Autobiography

by Diana Cooper

  By this time we had arrived at the famous Palace of the Prince-Archbishop and were being shown by retainers to our room. It was very large and, like the rest of the Palace and most things Austrian, spacious and fresh as a dairy. There was a bath, in a room nearly as big as our bedroom, that required a fire to be lit beneath it if one wanted it hot. Tea with the shy Professor under a pillared porch looking towards the lake was fairly paralysing. Duff’s German, as I suspected, was unheard. Mine was worse. Kommer translated our social banalities. I felt my every movement was being analysed, criticised and condemned. I felt fat and unspiritual and unsuitable and stupid. It didn’t last long—one trembling cup of tea to be drunk and a dry biscuit to be nibbled, and the ordeal ended.

  In the evening the presence of so many English helped, as did the candle-lit chamber music. The Sitwells were there with young Willie Walton, a name to become famous but then unknown to me. “They murdered Willie’s work,” said Osbert. “They played it last night. The cello spike stuck in the join of the stage boards. The cellist was brought to the ground. They murdered Willie’s work.” The Duchess had been tracked and captured and brought in. We felt ourselves on the stage and under the manager’s eye. Once out of the mise-en-scène came the freedom actors feel in the greenroom and coulisses.

  I cannot remember how many days we stayed. Kommer shone through the rain. We went on pelting picnics. One in particular I see. On a lake stood a villa full of charming smiling people in dirndls and Lederhosen. The dew of the morning, it seemed to me, was upon them. The sparkle of the lake, the crystalline purity of the high mountains were above them. Young and old they dived and darted like trout through the water. They gambolled, they ate ravenously of fresh bread and yellow butter, crisp green salad and all things wholesome. They turned out to be morphia-maniacs, every one of them, and their playful dog died of eating some stray heroin pellets with his dinner.

  At long last Nilson arrived and the fateful hour struck when I must be tried out by Reinhardt. I partially masked my nerves by dressing up. It was impossible, I felt, to get outside oneself in everyday dress, so I tied my head in a pair of chiffon drawers and safety-pinned my skirt into a longer one, and patched and pulled and pinned and improvised my garments into a disguise. The Professor must have found it hard not to laugh, but he had learnt his psychology from Freud and himself had suffered a great deal from inhibitions. He told me later that as a young actor he had been unable to play a part without wearing a beard. My drawers and pins were my beard, and no doubt he divined it.

  First the story of the play was told to me in his spell-binding voice. Kommer was there to translate, though I understood most of it and was naturally moved to quiet tears. Those tears, so normal to me, stood me in wonderful stead. The English are unemotional, therefore I must be an artist. So Reinhardt reasoned. Nilson then went to the piano and played the themes, while my motifs and movements were directed by Reinhardt. The statue must wake from stone, turn to flesh, and the living Virgin must break from her cerements, descend from her niche, lay down her jewelled crown and gather up in all humility the veil, scapula and cord of the fugitive Nun. She must dress herself in this livery—her own—and fastening the rosary to her cord must look at the crucifix with heartrending compassion. I had no confidence. Who could have enough belief in herself to interpret so beautiful and spiritual a part? But Reinhardt had experience of raw material and living, willing material, and I could see he was satisfied. So when he said “Sie könnte vielleicht auch die Nonne spielen” I knew that I had not been found wanting.

  The search for a Nun was in full swing. Potential nuns flitted through the passages and came to meals and died away like chords of music. I knew that my chord was to linger and reverberate for a long time. So to Venice we went, gay with relief, and for a few weeks forgot “The Plan” and the imminent separation, and came back to London and the Foreign Office to hear the strangest stories, reported chiefly by Lord Berners, who had remained some weeks at Salzburg. Maria Carmi had preceded me at Leopoldskron and had told them all that they would be mad to engage, for the part she had created in The Miracle, one who was drugged to the teeth, rarely sober, and totally unreliable. After my departure Morris Gest had swept in, grinning with clever mischievous ideas. Had anything been found in my room? Empty gin-bottles, hypodermics, compromising letters? No. Then his choice was a good choice and Maria Carmi must be engaged to act the Madonna as well as Diana Manners. It would stop her mouth and also stimulate interest in the elaborate publicity which was being prepared for American headlines during the long delays of rehearsal and preparation. The play’s opening had been set for Christmas week at the Century Theatre, New York. I was to arrive in November. On hearing these things I heard also a knell to “The Plan.” I could not see myself going to a new continent, to new people, to a new profession, being separated for six months from my husband, and having with me in the same yoke a woman older, more experienced both in life and on the stage, neither respecting truth nor fearing slander and bent on suppressing a menacing rival.

  Mr Otto Kahn, a man I was attached to and trusted completely, was, in admiration of Reinhardt, financing The Miracle. To him I wrote confessing my fears. I expect Kommer drafted this cri de coeur. He certainly answered it, as he came to do all the letters he wrote for me. As usual he dealt with the impediments and left me a smooth path to tread. Things that the lady was supposed to have said, she had also written. He had the letter in his possession, so she would say no more. Besides, he was there to protect me. What more did I need? Confidence returned. The Plan had taken the shape of a shining road leading upwards to the Vision Splendid.

  * Champagne.

  The Light of Common Day

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Miracle

  IN November 1923, with a high heart, unaccustomed courage, a certain confidence in my new vocation, and the splendid vision of The Miracle no longer a mirage, I boarded the pretty dancing Aquitania for my first ocean journey. Duff was by my side and in my heart, so everything delighted and excited us—the fine big cabin, the bath with fresh and sea water, the springing decks and space, the interminable menus, the orchestra and the bustle, the cupboard-trunks, bouquets and radiograms, but through the delight and excitement flitted the sinister shade of the Titanic. I felt something of a Columbus too. In 1923 not so many of my English friends had crossed the Atlantic, and we were farewelled as though for circumnavigation, with Fortnum & Mason provisions, cases of champagne, prayers, telegrams and a bevy of friends to speed us well at Southampton. On the third day it got rough, the Titanic shadow loomed darker and I suffered fearful shame when Duff took me to the ship’s kind doctor that he might prescribe some calmative. He handed me bromide with a look of contemptuous pity. “I suppose there are any amount of frightened people like me?” I said hopefully. “Sometimes a few emigrants in the hold,” he replied.

  Duff was sympathetic, so it did not matter. The bromide did not calm, but the waves did. We threw ourselves into the amusing novelty of life on a big liner—auctions, hat-pools, and horses and camels in the gymnasium. Halfway over, radiograms began fluttering in from friends in America. Less welcome ones arrived from newspapers, and formidable ones from Morris Gest, warning me of the pressmen at Quarantine and suggesting replies that I should give to difficult questions. This made me nervous, as some of the instructions, I saw on reading, I could not obey. To the question: “Who is to be the first to play the Madonna?” I was to answer: “I am,” and to the supplementary “How did I know?” “Because I had had a message from God.”

  I naturally replied, when they asked me, that I had no idea who would be the Madonna. I only knew that I had been engaged first. The cameras clicked away and the “Just one more”s seemed to have no end, but I did not then mind what I now abhor, and I had confidence in being well dressed by Madame Ospovat (the Russian designer of genius who had become famous in London overnight), though in the photographs of those days I look grotesque. On the quay stood Chaliapin and Morris Gest, w
ho pinched Chaliapin’s cheek in greeting. This seemed too familiar to Chaliapin, loud words were said in Russian and a quickly forgotten blow administered. Beloved Kommer was there to pour essential oils on us all, and soon we were installed in our beautiful suite at the Ambassador Hotel, with a Bible each by our beds and the crystal New York sky a background to our high-perched luxury. It was Sunday and as quiet as a trafficless town can be. There were no orchids for me, but for Duff a case of Scotch and another of Bourbon whisky from Cole Porter, and also the key of Carroll Carstairs’s liquor-locker at the Knickerbocker Club, with which to fight Prohibition. Duff went down to explore while I unpacked. He came up to say that he had met George Gordon Moore in the lift and that we were supping with him that night. So much for the pre-war London stories that he could not show his face in New York.

  At five o’clock I was to be ready for rehearsal. First we must have lunch, and gape and marvel at the canyons of architecture. We went to a restaurant on Fifth Avenue—Pierre’s—shy as bumpkins and feeling lost and foreign. Duff was asked if he would have tea or coffee with his lunch. He all but collapsed. Kommer fetched me for my ordeal. I had made a Nun’s rehearsal-dress to give me a little confidence, but I was very frightened. We drove to a vast unheated hall. It was freezing outside, and there was a big brazier of live charcoal, round which cowered some fifty shiverers, while another fifty or so were being rehearsed. Reinhardt strolled in, calm, with cigar-smoke curling round his magnificent brow and light compassionate eyes. I knew only him and Kommer, and it was to take me a little time to learn the rest of them. Luckily no one seemed in the least interested in my arrival. Maria Carmi was not due in New York for another three or four weeks. “Stand here, Miss Manners,” said Mr West, a stage-manager. So I stood there on a chair, suddenly very, very happy. I had come back to what I was used to—rehearsals and stage jargon and the palpitating interest of “shop.”

  The Nun in The Miracle is as important a part as the Madonna, and from the day of this production’s inception stars and beginners were praying and hustling to be given it. But it was an amateur who won it. Crossing the ocean a few weeks earlier, Reinhardt had noticed a magnificent young girl of eighteen, returning from buying her debutante’s trousseau in Paris. She was Rosamond Pinchot, daughter of Amos and niece of Governor Pinchot. She was rich, very beautiful, athletic, with a coltish grace and a strange face belonging to valleys and hills rather than gilded rooms and dance-bands. She had never thought of the stage, but she agreed, encouraged by her parents, to take the part of the Nun. Reinhardt was proud of his choice and became prouder as Rosamond was moulded by him into perfection. She was too busy rehearsing to pay any attention to me. I felt myself lucky in being allowed to stand and wait, learn the music and lose my fears.

  Morris Gest knew well what he was doing when he engaged two women to play one part. The production was so enormous, and the turning of the Century Theatre into a cathedral so mighty a conversion, that the rehearsals and building took six weeks longer than anticipated. Publicity had to be kept explosive, and what better way than to build up a story of the Lion and the Unicorn? I found it dreadfully disagreeable, and there were days when the headlines made me threaten and even want to go home. Duff would be leaving me very soon, and Maria Carmi had declared that she would not rehearse in front of me. Advisers and friends seemed to think that to play on the first night was essential to my fame, and they finally persuaded Duff to have a showdown with Morris Gest. It failed completely. Duff asked for a guarantee that I should have the lead and not become the understudy, without which he threatened to take me back to England. What hope had he with these seasoned theatre-sharks? Fobbed off with a “Trust me” and a leering wink from Gest, he sailed away, leaving me, in tears, to my fate. I felt ill with misery and fears, always fears, of immediate peril on the sea, of time and space, and the height of New York. Only the studio made it bearable. Letters tell more truthfully and more keenly the unhappiness than memory does, and mine for six months are an unpardonable jeremiad, a daily Gummidge-whine:

  New York

  I got home at five, having had my poor nut washed. I looked so dejected that the barber said “Poor kid.” A lady had a hare-lip. It illustrated how foreign we feel in America and I felt surprised that there should be hare-lips here.

  9 December 1923

  I slept on my sofa, to be awakened an hour later by very noisy newsboys. I felt that they must be shouting an Atlantic disaster and worked myself up naughtily.

  10 December

  Your wireless today more to my liking in words than I could have prayed for. Those wretched newsboys I wrote of yesterday were screaming disaster, and darling Wadey on her despised eighteenth floor had the same panic as I had.

  I lunched in a funnier, still cheaper place than Child’s. You take a long look at all the eggs, meat, fish, veg in appetising concoctions, you pick and carry your dish off to an armchair with one elephantine spatulate arm on which you place your plate, glass and utensils. I chose corned beef hash, a big sugar cake and a glass of milk (20 cents). I’m so sad that I’ll go and send you a cable. That sometimes helps.

  The radiograms from east, west and mid-ocean flashed daily. So did the letters. We studied departures and arrivals of ships, calculating their knots and hours to know when we might hope for a batch of letters.

  I was learning from the master of masters and falling in love with him, gaining confidence and making friends in and out of the theatre. The rehearsals lasted until 4 a.m., but did not begin until the afternoon. The great barrack hall got colder as the Christmas snow blocked the streets, and the brazier glowed less adequately. To see imagination fashion material with nature’s prodigality astounded me as might a real miracle. The Miracle, having no script and no stage-directions, had to be designed as it grew. The story was a legend, and the gathering of it together was claimed by Karl Vollmöller, but it was Reinhardt who carved it into its Gothic-Freudian shape, selecting and discarding and inventing. Werner Krauss, the famous German actor who played the Spielmann or Power of Evil, built his own part with an ebullience of graven stones and gar-goyles and arches that bridged to Good. He was the central pillar. He had the roof to bear and carried it on dancing feet, an unbowed Atlas, for which responsibility he claimed a bottle of spirits and two of wine daily—not an easy assignment in spite of The Miracle’s private bootlegger.

  11 December

  I breathe prayers for you incessantly, even when thinking of other things. “My Mummy” sails today. I shall have to pray for her too. O dear, O damn!

  I feel discouraged with my part and think that I have gone back, due to never being rehearsed. They’ve got into a groove of “She’s all right.” I’m not. I dread to think of what “my Mummy” will say to the pressmen. She must have said at Southampton that I went on the pictures originally because of “desperate poverty.” So all day the reporters have buzzed and shadowed me to discover what we call “poor.” Oggie [Lynn] lands tomorrow.

  Maria Carmi had arrived. In America she used her married name, Princess Matchabelli. She had been too obedient to the impresario’s dictates and had said silly things to her interviewers.

  12 December

  Carmi refused to meet me. One rehearsal, she says, at which I must not be present, for fear (I suppose) that I might pick up some good business—a disappointment to me, as I had relied on doing so. I’m forbidden the studio in consequence. The cast’s account is not favourable. She behaved very grande dame, stretched out a left hand to all the principals’ mouths and put all their backs up …

  I sent Oggie to have a look at Carmi. The cast is out to poison her. She looked savage, dressed completely in leopard, old but tall and thin. There are awful interviews in tonight’s papers. She is referred to as “Royal” and she tells how God visited her and said “Play My Mother,” and a lot about being Reinhardt’s choice. Her ex-husband Vollmöller appeared tonight, the Miracle legend’s exhumer. He had travelled over on the same boat and not known that she was aboard. He’
s a German—specs and Kultur. He shocked and adulated me. I don’t get his game.

  As, on account of the Carmi competition, I was to play on alternate nights, the Pinchot family thought that their young daughter should be equally favoured (I considered the cutting down of my performances a disfavour). So the old search for another Nun began. There was a pen (not too near the brazier) where the postulants sat day after day, the discouraged giving place to new hopefuls. Ina Claire had hesitated at the gate, so had Marion Davies. As the opening night drew nearer and the Nun was still not chosen, it became easier for the directors to pick someone who knew the part perfectly, having heard and seen the tireless teaching and application of Reinhardt and Pinchot.

  13 December

  They worried me today about playing the Nun until I agreed to try it, on the condition that they would say without embarrassment and fear of hurting that I was unsuited. I’m glad I stood out and only gave in to the trial to get them out of their difficulties. I’ll do it far better, I know, than the understudies they have tried, yet so much worse than Pinchot.

  The parts of the Madonna and Nun lend themselves to doubling, since they are in one way the same.

  I never had the potter’s thumb to shape me to this part. I came out cast from a mould and saved them all a lot of trouble, and there was plenty of trouble. The cathedral and stained-glass windows, the organ, the choir and the cloisters would not materialise on promised dates, and while the creators waited, better ideas crowded, jostled and fought with one another. Norman Bel Geddes, the scene-designer, Werner Krauss and Reinhardt were all three too rich in invention to tolerate satisfaction. Scenes, costumes, music and crowd-dispersals were made, unmade and remade. My attendant black shade these days took the shape of myself alone on the stage with the enemy audience in front. The thought of standing as a statue of the Madonna, motionless for an hour, held no fear, with nuns and crowds within moral reach, but to break my stony cerements alone and take upon myself life and movement, to walk down my niche’s steps that wound through candles and reliquaries and votive offerings, my eyes raised to the high gothic arches, alone: this I could not contemplate without panic.