by Diana Cooper
Chantilly
June 2nd, 1949
Today thirty years ago at this hour I sat under my wedding veil in the sombre morning room that gave on to the cobbled courtyard at 16 Arlington Street. All the family had gone to St. Margaret’s and I sat like an objet d’art under a glass globe that was my modesty and waited for my father. I was dressed (too soon) in palest gold tissue, covered with lace picturing tall Madonna lilies. Later it became your christening robes, but during intervening years I used to put it on before going to bed on June the 2nd and run up a flight of Gower Street stairs to surprise Papa in your night-nursery, then his dressing room. On my head I wore a crown of orange blossom made of seed pearls, the work and gift of your earliest old friend Louise Piers. When Father at last fetched me his temper was short and his gills were white and his top hat had no jauntiness. We drove behind Mr. Price the chauffeur in a powder-blue Renault car, and the crowds being enormous and slightly out of the control of mounted police, Father lost his head and put it and his trunk right out of the window and bawled the crowd out. Under the church’s awning a man dashed out of the populace with a missive. ‘Read this, read this before you proceed’ he said. It was the Ides of March over again and I read, fearing obstructing news, only good wishes from a lunatic.
Thirty years later I lie at Chantilly feeling most hideously ill. Fourteen pills a day after three weeks of totally innocuous absorption have at last caused a crise de foie.16 Was this their object? On se demande.17 Last night was five years of purgatory. Papa snored, the dog snored and panted and scratched. I took the maximum sleeping dose, just not overdose, but it was powerless against the noise and knee pain and bogeys. So this morning I let Melanie stew in her own milk and sent for the neighbour milker. She never turned up and at ten they told me so I had to tear down to the field, and in a fine stew the poor girl was.
Chantilly, June 8th, 1949
Princess Margaret Saga. I’m sure she came to show the Harveys her disapproval of their attitude towards us. She’d no other reason. We don’t know her, we’d nothing to offer her. At the hospital18 in white-gloved Matron’s gloomy little den, unenlivened by a bottle of pop and some sponge fingers, she asked me if I lived in France. She was not looking as pretty as I remember her at Buckingham Palace when we lunched after Papa’s accolade. Molyneux had done his worst with a cinnamon silk suit, some milliner had weighed in with a common little hat with white pompoms. The inevitable white shoes were worn and I felt disappointed. The eyes and smile give her all she needs, if you are lucky enough to be the one talking to her. ‘I wish you could have seen where we live. I did leave word at the Embassy how welcome you would be but I don’t suppose you heard of the invitation.’ This last was not said naughtily – I meant, in the general brouhaha it is natural. ‘Is it too late?’ she said in the Queen’s innocent child’s voice. ‘Of course not, but there is only tomorrow and it takes almost an hour each way.’ ‘May I let you know in the morning?’
So little did I think that she meant anything but politeness that the next day I let Papa and Jean go to Paris for lunch, so by eleven when the lady-in-waiting telephoned to say they were coming at teatime, I was calling up every young man and girl I knew to help and tracking Papa and Jean all over town. Those I caught up with but no one else was I able to rope in, not even Susan Mary who would have helped, just Nancy, Papa and me, the Princess and Lady Mary19 were all that mustered round a board in the picture room groaning under strawberries and cream, éclairs, kickshaws and hot and iced tea for twelve. There was the trousers trouble with Papa20 – not bad though and I won. I argued she must have some fun for the déplacement. She was commonly but most becomingly dressed as an edible little tart. She’d been dipped into a light shocking pink dye pot, her shoes were black and dainty, her eyes and smile quite breathtaking. Lady M. not unlike Princess Eliz. in a beret embroidered with pearls (!) seems a perfect light-in-hand sister for her.
She might have been one of our own daughters – gay and talkative, funny and as attractive as a mother could wish. We made her talk and tell us her journey stories and good she was about the Pope. ‘O he was ever so sweet. I was told I must curtsey to him three times. I imagined I should have room but when the door opened he was right there and I went – donk – donk – donk into his lap’ (I expect ‘donk’ is the family word for a curtsey, don’t you?). I thought it wiser to hurry things on so that she should want to stay so after tea I hustled her into the open Ford and took her through the grille next door to ours as far as the hameau.21 I’d telephoned in the morning to have it opened but M. Fossier not being at home it was locked and barred, but she thought it fairy-like and romantic and the birdsong of ‘God Save’ and the sun, already low, spotlit her.
From the little mill we drove on to the Castle Cap, whose gates opened to her (not a soul about) and from there we drove into the courtyard of the Great Stables. We went inside and O she loved it. I pointed out those four high round tunnelled windows. I don’t know if you remember them. They are deep as deep and strange oval. ‘It’s as though a horse had put his hoof through’, she said. Louise might have been praised for the justness of the simile. Off home she drove, gay and I’m sure delighted with the outing. It had the tang of the forbidden. She had clearly been genuinely appreciated by disinterested people – there was fun and the three hosts were in a sense famous. Eric told someone reluctantly that she had said it was what she had most enjoyed in Paris. Next morning the French were telephoning to say ‘Quel triomphe’. The English did not telephone. The ball, they say, was disastrous, all husbands and wives clung together, never a good sign. Sammy’s hop was gayer and they had Colette Mars.22 End of Princess Margaret saga – she wrote thanking me for a handkerchief from Hermès which I gave her, a very handsome little letter summing up the Chantilly delights. Nancy stayed the night and played canasta.
I never knew the date of the visit but the next date to tell of is June 3rd, the day after I wrote to you. La belle Madame Teissier asked me to dine chez Maxim’s to celebrate a fiftieth anniversary of fat old Albert, the maître d’hôtel. Everyone dressed 1899 and general gala. It’s my black hole is Maxim’s, but having an actual dress of the period given me by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and worn by her, I suppose I couldn’t resist the temptation to show off its ivory satin embroidered with gold baskets overflowing with forget-me-nots and spangled worked intertwining bows and ribands. Mary Teissier got me a period hat from Reboux to shade my shy face from the hideosity of Maxim’s illuminated skylight. Paul-Louis was to be of the party and the Alphands and poor Lucien her husband and Papa who ran out. Looking in on Dolly to pick up newly arrived Olga, I asked her to send me a hairdresser at 9.30 p.m. as I felt I’d never make my childish hair stand up with assurance and assertion. The dressing was no end of fun. First the hat, tho’ promised by word of mouth that afternoon, never turned up, but the coiffeur did (le champion du monde23 he was – last year he made it in Paris and hopes to retain the title this year in Rome). With him came a maquilleur,24 whose care I did not require, but I turned him loose in the hat and feather and flower and tulle boxes and told him to assemble everything into a hat. The champion really made a beauty of me and as correct as my perfectionism desired.
Alas! all the fun was in the preparation. You’d have enjoyed it so much. God knows what one paid to dine there but in return one got away with a porcelain plate commemorating the occasion, specially printed magazines, sweets, scent, favours of all kinds. There were very few really dressed up – Mary and I and about six others – but by the time the favours were given, consisting of first-class paper hats, boas, moustaches, toppers, eye-glasses – the room looked grotesque enough for us to appear the uncomic femmes du monde. The climax of the elegance was the défilé25 of courtesans of the date. Introduced by Jean Cocteau in romantic and abundant words, they walked under spotlights to their tables. Beautiful young women dressed as dear dead women whose names you’ve never heard of and I never saw – La Belle Otéro, Liane de Pougy, Cléo de Mérode, etc. etc. T
he grisliest moment was when the actual Mistinguett,26 aged seventy, as fat and deformed as an old sow, joined in the procession (was it luck or an arrangement – we never knew) and took a place at a table near us. The moment for deep laughter was when Paul-Louis donned his favours and looked like four Marx brothers in one and executed a kind of sitting dance on his chair at table – smiles gleaming through the moustache. The mirror in front of him seemed to please him, for he kept it jiggling for a long time without a vestige of self-consciousness. I was home by two – the faithful Noémi got up unasked to unhook and unpin me.
Chantilly
June 26th, 1949
There’s a lot to tell you of La Grande Semaine. It’s never been more hectic or more crowded into one glorious hour. For us it meant the Marie Blanche party for Yvonne Printemps.27 Next night the Hospital Ball, a huge success. I don’t know what it brought into the coffers but it certainly brought by tombola a signed copy of David28 and the pièce de résistance, a diamond ring plus handsome pearl, to the strong box of our Padre Dunbar. It also brought to the Duchess of Kent an evening of mad whirling pleasure till 5 a.m. To me it brought a moment of tortured embarrassment, seeing the organiser being bawled out by Lord Kemsley, who having paid for the performance and transport of Ambrose’s band, found himself tableless. I returned immediately to the task of mollifying the Baron. No one had tables except the egregious Harvey, but we fixed one up and I succeeded in making him forget. Paul-Louis, my sugar detrimental, escorted me from fireworks to cabaret. All the stock-in-trade, Suzy Solidor and Colette Mars. The night was superb, if freezing, and permitted of the garden in short doses. David and Rachel Cecil, our guests, were last out at 6 a.m. for lack of transport. They are not night birds. The modest Rachel was handicapped by not having brought any jewellery (‘Really not a thing’). I lent her the trembling spray which improved her morale.
We came back next day to rest at Chantilly and to gather force for the surprise ball in my honour on the following evening. Not much rest, for the Duchess of Kent, fired by Princess Margaret, had proposed herself (with a view to irritate the Harveys) to tea. I got some White Russians, detrimental Sugar-Daddy, Fulco the Sicilian Duke, Charlie Bestegui and many others. The day was the answer to a prayer. Leila Ralli, a Greek and best friend of the Duchess, makes everything easy and charming. The Harveys have not once asked her. So the servants were pleased because we had Prince Paul the ex-Regent of Jugoslavia as well – and we were ravis and Paul-Louis was in another world, but in one of which he dreams.
A blazing sun rose on the 24th, Midsummer Day, and dazzled us to Paris, increasing my nerves with its beams. I can’t remember how I got through the day. I had a bad fall two days before, damaging the damaged knee. I went to Elizabeth Arden to get ironed out and having no car had to walk from the Vendôme to the Rue de Lille, thereby undoing what good was done. In the flat I found Barbara Rothschild with her husband-to-be Rex Warner. (If you see his book The Aerodrome buy it for me, and buy any other you see by this writer, read them if you see them in libraries and tell me about them – we must know.) I’ve read The Aerodrome three years ago, I thought, as little as I remember, that it was diabolic, but I must have got it wrong – he’s the gentlest of men. Will he be true? Barbara is so passionately happy. She is to be married next week, but his unscrupulous behaviour towards his wife and three children – his wife who is beautiful, Barbara’s age and adoring, he has thrown away like an old glove – will he do as much for his new wife? ‘The Colonel would never do a thing like that’, says Nancy with pride. I wouldn’t put it past the Colonel. I asked them to my party but they declined – too happy alone.
Then I dressed in my satin, the colour of the eyes of les filles de St Malo.29 Frightened still, we tooled over to Tony Pawson’s apartment. There the candles were lit, the buffet spread, the garden lit. A suspicious-looking chair, dais and rug in back centre lawn, and friends and strangers in profusion. Many English over for the nonce.
At twelveish I was invited into the green room. A lovely lovely spectacle was showing – twenty white-robed diaphanous girls of great beauty were spread on the sofa cushions en parterre. Some carried their unicorn’s head30 on a stick, others had grouped their emblems in corners. The heads appeared to be living, with faintly tinted pinkness of nose and blueness of temples, their manes were feather-blown and their horns wreathed in roses. Two sinister beasts were stamping around with stallion behinds and impatient hoofs, one as black as night, the other red as blood. Leonora Fini, the designer, wore one head and Ann Millard the other; weaving through all this heraldry and romaunt were two nudish dancers – one from the deep south – dressed in a few roses. I was crowned with a huge white head that hid my nervous face and gave me the confidence of the Obsolete. They led me to the chair on the lawn, now under the projectors. The virgins processed in, Maxine31 lay prone at my feet, the great unicorns were my supporters, mantling my blushes. The dancers tripped, Jacques February32 playing two rooms away was unfortunately unheard by guests or figurantes.33 For me the moment was in the green room, once on the stage the projectors blotted out the effect. Maxine alone knew the story and knew what it all meant because she it was who had thought it up. No one else knew. She will tell me next weekend when she comes for the Chantilly Stable Ball.
Papa and I motored back through the pink dawn to Chantilly – Orson Welles mist, clear roads, no lights necessary. It was glorious and strange. The first chorus of birds greeted us at 4.15 when we got home.
London
? July 10th, 1949
I lunched alone with Pam who wanted me to warn Nancy that Gaston is in love and she in danger of loss. My instinct is not to interfere. One is more likely to do harm than good. Why cannot Pam write herself if she believes in meddling? There is nothing poor Nancy can do except to come bustling back, leaving her trip with Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley on their yacht, and to no avail. Gaston doesn’t love her enough to be drawn back from fresh adventurous arms and from a potential bride and mother. One can only hope the young lady is nauseated by him, or loves another, or is divorced and not annulled.
For the Buckingham Palace party I wore the water-coloured dress worn for the unicorn ball and looked horrid in spite of the sparkle. We dined with the Heads34 and four virtual strangers alone in a huge reception room at the Ritz, all too shy for the open restaurant. We had the fun of dressing Papa up after dinner – safety pins galore – and there the fun ended. The party like last year takes place in what appears to be a house of the dead. At 10.45 there were no cars in the big court, no lights, no interest. We drove round to the entrée (a smart door) – the same that side, no one coming or going; a footman opening the door puts the fear (or hope) of it being the wrong night out of one’s mind. You walk on down the endless passages, no sound, no sign of life, no smell of scent or cigarette, no ash, and at the last turn the hub and noise of a thousand guests covered in jewels and decorations, pacing leisurely the red-carpeted saloons and galleries under disfiguring lights.
The Queen35 was radiantly beautiful in a straw-coloured tulle crinoline sewn with diamonds and hung with them and crowned with them. The blue Garter married the amber happily. She told us how kind we’d been to Margaret. O no, it was she who had delighted us. How sweet of you to say so. O Ma’am how pretty she is. O how nice of you to think so, etc., etc. The King very robust and Princess Elizabeth so lovely I thought she was Princess Margaret and wondered at her not saying something. She’s as slim as a mannequin and has a look of Caroline. The Duke of Edinburgh gay and suitable. Quite early on I began to pester Papa to be allowed to go home. ‘Stay and let me go’, was the line. I couldn’t find any of the people I can bear, i.e. David [Cecil] or Antony Head or Andrew Scott or Douglas Fairbanks because they all go to the ballroom and I won’t because I don’t want to be asked to dance, and if one won’t dance one must sit on the tiered red brocade benches with dowagers and the Chinese. The Queen dances a lot and then she sits with her partner on a very wide though low dais which makes them gloriously c
onspicuous. They glow and bridle and preen and mantle. I watched Antony and Douglas Fairbanks put through this hoop and I sat with George Gage in the offing, waiting his chance. Just when he saw it they all moved on to supper.
Just like the Pagets36, the family sit together with not more than two or three outsiders. The Duchess of Portland moved off alone. She’s my godmother so I followed her, with my eyes only. To my surprise she walked deliberately into a corner like a punished child. Then she started to tread the ground. She’s eighty-four and never smoked so it couldn’t be the extinguishing gesture. The movement then became that of a dog covering the traces of its nuisance and at last I saw the drawers appear on the pile carpet and the poor old six-footed Duchess had to bend down to gather them into her bag.37 It used often to happen, but now I suppose they are not worn. Nothing – or the ‘camiknickers’ – have taken their place. Poor Kakoo looked too terrible and kept spectacles on. I had a nice bit (only one) with Admiral Troubridge and Guy Salisbury-Jones, now retired. It was 1.30 by now and Papa, enjoying himself, agreed to my going. We started to walk down an interminable gallery lined with people of the Services we had not seen for twenty years, all anxious to introduce their hideous children. It was there I spied a second table, not the buffet but a real table for ten in one of the drawing rooms. ‘I will be good’, I said, ‘and try once more.’ I proposed that we should pick up some pals and make our own party. I sat down while Papa went to collect. There were plenty scattered in that large salon. Alas! before he’d a chance Dick Molyneux, Lord Sefton’s uncle and heir, at least eighty-five and stone deaf, plopped down beside me. The chums came leaving a gap round us two. O it was hell. It went on for half an hour and at last my trials were over and away we went.
Champneys, Tring38
July 18th, 1949
We got here sixish to be greeted with a message from Papa that he had landed at Deauville. I was ‘signed in’ and shown the ropes. It’s a ghastly place is Champneys – red brick mansion suitable for asylum or institution. The patients mooch about en déshabille. They are neither fat nor crippled, so look like Bedlamites. One middle-aged man in a Jaeger dressing gown was playing with an outsize toy Spitfire in the fruit juice bar, another limber little patient ran jet-propelled through histories which couldn’t be said to have interested him. After that I went supperless to bed. I couldn’t read on account of the words swimming and coma. A tall fair girl, half nurse half maid, poked her head in and stared when I rang my bell at 8.30 next morning to know what happened. With no meals of course nothing happens. One hasn’t to be ready for anything. She stared in an insane way and said she didn’t know to everything. ‘You won’t get afternoon tea’, she suddenly informed me. ‘I don’t mind.’ ‘No, but you won’t get it.’ ‘I never have any.’ ‘That’s to say you won’t if you don’t ask for it’ then ‘Are you a patient?’ ‘Well of course, what else could I be?’ ‘Could you tell me your name?’ ‘Diana Cooper!!’ ‘Oh!’ And she left the room covering her face with her hand as one does to an accident.
