Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  Yet Oldham considered her excellent entertainment. When Diana promised a group of mill workers that she would perform a clog dance if they voted for Duff, they ‘mobbed me and kissed me and thought me funny’. When she told the elderly ladies of the town that Duff was a wonderful husband, and therefore an ideal MP, they adored her. ‘There’s no swank about her and, oh my, isn’t she a beauty?’43 said one of them to the Daily Mail reporter who’d been sent up from London to follow her around. Her popular touch and his election speeches delivered a small but decisive majority. On their way back to London they stopped at Belvoir where, for Diana, the real triumph was the sight of her father, waiting at the door to congratulate Duff, and the fact that they had been put in the King’s Room (always reserved for Belvoir’s honoured guests). ‘It was a proud day for me,’44 she wrote, and when she had to return to America she was miserable to be missing Duff’s maiden speech in the House of Commons.

  Yet, despite her loyalty to Duff, Diana was becoming increasingly addicted to her work. Later she would admit, ‘I was always happiest with the theatre people.’45 She enjoyed their rituals, their dramas and their gossip; they were were the people with whom she shared the daily comedy of theatre life, such as the woman in Cleveland who’d got drunk on highballs and groped Diana in the back seat of a ‘Chrysler B’. Or the story of the grumpy stagehand who had taken exception to the all-female Ballet of the Nymphs choreographed for The Miracle by Mikhail Fokine. ‘Fokine [just] can’t get away from Lesbianism,’ the stage-hand had muttered darkly, ‘but Lesbianism doesn’t fit in.’46

  Above all, Diana loved her work because she believed she was good at it. In New York the Russian director Stanislavsky had pronounced her to be a ‘great artist’,47 and when she began to receive other offers of work, including a film in Germany, she dared to dream that The Miracle could be more than an isolated triumph. ‘I think I must go on the stage proper in England,’ she wrote to Duff. ‘I really think I could be good, if only for the reason that I can concentrate so easily and gladly on it and am such a good learner.’48 Aware of her lack of formal training, she began to study with a former student of Stanislavsky and with an elocution coach recommended by John Barrymore.

  The latter proved a step too far – Mrs Carrington turned out to be fashionably Freudian in her theories of how to liberate an actor’s voice and Diana fled from classes that required her to explore her dreams and unconscious desires. Nevertheless, her ambitions were still in play. In 1925 she was complimented on her performance by Gladys Cooper, who hoped that a London season of The Miracle might be organized, in which she could alternate with Diana. Around the same time John Barrymore approached her to play Queen Ann in his production of Richard III, and Reinhardt and Kahn consulted her over their plan to acquire a London theatre, offering her a key role as both performer and director’s assistant. (Reinhardt had been impressed by Diana’s theatrical instincts, often agreeing to suggestions she made during The Miracle tour about costume and staging.)

  In March 1927, when they were performing in Hollywood, Diana was offered the possibility of starring in a film adaptation of Anna Karenina.* Greta Garbo was meant to be playing the lead role, but had thrown temperamental objections to her contract, and even though she was eventually coaxed back onto the set, the offer to replace her was a significant one for Diana, and could easily have been parlayed into other roles. Yet Diana remained oddly unmoved by the opportunity. Hollywood reminded her of all that she’d disliked about cinema – ‘the depressing grizzly light in the studio’; ‘the snail’s pace that outwears any patience’ – and even while the role of Anna Karenina had appeared to be hers for the taking, she told Duff that she would only accept it for a drastically high fee.49

  To most of her colleagues, Diana’s hesitation would have seemed madness, but ambitious as she was, her commitment to acting bumped up against two obstacles. One was Duff, to whose success and happiness she dedicated so much of herself, but the other was the nagging self-doubt she’d never been able to shed. Even with the éclat she was receiving in The Miracle she was incapable of pushing herself beyond what she believed she could do. Faced with a choice, she would rather stick with what she was good at than risk failure at something unknown.

  She had disappointed Reinhardt with her merely ‘moderate enthusiasm’ for his theatre project in London, and in 1928 she reacted with similar timidity when Diaghilev offered her a mime role in his company’s latest production, Ode. The Russian ballet had entranced Diana back in 1911, yet she recoiled from the challenge of actually appearing in its ranks. She wrote back to Diaghilev, ‘All my advisors say that the first time I appear in London must be in The Miracle … as they tell me that I might have been very bad in Ode – and that it is better to appear for the first time in London in something you can do, rather than in something experimental.’50

  Diana had grown comfortable acting in The Miracle, and as the years passed it became harder for her to imagine testing her reputation in another production. Perhaps the watershed moment came when she persuaded Iris Tree to join the cast, covering for Rosamond Pinchot in the role of the Nun. Iris had visited Diana in Salzburg in the summer of 1925, when The Miracle featured in the Salzburg festival. With another mutual friend, Ethel Russell, the three women had shared a large room at the top of Reinhardt’s schloss, and for Diana it was one of the most childishly pleasurable interludes of her life, another taste of what she had missed in the remoteness of her privileged upbringing. Every night was made ‘a riot’ by Ethel and Iris ‘laughing talking and wrestling’, she told Duff, and by the hatching of jokes and secrets and pranks.51

  In Iris’s company, Diana missed Duff less. Iris was ‘a perpetual renewer of spirits’, a ‘dearest romantic in clown’s clothes’,52 and when they returned to America for the next stage in The Miracle’s tour, the two women became inseparable, gossiping in rehearsals and talking late into the night in each other’s hotel rooms. Diana pondered what bliss this would have seemed to her and Iris when they were very young: ‘What would we not have given for a privacy like this, unhaunted by mothers and maidenheads.’53

  She would always remain the more cautious of the two, berating Iris’s extravagance and drinking, her unprofessional habit of turning up late for rehearsals, dosed up on a hangover cure of ‘kippers, herrings and prairie oysters’,54 but as Diana happily admitted to Duff, ‘Iris leads me to folly.’55 She began to party more recklessly (ending up ‘flogged’ at 4 a.m.), and to spend more of her hard-earned money on herself – a $600 summer ermine coat and a £100 Frigid Air for Gower Street, so that she could enjoy ‘well chilled drinks’ and ‘ice made on demand’ whenever she was back in London.56

  For Christmas that year she treated her fellow cast and crew to ready-cooked turkey, silver-spangled candles and hot dogs. When Diana had first arrived in New York she had winced at the stridency of an American Christmas: ‘electric trees … obscene Santas and deafening carols in the shops’.57 Two years later, while Duff was spending Christmas at a formal country house party, playing dull games of charades, Diana was enjoying a ‘greenroom frolic’, with whisky, dancing, banjos, singing and ‘a great many imitations of absent members of the cast’.

  Under Iris’s influence Diana also grew thoughtful about her sexual fidelity. Iris was still married to Curtis, but already looking for pleasure elsewhere. The results could have been disastrous: her first lover in America refused to use a condom, and Diana was petrified that Iris would end up having another ‘illegal’. She had already had several and Diana wrote exasperatedly to Duff, ‘Next month in all probability it will cost her her life and me £500 in specialists’ bills.’58

  But precarious as Iris’s passions were, Diana also felt they displayed admirable verve, resurrecting her doubts about her own passivity. Her years in America had been attended by the usual flock of male admirers, including Reinhardt’s assistant, Rudolph Kommer, and Bertram Cruger, a not-so-wealthy off-shoot of an old New York family. Also, when their paths crossed, the si
nger Chaliapin, who came to Diana’s dressing room one day, ‘red faced’ and ready ‘for a romp’, appalling her by grabbing her hand and pressing it to his crotch. These men added to Diana’s notoriety, but while she admitted to Duff that she was a ‘glutton … for petting’,59 she rarely felt tempted to anything more.

  In the autumn of 1926, however, Diana was thrown into the company of a nineteen-year-old boy, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who had joined the cast of The Miracle as a temporary extra.* He was slim, sweet-natured, poetic, and when he developed a crush on Diana she was aroused in a way that was both maternal and unexpectedly erotic. Raimond’s courtship was absurdly gallant: swearing he could never love another woman, he stood outside her bedroom for an entire night while she slept. The fact that his father Hugo was the librettist of Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier gave a romantic twist to his attentions. While the affair remained platonic, Diana allowed her ‘Octavian’ special liberties, sitting by her bedside to talk and brushing her hair. Duff picked up more than enough to become jealous: ‘I do not much like the sound of Mr Hofmannsthal,’ he wrote in December 1926.60 The following month he wrote a jerky, anxious letter, questioning his attitudes towards Diana’s admirers. ‘I wonder how much I should mind if you really loved one of them. I wonder if you do. Don’t tell me if you do, I’m with Othello on “prisoners and all”.’ With self-conscious virtue he assured Diana he had no comparable tales of conquest.61

  Even though Duff had no serious cause for sexual jealousy, a shift was occurring. It was now he who complained most about their periods of separation: ‘Is there to be no end of it,’ he grumbled in February 1926. Meanwhile, Diana’s letters were humming with a busy absorption. In New York the previous autumn, she had been to a dinner dance, held in her honour by Condé Nast; she had attended the premiere of Noël Coward’s latest play, and the Broadway adaptation of Michael Arlen’s novel The Green Hat (in whose London production Tallulah Bankhead had just opened). In Cincinnati a month later she improvised her way, fraudulently, through a live cookery demonstration; in Boston she went to a dance recital given by an avant-garde German who performed in a ‘Picasso-designed dress, with his naked parts covered with blood’.62 In Chicago there were dinners with Noël Coward and a visit to a preposterously rich architect, whose house boasted an Egyptian-themed dining room, with a table that ‘rose from the floor loaded with caviar’; there was also a roomful of black satin-sheeted beds that prompted Coward and Diana to wonder which of them the architect hoped to seduce. Probably both at the same time, they thought.

  In San Francisco, she shopped for presents and ate with chopsticks in Chinatown; she also met up with her former admirer George Gordon Moore. Moore was still impressively rich and well connected, and in his company Diana visited a house that was decorated in the style of a Persian fairy tale, with a live white peacock, white china elephants and silver espaliered trees bearing golden apples. She and Iris went out riding to Moore’s country ranch, where champagne and bourbon flowed until three in the morning and the ‘negro house boys [sang] in perfect harmony’.63 Hollywood, a fortnight later, was less appealing. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were among the local celebrities attending The Miracle’s opening night, yet none bothered to extend a personal welcome to the visiting troupe. Diana chafed at the lack of professional camaraderie: ‘I believe they despise us for being legitimate stage,’64 and it heightened her contempt for the swank and entitlement of Hollywood life. She was offended by the fake lawns and the swimming pools, by the money men and the bottle-dyed blondes. Most repugnant to her was Elinor Glyn, the popular novelist who in middle age had become a Hollywood screenwriter, and who was about to create the flapper movie, It Girl, which would make a cult of Clara Bow. After lunching with Glyn, Diana wrote to Duff with appalled distaste of her inappropriately made-up face and gaggle of gigolos. It gave her vengeful pleasure to watch Iris Tree steal away one of Glyn’s ‘beautiful young men’, a six-foot Austrian, whom she would eventually marry.

  Diana also dined with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (the latter was also trying to write a Hollywood script). The three of them had met previously in London, through Tallulah and Olga Lynn, and the Fitzgeralds joked that the reason they had hired an English nanny for Scottie was because they wanted her to develop an accent like Diana’s. Diana found an ally in Zelda, who disliked Hollywood almost as much as she did.

  Yet even if touring with The Miracle could be frustrating, Diana had become addicted to a life of movement and change. Back in the spring of 1925, when an unexpected gap had opened up in the schedule, she hadn’t opted to return directly home to Duff, but had instead gone exploring on her own. Alan Parsons and Viola Tree were wintering in the Bahamas that year and Diana travelled from New York to Nassau to visit them. The Caribbean was a revelation of colour and beauty to her, and its impressions remained vivid for the rest of her life: ‘Prisms of humming birds’, and a ‘peacock sea’; ‘rainbow fish seen through a glass bottomed boat’, and women going to market in ‘white boots and organdie … and spotted kerchiefs topped by rakish angled hats’.65

  Diana so relished that trip that when a second gap opened up in the tour, in December 1926, she proposed an adventure to the south-western desert with Iris. After an orgy of ‘dude buying’ – work shirts and ‘black kangaroo cowboy boots’ – they travelled to Taos, driving through mountain passes so steep and icy that they frequently had to get out of the car and travel by foot, warming themselves as they went with gulps of ‘white lightning’, the local corn liquor.66 Puebla, the Indian village close to Taos, enchanted Diana as an unspoiled American ‘Bethlehem’. She was astonished to meet the painter Dorothy Brett there, whom she and Iris had known before the war. Brett had followed D.H. Lawrence to Taos, in the expectation of becoming part of a utopian community, and had never gone home. She lived like a hermit, Diana reported to Duff: ‘She goes once a week to Taos for provisions and … thinks of it as London and Paris and New York. She nearly collapsed when she heard Iris & I were on the stage.’67

  After Taos they travelled on to the Grand Canyon and a riding trip through the desert. Guided by a ‘cowboy philosopher … with an irresistible southern poetic voice and a rugged wistful face brimming with laughter’, she and Iris lunched on steaks cooked over a mesquite fire; saw not only eagles, big red flowers and queer cactuses, but also strange pockets of twentieth-century luxury, ‘with golf courses and shops round the hotel like Cannes’.68 She adored all of it, and in her letter to Duff floated the possibility that they might even live there.

  ‘We could be so happy,’ she wrote, apparently forgetting how much Duff hated to be separated from the familiar comforts of his drawing room and club. Increasingly, however, Diana was forgetting things about home. Every time she returned to London she was ecstatic to be back in her husband’s arms, yet apart from Duff and Gower Street, much of her old life had altered. The death of her father in 1925 (a cause of sadness rather than real grief) had led to Arlington Street being sold and Belvoir passing into the possession of her brother John. And while Diana kept in touch with many of her old friends, a younger generation of Bright Young Things had taken over London, with their costume balls and treasure hunts, their scandals of drink and drug taking. Diana found them entertaining and joined in with some of their exploits, but she had essentially outgrown their antics.

  Her life was now centred on The Miracle, and when it had its final performance, during a short tour of central Europe in 1927, she was bereft. She had been clinging to the idea of a British season, but that would not take place until 1932; and so for the first time in six years she found herself without a job, or any other project to absorb her. Duff was busy – his career was advancing now, and in early 1928 he was given his first ministerial post as Financial Secretary to the War Office. But for all Diana’s genius at orchestrating social events, she did not want to dedicate herself to being a politician’s wife. She might hold a few dutiful dinners for Duff’s colleagues but, like her mother, she preferred to mix with h
er own friends.

  There were plenty of amusing distractions – parties where Olga Lynn sang, Duff recited Shakespeare and Maurice Baring wrote impromptu poems; holidays abroad, including a trip to North Africa where Duff was persuaded to accompany her on rides in the desert and to smoke a hubble-bubble pipe – but as Diana admitted to herself, she had got into the habit of an ocean journey at least once a year, and she resented the confines of her suddenly shrunken world. In December 1928, when the Coopers’ friend Sidney Herbert invited her to travel with him to the Bahamas, she seized the chance, even though it meant missing out on Christmas with Duff for the first time in five years.

  Diana claimed she was only going out of loyalty – Sidney Herbert was ill and needed a companion to care for him as he wintered in Nassau – and it may have been guilt that caused her to dwell on the negative aspects of the trip in her letters home: the toothache that plagued her and the ugliness of the new building developments on Nassau. But she couldn’t suppress the delight she took in the old Caribbean magic, as she bathed naked on a coral island, watched butterflies swoop in fluttering clouds, ate freshly caught turtle and danced under a full moon.

  Towards the end of her trip, however, a new topic entered her letters. Diana had missed her period and begun to feel nauseous, and while she typically jumped to the conclusion that she must be incubating a horrible tumour, she also had to consider the idea that she might be pregnant. It was very unsettling. After almost a decade of marriage, she had come to terms with what she called her ‘barrenness’. Aside from a momentary fantasy that involved Iris having a ‘spare’ baby she could adopt, Diana had persuaded herself that she and Duff were better off without the worry of children: ‘Girls were sure to be plain and without virtue, boys dishonest, even queer and certainly gambling drunkards.’69 She had congratulated herself on avoiding the lumpen heaviness of pregnancy, the pain and danger of childbirth.