by Diana Cooper
The first film, called The Glorious Adventure, was set in the golden days of good King Charles. It was made in a new colour process called Prizma. The crowds and countryside were not up to much, but the close-ups we thought wonderfully faithful to flesh-tints and really artistic. My lover Gerald Lawrence, the juvenile lead, must have been twenty-five years older than me, as I remembered him in important parts at Her Majesty’s when I was five. Victor McLagen made his debut as the jailbird villain. He had been a champion heavyweight in his native Australia, and here he was with his big pugnacious face for me to punch in defence of my honour. I lay on not in my Stuart four-poster bed, my fist clenched for the fray, but his tough jaw hurt my knuckles too much for that scene to carry conviction. He carried me through the Fire of London into the crypt of Old St Paul’s, and the melting lead from the burning roof rose higher and higher to engulf us both. Somehow I was rescued and restored to my elderly lover, and it all ended happily and silently as it had begun.
The second film was less propitious. I was cast for Queen Elizabeth and in spite of a red wig and shaved eyebrows my full young face could not give a suggestion of her fleshless aquilinity. The Virgin Queen was shot at Beaulieu in the New Forest. I took a nasty little house there with Wade, and Duff came for week-ends. I learnt patience, which is an all-important virtue if one is immobilised in farthingales and ruffs and collars like tennis racquets. Bewigged and caked in a yellow mask of paint, I would wait for three days running for an English sun that never shone with the rays we needed. I loved laughing with the cast in the village pub and motoring in the dark through the too-lonely forest, where wild ponies flitted across one’s way like ghosts, to meet Duff at Southampton on Saturday nights. I had little hope or faith or charity for The Virgin Queen with all its grotesque anachronisms, but I delighted in it as an inartistic lark.
The results were only fair, though they were fair enough to be stepping-stones to my next venture—a glorious adventure indeed. Out of the blue came the most unexpected of offers, one that I received as “The Plan” ready-made. Thirteen years before I had seen Max Reinhardt’s magnificent wordless spectacle given in Olympia, a miracle play laid in the Middle Ages. The miraculous statue of the Madonna, the Nun, the convent, the crowds, the Powers of Evil and Good, the bells, the dancing children, Death in skeleton guise, all the symbols and all humanity were there for Reinhardt’s genius to assemble. It was C. B. Cochran’s enterprise and was not a popular success for Olympian reasons. The hall was bespoken for a motor show before The Miracle had time to overcome the public’s surprise. Too late Lord Northcliffe, through the Daily Mail, ordered headlines to boom it, and articles and pictures and appeals to the gods of Olympia to prolong its life. But to an end it came and was only a memory till in 1923 Mr Otto Kahn, Reinhardt and a remarkable impresario called Morris Gest agreed to recreate the pantomime in New York.
Why I was ever chosen to play the Virgin remains a mystery and a miracle. Morris Gest, who got confused between truth and falsehood, used to give an imitation of Reinhardt jumping three feet off the Broadway pavement when my name was suggested, but Reinhardt had not followed the English Tatler and Sketch and had doubtless never heard of me, nor was he impressed by daughters of dukes. Morris Gest was; and Reinhardt, knowing his impresario’s genius for publicity, did not veto the idea. After seeing my raw efforts in the film, the offer was made to me and I was asked to suggest a salary. I remember rushing into a telephone-box at some theatre where the proposition was being made, trembling with excitement and fear and dread and hope, to ring Gerald du Maurier for advice. He fixed on £300 a week. I felt faint. George Grossmith, for I was negotiating with him, looked pale himself when I told him. Followed the anticlimax of “I’ll cable and let you know the answer” and silence for weeks, silence that was broken by the news that the scheme was abandoned and with it went “The Plan.” Very sad (I remember crying out of the window into a dark night), I was quick to recover, for the alteration had its compensations. America seemed a vast place in which to be alone and, best of all, I would not have to divorce myself from Duff.
I should have liked to have had a child. That I did not was a cloud in my bright sky. A wicked and famous doctor had told me to abandon hope. Another alarming one had advised an operation. The third good and experienced old accoucheur pooh-poohed the others and advised a tonic-cure at Luz St Sauveur, where the Empress Eugénie’s prayers for a Prince Imperial had been answered. Fortified by its baths, she gave this little town in the Pyrenees a frail bridge over the deep gorge, in gratitude for the birth of her son. There I thought I would go, and Duff and I would drive down together in a car I had had made for our needs. It was a cheap little machine, but boasted a Rolls bonnet. Moreover the back of the front seat let down to meet the back seat and formed with a thick rubber mattress (made to order) a luxurious bed for two. The capriciousness of lilos was not yet to be bought. Square like a real mattress, ours smelt of rubber and was blown up by a resisting concertina. The equipment included sleeping-bags (linen-lined), a case of cooking utensils, a petrol-air lamp and a primus stove—everything that I loved and that my poor Duff hated. Off we set, disappointment at “The Plan’s” collapse forgotten, into the spring weather, happy pilgrims in search of a child. Never once did we sleep à la belle étoile nor even in my snug kennel-car. The weather favoured Duff’s choice, and beyond eating our luncheon once or twice in fields of Pyrenean narcissi, we sheltered in the inns of France. Duff’s poem recording this voyage evokes it poignantly:
Lest we forget, by any chance,
The happy days we spent together,
Travelling through the fields of France
In sunshine and in cloudy weather.
Lest we forget the ruined keep
That Richard set above the Seine,
And how we climbed that castle steep,
You, I and Berners in the rain.
How Berners left us for Montmartre,
And how we took the road once more,
And didn’t care to stop at Chartres,
Because we’d seen it once before.
How, where another Diane lived,
And where I rather think she died,
With promises and bribes we strived,
And strived in vain to get inside.
At Châteaudun and at Vendôme
We stopped and stared; then on again,
Until we reached in cold and gloom
The capital of fair Touraine.
We went, intending not to go,
To Amboise, having lost our way.
They took us in at Chenonceaux,
They shut us out at Valençay.
Limoges we saw, but liked it not,
We saw and loved Rocamadour,
For there we felt the sunshine hot,
The thing we had been longing for.
Saint Antonin! the small hotel
Down by the river, where the band
Played in the darkness, till we fell
Asleep together, hand in hand.
Though other things may be forgot
In the bleak days of life’s December,
That happy night, that lovely spot,
We shall, oh shall we not remember?
Our hosts there who were kind and good
Shall be remembered, and so shall be
The devils who refused us food
In most inhospitable Albi.
We climbed La Montagne Noire with ease,
Whence looking on the plain below,
We cried “We’re in the Pyrenees,”
Which we were not—but didn’t know.
We coasted down, we seemed to fly,
And ere the sun to bed had gone,
We saw against the evening sky
The battlements of Carcassonne.
At Foix we saw a drunken man
Who’d lost his leg and lost his wife,
And been in prison for a span
For taking of his colonel’s life.
And there we bough
t red wine and cheese
And feasted in a field of green,
Surrounded by the Pyrenees,
And happy as a king and queen.
The joy of Luchon! and the fun
Of waking up at break of day,
Climbing the hillside in the sun
And picking wild flowers on the way.
Breakfast at the Hôtel Bordeaux,
And then the stern and steep ascent,
We cooled the heated car with snow,
And down the other side we went.
At Lourdes we watched the pilgrims pray,
And saw the holy waters stir,
No miracles were worked that day,
So we went on to Saint Sauveur.
I saw where you were bound to stay,
The doctor who should make you strong,
And then it rained the livelong day,
From matins until evensong.
Next day we travelled back to Pau,
Forlorn we were, my love, forlorn.
It didn’t cheer us much to know
Where Henry of Navarre was born.
Our thoughts were turned to fleeting joy,
And time’s all-conquering attacks—
We drank a bottle of “the Boy,”*
And said a sad farewell at Dax.
Luz was a gloomy little place and the cure filled one hour of the day, but unselfish friends came to solace me, the last of whom was Katharine Asquith. She and I were never parted from Belloc’s book and his Pyrenean injunctions. We read and wrote and talked and made expeditions. The first was to Burgos, where the armed Spanish police forced us to pay twice for our fares. Another was on foot twenty kilometres over the Cirque de Gavarnie into the Val d’Arazas, which is a poor man’s Grand Canyon. Over snow we trudged in great elation and slept in a cabin and returned next day triumphant wrecks. We dressed like palmers in wide straw hats with hoods beneath them to protect us from sun and wind. Then a last memorable trip to Lourdes, where the Blessed Virgin heard and in time answered both our prayers, mine for a child, Katharine’s for a conversion. We came home together, this time sleeping nightly beneath the stars. My mother was writing and telegraphing daily to remind us of the dangers of wolves in France. We saw some or thought we did—grey whining wraiths that frightened us, though less than the garde-chasse who could move us on when the camp was made. We lived on milk and potatoes to make us slim and pure, and we had the strength to send back our first gourmet’s luncheon at the best Bordeaux restaurant, it being uneatable.
Reunited in Gower Street, happiness refound, sun shining through the shutters. London was dancing in its season. Duff sweated away at the Foreign Office. He had become secretary to Ronald McNeill, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs who had once thrown a book at Winston’s head across the floor of the House. This post brought us another £100 a year to the good. My one-time patron Lord Curzon was Foreign Secretary and was apt to have his knife into Duff. It is true that we had toyed with an idea of taking for a song and as an investment the great piano nobile of the Palazzo Labia in Venice. The rumour got into some gossip column and enraged Lord Curzon, who complained that Duff was having too much leave. This not being true, the permanent head of the Foreign Office defended him. The dear Lord Curzon replied, “It is not so much his ordinary leave to which I object as his ability while performing his duties to enjoy an amount of social relaxation unclaimed by his fellow-workers.” (“Utterly meaningless drivel,” wrote Duff in his diary.)
Among our intimates were Belloc and Maurice Baring and Hutchie and his family, and a new concerto in three movements, Dr Ethel Smyth. Maurice Baring must have brought us to the notice and to the great affection of Hilaire Belloc, perhaps with Winston Churchill the man nearest to genius I have known, “one of the most complex, contradictory and brilliant characters ever to thunder, rumble, flash and explode across this astonishing world of ours.” He was to dedicate to Duff his great Ode on Wine and to write me some beautiful sonnets. He was the “Captain Good” in life as well as the minstrel, the story-teller, the soothsayer, the foundation and the flush of the feast. St John Hutchinson, our Hutchie, was indispensable and for some reason bracketed with Alan Parsons as “the Boys.” He looked like a Caldecott picture and was a companion as lovable and funny as one could find in life or legend. Maurice Baring lived in a minute flat in Gray’s Inn, giving luncheon parties (cooked by the Embassy Club) for Ethel Smyth and us and H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and Squire and other writers, and lots of sailors and beautiful women. Ethel remained a perpetual dawn to me. She grew almost stone-deaf and lived to a great age and to the very end she surprised. Sargent’s drawing shows her truly. She wore an unmoored tricorne on her wild, wild hair, through which a quick gesture of her hand would pass, oblivious of the hat, to make it rock like a ship in a storm. She thought a lot about her clothes and was ambitious for them, but they disappointed her sadly. To hear Ethel draw blood out of the piano while shouting “Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, les aristos à la lanterne” was to make you hold your head in your hands for fear of losing it.
It must have been in these years that Chaliapin returned, not to Covent Garden but to concerts in the Albert Hall, to make his gramophone records and ballader un peu in Gower Street. One night especially I remember he brought a Russian quartet of men singers. I lit the green grass and plane-trees of the garden with projected light from the house-top (unusual then). Moonlight and sunlight we could turn on, also quite an effective snowstorm for the Russian choruses. We cannot have been more than twenty close friends supping in this London backyard magically transformed by light and laughter into a poor man’s Parnassus where Chaliapin with his choir sang both high and low, with laughter for The Flea, with heavy groan for Ich grolle nicht, where Belloc quoted his ballads and sang in a red glow Auprès de ma blonde and other marching songs of the French Army, and Viola danced the nymph in the blue moonshine while Maurice, an agile satyr, pursued and lost her. The back windows of the other houses opened and those too of the cheerful chemist opposite. The frowning Irvingite church in Gordon Square (the last apostle dead) was lost in darkness. What can the neighbours have thought? They were chiefly occupants of boarding-houses. They never told us to “have done” for sleep’s sake, and I fear we never gave them any thought or sympathy.
Next glorious morning a letter arrived from America to say The Miracle was after all to be put on and announcing the arrival of Morris Gest in London on his way to Reinhardt’s Salzburg palace. “The Plan” rebuilt itself into airy castles. Came too a letter signed “R. Kommer von Czernowitz,” dated from Leopoldskron, Salzburg, inviting us both to stay with Professor Reinhardt in August. There was something in that first letter from my dearest friend that allayed fears and promised fulfilment of one’s wishes. We had taken, with three or four others, a floor of a palace in Venice for a fortnight. It was a cheap holiday in 1923. Three couples paid £100 a month between them. You found someone else to take it for two weeks and for £50 you lived for a fortnight in the splendour of wide salas hung with Doges in carved frames. We agreed to stay with Reinhardt on the way. Before leaving I had an appointment to meet Morris Gest at the Savoy Hotel. He noticed my tremblings and lost the respect for my rank which had prompted him to engage me. He told me to take off my hat and gloves and hold up my skirts. I became human merchandise. Luckily I got bought—at least I said “yes,” signed something provisional that I did not read and got a two-dollar bill thrust into my breast for luck. Later I realised that it was on approval that I went to Austria.
In the hullabaloo of departure, with the new life of fame and fortune ahead (holiday packing for the summer still had something of nursery days, since it came but once a year and demanded months of designing and economising and synchronising), I forgot to dread Leopoldskron, but once in the train puffing towards Salzburg my nerve began to flutter and fail. I infected Duff, who having bragged of being fluent in German was not looking forward to my finding him tongue-tied. Millicent Duchess of Sutherland w
as pacing up and down the train corridor. She also appeared to be in trepidation. She said she was going up to the top of the Geistberg “to think things out.”
At Munich we both panicked and resolved, unless we were pulled out of the train, to go straight through to Venice. But pulled out we were by the funniest, most fantastical, spherical figure in Lederhosen and sky-blue silver-buttoned jacket, shirt open on a fat child’s neck, round nose, round dark velvet eyes, thick semi-circular eyebrows and ruthlessly shaved round head, who, immediately recognising his unknown prey, had us out and into an open fiacre in a trice. He brought letters of encouragement from my mother (she always wrote ahead to welcome me) and special shoulders for all my burdens, wings for my feet and heart. His name was Rudolf Kommer. I can see him sitting on the box looking back at his two charges, pointing out the characteristics and monuments of his beloved Salzburg and at the same time giving us a clear précis of the situation. It amounted to this; that the Professor would like to see us at tea (it was about 2 p.m.) or would we rather wait for dinner? That there was to be chamber music that evening in the castle, and that the Sitwells and Lord Berners were in town. Should he ask them? Should he find the Duchess of Sutherland, who had escaped us, and invite her? That Frau Helene Timmig was the hostess and that Reinhardt was unfamiliar with any language but his own. That we must wait in Salzburg for the arrival of Einar Nilson, the arranger of Humperdinck’s Miracle music, that he was expected daily, and that nothing in the nature of rehearsal could be started without him. That it always rained, that we should be completely free, and that everything else should be organised and shaped to fit our pleasure and desires. I felt sure that Kommer would design even the weather through some link with the elements.
