He found her highly intelligent, and became a staunch defender, insisting she was under appreciated and misunderstood. “People say, this was what Tony introduced me to,” the royal historian Christopher Warwick recalled her venting once, “but I was always interested in that.” Though by the 60s some friends like Beaton had turned on Margaret because of her spoiled behavior, she found allies in intellectuals like the writer Gore Vidal, whose wit was equally caustic.
While Margaret’s bohemian circle undeniably grew through her marriage, she would later dismiss the idea that Snowdon was responsible for it. “This is my house, the only square inch in the world I own, and Oliver was a major contributor to it,” she once said. Even after Margaret and Snowdon divorced in 1978, following years alternating between ripping off their clothes and their faces, they continued to share a distinct sensibility. His adored uncle Oliver Messel, a designer who was largely known for his theatrical sets, was a father figure who once visited the teenage Antony in the hospital in the company of “ Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich, who sang ‘Boys in the Backroom’ to him.'" Later, when Messel branched into architecture, he designed Margaret’s adopted home, Les Jolies Eaux, on the island of Mustique. Snowdon himself enjoyed formative gay influences growing up. The year was 1978, when she divorced Lord Snowdon. Princess Margaret and her companion Roddy Llewellyn on their way to Heathrow Airport before departing for a holiday in the Caribbean. Harboring ambitions to marry Margaret himself, Thorpe had sent a postcard to a friend on the announcement of the engagement, “What a pity about HRH, I rather hoped to marry one and seduce the other.” When his 1960 nuptials to Princess Margaret were in nascent stages, Snowdon's first two choices for best man, Jeremy Fry followed by Jeremy Thorpe, were nixed because of their homosexual records. (In his biography Redeeming Features, Haslam also claimed an affair with Margaret's later boyfriend Roddy Llewellyn.) The eventual Lord Snowdon, “lived for work and sex,” de Courcy says, recalling a moment when he famously told her, “I didn’t fall in love with boys, but a few men have been in love with me.” Snowdon never confirmed he was bisexual to her, but she adds that "when Margaret first met him she thought he was gay." Whispers continue to dog the Earl to this day, including claims by interior designer Nicky Haslam that they were lovers. However, it was in her marriage with photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones where the Princess would get a panoramic view of all the colors of the rainbow (homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967).
Later feeling the need to clarify or perhaps stoke the notion, he released a statement saying, “There is no connection between my views on marriage and Princess Margaret, other than she has been known to be looking for a mate and so have I.” Even the pompadoured Liberace once floated the idea of a romance between himself and the younger royal. Anwar Hussein // Getty Imagesīeyond her adolescent home life, Margaret spent much of her social life in the 1950s in the company of accomplished gay men like the playwright Noel Coward, who affectionately called Elizabeth and Margaret, “Darling Ma’ams.” And she was captured adoringly by Cecil Beaton’s camera in come-hither beauty. Princess Margaret with her husband, born Antony Armstrong-Jones, photographer Lord Snowdon in 1970 in Badminton, England. “She’d grown up around them.” In fact, there were so many gay men in the royal household, one apocryphal story goes, that the Queen Mother once rang her staff wondering about her gin and Dubonnet, “I don’t know about any of you queens down there, but this Queen up here wants a drink.”
“A lot of her friends no doubt were gay,” says Anne de Courcy, the biographer of Margaret's ex-husband, the late Lord Snowdon, who was reportedly bisexual. In real life, as it turns out, Margaret's relationship with gay men was more complicated than this season let on, often tricky but never quite so clueless. Jennings, an openly gay priest who existed in real life, wasn't the only unrequited love affair Margaret experienced, but his storyline this season, combined with Helena Bonham Carter's already glamorously world-weary and borderline campy depiction, brings Her Royal Highness ever closer to gay icon status. Dazzle, or “Dehzehl," the queen tells Margaret, is a "Friend of Dorothy." It's not just that he was entering the seminary to become a priest. In an otherwise serious season of The Crown, one of the more laughable moments comes in Episode 7, "The Hereditary Principle," when Queen Elizabeth explains to her sister Princess Margaret why her friend Derek Jennings couldn't possibly be in love with her.
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