Hardly Regal

Like a poised and polished hostess trying to overlook a glaring social error, Buckingham Palace last week sought to restore glamour to Princess Margaret's wedding. Glossing over the uproar caused by the abrupt switch in the best man for Fiance Antony Armstrong-Jones, the government revealed lavish decoration plans for the wedding day. In honor of Princess Margaret Rose's second name, nearly a million fresh roses are to be strung on 60-ft. arches between the palace and Clarence House, the London home of the princess. From tall masts in Parliament Square will dangle metal baskets filled with pink hydrangeas and yellow marguerites; gold-tasseled banners, bearing the monograms M and A, are to flutter from 70 flagpoles along a route lined by ramrod-straight guardsmen. The estimated cost: $56,000, or five times as much as was spent on the Queen's wedding to Prince Philip in the austerity year of 1947.

Snubs & Slaps. The British press rallied around. There were renewed suggestions that Tony be given a title (one newsman suggested he be made Duke of Sussex) and elevated to the peerage before the wedding. In the face of more royal regrets (from the crowned heads of Belgium and The Netherlands, and from Don Juan, pretender to the Spanish throne), commentators pointed out that the snubs were probably not directed at Meg and Tony personally, but were retaliatory slaps at the snobbery of Queen Elizabeth, who has failed to attend, or to send a representative to, many of the weddings and funerals of continental royalty. In Germany, the Hamburg Die Welt ran a cartoon showing a king on the phone to Britain, saying, "But in case we should need asylum again, we'd be glad to come."

But the jinx that has haunted the wedding was not to be downed. Despite the palace's best efforts, the image of Margaret that dominated Britain's front pages last week was a preview of a gaunt-cheeked bronze by the late Sir Jacob Epstein. "Hardly regal," grumbled the Daily Telegraph of the scrawny figure. "The princess resembles a badly groomed suburban young woman, her hands roughened at the kitchen sink, about to pick up a tray," wrote the Daily Mail. Then Madame Tussaud's put on view a waxworks figure of Tony Armstrong-Jones in a hands-behind-the-back posture that he had borrowed from Prince Philip--who no longer uses it. On top of that, the Royal Academy rejected a portrait by Artist Ruskin Spear called Princess Margaret Catches the Night Train to Balmoral, which was described as a somewhat "satirical caricature."

Gossipy Angle. Even Margaret's well-intentioned gestures about the wedding had ironic overtones. Because half of the 2,000 invited guests in Westminster Abbey will be screened off from the altar, Meg has ordered closed-circuit TV sets installed in the Abbey for the first time to relay the proceedings at the altar. Traditionalists were shocked. And when she directed that the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount should be substituted for the customary address by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the gossipists quickly found an angle: Princess Margaret was slyly getting back at her critics, since the Ninth Beatitude goes: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake."

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