Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Craig Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ press described as a ‘fashionable bachelor pad’ in South Kensington.

      Senior members of the Royal Family were outraged on Snowdon’s behalf, but there was nothing they could do. Princess Margaret was determined to marry Picasso at her earliest convenience. ‘Yes, I’m sure he’s awfully sweet, darling, and you know how much I love pictures – but they tell me he’s desperately Spanish, and one can’t help but worry that he simply won’t fit in,’ protested the Queen Mother.

      Determined not to repeat her mistake of twelve years previously, on 12 September the wilful Princess applied for an uncontested divorce, and on 15 December 1967 Kensington Palace issued this brief announcement:

      Yesterday, HRH The Princess Margaret married Mr Pablo Picasso in a civil ceremony. Representatives of the Royal Family were in attendance. The couple will live together at Kensington Palace. For the time being, the Princess will be styled ‘HRH The Princess Margaret, Mrs Pablo Picasso’. There will be no honeymoon.

      The marriage was, by all accounts, a disaster. From the start, Picasso resisted all attempts to incorporate him in royal duties. Whenever he bothered to attend an official function, he seemed to make a point of dressing improperly. There was a national outcry, for instance, when he attended Ascot in 1968 wearing a grubby blue smock rather than the regulation tailcoat. Prince Philip is said to have walked out of a private dinner party in Buckingham Palace, slamming the door, when Picasso turned up bare-chested in shorts and a floral sunhat.

      Convinced that he could be brought to heel, the Queen Mother persuaded the Queen and Prince Charles that Picasso’s artistic leanings would make him the perfect choice to design the setting for the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle in 1969. Grudgingly attempting to save his marriage, Picasso accepted the commission, but his designs were deemed inappropriate, and were subject to widespread condemnation.

      ‘The sight of a clearly nervous Prince of Wales wearing a cow-horn helmet making his formal entry on a bull made from papier-mâché was for most people the last straw,’ read a strongly-worded editorial in the Daily Telegraph the following day. Even the more go-ahead Guardian felt the entire ceremony ‘grotesque’: ‘There was simply no need for the sixty-one-year-old Garter King of Arms to be forced to dress as Pan in a bright green leotard, nor for the Queen Mother to be borne aloft on a bamboo platform by twelve minotaurs, each bearing a suggestive horn.’

      Friends say that Princess Margaret was at first mesmerised by the forceful painter. If so, she soon came to regret her impulsiveness. ‘Women are machines for suffering,’ Picasso had told one of his mistresses in 1943, and he did not spare his British wife. The British public, who had extended such sympathy to the Princess during her Townsend years, and had rejoiced at her first wedding, now began to turn against her, condemning her as unfit for public office. Picasso’s reputation took a beating too, particularly from the avant-garde. Those who had once heralded him as a great revolutionary artist now chided him as an Establishment lickspittle. Consequently the prices commanded by his works began to plummet, and his dealers grew restless.

      By the end of the decade, the Picassos decided that it would be in their mutual interests to part. Their divorce was finalised in February 1970. Two months later, at the unveiling of Picasso’s Naked Woman Smoking Cigarette at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, sharp-eyed critics noticed what they took to be the Poltimore Tiara perched on the head of the weeping subject.

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      The serious-minded novelist John Fowles, four years older than Princess Margaret, shared the obsession of Pablo Picasso. In real life, as it were, he might well have cold-shouldered the Princess, as he had long considered himself an intellectual with no truck for social snobbery. But he cherished her as a fantasy object, particularly when comparing her with his more down-to-earth current girlfriend, whom he referred to in his diary only as ‘G’.

      ‘Physically I criticize her,’ he writes of poor Miss G on 13 March 1951. ‘That way I cannot blind myself. She is warm, nubile; but not beautiful. And I see her growing old quickly, fat, with the Jewish, Mediterranean strain coming out in her. I see her in all sorts of conditions – whenever they entail “chic”, she disappoints me. She has all the DH Lawrence qualities, heart and soul and heat, humanity, intelligence, and simplicity when it is needed, the qualities of peasant stock, but no aristocratic traits. And aesthetically I need a little more aristocracy, a little carriage, fine-bred beauty.’

      Later in the same entry, he declares that ‘I think it would do me good to marry G just for this one reason. That I should then limit myself, and achieve a certain humility which is lacking at the moment. Shed some of my aristocratic dream-projections. For example, I have day-dreamed of seducing Princess Margaret. I suppose many men must have done that. For unattached men she must be an obvious evasion out of solitary reality.’

      A year later, Fowles completed his first novel, The Collector, which he went on to sell for a record sum. It is the tale of a creepy man who kidnaps a beautiful young art student and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. In a letter to his publisher, Fowles explained that ‘the whole woman-in-the-dungeon idea has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle’. He had also been intrigued, he said, by a news story concerning ‘a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden’.

      In all his public utterances, Fowles took pains to express a more high-minded blueprint for his artistic purpose. In an essay on The Collector, he stated that by making his victim die in captivity,

      I did not mean by this that I view the future with a black pessimism: nor that a precious elite is threatened by the barbarian hordes. I mean simply that unless we face up to this unnecessarily brutal conflict (based largely on an unnecessary envy on the one hand and an unnecessary contempt on the other) between the biological Few and the biological Many … then we shall never arrive at a more just and happier world.

      But to his diary, he confided that the novel had also been inspired by

      My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think this must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used often to be famous people. Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a main sexual motive, the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has been constant. The imprisoning, in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned.

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      In Italy with his wife in September 1962, Fowles was still mulling over Princess Margaret, though by now his lust had curdled into irritation. Never blessed with the sunniest of dispositions, particularly when thinking of England, he complained to his diary of ‘The grey shock of England and the English … I haven’t had the extent of my exile from land and people so clear for a long time. They are foreign to me, and so the land seems foreign.’

      He went on to chastise England for ‘a colossal lack of style, an almost total inability to design life’, and noted sulkily that ‘The British sit like a fat pasty-faced bespectacled girl at the European party.’

      For a man so desperate to put his own country behind him, his choice of holiday reading that September was perverse, and harked back to his trusty old obsession:

      An extraordinary book we read in Rome – the banned-in-England My Life with Princess Margaret by a former footman. Written, or ghosted, in a nauseatingly СКАЧАТЬ