The royals - Kitty Kelley [127]
Snowdon, who was involved in his own love affair, was desperate for a divorce. The Princess unthinkingly gave him grounds in 1976 when she took her young lover to Mustique. The couple were photographed there in a cozy island bar with another couple. A picture of Margaret and Roddy sitting on a wooden bench in their bathing suits was published on the front page of the News of the World. The other couple was cropped from the photograph so Princess Margaret appeared to be dining intimately with a man who was not her husband. Under the headline “Margaret and the Handsome Young Courtier,” the article described the two lovers walking arm in arm on the beach, adding that “Roddy rubs suntan oil on her bronzed shoulders. She can suddenly look radiant in a way the public have not seen for a long time.” In a later edition, the headline was changed to “The Picture a Husband Just Couldn’t Take.”
Even people who had suspected that Margaret’s marriage was not perfect were grateful for the royal facade. For years the public made allowances for Princess Margaret, tolerating her minor transgressions such as smoking in public and showing up late for royal events. People said she had suffered extraordinary heartbreak when she was forced to give up Peter Townsend, so they relaxed the standards for her. They overlooked her imperious behavior and sympathetically referred to her as “poor Margaret.” That gave her further license to be naughty. But now, on Mustique, she had gone too far.
No longer was there tolerance for a married royal Princess, who received $70,000 a year from the public purse, who left her children in England and flagrantly cavorted in the Caribbean with a raffish young man of ambiguous sexuality from a hippie commune in Wales.
“If she thumbs her nose at taxpayers by flying off to Mustique,” said Willie Hamilton, “she shouldn’t expect the workers of the country to pay for it.”
This time another Member of Parliament agreed. “The Princess is a parasite,” said Dennis Canavan, a Labor MP from Scotland. “She should not get any money at all.”
Sensing the mounting public outrage, Snowdon pounced. He said he was humiliated by his wife’s flagrant indiscretion and that continuing their marriage under any circumstance was intolerable. Alarmed by the uproar, the Queen summoned Margaret to London, so she left Mustique—without her lover. The Palace told Snowdon to meet her at the airport for the sake of public appearance. He arrived in a royal limousine accompanied by his young son and thoughtfully carried Margaret’s fur coat so she would not freeze in her summer cottons. In front of photographers, he kissed her on the cheek and draped the coat over her shoulders. Afterward she said, “Lord Snowdon was devilish cunning.”
Two months later Kensington Palace issued a statement:*
Her Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart. The Princess will carry out her public duties and functions unaccompanied by Lord Snowdon. There are no plans for divorce proceedings.
“I remember the night the announcement was made,” recalled one of Margaret’s friends. “The Princess was terribly upset. She kept running to the loo to cry, but we kept her going, took her to a premiere, and then to Bubbles [a nightclub] for champagne. We stayed with her until four-thirty in the morning. She needed the support.”
British law requires a formal two-year separation before granting an uncontested divorce. If one party objects, a five-year waiting period is imposed before the divorce can be granted. Margaret never believed that the separation would lead to divorce, but Snowdon was determined. He said he felt like a prisoner serving time and he wanted his freedom.
The Queen was so disturbed by what she saw as her sister’s self-destructiveness that she didn’t speak to her for several