Margaret added zing to Britain

MARTIN E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 12, 2002

I was sad to hear that not many people are queueing up at St. James' Palace to sign the condolence book for Princess Margaret.

It is in striking contrast to the reaction just 4 1/2 years ago to the death of another princess. Then I was in London, watching in amazement as hundreds of thousands of Britons waited in line for hours to pay tribute to Princess Diana. In the space of just a few days, the floral offerings outside Kensington Palace grew from a dozen bouquets to a veritable sea of roses, mums and lilies that engulfed every lamppost and park bench in sight.

If Diana died too soon, Margaret died too late.

"Only people over 50 remember what she used to be," one woman said Monday as reporters waited for crowds of mourners that never materialized.

Indeed, in recent years, Margaret's public face was the bloated one of a woman who had drunk too much and partied too hard. She never fully recovered from a mishap several years ago -- rumored to have been alcohol-related -- in which she stepped into a bath of scalding water at her Caribbean retreat and severely burned her feet. Since then she had been a pathetic figure, hobbling around in tennis shoes and suffering a series of strokes that left her partially paralyzed and finally resulted in her death early Saturday.

As the Daily Telegraph put it, Margaret always thought she was too long of nose and too short of stature to be truly beautiful. But in gray and dowdy postwar Britain, that is not how others saw her.

"She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centered about large purple-blue eyes, generous, sensitive lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach.

"She was by nature generous, volatile. She was a comedienne at heart, played the piano with ease and loved to sing the latest hits, imitating her favorite stars. She was coquettish, sophisticated. She could make you bend double with laughing and also touch you deeply in your heart."

If those sound like the words of a man besotted, they are. That is how Margaret was once described by Royal Air Force Group Capt. Peter Townsend, the divorced war hero with whom she fell madly in love.

Theirs, of course, was a doomed affair. Just 16 years after Edward VIII abdicated the throne for an American divorcee, there was intense pressure on Margaret not to further disgrace the royal family by marrying a much older, divorced man. She and Townsend broke it off, sacrificing romance for duty.

But Margaret was not one to fade away, at least not yet. In a family whose main interests tended toward dogs and horses, she was the one who embraced the arts, dressed in Dior, mingled with the Beatles and generally reminded Britain that there was plenty of life in the old country yet.

She took up with a photographer -- the never-married Anthony Snowdon -- and enjoyed racing around London on his motorcycle and hanging out with artists in his modest flat. They wed, had two children and divorced. Therein began Margaret's slide.

As the years went by, what had been seen as a free spirit came to be viewed as a flighty, self-indulgent one. Press and public alike criticized Margaret's extravagance, her obvious boredom during official appearances, her affairs with celebrities and younger men.

Even close friends began to drift away, tired of having to call her "ma'am" and drink along with her until she boozily dismissed them. Shortly before her death, a poll found that only 14 percent of Britons thought Margaret did a good job of representing the royal family.

However much her own nature contributed to her unhappy final years, Margaret was just one of many royals unable to overcome the suffocating constraints of palace life. "What are we doing to help her?" Queen Elizabeth once asked about Princess Diana, who quickly became overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood and a public infatuated with her youth and glamor -- just as it had been with Margaret's three decades before.

"What are we doing to help her?" might also have been asked about another royal daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson, who has admitted she had no idea what she was getting into when she married Prince Andrew. Like Diana, Fergie did not begin a satisfying life until she left "the firm."

For the queen herself, Margaret's death is a sad start to what should have been the glorious 50th anniversary of her ascension to the throne. More sorrow may be in store: The 101-year-old Queen Mother is said to be in failing health. And even without family grief, the queen must be disheartened by the muted reaction to her Golden Jubilee year from a public that increasingly questions whether the monarchy has outlived its usefulness.

But for anyone who has ever watched the changing of the guard, wandered through the royal parks on a sunny day or marveled at the magnificence of Windsor Castle, it's hard to see how Britain without the royals would be -- how to say? -- quite so British.

In its finest moments, the royal family has been a tower of continuity and strength. At a time when thousands of children were sent to the countryside to escape Nazi bombs, the little princesses, Margaret and Elizabeth, remained in London with their parents to show the world that the British people would never bow to an invader.

And as Britain struggled to recover from the long, bleak years of war, Margaret showed that an indomitable zest for life lay beneath the rubble.

"Life in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s was rather gray," the Telegraph said in an editorial. "Most people who were young then gave thanks for Princess Margaret. She was elegant, and full of life and sex appeal. She understood that royalty means glamor as well as duty. . . . For all her qualities of fun, affection and patriotism, she should be warmly remembered."

-- Susan Martin can be reached at susan@sptimes.com

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