Roger Your Sense of Fashion Really Reeks
In light of The Crown'southward 4th season, we're republishing this 2019 story about Princess Margaret's favorite escape.
If you lot didn't take the right whiskey, forget it—Princess Margaret wouldn't be spending long at your party. Tatiana Copeland laughs as she recalls hosting Margaret in Mustique in that gauzy heyday when the Caribbean island, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, held the reputation for being a hedonistic idyll—of the very exclusive, fabulously wealthy kind. Margaret's preferred brand, allegedly the Famous Bickering, couldn't exist purchased on the island, which is just three miles long and one and a half miles broad. "You had to make certain you had it when she came to your firm," says Copeland, an American who, together with her husband, has been going to Mustique since the 1980s. "If yous didn't take her whiskey so that was probably the final time she would get to you. If you couldn't be bothered to know what she liked to drink, she probably wouldn't be bothered to come back to you."
Copeland knows how information technology sounds. "Nobody sane comes to Mustique," she tells Town & Land. "All the people who come are totally unusual, striking, and eccentric. I think that's what attracts them to the island."
The little island was mostly a secret until it became known to the wider globe in 1976, when photographs taken there of Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn—the human being with whom she had an eight-twelvemonth affair beginning in 1973—were published by the British News of the World.
At the time, Margaret was still married to lensman Antony Armstrong-Jones; Llewellyn was a mural gardener 17 years Margaret's inferior, and the exposure of their thing led to Margaret's split from Armstrong-Jones (known every bit Lord Snowdon) two years later. Margaret and Llewellyn did not terminate up together—in 1981, he married Tatiana Soskin—simply they remained friends until Margaret's death, aged 71, in 2002. (The affair and its fallout are portrayed in the third season of The Crown, starring Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret and Harry Treadaway as Llewellyn.)
Despite the scandal, Margaret adored Mustique until the stop of her life, maintaining that it was "the but place I can relax." Her home on the island, chosen Les Jolies Eaux, was built on x acres of land that had been a wedding gift from Colin Tennant. Tennant, who bought the island in 1958 for what would and then have been around $120,000 and founded the Mustique Company, was married to Lady Anne Glenconner, Margaret's close friend and lady-in-waiting. It was Glenconner who introduced Margaret to Llewellyn.
Margaret came to Mustique twice a year, in October/November and February. "She loved the island," said Copeland, whose husband, Gerret Copeland, is the son of Lammot du Pont Copeland, the 11th president of the DuPont Company. "Margaret told me Les Jolies Eaux was the only property she had ever owned in her unabridged life. It was hers. She felt inordinate love and pride that this was non from the regal family, it was not her sister'southward, information technology was non grace and favor. She loved the fact it was her own."
Basil Charles, former owner of the island's famous Basil's Bar, told T&C that Princess Margaret was "an amazing person, so cute. She was friendly, fun. She liked partying, tardily nights, and to dance."
Brian Alexander, who managed the island from 1979 to 2008 and who remains so discreet he professes not to call back anecdotes, said Princess Margaret was a "really good friend to me and my married woman, and to anybody here. I know it's not how she is portrayed in newspaper clippings, just she was a actually nice, kind, proficient person."
He was on the island when the scandal around Margaret and Llewellyn bankrupt, but says today the media "exaggerated certain aspects, which I sympathize—they take to sell product. Just the real background to the whole thing was people having nice holidays on a tropical island."
On Mustique, Copeland saw both Margaret the diva and Margaret the downwards-to-globe. "She could be very imperial and very demanding, and very warm and friendly. You never knew which Princess Margaret would arrive," says her friend. "She could be very entertaining and very funny. She could too exist quite a scattering. She liked to be courted and looked after. If she felt properly taken care of it was fun. She liked the company of good-looking men and preferred the company of men to women."
The Princess didn't similar anyone to be overly familiar, however. "She was a imperial person. Y'all had to know your boundaries: no hugging and kissing," says Copeland. Upon meeting Margaret for the starting time fourth dimension on Mustique, recalled Copeland, you addressed her every bit "your royal highness;" after that information technology was "ma'am."
Not even on the embankment were the rules forgotten. "If yous were English, yous curtsied on the beach in a bikini, which was a little strange. Americans didn't have to do it."
Despite her insistence on protocol, Margaret was far from buttoned upwards. "It could be very wild and unrestrained," says Copeland, who once rented Tennant's Great House property on the status that she and her hubby host Princess Margaret personally. "She liked cypher more than to sit and beverage and sing a ditty at the piano," Copeland recalled. "She sang somewhat off-color songs sitting on the stool with a piano player. She had a very ribald sense of sense of humour, which, effectually the right people, was pretty bad. She loved that sort of stuff."
Anyone who spent time on the island in those years has memories of the merry Princess. Jeannette Buck, who has lived on Mustique for 33 years—for most of that time as the Mustique Company's villa rentals manager, and now its real estate director—recalls Princess Margaret every bit "quite tiny and very fun-loving. Every day she would have lunch on the beach or at someone's house. Like all Brits she loved the drama of dressing up."
Tennant and Glenconnor formed the core of Margaret'due south social life on the isle. At his 50th birthday in 1976 Princess Margaret crowned Colin Tennant "Rex" of Mustique. "Colin was a master of creating something, and his whole job was to entertain Princess Margaret," says Copeland. "He loved dressing upwardly, and he had trunks full, literally trunks total, of costumes. Then, you could be an Indian princess, yous could be a pirate, yous could be a mermaid, a wench. That was fun. When you clothes upwardly you step into a unlike globe and change your personality. I'1000 certain copious amounts of rum helped."
It was painful, said Copeland, to see Margaret's joie de vivre decline, aslope her physical mobility, at the end of her life. "Her oral communication became more impacted," said Copeland. "I didn't think she wanted people to encounter her like that. She wanted people to remember how she was."
In 1996, five years before she died, Margaret gifted Les Jolies Eaux to her son David Linley, who sold the property in 2001 to American businessman Jim Murray.
2 decades afterward, the island has lost some of its ramshackle glamour but remains an sectional retreat. It's home to about 100 backdrop and is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars in real manor lonely. (You can rent the five-bedroom Les Jolies Eaux for between $21,000 a week in the off season to $62,000 in loftier flavor; information technology comes with a staff of five, including a chef.)
Mick Jagger, Bryan Adams, and Tommy Hilfiger have homes there. Other famous visitors include Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Victoria Beckham, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, and Daniel Craig. There is even a new generation of royals—Prince William and Kate Middleton and their family stayed at the island's Villa Antilles this summer.
Mick Jagger "basically sticks to himself," said Jeannette Buck. "I meet him effectually all the time; it'due south no big bargain. I just had lunch with Bryan Adams. Shania Twain was hither at one stage. And David Bowie was close to my heart: he was so into the community. Every Tuesday evening he would read stories to the schoolchildren."
Privacy remains Mustique's most sectional asset. (No one's was disturbed to movie The Crown, for which locations in southern Spain substitute for the beaches and tropical lushness of Mustique.) "That is an extraordinary luxury in this world," Copeland notes. "If Prince William and Kate and the kids desire to go to the beach, they are left alone."
Still, the isle isn't what information technology once was. Copeland said that when she and her married man first came to Mustique in the early 1980s, in that location were only a few cars (most people got around using golf buggy-manner vehicles called Mules), no golfing or museums, only a few shops, and dinners overlooking the sea and stars. It was a time of "far fewer houses, far fewer people, far fewer everything," says Buck.
"Erstwhile" Mustique was based on the social principle of invite others to your house and exist invited to other people'south houses for drinks and dinners. In the old days nobody sent invitations, said Cadet. "The news got around of house parties, but at present that the isle holds around i,200 residents, with 600 to 700 guests on top of that, it'southward not possible for everyone to get together in the aforementioned mode."
In the late 1970s, financial issues led Tennant to sell his bulk stake in the Mustique Company for effectually $1.viii meg to a consortium headed by the Venezuelan paint manufacturer (and Mustique homeowner) Hans Neumann. In Joseph Bullmer's revealing 2000 documentary, The Human Who Bought Mustique, society lensman Lord Lichfield said that artists like Tennant were not all-time suited to fiscal matters, and that his vision for Mustique had been "hijacked by the men in suits."
Tennant nevertheless took pleasure from visiting Mustique, merely found the lath of the Mustique Company to be full of "smug, inept, incompetent" people, or then he said in The Human Who Congenital Mustique. Tennant's eccentricity, wit, and quick temper are much in prove in the documentary. The filmmakers followed him equally he returned to the isle to erect an ornate tent to host a lunch with his former friend Princess Margaret, bossing and berating people in the process.
Roger Pritchard, the present managing director of the Mustique Company, told T&C that the island has indeed changed since Margaret (and Tennant's) time. "It's more family-friendly. When Princess Margaret came, she partied hard. Mod celebrities and royals come not to get away and party, but to accept a good time. Information technology's family unit entertainment they want more than hedonistic entertainment."
People ask Copeland whether she prefers the "old" or "new" Mustique. She tells them that she likes the best of both worlds. If, in the old days, electricity and h2o were patchy, and "you would gather down at the harbor to buy nutrient from the send when it came in." Island life and then was "democratic in a sense," says Copeland. "A duchess could dance with the fishermen at Basil's. I'g not sure that would happen today."
Copeland still hosts parties at Toucan Loma, the domicile she and her husband congenital (and which is also available to rent by the week), and enjoys getting invited to other shindigs, simply "these days people seem to go to Mustique to get away and stay within their own groups. It's get more family-oriented. I have not attended a wild party at that place in a long, long time."
Has Mustique really lost its hedonism? Cadet laughs. "There is still some—and long may it continue. Nosotros don't want it to be as well repose."
Designer: Michael Stillwell
Photo Editor: Jennifer Newman
This content is created and maintained past a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their electronic mail addresses. You lot may be able to find more than information about this and similar content at piano.io
0 Response to "Roger Your Sense of Fashion Really Reeks"
Post a Comment