Lord Snowdon on Pets

Where do you go in film making after you have made a home movie co-starring Peter Sellers and Princess Margaret? The film maker in question, Margaret's husband, Lord Snowdon, has found an answer: into offbeat, unblinking television documentaries. His first, dealing with old age and titled Don't Count the Candles, was shown in 21 countries and earned six awards (including two Emmys after its 1968 appearance on CBS). His second, which is called Love of a Kind and concerns Britons' infatuation with pets, can--and should--be seen on NBC's First Tuesday next week.

Like the earlier Snowdon effort, Love of a Kind is an evocative film essay on human loneliness and eccentricity. There are amusing flashes, as when a bosomy matron hatches a chick in her cleavage, but the general mood is straightforwardly clinical. Fetishism is obviously poignant and, at times, repugnant to Snowdon. Just as his work on aging contained some hospital footage as brutal as any in MASH, he is again deliberately trying to stir his audience. In one vignette, a curmudgeonly lady remarks that upon her death, she wants her 35 dogs "quietly put to sleep." Unfortunately, one of the film's strongest scenes, depicting two bachelor roommates breakfasting with their pet monkey, has been edited out by NBC.

Low Rubbish. Snowdon, now 40, ventured into film making to prove that he is something more than just a royal consort and a still photographer. "A still photographer," he says, "is a mechanic. He's not an artist, despite all you read." Snowdon, of course, remains one of the world's most artful still-picture mechanics for Vogue and London's Sunday Times. He also lends his refined eye to Britain's Council of Industrial Design. It was Snowdon who, in a speech to the nation's souvenir manufacturers, condemned most of their output as "low British rubbish." A trained architect (though he flunked his Cambridge exams) and a wizard handyman, Snowdon designed the impressive new aviary at the London Zoo and an improved motorized wheelchair. In sum, he calculates that he spends 80% of his life being Antony Armstrong-Jones and 20% being Lord Snowdon.

That sort of compartmentalization both "panics" and saves Tony, according to his friends. He actually pays rent to Margaret for the space in Kensington Palace where he does his office work, film processing and carpentry. He maintains an eight-room cottage at Nymans, the Armstrong-Jones family estate 35 miles south of London. Nymans has no gold-collared footmen nor servants. This retreat and his motorcycle are Tony's ways and means of "getting away from the telephone."

Inevitably, when he is spotted on the road, new rumors of marital bust-up hit the British gossip columns. But in general Tony enjoys a more favorable press and word-of-mouth than his wife Meg. She is criticized by some Londoners for her rather imperious behavior. As for their marriage, there are no indications of dissolution. Tony, who bubbles with humor (one of his best bits is a wicked impression of David Frost), telephoned Margaret from New York during one flurry of rift stories to suggest that they rendezvous, as a jape, in Reno.

Unfinished. In some ways, Snowdon has to cool his competitive instincts as a journalist lest he be accused of taking advantage of his royal access. Except in his role as court photographer, he says, "I only do pictures that anyone could have done." His celebrity status actually represents even more of a handicap when he is shooting film. "When you're doing stills," he says, "you're a chameleon, unseen and alone." TV filming is a more conspicuous, crowd-attracting business, particularly since union rules require a minimum crew of five. Though a cameraman was on the payroll for his two documentaries, Tony did most of the shooting himself. "You've got to hold your own camera, to feel it in your hands," he says.

He does not deceive himself that he is a finished film maker. He notes perceptively that "neither documentary has much flow" and that each is really just an "episodic" unreeling of stills. He felt "amateur," he reports, after seeing Costa-Gavras' Z: "It is so good that I don't know whether I should try more films." The remark, of course, is for effect. He would, if he could, mortgage Margaret's Christopher Wren-designed palace for a chance to do a feature film like that cinematographic tour de force, Elvira Madigan. His next project, though, will still be "on the fringes of documentary." He is dickering about it with CBS, to which he feels indebted for getting him into film. Though the BBC was outraged at being passed over, Lord Snowdon says: "It was important that I should be asked to do my first film by an entirely private firm with no state money behind it." That way, he feels, no one could cry tilt.

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