Review by New York Times Review
ONCE UPON A TIME, the queen's younger sister delighted in telling lesser folk that her son's first word was "chandelier." Imperious, clever, cruel and unhappy, Princess Margaret is described by Craig Brown as "the one who wasn't," "the second-born, the also-ran." King George VI himself pronounced the sober Elizabeth his pride and the mischievous Margaret his joy. When they were children, the less pretty, much steadier sister tended to mother Margaret; later on, Elizabeth learned to give her a wide berth; toward the end, before Margaret's death in 2002, the princess had her pity. As students of the crown (or viewers of "The Crown") will know, the monarch may also have felt guilty about having put the kibosh on Margaret's hopes of marrying the divorced Group Capt. Peter Townsend. Brown, however, sees more phoniness than fealty in the potential groom and emphasizes that neither party liked the idea of living without Margaret's royal allowance. In fact, the biographer is pretty sure that for most of her life the only torch Margaret carried was a cigarette lighter. Renunciation of Townsend led the princess toward what the world regarded as the ultimate rebound marriage, her union with Antony Armstrong-Jones, photographer, social climber and early "metrosexual," according to Brown. The soon-to-be minted Lord Snowdon was said by one of his girlfriends to have "wept on her bare breasts at the prospect of getting married to royalty." Three years after the wedding, he "had grown restless," and a few more beyond that he was "leaving nasty notes on her desk, including one headed 'Twenty-Four Reasons Why I Hate You.'" Margaret gave as good as she got during their "acid rows," but the marriage was doomed by Snowdon's inability to satisfy one half of the princess's two-stage central compulsion. First came her desire to appear rebellious and bohemian; marrying Tony was fine for that, since her artsy consort helped to assemble a showbizzy, swinging '60s crowd. But then Tony wouldn't cooperate with the second phase, during which Margaret required that nonroyals who'd just been trapped into committing lese-majesté be swatted for flouting the prerogatives she actually treasured. Stories abound: Colin Tennant, a preSnowdon suitor, was permitted to engage in "heavy petting" but not to call her Margaret. After a long, relaxed chat, the actor Derek Jacobi found himself being told: "You don't light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you're not that close." There would always be toadies (Peter Sellers gave his daughter's pony to Margaret's children), but also a lot more republican impatience as the decades passed. After hearing that she'd called him "an overmade-up tart," Boy George replied: "I bring more money into this country than she does." Those who genuinely liked her - Prince Philip, Gore Vidal - tended to be somewhat impossible themselves. The last quarter century was mostly downhill. In the mid-1970s, Margaret took the much younger Roddy Llewellyn for a lover, dallying with him on the Caribbean island of Mustique and at a hippieish commune in Wiltshire. The press shouted about her neglect of royal duties, which she'd never performed with much gusto. Snowdon seized the chance to appear the victim, and in 1978 the queen's sister, who hadn't been allowed to marry a divorced man, ended up being divorced herself. Brown, a longtime contributor to Private Eye magazine, is capable of witty concision, as when he characterizes the Queen Mother's "ruthless contentment." His "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret," some of them Rashomonian, are mostly fast and entertaining. But more than a few could have been a single sentence, and a handful of counterfactual fantasies - Margaret running off with Picasso; Mr. and Mrs. Peter Townsend living not far from the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor - never gain altitude. Too much of the book, like so much of its subject's life, is extraneous. The author shrewdly suggests that Margaret, "most at home in the company of the camp, the cultured and the waspish," probably didn't realize "that such a high proportion of them kept diaries." Brown scours those of Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, James Lees-Milne and others, along with heaps of memoirs and collected letters, but his dense eight-page list of sources doesn't seem to indicate any interviews he conducted himself. He divides royal biographers into "fawners and psychos," and admits to a certain "delirium" of his own. It isn't a thirst for fairness that makes one bring a book like this to the beach, but here and there a reader may wish the author had given Margaret a smidgen more credit. Brown, for example, acknowledges but scarcely dwells on how the princess' two children became "widely regarded as more accomplished and personable" than the queen's own feckless, always-divorcing offspring. And yet, any account of Margaret's existence will leave a sense of waste and ennui. Vidal found her "far too intelligent for her station in life," and Lord St. John of Fawsley regretted the lack of "an outlet" for her cleverness. In this she resembled that specimen of minor American royalty, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose remarks were piercing but whose life often seemed beside the point. In 1984, the princess played herself in a radio drama devoted to the prevention of child abuse. "Margaret," Brown reports, "sounds curiously flat and uninvolved, almost as though she can't get to grips with her character." Thomas mallon'S 10th novel, "Landfall," will be published in February. Snowdon left a note on her desk: '24 Reasons Why I Hate You.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chatty, catty, and intelligent, Brown's portrayal in vignettes of Britain's Princess Margaret (1930-2002) draws from published memoirs, interviews, and diaries. The "disobedient, attention-seeking" Margaret, writes critic and satirist Brown (One on One), grew up suffering in comparison to her older sister, who became Queen Elizabeth II. As "the one who wouldn't ever be first," Margaret was born to fulfill menial duties such as "the patronage of the more obscure charity, the glad-handing of the smaller fry." She captured the world's sympathy with her first, doomed romance to Royal Air Force pilot Peter Townsend (he was divorced and the queen refused to grant Margaret permission to marry him). "The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers," writes Brown. Margaret was a magnet for people who were "mesmerized less by her image than by the cracks to be found in it." She was invited to events because she could be counted on to misbehave deliciously: "The presence of the Princess would endow a party with grandeur; her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence." Brown is sympathetic to the plight of a woman who, as a friend said, was "one of the cleverest women... I have ever met, and she never really had an outlet for her intelligence." Brown's entertaining vignettes form a collage portrait of a rebellious anti-Cinderella. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this biography from noted satirist Brown, one expects and gets an effective skewering of both its subject, England's Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002), only sister to the reigning Queen Elizabeth II, and the entire royal industry and its hangers-on, yet a small balm of sympathy for Margaret is added to the mix. Relegated by chance of birth to a secondary position-always a princess, never a queen-Margaret meandered through life performing official royal duties and acts of personal self-indulgence, which Brown bounds through in 99 chapters of diaries, essays, minutiae, and a few imaginings of his own. The expected portrait emerges of Margaret as snobbish and exacting, an inveterate rank-puller and a dreadful dinner guest-and also a woman who turned to alcohol and affairs to fill up the empty tedium between charity visits and ribbon cuttings. VERDICT Readers wanting a straightforward biography should look elsewhere, but those interested in a sometimes hilarious, sometimes gloomy view of Princess Margaret through a variety of lenses, or a look at how popular representation shapes our view of a public figure should snap up this book.-Kathleen -McCallister, Tulane Univ., New Orleans © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sensationalistic snippets from the life of a royal princess.In this biographical montage of Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002), Daily Mail columnist Brown (Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings, 2012, etc.) reflects on the true nature of her regal life and loves. The author's "appetite for royal kitsch" surely fueled the culling of the book's material, which ranges from both adulating and scathing biographies to the letters and diaries of, among others, Peter Sellers and Gore Vidal. Brown lays bare the facets of Margaret's notoriously sharp-tongued personality, often abrasive behavior, affinity for well-heeled bohemia, and rumored sexual affairs. The author spares little in his scrutiny as the references hopscotch from the ubiquitous mentions of Margaret's name in notable texts and palace announcements to the post-mortem sale pricing of her jewelry collection. In a moment of parody, one of Brown's specialties, he hilariously imagines Margaret's marriage to Pablo Picasso. Many particularly scandalous chapters feature essays, opinions, and interview snippets categorizing Margaret as either an aloof snob who "turned pickiness into an art form" or a smug brat whose self-superiority and "snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch." Collectively, the narrative creates a brutally honest yet dramatically unflattering portrait of Margaret's regal sybaritic lifestyle, her legacy of boorish behavior, and the competitiveness and outspokenness that doomed her friendships and her stormy marriage to Lord Snowdon. While savory overall, the onslaught of dishy details bends beneath its own weight in the book's final third. Fusing facts with fancifulness, Brown's barbed, devilishly entertaining narrative exposes Margaret for the majesty she embodied and, to some, consistently tarnished, but the author barely contributes to explanations as to why she felt so "hurt by life" and behaved accordingly. Biographer Hugo Vickers opined that the difficult Queen Mother-Princess daughter relationship was the glaring culprit.An endlessly provocative and deliciously scandalous book for royal watchers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
