She goes regularly to the theatre but hates everything she sees and isn’t shy about telling the actors or directors back stage. She complains loudly about the “disgusting” food and wine she is served (“Tastes like petrol!”). Margaret interrupts her “punishing schedule of drinking and smoking,” as Brown calls it, for official and social events but always hates everything. “Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?” replied the Princess tartly. When Margaret played herself attending a charity event for an episode of the radio soap opera The Archers, for instance, her performance was lacklustre.Īfter their first run-through, the producer, William Smethurst, gathered enough courage to say, “That’s very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?” “Chips” Channon, Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Ken Tynan and Kenneth Williams are just a few of Brown’s sources.īrown is somewhat sympathetic to Margaret’s inferior role in the Royal Family, stuck with royal duties a few rungs below her mother, sister and brother-in-law, Phillip. He points out that Margaret was drawn to louche, bohemian figures, often gay, many of whom were assiduous diarists. Most of the “real life” stories are gleaned from Brown’s voracious taste for published diaries by writers, actors and politicians who met Margaret in a variety of circumstances. One of the books funniest parodies is a fictional passage from a biography of Pablo Picasso (who really did say he had erotic dreams about Margaret and her sister the Queen) detailing his madcap marriage to the Princess. (In real life, when told that Margaret had married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Thorpe wrote, “What a pity… I rather hoped to marry the one and seduce the other.”)
He also throws in some parodies and “whimsicalities” including counterfactual speculations on what life would have been like had Margaret married Group Captain Peter Townsend, her true love, or Jeremy Thorpe, the British politician accused of plotting to kill his gay lover. People came to almost hope for bad behavior from her to make for a juicy anecdote.īrown’s book is certainly chock full of haughty and arrogant behaviour from Margaret, most of it verifiable or at least believable. As Brown says, it was in a way her trademark or party piece. In her lifetime Margaret was famous for being as rude and disagreeable as possible to nearly everyone she met. NormĬraig Brown, a British satirist and humorist who has written for The Spectator, Private Eye and nearly every London daily newspaper at one time or another, has produced a very witty and catty book about Queen Elizabeth’s wayward younger sister called Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. It is being published this week in the US and Canada so I decided to re-post it. Note: I reviewed this strange and wonderful book last fall when it came out in the UK.
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