Biographer revisits life of a rebel princess

At 95, D.C. author Meryle Secrest has published her latest biography, about Princess Margaret.

By Audrey Partington
Posted on November 04, 2025

The Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was known to be a daily drinker, but no one has ever connected the dots from that habit to her daughter Princess Margaret’s troubled life.

Until now.

In her new book, Princess Margaret and the Curse, biographer Meryle Secrest suggests that the “Royal Rebel” may have been born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Secrest draws on interviews with Dr. Kenneth L. Jones, one of two doctors at the University of Washington who authored the first FAS study in 1973.

“That research came out 43 years after Margaret was born,” Secrest said. “The Queen Mother was most likely told she could drink while pregnant, but the doctor was wrong. It’s not her fault, and it’s not Margaret’s fault if she was poisoned by her mother.”

Margaret’s glamorous yet turbulent lifestyle — lived brazenly in the public eye — was in stark contrast to her stately elder sister, Elizabeth, who became Queen when Margaret was 22 years old.

Secrest explains that their mother suffered from prolonged morning sickness during her first pregnancy, which made her unable to continue her usual pattern of drinking throughout the day and into the night.

In a 1925 letter to her husband, the future King George VI, she wrote, “The sight of wine simply turns me up! Isn’t it extraordinary? It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers.”

Recover she did, and during her second pregnancy, she didn’t suffer the same debilitating nausea she had while carrying the future Queen.

Secrest’s latest work is a departure from her previous in-depth profiles of composers, artists and art collectors, which include Salvador Dalí, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers.

Her biography of art historian and collector Bernard Berenson earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1980. Research on that book led her to British art historian Kenneth Clark, another subject for the biographer.

English upbringing

Born in Bath, England, Secrest was always drawn to the arts.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I could go in so many directions. I painted, wrote music, danced. I loved everything that was creative,” she said.

She began working for a local newspaper, which felt right. “I’ve been writing since I was 18,” Secrest said.

After her family moved to Canada, her work as the women’s editor for the Hamilton News in Ontario, Canada, earned her recognition as the “Most Promising Young Writer” by the Canadian Women’s Press Club.

Secrest’s first marriage to an American took her to Columbus, Ohio, where she worked at a newspaper. In the late 1950s, his job brought them to Washington, D.C., with three small children in tow.

There, she began writing profiles of notable personalities for the Washington Post’s “For and About Women” section — the precursor to the Post’s Style Section, which launched in 1969.

All the while, Secrest longed to write a book.

“I always promised myself that by age 40 I’d have a book in print,” said Secrest.

After that birthday passed, she happened to visit what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. An exhibition of work by Romaine Brooks piqued her interest in the American painter, who worked mostly in Paris and Capri.

“She was painting women in a way that I was painting with words,” Secrest said. “Brooks had just died and left behind a memoir. I thought, ‘This is the subject for a book.’”

Doubleday agreed and published Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks in 1975, just shy of Secrest’s 45th birthday.

Her biographies of Berenson, Clark, Dalí and Frank Lloyd Wright followed. Her 1995 biography of Leonard Bernstein led her to Stephen Sondheim.

“After the Bernstein biography, Stephen’s friend, playwright Arthur Laurents, encouraged [Sondheim] to work with me on his biography. He said, ‘She’s very good; you should do it,’” Secrest recalled.

Once a reluctant subject, Sondheim sat for 50 hours of interviews with Secrest.

When the book was completed, she rushed to New York with an advance copy for the composer. Secrest handed the book to Sondheim and said, “Steve, here’s your book.”

“With his rapier wit, he joked, ‘Today it’s my book. Yesterday it was her book. She must have had a bad review.’ But he genuinely liked the book,” Secrest remembered.

Sondheim introduced her to Richard Rodgers’ daughter, Mary.

“She asked me to ‘do a biography of Daddy.’ I promised I would, after the Sondheim book,” she said. Those biographies spanned a decade of Secrest’s life.

“I spent 10 years in musical theater,” said Secrest, who is married to composer Thomas Beveridge, founder and artistic director of the New Dominion Chorale in McLean, Virginia. The couple just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.