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

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 cloying, inverted style: the man sounds like a voyeur and a fetishist. He constantly uses turns of phrase (and the sort of euphemism, in particular) that I gave the monster in The Collector. Again and again he praises, or smirks at, behaviour by the filthy little prig-princess that any decent person would despise; and the horror is not that he does this, but that one knows millions of silly men and women in America and here will agree with him. A whole society wrote this miserable book, not one man.

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      The book in question had been banned in Britain after the Queen Mother gained an injunction against it. The judge agreed that Princess Margaret’s former footman, David John Payne, had signed an agreement preventing him from writing about his time in the royal household. But no such restriction existed in the US, where Payne’s work was serialised in Good Housekeeping magazine, and had now been published in book form.

      In 1959, while in service to Lord Rothermere, Payne heard of a vacancy for a footman at Clarence House.

      He passed the interview. ‘You are tall, smart, and seem to have the bearing required to carry out your duties,’ said the comptroller, Lord Gordon, hiring Payne at a basic wage of five pounds ten shillings a week. Gordon then introduced him to Jack Kemp, steward to the household, who in turn presented him to HRH the Princess Margaret. Payne’s first impression was of ‘a tiny figure, beautiful in a pink and white cotton dress, her dark hair brushed into a bouffant style and a shining double row of pearls round her throat … She extended her small white hand – I had time to see the smoothness of the skin and the care which had gone into the manicure of her nails – and we shook hands … Margaret at twenty-nine was a beautiful woman. Her face, not too heavily powdered, had been made up by an expert – herself, as it later turned out. Her eyebrows had been pencilled in and her lipstick smoothly formed in a delightful cupid’s bow. But her most striking, almost mesmeric features were her enormous deep blue eyes.’

      From the start there is, as Fowles suggests, something voyeuristic, even fetishistic, about Payne’s memories of the Princess. And creepy, too: My Life with Princess Margaret is a strange, unsettling mixture of idolatry and loathing, suggesting they are two sides of the same coin. Payne is a forerunner of the Kathy Bates character in the film Misery, hero-worship turning, without warning, into almost passionate resentment, then back again, and all in the flicker of an eyelid.

      A few months later, now part of the furniture, Payne entered the Princess’s sitting room while she was

      lying full-length on the settee, her head pillowed on two pink brocade cushions and her dark hair spread out around her face. Her eyes were closed and she was concentrating on the music … She looked her very loveliest lying there in a midnight blue sequined cocktail dress with a tight bodice and flared skirt. She was lightly made up, her powder and lipstick applied with the delicate touch of an expert. Her shoulders above the low-cut neckline shone silkily in the soft lights.