The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Portrait of a royal is daring, entertaining
Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth II’s beautiful, reckless, perennially heartbroken younger sister, is everywhere and nowhere in British history in the second half of the 20th century.
Hers was a life of singular uselessness, runner-up in the royal potato-sack race and slipping further behind with the birth of every niece and nephew. In the everyday civilian sense, what she does is show up, cut the ribbon on the supermarket or the old people’s home, attend ceremony after ceremony of rote speeches and rigid smiles. She sleeps late and breakfasts on vodka and orange juice. She is desired and wooed and abandoned.
It’s a remarkable achievement on the part of biographer Craig Brown, a columnist for the British satirical magazine Private Eye, to build a book as entertaining, daring and moving as “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret” around this shell of a woman. The chief events of Margaret’s life are conveyed in the first three pages, through official proclamations issued between 1930 and 2006: birth, a proposal refused, a proposal accepted, separation, divorce, death, an auction.
Royal biographers, Brown notes, are a species divided into “fawners and psychos.” But since Margaret made bonfires of her private letters and documents before she died, he must look for her in books written by hangers-on and disloyal servants, and tease out the significance of chance encounters and coincidences. The result is a book that says as much about 20th-century British culture and history as it does about its subject.
Princess Margaret’s journey from stars to stuff, from promise to legacy, spans 71 years and rumored (if unlikely) affairs with 21 people, including Mick Jagger, Dusty Springfield and her brotherin-law, the Duke of Edinburgh. Countless men were obsessed with her, including Pablo Picasso, novelist John Fowles and liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe.
Like her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, Margaret nursed an aggrieved attachment to status, a resentment of her dutiful sibling the monarch and a restless fascination with those other modern royals, celebrities. She liked the company of “the camp, the cultured and the waspish,” men who reveled in her glamour but mocked her behind her back.
Is the princess, then, a victim? But how can she be, with so much money, so much privilege, such a sharp tongue? Brown’s skill is to keep shifting the angle of vision and with it, our sympathies, creating a story considerably more fascinating than its subject deserves.