Lord Snowdon: Many cock tales

Such good news that my good friend Anne de Courcy is to write the authorised Lord Snowdon biography. One can only hope that it will deal frankly with his sex life.

Like the gruesome husband-beater Liza Minnelli, Princess Margaret had a penchant for gay and bisexual men. Kitty Kelley relates in The Royals (which I had to smuggle into the UK from the States – I wrapped it in embossed wallpaper) that at a society party in New York the hostess asked Margaret: "How is the Queen?" and she replied: "Which one? my sister, my mother or my husband?" Before they married she heard him call a male servant “darling” (or some such endearment) when he failed to see her in the room, and she cross-examined him as to his meaning. Well, I call my brother’s cat “darling” and I wish to state here and now that I am not having, nor have I ever had, a relationship with pussy.

I do hope that Anne will put flesh on the bones of one of my favourite Snowdon stories. As his marriage to Margaret disintegrated like cow dung in a squall, they attended a dinner together. At table he placed a paper bag over his head without a word. For several minutes other guests tried to ignore him until Margaret asked him matter-of-factly why he had placed a bag over his head. He replied: “Because I don’t want to see your fucking face”. I do hope this is true. But I wonder where he got the paper bag? Was it stuffed in his pocket in a premeditated act of marital hostility? Or perhaps he found it at his feet in the dining room and improvised a plea for help. And did he take the bag off before he replied to his wife? Otherwise, as he inhaled to speak, did he suck in the paper, causing muffled speech? Maybe, with each exhaled insult, he blew out a side of the bag? For me anecdotes stand or fall on such causal details. Perhaps Anne will furnish us with the facts. She is, after all, the mistress of etiquette.

Or else Nicky Haslam will enlighten us. The first of his memoirs is out in a few months time and he knows Snowdon very well. Haslam also shared a property with Margaret’s bisexual pal Roddy Llewellyn before he became a media gardener in one of the leisure sections of a national newspaper that promotes family values. Both Haslam and Anne are being published by Weidenfeld: one does hope that the former doesn't in anyway cause Snowdon to throw a strop to the latter's loss.