Princess Margaret and the Curse - by Meryle Secrest (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A Groundbreaking New Perspective of Princess Margaret by Renowned Biographer Meryle Secrest

Meryle Secrest, distinguished biographer in the arts and humanities, and recipient of a White House Medal, has turned her focus to royalty. In Princess Margaret and the Curse, she has put the conventional view of a much-reviled Princess on its head. Her latest study, which she considers more of an investigation than a biography as such, proposes that nobody knows the truth about the fabled, doomed Princess.

She is the first person to have looked at Princess Margaret in a particular family context. That is to say with reference to her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the daughter of a famous, hard-drinking Scottish family that had inhabited an ancient dwelling, Glamis Castle, for centuries. Her older brothers were already renowned for their prowess in alcohol consumption. Decades later, once she became Queen Mother, this Elizabeth would begin to imbibe by eleven in the morning. She was already lamenting the loss of her "drinking powers" when, because of severe bouts of morning sickness during her first pregnancy with the future Queen Elizabeth in 1926, she could not drink. Four years later, while pregnant with Princess Margaret in 1930, she was not so handicapped. Doctors believed it was perfectly safe for a mother-to-be to drink, so she drank.

The doctors were wrong. But it took another forty-three years, until 1973, before new studies established that alcohol in any amount was poisonous to the developing human being. The effect is lifelong. We now know that victims' growth is stunted (Margaret stopped growing at five feet), and their skeletal structures are fragile. They get sick sooner and age faster. There are characteristic emotional differences, too. They never develop maturity of mind. They remain subject to sudden tantrums, rages, are poor judges of character, and particularly prone to run and hide, as Princess Margaret tried to do all her life. They may be as intelligent and gifted as she was, but mulish and fly into a rage. They are, it turns out, exactly like the person she became.

None of this has ever been recognized, let alone understood. With this study, the author places Margaret's life in its proper perspective. It seems particularly sad that someone expected to be perfection itself in her manners and behavior should have been born in the one situation where perfection was, in fact, impossible. It is time we looked at this public figure from a new and more forgiving frame of mind, and with a new understanding.

Review Quotes

Praise for the Work of Meryle Secrest

Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography

"Incisive, sympathetic, demonstrates great skill in unpicking the web of myths that Schiaparelli wove to reveal the shape of the woman beneath." --Economist

"Secrest's biography is a wonderful insight into a life that history hasn't remembered as well as it should have." --Vogue

Duveen: A Life in Art

"By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life . . . Rich in detail, scrupulously researched and sympathetically written." --The New York Review of Books

Stephen Sondheim

"A major biography . . . Secrest spent dozens of hours interviewing Sondheim, and he talks with unprecedented candor . . . Even walking Sondheim encyclopedias will find news here." --Newsweek

"A must read for anyone interested in the musical theater." --Jeremy Gerard, New York Magazine

Frank Lloyd Wright

"Captivating . . . Splendid . . . Absorbing . . . A life that no novelist could improve on, full of drama, tragedy, extravagance and inexplicable luck, both good and bad." --Witold Rybezynski, The Washington Post

Kenneth Clark

"Brilliant, attention-riveting . . . An enthralling biography." --Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal

Being Bernard Berenson

"The liveliest evocation of this strangely conflict-ridden man that has yet been written, a portrait with the unmistakable ring of psychological truth." --Robert Hughes, The New York Review of Books

"A remarkable tour de force . . . Scrupulously researched and never boring." --Harold Acton, The Washington Post

"You manage to build up a stereoscopic but coherent and entirely convincing portrait, which I recognize as authentic and psychologically correct; and you make it--in spite of some dark shadows--sympathetic." --Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor, Oxford University

About the Author

Meryle Secrest is known for her many biographies of famous men and women in the arts & humanities. She was born in 1930, by coincidence the same year as Princess Margaret Rose, and grew up in Bath, England. After graduating, she and her parents emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario, where she began her career as women's editor with the Hamilton News a year later. She received an award as "Most Promising Young Writer" from the Canadian Women's Press Club at the age of twenty and continued at papers in Britain, Ohio and at the Washington Post, where she spent the next twelve years. At the Post she specialized in profile interviews with the famous: Gregory Peck, Katherine Anne Porter, Gian Carlo Menotti, Artur Rubinstein, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Lady Bird Johnson, among them. In 1974, she published her first biography, Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks. The book was reviewed by Anais Nin in the New York Times and included in the American Library Association's "Thirty Most Notable Books" of 1974. In 1976 she left the Post to concentrate on writing biography full time. Her landmark study, Being Bernard Berenson, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Awards in 1980. Her books on Salvador Dali and Stephen Sondheim were best sellers as is her book on Frank Lloyd Wright. Additionally, she has received many grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In November 2006, President Bush presented Meryle Secrest with the Presidential National Humanities Medal for her services to biography in the Oval Office at the White House. She resides in Washington, DC.