KEY POINTS:
This juicy biography of the photographer who married and divorced the Queen's sister is authorised, in the sense that Antony Armstrong-Jones, the 1st Earl of Snowdon, gave its author "full access" to his archives and fixed her up with introductions to his friends and, erm, servants. But you have to wonder what he makes of it now.
If he's pleased with it - and I gather from British newspaper columns that he is not displeased - then the man must be even more of an egomaniac than the text suggests. Anne de Courcy tries hard to push Snowdon's good deeds: his work for the disabled. She praises the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo, which he helped to create, and her admiration for his photography seems to know no bounds ("His true genius," she writes, "lies in the field of photo-reportage", which was news to me). But there is really nothing she can do.
The other evidence just piles up. So, Snowdon can be charming. So, he made sure that the gamekeepers on royal shoots got a vacuum flask of hot stew for lunch, just like their employers. Unfortunately, he is also, to judge by his biography, haughty, self-regarding, selfish, needy, remote, rude, chilly, oversexed and highly spoilt.
No wonder Princess Margaret fell for him. It must have been like looking in a mirror. Snowdon's troubles began, psychologically speaking, in childhood. It was a pretty posh sort of childhood, with several grand houses in the family but Mummy and Daddy were divorced and when Mummy remarried, she favoured her new family over poor Tony and his sister, Susan (their father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a mere barrister).
His mother, Anne, didn't even visit her teenage son when he was recovering from poliomyelitis and it's possible that his attitude to women was sealed as he lay alone in his hospital bed.
Thereafter, relationships were on his terms only, and his marriage to Margaret was doomed. It wasn't only that they both had to be the most important person in the room; it was that, thanks to royal protocol, it was infuriatingly difficult for Snowdon to absent himself from proceedings. Still, for a while, they were a perfect match and de Courcy's account of the period before and just after their marriage in 1960 makes for joyous reading. Their shared vanity was immense.
The couple used to sunbathe on the roof of Snowdon's studio, preferably on tinfoil, to better reflect the rays, and he once dyed his hair - it came out apricot - so they would "match". Then there are the mysteries and outrages of royal life. If, at dinner, the princess did not help herself to potatoes, no one else was permitted to take any. This is enough to drive anyone bats and, sure enough, once the first glow had departed from their union, Tony began leaving lists around - "things I hate about you" - for his darling wife to read. "You look like a Jewish manicurist," was a message she once found in her glove drawer.
Thus came about the first royal divorce since Henry VIII dumped Anne of Cleves. Snowdon had a lover - Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, later his second wife - but that didn't mean he was pleased when Margaret took one, the hippy-turned-gardener Roddy Llewellyn. When she lay in bed moping over a separation from Roddy and Snowdon was not allowed to see her, he drove in circles in the courtyard outside her window, honking his car horn.
Once outside the gilded cage of the palace, he did not slip gratefully into relative anonymity: friends testify to his desire to be recognised, and to his grumpiness if mouths did not fall open. Nor did he settle for a quiet life sexually. Lucy was not pleased to learn that her husband had been having an affair with a journalist, Ann Hills, throughout their 20-year marriage (a fact she discovered only after Hills committed suicide on New Year's Eve 1996 and the affair became public).
Just weeks later came a further revelation: that Snowdon was expecting a child with Melanie Cable-Alexander, features editor of Country Life. Lucy left. Snowdon wanted her back, de Courcy tells us, but couldn't bear to have the heart-to-heart she demanded.
Today, the 78-year-old Snowdon is as busy as ever, with two mistresses on the go. In a different time, such a book, fat with revelations, would have given a severe prick to the dignity of the silly, profligate, Dubonnet-swigging royals and all who sail in them. Now we barely raise an eyebrow.
So, Snowdon gets away with it. Just. And this juicy book proves everyone likes to gossip. In that sense, we are all equals.
Snowdon: The Biography
By Anne de Courcy (Weidenfeld $39.99)
- Observer
