality about it that made Margaret, ebony hair cut short and fringed, the eyes knowing, the lips closed upon a secret smile, a rival for Elizabeth Taylor and other screen goddesses. This was royalty goes to Hollywood.

'Margaret was an extremely attractive young woman and being seen with the Margaret Set was considered very, very glamorous,' said the titled Chelsea lady. 'They frequented the Cafe de Paris, the 400 Club and the Stork Room. I remember going to the Cafe de Paris when Marlene Dietrich was singing there and seeing Margaret with a party of friends. She was smoking out of a long, black cigarette holder and she was beautifully made up for those days. She had the tiniest little waist and, like Elizabeth Taylor, these cornflower blue eyes. She was such fun. You got a shock when you realised who it was because she was literally like a Dresden doll. Whereas you are stunned by Diana and how tall she is when you meet her, Margaret was just absolutely, ravishingly beautiful.'

One of the trends she inspired was to go out minus her stockings. Bare legs were considered very fast, but other bright young things copied her instantly. 'I cannot imagine anything more wonderful than being who I am,' she proclaimed during the good times. Others spotted danger ahead. 'There is already a Marie Antoinette aroma about her,' noted the mischievous diarist Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon, father of one of Margaret's neighbours on Mustique, the Honourable Paul Channon, MP.

The footlights always sparkled for Margaret and she was attracted not only to the glamour of the performance but to the performers themselves. As a nineteen-year-old, she went to see Danny Kaye at the Palladium and insisted on going backstage to meet the American entertainer after the show. 'All of us in the royal party trooped down to his dressing room and Princess Margaret bounced up and down saying, "Do
Balling the Jack,
Danny. Oh, please do
Balling the Jack,"
' recalled Eileen Parker in her memoirs. This was the start of a friendship for Margaret which was very much outside the aristocratic circle.

'Wherever she went, Margaret was accompanied by a string of prancing Scottish lairds,' recounted Eileen. 'But all the time the Margaret Set were chasing themselves, she was in love with Townsend.' She started coming home well after midnight, but the King raised no objections. He knew that life for his younger daughter was difficult in the shadow of her famous sister.

Danny Kaye, who could sing, dance and act, encouraged Margaret's talent for mimicry. For one special event, he taught her to do the can-can. A close friend was Sharman Douglas, daughter of the American Ambassador, who was invited to join Margaret's carriage for the ride down the straight one Derby Day. When the Douglases held a fancy dress ball at the US Embassy, the cabaret came direct from Buckingham Palace.

'Mike (Parker), Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth went as the three characters in Bing Crosby's hit
The Waiter, the Porter and the Upstairs Maid,'
recalled Eileen Parker. 'They came on and sang the song to a mimed tableau of their own invention. This won first prize, but Margaret upstaged everybody. She appeared in a can-can routine as Madame Fifi. She wore lace panties, black stockings and suspenders and finished by hoisting her petticoats and wiggling her bottom in a finale that brought wolf-whistles.'

Less than six months after she had broken up with Townsend, Antony Armstrong-Jones entered Margaret's life, though it was to be another four years before she agreed to marry him. He had been Baron's assistant and, although making his mark as a society photographer, he was regarded as a bohemian.

An Old Etonian who walked with a limp caused by infantile paralysis, Tony's raffish charm and intriguing sexuality attracted Margaret far more than the aristocrats who were anxiously trying to woo her. They were soon passionate lovers. She secretly visited his home, a single white room in an end-of-terrace house at Rotherhithe with a view across the Thames to Tower Bridge. 'Tony gave her a life she'd never known before - the freedom to be herself away from the prying eyes of servants,' said a friend. She called him 'Tone' and he called her 'Pet',
infra dig
nicknames suited to the working-class location of their lovenest.

When Peter Townsend wrote to her just before Christmas in 1959 saying he was marrying a Belgian heiress, Marie- Luce Jamagne, twenty-six years his junior, Margaret reacted as though still on the rebound. 'I received a letter from Peter in the morning and that evening I decided to marry Tony,' she told another friend. She also had to tell the Queen that she intended to wed a commoner.

'Anyone who thinks that the turmoil at Sandringham over the Waleses and the Yorks is something new is quite mistaken,' said the royal historian. 'Sandringham has a history of royal crises. As in any other family, emotional issues come to the fore at Christmas and New Year.'

The Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, arrived at Sandringham to find the Queen's uncle, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, beside himself with anxiety. 'Thank heavens you have come, Prime Minister,' said the Duke. 'The Queen's in a terrible state - there's a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to marry her sister, and Prince Philip is in the library wanting to change the family name to Mountbatten.'

This time there was no denying Margaret's wishes. She and Tony were engaged in February 1960 and the wedding date was set for 6 May at Westminster Abbey. The fellow called Jones became the Earl of Snowdon and he moved into Kensington Palace with his royal wife. Their first child, David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, was born on 3 November, 1961. Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth followed on 1 May, 1964.

The family was now complete but instead of settling down into a happy, stable married life, the Snowdons began to indulge their instinct for self-destruction and there was a surfeit of like-minded co-stars.

One of Margaret's closest friends was Peter Sellers, the comedy actor of
Pink Panther
fame, who told friends they had been lovers. Certainly Margaret was close to him and helped him through one bout of ill health after another. Four days after he married Britt Ekland, the young Swedish actress, he flew to America to make
Kiss Me Stupid
and suffered the first of several massive heart attacks. To coax him back to work, Margaret persuaded him to direct a spoof film in which she starred as Queen Victoria. She gave it to her sister as a birthday present, in one sense, he was a male version of Margaret,' said a friend. 'At one level, they were both great mimics who loved to act the fool but, underneath it all, the sexual thing made them terribly unhappy.'