Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  At Elsa’s next the party was fast, furious and photographed, Elsa Maxwellian in short – with all the photographing let to Paris-Match alone – so that other photographers crowded the sidewalks and got insulted by the Duke of Windsor and knocked over and out by Aly Khan. By two I was yawning and longing to be gone. Charles,38 still bright and good for more, shamed me. I caught Marie-Blanche who was girding her loins and she agreed to take me. But I was reckoning without Wallis. Laura Dudley and I waiting on the pavement were victims of her not being able to listen to our excuses. No, no we must all go on to Monseigneur.39 But Wallis, we’ve had every fiddler of Monseigneur deafening us here for three hours. We must go on to Monseigneur – the Duke would like it, so don’t argue. She seldom calls him the Duke now but rather ‘My Romance’ with a funny tone – not sneery but not straight. We are for it, me and my leaking basket, Laura, Wallis and the Romance on the box swung off to Montmartre.

  The pitch-black chamber (for me of horrors) was half empty and we naturally made a bit of a sensation putting ourselves on a centre room table. The orchestra swarmed round, singing Windsor favourites. Champagne popped open – but there was a cloud of displeasure on Wallis’s countenance, dispelled twenty mins later when Jimmy Donaghue40 arrived with Eric Dudley. Followed a really embarrassing scene. If it had been college boys with a millionaire in tow, some pretty cocottes, etc. – but for all these elderlies to be animated by this insane young addict of bad taste. Eric, pretty tight, was whispering ‘We’re witnessing the end of another chapter, we saw the end of one and we’re seeing another, I can’t help liking the guy.’

  Meanwhile huge bunches of red roses were being carried in for the ladies, also bottles of scent graded according to rank (I got the biggest after Wallis). Jimmy was busy, shouting, singing and yelling ‘hit it up, hit it up’. Then he was up to the piano playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude. You couldn’t tell if it was good or bad because of the twenty-five other instruments playing all out. The Duke looked neither pleased nor shocked – Wallis was waving her martini-soaked fan and saying look at the Prince of Wales’s feathers in Mr. Donaghue’s roses. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II had arrived by then (more roses, scent) and Mr., who is gross to a degree, confided to Laura he would never do it again or go to the Windsors’ house again. At last it ended, Wallis remained sitting with Jimmy after we had all left the table. ‘Come on,’ the Duke said to Laura. ‘Why bother with them, the boy’s drunk anyway.’ So Jimmy was deputed to take me home.

  In the car he came quite clean. ‘Lady D.’, he took to calling me, ‘Do you hate me for all the scandal? – it’s not our fault you know, it’s the newspapers. Isn’t Wallis your favourite duchess? She is mine – or would you rather have Alice Gloucester? I adore Wallis – she knows she’s only got to call on Jimmy and I’ll do anything for her. I love her – like my mother you know – not any other way because I’m not that sort’, etc., etc. I don’t write what I answered, it seemed useless to say much to someone quite beside themselves. I said the indiscretion of it all was idiotic and wounding and unsuitable to the Duke. Isn’t it all desperately sad? He showed nothing, I have to admit, on his royal wizened face but if it’s true and he learns it, the wife is gone, the legend dead, he’ll have to throw himself off the Empire State Building.

  The Harveys are throwing a party tomorrow. We are asked, and Daisy is asked, at 10.30. I met that attaché David? [sic] who told me it was a mondain party, or was meant to be. Eighty to dinner but that they’d been obliged to ask three hundred bores after. ‘I’ll see you’ he said ‘but from afar, as I shall be bout de table.’ ‘I haven’t even made that,’ I said, ‘I’m one of the bores.’ He, looking uncomfortable, passed on. The Duke at dinner asked me if I was invited. Yes, I said, but with bores after. ‘We’ve been asked at 10.30’ he said. I told him he oughtn’t to go – but that I’d make doubly sure. I did – he’s not going now. I hear that the Bruces have also been asked after, so what Labour crème can they have got to dinner? Lady Harvey now goes to Dior, spends her whole day in a beautifying mask. Talking of Dior, that great dressmaker has made me a present of a dress (to measure) called Cecil Beaton. It’s not what I’d have chosen – but I’m awfully pleased. I’ll wear it to the Travellers Ball. Conversation here in our set is confined to missing diplomats.41

  May 10th, 1951

  Chantilly

  I’ll write you an extremely indiscreet letter for my own amusement and I hope for yours, as well as for posterity’s who will smile perhaps to hear of how age grabbed after youth.

  Chapter 1. I have for a long time been over-conscious of a hideous pouch in the upper inner corner of an eye. One eye pouched worse and I took it some time ago to Sir Harold Gillies,42 aged seventy-odd. He put me under Evipan, said he’d cut it out, left a scar and within a month or two it was as bad if not worse. Today off I hurried to 53 Rue de Longchamps where I was first put into a waiting room crowded with people and children clearly not in search of rejuvenation and later on to a little stool in the lobby from which point of vantage I was able to see the beautiful Mrs. George Annesley – wife of Papa’s partner in the business of which he is totally ignorant (doesn’t even know its name, but attends regularly – keeps mum) – issue from the consulting room. She caught my eye so we both caught each other out. M. Boivin was a nice dark gentleman – spare and serious and a bit of a blab. He told me in the three minutes that I had with him that a) my job was a trifle that he would do it any day I asked him, b) that we’d met before with Claude Alphand and did I not think he’d made a good thing of her face – and that he did not think much of Sir Archibald McIndoe aesthetically – as a surgeon of plastic necessities, wonderful, but not good for beauty. I should just see the Queen of Yugoslavia’s breasts. What a mess was there!

  Chapter 2. I made a date for last Tuesday. I knew that I should be demonisingly ugly for ten days and thought old home week (Michael [Duff], Caroline, David, Jamie Caffrey, are Sunday’s guests) would be the best time. That morning I was lunching with David and J. and Alvilde and they all thought me looking so well. The abominable glue-nosed Marguerite said she’d never noticed the pouch and I was sore tempted to postpone and not spoil an agreeable-looking week. But then it was icy cold, raining, Papa was away, so in the end I stuck to my plan – not seeing it really any worse than a dentist’s. I drove the camionette to Ave. des Roules, the clinic, thinking to drive it back two hours later and was admitted into Paradise – a large garden led to a pretty, large, Georgian house, spacious, fresh and painted sky blue from top to toe. The nurses, all pretty, were dressed to match with ethereal blue organdie caps.

  I was shown to a large hospital room and asked to get into bed. ‘I’ve brought nothing, not even a nightgown.’ ‘Here is a surgeon’s overall,’ so I put that on and obediently went to bed. I felt no apprehension, only amusement and surprise. A blue angel came in and stuck a needle in my thigh before I was aware. She had turned the bed-clothes down ‘So that you don’t bleed too much’. The first sinister note. What nonsense, no one’s ever died of having a pouch taken out of their lid. The theatre men arrived next, dreadfully white and swift. I became the parcel I was to remain for some hours, lifted from narrow bed to narrower trolley, from it to narrowest operating table. O I’ve forgotten the best event. While waiting in my blue room an unusually beautiful woman with a look of Bobby Helpmann43 dressed in operating white with a turban twisted with Schiaparelli art came to my bed and announced herself as Dr. Boivin II et sa femme en plus.44 ‘I hope there will be no scar’ I ventured. Dr. Boivin never leaves a scar she said. ‘Il vient de démenager ma poitrine – j’ai nourri mon enfant et ma poitrine avait beaucoup souffert – voulez vous que je vous la montre?’45 In a jiffy her white overall slipped from her shoulders to her waist and exposed two first-class breasts, small, firm, retroussés, with very palpable scars, flat and scarlet, that will surely go. I felicitated her and au revoired.

  Back to the op. theatre. We are going to cocaine round your eyes they said. Panic. ‘Is it novocaine?’
‘Yes.’ ‘But I react very often in the most terrible way – it’s like death.’ ‘It won’t be this time.’ ‘I must have a hand to hold.’ ‘Here it is’ a million candle power poured down on my closed lids while they pricked around with the stuff that I knew would nearly kill me. The reaction came – not as bad as it can, but terrible. I gasped and sweated and mutilated the kind hand. The doctor said ‘Has she had a shot of morphine?’ ‘No.’ ‘But why? We always give it. Bring it, quick.’ So that went in and gave me another panic, but I calmed down at last and bore with great courage the painless agony of hearing the scissors cut your flesh and worse, see the dazzling light not shaded by the red that is its lid but only by a thin membrane. I suppose the globules they were going to remove – globules they were for he showed them me, whitish caviar, and the extraction of each gave the sensation of immense pressure on the eyeball though he was not touching it.

  ‘Now I’m going to sew you up’, and there was the nursery noise of Nanny’s needle and the thread being pulled through, and next – O anguish remembered! – ‘The other one will not take so long’. ‘No – please not the other!’ but there was no appeal. ‘Your eyes will no longer be symmetrical. You’ll be back in a year to have the other caviar removed’, so I let them have their way. The morphia had got its strong soft arms round me and I was a Koestler case already. It wasn’t so bad – no element of surprise and nerves numbed. I was parcelled back into my pretty room, left to cool or to set or subside for an hour or so. But the thought of leaving it and returning with two poached egg eyes, a muzzy mind and an empty flat prompted me to stay the night. Three whacks of pericline were given almost without waking me and next morning I was out, bespectacled and lunching with Papa. That was the Wed. Today is the Thurs. and I’m very clever at concealing the eggs with specs and veil on the day and becoming blind old lace at night. Papa notices nothing fortunately. The stitches come out tomorrow but even then I dare not show eyes that I may not paint up and look exactly like a pig’s. FINIS.

  Chantilly

  Sept. 14th, 1951

  Read, corrected and approved by Papa

  This day twenty-two years ago I was leaving Gower Street in tears for the nursing home: it was a Saturday, and Noona and others were all pretending to be cheerful – and so was I, but as usual deathly fear was in my heart and knees as I drove off with a last lingering look behind me at the house we had made to be so happy in – drove off to Lady Carnarvon’s Nursing Home, and next day you were carved out of me, and I couldn’t remember for hours what sex you were (I asked four or five times). Papa sobbed and howled (quite untrue, D.C.) when he was told you were there and had not got a hare-lip as we expected, the grasspuss46 having crossed the road before our car two days before. So with that opening I’ll wish you many happy returns of the day and get back to my saga.

  When you left us [in Venice] we dined on board the Sister Anne. The crust was breaking up on every side – goodbyes echoing – Sunday a ‘clear up’ at the Lido – lunch at Harry’s beach with Fulco and Judy and Streetcar Called Desire film in the evening. My ‘upset’ interfered with my enjoyment. Vivien is wonderful – as you see she got the prize for individual acting – but she looks pretty ugly (deliberately) and the sound track curiously bad and the whole production 100 per cent fiercer and more sordid than the play, so can you imagine? We lunched delightfully in a piazza at Ferrara in the shade of the gigantic palace, of the d’Estes I suppose – they were the Dukes in Ferrara and a daughter Isabella went to Mantua when the Gonzagas ruled and Beatrice d’Este married Ludovico il Moro – a Sforza of Milan. Over the Apennines and down over Montecatini, bigger, smarter, more Spa than I expected, pretty though, with flower beds and plenty of fiacres drawn by jet horses. The streets are like Ben Hur. The well-conditioned horses are either hopped up or fed on corn which they are not able to take. The old cabbies are hanging on to their mouths with all their senile strength, unable to hold their horses. Bella Vista Hotel above the agglomoration was quite to my liking but Papa hankered after the fleshpots and frou-frou, so after two days we moved down to Vanity Fair.

  It’s a lovely Tuscan country, high Apennines, cypresses, peaceful citadel, townlets mountain-built,47 and many famous towns within reach. Our day is to rise with the sun at seven and with a glass-handled tumbler in our several hands stride briskly to what look like the Baths of Caracalla in their hey-day. Gigantic colonnades, halls, courts, awnings, marble on marble, a full orchestra scraping abominably (chiefly Verdi, who lived here). It costs 5/- to go in but once in there are shops, post offices, picture galleries, typewriters for passengers’, use, loos en masse and en série, and many thousand milling round with their tumblers filling and refilling themselves from gold taps and inlaid marble bars, with five different thermal waters each stronger than the last, they must be taken à petites gorgées48 ambulatorily. The five glasses must be spaced over thirty mins. Or more. We get rather irritated – the crowd naturally stare at me on account of my clothes and Papa on account of a large dark scab on his nose and because the drinks are so revolting, hot, salt and greasy.

  Three days later this plan was changed and we go to another pump room, more select. Papa at eight where he has a carbonic monoxide bath – followed by an inhalation – they wrap him up in white linen and rubber, a hideous woman tends him with laughing affection but she let him bang his poor nose disfiguringly on the apparatus. We meet for the water sipping (five pints of sip) at nine. I meanwhile have had my mud bath in another magnificent bath house. I go into a marble room and a robot arrives wheeling an enormous container of blue-black mud, steaming hot. A comely signora in impeccable white lies me naked on a sheeted bed and slops the mud in heaping handfuls under my back and legs and over my legs and thighs – it’s piping hot and delicious and the sheet is wrapped over this living mud pie – blankets piled on, and it’s left to stew for twenty minutes. Back comes Signora, undoes me, puts me in a hot bath while she sloshes back the mud into the pail and remakes me a clean bed. I scour away at my legs with a sponge. It comes off all right but there are layers of it. Thus cleansed I’m wrapped up again in white linen and rest for half an hour utterly exhausted.

  This treatment, with the water and an hour on the loo, finishes the daily cure. Lunch generally as you like it, siesta afterwards till four and expeditions till dinner, after dinner Italian film. Anna Karenina we saw, wonderful to me and so easily understood. Life of ‘Sonny Boy’ Al Jolson in gorgeous Tech. dubbed with English songs, Al played by a man of twenty-six. I blushed for our Americans, shamefully stupid it was. Last night an Italian film called Virginità. Too difficult for us so we left halfway. The cinema is out of doors and we are forced into it because in our beds we hear every word twice as loud by amplifier till 12.30 at night.

  Expeditions. The first ciceroned by a Jewish cosmopolitan Italian, called curiously enough Dino Philipson – rich once, politically powerful, nice, tho’ a bore of course. We went to Pistoia, a beautiful unspoilt little town. The mayor, Communist, received us on his stomach. From Pistoia on to Dino’s villa in the hills for dinner – heavyweight evening, but bearable. The next day we were taken to a house belonging to one Torregiani, marquis, his wife not at home but rather having a nervous breakdown on account of her mongrel’s paralysis. What a house. The best of its style – or perhaps of any style – imaginable with a garden full of water jokes designed by Le Nôtre, and an old gardener who delights in sousing the guests. I enjoyed this outing more than I can say and as always in cases of enjoyment and seeing perfect things, I missed you dreadfully.

  Yesterday an hour’s drive to Florence in search of The Times. One copy found, and a visit to the English Tea House. Campari not spirits. This brings me to today, your birthday, in fact to where I came in and to where you came in twenty-two years ago. It’s mid-day. I haven’t had a promised letter from you, only a p.c. I pray it comes soon, but I’ve suffered disappointment too often to hope. We’ll send you a telegram and then go to a peaceful citadel for lunch, with a funiculi funicula.<
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  Chantilly

  October 20th, 1951

  It’s been a year of gain. I’ve inherited Emerald’s handsome cultured pearls, which everyone takes to be real, also her paste and diamond bracelet which is thought to be emeralds – a mass of objects and pictures which I shall take back in the camionette, which brings me to London Monday 22nd. Over and above this wealth Sugar Daddy Weiller has given me an Aleutian mink (the best) coat from Dior costing £4,500. I like people to know he gave it to me.49 I consider it gives him credit, but I do not hold to anyone knowing the price. Anyway it’s paid for and delivered and Papa thinks it looks like any other fur coat and now my troubles begin. Rising above the misery that wanting motor cars, carpets, stone paving tiles for the terrace, ten dresses and a less expensive mantle, instead of the Aleutian, it entails being chained to it, insuring it, not sitting on it, having to have better hats, gloves, and bags, always thinking it’s lost or stolen, storing it all summer and ultimately being murdered for it, receiving inadequate insurance at its loss or being driven to sell it for £200. Stables of gift horses all gaping so I must keep my eyes shut.

  I’ve started the delightful habit of going to bed with the sun. Papa works rather gloomily at his Early Life so I creep into my bed with my inarticulate radio, embroidery and books and there keep warm and rested till dinner comes up to us both. Last night I slept only one hour and read nearly two books thro’ – one exceedingly indecent by Julia Strachey and one about Hazlitt by Hesketh Pearson called The Fool of Love. He’s just written a new one about Disraeli I’m anxious to read: in the afternoons I do a hard two hours in the garden, scraping paths or pulling up huge weedy growths rooted in Australia. Then there’s a daily dash to Paris – Louise very ill as usual – third pneumonia this year. She moved into that morgue American Hospital in order to be operated the next day and have her hips loosened or stiffened, but the fever caught her at once so the op. is postponed. She looks like death, cries with weakness. No rules there, so she opened her eyes in extremis to meet those of Prince Pierre de Monaco right at her bed foot.