(2 of 6)
It was nice of her to say so, but Margaret's 35-day holiday had not really been so wonderful. For more than a year the exuberant young princess had been nagging her family to let her take a trip to the Continent on her own. When consent was finally given, Margaret dived enthusiastically into her plans. But in almost no time, Whitehall, the Queen, the embassies of two foreign capitals and a clutch of palace aides were all involved. By April, when the princess stepped into one of her father's planes in London to take off for Italy, her holiday had become a royal tour. Margaret showed no disappointment—and no surprise. "Isn't it a pity," she had said to her father on their 1947 visit to South Africa, "that we have to travel with royalty?"
One Dip, No Hips. Hounded by newshawks, plagued by photographers, dogged by detectives and ringed around by protocol, prudence and propriety, the little (5 ft.) princess had not had what could be described as a riproaring time. Many an evening during her holiday, when the stars twinkled over Capri or the lights of Montmartre beckoned, Margaret had sat primly in a hotel room chatting with a palace aide, Major Thomas Harvey, and his wife. When she did go to a Paris nightclub, she sat out all the rumbas to avoid undignified hip-waving. A simple dip she took in the surf at a private estate on the Bay of Naples filled the world's press with bootleg photographs of royalty in a two-piece bathing suit and set editors snarling at one another over problems of journalistic good taste.
On her third day in Paris, Margaret did what any clothes-conscious 18-year-old girl would enjoy—she paid a call on the fashionable dress salon of Couturier Jean Dessès, of whom her stylish Aunt Marina, the Duchess of Kent, had spoken favorably. She had a lovely time but rival couturiers were in a dither at the royal honor done a competitor. Next day the princess soothed the tense situation somewhat by dropping in at Christian ("New Look") Dior's. The elegant establishment of British-born Captain Molyneux in the Rue Royale was in a flap of envy until the morning of Margaret's departure, when she at last came by. "We knew," the management purred later, "that she would come all the time."
Royal Boredom. Ambassadors, worthy charities, foreign dignitaries and expatriate dowagers had all to be mollified with the same nice sense of protocol, and vivacious Princess Margaret, with a rather set smile on her long Windsor face, spent hours enduring polite platitudes, visiting the sick and lending her presence to a tedious round of formal receptions. One day, as she was being shown France's historic, baroque palace of Versailles, the whole thing suddenly came into sharp focus for her. As she studied a massive oil painting showing a royal command performance of the Paris opera a century ago, she spotted the look of infinite boredom on the faces of King Louis Philippe and his family. Without warning Britain's princess threw back her head and laughed loud & long.