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She is there in the index of the Andy Warhol diaries, between Charles Manson and Imelda Marcos, and in the Kenneth Williams diaries, between Margate and Miriam Margolyes. It is almost as though everyone above a certain level of fame met her, at one time or another. This means that she shows up without warning, popping her head around the door of every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the 20th century. Throughout her adult life, she leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry Armstrong-Jones, a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram.

The presence of the princess would endow a party with grandeur her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence.Beside these laughing sophisticates, the princess could sometimes appear an innocent.Īnd yet she thirsted for their company. Someone who was an occasional guest at Tynan’s soirees told me that the assembled bohemians – actors, writers, artists, musicians – would kowtow to her royal highness while she was present and then make fun of her the moment she left, mimicking her general ignorance, her cackhanded opinions, her lofty put-downs, her absurd air of entitlement. And, the moment her back was turned, one can imagine them imitating her squeaky, high-pitched voice. We know all this because Beaton jotted the conversation down in his diaries, and Williams jotted it down too, and so did Tynan, and so too did Tynan’s former wife Elaine Dundy and so did the birthday boy himself, Vidal. “I hate squalor! Tennessee Williams makes me feel ill!” “Are you acquainted with the opera La Bohème, Ma’am? That’s my world.”Īs it happened, Williams’s suspicion was spot on: a few years before, the princess had confided to Cecil Beaton that she “loathed” plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire. “What world do you live in?” asked the princess.

“I’m afraid we can’t talk to each other, Ma’am,” he said, “because we live in such different worlds”. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty ImagesĬonversation between Williams and Princess Margaret got off to a sticky start. Princesses Elizabeth, left, and Margaret at Ascot for the Gold Cup in June 1948.