“Poor brute … Her appearance has gone to pot. “A little pocket monster,” hisses the designer and royal photographer Cecil Beaton to his journal in November 1973, after a ball at Buckingham Palace. This last little data point I gleaned from Craig Brown’s brilliant meta-biography 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, which pays a lot of attention to diaries, gossip columns, trashy memoirs, and wagging tongues-appropriately, these being the media in which Margaret’s semi-scandalous life was most thoroughly memorialized. Queen Elizabeth (left) and Princess Margaret at the Badminton Horse Trials in 1975.
There she is, for example, in the index to Andy Warhol’s diaries: Margaret, Princess, not far from Mapplethorpe, Robert, and right next door to Marcos, Imelda. Margaret liked drinking, smoking, staying up late, being rude, being regal, singing Cole Porter songs, and hanging around with celebrities.
Not for her the blend of ageless mystique and everyday English stodge that Elizabeth may be said to have invented (and which will probably die with her). Margaret, the naughty younger sister, moved in a different world. The rarer thing, in fact, is to have managed to avoid her.īut I never met Princess Margaret (who died at 71 in 2002). She came into the library of my boarding school, where a dozen or so of us were standing in dismal hairbrushed anticipation, and said, “Ah, the library.” I should explain, for my excitable American readers, that if you’re British there’s nothing particularly special about meeting the Queen in her 66 busy years on the throne, launching ships and nodding at sculptures and plodding dutifully through renovated hospital wings, she has met (my own estimate) 71.4 percent of the population.
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