Marriage and indiscretion

Princess Margaret was able to enjoy London as a young woman in a way that would not be possible today. Although photographers appeared from time to time, the Press and the public, by and large, left her alone. She adored the Casanova Club in Grosvenor Street and was able to dine with her Set at the Mirabelle in Curzon Street, a place with a reputation for serving the finest food in London. Kidney and oyster pudding was a speciality. In the 1950s the crooner Ray Miller performed for diners with a fourpiece band. Drums were not allowed. The restaurant was surrounded by very expensive flats and the noise was a frequent cause of complaint.

Quaglino's restaurant in Bury Street off Piccadilly held a special place in Princess Margaret's affections. It was here that she first heard the legendary entertainer Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, a black singer, strikingly handsome and exceptionally gifted. He played a white grand piano as he sang hits like A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, and the Princess would sit close by, entranced by the music. Author Charlotte Breese has written that Hutch, who was 56 when he met the 25-year-old princess, was enchanted with her. They became very close friends.

The princess would hang around The Colony in Berkeley Square where he did a late-night show. A friend recalled: "She would wait through his performance to dance and talk to him. They obviously loved each other's company. He was a big man but he danced like an angel."

When the relationship ended, Hutch and his drophead Bentley were seen less around the smarter parts of London. He was a compulsive gambler and his vast earnings dwindled until, in 1969, aged 69, he died penniless in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

Men were important, but the princess had some very close women friends. There was Judy Montagu, the bubbly and witty grand-daughter of Britain's most prominent merchant banker, Lord Swaythling, and Lady Elizabeth Cavendish who became one of Margaret's ladies-in-waiting and one of her most trusted confidantes. Highly intelligent and intellectual, she was to play a fateful role in the Princess's life when she invited her to a dinner party at her mother's house in Cheyne Walk in 1958. Among the guests was a handsome young photographer, Antony Armstrong-Jones.

In fact, her path had already crossed his. He took the wedding photographs when her friend Colin Tennant married Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, in 1956. Princess Margaret said later she could not remember him from that occasion. Indeed, the Cheyne Walk dinner party did not spark the romance that was to come. The Princess was to say later that she was not convinced Tony was interested in women.

But they met again when he was chosen to do portrait photographs of her. They talked, mostly about theatre and the arts, and became attracted to one another. They kept trysts at his studio at 20 Pimlico Road, then, as the relationship deepened and their anxiety about being discovered increased, he rented a ground-floor room at 59 Rotherhithe Street, Bermondsey, overlooking the river. They married on Friday 6 May, 1960. Armstrong-Jones was given the title Lord Snowdon, to reflect his Welsh ancestry, in October 1961. On 3 November 1961, Margaret gave birth to their first child, David Albert Charles, Viscount Linley. His sister, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, was born at Kensington Palace on 1 May 1964.

In the mid-Sixties, serious cracks began to appear in what, to the public gaze, appeared to be a perfect royal marriage. It seemed to Jocelyn Stevens that his earlier misgivings had been well-founded then, in 1964, another person entered the innermost circle, Peter Sellers. The Princess met him when Lord Snowdon was commissioned to photograph Sellers, then well into his successful film career. Sellers and the Princess clicked instantly. They made wacky home movies together and later, when the marriage to Lord Snowdon was over in all but name, they met secretly at his large flat in Clarges Street.

Margaret would be dropped off there by her detective who was told she was attending a dinner party. The door would be opened by Sellers, disguised as a butler. He would then disappear and announce Princess Margaret, using different voices to make the detective, on the doorstep, imagine the flat was filled with people. When he left Margaret and Sellers would collapse with laughter.

Sellers was close to Margaret throughout the 1960s. According to the actor's son Michael, there was an affair. He said that his father confessed it to him before he died of a heart attack in 1980. Michael, a property manager who lives in north London, said: "He said Margaret invited him to Kensington Palace. They had dinner, then the servants tactfully withdrew afterwards. That is when it happened." In 1966 the Princess started a passionate relationship with another nightclub entertainer, Robin Douglas-Home. She was 37, subject to frequent bouts of deep depression, drinking heavily and despite her many friends, desperately lonely. He was a raffish gambler, womanising pianist and writer who was even more emotionally unstable than she.

During late 1966 the Princess and Douglas-Home met often; first at Kensington Palace and in his house on Cromwell Road, then at his country house, Meadowbrook, in West Chiltington, Sussex. She sent him a number of love letters, but by the summer of 1967 she had cooled towards him. She celebrated her 37th birthday that year as a guest of the Aga Khan at his fabulous new hotel, the Cala di Volpe, on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. She spent most days sunbathing and swimming from Sellers's yacht, Bobo. Lord Snowdon was there, but the atmosphere between him and the princess was tense. Douglas-Home killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills on 15 October 1968. The Princess was not among mourners at his funeral. By the early 1970s, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were leading separate lives, although they continued to share their apartment at Kensington Palace. This was a desperate phase in her life and she was smoking and drinking more than ever, spending hours on the telephone to friends with whom she had once had such fun.

In 1973, the princess was introduced to Roddy Llewellyn, a Welshman who looked a lot like the young Tony Armstrong-Jones. He was 25; she was 43. Roddy had lived with interior designer Nicky Haslam at his London flat and was introduced to the princess by her old friend Colin Tennant. To the surprise of many, Roddy plunged into an affair with Margaret soon after they met.

He took her to a commune he shared with friends on a derelict farm at Surrendell in Wiltshire. She took him to Tennant's estate, Glen, near Innerleithen in Peebleshire. Then, in 1974, the princess embarked on what was to be the last truly hedonistic phase of her life. In February of that year she invited Roddy to her house on Mustique.

By then Colin Tennant had tamed his wild paradise island, and it had become a secluded haven for the rich and famous. Mick Jagger bought a house there and others from the world of music and films passed through for holidays and party weekends. Margaret's home, built for her by Tennant, had been extended to seven bedrooms, including a thatched gazebo and a small pool.

She and Roddy spent lazy days by the pool, on the beach or playing Scrabble with a Rachmaninov piano concerto playing in the background. There was an endless round of drinks parties, lunch parties, dinner parties and beach parties. The princess had a copy of the Times crossword faxed to her every day. In 1976, during one of their visits to Mustique, she and Roddy were secretly photographed by a journalist who had landed on the island posing as a schoolteacher. The picture clearly showed how intimate their relationship was. Pressure on Margaret and Roddy became unbearable, with tabloid attention reaching the point of hysteria. He was trying to make a career as a landscape gardener but things became impossible for him in Britain. In 1978 he accepted advice from Buckingham Palace to travel abroad and he slipped out of the country, heading for north Africa. While he was there, on 10 May 1978, it was announced that Princess Margaret would sue Snowdon for divorce.

Her relationship with Roddy later became what she described as "a loving friendship" and it continued to the end. He became a successful garden designer and the Princess would spend weekends with him and his wife Tatania at their home near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Occasionally the Llewellyns stayed at Kensington Palace.

In 1997, her health already beginning to fail, the Princess gave Roddy a grand 50th birthday lunch in her pink-walled Garden Room. It was one of the last times her friends saw her truly happy.