Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

 

Summary (from the publisher): She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.

Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. Dudley Moore propositioned her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was in love with her. For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. “If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies” he confided to a friend, “they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!”

Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding. In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.

The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.

Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma’am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.

Review: This unusual experiment on a traditional biography explores the life of Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. Known for her cold asides, insistence on protocol, demanding personality, glamor, and intelligence, her life was defined by her station in life and being born so close yet so far from the throne. In this book, Brown has provided 99 short meditations on Margaret that include interviews, parodies, imagined alternative lives, lists, essays, and more. 

While not a chronological, traditional biography, this book still gives such a full fledged glimpse into Margaret's life and character. The anecdotes about her cutting remarks, style, interactions with family, and various love affairs give a well fleshed out image of Margaret. I loved the short, staccato style chapters of this book, which made it a quick read and allowed the author to jump around rather than get bogged down in a more comprehensive thorough exploration of every stage of her life. 

That being said, there are obvious gaps in this book. Most notably, Margaret's children are barely mentioned. There is little description of Margaret as a mother or what her children were like. As other reviewers have said, it certainly reads as if Brown cannot stand Princess Margaret and paints her worst flaws heavily while hardly mentioning her selling points. I would not recommend this as a starting point if the reader is unfamiliar with Margaret. The what-if style chapters that imagine if Margaret had made different choices are difficult to decipher from the factual chapters and would be particularly confusing to a novice on her life. 

Stars: 3

Related Titles: 

• Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain's Queen by Sarah Bradford 
• Royal Childhood by Anna Reynolds and Lucy Peter
• The Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross
• The Real Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II by Andrew Marr