Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret By Craig Brown

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Author: Craig Brown

Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret Craig Brown

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“Rollicking, irresistible, un-put-downable . . . For anyone . . . who swooned to Netflix’s The Crown, this book will be manna from heaven.” —Hamish Bowles, Vogue“Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a brilliant, eccentric treat.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal“I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice . . . The wisdom of the book, and the artistry, is in how Brown subtly expands his lens from Margaret’s misbehavior . . . to those who gawked at her, who huddled around her, pens poised over their diaries, hoping for the show she never denied them.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times“Brown has done something astonishing: He makes the reader care, even sympathize, with perhaps the last subject worthy of such affection . . . His book is big fun, equal measures insightful and hysterical.” —Karen Heller, The Washington PostA witty and profound portrait of the most talked-about English royalShe made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando tongue-tied. She iced out Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor. Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was madly in love with her. For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding. In her 1950s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death in 2002, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman. The tale of Princess Margaret is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. Such an enigmatic and divisive figure demands a reckoning that is far from the usual fare. Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues, and essays, Craig Brown’s Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.

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I have read dozens of biographies of British and Continental royal personages. This biography of Princess Margaret is certainly the most unusual royal biography I have read. I think it is also the most amusing and entertaining. Most royal biographies, especially authorized ones, are hagiographies. Examples of this genre are William Shawcross’s “The Queen Mother” (2009) and Pope-Hennessy’s “Queen Mary” (1959).Craig Brown in writing this biography of Princess Margaret has broken with tradition in two mains respects. The book is the most irreverent royal biography I have read. It is the very antithesis of a hagiography. He has also created a new and possibly unique biographical style. Instead of the usual cradle to grave narrative, the reader is presented with ninety-nine glimpses from Princess Margaret’s life. Most are glimpses of her at unimportant social events that tend to highlight her moody, capricious, inconsiderate and often haughty behavior.Although the book is highly readable and entertaining one must wonder whether it can really qualify as a biography at all. Although I understand the author’s boredom with conventional biographies, royal and otherwise, I think the presentation of this book deprives it of any historical significance. A reader unfamiliar with the story of Princess Margaret would be left with a very incomplete picture of her indeed. Where, for example, is Princess Margaret as a mother?The Princess had two children with Anthony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. They are Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto and she also had three grandchildren. Yet there are hardly any references to them in this book and there is no description of the relationship Princess Margaret had with them. The only reference to Viscount Linley is in connection with the auction of his mother’s large collection of jewelry and other possessions after her death in which he is portrayed as a rather cold-blooded individual who did not hesitate to try to sell at auction even her 1957 portrait by Annigoni and was forced to buy it back from the auction house only after pressure was brought to bear by his father and sister.We learn virtually nothing of Princess Margaret’s relationship with her sister, Queen Elizabeth II. Although Princess Margaret had a phone on her desk with a direct line to the Queen’s apartments at Buckingham Palace and although the two apparently chatted by phone almost every morning, few details of what was by all accounts a very loving relationship are portrayed.More details are provided about the relationship between Princess Margaret and her mother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. They at one time both resided at Clarence House on different floors and communicated by letters delivered from one to the other by liveried footmen. The author describes some interactions between the pair that suggest that Princess Margaret’s treatment of her mother was often disrespectful and even cruel, but the Queen Mother seems to have accepted all the slights and insults from her daughter with the grace and dignity she always displayed.Towards the end of the book the author indulges in “what ifs.” He places emphasis on what if Princess Margaret had been the first-born child of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the current Queen, had been the second child. He suggests quite correctly I believe that Princess Margaret could never have carried off the royal job with the immense dignity and devotion of Queen Elizabeth II. However, this does not take into consideration the fact that the Queen was raised with the idea that she might one day inherit the throne, particularly after King Edward VIII’s abdication, and Princess Margaret was left to fulfill a secondary role.A more important “what if” is I think would Princess Margaret have been a different person if her marriage to her first love Group Captain Peter Townsend had not been prevented by the British establishment? The answer to that question cannot possibly ever be known. Would she have grown bored with him or would she have settled into a comfortable and conventional royal life since the Group Captain had been a favorite of George VI and was well acquainted with royalty and royal protocol? My sense is that Princess Margaret was left embittered by being deprived of an opportunity for a happy married life and that all her undesirable characteristics that the author shows such delight in portraying were the result of that early bad experience.The author points out that perhaps Princess Margaret’s most prominent characteristic was her unshakeable sense of being fully royal. She delighted in her title “Her Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret” and would often rebuke even close friends who failed to treat her with due deference. At dinner parties and functions of various types she would often use as an icebreaker the fact that she was the only person in the realm who could claim to be both the daughter of a King and the sister of a Queen.The question that arises though is can her sense of being royal be regarded as a defect? Today even among the British people there seems to be a desire that members of the Royal family be just like them and have the common touch. This explains the enormous popularity of Prince Harry who likes to be just one of the boys and has entered a marriage that among old established royalty would be unthinkable. However, what is the purpose of Royalty if they are going to be just like everyone else?The author takes a malicious delight throughout this book in pointing to Princess Margaret’s often bad behavior. It is true that Princess Margaret liked the arts and bohemia and therefore would often socialize with a rather raffish crowd. Therefore, she wanted to both have her royal cake and eat it. The author also tends to poke fun at the Princess’s appearance drawing attention to the fact that some called her “The Royal Dwarf” because of her small stature. However, the illustrations provided, except those towards the later part of her life, show a truly beautiful woman superbly dressed and coiffed and with a wonderful smile. I saw Princess Margaret once when she came to open a Clinic at a hospital where I worked, and she was the very epitome of what one might consider a Royal personage.In conclusion, I found this book tremendously interesting and entertaining. However, reading it for me was a kind of guilty pleasure. I think the author has been somewhat unfair to Princess Margaret and the definitive biography of her remains to be written. She deserves more credit than she gets in this amusingly malicious book.

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