Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Craig Brown
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Название: Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
Автор: Craig Brown
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008203627
isbn:
Some of Penrose’s more radical surrealist friends refused to stomach his sycophancy to royalty, but then they knew nothing of his role as the go-between for Pablo Picasso and the young Princess. One of the most indignant, the jazz singer and surrealist collector George Melly, wrote him a particularly huffy letter:
What are you up to? I hope you will enjoy the little jokes HRH will presumably make in front of the pictures. Perhaps he will suggest that Prince Charles could do better. Honestly, I find the whole concept an insult to a great painter. What are you after? A title? An invitation to lunch at the palace? A ticket for the Royal enclosure?
I wish to put it on record now that I shall lend no picture to an exhibition in the future under the aegis of yourself or the ICA.
Melly signed the letter to his old friend ‘Yours disgustedly’. Perhaps if he had known of the great painter’s sexual obsession with the Queen and Princess Margaret, he might have been more supportive.*
Five years later, Picasso was still nursing his unrequited love. On 28 April 1965, ‘with his wild, staring eyes’, he told Cecil Beaton, who had come to photograph him, that he was ‘a great admirer of Princess Margaret, with her long face’, but swore Beaton to silence, ‘otherwise someone will write a book about it’.
As for Penrose, Melly’s snub left him undaunted. In June 1967, now Sir Roland Penrose CBE, he organised another Picasso exhibition at the Tate, this time of the sculptures. There was to be a dinner at the gallery on the evening before the private view, and furthermore, he told Picasso, ‘we have invited the girlfriend of your dreams, her Royal Highness the Princess Margaret, to preside, and she has graciously agreed, and tra! la! la!’
The day after conducting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon around the exhibition, Penrose sent a telegram to Picasso. Once again, he cut the unnecessary photographer husband clean out of the picture:
LONDON VANQUISHED STOP ARE COMPLETELY INVOLVED WITH YOUR SCULPTURES STOP PRINCESS CAPTIVATED STOP PUBLIC FILLED WITH WONDER LOVE LEE ROLAND
Two days later, on 11 June, he joined Picasso for lunch, and made a note of their meeting: ‘Gave Picasso catalogues of sculpture show. He was very keen to hear how it all went and what Margaret thought …’
Despite the persistent efforts of Richardson, Cooper and Penrose, Picasso’s passionate yearning for Princess Margaret was never reciprocated. In fact, quite the opposite. ‘Many years later, I told Princess Margaret the story of Picasso’s quest for her hand,’ recalled Richardson. ‘Like her great-great-great* grandmother Queen Victoria, she was not amused; she was outraged. She said she thought it the most disgusting thing she had ever heard.’
But what if fate had dictated otherwise?
(Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
* In a review of David Sylvester’s book Magritte (1992), Melly pointed out that Sylvester ‘is not … particularly impressed by those pictures in which related objects merge to create a new object, though he acknowledges The Rape, where the woman’s body replaces the face, as one of the great icons of the century. He sees it as both horrifying and comic and, citing several people’s reaction to it, includes the unnerving observation that the navel suggests a nose eaten away by tertiary syphilis. I seem to remember, although he doesn’t confirm it here, that he once told me the originator of this alarming notion was Princess Margaret.’
* One great too many.
From Pablo Picasso: Memoir of a Friendship, by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape, 1998)
Pablo’s greatest mistake was to marry HRH the Princess Margaret. It was a decision that was to have the most atrocious consequences for his art, and was, I fear, to leave his reputation within the art world forever sullied.
He had, of course, lusted after the Princess for a decade or more, but only from a distance. Despite a number of opportunities, he failed to meet her – whether through bashfulness or accident I know not – until 4 June 1967, when he insisted upon escorting her around his first major exhibition of sculptures at the Tate Gallery, with the sole proviso that no one else should be present.
Aged eighty-five, he was over twice the age of the thirty-six-year-old Princess; in fact, he was a good deal older than HM the Queen Mother. But, sexually speaking, he was well up to scratch – he had married his thirty-four-year-old mistress Jacqueline Roque, just three years Margaret’s senior, in 1961 – and his worldwide fame, bullish charisma and dark, penetrating eyes continue to attract many female admirers.
For her part, the Princess was undergoing one of the rockiest times in her somewhat restless marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones. The pair of them were getting on each other’s nerves; each had begun to seek solace elsewhere. Increasingly exasperated by her husband’s vanity, it may have amused Margaret to taunt him by flirting with the man universally acknowledged as the greatest artist of the twentieth century.
At 10.30 p.m., under a cloak of secrecy, the exhibition’s curator, Roland Penrose, met Princess Margaret at a side entrance of the Tate, and took her through the deserted gallery to the doorway to the Picasso exhibition, where she found the artist standing, legs apart, hands on hips, ready to greet her.
From the moment they set eyes on one another, their mutual attraction was overwhelming. ‘I had never seen Picasso like it,’ remembered Penrose. ‘He simply couldn’t take his eyes off her, even when he was attempting to point out specific details in the sculptures.’ Penrose felt duty-bound to accompany the Princess and the artist around the first two or three exhibits, but the couple soon made it clear that they wished to be left alone: ‘If I remember rightly, the Princess turned to me and pointedly asked me if I had nothing better to do. Accordingly, I made my excuses, and retired to the hallway.’
It was well past midnight before Picasso and Princess were to emerge from the exhibition. ‘I couldn’t help but notice that the Princess’s hair had lost a little of its shape,’ reported Penrose. ‘And Pablo was not even bothering to conceal that look of triumph with which I was so familiar.’ The two of them left together in the Princess’s car. As he went around the gallery, turning off the lights, Penrose noticed a discarded pearl earring on the floor alongside what many regard as Picasso’s most singularly erotic sculpture, Woman in the Garden.
Over the next fortnight, while Lord Snowdon was away photographing Sir Noël Coward at his home in Jamaica, Picasso made repeated clandestine visits to Kensington Palace, often sporting a false-nose-specs-and-whiskers mask. He brought a large sketchbook with him, and as they entered her private apartment, Princess Margaret was insistent that no staff should disturb them. It is widely believed that Picasso’s late series of erotic drawings, The Kiss, springs from this period.
The consequences of their liaison are now too well-known to require detailed repetition. On his return to Paris, Picasso informed his wife Jacqueline that he had no further use for her. When Lord Snowdon returned to his and Princess Margaret’s apartment in Kensington Palace in late June, he found all the locks СКАЧАТЬ