The Meg & Tony Show

"My ducky, we mustn't be late!" she exclaimed. Husband Tony was clearly of a mind to linger among the Smithsonian Institution's automotive relics.

But Royalty Is Always Punctual. So off stepped Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon to yet another stop in last week's Washington-to-Manhattan round of receptions, rubberneck tours, shopping expeditions, luncheons, cocktail parties, teas, dinner dances and dinners without dances. Though their digestions may have suffered, their smiles were undimmed, the lips stiff and upper throughout.

They started the week in Washington with a reception attended by 1,200 members of the National Press Club and the Women's National Press Club. Meg and Tony did most of the asking. When a girl reporter told Meg that she worked for a national chain, the Princess caught on at once: "Dotted hither and yon, eh?" One chap answered Tony's query by saying he was retired. "I'm retired too," said Quondam Photographer Armstrong-Jones--though in fact he still moonlights camera assignments. Tony interrogated every press photographer he could buttonhole about equipment and technique, and lost no opportunity to mention a new book on British artists that includes 370 of his photographs. Only once did Meg make an overt concession to fatigue. After 15 minutes in one Washington reception line, she sat down for the balance of the receiving. "My feet," she explained. "I take my shoes off at home."

Nick's Place. Washington's shoes-off set got its chance to meet the royal couple at a soiree in the home of Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Wife Lydia. Since it was billed as an opportunity for the visitors to meet Washington's "young, gay, amusing people," Washington swingers who did not make the guest list consoled themselves with the fact that the 60 invited live wires included such sobersides as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. Lydia gave the Snowdons an album containing pictures of all the guests as babies. For Tony alone there was a knee-length sweater festooned with bow ties.

The next night Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson kept up with the Katzenbachs by inviting 140 of the "most important" to dinner and dancing at the White House. Lyndon set the tone of the evening with some advice to Tony that was not exactly news to the Princess' husband. "I have learned," the President said on his 31st wedding anniversary, "that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she is having her own way. And second, let her have it." Whereupon the tall Texan paired with the little (5 ft. 1 in.) Princess and Tony led Lady Bird as the band played Everything's Coming Up Roses. Nearly everyone danced with Meg. Tony danced most of the numbers, including the discotheque type meant for the Luci-Lynda generation. Hubert Humphrey, naturally, did the Charleston.

Boycott. In New York for the last six days of their U.S. trip, the Snowdons finally attended a reception where some of the guests were anxious not to meet them. At a lunch in the United Nations, several dozen African delegates boycotted the royal couple to protest Britain's failure to block Rhodesia's grab for independence. At a Waldorf-Astoria banquet that night, the Americans celebrated their own independence. When the orchestra struck up God Save the Queen, the crowd obliged by singing My Country, 'Tis of Thee.

Royal troupers are inured to such gaffes--and Meg and Tony at least seemed to enjoy most Yankee faux pas. Throughout her first visit to the U.S., the Princess impressed Americans as an attractive and dignified but eminently human woman, with none of the petulance attributed to her by the British press. Tony, following royal tradition --if not Lyndon's advice--gracefully yielded center stage to Margaret without submerging his own chipper, unaffected personality. As they neared the end of their stay, Meg warned that they had enjoyed the trip "oh, so terribly much" that the U.S. would be "hard put to keep us out" in the future. Which was nicer than many of her ancestors' comments on the Yanks.

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