PRINCESS MARGARET by Nigel Dempster Macmillan; 242 pages; $11.95
“One is used as a figurehead .. . and the sister of you-know-who.” The weary speaker is H.R.H. Princess Margaret, royal subject of this most common volume, currently a sensation in Britain. It is not difficult to see why.
According to Nigel Dempster’s keyhole narrative, the figurehead has lived “a life unfulfilled.” Whether she might have been happier as Prime Minister or nanny is unspecified; certainly she could have had a more gratifying Boswell. Dempster, 40, is a gossip columnist for the London Daily Mail, and throughout, if Margaret is the Disappointed Princess, he is the Old Pretender, stating the loftiest intentions, then betraying them with yet another innuendo.
Princess Margaret tracks the regal personage from its earliest years when it could be found in the nursery, biting its older sister. At times, Margaret seems to have walked from a Thurber cartoon, inquiring in 1939, “Who is this Hitler, spoiling everything?” By her early 20s she has become a peculiar amalgam of Elizabeth Taylor and an acrylic doll, possessing “an almost Semitic beauty with a Lucite complexion.”
As the world knows, Margaret suffered her severest checkmate when, in 1955, she was informed that the divorcee she loved, Group Captain Peter Townsend, was unacceptable to the House of Windsor. She renounced Townsend, “mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble.”
According to Dempster, Margaret’s life thereafter was marked with irony and marred by men. Antony Armstrong-Jones appears as the villainous Earl of Snowdon, vulpine photographer and “failed architect.” Though the couple’s early years are, in Dempster’s terse account, full of “sex, sex, sex,” the earl is all too soon observed spending more time in boudoirs than in darkrooms. When the lonely princess and mother of two takes up with an eligible aristocrat, Roddy Llewellyn, the earl appears on television. There, playing the crocodile cuckold, he tearfully begs indulgence for Princess Margaret and the children. “Lord Snowdon,” Margaret concludes, “was devilish cunning.”
Given this backstairs acrimony it is hardly a surprise when the divorce further isolates Margaret from the simple life in Balmoral and Buckingham. With her companion Roddy, 18 years her junior, she begins tripping around the Caribbean, vainly searching for health and cheer. Dempster pores over royal records and checks back issues of the newspapers, but one of his most reliable sources seems to be an old friend of Margaret’s whose drug-dependent son sold photographs of the princess to pay off his pusher. By the final curtain, Margaret and Roddy have split and the public is once again inquiring whether Her Royal Highness is worth a Civil List allowance of ,£82,000 per annum.
Of course she is. During World War II, Margaret provided her public with a diverting image of spunky innocence. Later, for the press who would not directly attack you-know-who and Prince Philip, Margaret and her husband provided vicarious prey as “the two highest paid performing dwarves in Europe.” Recently she has offered comforting proof of what every commoner suspects: royalty, in the words of Margaret’s uncle, Edward VIII, is “duty without responsibility, pomp without power”—in brief, a gilded misery. With such a history of service, Princess Margaret remains, at 51, one of the European Community’s best bargains. Pity the same cannot be said for her biography. —By Stefan Kanfer
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