Princess Margaret: A Royal Who Actually Enjoyed Being Royal
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Season Five of The Crown debuts this month, covering the ’90s-era decline of the marriage between Princess Diana and Prince Charles as well as, arguably, the most influential fashion era of Diana’s life. For each of the ten episodes, we will recap the fashion of the show, focusing in particular on Diana and her obsession with offering messages and stories through her clothes, with digressions on the Duchess of Windsor, the late Queen, and other royal style icons portrayed on the series. Read the recaps of episodes one, two, and three.
The fourth episode of The Crown’s latest season is utterly devoid of Diana. But it brings us an up close and personal look at another glamorous woman who could never get what she wanted and yet made dissatisfaction look so great: Princess Margaret.
Through all five seasons of The Crown, Princess Margaret has remained the steadfast heroine, maybe the only character who almost always earns our empathy and adoration. The foil to the Queen’s superhuman sense of decorum and duty, Margaret is all desire, all vice, all complaints. She is camp embodied, in her jet set caftans and her sadness and cigarettes and teased high hair. She is the kind of person who seems to have figured out exactly how to spend her time doing a job that requires her to do very little indeed. While her sister visits with prime ministers and attempts to provide comfort in times of national strife, Margaret hangs out with naughty celebrities, holes up in Mustique, and gets divorced as a revolutionary act. Some of the most memorable scenes of the show have simply been Margaret walking around, smoking.
This season, Lesley Manville takes over in the role for Helena Bonham Carter. Big shoes to fill, I suppose, but Manville also comes with excellently twisted, black comedy fashion credentials: she was the star of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, in which a widowed housewife scrimps and saves to buy a Dior gown, and played the head of Reynolds Woodcock’s London atelier (as well as the designer’s sister) in Phantom Thread. She grasps a cigarette holder with admirable aplomb, and drops a condescending bon mot with impeccable grace.
The episode is almost entirely dedicated to Margaret, tracking the return of her first love, Peter Townsend, who writes to her suggesting a reunion at an upcoming ball. (Margaret’s affair with Townsend, and the Queen’s refusal to let her sister marry a divorced man, are covered in the show’s first season and revisited several times thereafter.) The letter arrives in a grandiose style that is true to the Crown creator Peter Morgan’s preference for plodding plot over character development: we come to Margaret asleep, with a silk eye mask on, under a green damask duvet cover. Her head is smushed into a cloud of white pillow with slack tension suggesting the early stages of a light hangover. A servant pours sugar into her gold and blue coffee cup and stirs it; she arises and feeds her dog a bit of her toast.
Time to get dressed! She wraps her hair up in a paisley turban and heads to the bathtub, where she scrubs herself with a bar of soap as Tchaikovsky’s score from Swan Lake plays. The camera dances away from her and over to her cigarette holder in a bezeled glass ashtray, and just beyond…. SOME AIRMAIL!
That would be the letter from Townsend, whom she eventually meets again with a sly grin while wearing a puff-sleeved hot pink dress. (The Queen could never! Wear hot pink, I mean.) Though she later spends an evening on the phone with her sister, complaining that her heart is still broken over Townsend and that her declaration that she couldn’t marry him is something she still holds against her, one can’t help but look at this joyfully attired, happily drunk, blissfully dressed woman and think: this woman is really living!
Which is to say: Margaret may be the only royal amid the many of The Crown who is actually shown enjoying any of this, at all. Though much is made of her chagrin at being trapped in a gilded cage, she adores her cushy position adjacent to so much power and yet possessing none of the responsibilities. Prince Charles may have Savile Row suits and the Queen her Balmoral acreage, but they seem to approach these pleasures more like balms for their otherwise tortured existences. When one thinks of being “queen for a day,” Margaret’s toilet is generally what one imagines: bathing, smoking, having breakfast served in bed. Trapped—and thriving!
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