Princess Margaret was the unruly royal who loved men almost as much as she loved partying and loathed the idea of a quiet life
She said: 'When there are two sisters and one is the Queen, the other must be the focus of the creative malice, the evil sister.'
SHE was the unruly royal who loved men almost as much as she loved partying.
Now the Queen’s little sister, Princess Margaret, is the subject of the second series of Netflix drama The Crown, focusing on her Sixties wild days.
One of the new episodes, available now, shows her speeding through London on the back of a motorbike, while shouting: “I am a woman for the modern age. Free to live, free to love and free to break away.”
It is a fictitious scene that could easily have been real.
The chain-smoking, heavy-drinking princess loathed the idea of living a quiet life.
She was rude, awful to her staff and so arrogant that she felt most of her fellow royals were beneath her — even her own mum, the Queen Mother, was “only” the daughter of a Scottish Earl.
Sir Roy Strong, a guest at so many of her dinner parties, wrote in his diary: “It is a curious fact that if she had died in the middle of the 1960s, the response would have been akin to that on the death of Diana.
“As it was, she lived long enough for the bitter truth about her to become general knowledge. The way she behaved was so inconsiderate that I really couldn’t stand any more of it.”
The first series of The Crown suggested Margaret was distraught at being forbidden to marry the love of her life, Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcee who was 16 years her senior.
In reality the thought of living as the second wife of a middle-aged man — and forfeiting her income from the Civil List — did not appeal.
Instead, in 1960, she married photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon, who had enjoyed a wild sex life involving orgies and flings with both men and women before settling down with her.
But snobbish Margaret was fascinated by celebrities and would find any excuse to hang out with actors and rock stars.
A great beauty with a tiny waist and “vivid blue eyes”, she is rumoured to have bedded actor David Niven while with Lord Snowdon.
On another occasion she invited another actor, Derek Jacobi to dinner. She chain-smoked throughout and at one point he picked up her lighter as she pulled out another cigarette. She snatched the lighter and snapped: “You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close.”
Everyone in her company had to bend to her whims.
Wise hosts knew to always serve her first and the most subservient would even remove dishes she refused, so other guests could not eat them either.
Protocol dictated that nobody could begin eating until she had started and nobody could carry on eating after she had finished.
At a reception in the Dorchester Hotel following the royal premiere of The Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, a hungry George Harrison finally caved in and spoke up.
He said: “Your Highness, we really are hungry and can’t eat until you go.”
She replied: “I see. Well, in that case, we’d better run.”
He got off lightly. At another event she barked at a pregnant lady who attempted to sit down first: “One does not sit before royalty sits.”
She only accepted invitations to such receptions if she could see the names of her fellow guests first. She once vetoed an Indian guest on the grounds that she “didn’t like Indians”.
And she insisted that waiters be stationed every 50ft with a bottle of her favourite Famous Grouse whisky, ready to top her glass up.
Lord Carnarvon once presented her with a glass of his very rare and precious 1836 Madeira wine. The princess took one sip and sneered: “This tastes exactly like petrol.”
Never afraid of speaking her mind, during a trip to Derbyshire she was handed a dish of coronation chicken prepared by a group of elderly women.
She turned her nose up and said: “It looks like sick.”
On another royal visit, she asked a disabled man: “Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?”
But outside of her royal duties, as she entered her forties, she began to shun London society and instead spent much of her time on the private Caribbean island of Mustique.
Here was the perfect place for the decadent princess — who never learned to drive and was chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce — to idle away her days, getting tipsy in the sun and splashing around with socialite Roddy Llewellyn.
He was 25, she was 43 and they began an on-off affair that was to last eight years, highly publicised and the source of much shame to both Margaret and the family.
He was not the only toyboy she whisked off to her island retreat. She also entertained criminal and actor John Bindon, who had been in court for threatening a policeman with a knife.
Bindon appeared in the film Quadrophenia but was most famous in his social circle for his party trick — hanging five half-pint handled glasses from his manhood.
Margaret was once snapped on the beach in a strapless swimsuit, next to Bindon, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Enjoy Cocaine”.
Her marriage was not in tatters. The pair split in 1978 and Margaret then had a fling with comic Peter Sellers, who compared her breasts to movie star Sophia Loren’s.
Margaret was plagued by medical problems in later life, brought on by her refusal to take doctors’ advice and give up smoking.
Before she died of a stroke, aged 71, in 2002, and after a lifetime of partying, she looked older than her own mother, who was more than 100.
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Once dubbed the “dinner guest from hell” the princess confided in US author Gore Vidal as to why she was so unpopular.
She said: “When there are two sisters and one is the Queen, who must be the source of honour and all that is good, then the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.”