Princesses Behaving Badly (31 page)

Margaret met her future husband, Antony Armstrong-Jones, when he was working as a photographer at a party she attended, though she
probably didn’t remember the encounter afterward. When they crossed paths again, this time at a party he was invited to, Armstrong-Jones was then an up-and-coming society photographer taking pictures for glossy mags like
Tatler
. The two soon became friends, with Margaret frequenting his Pimlico studio/apartment.

Armstrong-Jones—Tony—was not at all the sort of man Margaret usually hung out with. After he moved out of his studio, for example, he rented a room in a friend’s house in London’s Docklands, where he shared a toilet with the landlord. This was a far cry from the Scottish castles and grand country estates Margaret grew up with. Tony was the son of a successful lawyer, which was a plus, but his parents were divorced, which was not. He was so not Margaret’s “sort” that one of her friends made him use the servants’ entrance when he visited. He was also rumored to be gay. But he was fun and exciting and, well, she’d just found out that Peter Townsend was marrying again, so … just like that, she agreed to marry him. This time, her family didn’t put up a fight.

The couple wed with great pomp and extra circumstance at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960. Margaret’s first child arrived a year later, just a few weeks after her husband was made earl of Snowdon and viscount Linley (couldn’t have the boy be born without a hereditary title). Tony, meanwhile, continued to earn a living as a photographer and later a documentary film producer, convinced of the need to pay his own way.

The marriage worked, for a while. Tony and Margaret made friends with all kinds of swinging sixties types: comedian Peter Sellers, writer Gore Vidal, designer Mary Quant, the Aga Khan. They partied with booze (her) and pills (him), and they had a lot of sex. Just not always with each other.

The cracks in the marriage that had started to form in the mid-1960s were veritable chasms by decade’s end. The couple was staying together for the children and for the country—divorce was still scandalous, after all—but both were having affairs, Tony with a 23-year-old and Margaret with men closer to her own age and social status. She also began spending more time on Mustique, the hedonistic Caribbean island where a friend
had given her a plot of land as a wedding gift.

By 1973, Margaret’s friends felt that she needed a lover, so they set her up with Roddy Llewellyn, a vaguely aristocratic and sexually confused sometime–punk rocker 17 years her junior. The two met during a holiday at a friend’s estate in Scotland; before the week was over, they were in love. (Their meeting was, apparently, fated: Roddy had visited a fortune teller five years earlier, who said he’d meet someone whose name began with “M” and with whom he’d spend a lot of time in the West Indies.)

At the beginning of the relationship, Roddy had help from Margaret’s friends, who groomed him to be her lover. After a year, however, he chafed at the strictures of being involved with a married princess—Tony wasn’t above being jealous—and so he took off, first to Guernsey (too close) and then to Turkey, without telling anyone. Margaret was reportedly so distressed that she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Upon his return, the lovers decided to take a breather. Roddy’s behavior grew increasingly unhinged—after a bender in Barbados and a breakdown on the plane ride back home, he was checked into a mental facility to rest.

Meanwhile, Tony had fallen in love with his assistant, a woman whom Margaret called “that thing.” He was also drinking heavily and barely disguising his hostility for his wayward wife. She said later they would practically growl at each other when passing on the stairs. In 1976, after she and a recuperated Roddy had resumed their relationship, the two were photographed eating lunch together at a bar in Mustique. Tony used the blurry picture as leverage to finally obtain a separation.

Margaret and Roddy’s relationship continued throughout her separation, despite the disapproval of her sister and brother-in-law. Roddy, who’d by then completed a horticultural course and found his calling as a gardener, was brought out for events, in the hope that the public might come to accept him. But then he had to go and cut a record. And invest in a restaurant. And generally make a fool of himself. Basically, whatever Roddy did, it would invariably lead to bad press, with Margaret making a “twerp of herself” over him.

When Roddy eventually left her for a woman his own age, Margaret found herself alone yet again. She faced the situation with a stiff-upper-lip sort of realism: “I don’t see myself ever marrying again.… As a member
of the royal family, one is used as a figurehead and, being the sister of you-know-who, it would put her in a difficult position. Anyway, it would probably be too much of a bore!”

Margaret never did remarry, and her middle age was marked by poor health. Drinking became her main vice, even after she received a diagnosis of alcoholic hepatitis in the late 1970s. In 1985 she had part of a lung removed but, according to the BBC, continued to smoke. She suffered a stroke in 1994 and another in 2000, followed by a ministroke; she lost vision in one eye and was confined to a wheelchair. She died on February 9, 2002, at the age of 71.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Margaret remained a favorite target for the British press.
Private Eye
always called her the “royal dwarf,” owing to her tiny stature; even as a bedridden Margaret neared the end of her life, one tabloid declared, “She’s spoilt and ill-mannered and over the years has drunk enough whisky to open a distillery.”

As unfair and nasty as the press could be, Margaret didn’t do much to dispel the public’s negative perception of her. “One does feel rather sorry for her but she does so very little to help herself,” wrote a palace insider. She was spoiled, even in middle age; a friend wrote of her in his diary, “She is, as we all know, tiresome, spoilt, idle and irritating; she has no direction, no overriding interest.” Hapless and aimless, she did indeed drink her way through life. She could also be grumpy and ill-tempered, prone to pouts and sulking and occasional bouts of rudeness, none of which plays well to the public.

But Margaret could also be surprisingly kind. She could be counted on to remember birthdays and to send gifts. Her softer side made striking appearances, such as on a diplomatic trip to the tiny Polynesian island of Tuvalu. When her lady-in-waiting was practically eaten alive by insects, the princess gave her own bed to the unfortunate woman and tended the bites herself. She was also full of weird household tips, like how to make perfect scrambled eggs (add a raw egg at the final moment of cooking), and she wanted people around her to relax and “be normal.” And though
Margaret may have been frivolous and boozy, she took her official duties very seriously—so much so that she capitulated to the will of the nation, didn’t marry the man she wanted, and then stayed married to another whom she should have divorced years earlier.

Princess Margaret’s life was certainly bizarre. She was never given anything to do, and so suffered the “spare’s” fate of being purely ornamental. That left her more than enough latitude to get up to trouble, a situation compounded by being constantly hounded by paparazzi, a new breed of journalists more rabid and ubiquitous than their ancestors. Everything she did was in the spotlight in a way that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of royals. And it made her a focal point for those in politics who wanted to curtail the monarchy—and its income. They couldn’t attack the queen, on whose head the crown seems to sit as easily as those pillbox hats she wears. But they could attack her scandalous sister.

Margaret’s life was recorded by a flock of unauthorized biographies, including
HRH the Princess Margaret: A Life Unfulfilled
and
Margaret: The Tragic Princess
. Even if the pages of such books are filled with speculation and gossip, they at least got the titles right.

Part of the tragedy of Princess Margaret’s life is that she couldn’t give it all up—the title, the family, the privilege—for the man she loved. But here are a few who did.

P
RINCESS
P
ATRICIA OF
C
ONNAUGHT

The granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Patricia gave up her title when she married a commoner. Sort of. Though no longer allowed to call herself “princess,” she was still a part of the British royal family, was invited to events, and stayed in the royal line of succession. But she was known as Lady Patricia Ramsey, wife of a naval commander, until her death in 1974.

P
RINCESS
U
BOLRATANA
R
AJAKANYA

This Thai princess, the daughter of King Bhumhimbol Adulyadej, relinquished her royal title when she married an American commoner in 1972. The two met when they were studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (she earned a degree in biochemistry). The marriage ended in 1998 after 26 years, and Ubolratana moved back to Thailand.

P
RINCESS
S
AYAKO

The daughter of Japanese emperor Akihito, Sayako renounced her title and its privileges when she married a commoner in November 2005. Now simply Sayako Kuroda, she had to take driving lessons and learn how to shop at the supermarket. She also lost her royal allowance, though the sting of that loss was blunted by her $1.2 million dowry.

Anna of Saxony

D
ECEMBER
23, 1544–D
ECEMBER
18, 1577
G
ERMANY
,
THE
N
ETHERLANDS
, T
WO
R
OOMS IN
D
RESDEN

I
n 1561 William, Prince of Orange, was in the market for a wife. His first wife, a wealthy heiress, had died in 1558, and the prominent Dutch nobleman of the Spanish Empire was looking for another way to shore up his political influence.

Princess Anna of Saxony was an ideal candidate. Daughter of the late elector Maurice of Saxony, and niece of the reigning elector (a princely title of the Holy Roman Empire), she was well bred and well placed. True, she was no great beauty—she was “high colored” (excessively
rosy cheeked), lame, and suffered a slight curvature of the spine. But what was that beside money and political connections?

Ahead of the couple’s first meeting, one of Anna’s ladies-in-waiting warned her aunt that if Anna didn’t like William, there was no way she would play the dutiful princess and marry him: “The Fraulein will never be persuaded to do anything she is not inclined to.” That was an understatement—Princess Anna of Saxony was a handful even then. It wasn’t until after she married, however, that everyone found out just how difficult she could be.

Anna’s childhood wasn’t easy. At age 9 she lost her father, followed by her mother when she was 11. Raised by her aunt and uncle, the then-current elector of Saxony, Anna was encouraged to think that she was the center of the universe. But she was also an unloved child, forced to grow up in isolation and never forgiven for not being a boy. These circumstances aggravated her tendency to be cruel and self-absorbed. The family saw but one remedy for her unsavory behavior: marry her off early and make her someone else’s problem.

Anna met William, then 28 and the acknowledged head of the Dutch nobility, at a wedding in his home region of Nassau. For 17-year-old Anna, it was love at first sight. Gone was the worry that she wouldn’t be led to the altar, though it was replaced by another concern: Anna, single-minded and narcissistic, fell crazy in love. Within hours of his departure, she’d fired off three love letters to William. The flames of her hasty ardor were likely fanned by some of her relatives’ objections to the match, her desperate need to claw at the affection she’d never really had, and the fact that she was absolutely insane.