When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. LADY IN WAITINGMy Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the CrownBy Anne Glenconner It seems particularly apt that Anne Coke Tennant, Baroness Glenconner, was born into an ancient British family whose crest is an ostrich swallowing an iron horseshoe, symbolizing, as she puts it, “our ability to digest anything. ” Readers of her sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, sometimes affecting, sometimes clueless memoir will learn that she was a perfect ostrich: Burying her head in the sand may well have been the only way to endure a 54-year marriage to her terrifyingly eccentric, deeply profligate husband, who would reward her loyalty by disinheriting her, and to remain in the good graces of her notoriously difficult, consummately petulant childhood friend Princess Margaret, whom she served for nearly three decades as a lady-in-waiting. Those expecting the sort of dishy gossip Craig Brown served up in “99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret” or the diva turns wrought by Helena Bonham Carter in Season 3 of “The Crown” will find “Lady in Waiting” more of a challenge.
The pleasures of Glenconner’s tales must be winkled out of her sturdy if occasionally clichéd prose: revelations of the strange juxtapositions of an unexpectedly upstairs-downstairs aristocratic life. Born at Holkham, the fifth largest estate in England (but unable, because of her sex, to inherit it), young Anne loved riffling through the pages of her grandfather’s proudest possession, Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, and making dens in the attic from old masters “deemed too louche for the walls of the state rooms. ” But just a few years later, she could be found lining up with her sponge bag to use the loo at a succession of seedy hotels for traveling salesmen as she set about hawking mugs and plates from the pottery her mother had established to help keep Holkham afloat. While on a similar mission in America via Greyhound bus, she was abruptly summoned home to be a maid of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.
For days on end, every step of the ceremony was choreographed and rehearsed at Westminster Abbey, but at night the apprentice courtier traded its splendor for her uncle’s flat, where she slept on a mattress on the floor. And so this up-and-down life proceeded. After Anne Coke married Colin Tennant, later to become Lord Glenconner, they set off on a three-month honeymoon that wasn’t exactly the grand tour a self-described “conservatively brought up” young woman had expected. In Paris, after discovering that his bride was a virgin, Colin (deemed a “fairly decadent fellow” by his pal Princess Margaret) hauled the demurely clad Anne to a filthy, rundown hotel, where he presented her with a “surprise” — two naked strangers “squelching into each other” as they had sex.
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In a scene that could have been scripted for “Monty Python,” Glenconner reports that “every now and then they asked us if we would like to join in. So, I found myself saying politely, ‘That’s very kind of you, but no thank you. ’” A little while later, in Cuba, Colin took her to a “rather shifty” cockfight, where one of the birds attacked her head, claws bared, sending blood coursing down her face. His response?
A furious accusation that it was all her fault, that she had ruined the proceedings. Why didn’t she ditch him then and there? Perhaps Colin explained it best: “We were brought up not to throw in the towel but to bite bullets and fold towels neatly.
“” Wildly unstable yet often entertaining and generous, Colin Tennant threw “as many tantrums as he threw parties.”
” At one of the latter, Princess Margaret made the acquaintance of her much younger lover, Roddy Llewellyn, whom she whisked off to buy swimming trunks so tight they qualified as “budgie smugglers. ” And it was at Mustique, a Caribbean island the intently shopaholic Colin had bought on a whim, despite its lack of running water and electricity, that Princess Margaret established her own sybaritic beachhead. By this time, Lady Glenconner, her official court capacity having merged with her B. F.
F. persona, was expected to acquiesce to Margaret’s “royal moments,” whether dog-paddling sideways so the breaststroking princess could continue a conversation or attending to her elaborate cigarette-smoking ritual, which was “rather like a Chinese tea ceremony. ” Glenconner’s travels on Margaret’s overseas tours yield some of the book’s best anecdotes. Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos receive concise dissing.
An interlude in Swaziland, where Margaret’s party was lodged in a hastily tidied-up brothel, showcases an unusual diplomatic quandary: where to pin an elaborate medal, sent by the queen herself, when faced with a half-naked tribal ruler. Best forgotten is the koala-peeing incident in Australia. And, back home, the awkwardness of playing weekend hostess to a well-meaning royal who brought her own kettle for morning tea but had no idea how to use it and dismantled one of the Tennants’ chandeliers so she could clean it in the bathtub. Then again, Margaret could be the sort of useful guest who was equipped not only with a bodyguard (admired by Glenconner’s younger family members for his ability to rip phone books in half) but also a butler (essential, the princess always insisted, if one is to have a proper picnic).
Despite its madcap romps, “Lady in Waiting” can make for sobering reading, and the downside of this privileged life, with its potential for tragedy, looms over three of Glenconner’s five children. After years as a drug addict, her eldest son, Charlie, embarked on a new, clean life as a husband and father only to contract a fatal case of hepatitis C. Another son, Henry, succumbed to AIDS. And a third son, Christopher, spent four months in a coma after a motorcycle accident in Central America.
Glenconner’s descriptions of these difficult times are evidence of the grit that underlies her genteel affect. And it’s hard not to be moved when Christopher finally responds to the taxing regimen prescribed by a sympathetic doctor who had nursed his own son back to consciousness: 15 minutes of sensory stimulation every hour, 24 hours a day. But it’s also hard not to roll your eyes when Christopher’s doting mother reports his first word upon awakening: Lamborghini. Truly, the rich are different.
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